2019 Year End Report: Worst Films

As per usual, I usually avoid movie that have no reason to believe I will like them – all of which means, many of the films that will dominate others worst of lists aren’t on mine. But when you watch as many movies as I do, you are going to see your share of bad ones. So below are all pretty bad – followed by my Bottom 10 of the year.

 

The Aftermath (James Kent) was a lifeless WWII drama that wastes a talented cast. Aladdin (Guy Ritchie) had none of the magic of the original animated film, and is overlong to boot. All is True (Kenneth Branagh) is a rather dull film about the final days in the life of Shakespeare – I’d prefer Branagh do more Shakespeare adaptations than this. American Son (Kenny Leon) has its heart in the right place, and fine performances – but it’s so on the nose that it becomes useless. Bliss (Joe Begos) is filled with artist clichés and needless provacations, so despite a committed performance in the lead, it’s a very bad horror film. Captive State (Rupert Wyatt) is the type of film we need more of – large scale, original filmmaking – but I just wish it was much, much better. Charlie Says (Mary Harron) does offer an original take on the Manson Family – but not original enough to overcome a miscast Matt Smith, and it made me slightly uncomfortable at the way it excuses the actions of the Manson girls. The Curse of La Llorna (Michael Chaves) is perhaps the nadir of the Conjuring universe – which just repeats anything, and isn’t even fun. A Dark Place (Simon Fellows) is a would be modern noir, that strains credibility to far too survive. The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (Xavier Dolan) is the second misfire in a row from Dolan. Dumbo (Tim Burton) continues Burton’s decline into anonymous corporate product. 47 Meters Down: Uncaged (Johannes Roberts) can be okay if you expect nothing from it – but I still want a little more from my killer shark movies. Glass (M. Night Shyamalan) is a hugely disappointing a sequel to Unbreakable – that doesn’t work in any real way. The Goldfinch (John Crowley) is too reverential to the source material, which just doesn’t work on screen. Gwen (William McGregor) is a slow burn horror which is way too slow, and not enough burn. In the Tall Grass (Vincenzo Natali) is a disappointing adaptation of a very disturbing Stephen King/Joe Hill story that pulls its punches. J.T. LeRoy (Justin Kelly) tells the fascinating true story from the wrong point of view. Just a Breath Away (Daniel Roby) is a France/Canadian co-production trying to be a blockbuster – and it didn’t really work. The Kitchen (Andrea Berloff) kind feels like a miniseries chopped down to feature length and the result is basically incoherent. Knives and Skin (Jennifer Reeder) is an admirable attempt at a feminist version of Twin Peaks – but it feels too calculated and hollow. The Lion King (Jon Favreau) adds nothing to the magic of the original – and is more than a little creepy. Lords of Chaos (Jonas Akerlund) has a fascinating true crime story to tell, and has absolutely no life to it. Lucy in the Sky (Noah Hawley) never quite figures out ins central conceit – and takes everything way too seriously. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (Joachim Ronning) is a pale shadow of the first film – which wasn’t exactly brilliant. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (Terry Gilliam) kind of makes you wonder why Gilliam spent so many years trying to get this made – its odd, but not in the best Gilliam way. Motherless Brooklyn (Edward Norton) is a modern noir, with too much story, and a distracting lead performance by director Norton. The Mountain (Rick Alverson) is not as awful as The Comedy was – I hated that one – but an interesting start really goes nowhere. Official Secrets (Gavin Hood) has a fascintating story, but basically tries to tell three stories at once at doesn’t quite figure out how to blance it all. Pasolini (Abel Ferrara) doesn’t really give you any idea of why Pasolini was such a major figure – or much other than the pain of his death. Peterloo (Mike Leigh) is very long and rather lifeless from Leigh – which is not something I ever thought I’d see from him. Possum (Matthew Holness) looks impressive, but there’s nothing going on in this low budget English horror film. The Secret Life of Pets 2 (Chris Renaud) does nothing to add to the charm of the original, and is oddly disjointed. Terminator: Dark Fate (Tim Miller) is probably the best in the series since T3 – and it’s still bad. Through Black Spruce (Don McKellar) doesn’t seem to know what the important story is – and McKellar seems to know he shouldn’t be directing it. Ugly Dolls (Kelly Asbury) shows perhaps how hard it was to pull off Trolls – because it doesn’t do anything with its cute dolls. Wonder Park (N/A) is a bargain basement animated film for kids – and feels like it.  Yesterday (Danny Boyle) has a fascinating premise – and yet it doesn’t do anywhere near enough with it.

