Human beings love war. For all our talk of peace and hollow messages of compassion and love, our track record of waging bloody battles against each other speaks for itself. Clearly, we have an affinity for endless destruction, so it’s no surprise that audiences love watching movies about conflict. War movies have been around since the early days of filmmaking, and to be fair, there have been many stirring efforts made towards capturing the absolute hell of combat and its human toll.
As it happens with every genre, there have also been some real bad war movies. Every war ever depicted on film has had at least one objectively bad movie made about it, and there have been plenty of them released in the last fifty years. Poorly written, these ill-conceived efforts do a great disservice to the service men and women who have fought and bled for their countries. The worst thing about war is itself, but these ten movies are reason enough that no country should ever engage again.
10
‘Windtalkers’
Nicolas Cage had two terrible war movies released within a year of each other in the 2000s. The schmaltzy romance Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is worthy of derision, but it’s not quite as infuriating as Windtalkers, which took an incredible true story and one of the greatest action directors of all time, and completely squandered both. Inspired by the real-life Navajo code talkers who were utilized during World War II, the film should have shone a spotlight on its unsung heroes, but instead gave it to Cage’s bland hero.
The film has been noted for its myriad historical inaccuracies, and its relegation of the code talker characters to supporting roles in their own story is indefensible. Despite making a couple of cult classic action movies, John Woo never found his groove as a director in the Hollywood system, and while Windtalkers does feature some stylish, bloody action, it can’t compare to the filmmaker’s far superior war film, Bullet in the Head.
9
‘Pearl Harbor’ (2001)
Like Windtalkers, Michael Bay‘s Pearl Harbor was made in the wake of Saving Private Ryan‘s success, trying to capitalize on audiences’ newfound interest in World War II. It also shoehorned in a soapy romance for good measure to try and attract the same audience that had turned Titanic into a phenomenon. The movie fails on both fronts, with a bland love triangle that pulls focus away from the real heroes of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Bay is too blunt a director to make anything approaching a nuanced portrayal of the events surrounding one of the most infamous days in American history. Instead, he falls back on his tried and true tricks of jingoistic patriot porn with loads of slow-motion shots of the flag waving in the wind. It’s all so empty and blatantly manipulative, it would be hard to even get upset with the movie if it didn’t also sideline so many characters based on real-life figures who deserved a far better tribute than this cornball crap.
8
‘Revolution’ (1985)
Considering how consequential it was to American history, you would think Hollywood would have made dozens of Revolutionary War movies, but the field is surprisingly thin. The most notable film efforts are Mel Gibson and Roland Emmerich‘s The Patriot and the musical 1776. Sandwiched between those two films is the bloated, boring Revolution. Starring a woefully miscast Al Pacino as a man who reluctantly joins the war effort, the movie makes attempts at inspirational grandeur, but induces more yawns than anything else.
The film was rushed into theaters for a Christmas release in the hopes that it would get some awards attention, but it was eviscerated by critics on sight. Pacino was so disillusioned with the experience that he took a hiatus from films until 1989’s Sea of Love, while director Hugh Hudson would eventually re-edit the film for a director’s cut that has a few more defenders, but any way you cut it, Revolution is an American travesty.
7
‘Best Defense’ (1984)
War comedies are more of a rare breed, likely because many filmmakers have a tough time finding the humor in deadly combat, and fewer still have actually been successful at it. For every Team America: World Police or Dr. Strangelove, there are far more movies like 1941 or Best Defense. This ’80s comedy, starring Dudley Moore with “strategic guest star” Eddie Murphy, had a disjointed production that resulted in a film of two halves, neither of which is funny. Originally shot solely as a vehicle for Moore, the movie had disastrous test screenings, which led the studio to hire the then white-hot popular Murphy to film a wholly new subplot.
In the final film, Moore plays a defense contractor engineer who steals the designs for a tank targeting system, while Murphy plays a tank commander who, two years later, accidentally wanders off course into an active combat zone thanks to the tank’s flawed design. The two comedy stars never share the screen, though they did film a scene that was ultimately cut, and the movie is one big sloppy mess. Best Defense was such a major misfire that Murphy himself notoriously made fun of it when he hosted SNL after its release.
6
‘Delta Farce’ (2007)
For anyone who feels Best Defense is too highbrow, there’s Delta Farce, which, instead of Moore and Murphy, features Blue Collar Comedy stars Bill Engvall and Larry the Cable Guy. Following three down-on-their luck reservists who are called up to active duty for the Iraq War but are accidentally dropped into Mexico, the movie is sophomoric in the extreme and boils down to a series of bad fart and gay jokes.
There’s very little to actually say about a movie as slight as Delta Farce, other than it has nothing to truly recommend it, even to fans of the stand-up comedy of its stars. At the height of their comedy tour success, none of the blue-collar comedians were able to properly parlay their success into movie stardom, unless you count Larry voicing Mater in Cars, and movies like Delta Farce are the reason why.
