2020 was a shit year. Duh. However, this was a shit year even beyond the metrics that other recent years have been shit, like the one-two-punch to our ideal of cultural heroes over 2016-2017. As terrifying as it already is to be under constant threat of plague all bloody year thanks to COVID-19, the extent to which it affected our lives and even our entertainment was something else entirely. It felt like large-scale hubris for 2019, the Omnicorp-isation of Disney, and then in comes a plague no-one seemed properly prepared to deal with, that threw a monkey wrench into a system everyone was far too confident could withstand whatever came at it.
The release schedule was in a continual state of shuffling throughout, meaning that a lot of big-name productions got delayed ‘til next year, and with varying degrees of lockdown worldwide, cinema attendance took a sharp dive, to the point that not only were there more classic movies being shown than anything new just to fill up the cinemas that were still open, but a lot of independent cinemas likely won’t survive if this continues for much longer. And at a time when all we had was our screens to alleviate the cabin fever, it felt like we were more in need of entertainment than ever.
As a result of all this, a lot of what makes up the worst that 2020’s cinema had to offer comes down to a matter of releasing anything and everything that could be spared just to keep butts in seats and eyes on screens, meaning that there was quite a bit of disposable garbage that filled in the margins. Not only that, but there were a lot of astonishingly miscalculated attempts to say something meaningful so that this year wasn’t a total waste as a pop culture moment, which only ended up making this whole situation feel even worse. And since all that time indoors gave me plenty of space to write up more reviews than any previous year, there are quite a few movies that surely deserve to be on this list, but only just missed the cut. Jeff Wadlow should be counting his blessings that Fantasy Island got passed up because, as you’re about to see, I have no mercy in stock for the 20 that made it in. As such, let’s stop waffling on and get into my picks for the 20 Worst Films Of 2020.
The first real critical punching bag of the year, this truly was a harbinger for the months’ worth of crap that would follow. Seeing Robert Downey Jr. go from saving the entire universe in Endgame, to being elbow-deep in a dragon’s rectal cavity in this, was pretty disheartening, as it was to hear this typically-overstuffed voice cast being wasted on such utterly pitiful jokes that even kids were too clever to fall for.
The whole production is built on reviving tried-and-failed blockbuster ideas, like trying to outdo the over-hyped disaster of 1967’s Doctor Dolittle and somehow doing even worse, or the attempts to ape the high-seas adventure tone of the Pirates Of The Caribbean series and the box office poison of pirate cinema in general. Even with all the talking animal movies I’ve sat through for these reviews, this still managed to stick out as a particularly bad example of the sub-genre. At a time when Hollywood was going through one of its most turbulent periods in the industry’s history, this film served as a grim reminder that, y’know what, maybe the industry needs that kind of drastic wake-up call, if only to prevent shit like this from happening again.
Speaking of bringing shit back that we didn’t need the first time around, what in the hell was William Trent Bell thinking when he made this thing? Easily one of the limpest horror movies of the year, it also serves as one of the single most confusing attempts at a sequel I think I’ve ever covered. It is both adamant that you remember the first film even happened (already a bad idea to ask of any audience), and yet also conveniently amnesiac about the details of that film for this one’s developments to even begin to make sense.
The acting isn’t good enough to be worth sitting through despite the weak material, with Katie Holmes coming off more as parody of a typical horror protagonist than anything genuine, and despite the reliance on atmosphere, it couldn’t even make its titular doll feel like a real threat to our nerves, let alone any of the characters on-screen. As much as this feels like a much-needed mulligan for how stupid the first film turned out, this only managed to be an even bigger shovel of dirt in its own grave, expanding on the original’s lack of coherent narrative to create a just-under-90-minute ass-pull of a so-called ‘horror’ film.
I’m starting to regret just how harsh I was towards After in 2019. I wound up laying all the blame for this new trend of Wattpad once-removed fanfiction becoming the latest adaptation farm squarely at its feet, merely because it was the first example of it I happened to watch for myself. Not that After isn’t still dreadful; just that it didn’t need to cop that much flak. Not when a series like The Kissing Booth exists, with the original outperforming After in sheer cringe value, and this sequel managing to go even further in a lot of respects.
