As Jennifer Lopez said to Ben Affleck when they were preparing to have sex in the notorious “Gigli’’ — “It’s turkey time. Gobble, gobble.’’
And in this case, you don’t even have to wait for Thursday! Put on a napkin and get ready to feast on The Post’s 16th Annual Turkey Movie Awards, honoring Hollywood’s most dubious cinematic achievements over the past 12 months.
Once again, there were more candidates for Top Turkey than gobblers on the Butterball assembly line.
Although it would be easy to serve up one of the countless superheroes’ heads on a platter, duty requires finally acknowledging a performer whose movies have consistently caused critics and moviegoers more heartburn than a leftover pumpkin pie.
Yes, it’s finally time to stick a fork in Cameron Diaz — who outdid herself and became worthy of a public roasting with the two latest in her long string of bombs.
Cited in 2013 for her writhing against a windshield in “The Counselor,’’ this 42-year-old actress continued refusing to grow up in 2014. Worse, she insisted on appearing in inferior versions of the same kind of romantic comedies that she headlined back in 1998, when she turned 26.
Audiences wisely shunned both the stupidly sexist “The Other Woman’’ and the crass soft-core sexploitationer “Sex Tape’’ (perhaps the only one ever nobody wanted to watch) like an Ebola victim on the L train.
So who else won a Turkey Award? Read on!
Reboots of properties that should have been left moldering in their graves: “I, Frankenstein,’’ “Dracula Untold,’’ “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,’’ “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,’’ “RoboCop,’’ “Hercules,’’ and “The Legend of Hercules.’’
‘Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit’
‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’
‘Hercules’
No pot of gold: Hollywood’s repeated failed attempts to turn Colin Farrell into a box-office attraction seemed to have finally ended when he went full leprechaun for “Winter’s Tale.’’ This ghastly romantic fantasy not only reunited Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly of “A Beautiful Mind’’ to risible effect — but threw in an indescribably awful Will Smith as the devil for good measure.
What can you possibly do to follow up a fiasco like “The Lone Ranger’’?: Not easy, but if you’re Johnny Depp, try playing a dying scientific genius who uploads his mind to the Internet in the brain-numbing sci-fi fiasco “Transcendence.’’
Even Don Draper would have a hard time marketing this dud: Poor Jon Hamm played a struggling sports agent who recruits baseball players from India in the equally inexplicable and uncharming Disney flop “Million Dollar Arm,’’ which took in approximately $1,000 at the worldwide box office outside of India.
What becomes a legend least? Meryl Streep out-paycheck-jobbed fellow Oscar winner Kate Winslet by turning up as an authority figure in “The Giver,’’ an even dopier (not to mention less successful) dystopian young-adult novel adaptation than Winslet’s “Divergent.’’
And speaking of sellouts: Marvel rented out Robert Redford’s credibility for the inane “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”: Hope he charged extra for saying “Hail, Hydra!’’ as a resurrected Nazi.
Not to mention the erstwhile Indiana Jones/Han Solo: A visibly bored Harrison Ford pretended to react to green-screen explosions while waiting for his paycheck to clear in “The Expendables 3,’’ a sequel desperate enough to even bail out the disgraced Mad Mel Gibson from the Ninth Circle of Hell.
With films like this, who needs enemies like Mia and Ronan Farrow? Woody Allen’s creaky “Magic in the Moonlight’’ featured the year’s most spectacularly mismatched couple — Colin Firth and Emma Stone — and a planetarium sequence the doddering Woodman apparently forgot he used before, to vastly greater effect, 35 years ago in “Manhattan.’’
He oughta be arrested for impersonating a movie star: The uncharismatic former Oscar host Seth MacFarlane demonstrated he is no Mel Brooks, at least as an on-camera comic, with the lethally unfunny Western spoof “A Million Ways To Die in the West.’’
What’s next, Oskar Schindler gunning for Joe McCarthy? Liam Neeson continues running his middle-aged vigilante thrillers into the ground with “Non-Stop’’ and “A Walk Among the Tombstones.’’
The audience has left the building: “The Identical’’ offered up a thinly disguised Elvis Presley in an abortive Christian heartwarmer, while “Son of God’’ recycled footage from the “Bible’’ miniseries for a big-screen movie that should have been called “Jesus for Dummies.’’
One way to get the critics’ attention: Scarlett Johansson mysteriously got some of the best notices of her career after taking off her clothes and luring Scotsmen to their doom in the incoherent sci-fi drama “Under the Skin.’’
It’s never a good sign when your movie titles begin charting the downward progress of your career: This year, the hapless ham Nicolas Cage went from “Rage’’ to “Outcast’’ to “Left Behind.’’
Well, real movie stars can do whatever they want: Tank commander Brad Pitt takes a break from World War II to get his protégé some nookie in the ludicrous adventure “Fury,’’ while Ben Stiller’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’’ turned James Thurber’s milquetoast fantasies into thuddingly dull real-life adventures.
Forgotten but not gone: Erstwhile Oscar winner Kevin Costner mounted another couple of comeback attempts that sank without a trace: the lame thriller “3 Days To Kill” (which took three days to bomb) and the sports comedy “Draft Day.’’
Who exactly is Aaron Paul again? Rand Paul’s brother? RuPaul’s cousin? Nevermind, Aaron P’s “Need for Speed’’ never got out of first gear at the box office.
James Franco, all is forgiven: The woeful animated “Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return’’ made Franco’s 2013 bomb, “Oz: The Great and Powerful,’’ look almost good by comparison. Not so sure about Franco’s 16 other releases this year, though.
Sequels more than worthy of extinction: “Transformers: Age of Extinction,’’ “The Amazing Spider-Man 2,’’ “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,’’ “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,’’ “Muppets Most Wanted,’’ “Sin City: A Dame To Kill For,’’ “Step Up All In,’’ “A Haunted House 2.”
‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2’
‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’
‘The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug’
And the big takeaway from the past 12 months? That “Howard the Duck’’ was merely 30 years before its time: Audiences worldwide flocked in record numbers to an equally ridiculous Marvel adaptation with talking animals, “Guardians of the Galaxy.’’
Gregory E. Miller, Reed Tucker, Sara Stewart and Kyle Smith contributed to this article.