Isaac Feldberg’s 15 Worst Movies Of 2014

1) Godzilla

Here we are at last with Godzilla, the movie I hated more than any other this year. For me, it was the single, biggest disappointment of 2014, a criminally overlong yawnfest in which the King of Monsters himself is kept off-screen for the first two-thirds. A year ago, it was my most-anticipated movie of 2014, sure to be a thrilling, epic, beautiful and satisfying return for Gojira. Alas, it’s none of those things – I’d hesitate to even call it a “return,” given how sparingly the big guy is actually involved.

Taking his place is a whopping dung-heap of godawful performances (from good actors like Bryan Cranston and Elizabeth Olsen, which makes it so much worse), pseudo-science that wouldn’t fool a five-year-old and writing so brain-dead I would have preferred the whole movie to be shown in whatever monster language Godzilla uses. It’s that bad.

Godzilla makes me sad for the future, which Warner Bros. will surely darken with sequels, and also sad for the millennials and post-millennials in the audience, who may be under the impression that this loud, lumbering waste of celluloid came anywhere close to capturing the spirit of Godzilla. It’s a monster-sized failure: boring as hell, needlessly convoluted and entirely misjudged.

Godzilla should have been called All-American Navy Guy (feat. ‘Zilla), which would have more accurately described the focus of Max Borenstein’s script. Inexplicably, in a movie about a giant lizard monster, most scenes are spent with ineffectual soldier Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, so wooden he’d be flammable even without a fire-breathing beastie running around).

If you’re going to take the only reason people are seeing your movie off-screen until over an hour in, at least replace it with something that will keep them awake in the meantime. That seems like common sense, but director Gareth Edwards fails to grasp the concept that people want to have fun with a big blockbuster like this. He’s all solemn build-up, overly concerned with plausibility in a film that never stood an ice cube’s chance in hell of checking that box. Blame him and Borenstein for the fact that Godzilla arrives not with a roar but with an deafening snore. They turned what could have been a triumphant return for the King of Monsters into a train-wreck so disastrous you just want to nuke the whole franchise out of existence.

Those are my picks for the worst films of 2014. What say you? Which films got under your skin in the wrong ways, irked you beyond belief and just generally stomped all over your hopes and dreams? Let me know your picks below!