It’s just so fucking gross as a teenage romance story, with a parade of unlikeable jerks being shown in the least flattering light possible, all wrapped up in a creepy cinematic perspective that made the whole mess even harder to sit through. I mean, this was already dead in the water with just how unabashedly clichéd every single moment in this piss-pile is, but when you saddle otherwise-competent actors with these words and just hope that they’ll be enough to excuse what’s going on, it becomes particularly excruciating. I’m still quite shocked that these filmmakers bottomed-out this badly just to fill up an already-overlong run time, and with a third film slated for 2021 (and since it’s on Netflix, there’s little hope of the schedule shuffle showing us mercy), I’m already prepared to deal with this shit all over again, because Dude-dammit, this 5th wave is going to be a long and bumpy one and I’m not about to let this shit slide.
In a year where it seemed like Adam Sandler was beginning to turn over a new leaf, between the great success of Uncut Gems and the respectable return to basics with Hubie Halloween, David Spade and director Tyler Spindel decided that the Happy Madison standard must be upheld in the face of good things happening in the world, and delivered one of the worst features in the studio’s history. And for a company responsible for the likes of That’s My Boy, that’s saying a lot.
Even as someone who still admits that Sandler and co. can make decent comedy even today, this was fucking aggravating to sit through. It’s like listening to a Best Of compilation from a band who couldn’t even manage to be a one-hit wonder, sounding the trumpets for every little thing that has made Happy Madison a laughing stock of the industry to march down the road with all the unearned pride of a Proud Boys rally. It’s depressing for this to be the mainstream breakthrough for Lauren Lapkus, who even in this load managed to show that there’s real potential in her stage presence, but when she’s given such an appalling character to bring to life, it’s hard to care about that potential when she’s basically the mainstream mockery of mental health incarnate. Dragging down people who are trying to make the best of a bad situation: Another reason 2020 sucked arse.
How do you do worse than playing up suicide and literal brainwashing for laughs? Well, how about teaming up a grown-ass man and a child for a buddy cop romp and have it chock-full of paedophile jokes? The best thing I can say about this film is that at least its title properly prepares the potential audience for what they’re about to sit through: Tired, painfully unfunny shit that thinks it’s much cleverer than it actually is. Despite how tasteless a lot this comes across, this is far more offensive to my comedic tastes than anything else, as these are the kinds of jokes that are so easy to make, there’s a reason why most other films (even ones arguably in the same ballpark of dreadful as this) left them the fuck alone.
Then there’s the acting, which largely consists of two actresses that are far too good for this in Betty Gilpin and Taraji P. Henson, drowning in an ocean-sized puddle of squick and bad decisions and making the audience pray for them to star in a film together, instead of having to sit through Ed Helms grind his stock persona into the ground once again. I mean, The Hunt wasn’t all that great either (although the attempts made here to comment on modern America give that film’s tone-deafness a run for its money), but at least that could deliver as an action flick if nothing else. This is just a choking cloud of fail from the title downwards.
#15: The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee
This film managed to knock The War With Grandpa out of the running for the worst of the year, as while that was also embarrassing for everyone involved, at least some of them had more recent successes to fall back on like Tim Hill’s Sponge On The Run. Paul Hogan, and basically every other faded star in attendance here, doesn’t have that. Instead, they have a film that serves as wink-wink-nudge-nudge condescension that, while they all have classic movies and music under their belts, those days are long behind them and they only have barrel-scraping trash like this to act in.
I brought up Curb Your Enthusiasm in my review proper as a pretty obvious reference point for this kind of ‘celebrities with more money than dignity taking the piss out of their line of work’ comedy, but more so than even that, it reminded me a lot of Ricky Gervais’ Extras. No matter how dicey the dude’s view of the world is nowadays, that show still works really damn well at taking the piss out of actors of all stripes, Gervais himself included. This never even comes close to that level of gratification, as the humour is so plodding and repetitive, Paul Hogan himself likely heard all of these jokes decades before this production was even an idea. And they weren’t any funnier back then than they are now.
