This list deserves a disclaimer: disappointing is not the same word as worst. Every year, people call me out for my choices on this list by saying the film wasn't that bad. Well, yes, I realize that. There's only one legitimately bad movie on this list. The rest, to my great disappointment, are artistic misfires that had unbelievable potential. This potential led me to think I was in for masterpieces that. In most cases, these were movies I thought would be my favorites of the year. Instead, they ended up here.
5. Cloud Atlas
I never wrote a review of Cloud Atlas because reviews, while they are literal tellings of one's subjective reaction to a piece of art, are not supposed to be written exclusively as a reaction to the biases one had walking into a film. With Cloud Atlas, I wasn't just watching an inventive new film; I was eagerly anticipating the adaptation of one of my favorite novels of all time. I absolutely adore David Mitchell's groundbreakingly original novel. It just reeked of genius and after watching the five minute long trailer for the movie, I just started believing that they'd somehow pulled it off. Before seeing the movie, I purchased the soundtrack and once again let myself think My God, they've done it. Never before have I listened to a soundtrack for a movie based on a beloved book and felt that the composers perfectly captured the tone of the novel, but Cloud Atlas did it for me. At this point, I was convinced that the Cloud Atlas movie would be my favorite movie of the year, maybe of all time.
Then, when I saw it, reality finally settled in. It was always going to be extremely difficult to fit all the things that make Cloud Atlas work into a 165 minute long movie. In fact, I'd argue that it's impossible, as proven by the movie. This needed to be a 6 hour long miniseries on HBO to really work, and hopefully someday someone will give me many millions of dollars to make that happen. Today however, I'm left with this strange hybrid of the novel that made a lot of artistic changes that worked well for some of the stories, but butchered my favorite one. The structure of the original novel was a large reason for why its multi-layered story worked, but the film becomes more disjointed and ultimately works so fast that you fail to get attached to these characters or feel the gravity of the situations they are in. The film has some beautiful acting and cinematography but it turns out that it's just too much to ask for someone to create a broad, short version of the breathtaking novel. All that being said, I still listen to the soundtrack on a regular basis.
4. Seven Psychopaths
There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that Seven Psychopaths, Martin McDonagh's followup to In Bruges, was going to be great. After all, Bruges is such a perfectly woven film with perfect nuance and attention to all the details that this guy had exhibited none of the qualities of a one-hit wonder. The movie, however, suggests he may be just that. Rather than make a movie, we have a collection of characters and skits and vignettes that have potential but never really pull together because, as the writer's block inflicted protagonist will admit, there was never any direction when writing the script. It came from writer's block and is about writer's block, but fails to make any real points about the subject we haven't seen handled with much more subtlety in works like Barton Fink or Adaptation. The acting here was all superb, so it was really a shame that nothing ever came together in the end here. Oh well, at least we got Tom Waits holding a bunny.
3. The Hobbit
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was the most unpleasant cinema experience I had all year. The worst film I saw all year would probably be Rock of Ages, but that doesn't get the title because it at least had the courtesy to cut its runtime under two hours. Don't get me wrong - I love a good three hour movie. I can easily sit through any of the Lord of the Rings movies, even if they don't have the charm now they had when I was younger. Don't you ever make me sit through The Hobbit again, though. First of all, I'll more than likely fall asleep. Second of all, that's just plain mean. Peter Jackson showed with King Kong and The Lovely Bones that he's actually not all that good at telling stories, but I was more than ready to enjoy his return to Middle Earth, this time taking one novel and splitting it into three movies. Unfortunately, he followed the King Kong formula of endless chase scenes and not the Lord of the Rings formula of well developed characters. The Hobbit is a waste of time and a huge disappointment given the amount of talent that works on those films.
2. Damsels in Distress
Whit Stillman is a filmmaker that very, very few people know about. Those that do, however, tend to appreciate his wonderfully unique voice and talent. In the 90s, he made a trilogy (the Doomed Bourgeoisie in Love Trilogy) about the demise of the talentless upper class coming from old money. The films (Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco) each tackle different issues, though they have a lot of the same actors and themes. Each one is utterly brilliant. Stillman displayed a perfectly developed sense of subtlety and biting satire that has not been matched on the subject. Then, he didn't make any movies following 1998 until his 2012 opus, Damsels in Distress. The film looked promising, with a great new cast of talented young stars (Greta Gerwig, Adam Brody, Aubrey Plaza) and a quirky enough story to recapture the magic. However, where Metropolitan felt like it was made by a seasoned veteran filmmaker who now knows all the secrets to great storytelling, Damsels feels like an unpolished work from a novice filmmaker no one ever really criticized along the way. It's uneven, broad, and ultimately a weird experience that recaptures none of the magic his career had thus far thrived on. He still has a few projects left in him, according to interviews, so I can only hope he rewatches his older movies before commencing on anything new.
1. The Dark Knight Rises
There were a lot of disappointing films that came out in 2012. None of them caught me off guard quite the way The Dark Knight Rises did, however. Christopher Nolan's impeccable resume of great films, especially considering the first two films in his Batman trilogy, assured me that there was no way he could mess this up. All the talk of the story taking inspiration from A Tale of Two Cities led me to believe we were going to see a gritty class warfare epic unlike anything that has come out before. Upon seeing it for the first time, I was honestly just confused. Is this really what Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan, and David S. Goyer came up with for the epic conclusion to the story? Really? Though there are flashes of great ideas sprinkled throughout the project, The Dark Knight Rises ultimately bites off more than it can chew as it tries to be a serious crime epic, a war movie, a mythological tale of a modern hero, and a crowd pleasing comic book movie.
The problem is: those genres don't really mix that well. Particularly when you limit your runtime to 164 minutes so IMAX can project it. I've said it before and I'll say it again, there's quite possibly a great five hour movie in here, but the not-quite-three-hour cut I saw was sloppy, underdeveloped, cheesy, and predictable. This is not A Tale of Two Cities. It's not even V for Vendetta. This is a plot hole filled, mostly lazy script that comes off more like a serious version of The Avengers than The Dark Knight. If Batman Begins and The Dark Knight were ahead of their time, The Dark Knight Rises is certainly years behind its. If it came out in 2005, perhaps it would have been more impressive, but rather than wowing me with the brilliance the trilogy had thus far been overflowing with, this third film had a been there, done that feel nearly the whole way through.
In my dreams, Christopher Nolan calls me up and tells me not to worry; this was just a joke project. The real epic conclusion is secretly in production right now and due for release next summer.
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