Julia Roberts should pray her agent gets her work better than “Eat Pray Love.” (©Columbia Pictures/courtesy Ever)
Break out a helping of leftover pumpkin pie. The top prize in The Post’s 12th annual Turkey Movie Awards is shared by a pair of siblings who appeared in two of the worst movies since last Thanksgiving — both of which landed with a thud on the same Friday in August.
Former box-office queen Julia Roberts was insufferable as the shallow heroine of the flop “Eat Pray Love.” Her character stuffs herself with pasta in Italy, seeks spiritual enlightenment in India and finds love in Bali, where her biggest problem is figuring out how to commute from New York.
Julia’s brother, C-lister Eric Roberts, gave the worst performance as the main bad guy in the ensemble cast of the action flick “The Expendables.” That’s not an easy feat when your competition includes such distinguished thespians as Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren. As a piece of filmmaking, “The Expendables” was even worse than “Eat Pray Love,” but it made money — and it’s been decades since Eric could boast he beat his little sister at the box office.
Another pair of siblings tied for the runner-up prize in our Turkey Movie Awards. Jake Gyllenhaal set back Middle Eastern-American relations several millennia with his performance in the title role of “Prince of Persia.” His sister, Maggie Gyllenhaal, seemed adrift somewhere over the English Channel as a British farmer in the dire family flick “Nanny McPhee Returns.” And now, a drumstick, or drumroll, for the rest of Tinseltown’s list of the bad, the worse and the ugly . . .
WORST PROFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A FILM WITH DOLPH LUNDGREN: In “The Expendables,” Eric Roberts proved himself expendable to Hollywood casting agents.
MOST APPITITE-KILLING PROFORMANCE IN A FILM WITH FOOD: Julia Roberts should pray her agent gets her work better than “Eat Pray Love.”
STILLBORN ARTIFICIAL
INSEMINATION COMEDIES WITH FADING STARS: The Jennifers couldn’t buy a laugh for “The Switch,” starring Aniston (below), or “The Back-Up Plan,” showcasing Lopez (bottom).
THE ONLY WAY IT COULD HAVE BEEN ANY WORSE WOULD HAVE BEEN TO FILM IT IN 3-D: The crass and endless “Sex and the City 2,” which cast Sarah Jessica Parker and her rapidly aging pals as ugly Americans in the Middle East.
MOST DUBIOUS OPENING SEQUENCE OF AN ACTION COMEDY: Swiftly declining star Tom Cruise kills the crew and all but one passenger on a plane in the box-office bomb “Knight and Day.” And kidnaps the only survivor (Cameron Diaz), who, of course, falls in love with him.
MOST QUESTIONABLE CAREER MOVE: Lindsay Lohan as a topless, coked-up heiress in “Machete.”
THANK GOODNESS NEPOTISM IS ALIVE AND WELL IN HOLLYWOOD: Ron Howard’s daughter, Bryce Dallas Howard, hams it up as a Southern belle in the unwatchable “The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond,” then tops herself as Matt Damon’s girlfriend in Clint Eastwood’s wretched “Hereafter.”
OVERHYPED, UNDERWHELMING: Carey Mulligan in the tedious “Brothers,” the not-great “The Greatest,” the disappointing “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” and the downright boring “Never Let Me Go.”
MOVIE THAT ANSWERED ITS OWN TITLE IN THE NEGATIVE: The Sarah Jessica Parker-Hugh Grant rom-com flop “Did You Hear About the Morgans?”
MOST ACCURATE TITLE: “Vampires Suck.”
FORGOTTEN BUT NOT GONE: Renée Zellweger in the laughably bad “Case 39,” Jude Law in “Repo Men.”
TWO REASONS KRISTEN BELL MOVIES SHOULD BE BANNED UNDER THE GENEVA CONVENTION: The execrable “When in Rome” and the even worse “You Again.”
FACE-LIFTS 9, FILM 0: The all-star musical box-office disaster “Nine.”
NINE YEARS LATER, 9/11 IS MERELY A PLOT CRUTCH FOR LAZY SCREENWRITERS: “Remember Me,” “Dear John,” “Megamind.”
THE THREE BEST REASONS NOT TO KILL YOURSELF: The depictions of the afterlife in Peter Jackson’s “The Lovely Bones,” Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter” and “Charlie St. Cloud” with Zac Efron.
IN SCRABBLE, THIS TITLE WOULD BE WORTH 56,000 POINTS: “Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole.”
HOW TO SPEND AN EXTRA FIVE BUCKS, GET A HEADACHE AND SEE ONE OF THE YEAR’S VERY WORST MOVIES TO BOOT: We generally limit these awards to actors, but reader John K. from Cherry Hill, NJ, suggested a special citation for 3-D movies. Great idea, given this partial list of stereoscopic horrors which insulted moviegoers this year: “Clash of the Titans,” “The Last Airbender,” “Piranha 3-D,” “Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore,” “Alpha and Omega,” “The Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole,” “Megamind,” “Jackass 3-D,” “Saw 3-D,” “My Soul to Take,” “Resident Evil: Afterlife,” “The Nutcracker in 3-D.”
A CROSS BETWEEN “THE BIG CHILL” FOR MORONS AND “THAT CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON” FOR CRETINS: “Grown Ups,” with (left to right) David Spade, Adam Sandler, Chris Rock and Kevin James as aging idiots.
FOUR REASONS WE’D BE HAPPY NEVER TO REVIEW ANOTHER ZACH GALIFIANAKIS MOVIE (BESIDES HAVING TO SPELL HIS NAME): “Youth in Revolt,” “Dinner With Schmucks,” “It’s Kind of a Funny Story,” “Due Date.”
TWO-TIME OSCAR NOMINEE APPARENTLY ATTEMPTING A COMEBACK BY TRYING TO LOOK LIKE ZACH GALIFIANAKIS: Joaquin Phoenix in the phony documentary “I’m Still Here.”
FILM THAT DESERVES TO BE BROKEN UP WITH: The painfully unfunny “Valentine’s Day.”
REWARD FOR ITS CAPTURE, $0: “The Bounty Hunter,” starring Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler.
MOST INEXPLICABLE CONCEPT FOR A MOVIE: Will Forte in the painfully unfunny “MacGruber,” based on an obscure “Saturday Night Live” sketch about a forgotten ’80s TV show.
OSCAR-NOMINATED ACTOR CASHING IN WITH THREE BAD MOVIES: Liam Neeson in the reboot of the classic TV action series “The A-Team,” the woe-begotten remake of “Clash of the Titans” and the arthouse fiasco “Chloe.”
BORN UNDER A VERY BAD SIGN: The wretched “Jonah Hex,” a comic book adaptation starring Josh Brolin. Josh Brolin?
LATEST REASONS THE GAG REFLEX SHOULD BE RENAMED THE HEIGL EXERCISE: Unbearable actress Katherine Heigl stank up theaters with the rom-coms “Killers” and “Life as We Know It”.
Reed Tucker and Sara Stewart contributed.
