From least terrible to worst

I sat down last year to watch the original "Ringu" films from Japan that inspired the Ring films we've enjoyed/dreaded since 2002.  I respect the original concept of Ringu but I got to say, the U.S. version is better (America, fuck yea!).  Then there are the sequels.  Everything after Ringu is incomprehensible nonsense with so much retconning that you question whether you even understood what happened in the original.  The Ring 2 isn't a good film and kind of dull, but at least it keeps the same emotional core of the U.S. original.  Now, 12 years after the last installment, rings continues the series.  It's terrible; confusing, convoluted, lacking any imagination, and ultimately dull, rings feels like a sequel to Ringu.  It retconns what happened in original installment, and I challenge anyone to explain to me how any of it makes sense.  Worst yet, it wastes good actors in bad filmmaking.  At this point, the rings story needs to end.

I suppose it’s fitting for the last movie in a series which starts with a bout of amnesia to completely forget everything that’s come before it.  Resident Evil: the Final chapter is the fifth and mercifully the last installment in the resident evil franchise.  It ignores almost all previous films and (again) retconns the origin story of Alice and Umbrella corporations.  By the time what passes for a plot comes to its conclusion and copies of copies of the bad buy killed two movies ago are finally terminated, I was done with it.

The theme for bad movies in 2017 was sequels that twist itself into knots justifying their own existence.  The latest Transformers may by the best example of this.  Altering the Transformers' storyline for the millionth time, this 2 hour + 'epic' (sarcastic quotes) spends lots of time explaining to us what's going on.  Even then, none of it makes sense.  It all involves Arthur and knights and secret societies and it's all garbage.  Even Marky Mark looks bored here.  Please stop making these movies, Michael Bay.  I beg you.

I try not to rag on movies made for children. I always figure everyone has the best of intentions and that the movie isn't made for me.  Well, I'm making an exception here.  I loved Despeciable Me 2 and thought it was one of the best films of 2014.  Despicable Me 3 is terrible; It's lazily written with jokes that fall flat, an has a plot that is so convoluted that I can almost pinpoint exactly which ideas were from different drafts of the script.  Ugh.  Maybe the next minions movie will be good...?

Reboots are all the rage nowadays.  There are many reasons but one of the biggest ones is financial:  existing properties already have a dedicated fan base who will go to see a sequel and/or a remake more readily than an original movie.  Enter Flatliners a remake of the 1990 original with a really cool premise:  overeager medical students want to investigate what happens when you die so they take turns killing one another and bringing each other back to life.  Naturally, there are terrible consequences, and, at least in the 1990 version, that was the fun to watch.  

So, how do you screw this up?  Well, first off you cast Keifer Sutherland, who was in the 1990 version as one of the medical students.  Keifer himself is not the problem and remains watchable in everything he's in but, I'm using his casting as an example of how lazy this remake is.  He plays a doctor.  So...is he the SAME former medical student, now-doctor from the original?   The movie plays coy.  Why? I have no idea, except that they couldn't decide what they wanted tso they kept their options open.  That kind of sums up the film, which can't decide if it's science fiction, horror, or drama.  Characters are unlikable, not relatable and completely forgettable.  The worst sin? The movie manages to make the central premise boring.  The consequences of coming back from the dead play like a cheap made-for-SyFy slasher film with an ending that is as unsatisfying as it is confusing.