2022 saw the world slowly start to return to normal (or whatever can be considered ‘normal’ for us nowadays) after COVID threw everything out of whack across 2020 and 2021. Public spaces were opening back up, the collective mood was much less dire, and the cinemas were bringing back the big tentpole blockbusters that usually mark the year as it passes. At a time when the life expectancy of the physical cinema was beginning to look like it’s on its death knell, between streaming and their closure during lockdown, film releases began to feel like events again. And on top of that, some of those event releases turned out really damn good, and we’ll absolutely be looking at a few of those when we get to the Best Of list.
Of course, with that return to normalcy also came the return of the usual bleh-ness of mainstream cinema, where a lot of the year wound up just being ‘okay’ or slightly-less-than, and I say that as someone who still liked most of what I saw this year. There was a larger amount of disappointment to the year’s produce as well, where I found myself really looking forward to films that wound up falling short.
Hell, this might be the first time I actively went out of my way not to watch movies, turning down FilmInk commissions to review Amsterdam and the new Fantastic Beasts sequel because, quite literally, you couldn’t pay me to give any kind of attention to the shitpersons at the heart of those productions. As such, this list won’t be as vitriolic as in past years, since most of what I consider this year’s worst films land more on the underwhelming and disappointing side of things than outright making me angry. Oh, rest assured, some of these still got me riled up, but not nearly as many as I was expecting.
But even with how many I passed on, I still managed to watch enough films to fill up this list. As such, let’s go over my picks for the Top 20 Worst Films Of 2022.
#20: Don’t Worry Darling
For a film that dominated so much of the film discourse in 2022, it just being disappointing itself feels like a disappointment. Like, all that time spent dunking on the marketing and publicity gaffs surrounding this film, and it’s just a weak Black Mirror episode in all but official branding. While the cast is doing their best (apart from Harry Styles, who only ends up trying his best) and the visuals show a lot of potential, its story amounts to little more than derivative Stepford sci-fi crossed with accurate but basic observations of the Manosphere. I mean, to an extent, I could at least see some people getting into this off the strength of its psychological elements and just how… fucking weird it can get; it’s nothing if not memorable. But even then, as a big fan of psycho-cinema, it’s difficult to look past the script apparently being thrown into a wood chipper before it got to the hands of the actors.
#19: Blonde
Yet another psycho-thriller that stirred up some controversy, and which I found quite disappointing. Only this one hurts even more because, considering a lot of the negative press I’d heard going into it was on the basis of it being super disturbing, I was fully prepared to be on-board with this. But this pushed even my standing as an edgelord optimism, going from reasonably unnerving to just plain uncomfortable to sit through. The line between commenting on exploitation and engaging in exploitation is a lot thinner than some filmmakers realise, and with this attempt to use Marilyn Monroe as a symbol for everyone that got chewed up and spat out by the Hollywood system… well, that’s the problem right there: This isn’t about a person, it’s about the idea of a person, which apparently makes it totally okay to put them through trauma for the sake of making a ‘point’ because, hey, it’s not supposed to be the real her. Y’know, as if that makes the veering into victim blaming any easier to sit through.
Because Andrew Dominik and Nick Cave’s involvement in this is what led to This Much I Know To Be True, I will admit that some good came out of this whole thing, and I certainly hope that Ana de Armas continues her upward trajectory as a lead actress… but man, this just did not work for me.
#18: Poker Face
I’ve really, really grown to like Russell Crowe as an actor over the past several years. Either he makes already-great film even better (Noah, The Nice Guys, Boy Erased, True History Of The Kelly Gang) or he makes for the best part of an underwhelming or even outright bad film (Unhinged, The Mummy, Man Of Steel). So bear in mind that when I say that it’s okay to not be great at everything you try, I am genuinely trying not to be condescending towards the guy. He’d already tried directing with The Water Diviner, which was a hot mess, and this film turned out even worse because at least Water Diviner had a coherent story to it; even years after the fact, I could remember what it was about.
Not so much for this film, even just a few days after watching it, because it’s such a garbled collection of borrowed story elements and mesmerising attempts at profundity that just do not work. When the end credits for this came up, I immediately burst out laughing, which is a stronger reaction than even a lot of genuine comedies got out of me in 2022. Credit to him for amusing me in even that regard, but as we’ll get into later on down the list, this wound up being the year that made me stop giving films a pass just for being ironically entertaining.
