My New Year's Resolution to lead a more optimistic life will have to wait until tomorrow, for now is the time to reflect back on a year in film: to name and shame the 2019 releases that boiled my blood and frayed my temper most, to begin with. These releases, based on UK release date (meaning that Uncut Gems - a 2020 release on this side of the pond - will have to hope I watch ten films I dislike more intensely this year to avoid winding up on a list like this next year) are not the worst-made films of the year, but more so the ones that I disliked the most - although a strong crossover is to be expected. No disrespect intended, I'm sure most of these filmmakers are great people.
Presented to you in alphabetical order.
Presented to you in alphabetical order.
Dishonourable Mentions:
- At Eternity's Gate
- Breakthrough
- The Laundromat
- Midway
- Peppermint
- The Perfection
- Breakthrough
- The Laundromat
- Midway
- Peppermint
- The Perfection
- Pet Sematary
- Rambo: Last Blood
- Serenity
- The Upside
Border (dir. Ali Abbasi)
The Shape of Water, this is not. A disturbing, tonally-awkward and exposition-heavy pseudo-romance-cum-thriller-cum-creature-feature, Ali Abbasi's second feature, Border, is an uncomfortably misguided one that seems to worsen with distance. Without sophistication to its theme or character work, Border alienates its audience from beginning to end, failing to find a resonance in a story that demands it to overcome an idiosyncratic weirdness. Instead, it essentially simmers down to a film about a social outcast finding love - just a lot more deranged and with ickier subtext about child abuse and mutilation making it rather distasteful indeed.
Black Christmas (dir. Sophia Takal) & Countdown (dir. Justin Dec)
2019 has been less than impressive for horror films tackling the zeitgeist, with both Black Christmas and Countdown's attempt to deliver a timely feature inspired by the #MeToo movement landing with a complete thud. The former, particularly egregious as it shares a name with the terrific 1974 original, is both over and underwritten, with weak characterisation yet sledgehammer unsubtle theme work that swings so forcefully that the mess it makes in its dreadful third act completely obliterates the potential to make a smart, relevant point. Elsewhere, the "killer app" movie was redundant from the word go, an eyeroll-worthy disaster that plays like the very worst episode of Black Mirror. The horror genre was not up to scratch this year, and these pair let the side down most. Speaking of....
The Curse of La Llorona (dir. Michael Chaves)
The Curse of La Llorona is a scarily unscary, crushingly dull entry into a series which has fallen into a rutt of bad instalments it must escape from before irreparable damage is caused. It's obvious to see why the filmmakers attempted to distance itself from the wider Conjuring universe, but they would have been in a stronger position to cut those tenuous ties entirely and present it as an original idea - or as an original idea as a film so shoddily, laughably constructed from the tropes used in superior genre entities can be. I'd welcome a real curse over a bad horror anyday.
Hellboy (dir. Neil Marshall)
A reboot as dire as reboots come, Neil Marshall's Hellboy is completely void of the soul, fantasy or charisma required to sell a story about a powerful demon trying to save the world from the plague a Blood Queen unleashes on England. A total lack of vision, an abysmal screenplay and poor cast performances turn Hellboy into a hellish experience that only has the year's most bizarre cameo (from Ainsley Harriot no less) that prevent it from being a total write-off.
Joker (dir. Todd Phillips)
Few films set a fire in and outside of the cineplex like Todd Phillips' Joker. In terms of both audience reception and digital ink spilt (and for better or for worse), everybody seemed to be discussing DC's most recent take on Batman's archenemy. But in the wrong hands to begin with, Phillips' juvenile treatment of serious, weighty themes results in a shallow script unwilling to practise what it preaches, rambling on about our treatment of society's most vulnerable people while then laughing at a dwarf for being unable to reach the door latch in a life-or-death scenario. This single moment epitomises everything wrong with this irresponsibly-told, carelessly-provocative picture: the filmmakers don't understand the film they have made, and that's dangerously irresponsible.
Life Itself (dir. Dan Fogelman)
A noble failure is a failure nonetheless, and Dan Fogelman's poorly-approached Life Itself squanders an impressive cast and promising interconnected story on an overwrought and exasperating screenplay punctuated with poor dialogue and populated with unlikeable characters and their inexplicable decisions. Horribly melodramatic, this is a feature whose sole aim is to manipulate the tear ducts but with every twist and turn and connection feeling so forced and unnatural, eyes will more likely roll (or glaze over) at this painful 118-minute misfire.
Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (dir. Quentin Tarantino)
With great power comes great responsibility, which is clearly something writer-director Quentin Tarantino should never be trusted with. The self-described, revisionist "love letter to Hollywood", Once Upon a Time.... in Hollywood captures the movie-making capital through Tarantino's favourite lens: an overwhelmingly white, heroic male one, where female characters are relegated to near-wordless supporting turns or comparatively extremes violent acts. While stopping short of calling this the year's worst film (there's some solid work from the art department, a handful of well-constructed shots and the performances aren't awful), none have made my blood simmer like Tarantino's supposedly penultimate flick, which frames a wife murderer as the cool guy next door you idolise and utilises a slaughtered women as an accessory to her own story.
Stuber (dir. Michael Dowse)
Stuber's co-lead Dave Bautista condemned audiences and critics for not seeing the film in a tweet shortly after its underwhelming opening weekend (from which it never recovered), asking why audiences weren't seeing this "plain and simply fun" movie. Well, Dave, let me put it bluntly - laugh-free comedy isn't fun, lazy storytelling isn't fun and dated writing isn't fun. Nothing about Stuber is fun. Even in a cinematic landscape in a state of disrepair, Stuber is an eyesore: as unfunny as they come and behind the times, despite the contemporary conceit at its disposal. Stuber is as stupendously stupid as its title suggests. A real, real car crash. No stars.
Vice (dir. Adam McKay)
Vice's utilisation of the same techniques that allowed Donald Trump to take up the most powerful position in the United States of America - namely, treating politically relevant and significant material as a continual joke that dismisses its validity and inadvertently permits such despicable behaviour as less severe under the guise of flippancy - is dangerous, quite frankly. An entirely toxic, ill-conceived piece of filmmaking that misjudges the emphasis on style over substance, Adam McKay's Vice tells you no more than a quick Google search would, taking extraordinary lengths to humanise and lionise a despicable man and angering its audience in the process. A satire biting the wrong thing, Vice is a nauseous experience and easily one of the decade's worst films.