Like a rubbish sequel to an already miserable original, 2021 was not a great year. More of the same time-haze where every day just seemed to blur into each other from the isolation, only it seemed to hit me harder the second time around because I wound up with a bad case of quarantine brain. I spent a fair amount of the year in creative burnout, meaning that I wound up seeing significantly fewer films than usual. And yet, because running on half power (or no power, as was the case for a few days in December) still isn’t enough to stop me, I still managed to see enough films to fill out my usual end-of-year list.
Sure, making such a list is just pointing at unpleasant things from the past just to point out how unpleasant they are, and it’s not as if the world is deprived of things to feel bad about these days. But quite frankly, making fun of bad movies with this annual list is pretty much the only joy I get out of still remembering that these features happened at all. One of the side effects of writing about every new film I see is that my memory of them is tied to something tangible, and they tend to be easier to recall as a result. And since forgetting about wrong things is a pretty sure-fire way to ensure that they keep happening, I reckon it’s worth taking some time to reflect on what I can only hope will be mistakes that are learnt from rather than repeated. As such, let’s take a look at my picks for the Worst Films of 2021.
#20: Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City
Video games adaptations have come a long way since 2002. And even with how much Johannes Roberts hasn’t really wowed me with his last couple directorial efforts, and how much the Paul W.S. Anderson films just plain didn’t work, I was genuinely looking forward to this reboot. But for all the improvements that were made, this still wound up being extremely underwhelming.
The characters felt more like their own entities, independent of an overpowered main character, but their personalities still didn’t register as they should have. There’s a decent setup for the story and the atmosphere therein, but thanks to lacklustre scripting and some of the hackiest attempts at horror chills I’ve seen in quite a while, it’s all wasted and just makes the film that much more disappointing.
Being unable to make an effective horror film out of this franchise would have been annoying in any other year, but considering how a viral plague has been tearing through the real world over the last couple years, there’s even less excuse for it to be this lacking in urgency.
#19: Earwig And The Witch
This wound up stuck between trying to bring Studio Ghibli into a new era, made by a lot of the studio’s younger blood, and doing justice to Ghibli’s illustrious history, and ends up doing neither all that effectively. The all-CGI animation certainly its more plastic-y elements, but even its better moments only highlight that the story it’s being used to deliver (and the English dub that it’s seemingly designed to support) goes beyond the typical Miyazaki simplicity and goes right into unfinished. Some of it at least tries to live up to the awesomeness of a rock band made up of a coven of witches, but on all fronts, this is a production where just about everyone involved should have been able to create something much better than audiences ended up with. If news broke that Hayao Miyazaki came out of retirement specifically to offset the damage this one film could potentially do to the studio’s legacy, I wouldn’t be surprised.
#18: The Unholy
Like with the last two entries on this list, The Unholy makes it on here largely because it wound up being a massive disappointment for me. Only that feeling is magnified exponentially with this one, as the very fact that I was disappointed in this to begin with kinda pisses me off because I really should have known better by this point. Nothing I had seen up to this point from Evan Spiliotopoulos gave me the impression that this is someone with a good idea in his head. Even the better films he’s worked on over the last few years, like Brett Ratner’s Hercules and the latest Charlie’s Angels movie, didn’t show enough potential on his part to make me think that, oh yeah, this guy should totally be directing his own features.
So when he finally did make that leap, we ended up with a painfully derivative horror film that spends more time leaning on trends that the Conjuring series already laid out (and judging by how lukewarm the reception was towards The Devil Made Me Do It, chances are said trends are on their way out by now) than it does expanding on what could have been some pretty damn interesting ideas within its own story. Evan seemed far more content to give Johannes Roberts a run for his money in raw jump-scare irritation, and walking back so many of his own ideas concerning Christianity and organised religion as a whole that the film itself reads like an act of cowardice on his part. Like he could have gone deeper and actually fleshed them out, but then realised that making the film’s appeal as wide (read: nondescript) as possible was more important than the possibility of making the audience even the slightest bit uncomfortable. It’s a horror film too scared of its own audience to be an actual horror film.