#17: Black Adam
Y’know, it’s difficult enough to justify being a fan of superhero movies nowadays. They dominate the industry, to the point of roadblocking so many other interesting films, and the thirst for that same franchise-sized pay check has made the notion of funding low or even mid-budget films less viable, as if everything absolutely must be a world-shaking moment in pop culture history. But I’ve had a weakness for these stories since long before the MCU became the force in modern mainstream cinema, and even with how worrying the logistics of it all are, I’ve made peace with these being my kind of films.
But then something like this comes along, which just makes things harder all over again. A film that unironically shows superheroes as authoritarian thugs, for whom might always makes right, turning what is usually just subtext about comic book heroes into straight-up text. And then it tries to show the title character as the needed answer to that regime, reframing an anti-hero as a real hero… only to try and retrofit him as the kind of hero that the film continues to insist is such a bad idea. The Amazon adaptation of The Boys may be an example of the current trend having an Emmanuel Goldstein moment, but at least it actually followed through with its nihilistic take on those characters; this just can’t stop getting high on its own supply.
It’s less a film than it is a peace offering to every critic who has ever railed against the genre’s hold on the industry; an open admission of how dodgy superhero stories are when you think about them for too long, but in a package that requires little to no effort to break down. Actually, that makes this sound downright sinister: Warner Bros. know how assembly-line these films have become, so they’ve stopped trying to hide it.
This will be the first of many examples on this list for 2022 being the Year Of The Self-Insert, with Dwayne Johnson trying to big himself up (both in front of and behind the camera) as some grand saviour of the DCEU after so many years of turmoil. I get that constant universe reboots are a pain in the arse for superhero fans, both in the comics and in the cinemas, but if this is supposed to be the kickstarter for a new era of the DCEU… yeah, maybe a reboot isn’t such a bad idea after all.
There’s an argument to be made that this film should be much, much lower on this list, but I’m intentionally padding it a bit because… well, part of my own negative experience with this is out of disappointment, and this didn’t even deserve me getting my hopes up for it when all is said and done. I mean, I sure was looking forward to it at one point: I have a lot of fondness for the previous Jurassic World film, the short films leading up to it were promising, and after reading up on Colin Trevorrow’s unused script ideas for Star Wars: Episode IX, I had hope that there was some genuine creativity lying in wait somewhere in that brain of his.
But alas, none of that ended up surfacing here, with a film that was ostensibly a finale for the franchise up to this point and yet seems to be ashamed to even be a Jurassic movie. The team-up between the casts of the Park and World movies not only takes its sweet-ass time to even happen, but takes advantage of none of the possibilities for comedy or drama between these characters. And the set pieces aren’t even trying anymore, borrowing so readily from other popular action franchises that it really gives the sensation that Trevorrow is just plain bored with this whole endeavour. Dinosaurs are no longer interesting, so let’s just put them to the side and make the audience think they’re watching something else; if that’s not an argument to leave this franchise the hell alone, I don’t know what is.
#15: Home Team
Happy Madison films showing up on a list like this is almost traditional by this point, but I’m putting this here because I would like to think that HM and Adam Sandler in particular should be past this point by now. Yeah, they’ve been critical punching bags for years, decades, but Sandler’s been finding a decent rhythm recently with his own HM films, between the revivalism of Hubie Halloween and 2022’s decent sports drama Hustle.
But no, it seems that some things will always stay the course, as this Kevin James vehicle fails both as the latest attempt to sell James as a likeable actor, and as a biopic about someone involved with particularly shady practices when it comes to professional football in coach Sean Payton. The former fails because the comedy just isn’t here, resuscitating ancient sports film cliches and not even doing anything with them, and the latter fails because the film is too busy aggrandising its subject to actually come to grips with why their story would be worth making a film about in the first place. It really only exists as aggrandisement of Sean Payton, to the point of him showing up on-screen to compliment himself (Self-Insert strikes again).
If you can’t pay the bounty, don’t bring up bounty hunting.
#14: Blacklight
Liam Neeson’s standing as a B-movie action hero is getting… concerning. Beyond the fact that Bruce Willis’ retirement in 2022 after his aphasia diagnosis creates a weird precedent to stick with making films like this until medical reasons insist you stop, as if that’s the only reason not to be involved in making unnecessary productions. Beyond the fact that this film’s perspective on mental disorders like OCD is truly aggravating, which is the main reason why I completely avoided his hitman-with-dementia film Memory, as I don’t need to see more of this nonsense attached to his name. Even beyond the fact that this was filmed here in Australia, and doesn’t exactly make us look good by the exposure.