5
‘All the Queen’s Men’ (2001)
It’s The Imitation Game meets Tootsie, but the worst versions of both of those films. All the Queen’s Men, an utterly forgotten action comedy, follows a fictional attempt by the British army to steal an Enigma machine from a factory in Germany. The factory is staffed completely by women, so, naturally, the military’s only recourse is to have four male soldiers dress as females to infiltrate it. It’s a lazy concept used for cheap jokes in a movie that has nothing interesting to say about war, gender or anything else.
The film made almost nothing on its release in the United States, which was probably for the best, considering most of those involved would prefer if it disappeared completely. Aside from the genuinely genderfluid Eddie Izzard, the rest of the cast seems either uncomfortable or completely out of sorts as to how to play their roles, including lead Matt LeBlanc, who, between this film, Lost in Space, and the chimpanzee baseball comedy Ed, easily had the worst movie career out of all the stars of Friends.
4
‘Battlefield Earth’ (2000)
From actual comedy to unintentional comedy, there are actually more laughs in Battlefield Earth than Best Defense and Delta Farce combined, many of them just from the sight of John Travolta with bad dreads. Based on the novel by L. Ron Hubbard, the film was a passion project for noted Scientologist Travolta, who poured his own money into the movie and used his ’90s star power to get it made. Upon release, it was hated by pretty much anyone with eyes and bombed hard at the box office, effectively derailing Travolta’s career once again.
Set in the year 3000, where Earth is now ruled by an alien species called Psychlos, who have enslaved humans. The humans, led by Barry Pepper, stage a revolt against their alien overlords, leading to all sorts of sci-fi warfare that is exceedingly dull. The prolonged production and fallout, which included a fraud lawsuit and allegations that it was being used as a recruitment tool for Scientology (Travolta actively denied those), are more interesting than anything that ended up on screen. Still, Battlefield Earth has gained a cult following of fans, who enjoy it as a so-bad-it’s-good disasterpiece.
3
‘Gods and Generals’ (2003)
In this follow-up to his previous Civil War film Gettysburg, Ronald F. Maxwell delivered an epic failure. Gods and Generals is an overlong piece of pro-Confederate propaganda that is stunningly bad considering the pedigree of the talent involved. Based on the novel by Jeffrey Shaara, whose father wrote the novel that served as the basis for Gettysburg, the film is set in the early days of the Civil War up through the Battle of Chancellorsville. It’s a slog to get through, not only because of the excruciating tedium of its lengthy scenes of dialogue, but also the outright offensiveness of its historical revisionism.
Gettysburg propagates the Lost Cause Myth, an alternative pseudo-history propagated by denialists seeking to lionize Confederates and downplay how intrinsic slavery was to the Civil War. Despite being filled with intricate and historically accurate details in its costuming and production design, Gods and Generals is otherwise completely biased and sanitizes one of the darkest chapters in the early history of America.
2
‘Inchon’ (1981)
Sometimes cited as the worst war movie ever made, Inchon dramatizes the pivotal battle of the titular city during the Korean War with maximum bombast and zero subtlety. The movie had a bonkers production, starting with its financing, which came from notorious religious leader Sun Myung Moon. The production was shot in several different countries, with the production luring Sir Laurence Olivier to play General Douglas MacArthur. Olivier openly admitted to taking the role for the money, and the rest of the overqualified cast were also paid handsomely for the embarrassment of appearing in the film.
The chaotic production, which was beset by all sorts of problems, including a typhoon, resulted in a film that is a glorious mess to behold. Cardboard cut-outs used to portray aircraft are plainly visible in the film, and myriad other continuity errors are littered across the explosion-filled battlefields. It may or may not be the worst war film ever made, but it is certainly trying its hardest to be.
Inchon
- Release Date
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September 17, 1982
- Runtime
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140 minutes
- Director
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Terence Young
1
‘Sniper Special Ops’ (2016)
Truth be told, the absolute worst war films are ones that most moviegoers have never heard of. They’re the cheaply made travesties that once filled up Redbox kiosks across the nation and now fill out streaming services like Tubi. This entire list could be filled with movies like the lousy Jarhead sequels, but life is too short to watch all those movies, and none of them could possibly be as bad or as embarrassing as Sniper Special Ops, starring everyone’s favorite bloated martial artist turned accused sexual predator and Russian special envoy, Steven Seagal.
There are no words that can accurately describe watching Seagal do the absolute minimum amount required to be considered the star of this god-awful war movie. The “actor” barely leaves a sitting position for the entirety of his brief screentime. Sniper Special Ops was directed by schlockmeister Fred Olen Ray, who has specialized in this kind of cheap exploitation since the late ’70s. His filmography is nothing but bad movies, some fun, others not, but Sniper Special Ops might be the laziest.