Top 10 Most Disappointing Films Of 2019

The 2010s, the decade that made me into the critic I am today, has officially concluded. And man, did it conclude on a whopper because 2019 was not a good year for movies. It certainly had its highlights, and we’ll definitely be getting into those later on this week, but for the most part, it was one marked by near-consistent disappointment. Middling features, underperforming productions that should’ve done better than they ultimately did, and Disney dominating the box office even more than any year previously; it’s been getting worrisome. So, to kick off our look at one of the bleaker years in recent cinema history, let’s count the top 10 films that, for one reason or another, didn’t match up with my expectations.

#10: Rambo: Last Blood

Man, do I hope that this is truly is last blood because the thought of this series sinking any further than it did here is almost too much to bear. One of Sylvester Stallone’s underappreciated and yet most influential film franchises suddenly decided that banking on its war-traumatised protagonist was too boring and diluted its own loose formula to the point where it didn’t even feel like a Rambo movie anymore.

There’s definitely something to be said about the irksome politics on display, which even for this series wasn’t ideal, but quite frankly, I take far more issue with how Stallone and co. thought that turning the most iconic figures in Vietnam-era action films into Diet Liam Neeson was in any way a good idea. Cartoonish splatstick and a plot too lame for a Taken sequel isn’t what I watch these movies for.

#9: Welcome To Marwen

One of the more initially-baffling underperformances of the year, the mere thought that a filmmaker as lauded as Robert Zemeckis could go this ignored was another sign that thing were pretty wonky in 2019. But that’s not why this film is on this list. Rather, it’s because this film showed so much thematic grip on its story and its main character, and yet failed to make much more of an impression than a damp thud. As a depiction of the healing power of escapism, I should’ve been all over this thing, and its star-studded components should’ve made that even easier.

But unfortunately, it just fell into a cluttered mess of badly-timed jokes, a mishandling of the more fetishistic aspects of the story, and lacking a real sense of impact that should naturally come from a based-on-real-life story about the victim of a hate crime. I swear, if Zemeckis manages to screw up the Witches remake slated for later this year, there’s gonna be some major re-evaluating in his future.

#8: The Kitchen

As someone who has been reading a lot of comic books lately, this is a situation that should’ve come up beforehand but in preparation for this adaptation of a Vertigo graphic novel, I actually went out and read the thing. And it’s a pretty damn good read, a re-imagining of the ‘mob wife’ genre archetype that fit in surprisingly well with the label’s history of revamping sidelined characters, as well as being an effective crime yarn all on its own.

A shame, then, that this film version lacked basically everything that made it work. It’s too clean to sell its own grittiness, a hell of a trick for a film that features a garbage truck full of severed body parts, its cast feel wasted in a story that easily could’ve worked to their strengths if they given the chance, and for a film supposedly all about female empowerment and escaping the shadows of men, it sure as shit kept the ‘character by association’ sheen that made the initial re-imagining of the mob wife so vital in the first place.

#7: Rim Of The World

Just the thought that I gave this film enough of a chance to even be disappointed with it makes me even angrier at this thing. After McG gave us the incredibly fun Netflix horror-comedy The Babysitter, I thought that he was on an upward swing with material that was outside of his lethargic standard for action flicks.

And what was I met with as a reward for having faith in this guy? A limp-wristed throwback to 80’s-era Spielberg that thinks just pointing out tired gender and racial stereotypes is the same as actually commenting on them. Oh, and eye-wateringly bad visuals that make it look like the world is being invaded by aliens from the planet Smash Mouth; can’t forget that, seeing as McG hasn’t seemed to. Maybe the sequel to The Babysitter that he’s working on will be good, but after this mess, I’m approaching it with far less optimism than I would’ve otherwise.

#6: 21 Bridges

Underachieving hurts far more than just being outright bad. When a film presents so many potentially-intriguing ideas, and yet seemingly goes out of its way to completely mishandle them, it basically earns its place on a list like this. From the titular 21 bridges that set this story up as an isolated crime thriller with a ticking clock, to the main character’s struggles with the legacy of his father and his place in the police department, right down to the film’s treatment of the typical inclusion of crooked cops, it keeps fumbling the ball so badly that it ends up scoring own goal after own goal. Knowing that this is the Russo brothers’ first step into producing films after claiming the highest-grossing film of all time in the exact same year only makes this production’s consistent failures that much more disheartening.

BTW, that picture up-above isn't a typo; that's what the original working title for the film was, before someone pointed out that Manhattan actually has 21 bridges connected to it. That's the level of attention to detail the production was working with, and believe me, it showed.

#5: The Lion King

2019, The Year Of Disney, was the point where I realised that I had been way too kind to the company’s slew of copyright updates disguised as cinematic productions. And it was with this film that that realisation finally sank in, a remake of one of the company’s most famous features that tries to sell photorealistic CGI all on its own as reason enough for this thing to exist. Jon Favreau showed enough competence with the visual style when he did The Jungle Book, but he apparently forgot everything that made that film work because none of it is found here.