No, this is where things get concerning because this is a Liam Neeson movie… that doesn’t really star Liam Neeson. It starts out being led by Taylor John Smith, an actor who could use a boost in industry awareness, but that only ends up serving as the appetiser for when Neeson turns up. That alone is embarrassing enough, but the fact that this film conspicuously stops trying to be in any way like a real action movie as soon as Neeson takes the reins is… well, it’s not surprising, but that doesn’t make it any less sad to witness. He’s being roped into stuff like this purely on name value now, not even for his performance in this specific genre, which only serves to reinforce his place as a parody of himself. That he has reportedly signed on to be the lead in a new Naked Gun film doesn’t help with that impression.
I mean, the movie itself is dull and just a complete waste of time, but considering my auteurist way of looking at films, there’s this added layer of second-hand embarrassment that really makes me feel uncomfortable thinking back on this whole thing. Here’s hoping Scorsese hires him for another film to remind everyone that the man can act his arse off when given the chance to.
#13: You Won’t Be Alone
When I contributed to FilmInk’s round-up of each writer’s five favourite films of the year, this showed up in two other critics’ listings. Maybe this is another example of me being at odds with other critics about Terence Malick’s style of cinematic storytelling, which does not work for me but seems to really click with others… okay, I’m genuinely trying not to be judgmental towards anyone else, since I respect everyone else who writes for FilmInk, but I do not get the appeal of this film.
This might be one of the most fucked depictions of a developmental disorder I have ever watched, let alone reviewed at length. Between the hand-waving of consent when it comes to the sex scenes, the rampant infantilisation throughout, the crip-face… did everyone else just black out when all of that showed up or something? Have we collectively learnt nothing from the Sia’s Music fiasco about how not-okay this kind of characterisation and framing is? Well, apparently not, seeing as this film got so much positive attention, it ended up being Australia’s nomination to the Academy for Best International Feature Film. Thankfully, it didn’t get shortlisted, but y’know what? They’re so used to rewarding voyeuristic depictions of disability on film, it wouldn’t have surprised me if it was shortlisted.
I’m quite used to be on the opposing side of this kind of reception, where I’m confused as to how seemingly everyone else can find so much fault in a movie I liked, but not so much with the reverse. And considering writer/director Goran Stolevski already has another film doing the rounds in festivals, I am more than a little scared of what could possibly be next because this kind of debut doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
It’s a bad sign when the possibility of the author of the source material being a vigilante against animal poachers is the most interesting part of its adaptation. It approaches its fictional narrative with the all-encompassing scope of a badly-made biopic, which not only makes the aforementioned allegations more than a little weird to contemplate with that in mind, but also ends up contributing to the Self-Insert trend that populated a lot of this year’s output.
It doesn’t help that, with all the different ideas and themes it tries to tackle, none of them seem to work. The romance isn’t romantic, the courtroom drama hates being inside a courtroom or being dramatic, the paean to nature is glaringly abnormal, and the life story of an outsider feigns empathy with little success; why is this even here? Surely, there are better ways to prop up a new Taylor Swift single.
#11: Girl At The Window
In a year where A.I. generation of pictures, text, even whole videos, became a public curiosity, this film being as algorithmic as it is seems suspicious. Everything here, from the title to the writing and the production values to what can charitably be called a ‘story’ (this is a story in the same way that shredded printer paper is a tree), is so amazingly generic that it barely even feels like its own product. In the same year that Kristen Bell basically put the nails in the coffin of these kinds of yarns with the Netflix series The Woman In The House Across The Street From The Girl In The Window, being able to take something this threadbare and desperate to chase trends seriously is just about impossible. To say nothing of how this might go even further than The Woman In The Window in terms of mental health gaslighting, the only thing about this that stands out in any real way.
I mean, if we must continue making films like this, can someone at least get their hands on a thesaurus?
#10: Firestarter
This film should have worked. It had a good director, good cast, and it’s a remake of an original that had potential for improvement. But instead, this turned out to be the worst King adaptation in quite a while, watering down the source material just so it could fit into the modern trend towards superhero stories. Like, there was always something of that ilk in the original story and even the 1984 film, but the way it’s been overemphasised and clumsily executed here really gives the impression that Blumhouse and Akiva Goldsman just wanted in on that MCU coin. Easily one of the biggest disappointments of the year, and I can only hope that everyone involved is able to pick back up from this misstep. Or, in the case of Goldsman, I hope that if he tries this approach to Stephen King again, he at least brings back Mike Flanagan to make it more palatable than this.
