Pretty self-explanatory. Let’s
go.
10. Glass
The big twist at the end of M.
Night Shyamalan’s Split
was that it was actually a sequel to Unbreakable. And the twist at the
end of Glass was that Shyamalan and Blumhouse saw that superhero movies
were the hot new thing and tried to get a piece of the action. Aside from the
laundry list of trademarks that made Shyamalan the pariah of Hollywood for
nearly twenty years, Glass is still a meandering, cheaply made (even by
Blumhouse standards), self-aggrandizing snore-fest where we have Samuel L.
Jackson in a wheelchair and cheap wig waxing rhapsodic about the mythological
nature of superhero comics, Bruce Willis groaning his lines and doing the
absolute minimal work, a final showdown that was foreshadowed to be on top of a
skyscraper but ends up happening in a hospital parking lot, and a twist that
retroactively makes the previous two movies worse. At least James McAvoy was
good in it.
9. Brightburn
On paper, Brightburn
sounds like a slam dunk. A deconstructionist superhero movie that reframes
Superman’s origin story as a horror movie produced by the guy who brought us Guardians
of the Galaxy and Super? What could possibly go wrong? The answer: A
lot. While the groundwork is all there for an interesting narrative, the movie
is so eager to get to the gory details that it skips over any character development,
making the kid’s transformation from a sweet natured farm boy to a remorseless
killing machine less of a leap and more of a step over a crack. While there are
a few fun, gory kills, the abrupt shift in nature was something that I had a
hard time getting past. As far as films about bad seed children go, it’s no The
Omen or We Need to Talk About Kevin, and as far as deconstructions
of superheroes go, television has it beat with the one-two punch of Watchmen
and The Boys. And say what you will about those shows, at least there
was a point to their sadism.
I was pretty kind to It:
Chapter Two in my initial review (kinder than most critics, at least), but
the more I rolled it around in my head, the less I liked it. Stephen King’s
doorstopper was a sprawling epic about collective trauma and how it follows us
from childhood to adulthood, and while It:
Chapter One laid the groundwork for that nicely, Chapter Two
squanders it in favor of turning it into a three-hour journey through a haunted house built
by someone who thinks jump scares are the most frightening thing on the planet.
And that’s not even getting into its clunky attempts to shoehorn humor into
things. Halfway through the movie I kept expecting David S. Pumpkins to pop out
of some random crevice and start doing the skeleton dance. Perhaps this was a
victim of its method of adaptation. The childhood story was far more investing
than the adult story, so it goes to stand that the least interesting part couldn’t
stand on its own. Kind of ironic that a movie with a running gag about a writer
not being able to write endings to save his life itself struggles with having a
satisfying ending.
The first Zombieland is
a pretty solid horror comedy, but it’s one that you can definitely tell was
from 2009. Likewise, Double Tap also feels like a movie from 2009 that
was scrapped at the last minute, then unearthed and released to theaters ten
years later. One can’t help but shake the feeling that this was supposed to be
released two or three years after the first Zombieland, but was stuck in
development hell and reluctantly dumped out virtually unchanged, and as such it
stands as how much has changed in the decade since the first one. All four of
its leads have gone on to win or get nominated for Oscars, the zombie craze of
the late 00’s has long since been run into the ground, and its brand of sardonic
meta humor has long since been played out. Throughout the runtime you expect it
to subvert these setups of jokes that you think are going in the most obvious
direction, and every time it goes exactly where you expect it to go. The plot
feels like a bunch of ideas for episodes of a scrapped Zombieland TV
show, and the jokes have the most boring and predictable
trajectory. The only good thing that came out of this was that every minute
Woody Harrelson and Reuben Fleischer spent making this movie were minutes they
didn’t spend working on Venom 2.
6. High
Life
Look, I tried. I saw this
movie twice. I understand that Claire Denis is an incredibly talented director.
I get that the slow as a glacier being pulled by a herd of snails through a sea
of glue pacing is deliberate. I get that it’s going more for mood, atmosphere and
symbolism than a concrete plot. Most of those things could also be said about that
other indie arthouse Robert Pattinson vehicle from A24, and that was my favorite
movie of the year. Normally, I’d be able to forgive all of that. I’d also be
able to forgive the wooden acting, unlikable characters, cheap set design,
laughable special effects and esoteric bordering on nonsensical storyline. But
I can’t forgive those because High Life commits the one cardinal sin
that makes the rest of those flaws all the more apparent: It’s monumentally,
astronomically, mind-numbingly BORING! And I shouldn’t have to say that about a
movie where a group of death row inmates are sent on a suicide mission on the
edges of space and become addicted to a sex machine as part of a group of
artificial insemination experiments.
Like It: Chapter Two, I
didn’t immediately hate The Rise of Skywalker, but its badness was something that
unfolded the more it went on and the longer it sat in your head. Part of me wants
to go easy on it, mostly because of the impossible odds it had to face: the departure
of director Colin Trevorrow, the unexpected death of Carrie Fisher, the shortest
production time of any Star Wars movie ever, but most damning of all,
having to follow up The
Last Jedi, the most controversial and divisive movie in the entire
franchise. It makes the end result being a garbled mess of retcons, fanservice,
characters that feel like they were plucked from ten different scripts and
hastily shoehorned in, and plot developments that make no sense and come out of
nowhere all the more tragic. It’s a movie that tries to please everyone and as
a result ends up pissing everyone off, and whose badness is so contagious that
it inadvertently infects the previous two, turning this new trilogy into a
bastardized sham. And even with all of that in mind, this isn’t even the most
egregious example of Disney’s cowardice.
