Critic's Grade: F

And now...Movie Eye film critic Frank Ochieng’s explanations for his Top Ten Worst Films of 2007:


THE COMEBACKS (Fox Atomic)
Frank’s original rating: * ½ stars (out of 4 stars)

Frank’s unfavorable impression: “Let’s face it, folks...we need another repetitive spoof movie like a piglet needs dirty fingernails...never registers beyond aping its lazy connect-the-dots jocularity.”

BOTTOM LINE: Director Tom Brady (not to be confused with the celebrated three-time Super Bowl winning New England Patriot quarterback) lazily helms another faceless satire that merely mines the stilted ridiculousness of an already overwrought genre in the tradition of Date Movie and Epic Movie. Listless and lame, Brady’s chuckle-headed romp wants to paint an outrageous portrait of inspirational sports-themed flicks that are parodies in their own right. Everything feels labored in The Comebacks from the forced sight gags to the wacky monikers (Coach Lambeau Fields?). Hence, this is a major misstep as a mainstream comedy vying for cheap-minded chuckles.

DELTA FARCE (Lions Gate Films)
Frank’s original rating: * star (out of 4 stars)

Frank’s unfavorable impression: “...a surefire reassurance that war is indeed hell...another prime example of ingenuity involving a box of crayons and someone’s desperate idea for quick-witted lunacy.”

BOTTOM LINE: Granted that the countrified kookiness of the former Blue Collar Comedians (Larry the Cable Guy, Bill Engvall and DJ Qualls) were searching for a vehicle to further their corn-porn craziness. With a tremendous following at record-selling concerts around the country naturally Larry the Cable Guy wanted to strike while the iron was still hot. However, Delta Farce seems like such a fast food concept that this military spoof could be merely dismissed as an accidental burp. A trio of hillbilly “weekend warriors” decides to join the service to kick some butt in Iraq but end up tangling in the crooked confrontation of gun-toting Mexican misfits. This premise is about as funny as playing hopscotch with your Uncle Elmer’s rake on a three acre farm in Hooterville. Somehow, Larry the Cable Guy and his country cohorts never “gits ‘er done” in this militaristic mockery.

FRED CLAUS (Warner Bros.)
Frank’s original rating: * ½ stars (out of 4 stars)

Frank’s unfavorable impression: “The anemically kooky coal-in-the-stocking comedy feebly employs the same tactics. The toothless slapstick Fred Claus is merely “ho ho ho” and a bottle of dumb!”

BOTTOM LINE: Wedding Crashers director David Dobkin reunites with his leading man Vince Vaughn in a hollow holiday hoot about Santa Claus’s boorish, neglected older brother Fred (Vaughn) feeling the heat in the shadow of his famous goody two-shoes sibling Nick a.k.a. Santa (Paul Giamatti). Vaughn seems to be having a heck of a goofy time in this contrived Christmas comedy but his party-hearty shtick becomes very tiresome amongst the cliched conventions of this soured egg nog laugher. The manufactured sappiness seriously gets in the way of the intermittent amusement and Vaughn strains for irreverence in a hapless holiday vehicle that drags more than a disabled reindeer on Christmas Eve.

GHOST RIDER (Columbia Pictures)
Frank’s original rating: * ½ stars (out of 4 stars)

Frank’s unfavorable impression: “The misguided rag tag ramblings of Ghost Rider will simply wipe away one’s memory bank faster than a chintzy ink-stained tattoo on a sweaty forearm.”

BOTTOM LINE: A very few comic book inspirations make it big successfully on the wide screen. Unfortunately for Marvel Comics’ Ghost Rider, it was one of many big screen adaptations that failed to do justice to Stan Lee’s printed page protagonist. Nicholas Cage, always an actor willing to be adventurous in his role choices, takes on the flaming Johnny Blaze as a motorcycling misfit known as Ghost Rider. The problem with director Mark Steven Johnson’s action-packed vehicle is that its lackluster approach with hammy dialogue, over-the-top visuals, a weak-kneed romancing subplot and a scattershot embellishment of personality quirkiness (tough guy Johnny Blaze loving The Carpenters’ melodic music) all seems mighty foolish and unfocused. This staggering superhero saga (sad to say) is forgettable and will fall by the waist side amongst the other uneventful comic book capers.

GOOD LUCK CHUCK (Lions Gate Films)
Frank’s original rating: * ½ stars (out of 4 stars)

Frank’s unfavorable impression: “[A] fetid romantic comedy...in short, if it weren’t for bad Luck then the chump Chuck wouldn’t have any cinematic luck at all.”

BOTTOM LINE: Strenuously gimmicky, womanizer dentist Charles Logan (Dane Cook) is an unlikely marital good luck charm for all the chicks he’s bedded down in the past. When you play footsies with Chuck, chances are you’re about to me married to Mr. Right—a definite dream for women wanting to be hitched everywhere. When an ultra pretty penguin specialist named Cam (Jessica Alba) comes into the scene, Chuck is drawn to her but doesn’t want to get too close. Otherwise, he may end up losing Cam to another man in marriage...and Cam means more to him then just another roll in the hay. Interesting concept but Mark Helfrich gets too cutesy and sketchy in a scattershot romancer that’s never challenging enough in its tawdry skin. Both Cook and Alba make for an attractive on-screen couple but the convoluted material fails them miserably. Cook appears too impish for his own good and Alba is never quite convincing as a comedic klutzy cutie pie. Luck be not a lady tonight...that’s for sure!

