The 4 Least Anticipated Movies of January 2013
January is traditionally the worst month of the year for theatrical releases. It's like a Dickensian orphanage where Hollywood banishes all of its cleft-lipped failures to try and work off their debts until they're sold on street corners four months later. Here are the four you should never watch for any reason:
Battle of the Year: The Dream Team
In Battle of the Year: The Dream Team, Chris Brown disguises himself as Sisqo and joins a break-dancing team coached by Sawyer from Lost, who apparently decided to trade a plane crash for a train wreck. The first 30 seconds of the trailer feature Chris Brown being loaded onto a bus and driven to prison, which is the only aspect of the movie that suggests the filmmakers are aware of current events and didn't come from space.
Chris Brown's "acting" consists of sneering and constantly lifting up his T-shirt like he was given the word "bellybutton" in a spelling contest but doesn't quite understand the rules. The best moment is when he says, "Let's bring back that trophy for America," because apparently the hopes and dreams of a nation depend on him defeating a dozen Koreans in a back-flipping contest. The film also promises to play up the aggressive misogyny of Chris Brown's character for maximum chuckles, which, in light of certain facts, is the creepiest thing imaginable. This would be like casting O.J. Simpson as Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners, but instead of threatening his wife with "BANG-ZOOM! Straight to the moon!" he says, "STIB-STAB! Straight to the slab!"
"Abs are the same thing as acting, right?"
However, creepiness is to be expected when you cast a world-famous perpetrator of domestic violence as anything other than a boxcar-lurking hobo filleter.
The Last Stand
The Last Stand stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as the aging lesbian sheriff of a small town who suddenly has to shoot a bunch of people with a Gatling gun. The trailer makes sure you know just how goddamned old he is, which seems to be the film's only selling point (beyond casting Brigitte Nielsen as Arnold Schwarzenegger).
"My neck is as leathery as my bosom is droopy."
Noobz
The trailer for Noobz may well be the worst two minutes of footage ever posted on the Internet that didn't involve an execution. It's like a clinic on every poor decision you can possibly make behind a video camera. The narrator sounds like he earns his living hypnotizing children, and doesn't seem to have any connection to the desperate suicide note playing out onscreen. As best we can figure, he's talking about a completely different movie.
Above: All the character development we can expect from this film.
Noobz tries to represent every comedy cliche from the past 20 years, including hilarious pratfalls, clumsy strippers, gay jokes, old women with Tasers, and a black kid saying "Daaaayumn." The only thing missing is a record scratch and Eddie Murphy in a fat suit. They also tossed in cameos by Bill Bellamy and Casper Van Dien, who might as well be juggling Tamagotchis and hosting Total Request Live, because it is apparently 1998 outside. Also, Jason Mewes looks like the extent of his professional gaming experience is using Xbox Live to search for his own movies on Netflix.
Recently, Jeremy Renner said he was quitting movies for a while (he's also claimed to have "taught himself to be unafraid of sharks," so he may be prone to fits of exaggeration). Perhaps after filming the seventh take of a scene in Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters wherein he blasts a child-eating witch's gingerbread house with a grenade launcher and quips out some candy-related zinger (like "Suck on this jawbreaker!" ... only less rapey), he stumbled upon a moment of clarity and realized that he'd gone from two Academy Award nominations to shotgunning fairy tale diabolists in a movie that nobody went to see eight years ago when it was called The Brothers Grimm.
We'd probably need to take time off to go on a vision quest, too.
Tom can't wait for Dredd to come out on Blu-ray next month. Read his novel Stitches and follow him on Twitter.
