Where 2018 as a year was
characterised by filmmakers looking back on the past and seeing where they
could improve, 2019 was characterised by filmmakers looking back and seeing how
much worse they could do. The main theme with the worst of 2019 was films that
made me look at films I had written off years ago as bad ideas, and making me
realise I didn’t know how good I had it because the new take is that much
worse. These are the films that defied the prevailing sense of disappointment
that populated the rest of the year, but only because the main response was “how
did you screw up this badly?!” Strap in for some raw anguish fuel as I
count down the top 20 worst films of 2019.
The latest feature
from cinematographer-cum-director John R. Leonetti, knowing his previous
efforts, didn’t have much chance of being good. However, what really pushed it
onto this list was how it seemed to look at every other recent example of
sensory horror and cherry-picked all of the worst lessons you could possibly take from them, mashing
them together into this rotten meatloaf of a film.
Its cred as an
actual horror film is constantly in question with how shockless it is, its visuals
are polluted by the abysmal CGI work for the Vesps, and its approach to having
a deaf main character has got to be the least convincing I’ve ever seen. I
mean, the actors are clearly trying, but Kiernan Shipka makes Kate Siegel look
like Marlee Matlin, only serving to further highlight just how wrong-headed
Leonetti’s understanding of being deaf truly was. The true horror, though,
comes in the realisation that Mortal Kombat: Annihilation might end up being
the “best” movie Leonetti has ever directed. Maybe it’s time to pack it in on
trying to be a horror director, eh?
After what happened
with Avatar and the Peter Jackson Hobbit movies, we shouldn’t need a reminder of
this but apparently we do: Technological advancements aren’t the same as satisfying
storytelling. I kept seeing this film get brought up for how ground-breaking
and visually-immersive it was, except all of those takes were in response to
the 120fps print of the film. A print that I wasn’t able to access at any of my
local cinemas, making me wonder what good it is if the supposed optimal way of
viewing it isn’t something everyone is able to see.
But that’s ultimately
small potatoes. To really get across what was wrong with the film that I
saw, I’m gonna show you a clip from the Slow Mo Guys.
See how much fun Will Smith is having? See how infectious the man’s charisma is? See how much better this clip is to watch than the film it’s promoting? It’s almost too much to believe that a YouTube video is a better showcase for Will Smith’s talents than a film built around there being two of him. Ang Lee should just stay away from the graphic enhancements for a bit because, between this and Hulk, the dude is no James Cameron.
Ready to be bored to goddamn tears? Well, too bad, because this film exists regardless. A psycho-thriller where the bad acting takes on a meta quality as even the characters themselves are unconvincing actors, this film made me look back on one of my earliest reviews with Before I Go To Sleep, and made me realise I might have been a little too harsh on that film. Yeah, it’s still quite snoozy and the plot is pretty haywire, but at least shit happened. At least there was a modicum of tension. At least the actors knew what in the hell they were doing. And as far as the amnesiac ‘who can I trust’ plot, at least BIGTS had enough understanding of its own plot that it was able to hide its bigger developments ahead of time.
This film, though?
It’s all just a big mess of obvious, tedious and profoundly not-scary.
The purported ‘final’ Madea movie, as well as my first real experience with the character proper, this was just a slog to sit through. Tyler Perry’s inability to sell character unless he’s got someone else to direct him holds true here, which is a feat in and of itself considering he plays four different characters in this thing. The fat suit comedy is lame, the individual character gimmicks are dated as fuck, and the only thing worse than the film’s reaching for laughs is the film’s reaching for drama. It’s like a guest-star spot on a really tacky sitcom, where the irritatingly melodramatic conversations get interrupted by a comedian slumming it for a paycheck. Except the comedian isn’t even slumming it; he made this movie, and so many others before it.
How this series has any fans is beyond me, since it’s not even bizarre enough to merit ‘so bad it’s good’ status. It’s just bad, and considering Tyler Perry has penned a deal with Netflix, I better get used to it because I’ll doubtless be returning to this mugging jackass' 'efforts' before too long.
I’m all for highlighting younger actors in my write-ups, as I honestly like seeing what the next generation of cinema is shaping up to be through their performances, but maybe we shouldn’t be letting them pitch their own productions just yet. Marsai Martin is a quite talented child actor, and her ability with the material show that she might have been on the right track with her initial pitch for this Big flip, but no-one else here seems to be on the same wavelength.
