Tooken | Through the Shattered Lens

There’s always a little bit of risk involved in making a list of the 16 worst films of the year. People take movies very seriously and, often times, the crappiest of films will have very passionate (and very ignorant) defenders. I was reminded of this in November when I wrote my review of The Leisure Class and I discovered that there actually are a few misguided dumbfug toadsuckers who actually enjoyed that movie.

But you know what? Even with that risk, I always enjoy making out my worst-of-the-year list. Let’s be honest: stupid people tend to like stupid movies. And it’s important to point out that stupidity. Only by pointing it out can we hope to defeat it. I’m sure that some people will disagree with some of my picks. After all, people initially disagreed with me when I announced that Man of Steel was the worst film of 2013. However, just 2 years later, most people now realize that I was right. There were also people who insisted, in 2011, that Another Earth was a great movie. Again, they now realize that they were wrong and I was right.

So, with all that in mind, here are my picks for the 16 worst films of 2015! For the most part, 2015 was a pretty good year for cinema. However, there were still a number of terrible films released and here’s 16 of them.

(Why 16? Because Lisa doesn’t do odd numbers!)

16) Stockholm, Pennsylvania (dir by Nicholas Beckwith)

15) Aloha (dir by Cameron Crowe)

14) The Lazarus Effect (dir by David Gelb)

13) The Woman In Black 2: The Angel of Death (dir by Tom Harper)

12) The Stranger (dir by Guillermo Amoedo)

11) Get Hard (dir by Etan Coen)

10) Fantastic Four (dir by Josh Trank)

9) War Room (dir by Alex Kendrick)

8) Tommorrowland (dir by Brad Bird)

7) Jenny’s Wedding (dir by Mary Agnes Donoghue)

6) The Gallows (dir by Craig Lofing and Travis Cluff)

5) Tooken (dir by John Asher)

4) The Last House on Cemetery Lane (dir by Andrew Jones)

3) Vacation (dir by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley)

2) The Leisure Class (dir by Jason Mann)

And finally, it’s time to name the worst film of 2015!

And the winner is….

1) Ted 2 (dir by Seth McFarlane)

(Feel free to also check out my picks for 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014!)

Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment and let us know! And if you disagree, please let me know what movie you think was worse than Ted 2!

Tomorrow, I will be posting my 10 favorite songs of 2015!

Previous Entries In The Best of 2015:

Why am I even reviewing Tooken?

That’s a good question. I’m about to tell you that this film sucked but the thing is, you probably know that it sucked just by the fact that the movie is named Tooken. I mean, do I even need to tell you that it’s supposed to be a parody of the Taken films? Bleh!

Originally, I was going to include this film as one of my Insomnia Files but then it occurred to me that Tooken is the type of film that gives insomnia a bad name. Seriously, go tell someone that you couldn’t sleep last night so you turned on the TV and watched Tooken.

Really? they’ll say, You stayed up all night so you could watch that crap?

And it doesn’t even matter that insomnia is something that you have no control over. Instead, it’ll all come down to the fact that you were actually awake at 4 in the morning and you were watching Tooken.

And you’ll hate yourself for it. Oh, the shame that you will feel….

Anyway, the depressing thing about Tooken is that it stars Lee Tergesen, who actually does a pretty good Liam Neeson imitation and who proved, in a short film called Into The Dark, that he deserves better than Tooken. Tergesen plays Bryan Millers, a former CIA agent who is now a mall security guard and the main joke of the film is that he’s always losing stuff and reacting to it in the style of Liam Neeson discovering that Kim has, once again, been taken. And I know that sounds like it has the potential to be funny but the joke actually wears thin pretty quickly.

(How thin? Thinner than the fabric of the nightie that I’m wearing as I type up this review it at 3 in the morning! And that’s pretty thin!)

Part of the problem with Tooken is that the Taken films don’t take themselves that seriously to begin with. In many ways, Tooken is a parody of a parody. Whenever Liam Neeson growls into that phone and lets the kidnappers know that he’s coming, he does so with just the slightest twinkle in his eye. He’s letting us know that he’s in on the joke and he understands that the entire franchise is ludicrous. There’s really not a single joke that you can make about the Taken franchise that the franchise hasn’t already made itself.

Of course, the other problem with Tooken is that it’s just not funny. In fact, it’s painfully unfunny. Watching this movie is like listening to a 3rd grader try to tell a joke and realizing, with a feeling of deepening horror, that not only have you heard the stupid joke before but the kid is totally going to screw up the delivery as well.

Back to the question that started this review. Why am I reviewing Tooken? Well, at the start of this year, I swore that I was going to make sure that this site had a review for every movie that I watched in 2015. Tooken is a film that I watched so I had to review it.

That’s right — I did it for the site.

And I did it for you, my loves.

Y’all owe me big time.