For every mind-blowing stroke of brilliance we are likely to witness at least one mind-boggling fiasco.

Some come as little surprise. Adam Sandler’s ‘Blended’, the casually racist ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys D’Movie’ and the latest Nicholas Sparks production line monstrosity ‘The Best of Me’ all arrived with little to nothing in the way of expectations.

But the real disappointments were the films that promised so much, yet failed to deliver.

• Movie spoiler: pointless finale to ‘The Hobbit’ trilogy
• Your blockbuster summer movie guide
• The must-see films of 2014

In 2014 that failure was notably common among the mainstream comedy offerings. When ‘Sex Tape’ and ‘Bad Neighbours’ rank as the best ‘big’ comedies, it is a sad year for laughter merchants.

Nonetheless, let us shake off the humour deficit and take a look back at the films that most let us down in an otherwise good year at the cinema.

The ‘don’t make me laugh’  award for most disappointing comedy

‘A Million Ways to Die in the West’ stars Seth MacFarlane and Charlize Theron. Photo: Getty

A Million Ways to Die in the West

After the joyful, R-rated laugh-fest of Ted there was real hope that Seth MacFarlane would prove capable of making live-action comedy to the standard of his masterpiece animated series Family Guy.

Sadly, such elevated hopes were dashed on the rocks of this miserable western wannabe. Ambition is a good thing in film, yet a comedy that aspires to be a heroic frontier tale needs to succeed at both, not fall between the cracks.

Dramatically, we didn’t care if the most sarcastic man in the wild west made it or didn’t.

Comedically, the film forgot to include jokes in the entire last act, with the exception of a comically awful drug sequence. While other comedies were dumb and unfunny (The Other Woman) only MacFarlane’s western managed to be dumb, unfunny and arrogant.

Dishonourable mentions – Tammy; Mrs Brown’s Boys D’Movie; Are We Officially Dating?; The Other Woman

The out of tune award for most disappointing music film

Jersey Boys

A great Broadway musical that tells an amazing real life story featuring some of the best songs of the 20th century, directed by the extraordinary Clint Eastwood. What could go wrong? This.

Performances that were too subdued to be a jazz-hands sing-a-thon, too over-the-top to be a gravitas-wielding biopic. The film never decided what it wanted to be, only finding any real energy in the intentionally cheesy closing number.

Dishonourable Mentions – Step-Up: All In (bad even by the standards of this franchise).

The ‘It’s alive! Unfortunately’ award for most disappointing Frankenstein film

Johnny Depp can hardly contain his excitement at being nominated for a Fizzer. Photo: Getty

Transcendence

There were two movies made of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein tale this year. The first was a woeful sequel made by Australian director Stuart Beattie which attempted to weave an ‘Underworld’-style story of angels and gargoyles.

The second and fare more disappointing effort was Johnny Depp vehicle ‘Transcendence’ in which the end was given away at the beginning along with any pretence of an intelligent plot. Not only was our suspension of disbelief pushed to breaking point, so was our interest in this lame moral tale: scientists bad; humanity good. Grunt. Grunt. Ugh.

Dishonourable Mentions – I, Frankenstein

The ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ award for most disappointing rom-com

And So It Goes

Once upon a time Rob Reiner gave us ‘When Harry Met Sally’, Diane Keaton was the muse for Woody Allen’s best work and Michael Douglas was romancing the stone. As such they should’ve known better than to involve themselves this miserable excuse for a rom-com.

We expect Nicholas Sparks to hammer home the same melodramatic tropes each year. Nothing was as pointlessly depressing as watching these three cinematic heavyweights labour through this curmudgeon with a heart of gold cliché. Just awful.

Dishonourable Mentions – The Best of Me; Words and Pictures

The ‘Chucky’ award for most disappointing children’s film

Muppets Most Wanted

It was always a mistake to hope for this seventh muppet film to match the brilliance of its most recent predecessor. Too many of the creative talents changed, replaced with extra celebrity cameos.

