50 Worst Movies Of 2011

Cars 2

The Bad Movie: Sad though it is to admit it, Pixar has made a film unworthy (and sloppily structured, lazily racist and simply not funny) enough to be in this list.

How To Make It Better: Remove Lightning McQueen and Mater entirely, and just make a film about Bond-esque spy car Finn McMissile (the ever ace Michael Caine).


The Bad Movie: The ever-unpredictable Gus Van Sant here tries to drown us in twee sentiment, as a boy who attends strangers' funerals for fun falls in love with Mia Wasikowska's terminally ill cancer patient.

How To Make It Better: For kooky teen romance, look no further than 2011's excellent Submarine .


The Bad Movie: Producer James Cameron indulges his dual obsession with 3D and swimming… but because he doesn't direct, pretty much all this has is 3D and swimming.

How To Make It Better: For starters, find a title that doesn't sound like rectum.

Horrid Henry: The Movie

The Bad Movie: You'd think producers would be confident that young cinemagoers would want to see kid-lit anti-hero Henry (Theo Stevenson) make mischief. So why the desperate attempt to cash-in on the novelty of 3D? Because even children know a turkey when they see it.

How To Make It Better: Stick to the style of the successful animated TV series.

Conan The Barbarian

The Bad Movie: Jason Momoa fills the considerable boots of Arnie Schwarzenegger as sword-swinger Conan. Maybe this'll become a cult classic in 30 years' time too. Then again, maybe not.

How To Make It Better: Seems nobody told Marcus Nispel that this needed an injection of tongue-in-cheek humour.

No Strings Attached

The Bad Movie: Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher lost the 2011 battle of the fuck-buddy comedies to Friends With Benefits , largely because its star had inferior chemistry and less class.

How To Make It Better: Sadly, the answer was released only a few months later.

Cowboys And Aliens

The Bad Movie: Western! Sci-fi! James Bond and Indiana Jones as the stars! Bound to be ace, right? Well, no. With Jon Favreau's anonymous direction and its impressive cast on auto-pilot, his is more Wild Wild West than Back To The Future 3 .

How To Make It Better: The problem is that it shouldn't be an A-list blockbuster. Change that lofty "And" in the title to "Vs," and instantly this can flourish as the low-down, cheap 'n' cheerful B-movie it needs to be.

Larry Crowne

The Bad Movie: A bit like Rodney Dangerfield's Back To School , except here boring Larry Crowne (Tom Hanks) goes to community college, does his homework and holds hands with his teacher (Julia Roberts).

How To Make It Better: This had the potential to be reverse- Big , in which Hanks is now as old as he looks but behaving like a kid.

The Smurfs

The Bad Movie: Granted, the Smurfs are annoying, but this cynical film - in which the cutesy critters are marooned in modern-day NY - appears to have been made by people who don't even smurfing well like them.

How To Make It Better: It's a shame the filmmakers didn't do it the other way around and have the humans invade the Smurfs' fairytale world. Think of the endless possibilities for Avatar jokes.

Apollo 18

The Bad Movie: In a year oversaturated with found footage horrors, this sloooow story of an alleged close encounter on the moon marked the tipping point where everybody got bored with the genre.

How To Make It Better: The idea's not bad. Make it properly without the grainy gimmick of zero-gravity camcorders.