#17: Tom & Jerry
With every new feature that Tim Story decides to inflict on the public, it’s almost like he’s daring the audience to reassess whether his earlier movies were as bad as people remember them being. Yeah, his Fantastic Four movies weren’t ideal, but buried in there, he seemed to at least have a working idea on why those characters were worth making movies about. He certainly understood them more than he did with Shaft a couple years ago, and especially with one of the greatest comedy duos in the history of animation with this one.
I at least get the impulse behind some of the wonkier creative decisions here, considering how much Hollywood relies on big names for their marketing, but at the expense of the titular characters? That part doesn’t make sense to me. A film about Tom & Jerry should primarily be about… well, Tom & Jerry. Not the interchangeable collection of humans around them. And it’s not even like this is the first time this mistake has been made concerning animated characters on the big screen, where the IP is being used to prop up just about everything else except itself. With how far animation has come in the last three decades, we should be past the point of failing to live up to ‘90s theatrical releases that were themselves not that good to begin with.
I’m not expecting anyone else to particularly care about this pick. Hell, I’m not even expecting anyone to know that this film exists in the first place. But as a sequel to a film I reviewed during the first year of this blog’s existence, I admittedly found myself in a weird state of curiosity when I learned that not only did it exist, but that it would be playing at one of my local cinemas. Before even sitting down to watch it, it seemed like a relic of a bygone era, since the big mainstream boom of terrible Christiansploitation films that spawned the original has long since faded into the background.
But no, the filmmakers once again tried to annoy me into an early grave, by banking on one of the more classic misunderstandings concerning animated characters, and just assuming that multiplying them automatically multiplies the entertainment value. And here, that manifested in taking one of the dumbest animated characters I’ve ever seen for a review in Dave the Nestrian, and giving the audience an entire village full of them. 2021 had more than a few productions that were seemingly fuelled by pure marketing cynicism, so I have no doubt that this exists solely to necessitate new variants for toys, but could they at least have made the Nestrians in any way appealing as a foundation for such things? No? Fine. I guess the onus is on me for even giving this film the time of day, when all it had to offer was Ooops! All Pointless!
#15: Buddy Games
Laughing at the current try-hard state of masculinity is something I consider to be a survival tactic nowadays. As easy as it is to just get angry at meat-headed imbeciles trying to lecture other people on what it means to be a man, I’ve taken to seeing such things as the behaviour of the terminally insecure, which coming from me is a hell of an indictment. So when a film like this comes out, one built entirely around those same regressive ideas on how men are supposed to behave, I tried to meet it on its own terms, but that only further highlighted just how unnecessary this whole enterprise is.
Beyond the fact that, much like Brains Dying Two By Two, Hurrah, this film seems designed to annoy me personally, with one of the most unlikeable ensemble(?) casts I’ve seen in years. Beyond the embarrassing attempts at humour that result in more laughing at the people who thought of it than any such instinct to laugh with them. Beyond the fact that it made one of the biggest whiffs I’ve ever seen in a comedy and managed to screw up a joke about Rotten Tomatoes, a thing I didn’t even think was possible with how much people inordinately care about such things (and I say that as someone whose work is listed in that aggregate).
This fails because it can’t even deliver on the macho feats of physical endurance that its title and plot are dependent on, doing all it can to distract from the kind of mindless but visceral comedy that, truth be told, might have gotten me to enjoy it despite me not being in-tune with its ‘proud to be toxic’ wavelength. Knowing that there’s a chance for redemption within this comedic subset with a new Jackass movie on the horizon softens the blow a little, but that only further highlights how much this filmed act of farting around was far from needed or even entertaining in its needlessness.
#14: Cinderella
Boy, 2021 sure did a fine job in letting people down, eh? And while this should rationally be on the same level as The Unholy, where I only wound up disappointing myself for having any kind of positive expectations for this thing… bloody hell, I really wanted to see Kay Cannon make another great movie. Blockers might be my favourite of the new crop of coming-of-age films starring women, and despite the diminishing returns with the Pitch Perfect trilogy, the high points in those movies scratched so many of my itches concerning licensed music in movies. Even with the poor reception this film had been getting, knowing how I tend to like most of the films I watch, I was hanging onto hope that I would see some merit that everyone else missed.
