Top 20 Worst Films Of 2023

2023 was a very turbulent year for the film industry. In an event that I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the basis for its own movie later on down the line, the impeding threat of artificial intelligence on people who actually work to create things led both of the major Hollywood unions, the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild, to jointly go on strike. Deals have since been struck, but between codifying the frankly surreal situation that the industry is in right now post-COVID, and the delays and marketing muffles that resulted from the strikes, it’s a situation that will likely ripple out into 2024 and beyond.

That defining moment goes some way to explain how weird the bad moments of the year had gotten (not saying that media creatives wanting a fair wage and job security is a bad thing, but them being in the position of needing to negotiate for them sure as fuck is). Films with decent and even high expectations fell short, filmmakers try to go big and just wound up embarrassing themselves, and fan-favourite franchises, IPs, and even entire sub-genres hit such a low point that I found myself completely souring on them. Truly, this was a time of sudden, jarring changes.

Compared to last year’s list, there’s also more entries on here that go beyond mere dissatisfaction and right into active irritation and even anger at times, meaning that quite a bit of what’s on here is likely worse than what showed up there. So, let’s join together and flip off the previous year’s trash as it shrinks in the rear view, with a look at my picks for the Top 20 Worst Films of 2023.

 

#20: Beautiful Disaster

The Wattpad content factory pumped out another trash movie based on a trash book; business as usual at this point. I didn’t so much watch this as I did conduct an anthropological study on it, as my morbid curiosity about what this generation of young-adult/new-adult film adaptations is going to churn out next is still resulting in new spores of madness within the 5^th Wave. It’s Fight Club as a rom-com, and seems to have been made on a bet to make the protagonists of every other Wattpad-adjacent film look better in comparison to its own ‘proud to be toxic’ male lead. Funny for a hate-watch, but still abundantly not-good.

 

#19: Fast X

Like with any famous family, ego always gets in the way. In this case, both in front of the camera and behind the scenes, it appears that Vin Diesel’s sense of self-import has inflated to the point where it’s actively sabotaging his own films. Everyone here looks so bloody miserable, as if they’re forced to engage with this material at gunpoint, and it’s quite telling that Diesel spends most of the film away from everyone else. To say nothing of how frictions between him and series regular director Justin Lin led to his exit, a move that made for an accurately bad omen for what the film would actually turn into.

I’ve been a fan of these films since I was a kid, but after they hit the silly ceiling with F9: Fast & Furious IN SPACE!!!, nothing here even attempts to match that level of knowing goofiness. It’s all just so tame and held-back, to the point where I wouldn’t be surprised if they greenlit this film’s sequels (yes, sequels, because this is apparently the start of a three-part finale… I’m already losing consciousness just thinking about it) just to excuse how pedestrian the action is here. It’s considerably less fun this time around.

This is the first of many films on this list that basically serve as arguments against their own existence. If a film series so terminally obsessed with family has become so fractured that the main cast can barely stand to be in the same room together, maybe take that as a side that we don’t need more protracted sequels. While I am likely to still watch what comes next, I’ll be going in with considerably weaker expectations than I did here.

 

#18: Haunted Mansion

Even in an era where Disney’s live-action films are feeling particularly unnecessary, this one felt especially needless. There were quite a few films in 2023 that were cynically crammed full of recognisable names in the cast and crew, and while I’d argue that the jumble here isn’t quite as baffling as, say, Ghosted, it’s honestly much more of a letdown. Director Justin Simien’s been neutered to fit into the Disney mass-market formula, writer Katie Dippold does slightly better than her more notorious works but not enough to be watchable, and as adamantly as the performers try to salvage this under-egged souffle, they aren’t able to make up for this scareless horror film and its incredibly out-of-place attempts to comment on things like slavery and Hurricane Katrina. Without irony or damning with faint praise, the Eddie Murphy version was more entertaining than this.

 

#17: Love Again

It’s the smugness of this one that earned it a place on this list. It’s the attitude of propping up both its own drama and its own guest star in Celine Dion, but by insinuating that there must be something ‘wrong’ with anyone who doesn’t like either of those things. I tend to get a bit touchy whenever people start making judgement calls about others’ taste in media, especially from within the industry’s products and commentators (I see way too many critics still engaging in this garbage behaviour), and when connected to a story this incredulous, it is especially difficult to swallow. I struggled to believe that this film even existed at first, and quite frankly, it’d probably be better for all involved (including the audience) if it didn’t.

