Worst of the Worst: #97, Boat Trip

You probably haven't heard of a lot of the movies on this list of the worst movies of the last decade, but you have probably heard of this one. Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Horatio Sanz star as two guys who go on a cruise to meet women. When they anger the travel agent, they are booked on a gay cruise, much to their surprise. Somehow they don't realize it at first, but then Gooding has to pretend to be gay to get close to the only woman on the boat, the dance instructor. She falls for him, he reveals he's straight, she's pissed, blah, blah, blah. Everyone knew it would be awful, to the point that I actually tried to rent it when it first came out on DVD. Funny enough, the box was mislabeled and I ended up with Daddy Day Care instead. Daddy Day Care, which had a few laughs thanks to Jeff Garlin and Steve Zahn, isn't on this list but Boat Trip is. So, much like Sam Beckett, I was given the opportunity to put right what once went wrong and watch the movie.

You know the premise is awful. Bad, to the point that the "Swedish Sun-Tanning Team" appears on the boat at one point to tempt Sanz' character. I googled "Swedish Sun-Tanning Team" to see if it actually exists -- yes, I already knew the answer -- and it only returned links for Boat Trip. Towards the end, the filmmakers inexplicably finish the cruise with no real wrap-up, just so they can just get the story over with. It feels like ten minutes were just cut out, which, believe me, I'm not complaining about. On top of the bad plot, the homophobic jokes are shocking in their extremity. Almost the entire movie is gay jokes and, while the gay characters obviously are the heroes in the end and the two main characters obviously learn that gay people can be real people too (actual plot point), the movie doesn't quite seem to shy away from stereotypes. It's on the list, we know it's bad, whatever. As you know, here's where the "but" comes in.

But...

I actually laughed a couple of times. Will Ferrell has an cameo towards the beginning where he ad-libs with Artie Lange and made me chuckle. There's a joke involving bodily fluids at one point that caught me off guard and made me chuckle. Horatio Sanz overall just kind of makes me chuckle. He's definitely lame but a) it's unfair to pin the crapiness of SNL on him as I think I even used to do myself and b) I can sort of tell why he gets these parts. He's not that funny on film, but I bet he's funny as hell in person. The kind of guy who comes to a bachelor party and makes everyone die laughing all night even though you wouldn't want to spend any time with him when alcohol and/or strippers aren't involved. Sanz tries too hard, which doesn't work in a good comedy, but works just fine when everything else around him is junk.

The movie was #97, so it barely made the list with a 7% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I know the list comes from the ratings, so it's not a completely subjective ranking of every film from the last decade against each other. I'm sure I've said before that there is one movie, Year One, that belongs on the list. It was a wide enough release and there was not only laugh in the entire movie. I could also make a case for last year's The Ugly Truth, which was also embarrassingly bad. I'm not sure I'd put Boat Trip on the list because at least I chuckled a couple of times. I come in to every movie on this list with low expectations, but for some, you can't go low enough. I went in to this one with expectations as low as the Dead Sea and I was (only barely) pleasantly surprised. Bravo.