I may feel bad for Robert De Niro et al. for being involved in War With Grandpa, but fucking hell, I feel even worse for Hogan et al. for being involved in something this embarrassing, let alone something that acts as a stain on one of our few genuine pop culture landmarks.
#14: The Secret: Dare To Dream
You can almost smell the Brut body spray pouring out of the meeting room where a bunch of producers got together and decided that this was a good idea. “We’ll take that self-help book that Oprah made famous, and turn it into a romance movie we can cross-promote with the LifeTime network! It’s a slam-dunk; we’ll easily corner the suburban housewife demographic with this one! High-five!” And after no-one reciprocated that high-five, they all shuffle out of the building in search of more money-grubbing ideas that, by sheer probability, have got to be more successful than this because very few would be able to do worse.
Even months after having watched it, I’m still confused as to how any of this was supposed to work even on paper, let alone on screen. A bland, impossible-to-care-about romance meant to prop up a life philosophy that not only has aged like films starring Bill Cosby (they were always pretty bad, but are especially tough to deal with nowadays), but is particularly out of place at a time when the mere idea that all the shit that happened this year was because we didn’t think hard enough about good things happening is pretty disgusting. It’s almost impressive that Katie Holmes, Josh Lucas, and Jerry O’Connell, all actors with a less-than-ideal batting average when it comes to scripts, managed to carve a new divot in their respective careers all at the same time with this one. Well, it might’ve been impressive if I wasn’t already falling asleep just from recollecting the bloody thing, let alone watching it in real time.
As would be the case for any film that stars Michael Caine as Yobacca the Inflation Fetish Genie, there’s a chance that this could go the cult route and become a popular film for people to point and laugh at from their seats. The kind of film that YouTube critics who specialise in riffing on the must-be-seen-to-be-believed brand of bad cinema would jump at the chance to tear a new one. And yeah, I’m admittedly part of that mindset (albeit in a less visual respect), but regardless of this film’s potential for ironic entertainment, this is still an astoundingly crap attempt at family-friendly entertainment. Although considering the inclusion of “ethnically insensitive erotica” in the dialogue without anyone batting an eye, even that intent is in doubt.
A kids film made by people with zero respect for the growing intelligence of their own audience, this is the kind of production that furthers the divide between British comedy at its best and its worst. Banking on unfathomably cheap jokes, plot progression that feels like you’re fading in and out of consciousness with how little connective tissue there is between scenes, and an attitude that thinks giving its main characters superpowers off-screen is an interesting idea, it’s impossible to think that no amounts of hard drugs were involved in the process of greenlighting this production, let alone inflicting it on an unsuspecting audience.
Regardless of what anyone else thinks about any of my picks for this list, this one is a special inclusion as I’m putting my foot down about this needing to be on a list like this. It is objectively terrible, with some of the most confused marketing I’ve ever seen (and there were plenty of examples of such to go around in 2020) and production values that retroactively made me appreciate the effort that went into every other entry on this list. Even the ones that managed to outdo this particular feature for sheer lack of entertainment value.
One of the side effects of watching most of my review subjects at home is that, thanks to headphones, I’ve been paying more attention to the sound design of these films than I usually would if I saw them at the cinema. And even for something as reliably shoddy as the dubbing of an imported B-movie, this is remarkably shite and gives the dregs of Steven Seagal’s filmography competition for worst voice-over in a supposed action flick. To say nothing of the actual content, which is both over-stuffed and under-cooked to create a film where nothing happens but there’s an awful lot of that nothing that fills up the run time. The marketing seemed to be priming the audience for disappointment, promising a throw-down between two action movie legends that only happened by technicality, but that still wasn’t enough to prepare anyone for just how terrible this is on all counts.
