Thursday, January 17, 2019

2018 Year End Report: Most Disappointing Films

Sometimes, I’d rather sit through an awful movie than one that is better but is going to be a punch to the gut because its disappointing. You find yourself in this position many times a year –walking into a film looking forward to it, and then just slowly deflating when you realize that the film isn’t as good as what you expecting. Sometimes the films themselves are fine – okay, good even – but they aren’t the film you expected, and worse, they weren’t interesting in a way you didn’t expect (those are the opposite – the films that shock you, in a good way).
 
These films were all films I went in with expectations for, only to have them dashed. American Animals (Bart Layton) basically tries to do what Layton did with the doc The Imposter again – but on subjects who aren’t worth it, and he doesn’t seem to realize how awful they are. Anon (Andrew Niccol) is another film from Niccol which shows just how long ago Gattaca was. Dark River (Clio Barnard) followed The Arbor and The Selfish Giant, two very good films, for Barnard and was, okay, I guess. Death Wish (Eli Roth) was a massive missed opportunity for all involved – making this film, in this environment, should cause some debate – it didn’t. Fahrenheit 451 (Ramin Bahrani) tried to update Bradbury’s classic novel – a good idea – but ended up not really doing anything with the premise. The Insult (Ziad Doueir) was Doueir’s follow-up to The Attack – a complex film, that looked at a complex issue from all sides, and while this tries to do the same thing, it fails. The Legacy of a White Tail Deer Hunter (Jody Hill) was Hill’s return to movies, after nearly a decade in TV – and the film just feels so hollow – despite some good work by Josh Brolin. Manhunt (John Woo) was Woo’s return to the kind of film that made his name – and while it certainly is good, you’d still be better off watching The Killer or HardBoiled again. Mrs. Hyde (Serge Bozon) represents probably the most miscast I’ve ever seen Isabelle Huppert – but at least it shows there is something she cannot do. Mute (Duncan Jones) continues a confusing, disappointing streak for Jones – who started off with so much promise with Moon and Source Code. The Nun (Corin Hardy) is perhaps the worst film in the fairly solid Conjuring universe to date. Pacific Rim: Uprising (Steven S. DeKnight) proves that you can make a really dull film about giant robots fighting giant monsters. Psychokinesis (Sang-ho Yeon) was an ambitious failure for the director of Train to Busan – as I don’t think he ever really figured out what he was trying to say. The Third Murder (Hirokazu Kore-eda) was one of the great directors currently working, trying a genre film on for size – and realizing it doesn’t fit. Unfriended: Dark Web (Stephen Susco) failed to live up to the very surprising good original, or to justify itself in a year that also included Searching. Venom (Ruben Flesicher) was a weirdly entertaining bad film – disappointing in that it took so long to really go off the rails, because it’s bonkers fun when it does. A Wrinkle in Time (Ava DuVernay) was certainly an okay film – but given all the talent involved, it should have been a lot better.
 
Ten Most Disappointing Films
 
10. Bohemian Rhapsody (Bryan Singer)
Bohemian Rhapsody takes one of the most interesting people in the history of rock music, and makes a bland, artificial biopic for him. There were so many avenues you could have gone down in making a Freddie Mercury movie – and Rami Malek’s performance is good enough to suggest that he could have handled a more daring treatment. But with the rest of the members of Queen involved, it seems everyone wanted a standard issue film. This film almost plays like a straight faced version of Jake Kasdan’s classic Walk Hard with John C. Reilly as a fictional singer. Sure, the music is great, and the final concert at LiveAid is an undeniable highlight, and is genuinely moving. But this film was way too sanitized and by the numbers for a true original like Mercury. He deserved a better – more honest – film made about him.
 
9. The Girl in the Spider’s Web (Fede Alvarez)
I am a fan Steig Larson’s Lisbeth Salander books, the Swedish trilogy which was their first cinematic representation, David Fincher’s American remake –and at least somewhat enjoyed the other books written by others since Larson’s death. So it is very disappointing that the long gestating next film for the character in America ended up being this bland and anonymous. Claire Foy is good enough here to suggest she could make a fine Salander given the right movie – but the story they thrust her into isn’t interesting, the rest of the cast isn’t particularly good, and the gifted director Fede Alvarez (I quite liked both his Evil Dead remake and especially Don’t Breathe) has had all his personality stripped out of him. The film bombed at the box office, so the chances we see more in this series is slim – and that’s a shame – but it’s too expected when you whiff on a film this badly.
 
8. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot (Gus Van Sant)
It wasn’t that long ago that Gus Van Sant was one of the most interesting filmmakers in the world. His run from Gerry (2002) to Paranoid Park (2007) was the best of his career, a quartet of films about young men and death. Since then, his career has grown uneven – Milk is a fine Hollywood style biopic, but there hasn’t been very much else of interest for a decade now. Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot is a biopic of sorts about John Callahan, the Oregon comic writer, confined to a wheelchair after a car accident, does do an admirable job of avoiding the kind of clichés that usually mare this kind of film. Unfortunately, it doesn’t replace those clichés with much of anything resembling a story of a point. Joaquin Phoenix is fine in the lead role – and Jack Black does some of the best work of his career as the man who was driving when Callahan had the accident. But the other alcoholics that Callahan goes to meetings with – provide almost nothing to do the movie, and Jonah Hill delivers one of his weakest performances as his sponsor. In short, this is a disappointing film from Van Sant – who wanted to deliver a different kind of addiction story, but doesn’t really succeed.
 