But no. No. No, I had to eat humble pie with the realisation that this film was indeed as shocking as I had heard about beforehand. Every bit of legitimate agency Cannon’s films had shown up to this point regarding their leading women was replaced with so many half-hearted appeals to the blandest kinds of feminism that it managed to make Camilla Cabello look even more hollow than she already did in her own career. Combine that with song choices that seem tailor-made to sabotage anything this film might have been aiming for in terms of dramatic resonance, and some of the most nightmarish animation of any film on this list, and I wound up filled with the unfortunate impression that Blockers may have been a fluke in Kay Cannon’s career as a director. Please prove me wrong on that, Kay, because I don’t want to believe you could do worse than this.
#13: Vanquish
Ever done a group project where you are doing your best to complete the assignment, but every other member of your team is too busy trying to drink their pens to do what they’re supposed to be doing? This is the film version of that. It makes for a thankful reprieve from the general air of disappointment that has so permeated the list up to this point, as I didn’t go into this with any real inkling that I was in for an underappreciated gem. And yet, I can certainly see something that was underappreciated in this film, as Anastas N. Michos seemed determined to make this film work, even though everything else around him was more than content chewing on their toenails rather than making this film any more watchable.
It’s quite the case study in how good filmmaking involves more than just the right framing and camera work, as the acting makes both its better and worser cast members look about as talented as each other, the writing is so threadbare that it barely even feels like an actual story is being told, and the editing is fucking horrible. This is genuinely in competition for the worst editing I’ve ever seen in a film, and when that reference pool includes Taken 3, Paul W.S. Anderson’s collaborations with Doobie White, and even the works of Neil Breen, that’s quite the accomplishment. If the Razzies had an Editing category, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a deliberate attempt to win an award in failing. But instead, this is just a one-of-a-million action-thriller that only manages to poke its head out of the pile by going even further into sheer incompetence. Here’s hoping that Anastos has another Empty Man lined up in the future, as the kind of talent this man has deserves a better spotlight than the shit he was given in 2021.
As a general rule for these lists, I tend to take films out of the running for being among the Worst or Best if I myself can’t really remember much about them. Not much sense in highlighting something I can’t actually pick out of the collage of films I watch every year. And for quite a while, I was sure that that would be the case with this film, since it’s so inhumanly bland that I was having trouble really isolating any part of it that was worth piling on in a list like this.
But then one of my Twitter mutuals publicly asked if anyone remembered this particular film… and as soon as I saw the title, one image immediately sprang back out of my subconscious memory. The image of a psychiatrist’s house that was decorated with framed Rorschach pictures on the walls. An image so self-parodic, so asinine, so lowest common denominator, that in the moment that it all came flooding back to me, I questioned how in the hell I ever forgot that happened in the first place.
It's the kind of creative decision that I, a person with little-to-no practical experience in set design, would bring up as a joke, but that set decorator Bonnie Smith actually thought would work in a film that is supposed to be taken dead seriously. As someone who regularly fixates on minor details, and ends up distracting myself from the bigger points in the process on occasion, it’s such a ‘Baby’s First Movie’ choice that it stands head-and-shoulders above the amorphous blob of grey and bad mental health takes that is the rest of the film. This may seem like a much lesser sin than those committed by the films on this list up to this point, but it really says something when this kind of domestic thriller is so lacking in engagement, that something this trivial is what sticks out the most. I eagerly look forward to when Bonnie Smith works on a film about a struggling comedian, where their home will no doubt be full of rubber chickens hanging on hooks.
#11: Breaking News In Yuba County
With the last handful of films I’ve reviewed from Tate Taylor, I never ended up being wowed by them but I at least understood their relative underperformance. The Girl On The Train? Yeah, it fell short of its competition, but it still turned out mostly good and gave me a lot to think about. Ma? A strong central performance and some interesting bits of social commentary ultimately outweighed the limp attempts at horror and the unrepentant idiot plot at its core. Even Ava didn’t leave me with a bad impression of its director, considering how tumultuous its production history was and how it wasn’t even a film that needed to exist in the first place; he did what he could under the circumstances.
But not with this film. This was the point where all of the little flaws I had been picking up on began to coalesce into something capable of swallowing an entire production whole, digesting any sense of worth or point the film might have had beforehand and leaving only its displeasing excreta plastered all over the frame. In the same year that Ridley Scott delivered a masterclass in modern camp with House Of Gucci, something that fails this hard at a similar tone only stands out even further in its own failure. It tries to fill the void left by John Waters being unable to get studios to fund his own cinematic projects, and in the process only further highlights how much we need the old masters to come back and do this shit properly.