Easily one of the
more exhausting sits I had all year, this amorphous blob of bad
characterisation and even worse narrative ideas hits all the different
varieties of bad movie-going experience. It’s icky with its scenes of the
adult-in-a-child’s-body hitting on her school teacher, it’s irritating in how
badly it handles making the lead realistically flawed so that we want to see
her be better, and it’s even disappointing because the lesson at the film’s
core isn’t half-bad. However, just because the film’s intent of empowerment and
not letting put-downs define you as a person falls on deaf ears because the entire
production is tone-deaf in the extreme. And yet, as we’ll get into further down
the list, it’s not even the most tone-deaf 2019 had to offer.
It just wouldn’t be one of my worst-of lists without a showing from the talking animal community, and we’re starting off light with this right clunker of a so-called ‘animated film’. The animators here were way too confident of their abilities, as the visual gags involving arctic foxes blending into their background only serve to highlight just how slapdash the animation quality actually is.
But it’s the film’s
self-sabotage attempts at messaging that really piss me off. It has all kinds
of pretences about discussing important issues like climate change and
environmentalism, which I was prepared for from the same studio behind Norm Of The North, but I wasn’t prepared for how it would end up doing worse
than Norm did in that regard. It talks a big game about wanting people to care
about the environment, and yet it wants to have its vegan cake and eat it too
by caricaturing everyone involved as conspiracy theorists and crazies, turning
its main message into a rallying cry for the populace to completely disregard
the very issue it deems to be so damn important. The only thing keeping this
from being any lower on the list is that, well, I was one of the few people who
actually watched it. And quite frankly, this is the level of incompetence that
deserves to bomb at the box office, plain and simple.
And speaking of animated films that half-arsed their own attempts at social messaging, we have this glorified Whiskers commercial that someone tried to pass off as an actual movie. Even ignoring its blasé approach to environmentalism, this is easily some of the worst big-screen animation I have ever sat through. The animation is embarrassing, the lip-synch is so awful that it ends up making the voice cast sound that much worse, and I’m already starting to wonder if Toy Story 3 is really all that great in retrospect, considering it started this trend of throwing characters into a furnace just to get a reaction out of the audience. I thought I knew what bad talking animal movies were like, but believe it or not, this still isn’t the worst that 2019 had to offer.
An initial contender for Best Worst Film of the year, this is almost retro in how stupid it is. Built on what is already a pretty antiquated take on modern technology with its smartphone-ready Death Clock, the script is so bloody asinine that I wouldn’t be surprised if Justin Dec initially wrote it back in the 90s and only just rediscovered it. For a horror flick aimed at the teenaged demographic, its approach to characters, scares and even its cheap shots at humour are all relics of a bygone era.
It’s somewhat unfair to regard only recent years as the point where horror became more artsy, as there’s never been a shortage of solid scare flicks, but this really comes across like Justin hadn’t watched a single horror film in decades and yet wanted to make his own anyway. However, because of all that, this is the only film on this list that I could foreseeably recommend to someone else, as its constant face-planting as a production is ideal ‘bad movie night’ material. From here on out, that’s the closest thing to mercy I’m willing to give for any of these movies.
One of the only films that could compete with The Emoji Movie for naked kid-film cynicism, this film genuinely got me angry on my way out of the cinema. An animated musical where the animation is painfully generic and the music even more so, this thing is like the Ghost of Pop Music Past in how readily it reminds its own audience that there are worse things in the world than songs that are just dreary.
Indeed, with its
inclusion of names like Nick Jonas, Blake Shelton and fucking Pitbull (who in
the actual fuck asked for him to come back, and why haven’t they been
horse-whipped yet?), it shoots its own pretences of mocking the reality-TV
state of the world right in the face, letting the exhumed fragments of blood
and grey matter rest on the audience’s collective brow. Add to that its painful
attempts at the clichéd "just be yourself" family-film mantra, and you have a
film that makes Kelly Asbury’s Gnomeo And Juliet look positively inspired by
comparison.
If it’s an idea that hasn’t been good in ages, chances are that Marlon Wayans will still try and sell it anyway. Managing to wrestle out Tyler freaking Perry at his own game, this multi-cast comedy somehow finds Marlon reaching new lows, which is quite a feat for a man who started out spoofing the easiest targets possible and still fucked it up. Whatever modicum of respect I had for Marlon, who much like Tyler is genuinely capable of a good performance when he’s handed to the right director, has pretty much evaporated in the face of this grating, aimless and phenomenally wrong-headed feature.
It’s like he himself
realised that his past attempts at satire weren’t all that great, so he took
one of the most mocked tropes in comedic cinema and just played it straight. Of
course, that notion implies that Marlon is even capable of playing anything
straight, which his constantly-mugging arse refuses to do, and that the trope
itself was worth bringing back at all, neither of which are evident from having
to watch something this painfully unfunny.