THE HEARTBREAK KID (Paramount Pictures)
Frank’s original rating: * ½ stars (out of 4 stars)

Frank’s unfavorable impression: “The Farrellys’ The Heartbreak Kid is a seemingly sketchy and erratic farce that begs for some of the wayward cinematic siblings’ trademark quirkiness.”

BOTTOM LINE: A faceless remake of the 1972 Elaine May comedy set to the recycled brand of the Farrelly Brothers’ naughty-minded nuances. Once again the Farrellys tap their There’s Something About Mary leading man Ben Stiller as the 40-year old Eddie Cantrow desperate to find a wife after getting undue pressure for still being single. When he marries a woman he has met after a mere few weeks, he finds out how insufferable she really is in nature. What stings even more is that Eddie comes across a sensible woman that’s more compatible to him. What should Eddie do to win this woman’s affection despite the albatross that is his current wacky wife? Sadly, the Farrelly’s real Heartbreak is that they disabled a cozy comedy that was originally breezy, sympathetic and rich in its irreverent overtones some three decades earlier.

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING (Paramount Vantage)
Frank’s original rating: ** stars (out of 4 stars)

Frank’s unfavorable impression: “Synthetically dull, manipulative and emotionally clunky, Baumbach’s mawkish melodrama is a pretentious and garrulous character study that sits idly in its moping gibberish.”

BOTTOM LINE: Noah Baumbach, who brought audiences the fabulously underrated melodrama The Squid and the Whale, somehow lingers uncharacteristically in the middling and meandering Margot at the Wedding. Stillborn in its staid presentation, writer Margot (Nicole Kidman) is en route to the family compound with her son (Zane Pais) to attend her estranged sister Pauline’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) wedding to deadbeat and unfaithful abstract painter Malcolm (Jack Black). No one captures the drudgery of family dysfunction more than writer-director Baumbach with such elegance and insight. However, Margot feels sluggish and pretentiously conceived with nonchalant performances and stagy pathos that renders Baumbach’s narrative artfully uneventful.

NORBIT (DreamWorks Distribution LLC)
Frank’s original rating: * ½ stars (out of 4 stars)

Frank’s unfavorable impression: “Regrettably, Norbit is too cowardly, sophomoric, and woefully tacky...[it’s] lazy and disarming in its myopic presentation of a modern day minstrel show.”

BOTTOM LINE: Just think...Norbit was the instant follow up to Eddie Murphy’s career-making, Oscar-nominated performance in Dreamgirls. With that being said, Murphy morphed into his typical calorie-loving, chunky caricature (as if The Nutty Professor’s Sherman Klump wasn’t enough to cringe at) with shameless indifference. Norbit is needlessly unfunny as well as embarrassing, degrading and just plain mean-spirited. Apparently goofing on big bulky black folks is an easy target for guffaws and the likes of Murphy and Martin Lawrence (Big Momma’s House) find inspiration behind such degradation. Vulgar and insipid to boot, formula flicks such as Norbit are undeniably needed to make the insecure likes of snickering Murphy and others feel good about themselves in comparison. It’s refreshing to know that people with poundage will appreciate such flattering acknowledgement, right?

THE REAPING (Warner Bros.)

Frank’s original rating: * ½ stars (out of 4 stars)

Frank’s unfavorable impression: “Let’s face it folks...The Reaping is one eerie cinematic Easter ham that will be tough to swallow.”

BOTTOM LINE: Responsible two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank in a tepid thriller about a college professor discounting mysterious occurrences and other unexplainable phenomenon with conclusive scientific findings. Swank belongs in this banal boofest no more than a terrorist is allowed to expect your luggage as you board your scheduled plane for takeoff. Stephen Hopkins’s (Lost in Space) Satanic saga is ridiculously uneven and messy and may very well tarnish the respectable polish of off Swank’s well-earned golden statuettes. A horrendous boofest that Swank (or the movie’s grip) had no business being involved in the first place.

SAW IV (Lions Gate Films)
Frank’s original rating: * ½ stars (out of 4 stars)

Frank’s unfavorable impression: “Stultifying in its pseudo-sensationalistic schlock, this numbingly and nightmarish narrative has no legitimate creepy conviction beyond flexing its meaningless, morose muscles.”

BOTTOM LINE: Whoopie...the jolting Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) is back and as nefarious as ever! Of course Jigsaw’s handlers—led by director Darren Lynn Bouseman—are also back and in the middle of the familiar frightening fray as well. The problem, however, is that Bouseman has nothing to really offer in this fourth installment of this inexplicably popular blood bath cinema. Sure the gross factor is pumped up to an indigestible volume. Predictably, Jigsaw purports to be the ultra-creepy cad that he has been since 2003. However, we’ve seen all this contrived carnage before and Bouseman’s slice-and-dice extravaganza is just plain tedious and tiring. It’s too bad that someone cannot Saw this flagrant film franchise in half and discard the remains.

Frank Ochieng
@ MovieEye.com (2008)

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