I'm not going to waste a whole post on Max Payne. Plain and simple, it's the worst movie this year. Worst direction. Worst Screenplay. Worst Score. Mark Wahlberg might have even trumped his performance in The Happening because at least in that film you could laugh at him. Aside from new Bond girl Olga Kurylenko's sexy but small role, the film is a complete waste.

The film did inspire me to make a quick list of the worst scenes so far this year. This list could include some spoilers although how can you really spoil a bad movie?

So without further ado, here's the bottom 10 scenes of the year.

10. Wanted: The Truck/Car Chase
Now, I'm a guy who liked Live Free or Die Hard. I was able to accept the fact that a trailer truck could somehow outrun a fighter jet. And I also realized that Wanted was supposed to be cartoonish and over-the-top. Still, the first chase between a crappy truck and a sports car was so poorly shot and edited that I was too annoyed to suspend my disbelief.

9. Pineapple Express: The Triple Joint
I think even stoners can admit that this scene dragged. I loved this movie but the scene with Seth Rogen and James Franco hanging out killed the pacing and just wasn't that funny. While the scene was dragging on, part of me was hoping the camera would just pan over so I could ignore Franco and Rogen in favor of watching the episode of 227 that was on the TV.

8. Eagle Eye: Shia's Boo Boo
SPOILER
Eagle Eye is an extremely ridiculous movie. Somehow a mysterious person can not only control traffic lights, automated cranes, and security camera, but it also has the power to make power lines snap at will and also basically direct how they fall. Even still, I was ok. The ending, however, was just too much. Nevermind the terribly planned assassination attempt but Shia gets shot three times from close in and a few days later (if even that long) he's standing there with nothing more than a sling. I almost expected him to say, "Yeah, the bullets weren't bad but when I fell down I dinged up my shoulder." When Shia was shot I was actually surprised because I couldn't believe they would have him get blasted like they did but then they remedied that possible interesting ending by having him inexplicably survive the gunfire.

7. The Happening: "We have to stay head of the wind!"
I almost hate to include this because The Happening was so ridiculous that it was actually funny but this line was just too outrageous to ignore. After throwing a hissy fit in the middle of the field, Mark Wahlberg deduces that the wind could be carrying the evil toxin so the character need to somehow stay ahead of the wind. Then we see a breeze blowing through the grass and the chase begins. It's an amazing scene that really could only have been made better if the response to the aforementioned line was:
Zooey: So we have to run like the wind?
Mark: No. (nervous pause) Faster!

6. Righteous Kill: The Sex Scene
I can deal with DeNiro phoning in his performance. I can handle Pacino doing a half-assed job. What I can't accept, however, is Carla Gugino not fully committing to a sex scene and not allowing us even a glimpse of her amazing breasts. The fact that I had to suffer through DeNiro in a sex scene was made worse by the fact that Carla's cans were corralled in her bra. There really is no excuse for this. They should have taken whatever money Brian Dennehy made and spent it on Carla's boobs. Hell, they could have even had one of her boobs play Dennehy's part. It would have made the film more watchable.

5. The Dark Knight: The ending
SPOILER
I've been through this before but the ending didn't work for me. The people of Gotham had just stood up to the Joker but if they found out that Harvey Dent went crazy then that whole moment would be moot and they would lose faith? Mind you, everyone was FLEEING Gotham and trying to get out at this point. The National Guard had to be called in. How much faith was there? On top of that, the people would feel better with Dent being dead and Batman as an evil doer? And to make matters worse, the whole episode was wrapped up in the 974th monologue of the movie. Just a bad ending that took what could have been a great movie (and probably should have been two movies) down a notch.

4. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist: The Recording Studio
SPOILER
I'll keep it short. Norah is a girl who doesn't like being known as the rich girl. She wants to have her own identity. She just had her on/off boyfriend push his CD on her so she could give it to her music producer dad. So where does she take Nick on their first night together (a night, mind you, that hasn't gone all that well)? To her father's recording studio. It makes absolutely no sense. She wants to be her own person so to get closer to Nick she takes him to the one place she's been running from? They try to explain it with some schmaltzy insightful rambling but it is quite simply a disaster.

3. Max Payne: This is Bullet Time?
One of the cool parts of the game Max Payne was a Matrix-like feature in which you could go into slow motion and dodge bullets. In the movie, bullet time was used once in a laughable scene. Max basically bend backwards a bit to get a shot off at a bad guy who is directly behind him. Not only is watching a guy bend over backwards a bit not something that is all that impressive in slow motion but, making matters worse, the guy who was directly behind Max and shooting at him (and whose bullets we saw fire in slow motion) was somehow missing Max by 20 feet. Max wasn't dodging bullets, the bad guy was just one of the worst shots in movie history.

2. Indy 4: Nuking the Fridge
This scene is already infamous but it can't be stated enough how George Lucas's idea of bigger and better is actually bigger and more implausible. Sure, some film nerds probably complained about the perfectly round boulder that chased Dr. Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark but this scene blew that one out of the water. Not only was it ludicrous but it was poorly done. The CGI was crap. An embarrassing scene in a bad movie.

1. Cloverfield: The Party Scene
This scene is basically a great way to show how not to open a movie. This introductory scene not only lasts three times longer than it should but it succeeds in introducing the characters and establishing them all as annoying people who you really wouldn't mind seeing getting eaten by a huge monster. When your first act has people tapping their feet anxiously and muttering "Enough already!", you should probably change it.