 

#16: The Out-Laws

Has Adam DeVine ever been funny? I mean, he’s been in films that I’ve liked (Pitch Perfect 1 and 2, Mike And Dave Need Wedding Dates, The LEGO Batman Movie, Game Over, Man!), but I’ve never considered him to be a highlight of any production he’s in, even if he’s in the lead. He’s just an obnoxious, mugging jackass that ends up getting in the way of people that I am interested in watching. Him getting together with the has-been hovel that is Happy Madison makes a little too much sense, as his presence here and the joyless vacuum of a story he’s been given is on-par with the averages for fellow millstones like David Spade and Rob Schneider.

It's basically customary for an HM production to wind up on this list every year, but in 2023, when the studio reached a genuine high point with Leo, shit like this sticks out even more as unnecessary.

 

#15: My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3

Despite its low ranking, I’d argue this is one of the more straight-up incompetent features on this list. The barest of bare minimum justifications for what is just a paid vacation for the cast and crew, the kind that shows up even in the weaker efforts in this kinda-sorta sub-genre, are completely absent here. People do things in places because; that’s it. It’s such a half-arsed effort that it can’t even justify its own existence as vacation-core, which after the colossal waste of the second film was required for this follow-up.

It doesn’t help that all of this lackadaisical ‘storytelling’ and nothing-special production values exist just to prop up some pretty damn toxic perspectives on family and how much they should be allowed to dictate the lives of individuals within the same family. It employs basic-bitch rom-com clichés, and then tries to pass them off as ‘family wisdom’, as if strong-arming a woman into getting back together with her ex is anything other than grossly manipulative. That the film actually manages to sell its own pretences about family connections well in pockets just makes the fouler moments feel that much worse.

 

#14: Foe

Another star-studded affair, and easily one of the dullest films I saw all year. Whatever decent ideas it has regarding the use of artificial intelligence in romantic relationships have not only been done better in countless other sci-fi stories, but can’t even break through how embarrassingly phony this whole production is. It tries to convince that the Australian Outback is the American Midwest, that two Irish actors are actually American, and that this is a relationship worth being invested in, and fails on all counts. I’ve gone to bat for director Garth Davis twice before on here, and the adaptation of writer Iain Canning’s I’m Thinking Of Ending Things has aged like a fine wine since I first looked at it, so I have a lot of respect for him as well… which is why seeing them both underperform this badly is so disheartening.

 

#13: The Inspection

Out of respect for lived experiences I have never gone through myself, part of me feels bad that this film is on here at all. It’s a personal story about actually going through army training, and the complex identity dilemmas that entails for a Black Gay cadet, and if nothing else, I accept that this is genuinely how the writer/director Elegance Bratton reflects on that time in his life.

But as someone whose scepticism regarding armed conflict and those who wage it only seems to grow with each passing year (especially in a year like 2023, when open war and taking sides in said war was a hot-button issue), I felt really uncomfortable viewing this, and not for the intended reasons. It was like watching someone still in the grips of their own trauma, and trying desperately to put a happy face on it in a “I went through (abusive situation) and I turned out fine” kind of way. Even its most effective and touching moments aren’t able to cover up how much of this comes across like a government psy-op to get audiences to accept this kind of treatment as ‘normal’.

 

#12: The Pope’s Exorcist

This was the point when I officially got sick of The Conjuring and all adjacent exorcism flicks. Part of that is down to the film’s more technical issues, like its complete absence of tonal control, Russell Crowe being the star and yet somehow being in a completely different film from both the rest of the cast and even the filmmakers, and its tired rehashing of already-tired horror clichés.

But mostly, this drove the nail in the coffin because it basically spells out how these films are just uncritical PR for the Catholic Church, right down to bringing up the Spanish Inquisition and the Church’s history with sexual abuse, and then trying to excuse both of them with literal “the devil made me do it” bullshit. Co-writer Evan Spiliotopoulos (who already whizzed on the genre with The Unholy in 2021) managed to one-up his already-established cowardice with dishing on controversial topics, by dipping dangerously close to The Exorcism Of God in terms of thematic moral bankruptcy.

Can we just… spare a moment of silence for Julius Avery’s career? Going from the glory of Overlord, to the mid-ness of Samaritan, to this? I don’t want to write anyone off as a one-trick pony, but for the love of Dude, could you at least attempt that one trick again instead of wasting your and our time on crap like this?

