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As St. Pete Times media critic Eric Deggans noted recently, year-end top 10 lists are an easy way for columnists to fill space while also allowing them to take another shot at films they disliked and praise those worthy of the honor. If you’ve been following Reel Projections for the past few weeks, you know that every few days, another critics’ organization has issued its best-of picks for 2008.

Not me. Instead, I thought I’d give a tip of the cap to those critics who toiled in darkened theaters and saved me my hard-earned money by warning me off a slew of films I had been at least somewhat interested in seeing.

When I want to gauge the overall critical reaction to a new film, the first place I head is Rotten Tomatoes, which provides a useful consensus, expressed as a number (anything below 60 is considered bad).

Here then, are the Top 8 of 2008 I initially wanted to see before the critics cut them down to size, along with some of the pithiest, nastiest comments by reviewers:

1. Jumper Rotten Tomatoes rating: 16.
“Liman’s movie candy is philistine, banal and lacks surrealist thrill. His sci-fi, quasi-political allegory is like an X-Men or Hulk narrative told from the ass end.” —Armond White, New York Press

2. Star Wars: The Clone Wars RT rating:19
“It is so bad that it could well rival the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special as the single most useless piece of Star Wars-related entertainment ever made, and at least in that legendary disaster, the animated aspect was actually not too bad.” —Peter Sobczynksi, eFilmCritic.com

3. Righteous Kill RT rating: 21
“It’s not much fun to see these two reduced to Mad TV parodies of themselves. In the right movie, they’d stop coasting on their legends long enough to remind us how they became them.” —Owen Glieberman, Entertainment Weekly

4. Miracle at St. Anna RT rating: 33
“Overwrought, overproduced, overbusy and overlong, Miracle at St. Anna finally suffers from the worst filmmaking sin of all: the failure of trust, in the story and the audience.” —Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

5. Vantage Point RT rating: 36
“A monument to cinematic suckiness.” —Nick Schager, Lessons of Darkness

6. Swing Vote RT rating 36
“Swing Vote isn’t exactly a toothless political satire. It’s something worse: a satire with dentures.” —Dana Stevens, Slate

7. Speed Racer RT rating: 37.
“This toxic admixture of computer-generated frenzy and live-action torpor succeeds in being, almost simultaneously, genuinely painful — the esthetic equivalent of needles in eyeballs — and weirdly benumbing, like eye candy laced with lidocaine.” —Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal

8. Sex and the City RT rating: 50.
“More disappointment than joyful reunion, a tedious and desperately drawn-out affair that tests your patience even as it brazenly courts (and often earns) your contempt.” —Connie Ogle, Miami Herald

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