And spare a thought for poor Franklin Leonard, whose first named credit in feature film production since founding the Black List (which is an excellent aggregate of unproduced screenplays that have led to the creation of some incredible films) finds him on the wrong end of his own contribution to the film world, with a feature that finds its home all too easily in the obituary column.
#10: Thunder Force
And speaking of final straws that made me give up on directors, we have one of the most embarrassing attempts at a superhero flick in recent years. Whatever begrudging compliments I could give to Ben Falcone and Melissa McCarthy’s previous collaborations are nowhere to be found here. Instead, we have a parade of their least likeable traits as a creative team, treating their own story as little more than a prompt for them to just fart around, wasting the production crew’s time and, in turn, the audience’s.
I get that I’m in a precarious position as a film critic who still has a real adoration for comic book movies and superhero movies in general, knowing how much the industry is dominated by such productions to the detriment of just about any other kind of cinematic storytelling. But even with the worst kinds of cynical marketing and overwhelming release tactics employed by Disney and Warner Bros. along those lines, something that nestles itself in a genre I love more than almost all others, yet does fuck all with the creative possibilities of that framework, honestly gets on my nerves even more. It’s a do-nothing, say-nothing, feel-nothing trend chaser that apparently wants to excuse how much it bored the audience by showing the people who made it were just as disinterested in their own product.
#9: Peter Rabbit 2
There is a minimum degree of respect that a film should give to its audience. An acknowledgement that said audience, of their own free will, chose to use their hard-earned money and free time to engage with a given film, when they just as easily could have chosen something else. It doesn’t matter whether a film is made for kids, adults, men, women, Americans, or Monacans; the least that a filmmaker can do, and indeed should do, is give the audience respect for choosing their art.
Unless your name is Will Gluck, apparently. He made the Worst Films list in 2014 with his thoroughly smug and misguided attempt at an Annie remake, and he makes it on this list for pulling a lot of the same shit. I went into this with little-to-no expectations, after how mixed the first film turned out, so I wound up being blindsided by how much this film, flagrantly, could not give less of a shit about itself or the people unfortunate enough to be stuck with it for just over 90 minutes.
I try and give credit where it’s due for real self-awareness, as self-delusion tends to be a lot more disheartening to witness in someone else, but this really pushed it in trying to freely admit that it doesn’t care about its source material and thinking that that admission on its own is enough to excuse that it still thinks it’s worth taking time out to witness. It’s a kids’ film built on the misconception that kids are stupid and therefore will sit through anything, and as long as they confess that sin in the film proper, that makes it A-Okay. I have zero patience for that kind of attitude, and if Will Gluck ever gets it in his head to try and pull this crap for a third time, he’s in for another reckoning.
#8: Don’t Look Up
Somehow, the conversation surrounding this movie has become even worse than the film itself. I can sympathise with being frustrated at not getting as warm a reception for your art as you’d like, but going full ‘you just don’t get it’ in the face of negative criticism is fucking pathetic. I really have no other way to describe such a reaction, as putting down a person’s dislike for something as a personal fault of theirs is one of the most toxic mindsets a person can have when making or discussing art. It especially rings hollow when, of the myriad of problems I have with the film, ‘not getting it’ isn’t anywhere on that list.
There’s something seriously infuriating about this kind of critic-proofing, where any and all criticism can be hand-waved away by saying that said critics just don’t care about the subject matter, or its reflection of the real world, in turn strawman-ing them into ‘the enemy’. For disagreeing on a movie. And as I’ve learnt from more than a few left-leaning features that I’ve reviewed on here, agreeing with a film in principle and actually liking it aren’t necessarily the same thing.
And for as much as the film itself tries to excuse its own battering ram approach to commenting on the exasperating lack of response to climate change, this isn’t a bloody documentary. This is a film dramatising the real world, and there’s expectations that come with a production like that, and if you can’t take the notion that someone else doesn’t see the point in just repeating anything and everything that makes the current conversation so stressful to deal with, maybe you don’t have a thick enough skin to be displaying your work in the first place.
