In a few years, we may look back on 2022 as the year movies broke through. There was the streaming war, the collapse of the theatrical market, the continued dominance of franchises over everything else. It doesn’t matter that the audience was treated to a metric ton of trash — and not even the fun trash that helps a Saturday night fly by. For those who avoided the 10 worst movies of the year below, consider this a warning against wasting your time and money. Let this serve as an act of public shaming for the filmmakers and studios responsible.
1. Morbius
Director Daniel Espinosa’s Spider-Man spin-off is, in every way, an irreplaceable, hackneyed attempt to turn golden intellectual property into lung-clogging coal. It is charmless, incoherent, ugly and aggressively stupid. There’s just no joy here, not even for those (like me!) who can appreciate a nonsensical CGI spectacle that knows it’s silly nothingness and only asks its audience to forget their worries for 90 minutes and play . in Morbius, there’s no playing, no guilty pleasures to be found – just excruciatingly dull pain. So much pain.
2. Black Adam
Like anyone gifted with superpowers—in his case, supermagic and superslope—Dwayne Johnson could choose to use his gifts for the good of humanity. Unfortunately, more often than not, the Rock sided with the dark forces by producing the most vile and pernicious blockbusters. And it comes on the heels of such eerily empty glasses as Jungle cruise and Red alert (the latter my pick for worst movie of 2021), Johnson’s DC Extended Universe movie Black Adam it comes across as a particularly diabolical plot to drain the remaining life from the audience. Watching Johnson spin social media to prove that the film would turn a profit—all while the cameo of Superman, which he helped engineer and was preceded by Warner Bros. kicking Henry Cavill to the curb—was the moldy cherry on top of the rancid cup.
3. Triangle of grief
There are films that are on the nose, and then there is Ruben Ostlund’s film Triangle of sadness, a satire™ that’s so pharyngeal it’s the cinematic equivalent of a COVID-19 swab. It hit theaters this fall after winning the prestigious Palme d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival in the spring. Triangle of sadness was welcomed as a breath of fresh air for telling it like it is. By that I mean uncovering such unspoken truths as: Aren’t these social media influencers the worst? What about the Russian oligarchs? Ugh, terrible! But by making and then erasing such easy targets, Ostlund has created a self-indulgent and lazy spawn that mistakes anger for wit, rebuke for irony, and vomit for gags of real substance.
4. Pinocchio
Good news, Guillermo del Toro: you’re not out of luck Pinocchio movie of 2022. That honor instead goes to Robert Zemeckis, whose version of the fairy tale arrived on Disney+ this fall with all the grace of a rotting log destined for the chipper. The CGI wooden boy of this film looks like a ghostly aberration that wandered out of it Child’s play franchises, unnatural and stomach-churning. And I’ll leave it to you to guess how the filmmaker handles the story’s most harrowing sequence, the Pleasure Island disaster. “Nightmare fuel” may be too strong a description, but if you have small children at home who you might like to see sleep from time to time: beware.
5. Black light
Take it from thriller expert Liam “Action Daddy” Neeson: You’ll walk away from the actor’s new endeavor black light with many questions. The first is: Can I have my money and 107 minutes back please? No, probably not. But also: Is Liam Neeson… okay, financially or otherwise? The fact that it churns out forgettable nothingness like black light suggests: no.
6. Sugar
If Sugar, Prime Video’s first “Canadian Amazon Original,” is set to plant the streamer’s flag domestically with confidence, then someone needs to call Jeff Bezos from space to testify before the Senate, because Ottawa, we have a problem. It’s a drug thriller is it even legally allowed to call itself a movie? The scenes don’t make spatial sense, the performances are eerie with that uniquely open-mic night, and the whole endeavor is stuffed with enough exotic locale footage to make Prime Video subscribers wonder if they accidentally made it onto the screen. a saver option on their Apple TV.
7. Realm of light
A grim and starchy concoction from a filmmaker who should know better, Sam Mendes’ drama Realm of light he desperately argues that the social ills of 1980s England (but, you know, today too) – racism, sexism, homophobia – can be cured with a trip to the cinema. But even the most ardent supporter of the theater experience will be forced to inject Netflix into their veins after sitting through this haughty, mindless trip to the cinema.
8. Man from Toronto
A wonderfully boring action comedy that lacks tension and humor, A man from Toronto features Kevin Hart at his grittiest, playing a fast-talking beta who must pose as a hitman codenamed “The Man from Toronto” (Woody Harrelson). Directed/hacked by Patrick Hughes, the film represents the bottom of the once reliable buddy/action comedy genre. The humor is dull. The fights are uneven. And the characters are thinly-conceived nuisances cooked up by Mad Lib-sponsored Final Draft malware. Deport the bastard.
9. Bardo
A semi-autobiographical drama by Alejandro G. Inarritu Bardo he knows exactly how to play on his audience, but he cheapens the emotions he breaks with falsely expensive tricks from an imagination that relies on years of self-aggrandizement. At the end of the film – after a successful journalist/documentarian who is stylized in character and body in the image of his director – you will feel empty, and why? The privilege of being a passenger on a guided tour of the brilliant, oh-so-tortured mind of back-to-back Oscar winner Alejandro G. Inarrita.
10. The unbearable weight of massive talent
Tom Gormican’s film, a cheap and sloppy jab at celebrity culture that is barely a millimeter above the material it purports to satirize so sharply, is the definition of disappointing. I’d say the filmmaker hit the jackpot by convincing Nicolas Cage to star in his Hollywood comedy about the games themselves (was John Travolta his backup choice?), but that flies in the face of the film’s own conceit about reality mining: How We Saw Time then again, Cage will take any project that lands in his lap. Difference between The unbearable weight of enormous talent and Cage’s VOD waste as Original, Kill Chain and Arsenal it’s not that big of a difference. Cage’s name still sells even if he can’t sell his own movie. And the joke is still on the audience.
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