As much as I have grown to despise UglyDolls over the course of 2019, I can at least admit that it had a singular moment where its place as cinematic product placement actually got the intent of the toy itself. This movie couldn’t even get that far, settling for being a bargain-bin LEGO Movie minus anything visually, textually or even sonically interesting. In fact, it seems to actively go against everything that made the LEGO movies so damn good, as this film is far more fixated on bland animation, misleading marketing (all the trailers were built around Daniel Radcliffe as Rex Dasher, a character who is barely even in the film in the first place) and some of the limpest appeals to self-empowerment I have ever seen in a so-called ‘family film’.
But what really
makes this film qualify for being this low on the list is that, in the process
of dumbing down the LEGO formula, it actually ends up insulting the audience by
proxy, only adding to the thin-veiled bullshit of its own conceit regarding
imagination. Best to actually have some yourself before asking anyone else to
use it, methinks.
In the age of John Wick and the Fast & Furious series, this film’s mere existence is inexcusable. It’s approach to action shootouts seem to walk back every single bit of artistic advancement David Leitch and Chad Stahelski have made in recent years, and the attempts at woman-ogling fanservice manage to make even the most puerile F&F moments seem downright subtle. It’s also a production that feels like two separate movies have been stapled together, one being a more sombre Red-esque contemplation on retiring assassins and the other being a Harmony Korine action thriller, an idea that Korine himself would object to given how long The Trap has been stuck in development hell.
But more than anything
else, it serves as a massive disappointment as a feature from Jonas Åkerlund,
whose work as a pop music video director has shown ample evidence that he knows
how to remix classic cinema and pop star charisma to make for engaging content.
Except here, he finds himself stuck up to his neck in his own influences, struggling
for breath while delivering one of the most derivative, and honestly one of the
most all-out bad, action flicks of the entire decade.
The infamously bloke-y Guy Ritchie, who has never had that much luck with depicting music, women, and people who aren’t white, was tapped for a remake of Disney’s Aladdin that was meant to give Jasmine more narrative agency. No fucking duh, this shit didn’t work out!
This was officially the point where I realised just how tenderly I had been treating Disney’s live-action remakes, as I would normally jump at the chance to defend them and highlight at least some kind of reason for their existence beyond the monetarily obvious. But this is where that stopped. There was no angle that I could approach this from that could it look any better.
The genie being fleshed
out and given additional characterisation? It only made Will Smith look like he
was tapping into his inner Shaq, to the point where there were a couple lines
of dialogue that seemed to be ripped whole-cloth right out of Kazaam. Bringing
the visuals into the live-action realm? It only served to make everything that
much more lifeless, and I still don’t know how you make a film full of
Bollywood colours seem this dead. Making Jasmine a more forceful character? Not
only was it as a result of downgrading everyone else in the story, her one main
moment of empowerment was courtesy of an ‘original’ song that is basically a
re-write of ABBA’s S.O.S; same chorus melody and everything. It’s excruciatingly cynical, but more pointedly, it’s
just an utter shit pile of a movie.
Oh, and its lead actor struggling to get work while the film's token white actor gets offered a spin-off just rubs salt into the wound.
Oh, and its lead actor struggling to get work while the film's token white actor gets offered a spin-off just rubs salt into the wound.
This film’s inclusion so low on the list may come as a bit of a surprise as, to be perfectly honest, this film’s sins as a production aren’t nearly as all-encompassing as what’s already been featured on here. However, this film makes the cut because its singular fault is so deep, so ingrained, so bafflingly self-destructive, that it managed to offend my tastes on a whole new level.
To put it simply, it’s
a politically-charged effort all about freedom of the press and fake news that
is so disastrously mishandled that it ends up validating the very opinions it
wants to go after. The rising levels of hostility towards journalists and news
outlets over the last handful of years is genuinely worrying to me, as I know
enough about history to know that nothing good comes out of painting the press
as the enemy. So when I see a film like this, one that throws every variety of media
journalism into the same basket as ‘part of the problem’, I can only respond to
how this film itself has become part of that same problem.
And coming from a
filmmaker like Jason Reitman, who has shown remarkable salience in the past
with films like Thank You For Smoking, it’s quite confounding just how bad this
film’s intentions turned out. It even has the potential to take on a
metatextual aspect, as the narrative about a man at the centre of a media
circus seems weirdly prophetic, given Reitman’s next production will be a new
Ghostbusters film that will purportedly "hand the movie back to the fans". Because
that worked out so well for Star Wars, didn’t it?
