My Worst Ten Films of 2019

Normally my Worst Ten movies lists will all be truly terrible movies, but that’s when I see 100 titles a year. For 2019, but my count is currently at 62, and I avoided a lot of movies I was iffy on. So I didn’t see a lot of truly bad movies. For instance, I never saw such universally panned titles as Replicas, Miss Bala, Hellboy, The Intruder, Poms, Brightburn, Shaft, Stuber, The Kitchen, The Goldfinch, Rambo: Last Blood, Jexi, Gemini Man, Playing with Fire, Charlie’s Angels, Playmobil, Black Christmas, or Cats.

So of what I have seen, these are the 53rd to 62nd best I’ve seen, i.e. the Ten Worst:

10. GLASS - I loved Unbreakable, I liked Split, and I had high hopes this would work. And I really enjoyed the first half or so. But man, that third act.. It became disjointed and self-indulgent the way the worst of M. Night Shyamalan can. He should have asked for another $10 million for his budget so he could have had a better ending. One should not leave a movie going "Man, I really wanted to like it..."

9. CHILD’S PLAY - It’s nice and grisly, but it also doesn’t quite capture the campy charm of the original. Instead of demonic possession involved, Chucky is a doll with an AI chip that goes haywire. Thing is, in the beginning Chucky doesn’t look like a doll any sane person would buy.

8. UNDER THE SILVER LAKE - There’s undeniable talent behind this movie written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, who made It Follows. It’s a swooping David Lynch type mystery, with strange characters, off-kilter angles, and weird stuff that happens for no reason and is never eluded to again. At the center is Sam (Andrew Garfield), a slacker who gets a crush on a neighbor girl who promptly disappears. The finale is a letdown, and even then it doesn’t wrap up half of what’s going on. So if this is all it was, why is it 2 hours and 19 minutes long?

7. ANNABELLE COME HOME - Not as bad as the original Annabelle, but not as good as Annabelle: Creation, this is another Conjuring spinoff where the jump scares all feel the same. And with this, we go for almost an hour before it even tries to be scary. I’ll admit I’d enjoy a Ferry Man spinoff, but I also thought I’d like a Nun spinoff, and that was awful.

6. DARK PHOENIX - The final X-Men movie (with this cast) goes out not with a bang but with a whimper. I loved First Class, liked Days of Future Past, and found Apocalypse to be meh, and this is the weakest of the four. It centers on Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), and it redoes the Dark Phoenix plot that X-Men: Last Stand tried. Also weirdly, this takes place in the 1990’s, so Xavier and Magneto are supposed to be just 5-6 year away from looking like Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, but they haven’t aged much.

5. CAPTIVE STATE - Intriguing premise poorly executed. Aliens have occupied the Earth, and they demand allegiance in thought. The movie is mostly about a possible resistance against them, but when we got to the last five minutes, I realized that’s what the halfway mark should have been instead of most of the earlier stuff we wasted our time on.

4. GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS - Most of the original cast didn’t return, and this has one of the lamest terrorist motivations yet. They want to unleash all of the titans to destroy the vast majority of humanity in order to… save humanity? Bradley Whitford gets the thankless role as the sarcastic guy who’s actually in charge of giving tons of expository dialogue, Kyle Chandler is in permanent grimace mode, and while some of the titans’ special effects are cool, we don’t care about the characters. 

3. THE DIRT - Since we’re supposed to treat Netflix like real movies…. This Motley Crue biopic is ultimately a paint-by-numbers lazy approach to the music band biopic formula. It’s cool to see Game of Thrones’ Iwan Rheon (Ramsay) as Mick Mars, Machine Gun Kelly as Tommy Lee, etc., but it’s a really a relay of “this happened, then this happened, then this happened” while subplots like Lee’s domestic violence problems or Vince Neil’s daughter dying barely get mentioned so as to avoid emotional impact. We’re left wondering why Crue was ever a big deal. Or were they even?

2. THE PRODIGY - Cliched horror movie that betrays its own logic. It’s about a boy possessed by a serial killer, but it takes everyone else in the movie an hour to catch up to this while the audience is shown this in the beginning.

1. SERENITY - The movie sets up itself as a potboiler, a thriller about an old flame (Anne Hathaway) who’s come back into the life of her fisherman ex-husband (Matthew McConaughey) with a favor to ask - that he kills her current husband (Jason Clarke) and makes it look like an accident. The first half of the movie is about this… and then it changes into a completely different movie that feels like a cheat. It’s a crazy twist that might have worked in the final five minutes of a movie, but to do it halfway through, we get 45 minutes to contemplate how stupid this is.

