4) If I Stay
Move over, The Interview – If I Stay is the most dangerous movie of the year. Such is the risk of viewers drifting off into blissful but possibly permanent comas while watching this mawkish, manipulative mess that I can only hope theaters showing it kept paramedics stationed just outside. Aimed squarely at the teenage demographic that made The Fault In Our Stars such a success, If I Stay, about a conflicted girl in a coma deciding whether to wake up or die, is a shameless cash-grab that only jerks tears by reaching traumatic levels of badness.
What makes it worse is that I was genuinely excited for it. Chloë Grace Moretz is a talented actress, and here was her chance to hit it big with the YA crowd. Instead of watching her character fight against the odds, however, I witnessed Moretz herself battle to stay afloat in a raging sea of genre tropes and canned dialogue (spoiler alert: the actress surrenders around the same time that a Magical Negro nurse appears to give a pump-up speech to her comatose teen).
The film is so blandly directed, stiffly acted and lazily written that I felt as if I’d just watched a bad parody of YA movies. No such luck. If I Stay is both deadly serious and just plain deadly.