What’s worse than nakedly-cynical pandering on film? Pandering that can’t even make its mind up on whether it wants to give its target demographic a pat on the back or a pie to the face. A culmination of the prevailing vibe I’ve been getting from comedies starring older actors, namely that they’re just an exercise in removing any semblance of dignity from the actors’ past pedigree, it can’t seem to make its mind up on whether it wants to be a genuinely thoughtful look at aging and the inevitability of death, or a sitcom about those wacky old people who want to relive the good ol’ days. It’s the same splintered tone as A Madea Family Funeral, except this has actual talent behind it, a fact that only makes the resulting failure that much worse.
To make things even
worse, this film’s position as a production was always going to be in hot water,
given the filmmakers’ decision to film in Georgia, when a bulk of the industry was boycotting the state in response to recent abortion legislation.
So, not only is it a film that serves as a back-handed insult to its own
audience, it’s a back-handed insult to its own industry, at a time when
said industry was at one of its most difficult points in recent memory. And no,
I’m not just referring to the boycott; I’m also referring to things like…
You know the year has been bad when this isn’t even the only bad movie about cats to come out. One of the accidentally-nightmarish big-screen musicals of all time, this film’s hilariously bad reception is matched only by how awful literally every single aspect of the production itself is. All of the actors are deliriously underutilised, making even people who have legitimate talent seem like they’ve never acted before in their lives, and serving as the utter nadir that pop music movie crossovers could attain for the entire decade. Its music is so all-over-the-place, a literal kitchen sink would’ve been more pleasant to listen to, and its tone manages to hit such an irritation point, it ventures into taunting the audience for the fact that they even paid to see it. Maybe release a finished film first before your actors get on a high horse on who's allowed to criticise what, eh?
It’s so bloody
atrocious that I should be laughing at the train wreck… except I’m far more
worried by what it could mean for cinema in the years to come than anything
else. When it was released to American cinemas with unfinished effects work,
Universal Pictures wound up re-releasing the film with fixed visuals. This
tactic of releasing first and patching up later is one that has already seen
another industry in its darkest times, with the AAA video game industry
basically engaging its audience on a instalment plan, and the mere
thought of the same thing happening to a medium that I hold closer to my heart
than anything is honestly terrifying. With any luck, this film’s dismal critical
and financial reception will keep this being a repeatable idea out of people’s
heads, but with how bafflingly 2019 turned out when all is said and done, it remains
an unfortunate possibility.
The foul spectre of Fifty Shades Of Grey is sticking around for the long haul, it seems. The young adult adaptation trends of the last two decades have shifted from magical chosen one narratives (Harry Potter) to supernatural romances (Twilight) to post-apocalyptic high school allegories (The Hunger Games) to romantic comedies involving the terminally ill (The Fault In Our Stars). And with this film, both on its own and with its already-slated sequel, it is now official that Fifty Shades has begun the 5th Wave of YA Adaptations, one that will be populated by repurposed fanfiction trying to convince people that it’s actual literature.
As I said in my
review proper, I have no real issue with fanfiction as a writing practice and I’ve
even dabbled in it myself in the past. But what it isn’t is a substitute for
actual storytelling, as a lot of it amounts to self-insert wish fulfillment couched
in sanctifying horrifically toxic relationships. This is the trend of the
future, and one that will doubtless inspire countless imitators as each
previous wave has engendered. And if the future of YA adaptations is destined
to be this pretentious, this ugly, this oppressively boring, then holy shit, we’re
in for some real dark times. I fully expect an adaptation of Stones To Abbigale
in the near future, because after this, there really isn’t anywhere lower we
can sink.
My initial review for this was so incendiary that not only am I under the impression that FilmInk Magazine at large wants to pretend it didn’t happen (it was conspicuously absent from their own year-end round-up, and they actually said that they hadn’t published a $0 review all year), but part of me wonders if I didn’t end up intriguing people into checking out the film anyway. That’s usually what happens with worst-possible-rating reviews like this, and it’s something that’s affected my moviegoing choices in the past: The curiosity of just how bad a given film actually is, and the masochistic compulsion to find out for one’s self.
Whether that holds true remains to be seen, but for me personally, this was the most infuriating sit I had all year. A shamelessly exploitative look at the disabled living below the poverty line, it was soaking in its own edgelordisms, pushing continually distasteful imagery in the audience’s faces under the guise of aiming for some kind of emotional truth. But all it ended up doing was making me truthfully wish that writer/director Shinzo Katayama never make another movie ever again, if this is him pretending to have an empathetic bone in his body. I don’t normally get that vindictive about people who make movies, but then again, filmmakers don’t normally present an autistic woman being raped for 90 minutes as 'art'.
