I do have a Worst of list coming up, but I always find it more
depressing to my most disappointing list – because each of these films are ones
I was really looking to, and just didn’t live up to those expectations. Some of
them aren’t even that bad – they’re mediocre – but when I think of what they
could have been; you cannot help but be let done.
Before we get to my list of the most disappoint, there are these films: All is True (Kenneth Branagh) which
finds Branagh playing Shakespeare – and not even in an interesting way – when
he probably should just adapt more Shakespeare plays. Charlie Says (Mary Harron) wants to be a different kind of Manson
family story – but doesn’t really hit the right note, and wants to excuse too
many of the Manson girl’s actions. Dark
Phoenix (Simon Kinberg) is a story that should work in the X-Men movie
universe, but they’ve messed it up twice now, and this one far worse than the
first one. The Death and Life of John F.
Donovan (Xavier Dolan) is another misfire from Dolan – whose career is
faltering a little. Domino (Brian
DePalma) shows that DePalma still has it – the set pieces are brilliant,
but nothing else is so my hope for another great DePalma film continues to be
unfulfilled. Everybody Knows (Asghar
Farhadi) is a finely acted, beautiful melodrama – but coming from Farhadi,
I expect much, much more. Hellboy (Neil
Marshall) is the type of comic book property that should be impossible to
make as boring as this one is. In the
Tall Grass (Vincenzo Natali) took a very disturbing story co-written by
Stephen King, and completely undermines it. The Kid Who Would Be King (Joe Cornish) is a fine kids film – but
when we waited this long for Cornish to follow-up Attack the Block, and this is
what we get, it’s still a letdown. The
Laundromat (Steven Soderbergh) is the auteur’s least interesting film since
his comeback – it wants to be The Big Short, but is nowhere near that good. Rambo: Last Blood (Adrian Grunberg) was
a real letdown, given that the last film in the series – 2008’s Rambo – was one
of the best in the series, next only to First Blood. Terminator: Dark Fate (Tim Miller) surprised me in that I didn’t
think I could still be disappointed by Terminator movies – but this one did,
because it teased us with the Linda Hamilton film we want, and instead
delivered a bland action film. Triple
Frontier (J.C. Chandor) is the first film of his his career I didn’t
really, really like – and it comes after a long layoff as well – making it
doubly disappointing. Velvet Buzzsaw
(Dan Gilroy) has a promising setup, but doesn’t quite pay it off properly –
it’s a good film, but I keep hoping that Gilroy has another Nightcrawler in
him. Where’d You Go, Bernadette (Richard
Linklater) is an interesting film in many ways, with a good performance by Blanchett
– but from Linklater, it’s another film that doesn’t reach his heights. I would
probably have been more disappointed in Zombieland:
Double Tap (Ruben Fleischer) had it come out years ago – when it made more
sense for it to exist – but it’s still a bit of a letdown.
10. The Goldfinch (John
Crowley)
The way some critics talked about The Goldfinch you would think the film
was an absolute disaster. It really isn’t – what it really is an honest attempt
to shove a massive brink of a novel into a two-and-a-half-hour runtime, and not
quite figuring out how to do it. Part of that is that the book, which is so
heavily built on coincidence, seems a little silly on the screen – especially
when you have to rush through everything, so that by the time we get to a
finale with guns and gangsters, it seems silly. I do admire some of the
performances (Nicole Kidman is very good, as is Oakes Fegley – and Ansel Elgort
does what he can with a very passive role) and the cinematography Roger Deakins
is quite lovely. But I did love the book when I read it a few years ago, and
given that Crowley is the director behind the wonderful and lovely Brooklyn,
this ends up being a disappointing film. A valiant effort perhaps, but a movie
that doesn’t work.
9. Yesterday (Danny
Boyle)
I didn’t hate Yesterday – hell, I saw it twice (once in theaters solo,
once with my wife at home) but I do think the idea behind the film – that one
day we all wake up and The Beatles never existed, and everyone save for one
aspiring singer-songwriter has no idea what they are missing – is great, and
the execution is dull and predictable. That probably has something to do with
the screenwriter – Richard Curtis – who has never met a concept he cannot make
into a romcom, which takes the film is the most predictable way it could
possibly go. And I’m still not quite sure what to make of the “surprise” cameo
near the end of the film – that some downright hated, but I’m fairly
indifferent to. It’s also a Danny Boyle film – something I keep forgetting,
because his trademark style and energy just isn’t there. I appreciate that the
film found an audience – films like this struggle to do so these days – but the
film just doesn’t do anything it could have as well as it could have done it –
not even the music.
8. Motherless Brooklyn
(Edward Norton)
I always thought that Edward Norton should direct more films – I liked
his debut way back in 2000, Keeping the Faith, and the rumors of how involved
he gets in the projects he acts in makes me think he has a director brain. So
it’s pretty disappointing to see his long awaited for follow-up – a would-be
Chinatown inspired noir, set in New York in the 1950s with Norton playing a
detective with Tourette’s uncovering a vast conspiracy, was so poorly executed.
The film is overly packed with plot – which means that no one other than Norton
gets time to become much of a character. Worse still, Norton’s performance is
more distracting that anything else – he’s at his best at his most toned down.
Even worse, the look of the film is off – the film has a shiny sheen to its
cinematography that is all wrong for noir. The film is long (nearly
two-and-a-half hours) and isn’t boring, but isn’t the film I was hoping for
from either Norton the actor, nor Norton the director.
