Top 10 and Worst Films of 2017

Greetings, and welcome to my best and worst movies of 2017 feature! This is my second installment of breaking down my best of cinema of the year, if you missed last year’s feature, click here to get caught up! I did not get to hit the theater as much as I wanted to this year and have missed out on at least several movies I wanted to see and will be catching up on Netflix throughout the year. I still managed to see 25 live action films, four animated films and seven documentaries from 2017 so with that said, let us get on with the rankings!

Top 10 Films of 2017

1) Logan
2) Wonder Woman
3) Trainspotting 2
4) Guardians of the Galaxy 2
5) Dunkirk
6) Greatest Showman
7) Spider-Man: Homecoming
8) Justice League
9) The F8 of the Furious
10) Goon 2: Last of the Enforcers

The first Goon blew me away and reignited Sean William Scott’s career. It is right up there with Major League as one of the funniest sports films ever. The sequel picks up where it left off and most of the cast returns in a follow-up that managed to hit nearly all the same notes, but of course could not be as good as the original but still cracked me up enough to crack my top 10! F8 of the Furious is another crazy adventure with our favorite gang of superstar car-jackers as I enjoyed a bucket of popcorn and awaited the next preposterous stunt they threw my way.

Spider-Man: Homecoming surprised me after the disappointing cameo in 2016’s Civil War, but Marvel/Disney got it right and props to them for blowing right by his origin story and getting it out of the way with a throwaway line of dialogue in three seconds! He has a fun chemistry with Iron Man, and the jokes all find their mark for the most part. Justice League also surprised me because all I saw on news feeds is how awful all DC films were going into it, but I thought it laid a solid foundation for future films as it solidified the team. They just need to dial back the comedic antics of The Flash in future films. I am a sucker for musicals and Greatest Showman absolutely nailed it with countless numbers that had me bopping along with a sublime performance from Hugh Jackman.

Guardians of the Galaxy 2 is the only film out of the MCU where I usually do not mind Disney/Marvel going all out with comedy because of the unique cast and cosmic setting, but then I stood corrected as the first half hour plays out almost like a satire and when it got time to get real with the plot I was still in the mindset of ‘where’s the jokes.’ I had the same problem with Thor 3, but it is less damaging with GOTG2 because like I said, the first film established that brand as a whimsical, light-hearted ragtag bunch of misfits and it was able to recover.

Logan and Wonder Woman both stunned the hell out of me. Wonder Woman is a bona-fide ass-kicker, and the film made the World War I setting work far better than I thought. I didn't know Logan was R rated going in and its opening scene thus went on to leave me open-eyed throughout. If this is indeed Hugh Jackman’s final portrayal of Wolverine as he alluded to, then it was a hell of a sendoff. And let us raise a glass to more films having thrilling finales taking place in the mountainous wilds of North Dakota! Trainspotting 2 had a lot to live up to for a sequel happening 20 years after its cult hit predecessor but it delivered and its final half hour is insane.

Best Documentary – Tie: Jim & Andy & The Great Beyond and Too Funny to Fail: The Life and Death of the Dana Carvey Show

I saw seven documentaries this year, but wanted to see more as I only got around to seeing just one ESPN 30 for 30 this year and there were a couple others as well. Netflix’s rundown of Jim Carrey causing mayhem behind-the-scenes of Man on the Moon in its documentary, Jim & Andy & The Great Beyond inspired me to pull out Man on the Moon from my backlog box and review it last month. Too Funny to Fail is a fantastic dissection of how The Dana Carvey Show was suppose to be the greatest new sketch show ever, but instead had a rapid decline and was cancelled after seven episodes, but not without introducing the future kings of comedy for the next two decades.

Best Animated – Batman & Harley Quinn

The only animated films I go out of my way to see each year are the straight-to-video animated DC films. A lot of people that worked on the hit animated DC cartoons of the 90s went on to work on those and they got a good routine of pumping these out at about three to four a year. The best one I saw was Batman & Harley Quinn. It was a bit edgier than I anticipated as it tells the tale of Harley Quinn teaming up with Batman & Nightwing to stop Poison Ivy’s latest dastardly plan.

Wor-…..err…underwhelming….disappointments of the Year!


3) First half-hour of Thor 3: Ragnarok
2) First Half-hour of Jumanji
1) The Circle

None of these three films are ‘Worst Film of the Year’ material. They all just underwhelmed/disappointed me. With Thor 3 and Jumanji it was more of the first half hour of each were downright painful to get through. Thor manages to salvage its act once a certain someone is introduced a half hour in, but the first half hour is abysmal. That is doubly so with Jumanji because it is getting through stereotypical-bad high school stereotypes until the cast is stuck in the Jumanji game. Then they shove Kevin Hart and Jack Black in your face both of whom I am not too big on nowadays, but then the film introduces how each player has three lives like in a videogame and they get creative with some of the early deaths for some surprising laughs that got me back on track with the film and actually got me into it after that. Any film gratuitously killing off Jack Black and Kevin Hart not once, but twice I can get down with! The Circle was just a blah film I did not either love or hate, but wound up being the first film I walked out on about halfway through because it was not worth the time to finish.

That is it for this year, see you all in 12 months!