 

#11: Skittles! Shazam! Fury Of The Gods

This is the only film on here that I’d say I’m glad I watched. Getting over my hang-ups concerning Lights Out (and by extension Shazam!) was a moment of growth I needed to have, and if nothing else, I’ll admit that I have a certain personal connection with this film for that reason alone. That’s likely why this film isn’t any higher on this list, even though something this utterly bewildering could easily have landed in the top 10 or even the top 5.

Much like how fellow DC embarrassment Black Adam felt like a gimme to every critic and general audience member who has grown tired of modern superhero films, this is like if capeshit (and the MCU in particular) were actually as juvenile as their biggest detractors claim. Immature and phenomenally annoying central hero, bottom-of-the-barrel jokes, unbelievably mishandled attempts to just copy the Snyder era of the DCEU, and a story that might have led to some decent dramatic territory if the filmmakers weren’t more interested in riding the coattails of Fast & Furious (during its worst year to date) and shilling for Skittles.

Honestly, that last part could justify this film being on the list, maybe even at the very bottom, all on its own. It’s the kind of naked, wholly-without-shame commercialism that would make Space Jam and The Wizard blush, not to mention recycling a joke that made me cringe at the idea that, holy shit, the reason I started doing all this is because I was obsessed with That Guy With The Glasses in high school. Where the first Venom felt like a relic of the pre-MCU attitude towards making superhero films in terms of trying too hard to make everything super-serious, this is under the same general heading but as an example of how much people used to really not think things through properly. Like, if this kind of shit showed up in a Roger Corman or Golan/Globus superhero flick, no one would even blink.

 

#10: Empire Of Light

The recent trend of big-name directors making these sentimental paeans to cinema as this glowing artistic ideal could easily be classified as Oscar bait. However, most of the entries in that trend clearly came from a deeply personal place, and that kind of investment on the creator’s part allowed for them to transcend the plastic-y connotations of that label.

Sam Mendes, however, didn’t. Given just how much Academy attention his last film 1917 got, Empire Of Light really comes across as an also-ran within that trend. Whatever thoughtful or emotional or revealing or even interesting aspects showed up in films like The Fabelmans or Apollo 10 ½ or Bardo are completely absent here, sticking solely to prestige drama tropes and managing to completely balls up any kind of messaging in the process. Whether it’s racism or sexism or mental illness or even the sanctity of the physical cinema (at a time when brick-and-mortar cinemas are still recovering from COVID), it all falls flat and even comes across as insensitive.

I am no stranger to sentimentality when it comes to cinema as art, and for as flowery as I can get in expressing how I feel about that, you better believe that I stand by every word of it. I genuinely believe in movie magic. So when a film like this comes out, which so utterly mishandles that ideal to the point of trivialising it, I can’t help but feel offended on behalf of the medium as a whole. It deserves better than to be represented by this tripe.

 

#9: Allelujah

In late 2022, Philosophy Tube released a video exploring herattempts to gain transgender treatment within the British Healthcare System. Between that and the revelation that goated rapper MF DOOM, who passed away in 2020, died as a result of mismanagement in an NHS hospital, I don’t have the most glowing reception of the NHS as a collective system. But considering their role during the COVID pandemic, along with healthcare workers globally, I am still open to messaging about how essential their work is and how much they should be appreciated given what they do.

But not like this. Not when it’s delivered this loudly, and yet this tone-deaf, while being so incapable of reading the room that it could easily be mistaken for a stealth attack campaign against the NHS. It’s all too easy to imagine stark black-and-white footage of syringes injecting mysterious fluids, while a narrator chillingly describes how nurses are secretly killing patients and getting the taxpayer to pay them for it, followed by a call-to-action for voting on Proposition Such-And-Such.

The cast may be charming, and a lot of this film’s faults are because of its endings (both the murderous reveal and the patronising epilogue), but when taken as a whole, there’s something really unsavoury about this that makes everyone involved look suss by association.

 

#8: Beau Is Afraid

One positive I can say for this film that I can’t say for any of the others on this list is that, at some point far in the future, I might be open to revisiting this to see if my feelings on it have changed. It genuinely had me going at first, and its general nightmare-logic atmosphere is something I could easily see myself getting into.

But as for right now, though, my first experience with this only solidified Ari Aster as not being my cup of tea. All my complicated feelings towards Hereditary, contrasted with my decidedly uncomplicated feelings about Midsommar, combined with this revealed his ingrained nihilism and defeatism as just not gelling with me. I mean, I get what it’s going for: A grand paranoiac production where your mother really is the source of all your misery. It’s just that I don’t think I’m anywhere near jaded enough to indulge this kind of performative self-flagellation.

