This Is the Worst Spy Movie of All Time

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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This Is the Worst Spy Movie of All Time

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There are a number of “best movies” lists. The most famous is probably the American Film Institute’s “100 Years–100 Movies”. The online movie and TV review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes has a “100 Best,” too. IMDb, the online movie database owned by Amazon, ups the ante with a “250 Best.”

The concept of espionage – gathering secret or confidential information for the benefit of a government or organization – is inherently dramatic. Following spies around while they do their thing has formed the foundation of some of the very best movies ever made.

Some critics like the other side of the coin. Awards for worst movies are given out each year by a parody awards show called the Golden Raspberry Awards, or Razzies”, a parody of the Oscars. We’ve identified the worst movie of all time ourselves, and it’s The Avengers (1998).

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A spy movie can go off the rails for a whole host of reasons. If it’s a comedy, it might simply be unfunny. If it’s for kids, anyone over the age of 10 might find it dull. If it’s an action film, it might be overburdened with badly-edited chase sequences and unburdened by any coherent plot. And if it’s just trying to be a smart spy thriller, it can easily fall into the trap of being formulaic, generic, and forgettable.

To determine the worst spy film of all time, 24/7 Tempo developed an index using average ratings on IMDb, an online movie database owned by Amazon, and a combination of audience scores and Tomatometer scores on Rotten Tomatoes, an online movie and TV review aggregator, as of February 2022, weighting all ratings equally. We considered only movies with at least 25,000 audience votes on either IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes. Only films that center on a spy or clandestine intelligence officer protagonist or deal with the theme of espionage were included. Data on cast is from IMDb.

The worst movie is The Avengers (1998). Here are the details:

> IMDb user rating: 3.8/10 (43,139 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 15% (42,972 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 5% (83 reviews)
> Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Uma Thurman, Sean Connery, Patrick Macnee

No, this isn’t the Marvel blockbuster; it’s the 1998 movie based on the ’60s British TV show of the same name, and the worst spy film of all time. The storyline is largely indecipherable, but we’ll give it a go: When an evil genius named Sir August de Wynter (Sean Connery) discovers a way to control the weather, two British Ministry agents named John Steed and Emma Peel (Ralph Feinnes and Uma Thurman, the later a meteorologist) are sent to stop him. But they’re stymied by (among other things) dead men in teddy bear suits, mechanical bees, hypnotism, poison gas, and an abandoned plotline involving clones of Peel. A hot air balloon also makes an appearance at one point, but we’re not sure why. Inscrutable, painfully dull, awkwardly edited, badly written, woefully miscast, and painfully overwrought, “The Avengers” isn’t just bad, it’s downright awful; critics gave it a thorough drubbing at the time, and to this day it’s still regarded as one of the very worst films ever made.

Click here to read the 30 worst spy movies of all time

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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