 

10. Men in Black International (F. Gary Gray)

I have to admit, that I’ve never been much of a fan of any of the Men in Black movies – the first one is fine, the second one not so much, and third is okay at best. Still, all of them are better than Men in Black International – the ill-advised and lazy attempt to reboot the franchise. If you were going to do that, then you could certainly do worse that casting Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth – they do look great in those suits – but they have absolutely nothing to work with here. This wasn’t a world that needed expanding, and the film lacks the punch and humor that the series could be at its best. This was probably the laziest attempt to capitalize on some existing IP this year – not the worst (as you’ll see) – but certainly the one that didn’t seem to even be trying.

 

9. Hellboy (Neil Marshall)

The sad truth about Guillermo del Toro’s two fine Hellboy films is that they didn’t make enough money to justify their budgets. The fact that they both came out really before the MCU was a thing didn’t help make the studio confident enough to give him enough money to do a third film. And yet, you have to wonder why they would even bother with this reboot if they were clearly going to do it so cheaply and with such little effort. There are a couple of stand-alone sequences in Hellboy that show what director Neil Marshall can do – especially the final scene in the film, which has more energy than the rest of the film combined – but basically, this is a bargain basement attempt to cash in on what Del Toro created – and the result is painfully dull.

 

8. The Angry Birds Move 2 (Thorop Van Orman)

I’m not sure I can explain why I disliked The Angry Birds Movie 2 as much as I did. I have seen more than my fair share of bad children’s animation in the past few years (having two girls, who love to go to the movies, and wanting to make sure that love continues, means we go see pretty much everything aimed at them). But something about this cynical, loud, fast moving garbage, with a plot that didn’t seem to be given a moment’s thought really just irked me sitting in the theater. For reasons I cannot explain, the film got pretty good reviews from people – not good reviews exactly, but many expressed surprise with how much they enjoyed it. I didn’t see that here – I saw a lot of loud, incoherent action, with subplots designed to get some cute birds in the mix, and the laziest humor I can imagine. It still bugs me – more so than the other subpar animated films I saw this year – by far.

 

7. 6 Underground (Michael Bay)

I’m not quite sure when Michael Bay became quite this awful – it was certainly sometime during his years doing Transformers. Personally, I had kind of hoped that leaving those movies behind, and working with Netflix, would produce something great from Bay again – hell, my favorite of all of his films is Pain & Gain, made during the Transformers years. Instead what we got was another loud, incoherent movie – a film that values constant action, violence and spectacle over everything else. The result is a Netflix movie that runs just over two hours, but seems to be about three times as long as The Irishman – a headache inducing mess of a film, by a filmmaker I know has immense talent, but has buried it under so much crap that you cannot tell anymore.

 

6. Donnybrook (Tim Sutton)

I’m not sure why director Tim Sutton seems to have been confused while making Donnybrook – but he certainly. This should have been a straight ahead exploitive B-movie – its two main characters after all are named Jarhead Earl and Chainsaw Angus, and they are making their violent ways to a bare knuckles boxing competition in the mountains, and includes a scene where a woman has sex with a man and shoots him in the head the exact moment he climaxes. This is a movie impossible to take serious – and had it been made as a fun, exploitive B-movie, then Donnybrook may well have been a filthy good time at the movies. Instead, the director of Dark Night (his awful re-imagining of the shooting in the Colorado movie theater playing The Dark Knight Rises) seems to think he’s making something deep and meaningful here. It doesn’t. The film makes darkness and misery for truthfulness and profundity. It isn’t – it’s just painfully bad.

