There are great films, there are mediocre films, and then there are down right horrible, awful films.  We enjoy the great films, it's the great films that keep us going to the movies.  But the awful films are, in a way, more interesting, because they aspired to, at the very least, be decent.  No filmmaker sets out to make an awful film.  However, despite so many good intentions, we are besieged by horrible, awful films.  It was difficult to parse down the contenders amid so many Stallone and Schwarzenegger movies, but eventually we arrived at a definitive list of the worst.  (We tried to keep it to recognized films, otherwise we'd have a list of hundreds of movies starring Dolph Lundgren where the protagonist was a soldier, which sort of counts as a "war movie.")

1. Redacted (2007)

Redacted is a "found footage" war movie, in the vein of Cloverfield or the Blair Witch franchise.  Except that none of the "found footage" appears even the slightest bit real; it's so painfully scripted and staged, that as the viewer you want to scream, "That's so obviously not real!  Quit lying to me!"  The dialogue is stilted and forced, the interactions between soldiers - far from being organic and natural - is instead awkward and clumsy (as if they were just actors who had only known each other for a single day before shooting the scene), the direction is tepid and dull, and the production values are on par with a sitcom.  And this is all from the famed auteur director Brian de Palma.

2. Basic (2003)

This movie is so awful, that I cannot bring myself to write even a short summary of it, after writing my full length review.  Suffice to say, it's one of the most horrific war films ever made.  

3. Pearl Harbor (2001)

In 2001, Michael Bay (Transformers) attempted to make a historical epic, starring Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett revolving around the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  While the action scenes of the attack itself are quite magnificent, the entire rest of the film from the cornball romantic triangle with Kate Beckinsale, to the wooden acting, to the over the top manufactured sentimentality (think lots of slow motion shots of American flags flapping), adds up to just be a giant mess.  And a long mess at that, with the final film clocking in at 183 minutes.  

4. The Patriot (2000)

Mel Gibson had such a hit with Braveheart, that in 2000 he released The Patriot, which is pretty much a re-creation of his Scottish war saga, but set during Revolutionary War America.  This film is bad on so many levels, that it's difficult to know where to begin:  The lack of a single character the audience cares about, the fetishization of Gibson's psychopathic rage, or simply the meandering script which fails to engage the viewer with anything that's happening on screen.  Perhaps the worst violation though is simply how dumbed down the history of the Revolutionary War is within this film, playing to every bad meme about the war that's ever existed.

5. The Thin Red Line (1998)

While some view director Terrence Malick as a genius auteur, I've never been that fond of him.  And I was even less fond of his World War II film about combat in the Pacific theater.  I'll be the first to admit that it has some great scenes, and some great actors turning in great performances, but the entire film is so esoteric, so abstract, that without a tight narrative structure (or even a cogent storyline) it doesn't add up to much more than a massive snooze fest.  Worse than boring though, the film is also horribly pretentious, with Marines spouting off poetry in voice-overs during combat scenes.  I have no idea what this film is supposed to be about, or what it's trying to say about war.  For me, it was headache inducing.  (In an article I wrote about veterans and the war films they hated, it seems I'm not alone in this opinion.)

Click here for the Most Overrated War Movies.

6. Dead Presidents (1995)

Dead Presidents was about a decade and a half too late to be a poignant Vietnam movie.  By 1995, no one found it that shocking that soldiers in Vietnam were, in fact, not happy about being in Vietnam.  And, of course, there is the requisite occurrence of war crimes and drug use, and the difficult reunion home.  But this film takes it one step further and has the veterans become bank robbers, because well - the war drove them to it, I guess.  Sort of an insulting film to Vietnam vets.

Click here for the Best and Worst Vietnam War Movies.

7. Iron Eagle (1986)

I'll let this summary from IMDB speak for itself:

When Doug's father, an Air Force Pilot, is shot down by MiGs belonging to a radical Middle Eastern state, no one seems able to get him out. Doug finds Chappy, an Air Force Colonel who is intrigued by the idea of sending in two fighters piloted by himself and Doug to rescue Doug's father after bombing the MiG base. Their only problems: Borrowing two fighters, getting them from California to the Mediteranean without anyone noticing, and Doug's inability to hit anything unless he has music playing. Then come the minor problems of the state's air defenses.

That about sums it up. 

Click here for the Best and Worst War Movies about Aerial Combat.

8. Delta Force (1986)

Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin enter Beirut on a secret mission…and then proceed to kill terrorists with bazookas while offering up corny one-liners without any emotion.

9. Rambo II - IV (1985 - 2008)

I couldn't decide on which film in the franchise was the worst, so I added all of them (except the first one, First Blood is pretty good).  In the second film, Rambo takes on the entire Vietcong all by himself.  In the third, the Soviets in Afghanistan.  In the fourth, the entire Burmese Army.

I know it's just a dumb action film, but there are limits to the enjoyability of dumb.

10. Commando (1985)

Someone is hunting down and killing the former member's of Schwarzenegger's old unit, Delta Force.  (Is it Chuck Norris?)  And Arnold decides to bring the fight to the bad guys.  How does he bring the fight?  With hand-held missile launchers.  A nuanced meditation on the nature of warfare this was not.  Unfortunately, it was also not an exciting action movie.