#9: The Invitation
I should mention at this point that, where I toyed around with it last year, I am officially retiring the Best Worst Film placement in these year-end lists. One of the reasons for that is because it always seemed destined to go towards a film like this, which embody the year’s Self-Insert theme by being filmed fanfiction with a budget. On top of being predictable, there’s just something… off about giving special mentions to productions like this, whose only real positives are in spite of the efforts of everyone involved, rather than because of them. It’s still entertaining through that lens, don’t get me wrong, but with just how prevalent this particular trend is becoming, I feel the need to point out that it is a bad idea to continue with.
Especially when it results in stuff like this, a total farce of a vampire horror film that managed to be leagues worse than the year’s favourite bad vampire horror film in Morbius, and yet this didn’t get nearly as much attention despite its comparable meme potential. For the sake of Nathalie Emmanuel, whose lead performance here is the only genuine saving grace to be found here, I hope that lack of notice will likely be a good thing in the long run, but that’s not enough to spare everyone else involved in this. Aside from being painfully not-scary for a horror film, this is in the running for the worst script of any film I’ve reviewed, giving me vivid flashbacks to the days when I was writing overblown crossover fanfiction about internet content creators fighting bad guys (the Angry Critic days were weird, man) in just how amateur-hour it all is. The Fifty Shades effect is infecting genres outside of romance, meaning that this 5th Wave is likely going to be around for a while yet.
#8: The School For Good And Evil
This might be the pettiest inclusion on this list, as the reason why it’s here and at such a low numbering isn’t for any of the immediately obvious reasons. Sure, the world-building is terrible and unbelievably derivative, the performances mismatched, and the production values do nothing to bring out the escapist qualities that a fantasy world like this should have.
But really, this is on here for one reason and one reason only: That fucking fight scene backed by Britney Spears’ Toxic. What 2WEI did to that song with their remix is bad enough, adding it to the graveyard of great popular songs that got turned into movie trailer fodder, but the decision to include it in the film proper truly confounds me. This is the kind of choice that only comes about through total apathy for the product you’re making, taking what is already a widely-mocked trend and revealing just how ridiculous it is. Good uses of licensed music make for some of my favourite moments in a film: It’s why I have such fondness for Point Grey Pictures, who always have at least one amazing needle drop in their films. So when a film does this badly with it, to the point where it has effectively dethroned Hallelujah in Watchmen for the worst needle drop I’ve ever seen, it really gets on my nerves. Paul Feig, consider yourself on my shit list.
A lot of big-name horror franchises made a comeback in 2022, adding to how great the year was for horror as a whole. Scream came back with a vengeance with one of its best installments yet, Halloween Ends was divisive but I really enjoyed it, and I’ve heard good things about the new Hellraiser. But not all of them did so well, as this entry managed to find a new low point for a franchise that was already notorious for its bad and unnecessary creative decisions.
More so than all of the prequels, all of the tonal shifts, all of the maddening reinterpretations of an all-time classic horror icon in Leatherface, this film’s infuriatingly self-satisfied approach to what could have been interesting directions to take this series down managed to piss me off the most. There’s a highly unpleasant and mean-spirited vibe to this thing, with its attempts at commentary on Millennial hipsters that venture so close to flat-out propaganda, I’m surprised The Daily Wire wasn’t involved. And indeed, a lot of this film’s attempts at horror are just as regressive, trying to ape Halloween 2018 and only managing to make me wish I was watching that instead. If this franchise is only going to be brought back just to see how much worse things can get, then it’s time to leave it the hell alone.
#6: After Ever Happy
Okay, even as someone who has been totally on-board with this franchise as the most consistent source of ironic entertainment on film in recent years, this marked the point where I just… couldn’t keep giving this a pass. Even more so than the sheer volume of fanfiction cinema in 2022, this is what made me give up on Best Worst Film as its own special category in these lists. Yeah, this totally would’ve won (as it has for the last couple years running), but with how far down these films are getting now, I’m starting to get worried that the entertainment value is going to turn sour very soon.
Even with how incredibly bad the 5th Wave of adaptations has turned out, from Fifty Shades to The Kissing Booth, it really says something when this contains what might be the single scummiest character of all of them. Christian Gray was domineering and trying to cover up his abusive behaviour, and just about everyone in TKB was emotionally manipulative, but Hardin exploiting his and someone else’s trauma for the sake of getting a book published… behold! We have now reached Peak Self-Insert.