7. Sicario: Day of the Soldado (Stefano Sollima)
The sequel to the very good Sicario from a couple of years ago, makes several missteps along the way. Sure, Emily Blunt’s character from the first film wasn’t needed to tell this story, but she was the emotional core of the film – and the film doesn’t replace her with anything. What we are left with is empty action sequences – which aren’t as good as the ones staged by Denis Villeneuve in the original – and doesn’t do anything to make Josh Brolin or Benicio Del Toro’s characters any deeper or more interesting. This is supposedly the middle film in the trilogy, and I want to see the third film – the one this one sets up should be a lot more interesting than this one. In short, this movie felt like those TV episodes that happen between major episodes – the ones needed for story purposes that aren’t interesting on their own. The problem here, of course, is that this isn’t a TV series – and the filmmakers forgot they had to make an interesting film in its own right, not just in context of what surrounds it.
 
6. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (Bruno Dumont)
Bruno Dumont has been making provocative films his entire career – often ones that have used sex or violence (or, frequently, sexual violence) in ways to poke and prod the audience. He has tried to mix it up a little in recent years with films like Slack Bay and the miniseries Li’l Quinquin – which seem to almost be satirizing his previous films. With Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc, he has made a musical out of the early years of the future martyr – one with deliberately crude music, singing and dancing (crude being a kind word – bad would be another). Watching the film, I can no longer tell if he is making fun of himself, making fun of the audience, both, or neither. The film is repetitive – if you’ve seen any 15-minute segment of the film, you’ve seen the whole thing. At this point, I wonder if Dumont is simply out of things to say, but still wants to seem provocative – I hope not, he has made some genuinely fine films in the past. But this one was more painful than anything else.
 
5. The Happytime Murders (Brian Hensen)
I love swearing, fucking, murdering puppets – Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles is hilarious and Avenue Q is a great Broadway musical. But the filmmakers behind The Happytime Murders seem to have thought that if you add puppets and swearing to Melissa McCarthy, you would automatically get a hilarious movie. They were very, very wrong. This type of movie should be hard to screw up this badly – but it really is the writing that does the film in, since none of it is the least bit funny, and leaves McCarthy and others with nothing to say. The puppets aren’t shot very well either, and the storytelling is lazy. I like Brian Hensen as a director – I have seen A Muppet Christmas Carol 20 times at least – but he really should have known better than to take a project with this little going for it.
 
4. The Cloverfield Paradox (Julius Onah)
You can see why JJ Abrams and company thought they could take an unrelated script and turn it into a Cloverfield movie – they did it before with 10 Cloverfield Lane, and that worked out brilliantly. What they miscalculated here was that the screenplay in question wasn’t particularly good, and trying to shoehorn in a Cloverfield aspect to it really wasn’t going to do it any favors. In general, I like the idea of the Cloverfield franchise – loosely connected films, taking place in the same universe, but could go in any direction. It’s a good way to get some interesting films through the franchise obsessed system. But the franchise won’t last if they aren’t smart about what movies they select to make. I will still look forward to the next Cloverfield movie – but I’ll be much warier next time.
 
3. The 15:17 to Paris (Clint Eastwood)
Clint Eastwood is a great filmmaker – who has made a career of examining the causes and effects of violence in masterpieces like The Outlaw Josey Wales, Unforgiven, Mystic River and Flags of Our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima and countless others. He has a minimalist streak in his direction that usually works. But the 15:17 to Paris may just be the worst film of his long directing career. For most of the movie, he is trying to make a laidback, hangout movie – starring the real life, non-actors, whose story he is telling. When we finally get to the attack on a train that gives the film its title – and is the reason the film got made – Eastwood actually does an expert job of staging the violence. But that’s about 5 minutes of a two-hour movie, which is mostly full of awkward dialogue, delivered by actors who really cannot handle the roles. You have to give it to Eastwood – that in his late 80s, he tried something completely different. But in this case, he delivered a bad film – and a huge disappointment.
 
2. Kings (Deniz Gamze Erguven)
Deniz Gamze Erguven’s Mustang is one of the best debut films of the decade – a sneaky film that came out very late in the year a couple years ago, picked up a Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination, and has haunted me ever since. That film was so good, that I was going to see anything that she made next – and even though the reviews for this were bad, I had no idea it was going to be this bad. It is a stunningly awful film about the LA riots, which has a weird tone – at times comedic, at times romantic, at times tragic – but it goes back and forth so often, and with no thought in it, that the result is a confusing mess of a film. Mustang was so good that I refuse to believe it was a fluke – and that Kings is the outlier instead – but for now, this film was a crushing disappointment.
 
1.The Predator (Shane Black)
As a director, Shane Black has a very good track record – Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys are wonderful, smaller, character driven comedic noirs, and his Iron Man 3 is an underrated entry in the MCU. He writes dialogue that is distinctive, clever, profane and fun – and his characters can be quite odd, in endearing ways. His sensibility should fit in precisely in a Predator movie – but it really doesn’t. Black’s screenplay here is bad – the dialogue doesn’t have the same snap, his characters are ill defined and interchangeable, and the plot makes little to no sense. The action sequences don’t work either and are basically a giant mess. The whole film is really. This film really was a huge disappointment to me – there should be no way for Black to mess it up this badly – but he did, and the result is horrible film.

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