#11: Cats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite
Even in a year as turbulent as 2020, some things never change… like the dependable crap factor of talking animal movies for kids. Only this managed to go even further than the likes of Dolittle in that regard, with a nostalgia carpet bombing seemingly designed to show that, while the first C&D film was merely passable and the second one was Dude-awful, they look like Laika productions in comparison to this subpar and surprisingly haughty serving of disposable entertainment-substitute by a filmmaker who specialises in such fare.
Director Sean McNamara doesn’t make movies worth watching as a rule, with only the occasional involvement in material like Mighty Oak serving as exceptions to that rule. But even for someone not well-known for making movies for the craft of it, this is a particularly unlikeable addition to his catalogue. I mean, beyond the sterile realisation of the talking animals, the do-nothing plot, and the sense of humour that would barely be passable in the ‘80s, let alone right the hell now. The fact that McNamara and writer Scott Bindley made a movie that browbeats about people spending too much time on their screens, at a time when screens were one of the only things we still had access to for entertainment, stands out as an especially boneheaded move, and something of a new low for the annals of talking animal movies. Not that it’s the absolute lowest they can reach, even this year, but it’s still pretty far down there.
I asked this question in my initial review, and even with a couple of possible rationales floating in the back of my head, I feel compelled to ask it again: What is the point of this thing? What is the point in creating a blatant John Wick rip-off, but without any of the action finesse and wholehearted artistic appeal that makes those movies so relentlessly watchable? What is the point in making a film about a Black American named John Henry, yet do next to nothing with the historical inspiration save for some misplaced gospel numbers? And most importantly, what is the point of trying to sell the hip-hop aesthetic when you’re only going to represent the driest and least interesting aspects of it?
More so than anything else about this lazy-as-fuck production, it’s that last point that really sticks in my craw. In the same year when films like Cut Throat City, The Forty-Year-Old Version, and even Waves did the aesthetic justice in cinematic form, the sheer gall of something like this trying to empathise with the struggle while including needle drops that call out this specific kind of opportunistic bullshit… it’s almost too much to believe this is even real. Then again, casting Ludacris as a metal-faced thug named Helen is the kind of thing too fucking stupid for me to make up, and in a year like 2020, coming to terms with the world making this little sense was all too easy to accomplish.
#9: Evolution: The Genius Equation
With how many highfalutin essays I’ve written on here about philosophy, psychology, and my personal takes on the human condition at large, I’ve been trying to refrain from using a particular word to describe any of the films I cover. Partly because of how overused it’s become in the social media age, but also because I don’t want to come off like a total hypocrite in questioning the knowledge of anyone else, when I’m largely self-taught-and-trained as it is. But with films like this, such a label is unavoidable, as this is easily the most pretentious movie I’ve sat through over the last 11 years of doing this critical shit.
It being pretentious isn’t even the main issue with it, as that could still lead to something I didn’t entirely agree with, but is at least interesting as far as seeing how someone else sees and processes the world around them; it’s one of the reasons why I still vibe with a lot of the old guard from Vertigo. It’s because this is the worst kind of pretentious, where it’s so busy parroting all these grand ideas and theories about the universe, that it doesn’t pay any heed to whether the audience is even paying attention, let alone grasping any of it. It’s the film equivalent of someone having a passionate love affair with the sound of their own voice.
It’s an endless barrage of so many different topics, strung together in the sheerest of ways, that it felt like I had to take a dissertation to figure out what the fuck these people were going on about. But because the engagement factor just isn’t present throughout, and watching this becomes a slog in record time, I wouldn’t even care to take the time out to meet the film on its terms. Because its terms amount to an elevator pitch for a philosophy about as grounded in logical reality as the idea that working for an MLM will give you a fair wage. And even as someone on the fringes of mainstream philosophy as it is, speaking as a Dudeist, I couldn’t even begin to take this shit seriously.
Much like with The Iron Mask, this appearing on the list was inevitable because of how fundamentally awful it is as a production. Talking animal movies have become something of a running gag on this blog, not because I actively set out to look for the things, but because there’s just so damn many of them every year, such is the way with industry formulas on what younger audiences apparently want to see. But even with all the different titles under my belt, this still ranks as the absolute worst I’ve seen yet. I don’t doubt that there’s likely even worse out there (although I’m frankly shit-scared at the thought of encountering such a monstrosity in the future), but for the time being, this is the low bar that every talking animal movie to come will have to clear. And it accomplishes the setting of that low bar by barely even qualifying as a movie in the first place.
