By Pajiba Staff | Film | January 4, 2018 |
By Pajiba Staff | Film | January 4, 2018 |
2017 was a great and terrible year for movies. Along the way, we’ve cheered and jeered. And still there’s more to say. Because some movies gave us moments so stupid, you just have to say something.
Now, we left the definition of “stupid” up to each of our writers. Stupid can mean deliciously bonkers, infuriatingly nonsensical, or flat-out bad. For every brand of stupid, there was a movie moment in 2017.
The Mummy: How old is Tom Cruise’s character in this movie? No, seriously, think about it. Yeah, it’s cool that 54-year-old Cruise can still keep up with action stars half his age, but the film seems determined to convince audiences that his character is about 35, and it never works. In one scene, Russell Crowe refers to him as a young man. Russell Crowe: The actor who is a year younger than Tom Cruise.—Kayleigh Donaldson
Transformers: The Last Knight: That thing where Stanley Tucci popped up in medieval Transformer times to play a drunken Merlin who isn’t actually magic, but just friends with the right Autobots, who own a robo-dragon.—Kristy Puchko
Mother!: Its last 30 minutes. Ah, yes, that thing where writers become so popular that their fans literally storm their house and start ripping fixtures off the wall. This whole concept absolutely hasn’t gotten away from them in a bad way.—Genevieve Burgess
The Snowman: All the snowmen. Also, the entire movie.—Tori Preston
Nocturama: By no means a silly film overall, this daring French drama follows a group of disaffected Parisian teenagers as they commit a series of terrorist attacks, then hide out in a shopping mall. But there’s a moment about halfway through the movie, when a few of the characters are indulging themselves in the mall’s audiovisual department. It’s the middle of the night. They are alone, blasting the giant speaker system and testing the large screen TVs, when the news start broadcasting the live aftermath of their explosive attacks. As they stare agape at what they have wrought, their—and our—senses are overwhelmed by the deafening strains of Willow Smith’s “Whip My Hair.” Fire and death play on huge screens and Willow Smith sings maddeningly loud and unceasing about whipping her hair back and forth. It’s disorienting, disturbing, and completely fucking bonkers.—Petr Knava
Transformers: The Last Knight: That thing where they revealed the Autobots were friends with Harriet Tubman, and implied they helped build the Underground Railroad, which is probably a physical railroad made of alien robot people.—Kristy Puchko
The Great Wall: It is garbage. It is nonsense. It has frightfully bad racial implications. It sucks on every conceivable level. IT MAKES PEDRO PASCAL LOOK BAD. And yet. It’s most egregious sin is none of those things - not the racism, not Matt Damon’s dumb, bland mug being the hero and savior of all of China. Not even the tragic misuse of Pascal and the luminous Jing Tian. No, it’s the fact that its ending somehow makes everything even more stupid. Because it borrows from the most idiotic plot contrivance in the history of cinema. It steals from Independence Day. No, they don’t use a laptop to upload a virus to the the monster’s mothership (although the creatures are actually aliens). Rather, they discover that by killing the queen every single one of the creatures that they’ve been fighting for years drops dead instantaneously. And they kill her thanks only to Damon’s brilliance and courage and their innovative use of—I shit you not—magnets.
There are a lot of dumb fucking movie ideas each year, but my god. Magnets and Matt Damon save China from aliens? Time to hang it up, Gods of Stupid. You’ve peaked.—TK
What was the stupidest thing you saw in a movie in 2017?