4.
Aladdin
If there was one word that would
describe this remake of Aladdin, it’s “pointless”. That could be said of
this whole string of live-action remakes that Disney has been churning out at a
clockwork rate, but Aladdin for me was when the soullessness of this whole
enterprise really started to sink in. An aggressively mediocre near
shot-for-shot retread that adds little to justify its own existence, takes an interesting
if not always consistent director and sands off all but his most obnoxious signatures, sucks
the soul out of its musical numbers, and replaces the late great Robin Williams
with Will Smith doing the same old in-your-face mugging that was played out by
2004. I’m actually surprised that it took a DJ Khaled song playing during the
credits to get me bolting for the door. That’s not to say it’s completely
without merit. Naomi Scott’s performance as Jasmine was pretty good, she and
Mena Masoud had decent chemistry, and the set design was great. But at the end
of the day, one question kept rolling around in my head: Aside from Disney’s
shareholders, who was this for?
3.
Serenity
Be honest, you forgot this one
even came out, didn't you? Not hard to see why considering most dismissed this as
a mediocre potboiler quietly dumped into January that the cast most likely
signed up for so they can chill on a tropical island and get paid for it. If
that was your assumption based on the trailer, then you missed out on one of
the most fascinatingly bizarre and wrongheaded movies to come along in a long
time. Every once in a blue moon, a bad movie pops up that’s high on ambition
but makes so many baffling decisions and ridiculous plot turns that they have
to be deliberate. It’s like watching someone play darts and watching them miss
the board every single time, but watching those darts bounce around and hit
glasses, tables and people’s foreheads. Midway there’s a plot twist that
completely shifts the direction of the entire movie that’s comes right out of
nowhere, then it keeps going like this was the movie everyone signed up for. You
wouldn’t believe me if I told you what it was, but half of the fun is having
the rug pulled from under you, so if your morbid curiosity gets the best of
you, it’s best to go in completely blind. This is one of two movies on this
list I’d recommend most for bad movie night, the other one being…
2. CATS!
Serenity held
the title of most fascinatingly bad movie of 2019 for eleven months, and then
right at the tail end of December, CATS! came along, snatched the trophy
from its hands and kicked it down a flight of stairs. From the minute the
trailer dropped, everyone anticipated that this was going to be a CGI nightmare
and a box office bomb, and from the second it finally arrived in theaters,
every critic under the sun, myself included, had a field day tearing it to
shreds. Although my review mostly consisted of me screaming in abject horror
for five paragraphs, there is so much more wrong than the hideous character
designs. The story is a load of plotless nonsense. Characters show up, sing a
song about themselves and are never heard from again. The sizing of the props
is inconsistent. There’s a load of weird sexual overtones. Rebel Wilson removes
her skin to reveal that she’s wearing a bedazzled showgirl’s outfit underneath.
Once the Cronenbergian nightmare settles in, there’s a really dull stretch
where nothing happens before circling right back into batshit insanity. And
yet, in such a short amount of time, it’s obtained a cult following that revels
in this movie, the same way people revel in movies like The Rocky Horror
Picture Show or The Room. All I’m saying is I wouldn’t be surprised
if we started getting midnight screenings of this in the future. Another thing
it has going for it: It’s not the worst big-budget spectacle featuring digital
felines that I saw this year.
Oh, how the mighty hath
fallen. There are movies that are so bad that they’re good, there are movies
that are so bad that they make you angry, and then there are movies that are so
bad that they give you an existential crisis. People were rightfully worried
when Disney bought out 20th Century Fox and became the owner of 30%
of the American entertainment industry, raking in 80% of this year’s box office
earnings. But we turned a blind eye because of what they gave us. And why
wouldn’t we? They gave us Pixar. They gave us Marvel. They gave us Baby Yoda.
And while their degradation as slaves to intertextuality is so slow and gradual
that you don’t even notice until it’s too late, the same can’t be said about
their line of live-action reboots of their animated classics. Say what you will
about these soulless rehashes of Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, The
Jungle Book, Dumbo, or even Aladdin, they at least made the bare
minimum of changes to justify calling themselves reboots. The Lion King,
while technically proficient with its photorealistic animation, couldn’t even
be bothered with that. What we got instead was a hollow, meaningless, creatively
bankrupt homonculus of a film that makes Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho look like a
wellspring of imagination and originality. This is everything wrong with late
capitalism in movie form. This is a capitalist, technocratic oligarch eating
its own tail. This is a glorified tech demo used to test out this tech before they
use it to bring Tony Stark back from the dead and digitally insert Robert
Downey Jr.’s likeness into every Marvel movie from here on out. This is the biggest
film studio in the world kidnapping your dog, selling it back to you at a
jacked-up price, then looking you straight in the eye and saying without an
iota of irony, “Fuck you, you’ll buy it anyway.” And how were they rewarded for
their rampant greed and cynicism? By making it the second highest grossing
animated film of all time. We all let this happen, and we all deserve it. All
hail God Emperor Disney.
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