This is a movie in the same way as a PowerPoint presentation, as while the images on-screen are technically moving, they’re all the same images, looped into infinity to pass the time during the egregiously dull dialogue that makes up the entirety of this feature. It’s much closer to a video of someone describing a movie’s plot verbatim than it is a movie in its own right, with the kind of stock animation that makes me look back at even the likes of Cats & Dogs 3 with comparative fondness. I can accept a film like this being made on the cheap, but when it doesn’t even try to make good use of that limited budget, it ends up reeking of contempt for its own audience if they think that this is worth a passing grade. The typical rating system needs to be revamped just so there’s a lower mark than F, because that’s the only one that this pile deserves.
Once more for those playing the home game: There is nothing wrong with porn as a form of entertainment. It doesn’t matter where you enjoy watching it or even making it, it has a purpose and it can be a genuine art form when done right. Hell, one of my favourite aspects of this production is the notion that, reportedly, Blanka Lipinska, the writer of the source material, wanted to cast herself in the film’s infamous opening blowjob scene. And truth be told, if that did make it into the final cut… I might have been a bit kinder to this film at large. At least that one decision would’ve meant a glimmer of honesty about what this is: Softcore porn for people who aren’t adventurous enough to look beyond Netflix for their fix.
But that’s the problem with adaptations like this: This kind of incredibly skeevy, quasi-wish-fulfillment romance can be tolerated in a kinky fanfiction kind of way… but once you put a budget onto it, turn it into something cinematic, and expect audiences to just go along with every brain-rottingly stupid decision therein, that’s when it becomes a problem. When you put yourself into a market, you’re going to be judged by the same standards as every other product you’re sharing space with.
And for whatever my opinion may be worth about such things, this thing isn’t even that hot. It’s explicit, sure, and in a way that resembles PornHub productions, but between the laughable soundtrack, the ‘we’re desperately trying to be Fifty Shades’ production values, and just the blatantly horrific trappings of the main “romance” itself, this isn’t even the fun kind of sleazy. It’s just gross, and the thought of this being the start of a trilogy of equally-useless pap has definitely got me all hot and bothered… just not in the way this film intended.
When this film initially came out to a collective cry of “Horseshit!”, the actors were quick to jump to the film’s defence. This is something I often worry about whenever making lists like this as, regardless of how strongly I feel about all of these entries, I can’t deny that they still involved work to make happen, and having someone detached from that work come in and call it shit isn’t a good feeling, especially when you make that work a lifelong ambition.
Anyway, while this was going on, Glenn Close and Amy Adams were interviewed (over Zoom, such is 2020) for NME about their feelings concerning the film and its negative reception. And one particular quote from Adams stood out to me, when she said “I think the universality of the themes of the movie far transcend politics”. And in a way, she is right about that. But only because this film was so nightmarishly misguided that it caused the rare phenomenon of bipartisan backlash.
To the left, it was the result of a right-wing capitalist trying to make himself look good by pushing the faces of his family into the Appalachian dirt, emphasising the ‘horror’ of his upbringing to make his successes seem more triumphant and evocative of the American Dream. And to the right, it was the latest example of the leftist Hollywood elite trying (and failing) to relate to lower-class Americana, taking a condescending eye to the unfortunate who just didn’t take their lives into their own hands because it’s clearly them and them alone that’s holding them back. And while both takes are definitely flawed, they both have elements of truth in them.
Me personally, beyond any political leanings, I just hate how clearly skewed this entire film’s perspective is, making for the kind of poverty porn where the only redeeming quality about it is that, in a year this divisive, it actually got us to cross the aisle and agree on something. Even if it’s just that this movie is fucking awful.