I try not to call things ‘overrated’, because that’s ultimately a dig at people who do like it as if there’s something wrong with liking things, trying to turn your own disinterest into someone else’s problem. But when I think about the sizeable gap between how much this didn’t work for me and how much this really seemed to work for others, I can’t help but wonder if I just watched a completely different film from everyone else. Maybe I'll turn around on this with a rewatch, but I can’t see myself walking down Disappointment Blvd. again any time soon.

 

#7: After Everything

I’ll give the film this: It fulfilled my expectations. I went into this wondering how things could possibly get crazier after the conclusion of After Ever Happy, and my morbid curiosity was soundly answered. But I’ll admit to being taken aback by how intently this film managed to make Hardin look even worse than he did before, and he had already reached the point where even I was done with the little shit. The attempts here to try and win back some sympathy for him are so astoundingly misjudged as to seem deliberate. Like… are we supposed to want Hardin to get his manhood caught in a wood chipper?

The main reason why this lands so high on this list is that, while it continues the delirious plot progression of the series up to this point, it unfortunately returns to the very first film in terms of actual watchability. The consistent focus on Hardin and his BS redemption arc is decidedly less fun, even ironically, than his and Tessa’s make-up-break-up sexcapades and the soap opera ridiculousness surrounding them. There’s also how the self-insert vibe of Ever Happy becomes particularly gross here, trying to justify this kind of invasive fanfiction writing on two different fronts and failing to make it look anything less than sinister. I maintain that there’s nothing inherently wrong with making stuff like this, but when framed in this way and with the presumption that doing creepy and reprehensible shit is okay so long as you’re sowwy, it doesn’t do the practice any favours.

If only it did any for the audience and made this easier to sit through. I’m still along for the ride with these 5^th Wave features, but my enthusiasm definitely took a hit with this one.

 

#6: EXmas

From this point on, any kind of ironic recommendation on my part becomes near-impossible, as my personal experience from here on out is uniformly miserable. This may not reach the utter depths of bile that BuzzFeed’s previous feature Book Of Love sank to, but it’s guilty of a lot of the same shit, up to and including its considerably sexist attitude towards its main characters and who needs to own up to being shitty to other people.

I don’t usually go out of my way to watch the deluge of Christmas-flavoured rom-coms that get released every year, but since this was a work placement, I went along with it. And man, no other film I watched for work in 2023 felt like work as much as this did, managing to squeeze an excessive amount of pain and irritation into around an hour and a half. This might as well be an argument against BuzzFeed even being involved in the film business, although if the basic act of self-awareness was within their range, they would have gotten out of media creation at large long ago.

 

#5: You People

I seem to have gotten the wrong impression of Kenya Barris. I haven’t seen any of his TV work, but my first exposure to him was through his writing work on Girls Trip, a film that stands out more and more each year as one of the more positive Black films I’ve seen. But with every move after that, from producing Little to co-writing both the Shaft reboot and the remake of The Witches, he only managed to make himself look like he magnetically attracts garbage like those magic ear studs from Round The Twist’s Sloppy Jalopy.

And then he stepped into the director’s chair and pretty much confirmed that, delivering one of the most painful attempts at satire and cultural commentary I’ve seen in years. Beyond the fact that it manages to make Jews, Muslims, White people, and Black people all look bad, that manages to fly in the face of the clearly-biased perspective of the film overall. I’m not saying that Kenya Barris intentionally made this just to stir up more tension between Jews and Muslims, in a year where the Israel-Hamas War became a major line-in-the-sand topic (word of advice: don’t ask a pacifist what they think of war), but this film fails so badly at conveying anything else about that divide that that explanation would at least make sense.

What a shame. We finally got Kanye West to stop being a Neo-Nazi contrarian (contrAryan?) by watching Jonah Hill in 21 Jump Street, and now he’s gonna fall off the wagon again if he ever watches Jonah Hill in this. The shame is with how that stupid topical gag is actually funnier than… yeah, pretty much all of the actual film. Kenya Barris is apparently remaking The Wizard Of Oz next and… wow, good fucking luck with that one, mate; can’t wait to see how you fuck that up.

 

#4: Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood And Honey

There is nothing wrong with sticking it to one of the biggest media conglomerates in the world. Anyone who has such a cultural stranglehold, and financial portfolio, as big as Disney’s is fair game, and this kind of public domain shitpost arguably fits into that category. However, this thing is so devoid of fun and so mismanaged that it ends up making Disney look good by comparison, inadvertently arguing that the company that has spent the last several years grinding their recognisable IPs into processed film-mush are the only ones who can be trusted with bringing these properties to the big screen.