Knowing that there’s at least one more film in this series, I’m sure that the filmmakers and Anna Todd will pull something out of their arse to justify this and try to redeem Hardin. But I doubt that anything would be enough to undo the damage, as this one development ends up revealing the entire problem with the 5th Wave and its intent to use just about anything as the basis for an adaptation: It’s all built on the foundation that, as long as it creates cheap pathos, anything and everything is okay. Abusive relationships, mental health crises, childhood trauma, and all without a single fuck given to being at all tactful or even realistic in their depiction. Because hey, if people are willing to read it done by amateurs for nothing, then surely, that makes it cool for us grown-ass professionals to throw millions of dollars at it and charge people for it, right?
#5: Marmaduke
With how many times I’ve gotten aggro about bad talking animal movies, and how regularly they’ve shown up in my Worst Of lists, I thought I was past the point where one of these movies could actually shock me with how bad they are. I mean, it’s not Little Foot levels of terrible because at least there’s movement here, but this has a pretty decent cast, led by Pete Davidson who has been in some damn good films in the last couple years, and was released on one of the biggest streaming platforms in the market right now. Where other examples have either been obscure material that I actively had to dig for, or at least polished to the point where I could fathom it being released on the scale that it has, this… doesn’t have any of that.
No, what this does have is what might be the worst animation that has ever shown up on Netflix, and I’m including Masha And The Bear in that assessment, and an approach to family-friendly filmmaking that is so goddamn lazy, it makes the Owen Wilson Marmaduke movie look like a Laika production. More so than anything else that has transpired with Netflix over the last few years, including how much money they’ve been losing off the back of badly-timed theatrical release windows, this is the biggest indicator of just how far into the red the company must be, if they think acquiring stuff like this is a worthwhile investment.
And speaking of bad content picks on Netflix…
#4: 365 Days: This Day and The Next 365 Days
These two are being forced to share this entry on the list because they’re basically the same film. Sure, I’d still consider The Next 365 Days to the worse of the two, but they both still represent the absolute nadir of the 5th Wave. As much as I genuinely have a problem with After Ever Happy, at least something happened in that movie, which most certainly isn’t the case for either of these wastes of bandwidth.
Instead, they both play out like glorified music videos, in the vain hope that editing and soundtrack are enough to make nearly four hours of overblown and yet undercooked melodrama seem interesting. It co-opts Eurotrash soap opera antics, but somehow manages to sap any sense of energy or intrigue or even just perverse interest out of them, leaving only a hollowed-out corpse that the filmmakers somehow found a way to prop up. It’s so monotonous that it actively made me miss when this series was just about literal Stockholm Syndrome and the worst kind of romantic wish fulfilment.
I mean, calling this softcore porn is an insult to actual porn, since there are studios out there with, like, real production values and pacing and, yes, plots to their videos. With how desperate Netflix seems to be for stable franchises that they can pump out regularly, I wouldn’t be surprised if they decided to squeeze more films out of this pulp puddle with a dozen footprints in it, but please, please, please, find something better. That is to say find anything else.
#3: The Bubble
Okay, maybe not anything else.
Once again continuing the year’s Self-Insert theme, here we have Judd Apatow seeing all the other films directly inspired by how COVID has changed our way of life in recent years, and deciding that he had to get in on that. And in the process of trying to take the piss out of Jurassic World Dominion, a film that’s pretty friggin’ bad already, he managed to make a film that is even worse.
Even though we still have a couple of films left to go, this was hands-down the most unpleasant experience I had watching a film in 2022. This was Don’t Look Up levels of misery fuel, starting out on a note of annoying me to the point that I wanted to chew both of my arms off, and managing to go down from there. It’s a hypocritical mess that tries to poke fun at the egotism of Hollywood, while conveniently ignoring its own examples (what, nepotism doesn’t count, guy who cast his own daughter in a pivotal role?), and only ends up bringing out just how fucking exhausting this mode of comedy has been over the last couple years.
Where there’s an argument to be made that films like Host
could serve as useful cultural artifacts for how just how much of a cultural
shockwave this event was, films like this will only show future
historians how insufferable it could get when anyone and everyone tried to
capitalise on this moment in pop culture history. And coming from a filmmaker who
absolutely should know better than this, we get more of that characteristic
feeling of disappointment just to make things feel even worse. This bubble needs to be popped, fast.