The CGI is dead-eyed and lifeless, the voice acting shows far more energy and personality than the visuals can match, and the soundtrack is so misguided, Can You Feel The Love Tonight is set in the middle of the fucking day. It takes a hell of a lot to make a shot at the Beauty And The Beast remake feel presumptuous, but that’s the kind of dreadful we’re dealing with here.

#4: The Banana Splits Movie

Five Nights At Freddy’s is one of my all-time favourite video game franchises, and conversely a series of games that I cannot bring myself to play because my ability to deal with jump scares is significantly worse when I’m in direct control of the proceedings. Most of my enjoyment of the games has come out of watching Let’s Players and reading up on the series lore, and I was honestly looking forward to this for the same reason as I ended up loving Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born: A chance to experience something that my own nerves prevent me from enjoying in their natural habitat, transplanted to a medium that I can actually deal with.

This is what happens when you bank on cheap substitutes to get you through the day. Outside of its resemblance to FNAF, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. I most certainly wasn’t expecting one of the cheapest, tackiest and enjoyment-devoid features I’d sit through all year. Taking a rather kitschy property in the original TV show and making dark and subversive isn’t even that bad an idea (hell, it worked for The Brady Bunch Movie, and that’s one of my all-time favourites), but the execution here is so woeful, it genuinely would’ve been improved if Gary Busey suddenly showed up and starting shooting everyone.

#3: X-Men: Dark Phoenix

As I got into with my 2018 year-end lists, I have a real thing for cinematic redemption stories. Films where a creative or even an entire series looks back at its own history, learns from their mistakes and uses that newfound knowledge to create something special. And after how wonky the X-Men movies have turned out, in particular the attempt to recreate the Dark Phoenix story with The Last Stand, I was ready to give Simon Kinberg a chance to get it right and close out the Fox era of the franchise on an optimistic note.

To its credit, it makes for an interesting proof of concept for a superhero horror flick, something that the MCU seems to be gearing up for with some of their upcoming releases. However, the overwhelming sense of “I just want this over and done with” radiating from the actors and the underwhelming attempts to channel emotional impact from characters that were starved for development back in X-Men: Apocalypse are impossible to overlook. The future of this superhero team is going to be in stasis until Marvel Studios reveal their next iteration, but until then, this end of one of the most important comic book movie franchises ever is just saddening in how disappointing it is.

#2: Alita: Battle Angel

Unlike the other entries on this list, Alita isn’t even all that bad of a movie. In fact, I was quite entertained by it, seeing Robert Rodriguez continue his brand of gleefully-kinetic action beats, fun and engaging characters, and even some nice south-of-the-border visual aesthetic and cultural commentary. It kind of sucked that this film’s main place in the bigger conversation was for people who hated Captain Marvel to have a rallying point that would show that their criticisms totally weren’t sexist, but on its own, it was fun.

And then it just stopped being fun. Hell, it pretty much stopped being a movie in its own right at all, as it ended up collapsing in a big pile of sequel-baiting and embarrassingly weak storytelling. Watching this film in the cinema was like watching an Olympic diver jump off the board, do so many twists in mid-air that they break the laws of gravity, and then as they hit the water, the pool suddenly freezes over and the impact breaks the diver’s legs. It’s a level of failing-to-stick-the-landing that wound up sucking out a large amount of the entertainment it provided beforehand, and considering it didn’t exactly set the box office on fire, it’s unlikely that we’ll get a follow-up that actually gives this film the conclusion it deserves.

#1: The Irishman

I can already hear the sharpening of pitchforks and the lighting of torches at the notion of this film being on this list at all, let alone right at the top… but honestly, that itself is part of the reason it’s on here. Knowing how effective Scorsese can be with lengthy crime epics, to the point where he’s the main guy I go to to show that my wilting attention span isn’t a complete shut-off from great cinema, knowing how immediately-effective his other efforts in the 2010’s turned out (including Rolling Thunder Revue, an enthralling example of what the cinematic medium is capable of in the hands of a true master), and knowing how accurate his statements about the current state of the movie industry wound up being, I desperately wanted to like this.

But alas, it just didn’t work for me. I can at least see what everyone else is getting out of it, and I understand enough of the significance of the film in Scorsese’s larger canon that I’m willing to give it another shot at some point, but that wasn’t enough to make me engage with this thing. It lacks the punchiness of Scorsese’s other looks at crime from the inside-out, but what makes it properly hurt is that, for a guy who is still largely-associated with these sorts of crime flicks, it shows that Scorsese’s greatest strengths have been sitting outside of his attributed genre.

Hugo as a tribute to one of cinema’s earliest triumphs, Silence as an examination of religious zealotry that felt necessary in the age of PureFlix, even The Wolf Of Wall Street as a decidedly more modern and darkly humourous take on Scorsese’s typical subject matter; all of these films are fucking amazing and didn’t require an additional viewing for me to get the appeal for myself. In fact, it might make for the single worst kind of disappointment there is: Part of me is actually angry at myself that I didn’t like this more than I did. So for those who want to man the keyboards and chew me out for failing to understand this masterpiece, at least understand that your ire won’t even hold a candle to how bad I feel about myself already.