The Most Disappointing Movies of The Year

This is the time for everyone to look back and name the best movies of the year. But I'm not going to do that. Look, you can quibble with a movie here or there, but the list will be pretty much the same if you have any taste in movies whatsoever. Your list will include The Departed and Little Children and Little Miss Sunshine and Letters from Iwo Jima and The Queen and probably Borat as well as others. And if I wanted to, I could throw in an obscure movie like Hard Candy to raise a few eyebrows and to prove my movie geekness, but I'm not going to do that. If you want the best of 2006, go here, here, or here. However, if you want the greatest disappointments of 2006, you've come to the right place.

All The King's Men Probably my greatest disappointment. What a cast. Sean Penn as a corrupt southern politician and Jude Law as the journalist who becomes his right hand man. Add to that Mark Ruffalo, Kate Winslet, Patricia Clarkson, Anthony Hopkins and you've got a movie that on the surface looks like a masterpiece. Unfortunately, the book is practically unfilmable, so the film is choppy with a narrative that's all over the place. To make up for it, Penn does a lot of yelling throughout.

The Black Dahlia Film noir written by James Elroy and directed by Brian DePalma. If ever there was a match made in heaven, this was it. This movie had all the makings of a DePalma comeback to the glory days of Body Double and Blowout. Unfortunately DePalma didn't ever grasp the story and despite having lots of DePalma signatures like spectacular death scenes and a lesbian night club scene, this movie does little to truly engage.

Cars I liked this movie about 10 years ago when it starred Michael J. Fox and was called Doc Hollywood. Let Brad Bird direct and write from now on and lets get more movies like The Incredibles.

Clerks II Poor Kevin Smith. It wasn't long ago that he was judging Cannes and making interesting movies like Chasing Amy and Dogma. With the release of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Clerks X on DVD and now Clerks II, Smith has gone to the teet one too many times.

The Da Vinci Code Actually, this is not a disappointment to me since I thought the book fell very short of the litereary praise it received. So Ron Howard couldn't polish a turd. So big deal.

Pirates Of The Carribean 2 The first was a nice surprise, but the second was too wink wink nudge nudge. As a result there's too much Depp playing the drunken sailor and not enough swashbuckling.

After Dark Horrorfest Man did I get duped by this brilliant marketing ploy. Eight horror movies received a special weekend release from After Dark because they were billed as "too graphic or disturbing for audiences." The truth was they were "too shitty and dumb to make any money which is why they didn't get a general release."