That this even made it to cinemas over here is a serious headscratcher on top of that. Studios have apparently learnt nothing from the Morbius debacle, where Sony mistook meme traction for genuine audience interest, and didn’t stop to think that something this low-grade streaming quality should, y’know, be on streaming services and not charging premium ticket prices for what is just a glorified home movie. Trash cinema is a legitimate form of entertainment, and I would have loved nothing more than to hold this movie up as a cinematic fuck-you to the hegemony of the House of Mouse. Like a just-as-memeable but more entertaining version of Santa Claus Conquers The Martians.

But instead, this is just a precursor for what could be a new Dark Age of cinema, between its producers’ plans for more public domain slashers, and Mickey Mouse entering a similar Schroedinger’s copyright zone and being open for this same treatment. Like with the Day One patching of Cats in 2019, I welcome the chance to be proven wrong, and for this to just be a bizarre anomaly… but as I said at the start, the industry is in a really odd place right now; it could still happen. Winnie-The-Pooh and his crappy rubber mask could become the paralysis demon of the industry.

 

#3: Close

For most of the year, I was totally convinced that this would be at the very bottom of the list. Even with how much I got into it initially, the way it just soured any and all positive engagement I had with it makes this feel worse than if it had just been all bad. I went from thinking it was alright, but nothing special, to actively disliking in record time, and for as manipulative as its later developments get, I’m honestly more pissed off that it managed to emotionally affect me prior to that. Like… congrats, guys; you remembered to use lube before you fucked me over.

But more so than the film on its own, it’s what it represents in my mind that makes it worth this placement on the list. Over the course of 2023, I saw quite a few quality Queer movies, and they all shared a defining attitude: Not bothering with respectability politics. They didn’t make their mark by succumbing to the Oscar bait tropes that mainstream Gay narratives are still glued to; they rebelled against it and pointed the finger right at the attitude that personhood is dependent on how ‘likeable’ a person is. I felt more represented by Theater Camp, Dicks: The Musical, Bottoms, and even Rotting In The Sun than I ever would by shit like this.

It's the underlying mindset that Gay experience is defined by trauma and tragedy, and that the only way to tell a fulfilling story about Gay people is to make sure at least one of them doesn’t survive to the end, that deeply unsettles me about this whole thing. That it tastelessly uses child suicide as a teaching moment about internalised homophobia (as opposed to the actual abusive homophobia, oh no, it’s us that need to learn a lesson here), and then absolutely fail to hold up the façade of this as anything other than ‘Bury Your Gays’ trauma porn, got on my nerves more so than I ever would have expected a film like this was capable of.

The only reason this didn’t rank any lower is that, however fleeting and duplicitous, I did enjoy this film at first. The same cannot be said for the last two.

 

#2: Digimon Adventure 02: The Beginning

I was a big Digimon kid growing up. I watched the shows, I had the DigiVices, I drew up charts for the Digivolutions of my own OC Digimon; this was absolutely my thing, even more than Pokémon. That nostalgic affection didn’t follow me into adulthood like with Power Rangers or Goosebumps, but I still carry fond memories of it. So you can imagine my shock and horror when a new addition to one of my childhood favourites comes out, and it revolves around a message of ‘oh, it’s okay when your friends and family abuse you; it just means they really care about you’. Yeah.

And not only that, but it derails the actual Digimon stuff just so it can indulge in its angsty, fanfiction-grade trauma porn about an Original Character and how he was the first-ever DigiDestined and his Digimon made all the other DigiDestined, but it also killed his parents, and then ripped his eye out, and… and… how in the actual fuck did anyone think this was a good idea? Like, yeah, let’s only include one Digimon fight in this feature film, and sideline the actual main characters, so that we can focus on misery fuel and subject matter that, even for a franchise that has delved into proper Lovecraftian mindfuckery at times (and actively has dealt with abuse between humans and Digimon before, with the same characters as this film no less), feels astoundingly out-of-place here. I mean, sure, this didn’t involve the main characters fighting a monster called Political Correctness and its ultimate move Cancel Culture (and yes, that actually happened not that long ago), but at least that wasn’t fully animated and accepted as canon.

