2017 was a very disappointing year. It revealed how much
genuinely heinous behaviour was being kept under wraps, how desperate people
were to excuse those actions (the double-team of Kevin Spacey and Australia’s
own Don Burke was particularly gross in that regard), and how a person’s past
actions can come back to bite them in the arse in a major way. 2017 wasn’t just
disappointing because it fell below the median; it created disappointment in
individual people, people that up until that point the general public gave the
benefit of the doubt. It’s rather fitting then that, along with some surprising
successes, the year’s cinema would turn out some unbelievable letdowns.
Seriously, this is the year that created some of the biggest cinematic
nosedives I’ve ever covered, and the legendarily weak box office receipts show
that audiences definitely noticed.
However, we’re not talking about the obvious suspects. As
bad as films like Fifty Shades Darker, Collateral Beauty and even The Emoji Movie are, it was a given that they weren’t going to turn so well in the first
place. No, this list is dedicated to the films that showed a lot of initial
promise… and then proceeded to spoil it in increasingly disastrous ways. Let’s
test how much worse the phrase “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed” can be to
blind rage and go over the Top 11 Biggest Disappointments of 2017… and oh boy,
I had to do some serious trimming down to fit in only 11 this year.
With the PureFlix production line well and truly in the
popular consciousness, bringing such “gems” as the God’s Not Dead films to our
screens, it’s safe to say that Christians are getting a lot more representation
than atheists at the moment. Well, positive
representation at least, given the Christiansploitation trope of always
painting any non-Christian as literal spawns of Satan like with The Case For Christ. So, when news reached me that there was a biopic about a rather
prominent atheist on Netflix, I decided to check it out. Unfortunately, instead
of a rewarding look at the life and times of a rather polemic figure, we
instead got a combination of monetary fixation and an embarrassing lack of
story detail that made the titular person Madalyn Murray O’Hair out to be the
worst kind of person and nothing else. It’s dishonest, to put it sickeningly
mildly, and aside from wasting very ripe source material, it gives the
impression that there is no place for atheist representation in this new age of
religious cinema. As an agnostic, I cannot conceivably be okay with this,
especially with how underhanded this film turned out.
This kind of situation was inevitable: After two very
impressive offerings with the first LEGO Movie and the LEGO Batman Movie, there
was no way that this franchise would be able to keep that level of quality
control indefinitely. And sure enough, we get that very drop-off here with a
complete absence of the clever subversion or even unabashed fun that those two
films offered. Not only that, it seemed to be actively working against what made those films work in
the first place, given the complete 180 this did concerning the larger bits of
subtext. I can only hope that this isn’t going to set a new standard, given how
this franchise is still pushing ahead with two
more films scheduled for 2019, but honestly, we’ve all seen promising
franchises fall under these same circumstances before. Hope for the best, but
prepare for the worst.
This is a bit of a weird entry, considering I wasn’t all
that massive on the original film in the first place. However, as much as that
film’s sense of humour didn’t always gel with me, I at least got what it was
going for: Another instance of Stephen Chow combining philosophy with
slapstick, something he’s very friggin’ good at, and that allowed the film to
end on a satisfying note. This film, by contrast? Considering this was also
written by Chow, it is astounding how surface-level this all is. It’s decent
enough as a comedy, but the way it takes four very compelling characters and
just grind them all into the dirt is rather disheartening. We went from muddled
but still poignant bits of Buddhist philosophy to a painfully generic take on
overcoming lost love; no thanks!
#8: The Discovery
Sci-fi seems to be becoming a foreign language for a lot of
filmmakers out there. A growing methodology I keep seeing is the notion that
all good science-fiction requires is good ideas; not good use of those ideas,
just enough of them to make the production seem full. One of the bigger victims
of this mindset is this particular Netflix feature, a film that drew me right
the hell in with its initial premise about the scientific proof of an afterlife
and the fallout from that announcement. However, in record time, it becomes
clear that the filmmakers don’t know how to properly utilise that idea,
bolstering it with so many wildly varying concepts that the film feels less
like a complete story and more a slurry of discarded ideas not thought through
enough to be their own stories. I got into Rick & Morty hardcore earlier in
the year, so I know what good
high-concept storytelling is supposed to look like. Here’s a hint: It’s not
this, and this isn’t even the biggest offender.
Well, there goes any shred of credibility I had as a film
critic(!) Okay, in all seriousness, I really was expecting great things from
this. The original Blade Runner has been growing on me slowly but surely with
each consecutive viewing, and director Denis Villeneuve just came off of a
major sci-fi success with Arrival; what could go wrong? Well, technically,
nothing did: It still looks gorgeous and it implants itself into that same
universe that so captivates audiences to this day quite well. However, instead
of a natural progression and expansion of the original premise, or even
anything all that ground-breaking in terms of theme overall, what we get here
is basically a reheated version of the original. This really isn’t that bad of
a movie, but as a follow-up to both a classic piece of pop culture and the proceeding production from a
director behind one of my new all-time favourite films? Sorry, but this really
doesn’t hold up.
Just thinking about this movie is enough to make me
seriously pissed off. Right from the trailer, this film looks like very few
horror films we’ve been getting recently and for good reason: The visuals for
this are among the most striking of any film in 2017. However, once I looked
past the coat of gloss and saw the actual wilting heart of the story, things
became far less groovy. So much of the film is comprised of elements from other
horror films, some of which are lifted in their entirety, and whatever is left
over is so thin and undeveloped that you’ll start to wonder why a man is openly
masturbating to a topless nurse while Dane DeHaan is being attacked by magic
eels in the next room. You know, besides the fact that that actually exists as
a moment on-screen. It’s bad enough when taken on its own merits, but when put
in proximity to my love for psychological horror? This is shockingly under-par.