Even considering the films yet to come on this list, this might be the single most unpleasant experience I had watching a film all year, and it doesn’t even reach proper engagement by doing so. Where other films aim for sour feelings, but reach some kind of emotional revelation or clarity in doing so, Adam McKay seems content to just reiterate what everyone else has already contributed to the conversation before he showed up, and then get annoyed when people don’t appreciate his ‘ground-breaking’, ‘vital’ addition to the cause. Piss off, dude.
For the third year in a row, a movie adapted from a Wattpad piece of writing has made it onto the Worst list. Only this winds up being far more egregious than After or even the previous Kissing Booth films, as at least those films seemed to care enough about their stories to have things happen in them. This is the equivalent of watching a compilation of someone else’s bitchin’ summer vacation, where they keep trying to sell just how much fun they had, but are utterly unable to translate that into anything an observer would give a shit about themselves.
I understand who this film was designed for, and I even get
the function of the fanfiction that it spawned from; not everything has to be
an epic saga about the human condition. But like I said earlier about how
filmmakers should respect their own audiences, being lightweight isn’t an
excuse to deliver next to nothing under the guise of entertainment. Self-insert
fiction has its place, but when the characters are this self-obsessed,
and the film around them exists solely to placate the whims of fictional
people, I fail to see what aspect of this mess is supposed to be worth sitting
through. Not even the cinematography from Anastos N. Michos, with its gorgeous depiction of sunny California, is enough to make this in any way enticing.
As much as I unfortunately recognise that the 5th wave of YA adaptations likely isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, the least I ask for is that this particular series ends here, as while it’s unlikely that things could somehow get worse from here, the whole of 2021 has reset my expectations for just how depressing the world and its decisions can be.
#6: The Misfits
Dunning-Kruger coolness is one of the most laughable things to see in another person. That impression where someone else really wants you to think that they’re the most awesome person in the room, and make you want to be like them, but the rampant stench of try-hard in their every word and action just hammers home that, no matter what situation you may be in in your own life, you’re just thankful that at least you’re not as desperate as they are.
That’s about as much engagement as this particular nothing of a film managed to get out of me. Well, that and seeing Nick Cannon find a whole new way to make a complete arse of himself. Part of me will always have the smallest modicum of respect for the guy just for Wild ‘n Out and him giving a spotlight to a lot of unsung heroes in the hip-hop world, but much like with that theoretical ‘cool guy’, watching this just further highlights all of that as a vain attempt to make himself look better by association. Admittedly, it’d be difficult for him to look any worse, between the racist and homophobic caricaturing in this film, and the anti-Semitic shit he’s been saying off-set, but with the help of Renny Harlin, Kurt Wimmer, and a very not-in-the-mood-for-this-shit Pierce Brosnan, he sure found a new way to look the fool.
Now we’re getting into the properly awful shit. The films that went beyond just being uninteresting or smug or otherwise unlikeable, and go right into genuinely distasteful territory. Out of respect for just how much effort goes into the cinematic process, even for films I truly dislike, I try and refrain from going full anti-creation and thinking that a given film shouldn’t exist at all. This is a very major exception to that rule, but in my own defence, this thing barely even feels like a film to begin with.
This is Warner Bros. taking that step too far in their latest attempt to satisfy their own greed. They have made a lot of bank in recent years off the backs of productions that are basically thinly-veiled excuses to show off just how many intellectual properties they themselves own, except this couldn’t even manage to do the bare minimum and entertain others while it shows off its overstuffed box of toys. Instead, they cut out the middleman and made a product that is an indictment against its own existence, with a group of beloved pop culture icons at the mercy of a heartless and self-serving algorithm. And “product” is the only reasonable thing to call something like this, since something that is this blatantly money-hungry sure as fuck isn’t art. I’m not saying that cinema as art isn’t inherently built on financial gains; I’m just saying that most films do a hell of a better job hiding that fact than this thing did.