Hell, my hatred for this thing might actually eclipse that of Vacation 2015, a feat I didn’t even want to think was possible. Congratulations: You truly did fuck up that badly.
And yet, even with
that amazingly visceral reaction, that still didn’t clinch this film’s place as
one of the worst films I’ve seen. No, that came with the realisation that I reached
at the end of my official review: In terms of depicting sexually-active
disabled people, Freddy Got Fingered was more respectful than this thing. Yes, one
of the most legendarily-awful films in the history of the medium actually did
something right by comparison. Say what you will about Tom Green’s woeful riff
on mainstream rom-coms, but the relationship subplot between Gorgon and Betty
showed more care and compassion and good-hearted humour than anything found in
this utter abomination.
As one of the few people who went into this movie knowing nWave Pictures’ previous work beforehand, I probably should have seen this one coming. There’s only so long that a studio can spend delivering such blandly-inoffensive fare year after year before someone gets the bright idea to try for something a little riskier. And to an extent, I almost commend the filmmakers for their daring, as family films that take aim at the sexual abuse allegations of a head of state isn’t something you see every day, even at a time when mainstream animation was reaching new heights of sophistication.
However, any respect I would have had for this film evaporates instantly when it sets in that this film is willing to talk the talk but ends up breaking its legs when it tries to walk the walk. It tries to poke at Donald Trump’s history with rape allegations, along with his phenomenally unsavoury quips on the subject matter (they even include a variation on the infamous "grab by the pussy" remark, dead serious), but then when it gets to the story about the titular dog, it finds him at the mercy of Trump’s sexually-aggressive corgi with quite literally won’t take no for an answer.
Say what you will
about the modern re-examination of old Pepe LePew cartoons, even they
didn’t make the actual non-consensual act part of the fucking comedy itself.
Hell, to go one further, Show Dogs’ own accidental horror was pretty bad, but
they still had the common sense to get rid of it before the official release.
And even then, they weren’t nearly as to-the-point as this film turned out,
basically turning rape into a joke and a justifiable punishment for the villain
in a fucking kids’ movie!
As the oldest brother of six siblings, and as someone who loves championing young and rising talent in films, words truly cannot express how much I loathe the filmmakers who thought any of this was a good idea. If they hadn’t completely abandoned the concept of shame in making this, I would hope that the people who made this feel nothing but shame from now until the end of their respective lifespans. Fuck this movie.
As the oldest brother of six siblings, and as someone who loves championing young and rising talent in films, words truly cannot express how much I loathe the filmmakers who thought any of this was a good idea. If they hadn’t completely abandoned the concept of shame in making this, I would hope that the people who made this feel nothing but shame from now until the end of their respective lifespans. Fuck this movie.
After my begrudgingly kind review, I’m sure that many people are surprised to see this film on the list at all, let alone right at the very bottom. And quite honestly, I’m a bit taken aback too, as I never could have foreseen just how much this film would sour in my memory after watching it. I just thought it was a tangibly mishandled effort that, despite its quite-evident business agenda, still had some elements of good to it. But then, only a few short weeks after I posted my review, this happened (cw: animal cruelty):
Fun fact: I actually met the journalist who broke this story. One of the more eventful things that happened to me in 2019 was that I was invited to the Logies, the big-time TV award ceremony here in Australia. And I wound up at the same table as Caro Meldrum-Hanna, who I could instantly identify as someone with a good head on their shoulders and all kinds of empathy for those around her. I spent most of the night worried out of my mind about being there and the reasons why I was there, and yet through talking with her, I managed to bounce back and treat the whole night as one of the better learning experiences I’ve had.
With that in mind,
her breaking the story so close to my examination of the film got me to realise
that I had to address this elephant in the room. This is the
highest-grossing Australian film of 2019, one that was backed by the horse
racing industry as well as its perpendicular gambling industry through Racing
Victoria and TAB respectively, and one that goes out of its way to give a
glowing endorsement of an industry capable of such shamelessly abhorrent treatment
of its main animals.
Everyone who paid to see this movie in cinemas (which includes me, meaning I’m just as guilty so don’t think this is me getting all self-righteous) actively paid into the pockets of the people responsible for herding these horses into the abattoirs. In a year that highlighted more than ever the consequences of the media we engage with, this one example might be the single most horrifying, and I am honestly fucking disgusted with myself that I put money into feeding this literal meat grinder.
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