Before you roll your eyes too hard… yes, bad movies come out every year and yes, they are the reason one appreciates the good ones. But if you are one of those unlucky souls who spent 2024 wondering “Someone is definitely pin-punching a voodoo doll of me” then you know how you couldn’t rely on films this year to find your escape…
… because everywhere you turned, there was a bad film.
Harebrained plots cocooning brainless dialogues spoken by mouths with a forever buffering brain, painfully disastrous jokes, tone-deaf depictions, and horrendously awful CGI — all this came from some of the most brilliant minds in Hollywood and was lived on the silver screen by faces who no longer deserve our unwavering trust in their art. But the pen is mightier than the cinematic diarrhea that clogs the innocent crevices of our scarred minds, and we are here to call out the culprits.
Madame Web
It takes a real miracle to make Christian Bone
Unfrosted
Jerry Seinfeld’s directorial debut about the creator of the Pop-Tarts, Unfrosted, might sound like a completely made-up movie but, unfortunately, it is very much real. It came out on Netflix in May, and I was tasked with Francisca Tinoco
Mean Girls
Having grown up in the generation that still regularly uses phrases like “she doesn’t even go here!” and “scum-sucking road whore,” I was beyond excited to see the big-screen Mean Girls: The Musical, emphatically renamed Mean Girls when Paramount Pictures decided to mask the remake’s musical nature from the general public. Having enjoyed the Broadway rendition, I thought I knew what I was getting myself into with the 2024 adaptation. Alas, Paramount’s update was a swing, miss, and death by proverbial school bus.
Despite Renée Rapp and Auliʻi Cravalho’s best attempts to steer the vocal ship, Mean Girls felt like an extended music video that failed to cleverly mix the flavor of the original with the musical’s more updated ambitions. The result was a Kälteen Bar that promised to shave off three pounds but actually stole two hours from our collective lives instead. Not only will I probably never watch it again, but like the limit, I may have to pretend it does not exist so I can enjoy the original and its musical counterpart in peace. ⏤ Josh Conrad
Deadpool & Wolverine
Put down the pitchforks, please. Yes, Deadpool & Wolverine got the MCU out of its slump, yes it was funny, yes it was great to hear Chris Evans cuss in a Marvel film, and yes Wolverine is back, but… no one can convince me that the highly awaited third film in the Deadpool series was anything more than a filler. And that too which just blatantly cooked up its own logic and defied the laws of the MCU.
Wade’s knowledge of the Marvel superheroes felt forced, the ending made no sense, and everything that made Deadpool exceptional was pushed aside — except his foul-mouthed humor — to make space for countless cameos, fight scenes, and Apeksha Bagchi
Megalopolis
Francis Ford Coppola apparently spent hours in his trailer, smoking marijuana, while filming Megalopolis. If you go into the film knowing this, it kind of makes a bit more sense – like yeah, this is definitely something a guy would make while out of his head on illicit substances. Jordan Collins
The Apprentice
If you dared to watch The Apprentice in theaters, congrats on the extra legroom! Who thought watching Donald Trump on screen would be a good idea? Clearly, someone missed the memo that we’re all Trumped out.
With probably only three souls in the audience, it’s the perfect spot for an introvert’s paradise or a sad popcorn party. This film ties itself so desperately to the 2024 election it almost screams for relevance but ends up feeling like a two-hour-long political ad that nobody asked for. Ali Abbasi tries to serve us a deep dive into Trump’s rise with Sebastian Stan’s portrayal, along with Jeremy Strong’s Roy Cohn teaching him the sinister “Rules of Winning.” Despite its attempt to critique, the film can’t help but seem almost sympathetic to these infamous figures. Either way, it’s a cinematic facepalm, and Omar Faruque
Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver
Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver, like its empty predecessor and dreary director’s cut, is not one of those cases of so-bad-it’s-good, nor is it one of those cases where it’s simply bad. No, The Scargiver’s badness is that elusive type of bad that you will inadvertently wind up being thankful for a decade from now, and you may not even realize it. Why? Because The Scargiver is the rawest, loudest, most undiluted proof in this perverted pudding that the entertainment industry is not a meritocracy; a revelation that may just be the spark of confidence that an otherwise imposter syndrome-ridden luminary needs to send out that screenplay they’ve been perfecting for years.
So — on behalf of every gifted storyteller who just needed a tiny voice to tell them that they were good enough — thank you, Zack Snyder, for reminding us that you can get paid for this job even if you have the artistic sensibilities of a terminally-online rhinoceros. ⏤ Charlotte Simmons
Uglies
Netflix’s Uglies imagines a world where everyone undergoes mandatory plastic surgery to achieve perfection — but no amount of medical intervention can fix the ugliness of this dystopian disaster. Despite Joey King’s valiant efforts to inject some life into her lead role, this misfire speeds through its 90-minute runtime like a runaway hoverboard, leaving character development and coherent worldbuilding in the dust. With three writers inefficiently cramming exposition down our throats, Laverne Cox trapped in cartoon villain mode, and set pieces desperately needing some makeup, there’s nothing worth saving in Netflix’s shallow, bland, and tasteless take on young adult dystopia. — Marco Vito Oddo
Argylle
For Matthew Vaughn, more is always more, and his latest attempt to launch a franchise, Argylle, is yet another convoluted spy thriller, this time about a novelist who writes spy thrillers. The plot betrays Vaughn’s attempt to over-correct criticisms of his recent films, which often feature unrefined plots seemingly designed to primarily kickstart a franchise. Rather than creating a movie with a defined beginning, middle, and end — avoiding his usual puzzling cliffhanger endings — Vaughn overloads this typical amnesiac-spy thriller with plot twists to create the illusion of depth.
But instead of heightening intrigue, these twists become increasingly predictable, culminating in a tepid ending that inspired nothing but indifference from me. Vaughn continues to overcomplicate things when he should be simplifying. This is why he keeps releasing misfires, and Argylle stands as one of the year’s most wasted opportunities. It only left me with a lingering sense of what could have been. I just hope Matthew Vaughn can return to one-offs like he did with Layer Cake. — Fred Onyango
Joker: Folie à Deux
After the success of its brilliant 2019 predecessor, I expected more from Joker: Folie à Deux. Making it part jukebox musical and part courtroom drama always felt risky, and, sure enough, it didn’t work. As expected, Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga bring bags of talent and energy as the eponymous Arthur Fleck and Harleen Quinzel — and their chemistry isn’t terrible — but the Kevin Stewart
Kraven The Hunter
Kraven the Hunter had no business prowling into theaters as a full-fledged feature, because, let’s face it, no one was clamoring for this origin story. But Sony, ever the bold predator of Marvel’s rogues’ gallery, took the bait—and now Marvel can never undo the damage, even if the rights are reclaimed.
Despite having all the necessary ingredients—a strong tone, gripping source material, and a gifted cast—the movie feels like a hunter’s feast that is served cold and bland right off the factory line. At its core, Kraven himself is treated more like a glorified plot gadget than the protagonist of his own tale, slicing his way through a script that prevents him from developing into the complex antihero he could be. — Kopal Kumari
Published: Dec 30, 2024 03:49 pm