2021 was a depressing year. Another year spent at home in isolation, watching the world go to shit outside my window, and while I understand the necessity in that isolation for everyone else’s sake, that didn’t make the crushing banality of that existence any easier to deal with in the moment. It’s part of the reason why I still cling onto the ideal of cinema as something I need on a regular basis, as this kind of art has helped me through a lot of rough patches in my own life, worldwide plague included. So when one of those films takes time out to get all sanctimonious about what people with a history of mental health problems are and aren’t allowed to say about their own experiences, you can imagine how much contempt I hold for the people responsible for that little moment.
Yeah, as I said in the review proper, I fucking hate the writing in this thing, and Tracy Letts has some serious explaining to do for some of the shit he decided was worth bringing to the big screen with this one, but he’s far from the only guilty part here. The whole film is just a tiring and quite embarrassing display of gaslighting, not just for the main character, but for the audience as well. It’s a filmmaker lying to their audience’s collective faces that what they have to offer is what needs to exist at this moment in time, when all they really have is something that only adds to the bigger problems regarding the depiction of mental health in mainstream media. I’ve been hearing good things about Joe Wright’s latest film Cyrano, but between this, Pan, and the pretty damn underwhelming result of Darkest Hour, I question whether this man has a single good idea left in his head.
#3: Cosmic Sin
A film this absolutely forgettable and boring wouldn’t normally make it this low on the list for the simple fact that, while it’s incredibly irritating to just completely forget a thing I spend a fair amount of time and money on, there are still worse things I could be writing about. Except this production’s lack of shits to give about its own status as entertainment, the more I think about it, is just a symptom of an even worse attitude at its heart. An attitude that actively objects to the idea that the audience should do any thinking whatsoever in response to the product being offered, as an audience that is sufficiently stupid enough (in their eyes, at least) will swallow anything you give to them.
It’s really the only rational explanation I can think of why this film inexplicably brings up genocide as an act of war, and creates so many conveniences and contrivances around it so that the audience never has to think about the ethics and logistics of such an act for even a moment, lest they object to it being used as a cheap dramatic ploy in a film like this. It’s a reflection of just how behind-the-times this film ultimately is, to the point where probably they cast Bruce Willis because they think it’s still the late-‘80s and he’s hot off of the first Die Hard.
There’s also the sheer lack of satisfying world-building in this thing that I object to as well, as Edward Drake and company seem determined to walk back every modern-day advancement that has been made in that area over the last decade. Their efforts here really help highlight that creating a compelling universe for a story to exist in is easier said than done, and even though the impulse to chase after more recent features that took the time to properly flesh out their settings and characters is understandable, it still needs to be met with enough competence to follow through. It could be said that this film just exists as throwaway action fluff, but since it can’t even achieve that much, it treating every other aspect of its construction with the same disregard is just that much more obvious.
#2: Dear Evan Hansen
Bear with me on this one because, in order to really get into just how much I despise this little feature, I’m going to have to once again dig into my personal history. Except this isn’t necessarily about myself, but someone else.
Back in the old days, when I was first becoming familiar with this whole idea of film criticism as entertainment, there was a content creator named Justin (he went by a pseudonym, but as I’ll get into, I don’t see him as worth being hidden behind a pen name). He collaborated with a lot of other content producers I was watching at the time, and was generally perceived as a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. So when news hit that he had committed suicide on the 23rd of January, 2014, it shook the entire community. Those who had worked with him, people I basically grew up watching, were in total shock that such a beloved figure had gone out the way he did, and a lot of their audience was doing the same. Myself included. I still remember where I was and the precise chain of events that took place on the day he died, right down to tuning into a livestream of another producer and seeing him just… break down in tears at the news. That sight, that sound, is something I’ll never be able to forget.
From that day on, Justin was memorialised within the community, with all of us treating him as this lost angel that left us all too soon. He basically became our Robin Williams; this funny guy with a tragic story that served as morbid comfort for a lot of us going through the same mental shit. But then, in the midst of an even bigger calamity that completely fractured the community (a fracture which remains to this day), it was revealed that the man we had spent so much time mourning was, in reality, a groomer and a sexual abuser.
This all took place in April of 2018, after the more collective feeling of our heroes being exposed as monsters that went on 2017, but this honestly hit me even harder than anything that took place in the previous year. The fact that some of these people knew about this shit, let all of us carry on honouring someone despite knowing who they really were, and ultimately ended up revealing the truth and their complicity in it by accident, was just about the most heartbreaking thing that had ever taken place within that community. It’s one of the major reasons why I’ve gone from taking a whole month of the year out to tribute those same creators, to staying as far the fuck away from the whole community as I can. The memories are just too much to take.
