10. The Boat That Rocked
The rock 'n' roll gospel according to Noel Edmonds and Dave Lee Travis. I have no issues with Richard Curtis as a screenwriter, and will even confess to a fondness for certain strands in Love Actually, but this was a self-indulgent debacle which only Working Title's golden boy could have got into cinemas, and only then after the success of Mamma Mia! had demonstrated that the multiplex bar for singalonga-fun was set low. American viewers were offered the shorter cut known as Pirate Radio, and were presumably spared the "comedy" rape scene, if not the creepy attitudes towards the fairer sex expressed elsewhere, the Austin Powers-like cutaways to a tamely Swinging London, the never-ending hilarity of a character named Twatt, the smugness, the cosiness, and the end-credit assertion that without maverick broadcasters such as these, we'd never have had the opportunity to hear Duffy.
9. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
A curious case, indeed: how could the man who made the tough and compelling Zodiac only two years before arrive at something so soft of head and centre? You can admire Fincher's technical achievements as much as you want - and the Academy certainly did early in 2009 - but they are as nothing compared to the cumulative weight of irritation caused by a film insistently nudging you in the ribs and saying "Isn't life funny?" every ten minutes for six-and-a-half hours, or however long it went on for. The "Clegghead" episode of Focus North did it all so much better: http://www.youtube.com/wat
8. Surveillance
Jennifer Lynch was never going to get back on my Christmas card list after destroying Sherilyn Fenn's chances of becoming the new Monroe with Boxing Helena, but even so, this tangled thriller was grating, ponderous, ineptly handled rubbish, bringing the worst out of previously dependable performers (Bill Pullman, Julia Ormond), and dependant upon a twist you could see coming three hours before you'd even left the house.
7. Dead Man Running
Of the twenty-seven Danny Dyer films released this year (how many Nuts subscriptions does one actor need?), I still maintain this was the worst, a lairy bling fantasy from the director of The Calcium Kid in which unlikely travel agents Dyer and Tamer Hassan "get handy" with anyone standing between them and their money. If executive producers Ashley Cole and Rio Ferdinand had had sense enough to insist that co-stars Brenda Blethyn and 50 Cent shared a scene together, I might have been better disposed towards it; still, it was good of Rio to turn up at the film's West End premiere, given his spotty track record when it comes to F.A. drug tests.
6. Soi Cowboy
Having aped Catherine Breillat and Gaspar Noe in the near-unwatchable The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael - Newhaven hoodies led by Danny Dyer torment a celebrity chef played by a former Hollyoaks actor, only it's all Tony Blairs's fault - sixth-form drama director Thomas Clay packed up his pretensions (and Chantal Akerman DVDs) and headed to Bangkok for this obscenely tedious follow-up, observing in excruciating detail the domestic routine of a corpulent Dane and his pregnant Thai bride. It's all very well hailing Clay as a brave new voice in British art cinema, and using his exile as a stick to beat the Arts Council into providing more funding for homegrown directors with big ideas (not least of themselves), but at the end of the day, he left us watching a fat man having a shower for ten minutes and trying to conduct a mobile-phone conversation on a train passing through an area of limited reception - things you'd go out of your way to avoid on the 12.32 Chiltern Railways departure to Denham Golf Club, not actively want to pay to sit through.
5. The Ugly Truth
Katherine Heigl rather undermined all those (not entirely inaccurate) comments she had to make about the portrayal of women in Judd Apatow's Knocked Up by starring in and producing something even more demeaning, not just to the fairer sex, but to THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE. Still, let's reserve some of our scorn for her co-star, the perennially unfathomable Gerard Butler, playing 2009's almightiest bell end. Its wrongness was absolute.
4. Dragonball: Evolution
The most pointless release of the year: a live-action American version of a Japanese trading-card sensation followed by, at best, twelve people over here, almost all of whom smell of wee. Highlight: the endless dialogue about the status of the hero's (dragon)balls. Lowlight: the sight of Chow Yun Fat, once the coolest man in movies, pulling faces in a variety of terrible shirts.
3. Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus
To be fair, in any sane world, this would never have played in cinemas - only emerging for an "exclusive" three-day engagement at the Prince Charles in Leicester Square after its spectacularly rubbish trailer became a sensation on YouTube - but it did, after all the frenzied nerdbuzz, more than live down to its provenance. Anyone turning up and paying money to see it should have been Rick-rolled into watching the "Never Gonna Give You Up" video for 86 minutes, and - after the bit where the shark eats the plane early on - that would indeed have been a better way to spend one's time.
2. Angels and Demons
I can't see how this was much of an improvement on The Da Vinci Code, to be honest: leaden, dispiriting, seemingly eternal nonsense from preposterous start (pontiff murdered inside the Large-Hadron Collider!) to preposterous finale (parachuting priest Ewan McGregor saves the world in a helicopter!). McGregor's Irish accent - "Derr's been a develoipment!" - was something to cherish, though, as was Armin Mueller-Stahl's deliciously non-committal Cardinal: "If it's God's will, it may as well be done." What are Tom Hanks and Ron Howard doing perpetuating this witless nonsense?
1. Couples Retreat
In the interests of full disclosure - and by way of underlining the movie's comedy credentials - I should point out this was the only film I felt compelled to walk out of this year, at the point where Vince Vaughn was introducing token Brit Peter Serafinowicz (shame on him) to the delights of underpromoted console game Guitar Hero. I could well have missed twenty minutes or so in which Vaughn and Jon Favreau - a.k.a. Porky and Porkier - did something more compelling and hilarious than leering at women in bikinis; or a scene in which any one of the assembled female cast (Kristen Davis, Malin Akerman, Kristen Bell) summoned up an emotion other than brittle, whiny or needy; or a stunning vista that suggested the principles were actually filming on location, and not against a blue screen the studio had hired out for the day from Poundland. But it seems unlikely. How bad was Couples Retreat? So bad that, at Vince Vaughn's nuptials earlier this month, when the priest asked whether there was anyone present who knew of any reason why this man and this woman should not be joined in holy matrimony, I flew in just to stand up and say: "Yeah; dude made Couples Retreat."
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