My 5 Worst Movies of 2018
I actually look more forward to my Best Movies of the Year list than I do to my Worst. The Best list is a chance to take stock of a year, to look at what spoke to me, what stuck with me, what made me feel feelings. My worst list is usually just a chance to bash the usual suspects: A franchise or two that hasn’t been good in years, probably a remake or a bad Faith Based movie, Michael Bay is usually there, you get the idea. But thems the breaks, and there’s several more movies I wanna see before I do my Top 10 (or possibly top 15) so here for now are my Worst 5 Movies of 2018. I was gonna say Least Favorite to be more accurate, but whatever, Worst sounds better.
#5: Avengers: Infinity War
This might be a controversial pick, as Infinity War was technically fine, with a lot of solid CGI and great cinematography, and the usual good acting we’ve come to expect from MCU productions. And I hate it. I hate it for how cynical and dead inside it feels. Yes, everyone came away talking about the shocking ending, but I don’t believe for a second that anything in that ending will stick. Infinity War is on this list because it reminded me why I stopped reading comics and permanently killed a small part of the interest I have in future MCU movies.
#4: Ready Player One
Ready Player One, the book, is one of only a handful of books I stopped reading part way through (and the first Twilight book is not on that list, just for context) and while the movie fixed some of the issues I had with it (no scenes where the main character wins by reciting all of Monty Python and the Holy Grail to be found) but I think the awfulness at the center of this story runs so deep that nothing short of a teardown and rebuild job would have saved it. I had more to say here, but it honestly gets a little mean, and this book and movie have been thoroughly dissected this year, so I’m going to move on.
Also we get a Ready Player One movie before a Neuromancer movie? I mean come the fuck on.
#3: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
The first Jurassic World was one of the worst blockbusters of the last 5 years so it’s not like Fallen Kingdom had big shoes to fill. I dunno if it actually managed to do it though, because it’s hard to judge them together. I guess Jurassic World is more insulting whereas Fallen Kingdom is more bizarre. It does at least end with the possibility of moving the franchise in a new direction, but to get there it goes through a gamut of strange plot turns, nonsensical script machinations and a bizarre attempt to basically recreate scenes from The Lost World. Also there’s a part where a velociraptor cries a single tear. So that happened.
#2: God’s Not Dead: A Light in the Darkness
Regular followers of my content will know I have a fascination with bad faith-based films that I have trouble properly explaining. Part of it has to do with their extremely basic existence as naked propaganda, and having spent my entire adult life grappling with Evangelicals’ death grip on American politics, knowing what they’re thinking is often important to me. But they also tend to be weird and novel as bad movies, in a way that more conventional bad movies often can’t be. Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas remains one of the most fascinatingly strange bad movies I’ve ever seen and it’s criminal it’s not been more widely adopted as a bad movie staple. A Light in the Darkness has all that (its plot is weird) but adds the additional frustration of coming dangerously close to recognizing its own idiocy before slamming back down into a denouncement that says “Everyone should stop arguing and listen to each other, and by each other, I mean me.”
#1: Sicario: Day of the Soldado
It’s rare that I declare a movie to be morally irresponsible, without intentionally collapsing over the line into outright propaganda and that’s a whole nother ball game (specifically the slot above this one). But maybe, just maybe, a movie in which it is claimed that the Mexican cartels are smuggling in ISIS terrorists (no, really) and which centers around the US government conspiring to kidnap a 16 year old Mexican girl (No. Really.) in 2018 might be a wee bit irresponsible. That alone (and the fact that it’s a sequel to a much more emotionally complex and dark movie) would be enough to condemn it to a slot here, but what cements it from “On the list” to “Number 1” is that it’s just boring. Every scene, every shot, goes on way longer than it needs to, and rather than building the mood it never seems like it’s going anywhere, which turns out to be true as the movie just unceremoniously ends without building to anything. A reprehensible, irritating and just plain dull experience, from beginning to end.