Men in Black Intl. gets $30 million

For the weekend of June 14-16, 2019, Men in Black International won the weekend, but it continues the recent box-office trend of underperforming titles. I think part of it can be blamed on savvy audience members who do check what the critics say before they go, and MIB Intl. was eviscerated.

The other new wide release was Shaft, and while it was tracking for a $20 million opening weekend a couple weeks ago, it fell on its face. Late Night tried to build word of mouth by opening on a handful of screen the week before, but it didn’t pay off. Also, Jim Jarmusch’s wry zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die was dead on arrival.

In its second week, Dark Phoenix fell a staggering 71.5%. The only studio finding consistent success is Disney. Avengers Endgame should pass Avatar next week as the highest-grossing worldwide movie ever. (It will fall short of breaking The Force Awakens’ domestic record.) Aladdin continues to stay in the top three in its fourth week, and next week, Toy Story 4 should open to over $100 million. AND they still have Spider-Man Far From Home and The Lion King coming this summer.

Opens June 21

TOY STORY 4 with the voices of Tom Hanks, Tim Allen and Joan Cusack.

CHILD'S PLAY with Aubrey Plaza, Brian Tyree Henry and Mark Hamill.

ANNA with Helen Mirren, Sasha Luss, Luke Evans and Cillian Murphy.

Dark Phoenix - Movie Review

Starring James McAvoy, Sophie Turner, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Jessica Chastain, Tye Sheridan, Evan Peters, Alexandra Shipp and Kodi Smit-McPhee.

Written & Directed by Simon Kinberg.

★★½ 

We’ve had three X-Men movies, three Wolverine movies, and this is the fourth X-Men First Class movie. Between this and Apocalypse, it’s a good argument for the franchise to hibernate for a few years and come back rebooted in the MCU.

Why is this movie retreading the plot from X-Men: The Last Stand? For one, I’d argue it was the worst movie of all of them so they wanted to retell this story right. For another, the events of Days of Future Past screwed up the timeline, so the events of the Patrick Stewart trilogy wouldn’t have happened that way in this timeline.

I did find it strange this movie takes place in 1992. That means it’s been 29 years since McAvoy, Fassbender, Lawrence, etc. were in X-Men: First Class, and there’s no effort to age them accordingly. Oh well.

So how is it? Well, for starters, maybe the producers thought Sophie Turner’s big from Game of Thrones so it’d pay off to make her the star of the show. But this means other, more famous actors take a back seat to her in the action. Jennifer Lawrence seems like she’d rather be anywhere else than doing another one of these movies. Michael Fassbender doesn’t show up until a good 45 minutes in (but when he does show up, the movie is better for it.)

I liked it a little more than X-Men: Apocalypse. The third act final battles are more satisfying, especially the part on the train. But ultimately I’m glad this was the last outing.

Secret Life of Pets #1 at Box Office; Dark Phoenix Fizzles

For the weekend of June 7-9, 2019, The Secret Life of Pets 2 managed to win the weekend. The sequel opened far below the $104 million the original opened to, so maybe this is not going to be the next Ice Age level franchise, but it’ll still ultimately be profitable.

Dark Phoenix, meanwhile, is the lowest opening ever for an X-Men movie, including the different Wolverine spin-offs. It’s also the worst reviewed of them all. Maybe they shouldn’t have taken the plot from X-Men: The Last Stand and made Sophie Turner the star while making James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, etc., take backseat roles. Perhaps it’s a good thing this will be the final outing for this cast. Expect the X-Men to lie dormant for a few years, then circa 2023, they’ll be introduced into the MCU.

Late Night opted to open on only 4 screens before going wide next week, and with a $62,000 per-screen average, it’s poised to do well in expansion, albeit against a couple other comedic offerings in Men in Black International and Shaft.

Of the holdovers, Godzilla’s dropping like a stone. Godzilla v. Kong is still the plan for 2021, but WB has to be wondering if they’ll be able to break even on the project. Rocketman hasn’t really caught fire the way Bohemian Rhapsody did. Perhaps the R-rating can be blamed, although A Star Is Born seemed to manage with one.

Many films seem to be underperforming what studios had expected, but the real overperformer has been Aladdin. And Disney still has Toy Story 4, Spider-Man: Far from Home, and The Lion King on the way.

Opens June 14

MEN IN BLACK INTL. with Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson and Liam Neeson.

SHAFT with Samuel L. Jackson, Jesse T. Usher, Regina Hall and Richard Roundtree.