7. Dumbo (Tim Burton)
Perhaps it’s my fault for expecting too much from Tim Burton. I actually
think Dumbo is probably better than Aladdin or The Lion King this year (even if
only a fraction of the number of people saw it) – but I didn’t expect as much
from those – the looked exactly like what they were – warmed over versions of
more recent Disney classics. But the Burton who made films like Edward
Scissorhands or Ed Wood would seem like the perfect filmmaker to make Dumbo –
to connect with the melancholy of the original – and given that the film wasn’t
slavish in its devotion to the original, you may have thought Burton could do
that. But Burton isn’t that filmmaker anymore – he hasn’t been in a long time –
and he seems to be okay with that. He’s on autopilot here – as he normally is
nowadays – and there’s just nothing here to really enjoy. I don’t think future
Burton films will make a list like this from me – because at this point, I
think I’m done expecting good films from him.
6. Lucy in the Sky
(Noah Hawley)
Fargo is one of the best shows of the last decade – so when the
showrunner behind that great show, Noah Hawley, makes his feature debut, I was
looking forward to it – especially when you consider he cast Natalie Portman,
Jon Hamm, Zazie Beetz, Ellen Burstyn and Dan Stevens – and it is based on one
of the strangest true crime cases in recent memory – about an astronaut accused
of trying to kidnap another astronaut. What Hawley delivered though was a story
that takes things way too seriously, and yet somehow not seriously enough. So
when Natalie Portman starts spiraling downwards – something she excels at –
none of it make a lot of sense, and the film spins out of control. It doesn’t
help that Hawley tries so many directorial tricks that its a distraction.
Hawley is clearly talented – but his debut film was a misfire from someone who
has done great work on TV, but hasn’t cracked movies just yet.
5. Gemini Man (Ang Lee)
It may not be fair, but I want the old Ang Lee back – the filmmaker who
made Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon,
Brokeback Mountain and Lust Caution. What we’ve gotten instead from Lee in
recent years is his experiments with high frame rates, and digital technology –
which still isn’t where it should be in terms of with how it looks (although it’s
getting better) but films that just don’t hit you as hard emotionally – nor
look as good – as what Lee is capable of. Gemini Man is better than Billy
Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk – and I appreciate that with every new technology
someone needs to experiment with it – but why does it have to be Ang Lee? Let
Michael Bay waste his time figuring this out – and let’s get Ang Lee back to
being Ang Lee.
4. The Man Who Killed
Don Quixote (Terry Gilliam)
I like passion projects – and I like it when auteurs finally get to make
long gestating projects to the screen. But it doesn’t seem like many of those
long gestating for a reason – and that reason being they’re not very good. Case
in point, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which Terry Gilliam has been trying
to get made for decades – one attempt is documented in the 2002 documentary
Lost in La Mancha. Now it’s finally here – with Jonathan Pryce and Adam Driver
– and like all Gilliam films it is a complete and total mess. But sometimes
those messes can be absolutely glorious – Brazil, The Fisher King 12 Monkeys,
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, etc. Here, it’s just messy. Like Burton, I’m
not sure Gilliam is the same filmmaker he once was – or perhaps his problem is
he’s trying too hard to be that filmmaker. Still, you would think when you’ve
had decades to think of what you would do when you finally got to make your
passion project – the result wouldn’t be this muddled mess.
3. Godzilla: King of
Monsters (Michael Dougherty)
I know that I may be in the minority here, but I really do think that
Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla (2014) was a great blockbuster – a new kind of
blockbuster, for a world threaten by climate change. That was a film about the
best laid plans of men all being useless – if the monsters we created wanted to
destroy us, they would – and only another monster we created could save us. I
loved it. I didn’t love Michael Dougherty’s Godzilla: King of Monsters – its
sequel – which spends way too much time on its completely uninteresting human
characters, and then crammed too many monsters in all together. I think Edwards
was headed somewhere truly unique – and the sequel backs away from it. Too bad
– we need some different takes on in the blockbuster realm.
2. Peterloo (Mike
Leigh)
Up until Peterloo, you could argue that Mike Leigh has been a model of
consistency – making a new film every two to three years, and almost all of
them are wonderful – stretching all the way until the early 1990s (and maybe
longer). Peterloo is another passion project of Leigh – he has been wanting to
make this film for a long time – but it is completely opposite of the type of
film that Leigh does well. It isn’t an intimate character driven drama – but
instead of a very a sweeping epic of the events leading to the Peterloo
massacre in England in 1819. The film has dozens of speaking roles and a
massive scope – and yet it’s basically a lot of people talking at each other,
either giving speeches to big crowds, or speeches to individuals. It’s a dull
and lifeless film. The actual massacre – all of about 15 minutes of 150 – is
quite good – but the rest just doesn’t match what Leigh does well.
1. Glass (M. Night
Shyamalan)
I remember watching M. Night Shyamalan’s
Unbreakable all the way back in 2000 – and really thinking that I was
witnessing one of the early films of the new Hitchcock – something I had
resisted when I saw (and really liked) The Sixth Sense the previous year. I
don’t think I quite love it as much as I did then – as a 19-year-old – but I
still think it’s a masterful film, and the best of Shyamalan’s career. The idea
of following it up, 19 years later, bring back Bruce Willis’ hero, and Samuel
L. Jackson’s villain – and adding in James McAvoy (from the stealth sequel
Split, that we didn’t know until the last scene) was tantalizing – eve if
Shyamalan has certainly fallen off that pedestal so long ago. Instead, what we
ended up with was this – a talky, boring film in which there is a lot of
meaningless plot and talk, and subplots – all leading to a messy conclusion
that just doesn’t add up. Unbreakable remains a great film – a film ahead of
its time as it foresaw our obsession with comic books movies. All these years
later, Glass seems desperately behind the time. I cannot remember the last time
I was this disappointed walking out of a movie theater.
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