With half the year behind us, we recently looked at the Ten Best Films of 2012 So Far, and as I wrote in that article, it has been an incredibly strong year for film. But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been some outright creative failures as well, and while I don’t feel there have been enough awful films to fill another top-ten list, there’s plenty for a Top Five.

So today, we’re looking at the Five Worst Films of 2012 So Far, and trust me when I say this is a list loaded with bad. Each one of these movies hurt me, battered my soul and chipped away at my spirit until I felt like never returning to a theatre again. They are that awful, and if you’re one of those people who thinks watching bad movies is fun, don’t seek out these. They’re not ‘funny’ bad. They’re offensively bad, and I despise them with every fiber of my being.

So without further ado, let’s kick off the countdown of crap with the Top Five Worst Films of 2012 So Far… 

5. John Carter

I resent the idea some have recently suggested that critics like me dismissed John Carter creatively because it bombed financially. I saw John Carter at an early screening a week before it opened. There was no possible way for box-office data to influence my criticism, and even if there were, I believe myself an intelligent enough person to separate commerce from art when forming opinions.

And in my honest, unfiltered opinion, I believe John Carter is a train-wreck of a movie. The script is a disastrous hodge-podge of unnecessarily complex exposition and inept character development, the acting is largely horrendous (especially from lead Taylor Kitsch), and tonally, it’s all over the place without any clear sense of voice. Director Andrew Stanton seems unsure whether he’s making a serious sci-fi drama or a lighthearted pulp adventure, so he’s seemingly elected to do both, and the choice doesn’t succeed. It’s impossible to take long conversations about Martian marital succession plans seriously when the next cut will take us to the title character jumping around canyons like a super Mario brother. The tone never gels, the story is too convoluted to be interesting, and I never felt even remotely invested in the characters.

John Carter is a bad, bad movie. I personally believe that is part of the reason why it bombed at the box-office. That it set new records for financial failure has nothing to do with my opinion of the film. I simply did not like nor respond to it on any level, and while it’s certainly not as bad as the next four movies on this countdown, it’s absolutely one of the biggest creative misfires of 2012.

4. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

You know what I love about fishing?  Subtlety. 

It is a quiet sport, one based on patience and discipline; it requires both a nuance of craft and a stillness of mind, which is precisely why fishing is such an attractive activity to many.  With a rod in one’s hand, in a boat or in waders, where else can one find such mental peace and clarity?

Not in Lasse Hallström’s Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, for starters. A story about a real-life effort to introduce salmon fishing to the harsh conditions of the Yemen river, the film claims to have a love and understanding of fishing, but it is an impostor, for it has not a subtle bone in its spectacularly stupid body.  Every plot point is loudly telegraphed, every character trait shouted at the camera, every message or theme delivered in monologue, every second of music obvious and manipulative, every piece of development outlined with small, easily digestible phrases, and so on and so on.  Combined with flat characters, terrible comedic interludes, and a number of plot contrivances so ill-advised they border on morally reprehensible, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen displays startlingly naked contempt for the audience’s intellect. The film fishes not with grace and precision, but with dynamite, and the results are proportionally disastrous. To their credit, Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt are both quite good in the lead roles, but that’s the film’s sole redeeming quality. Like a salmon scared away by a group of loud, drunken buffoons, it’s best to keep swimming until one finds something better.

3. Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos

Hiromu Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist is one of my absolute favorite stories of all time, an endlessly imaginative and wickedly smart work of epic fiction that I could never recommend highly enough.

But The Sacred Star of Milos, the latest film based on the anime adaptation, is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad train-wreck, a giant middle finger to devoted fans of Arakawa’s work and one of the more thoroughly painful cinematic experiences in recent memory.

The film has many problems – for starters, the animation is atrociously lazy on every possible level – but the film’s core issue is that it is, in essence, one-hundred uninterrupted minutes of exposition. Of characters explaining, in excruciatingly precise detail, every single minute facet of the story, most of it entirely irrelevant. When they aren’t going over the plot, they dive into backstory, exploring the history behind the narrative. When they aren’t doing this, the characters inexplicably decide to relate everything they are feeling, describing every emotion or thought as though it is worthy of Shakespearean scholarship. Even in the midst of a big-action set piece, the characters will still find time for long, droning exposition, and it is absolutely dreadful to watch.