Sadly it became not just a game of spot-the-face so much as find-the-plot as one hero from the last film was sent to a gulag, the other was relegated to a bit part. The individual scenes were amusing. The overall picture was a mess.

Dishonourable Mentions – Rio 2; Tarzan 3D

The ‘not-so-great escape’ award for most disappointing escapade

Monuments Men

At The Monuments Men. Photo: supplied

Let’s be absolutely clear: ‘Monuments Men’ wasn’t a genuinely bad film, it was just monumentally disappointing. It wasn’t just the amazing ensemble cast that inspired hope.

The premise of art nerds defying Hitler, saving masterpieces and defying the odds stacked against their survival was brilliant. A dash of true story, a smattering of swashbuckling adventure.

Instead we got a series of odd little unrelated vignettes that left us yearning for bigger laughs, bigger action and just better storytelling.

Dishonourable Mentions – The Expendables 3; The Inbetweeners 2

The ‘we weren’t expecting much … but wow’ award for most disappointing film with the lowest expectations

Transformers: Age Of Extinction

First off, let’s address the elephant in the room, or rather the Dinobot in the barn. Even with the caveat of giving a pass to films we expected nothing from, there are a handful of examples of cinema garbage so wretched that even the lowest expectations are too high.

Eva Green’s bizarrely awful 300 sequel was worthy of any audience’s contempt, yet it was the billion-dollar grossing fourth Transformers effort that really defied belief. For a Michael Bay tale of talking cars and animated crash test dummies to be daft and childish is only to be expected. But this was … dull. Boring. Yawn-inducing. It took mechanical dinosaurs to wake us from our reverie. Too little too late.

Dishonourable mentions – Vampire Academy; 300: Rise of an Empire

The ‘fall from grace’ award for most disappointing high-brow offering

The Double

It’s easy to kick the lightweight popcorn flicks for being dumber than dust, but it’s only fair to turn our microscope onto those who endeavor to challenge our neurons. No free passes.

With that in mind, Richard Ayoade’s take on Dostoeyevsky’s novel has to be skewered for its high-pretension, low-impact, willfully confusing effort.

With art design borrowed from the 1984 Apple Macintosh commercial and a style lifting heavily from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, this was a misfire from talented director Ayoade for his follow up to Submarine, wasting a strong cast led by Mia Wasikowska and Jesse Eisenberg.

Dishonourable Mentions – Night Moves; Under The Skin (Also appears on our Best Of list – proving critics can never agree).

The ‘thank your mother’ award for unabashed Oscar bait

Despite Nicole Kidman’s best efforts, Grace of Monaco was doomed.

Grace of Monaco

Some films seem to be made with the ‘for your consideration’ advertisements in mind. ‘August: Osage County’ sacrificed plot cohesion in order to give everyone an award-worthy monologue. ‘Devil’s Knot’ turned the melodrama up to 11. But ‘Grace of Monaco’ was such a mess the much-anticipated Oscar-aimed film was delayed so that its release came after the Oscars, dumped prior to the North American blockbuster season.

Nicole Kidman did her best to breathe life into the shambles, but the problems started with an incoherent script that tried to paint Kelly as the savior of peace in our time and were sealed through direction that had all the subtlety of a royal engagement.

Dishonourable Mentions – August: Osage County; Devil’s Knot

The ‘long bomb’ award for most disappointing action blockbuster

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Finally to the most hotly contested category. ‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2’ couldn’t find a decent villain with blueprints. ‘Sin City 2’ and ‘Robocop’ both trashed the sterling reputations of their forebears while ‘Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit’ took a novel approach to reboots by removing everything that made the original story original.

But nothing could match the disappointment of Peter Jackson’s final (we hope) Middle Earth adventure. After two films dedicated to setting up a big finale, we got two and a half hours of pixel versus pixel action with no clear hero, no clear villain, no character arcs, no clear goals and, for the most part, no Hobbit.

The end is a lame promo for the Lord of the Rings, not that anyone will remember – they will all have lost interest in this genuinely bad film long before.

Dishonourable Mentions – The Amazing Spider-Man 2; Sin City 2; Robocop; Jack Ryan; Shadow Recruit