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29.1.23

Bottom 10 of 2022

Well, here we are, back at it again, with the - counting on my fingers - 15th annual list of my best and worst movies experiences from the last year. In 2022 I took a deep dive into the films of the 1930's, as a result I had fewer new films to pick from for the lists, so I've decided just to do Top 10s this year. Learn to love it.

First a few titles that didn't make it to the actual list....

SPECIAL MENTION

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

Had this list been longer, it might have crept in at the bottom, but honestly Avatar 2 is too aggressively meh to warrant an inclusion in any list.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Jordan Peele's Nope (2022) almost made the list, a bit of class kept it off. His other project, the unlikable stop-motion animation Wendell & Wild (2022) only avoided the list due to sheer sympathy for the style. Uncharted (2022) avoided the list only because I decided to stop at 10.

THE LIST

10) Bullet Train (2022)

I found this movie profoundly annoying. The characters, the story, even the always likable Brad Pitt was annoying. Sure, there was a bit of cool action here and there, but I just hated the premise and I wanted everyone in the film to die. Make World War Z 2 instead, Brad!

9) The 355 (2022)

Hardcore action movies led by kick-ass ladies? Yes! Can't get enough of those! Unless they're as uninspired and badly written as The 355. Nothing makes sense, the whole plot revolves around chasing a magical tech thingy, and it's got zero heart.

8) The Gray Man (2022)

Soulless and witless $200 million action spectacle. And with that single sentence, I've already wasted more time on this film than it deserves.

7) Black Adam (2022)

Sorry The Rock, but this dull, pompous superhero (Or is he a villain? No, of course not) movie did absolutely nothing for me. The best part was the always delightful Sarah Shahi, but every time YOU showed up, you drained whatever sympathy and interest she had managed to build up from the film. At least they wasted so much money making this that a sequel is unlikely to materialise.

6) Skyggen i mit øje (2021)

The accidental bombing of a school in Copenhagen during World War II by Allied forces would have made for an interesting and harrowing movie. If director Ole Bornedal didn't have his head so far up his own ass, he would have been able to make that movie. He's a capable filmmaker, but he doesn't want to listen to anybody, and apparently has a habit of sidelining anybody who tells him he's wrong, and then acting all surprised and indignant when the public and the critics reject his films.The end result is predictably off key. Bornedal is too preoccupied with subjects that frankly have no place in this story. He also gets the most basic historic facts wrong, and he doesn't seem to care. So why should we care about the film?

5) Hellraiser (2022)

I didn't mind the idea of doing a modern take on the Hellraiser story, the original from 1987 is rather scrappy. This pile of garbage, though, is not the way to go. Hellraiser 2022 gets almost everything wrong from the first frame. There's no sense of danger, the plot is almost incomprehensible at times, and the lead actress looks like she's been on a 3-day bender before shooting every scene. But at least they checked the woke-box with a female Pinhead. Wait, are you still woke, if everybody in the audience fell asleep and missed it?

4) WarHunt (2022)

This is one of those it-could-have-worked kind of movies. The low budget restructions and the increasingly grotesque looking Mickey Rourke aren't even deal-breakers, but the script and the direction is. Honestly a quick rewrite and a new helmer could easily have moved this from the top of the bottom list to the bottom of the top list (next time guys, call me). As it stands now, WarHunt is a fascinatingly shapeless, bumbling, incoherent mess. Much like Rourke!

3) Blonde (2022)

Blonde is, of course, a different kind of bad than the other entires on this list, but it still is quite bad. Strapping Marilyn Monroe’s cold, dead corpse to the old Hollywood wagon and taking it for another ride around the Tinseltown circus is questionable at best. Robbing Marilyn of her own voice by simply making up life altering events throughout the movie is downright disgusting. Some films have that "based on a true story" text in the beginning. This one should have another text entirely. How about: "Not to be confused with a true story. We made most of this shit up.

2) Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)

This one made me MAD. Furious even. That rarely happens, But this remake/reboot - or whatever the hell we're calling it these days - is so spectacularly detached from anything resembling reality and logic that it's hard to believe. This film is almost the exact opposite of what the original was in every way, shape and form. This year we learned that it's possible to simply NOT release a film, even if it cost close to $100.000.000 and is virtually finished. If only the laughably incompetent filmmakers behind this film had been the ones to teach us that lesson.

1) Moonfall (2022)

There are dumb movies and then there's Moonfall. Roland Emmerich usually makes big dumb movies, but this one is his dumbest yet. It's almost like he said to himself... "Independence Day: Resurgence was my worst film yet, but dammit, I can do worse!" And so he did. Moonfall looks like a shitty fan cut of the last couple of decades of disaster movies, with some cheap CGI slapped on top. It has a finale so ludicrous that it manages to make the "let's hack an alien spaceship" ending of Independence Day look downright clever.

WRAP-UP

2022 - what a year, eh? Luckily I had some good movie experiences too. We will get to those next.

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