I was originally meant to bring my kid brother with me to the screening for this, but he cancelled last minute, and holy shit, he dodged a bigger bullet than he will ever know. Like, if only so he didn’t have to hear me audibly struggle with this film’s existence as something that was apparently meant for kids. Sure, it’s likely made more for long-time fans who were kids when the original show first aired, but Toy Story 3, this is not. Hell, this is the kind of screwface-inducing disaster that honestly turned me off from the idea of returning to this franchise again; it’s Madoka Magica: Rebellion levels of unnecessary.

But even with all of that said… I mean, at least some of the fandom seem to be into this. A lot of reception I’ve read about this movie seems to congratulate it for broaching the topic of abuse at all, and while there’s an argument about how surface-level that observation is, it at least proves that there are people out there who could get into this. I may be absolutely horrified at the idea of the franchise’s long-time fans being subjected to this out of raw protection instinct (I don’t abide films that excuse abusive behaviour, end of story), but I also hate getting between people and what they take entertainment from. I may be opinionated, but I try not to be that much of a dick.

No matter how much I have come to loathe this nonsense, I can see why someone else could get into it. The same absolutely, positive, can not be said for…

 

#1: Freelance

If my writing has been coming across as particularly politicised lately, especially at the tail-end of 2023, that’s likely the result of me delving more into anarchist philosophy over the course of the year. I went from being rather sceptical of it (speaking as a disabled person who has been in many disability support groups, arguing that people are better off fending for themselves is a tough sell) to researching its connections to Taoist philosophy and reflecting on my own experiences with authority and hierarchal structures… to realising, y’know what, this actually sounds ideal. We should all be the masters of our own destinies, and not be forced to associate with anyone or anything unless we choose to do so.

My patience for authoritarian presences in society through the police force and government bureaucracy and such has gotten considerably thinner since coming to that realisation, as has my willingness to play ball with autocratic nonsense in my fiction intake. I’m not saying that I automatically reject everything that doesn’t align with what I believe (the better action films historically have been made by right-wingers, and I’m not exactly going to reject the legacy that led up to John Wick off-hand), but I’m much more critical of such things whenever I notice them.

When you take all of this, and introduce it to a film that tries to soften the image of a military dictator and make the audience like him, you get a recipe for a highly volatile reaction from yours truly. Juan Pablo Raba may be the only consistently entertaining part of this whole package, but that only serves to make the framing of the character he’s playing look that much more insidious. Even with its attempt to rehabilitate him into a ‘better’ despot, the film is unnervingly consistent about showing him in the most favourable light possible. Even when he's describing actions being taken in the real world by actual autocrats.

But that’s not really the problem with this film. It’s rather infuriating as a specific, but the more general problem is that the writer, Jacob Lentz, is one of the biggest hacks attached to any film I’ve ever watched. Over the course of 100-or-so minutes, he manages to argue both for and against dictators, the U.S. military, PMCs, hegemonic interference with other nations, and even the idea that John Cena should still be headlining films at this point. But not in a measured, even-handed way that shows Lentz actually thought through these topics for more than a single goddamn second, but in a cowardly, centrist, ‘sense and nonsense are equally valid’ kind of way. It’s hack propaganda that can’t even do propaganda properly.

And in that mish-mash of talking points and profoundly boneheaded takes, the only real constant is that you could likely get Jacob Lentz to attempt an inviting write-up about pretty much anything. If there was a village of Useful Idiots, he would be the village idiot of that village. I don’t have that big of an opinion about Jimmy Kimmel one way or another (a lot of late-night talk show hosts nowadays are just meh to me), but surely, he should have to answer for giving Lentz enough stable work as to make him feel comfortable enough to think this was a good idea, right?

And if you think this is way too fixated on the political side of things to be a proper judgment of the film as a whole, then rest assured, there’s plenty other things in this burning trash-hole to get annoyed over. The comedy is basically non-existent, the action is unmemorable and poorly-staged, the performances make everyone look flagrantly disinterested in what they’re doing (as the john said to the hooker: “If I’m going to pay you, could you at least pretend that you want to be here?”), and its production values manage to make $40 million look like it would barely cover cab fare to the next city block. Not since Vacation 2015 have I sat through a film this devoid of redeeming qualities, and at least that film had the surreal encounter at the Four Points Monument.

As an artistic message, it is inexcusable and without a doubt the worst I had to endure throughout 2023. But just as a film meant to entertain, it is also inexcusable and without a doubt the worst I had to endure throughout 2023. Let’s all hope that we don’t have to deal with its like in 2024.