3) Annie
The sun may come out tomorrow, but chances are my retinas will still be too seared from this polished but still plainly hideous bilge to notice. Annie somehow gets just about everything wrong that a remake can, mutilating the iconic music with an excess of Auto-Tune and blending cynicism and schmaltz in such a way that the film feels profoundly fake from top to bottom.
Where do you even start with something this roundly awful? There’s no one aspect of Annie that makes it particularly bad. It’s just that practically everything in the film is downright awful, from the music (you’ll never hear a more nightmarish rendition of “Easy Street” than Cameron Diaz and Bobby Cannavale’s, I promise) to the acting (Jamie Foxx is shockingly bad) to the poor editing and bizarrely bland direction. The stilted script, maybe, is a viable contender for weakest link.
But there’s something rank at the very core of Annie – an unshakable feeling that this movie has absolutely no reason to exist outside of a financial one. The story doesn’t jibe with modern times, and there’s not an honest line in the whole thing. So why make it? Kids and parents alike deserve something less blatantly atrocious on which to blow their bottom dollar.
Published: Dec 22, 2014 10:57 am