I’m something of an outlier in the larger conversation about autistic representation in media. I don’t take as much immediate offence at the idea of neurotypicals playing people on the spectrum as most others, and in the case of more recent examples like The Accountant and The Predator, I wound up appreciating those aspects specifically because it involved autistic characters in narrative positions usually reserved for characters that just about everyone else is supposed to relate except us. But even I have my limits, and boy oh boy, did this film test them.
This effectively knocked Fred Durst’s The Fanatic out of the running as, while that film also made a mockery out of a condition I live with every single day, that was more in service to Durst’s perpetually butt-hurt attitudes towards the world and the people in it. Here, though, it ends up exposing how accessorised autism and Asperger’s Syndrome in particular has become in the mainstream. We’re not usually the ones telling these stories because these aren’t made with us as the prospective audience; they’re made for everyone else.
They’re made for people who will willingly sit through utter dross, just because it has a spectrum kid in there to ‘spice things up’. They’re made for NTs to superficially identify traits in other people, rather than letting us identify with our own. The treatment of the condition itself is bad enough, in all its armchair sociopathic, ‘you’re so inspiring’ bullshit, but the notion that the most respect we deserve is to be roped into other people’s crappy stories because we’re just that inherently interesting… well, that last part I kind of agree with, but only because this film proves that NTs are some boring-ass peeps.
Now we’re getting into the cluster of features that, upon first watching them, I had to actively debate with myself as to whether they’d end up at the lowest point on this list. And this is quite a contender in that regard, as this was officially the point where I got tired of Clint Eastwood’s political aggrandising, which is fitting as a reaction to that mode at its most blatant and duplicitous.
Something that can be said about this film (and the ones lower on this list), in that they are definitely better-made than something like Little Foot or The Iron Mask. But much like with all those debate-horny ‘provocateurs’ the Internet seems so enamoured with, just because it’s well-worded and delivered bullshit, that doesn’t make it any less bullshit. If anything, it being delivered with this level of quality might be the worst thing about it, as it amounts to a film with capable actors in service to a script that only gives a fuck about a single person in its based-on-actual-events story, and it doesn’t care how much back-stabbing has to be done to make that point. It’s the kind of biopic that’s so aggressively one-sided, it manages to depict its own main character as someone who would not approve of his story being used as a cudgel to beat other people down with. Forget holding up to history; it can’t even hold up to its own standards.
Not everyone can be Jordan Peele. Not everyone can take the classic tropes of horror and use them to highlight the real-life horror going on to this day under the umbrella of racial prejudice. There were admittedly examples of that working out within 2020 (namely clipping.’s horrorcore masterpiece Visions Of Bodies Being Burned), but this… this was not one of them. This didn’t even come close, despite how hard it tried to copy the aesthetics of Get Out and Us. Instead, it became the manifestation of a totally different kind of nightmare: When white filmmakers try to do justice to the Black experience, and fuck it up so badly as to cause utter disrespect in its mere existence as a piece of art.
As a white suburbanite who lives and breathes hip-hop culture, I get that I’m not in the position to dictate what is and what isn’t respectful to the Black community. But by that same token, respect for the experiences of Black and other POC communities is built into my appreciation of that culture; that’s where this whole thing was borne from, and I’d be intellectually dishonest if I didn’t honour that in turn.
And through that perspective, this shamelessly torture porn take on slavery and modern-day racial tensions really got on my nerves, as I don’t particularly see why scene after scene of graphic and profoundly tasteless brutality towards Black people is meant to be particularly gripping cinema, especially when depicting said brutality is about as far as these filmmakers get towards actually commenting on it. In the year of 2020, when the video of George Floyd’s death was shared worldwide, merely showing the damage done isn’t enough. All it does is trivialise the fact that this shit is still going on to this fucking day.
#2: The Last Days Of American Crime
For the longest time, I was convinced this was going to be the worst film of the year. There is not a single thing about this film that works. The acting is almost-mechanical in how lifeless it is, the soundtrack is either horribly mismatched or too damn good for this production, the production values are woeful and show director Olivier Megaton somehow finding a whole new low to sink to as a filmmaker, and the adaptation from comic book to film couldn’t have missed the mark harder if it tried, and they tried their damnedest with this one.
