After Earth (2013)

This father-son sci-fi wilderness adventure starring real-life father and son Will and Jaden Smith is nothing more than an overlong and overly sadistic obstacle course, both for its main character and the viewer. As the teenager hero of After Earth makes his way though dangerous territory, leaping from safe spot to safe spot, the movie leaps from lazy cliché to lazy cliché and listless life lesson to listless life lesson beat by predictable beat.

In the film’s exposition-heavy prologue we find out humankind now wears a lot of white unitards and moved to distant Nova Prime a thousand years ago because of Earth’s manmade downfall, elucidated through a stock montage of floods, fires, riots and explosions. The natives of our new home planet, none the happiest to be colonized however, have engineered super alien beasts known as Ursas—they are not bearlike, in case you were wondering—that are almost blind, but can track, hunt, and kill by smelling human pheromones—“they literally smell fear,” the voiceover helpfully explains. What I’ve just described—and so, so, so much more—could have easily been expanded into a full-length feature. Director M. Night Shyamalan squeezes it into about five minutes, and packs everything full of superficial details, justifications, and rationalizations that are both unnecessary and unimpressive.

The Hangover Part III (2013)

Anyone who’s seen the trailers and promos for the last—fingers crossed—installment of The Hangover franchise knows that, among other instances of senseless animal cruelty, Todd Phillips’ Part III features giraffe decapitation by highway underpass. I couldn’t make this up if I wanted to. It’s not very funny, and completely tangential to the plot, but then a lot of things are. The problem is it takes place in the first five minutes, and the movie tries really really hard to top it for the remaining hour and a half. It fails.

There are some movies that should stand alone; sequels, prequels, remakes, and spin-offs can only harm their reputation. The first Hangover is one of these movies.  Perhaps the funniest and most entertaining film of 2009, it was an uproariously hilarious lowbrow achievement of raunch, profanity, and political incorrectness, and a modernized, twisted return to a simpler, gentler age (circa 1980) when bros and boobs ruled the comedic screen. Part II made the mistake of trying to outdo it, but, although inferior to its predecessor and patently unoriginal, replicating every situation of the first with mechanical obligation, it was still a good time. Part III tries to top both movies. Combined. Losing the expected, exciting backtracking structure—and any sort of boozing and hangovers, debauchery and fun, for that matter—this Hangover does away with the comedy almost entirely, replacing laughs with the half-parodied, predictable conventions of a bad, exposition-heavy B-movie caper played chronologically and completely soberly.