[tw: sexual assault, rape]
There is a certain… theme connecting the bottom two entries on this year’s list, and it has to do with the treatment of sexual assault on film. Here, that takes the form of a story that shows said abuse in the context of a Catholic exorcist, which already raises a number of red flags, and then follows through with it by presenting a perspective on the matter that manages to insultingly downplay both perpetrators and victims at the same time.
While the victim is largely disregarded (despite the film’s astoundingly fucked-up perspective of rape as only happening to women), the demon-possessed priest who did it is not only described as having influenced to do something he already wanted to do in the first place, but then treats the act only as it interferes with his religious faith, rather than, y’know, having done the single worst thing a person can do to another person. I doubt even PureFlix would try something this stupid.
Where all of this gets even worse is with how, while the script is making a pretty decent argument for never depicting sexual assault in fiction ever again, the film craft around it is busy finding whole other ways to be completely terrible. Its approach to horror, and particularly tired horror at this point with how much it rips off the Conjuring Universe and The Exorcist, pulls more from spoofs, porn parodies, and internet screamer videos than it does from actual horror movies in terms of aesthetics and atmosphere. If word got out that this film was some big social experiment to just take the piss out of modern horror trends, I would totally buy it, because there is no way that at least someone involved in the making of this didn’t realise how amazingly stupid this is.
But hey, it may be astoundingly broken as a film, but at least it acknowledges that sexual assault is indeed a bad thing. The same cannot be said for…
#1: Book Of Love
Okay... the gloves are coming off.
In a year, and indeed an entire era of mainstream filmmaking, that is dominated by Wattpad, it’s something of a surprise that the film I hated the most in 2022 came not from them or their copycats, but from BuzzFeed Studios. Oh, it’s riddled with all of the same fanfiction-adjacent story problems that have plagued a decent chunk of this year’s list, not to mention the Self-Insert theme that has run parallel with it, but this managed to go several steps further in truly pissing me off.
I’ve made mention before that one of the biggest things that I hate seeing, not just in films but in any aspect of life, is the maddening double standards when it comes to sex and sexual assault in particular between men and women. In the wake of #MeToo, we all seem to have a healthy understanding of how terrible and inexcusable this behaviour is when it happens to women… but men, on the other hand? At the intersection where the most toxic masculine and feminine traits collide, there is this idea that men are open for sex at any and all times. That sexually assaulting a man isn’t even possible, because men always want it, and if they ever say they don’t, they just ‘need to be taught how to appreciate it’. On behalf of aces everywhere, fuck you.
I am so fucking sick of this! I cannot, and will not, accept this as something that just conveniently flies under everyone else’s radar and normalised, especially at a time when everyone is talking a big game of taking the piss out of the wrong-headed sexism behind a lot of MRAs in the popular discourse. And here, we get an example of that with an author who not only gets his work co-opted and essentially stolen from him, and who is subjected to numerous instances of unwanted sexual advances and attention, but that the film insists he should be thankful for it because it makes him appreciate what love can offer him. And just to further rub salt into the wound, the woman responsible for putting him through this garbage is framed as someone worth cheering for as he puts someone else through something that, were the genders flipped around, would be the basis of a horror film.
But no. No. This is just the way of things in the mainstream; this is what people consider to be cute, lightweight, rom-com fluff. Stuff like 365 Days will get lambasted from end to end, and yet movies that pull this bullshit are left to just continue pulling said bullshit with little to no opposition. And for even daring to bring up such things, I feel like I’m running the risk of getting myself caught in a scandal for pulling whataboutism on the subject, as if pointing out how prevalent this problem is means that I’m downplaying the seriousness of the issue when it happens to women. Even with how much I fucking loathe this movie, I don’t want my blind rage to pull me into a position where I can be influenced to go further down that road, and end up becoming the very thing I hate in the process.
Sure, there’s more than enough garbage filmmaking here to
justify its placement at the very bottom of this list regardless of all that,
from its tacky opening, to its embarrassingly cheap production values, to the
utter gall of it trying to make fun of bad writing when it can’t provide
anything better to compare with, right down to the romance being built on
erotic fiction that is about as steamy as room-temperature water. But beyond all
of that, this lands right here because it represents an attitude to
storytelling, and indeed life in general, that I despise with every fibre of my
being. An attitude that is willing to turn a blind eye to horrific things
happening to people, and dress it up as if this is the way things are
‘supposed’ to be. There is no love to be found here, and audiences deserve better.
No comments:
Post a Comment