But the main thing that so righteously pissed me off about this movie isn’t as simple as the aesthetics or its genre trappings or its competence as a film. It’s the message behind all this that I cannot stand in the slightest. The message that the snuffing-out of free will and the encroachment of a totalitarian police state are both inevitable events that we have no chance of stopping, and if we just don’t care about anything that happens to ourselves or others, that’s the only strength that matters. Nihilism as a personal bubble to guard against the world’s bullshit, because there’s no way in hell or high water that we can do anything to positively affect our environment.
Fuck right off with that nonsense. Fuck right off with the idea that not caring about other people makes you special in any fucking way, or that it’s even remotely close to actually working as protection from how the world treats all of us. I may be an incredibly naïve teenager-in-an-adult’s-body who still has hope for humanity and believes that we’re not all hopeless wastes of flesh, but holy shit, the stench of edgelord coming off this thing is unbearable. This is 2020 personified: An overlong, phenomenally disinterested and jumbled mess that seemed eager to bring the worst out of everyone unfortunate enough to witness it.
And yet… this isn’t even the biggest offender in that regard. Nor did it end up being my pick for worst film of the year. Instead, we have…
I’ve reviewed a lot of movies on here. Like… a lot. And 2020 saw me reviewing more than in any other year previous, meaning that I opened myself up to even more opportunities to be elated or deflated, depending on how a given film turned out. In all that time, I’ve covered a wide range of emotions in response to those films: Joy, catharsis, a depressive feeling that was warranted, a depressive feeling that wasn’t warranted, shock, excitement, even discovering new things about myself by proxy.
This film, far more than anything else I’ve reviewed (more than Death Wish, more than Lights Out, even more so than Vacation 2015), left me feeling the worst. It was a very specific, existential kind of bad, where it felt like I was losing grip of my own sense of self. I mean, it’s a musical comedy all about LGBT acceptance; I honestly tried to give this film a fair chance. But instead, all I saw was… pandering. A cinematic feint meant to make everyone who worked on it appear concerned about the prejudice that Ls, Bs, Gs and Ts face in the modern world, but wound up being so superficial that it only drew attention to its own artifice.
I mean… like I said before, big-time idealist talking here: Of all the people who sat down to watch this, I shouldn’t have been the one to make that assessment. And as that realisation dawned on me, I began to question… basically everything that I thought I was putting out there about myself in these reviews. Was I really as hopeful as I had convinced myself I was? Did I really believe that cinema and theatre have the power to move hearts, change minds, and positively affect humanity like few other things can? Or have I finally grown the fuck up, realised that we’re all just part of a shitty species that does shitty things to ourselves and others, and any chance of hope for better days will never be cashed in on?
It sucked, going through this process. But on the advice of my boyfriend (basically my lifeline throughout this hellish year), I took a step back, cleared my mind (with a little help from The Breakfast Club), and regained my grip on myself. And it’s there that I realised nothing had changed about me. This film is just that fucking awful.
For mediums as reliant on suspending disbelief and banking on emotional engagement above all else as the movies and musical theatre, something that fails this badly to maintain that connection is quite astounding. At no point while watching this turd did I feel transported into a different realm, where I could pack away my own troubles and lose myself in the rapture of the moment. Instead, it only drew attention to how much this was not needed at this specific time. We didn’t need the better-off making half-hearted appeals to social activism and change; we needed them to step the fuck up and put hands towards that change. I understand that pop culture has its place in that fight, but this… this is not it. This isn’t uplifting or empowering or even all that likeable; it’s just perverse and more than a little sickening to think back on.
It’s essentially at the very bottom of the list for the same reason Divergent landed here in 2014: Because at a time when we needed artistic escapism, if not to heal the world than to at least let us heal ourselves, something that can’t even be bothered to offer such services, while kicking up so much dust trying to establish the pretence of it, doesn’t get any respect from me because it doesn’t deserve any respect from me. Fuck this movie, but more importantly, fuck 2020.
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