I bring all this up because this film tries to pull the same bullshit, only it tries to make us agree with the bullshit artist trying to pull it. It tries to present the titular Evan Hansen as a disturbed, damaged, but still human character whose crippling social anxiety inadvertently lead him to basically inventing an entire friendship with a classmate who had recently committed suicide, which in turn leads to him getting the friends he so dearly wanted. It tries to pass off gaslighting, and a particularly atrocious brand of gaslighting at that, as something heartwarming and inspirational, and not the fundamentally fucked behaviour that it is.
There’s a proper conversation to be had about this kind of scenario, where the dead are turned against their will into symbols to inspire the living to continue living, but that’s not the conversation we get. Director Stephen Chbosky and writer Steven Levenson are far too busy trying to inject whimsy into an inherently dark situation, pushing so many sugary rainbows down the audience's collective throats that they're likely to shit out a Lisa Frank poster. It was profoundly gross to watch this film try so damn hard to excuse such awful behaviour, knowing that I’ve experienced people trying to do this exact same shit and how much damage they wound up doing. People can exclaim how much worse this is than the original musical, but quite frankly, I couldn’t care less. This is fucking awful, and in a year where properly resonant musicals populated a lot of the release schedule, the sheer disgust it generates only sinks in that much deeper.
And yet, even with how much blind rage I experienced while watching this (and boy, did I bend over backwards to try and be charitable to the damned thing when it came time to review it for FilmInk), this still didn’t end up being the worst film I saw in 2021. No, that dubious honour goes to…
#1: Locked Down and Songbird
Yep. For the first time ever, we have an honest-to-goodness tie for the worst film of the year. When it came time to draft up this list, it was tricky figuring out which one of these two was the worst offender. Locked Down was an insufferably self-satisfied Zoom call from a director who was already on thin ice for botching Chaos Walking as badly as he did, and a writer whose most enjoyable work in recent years was the utter baffling Serenity. Whereas Songbird was a hokey and incredibly tone-deaf romance that suddenly shifted gears into being a delirious action flick, the scenes of which were directed by someone who was already a laughing stock for his approach to action beats, who managed to be even worse here.
They fail in completely opposite directions, so trying to split the difference between them was a bit difficult… until it hit me that, even though their methodologies were vastly different, they both ultimately failed at the exact same thing: Trying to mine our lived-in existence over the last two years for cinematic art. Much like Host, or In The Earth, or hell, any number of claustrophobic films that have come out recently that weren’t even explicitly about COVID quarantine, they saw dramatic potential in the real world. Only in both cases, I’d argue that it was less a matter of artistic inspiration and more a matter of dollar-sign-eyes because these are about as loose as rushed cash-ins can get.
And it’s not as if they’re alone in that regard. No matter what new spore of madness is taking place on our side of the screen, there are always some people in the industry who want to exploit it for some quick gains. But with how much this event has impacted everyday life, and my own mental state (especially this year), seeing two relatively well-off filmmakers throw this kind of shit together pisses me off more than anything else on this list. At a time when art based on this New Normal could’ve made this whole mess feel like there was some kind of success to come out of it, and indeed had already happened with the likes of Host, Doug Liman, Adam Mason, and Michael Bay instead decided to find a way to make this already miserable mess we’ve been living feel even more so.
And I’ll be honest, even with the different results, I hate them both equally. I hate Locked Down for its appropriating of the ‘Art For Art’s Sake’ ideal just to parade around people who are in a far better position than I am in terms of dealing with the pandemic (all that box office money is bound to be enough for some top-notch medical care), and I hated Songbird for thinking that our current situation somehow wasn’t depressing enough to think about, and so decided to build on it in a way that only validates some of the literal unhealthiest attitudes in the mainstream conversation as I’m typing this. Rather than fighting on the cultural front, using their art to help the populace get through this rough time, their efforts show them only looking out for their own ends. The very attitude that is the reason why 2022 is likely going to be a threequel of 20-goddamn-20. Fuck the both of them, but more importantly, fuck 2021.
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