#5: Downsizing
Much like The Discovery, this suffers from a lack of real
development of its own high-concept aspirations. Unlike The Discovery, and the reason why this ranks even higher on
this list, is that it actually starts out rather promising. For a good 40-ish
minute stretch at the beginning, this film looks like it will be a rather
salient, if needlessly kitsch, look at modern class structures. But then the
film completely loses its marbles, devolving into another instance of the
writers just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. And barely any of
it does. Writer/director Alexander Payne is capable of some seriously poignant
cinema, like with the previously-covered Nebraska, but something this large in
scale and scope feels too far outside of his capabilities to get the same
result. Then again, the only other experience he and co-writer Jim Taylor have
with science-fiction is writing for Jurassic Park III. Suddenly, this level of
incompetence is starting to make a bit more sense, innit?
If there’s anything I love in this world as much or possibly
even more so than film, it’s hip-hop. I grew up listening to it, it was one of
the first real communities I got into alongside film discussions, and the
artists I have listened to have gotten me through some pretty dire situations.
One of those artists is the Midwest indie legend Eyedea, whose music I can
immediately point to as something that helped pull me out of some darker pits I
found myself in. Knowing the micro-budget of the production itself, I wasn’t
expecting anything lavish or bombastic; just something that did justice to the
man’s place in the culture. What I got instead was a lot of dismally static
interview footage, seriously amateur-hour editing and audio mixing, and
attempts at stylisation that comes across a lot creepier than they were likely
intended. I won’t pretend to be the definitive scholar on the man’s life and/or
body of work, but knowing how much I adore his music and the impact he left on
the underground hip-hop community, I just have
to imagine that there was more to him than just this.
#3: Wonder Wheel
As much as the #MeToo movement has led to some seriously
good things, and likely will continue to, this film is unfortunately the
representative of everything on the other side of that coin. The hideous
actions, the insulting attempts to excuse them, the idea of twisting one’s own
failings into a position of advantage; that’s basically this entire film down
to a T. I’ll admit that I never really gave much thought to writer/director
Woody Allen’s own sexual allegations when looking at his recent films, but with
the way this film’s narrative is arranged, I was pretty much had to compare it with the filmmaker’s
own history… and the comparison is anything but flattering. Employing
tried-and-true hallmarks of his filmography, he creates a story that
essentially forces the audience to realise how broken the person telling it
really is. I said in my review for this that, after this shit, I wasn’t going
to give Woody Allen another second of my time and I am absolutely standing by
that. No review for A Rainy Day In New York when that comes out, or any Woody
Allen film after that. Because I am really not in the fucking mood to help fund
this kind of self-aggrandisement. Oh, and the acting is terrible and the
visuals are irritating; there’s that too, I suppose.
#2: Justice League
I don’t have any real love for the DC Extended Universe. At
all. I’ll still argue that Suicide Squad isn’t nearly as bad as everyone keeps
insisting that it is, and Wonder Woman is un-goddamn-touchable as a piece of
superhero fiction, but the franchise’s storytelling as a whole is incredibly
samey and it still started off with Man Of Steel and Dawn Of Justice, the kind
of one-two punch that would kill a franchise dead; just look at The Mummy for
an example of franchise aspirations meeting the cold brick wall of reality from
the same year. With all that in mind, this film being as crushingly
underwhelming as it is shouldn’t be much of a surprise. That. Said. This is still the conclusion of a good four years’
worth of build-up, with the studio trying to make this a genuine competitor to
Marvel’s own cinematic universe, and the result in no way feels like it was
worth the wait. It’s like scaling a mountain during a snowstorm and, rather
than a feeling of accomplishment, you just feel like you wasted the vast amount
of time it took to make it that far. This is how much it takes to make me hate
a superhero movie nowadays: Blind fucking apathy.
If I was going to redo my movie list for 2017, I would
probably put this film right at the very bottom of the list. Not because it’s
as wholesale offensive as something like The Shack or Collateral Beauty, but
because it commits the greatest sin that any
reinterpretation of a classic story can do: It makes the original look bad just
from sheer proximity to itself. I watched the 1991 version for the first time
in preparation for this remake, and without a word of a lie, it became one of
my favourite films far quicker than any other older film I’ve watched. This
film, because of how it re-arranges the story structure and fills out some of
the background characters, brings some potentially unsettling subtext of the
original film right to the surface. Subtext like kidnapping, Stockholm Syndrome,
unhealthy relationships, and a bunch of other things that fans of the original
have been annoyingly debunking for years. This is what happens when you get the
co-writer of The Huntsman: Winter’s War and the director of Twilight: Breaking
Dawn to retell a story that didn’t really need to be retold, in a way that
actively diminishes the story as a whole.
As bad as the other films on this
list are, none of them take other perfectly fine features down with them. This
pretty much grabs the 1991 version by the throat and buries in a sea of Scotch
tape used to patch up a story that didn’t fucking need patching up in the first
place! I can only hope that the next
live-action Disney remake isn’t this painful or this much of an insult to its
source material… even if it is Aladdin directed by Guy Ritchie.
And that is that. I wash my hands of this skulking behemoth
of a year and press on into the new dawn. Thank you to everyone who has stuck
with me during all of this, particularly my critical onslaught in December, and
here’s to better things to come in 2018.
Speaking of which, what is
the first film I’ll be looking at this year?
*looks at cinema release schedule*
Oh… well then… seems like the disappointments have only just
begun.
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