Even with all this exposition, the plot still makes precious little sense. To say The Sacred Star of Milos is riddled with plot holes would be an insult both to plots and to holes. The ‘story,’ such as it is, involves three nations, a town, and a great big valley, but figuring out where all the characters fit in, who they work for, or what they’re trying to accomplish is a fool’s errand, because what may be true one minute could be entirely false once the next plot contrivance arrives. The new characters, of which there are many, are wildly inconsistent, and the old characters we know and love are barely featured. In the last act, the film’s last vestiges of coherency are torn asunder by a number of twists that make so little sense it’s a wonder they don’t rupture tears in the space-time continuum.

I have never before seen a movie that was both largely incomprehensible and fetishistically devoted to clarifying its own story. Usually, it’s one or the other. With Milos, it’s both, and at the very least, you have to give the movie props for establishing a brand new level of anime awfulness.

2. The Lorax

Even though I have seen one worse film this year, no movie has made me quite as sad these past six months as The Lorax. Dr. Seuss’ book is one of the greatest works ever written for children, a beautifully bleak, thoroughly solemn environmental parable that respects the intelligence of its young audience on every level.

But Universal’s The Lorax? It is easily one of the worst children’s films ever made, for it ignores or mocks everything that mattered to Dr. Seuss. Instead of a serious, down-to-earth fable, it is a broad, pandering comedy, filled wall-to-wall with terrible jokes, endless slapstick, pop culture references, horrifyingly awful musical numbers, and long, complicated car chases.  Yes, you read that right. The Lorax now includes car chases.  Several of them.

The Lorax himself is no longer a dignified, reverential figure, but a pathetic piece of comic relief we are made to laugh at. The Once-ler isn’t a somber, single-minded businessman, but a buffoon with an electric guitar. There are singing fish, dancing bears, and a ridiculously over-the-top villain whose evil plan is plagiarized from Spaceballs. The few moments in the film that directly reference the book make fun of or parody what Seuss wrote, and most depressingly of all, the environmental message is buried deep, deep down until the film’s final minutes, when a highly simplified version of it is delivered with all the effectiveness and sincerity of an eighties public service announcement.

It’s rare that a movie outrages me on a fundamental level, but to my mind, this hollow, studio-manufactured desecration of The Lorax is a frightening distillation of everything that is wrong with Hollywood, and I feel nothing but remorse for what they are putting our nation’s children through. They deserve so, so much better than this. 

1. That’s My Boy 

That’s My Boy isn’t just the worst film of 2012. It isn’t just the worst comedy in a decade. It is one of the most disgusting, morally reprehensible films of all time, and the anger I still hold towards this cinematic abomination is so vast it cannot possibly be contained in a brief description. I suggest reading my full review of the film, a piece so heavily vitriolic that it was quoted by The Huffington Post with the headline “Did These Critics Go Too Far?” And while we here at We Got This Covered absolutely appreciate the publicity, we also resent the suggestion that anyone could go too far in criticizing Adam Sandler’s latest s***-fest.

That’s My Boy asks us to laugh at situations any sane human would find horrific, and desires our sympathy for detestable characters, all without having anything intelligent, meaningful, or the least bit redeeming to say about its subject matter. Shocking the audience may be one of the cornerstones of intelligent comedy, but offending without insight or reason is the bedrock of lowbrow humor. That’s My Boy falls several cavernous steps beneath lowbrow. It may, in fact, establish the bottom of the comedy barrel for several generations to come.

This is a thoroughly misanthropic film, one that hates the sane and demented characters alike; it hates subtle comedy and intelligent subtext; it hates the idea of healthy sexual relations, and it hates laughs that arise organically from the characters; it really hates minorities, fat people, and women, but above all else, it hates the audience, and shows it by delivering nothing but repulsive drivel.

And you know what? I hate it right back. That’s My Boy is easily the worst film of 2012.

And I’m still waiting for Columbia to put that quote on a poster.