Sequels are bad news. For every worthwhile follow-up, movie-goers are usually treated to a lazy, uninspired re-hash; a movie that pretends that it has an audience's best interests at heart, but in reality has scraped the bottom of the cinematic barrel in a greedy attempt to play on either your nostalgia or an emotional connection to established characters. What's more, this usually works; studios somehow manage to convince movie-lovers, time after time, that sequels are things we need to fork out money for. Though there were certainly a handful of worthwhile sequels released over the course of the year, 2014 was a pretty notorious year for bad sequels. Arguably more than any other year in cinematic history, in fact, 2014 made a point when it came to the sorts of sequels that you wished had never found themselves in development: belated, awkward attempts to cash in on characters of long ago; sequels cut in half to ensure a higher box office gross; the next chapters in franchises that have been broken since inception. What follows, then, are the worst sequel movies to rear their ugly heads over the course of 2014. It would have been better, apparently, to have jumped headfirst into a pit filled with angry scorpions than sit down to any of these monstrosities. May God have mercy...
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