 

5. Rambo: Last Blood (Adrian Grunberg)

I have no idea why Sylvester Stallone decided to bring Rambo – his second most famous character – out of retirement for this jingoistic piece of exploitation cinema, but here we are. I actually quite liked Rambo’s last outing – in 2008 – which was basically as close as Stallone has gotten to making his own version of Unforgiven. But here, he is back in pure exploitation territory – with Rambo’s sweet, innocent, naïve niece kidnapped and abused horribly by human traffickers in Mexico, meaning he has to strike back of course. The result is a nasty film – one that would be more offensive if its wasn’t so damn silly – and ending with, if not a promise for more, at least a possibility for more. I don’t really want more – if it’s going to be this awful – but John Rambo deserves a better sendoff than this.

 

4. Serenity (Steven Knight)

Serenity is the type of awful film that only really talented people can make. Led by Steven Knight – who is a great screenwriter (Dirty Pretty Things, Eastern Promises) and director (Locke) – who this time tries to make a modern sunshine noir – set on a tropical island, in which a fisherman with a past (Matthew McConaughey) who is approached by his ex (Anne Hathaway) with an offer to kill her current husband (Jason Clarke). The films dialogue plays like a parody of noir dialogue – and even if there is a reason for that, it doesn’t make it any less tin eared. It doesn’t help that Hathaway is horribly miscast – and Clarke seems to be sleepwalking through the role he always gets. When we finally get to the now infamous twist, well, we’ve stopped caring. I can see where Knight and company were going here – and you have to kind of admire it for the sheer, dumb arrogance of it all it – but it doesn’t save the film from being awful.

 

3. Cats (Tom Hooper)

A part of me wants to give Tom Hooper and company credit for Cats – they certainly completely and totally committed to their vision of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, but sweet Jesus, was this a painful experience. So painful in fact that I wonder if the ever popular musical is in fact terrible as well – I haven’t seen it on stage, but am interested to, because the songs are awful in this, and the whole thing is just so goofy and over-the-top, but played completely straight. The only performer who emerges unscatched from it is Taylor Swift, who somehow completely nails her one song, and gets the tone exactly right for it. Everything else is so weird, so creepy, and yet somehow so boring, that it’s the type of film that you kind of have to see it to believe it – but you don’t really want to sit through it.

 

2. Dark Phoenix (Simon Kinberg)

Even if The New Mutants will be the actual end of the X-Men at Fox before it’s swallowed by Disney, Dark Phoenix really does feel like the death rattle of the franchise as we knew it. To be fair, Fox has been struggling with this franchise since the third film – Brent Ratner’s The Last Stand – producing some great films (like Logan) and some really bad films (like Apocalypse) as the series kind of starts and stops, moves forward and backwards, etc. Yet, at no time have they ever made a film as singularly bland, boring and misguided as Dark Phoenix. I’m not sure why they tried to tell the legendary Dark Phoenix saga again – after they failed so badly with The Last Stand – and if they were going to do so, why they gave it to Simon Kinberg, who co-wrote that film. Whatever the reason, Dark Phoenix is disjointed and boring – wastes its entire cast, who is sleepwalking through their roles and is as painfully boring as a comic book could be. I don’t like the idea of so many corporate mergers, where everything is owned by one mega corporation. In the case of X-Men though, it cannot get worse than this, can it?

 

1. The Haunting of Sharon Tate (Daniel Farrands)

I would wish that all those who hated the depiction of the Manson family and Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood would watch The Haunting of Sharon Tate to see just exactly how awful things could have been. I would wish that, but that would mean more people would watch this absolutely awful movie – the worst I’ve seen in several years. The film is incompetently made, written and acted – and engages in some strange victim blaming as well as some wish fulfillment. I can legitimately see the filmmakers behind it saying their intentions were basically the same as Tarantino’s – accept, of course, they don’t have the talent of Tarantino, and they don’t appear to have any real understanding of Tate, the Manson family, the sixties, or just about anything else. This is a downright awful film – the worst you could have possibly have seen this year.