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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Friday, September 14, 2007

Here you go — the worst stinkers of the summer

By William Booth
Washington Post

LOS ANGELES — Ahh, summer, how it smelled.

'Twas the most lucrative season ever for Hollywood, with more than $4 billion in gross domestic ticket sales. Yet it was also a summer for some serious slop. Ladies and gentlemen, we bring you the Ten Worst Summer Movies of 2007, as scientifically tabulated by the review-aggregating Web site Rotten Tomatoes.

Rotten Tomatoes, owned by News Corp., tracks all film reviews from its list of more than 250 critics in print and online and rates their appraisals as either "rotten" or "fresh." The site provides an instant groupthink rating for a movie and also allows a viewer to graze through the work of some of the best (and dumbest) reviewers in the business.

The RT engineers were happy to crunch the summer numbers for The Washington Post. To make the Ten Worst list, Rotten Tomatoes required that a film receive at least 50 reviews (thereby sparing generally ignored indie-film turkeys). In addition, the RT engineers employed a weighted Bayesian formula to account for the variation in the number of reviews per movie — meaning if Movie A and B are equally appalling, but B has more reviews, then B is worse. By that formula, the winner is "License to Wed," starring Robin Williams as a cordless power drill boring holes into your forehead.

How vile? The San Francisco Chronicle began its "License to Wed" review: "There's bad, there's awful and there's horrible, and then somewhere beyond that. ..." Even Christianity Today got in a punch: "If ever there was a ceremony or ritual that needed to be called off, it is the one that begins with the act of buying a ticket for this movie."

The worst-reviewed films of summer 2007:

1. "License to Wed": "A pastiche of tortured slapstick, groan-inducing dialogue and a lethal dose of treacle, apparently awaiting one of (Robin) Williams' trademark sprees of riffing and vamping to save the day." (Los Angeles Times)

2. "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry": "Like 'Tootsie,' only without the drag. Or the class. Or the laughs." (Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

3. "Daddy Day Camp": "We try to remember the good times, when we actually enjoyed watching (Cuba) Gooding on screen." (The Washington Post)

4. "Captivity": "Sick, slick sleaze." (New York Post)

5. "Rush Hour 3": "None but the mad will want to see it." (Financial Times)

6. "I Know Who Killed Me": "Incoherent and semi-vile." (Chicago Tribune)

7. "Bratz: The Movie": "Apparently, Jon Voight can do worse than 'Baby Geniuses 2.' " (www.Efilmcritic.com)

8. "The Invasion": "Plays as if it had been made by someone in a trance, though not a cool one." (The New York Times)

9. "Georgia Rule": "The subject matter is grim, the relationships are gnarled, the worldview is bleak, and, at any given moment, you suspect someone's going to be hit with a pie." (Variety)

10. "Evan Almighty": "Shamelessly juvenile, pseudo-religious, mock-sincere." (Rolling Stone)

Source: www.RottenTomatoes.com