• Sun. Feb 9th, 2025

Movie Curiosities

The online diary of an aspiring movie nerd

As a general rule, I try my best not to make this a “Worst of” list. I sincerely try not to dignify movies that stand no chance at all of being good. That simply wasn’t feasible this year.

To be sure, there were a lot of notorious stinkers that I didn’t bother with in 2024. Poolman, Miller’s Girl, Reagan, The Mouse Trap, Not Another Church Movie, Harold and the Purple Crayon, the Rebel Moon sequel and the director’s cut of the first movie, Imaginary, Night Swim, Tarot, Unfrosted, Kraven the Hunter, these and other movies were so obviously putrid that they never stood any chance at being good.

But this year, in the absence of any other movies to release in the fallout of the AMPAS holdouts, there were simply too many bad movies with too much money thrown at them. Bad movies with a pedigree of talent. Bad movies with ideally-placed release windows. Hell, I even saw a few bad movies that came highly recommended by people I like and respect.

As with every year, this is a list about wasted potential. Gods above, what a year of wasted potential this was. For clarity, I have three different classes of cinematic disappointment.

  • Benign Disappointments: This one simply comes down to a difference of opinion. A lot of other people like the film for perfectly valid reasons, but it didn’t work for me.
  • Stupid Disappointments: The most common variety. There was effort here, everyone involved clearly did the best they could, but the end result fell short for whatever reason.
  • Malicious Disappointments: The filmmakers had every opportunity to change course and avoid the glaringly obvious mistakes right ahead of them, but they charged ahead anyway. These are the films that failed on purpose. And we got a bumper crop of them in 2024.

Most Benign Disappointment

This is always my least favorite category every year. Here we have the movies that everybody else loved for perfectly valid reasons, but simply didn’t work for me. Babes, for instance, really only works if you can tolerate Ilana Glazer’s style of comedy.

Babygirl seemed to get a pretty good critical response, but I couldn’t see the chemistry between the two romantic leads. A Complete Unknown works great for anyone who wants a boilerplate musical awards-bait biopic, but excuse me if I expected something more. Likewise, everybody freaking loved Kill when it came out, but I didn’t see anything new in that movie. And I find it rather vindicating that nobody’s talking about that movie anymore.

But then we have I Saw the TV Glow. I know this movie has a strong fan following and there are a great many arguments that this is a clever trans allegory, but I’m not seeing it. More to the point, the movie is so deliberately opaque and impenetrably abstract, any reasonably intelligent filmgoer could probably interpret the film to mean literally anything. Sorry, but I have a harder time respecting the groundbreaking thematic depth of a movie if it feels like I’m the one doing all the mental gymnastics to try and make the film say what I want it to say.

Most Disappointing Sequel

No shortage of candidates here. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire blundered into the classic Iron Man 2 trap, placing a greater emphasis on long-term worldbuilding at the cost of short-term coherent storytelling. Kung Fu Panda 4 had the opposite problem, telling a passable story at the risk of jeopardizing the long-term future of the franchise and retroactively tainting the previous trilogy.

Venom: The Last Dance contradicted its own logic at every turn, inexplicably trying to cap the trilogy while keeping the greater franchise going. Likewise, Alien: Romulus tried to bring the franchise back to its roots and shed the unnecessary bullshit of the Prometheus era, right up until it brought in the Prometheus-era bullshit for a critical plot point. Say what you will about MaXXXine, but at least that movie only failed to live up to its prequels without actively contradicting itself in the process.

But of course the clear winner here has to be Joker: Folie a Deux. I can’t remember the last time I ever saw such a clear and deliberate case of a Malicious Disappointment. This movie hated its fans, hated the studio, hated the previous movie, hated the audience, and hated its own existence. Yet the studio still pumped a reported $200 million budget into this movie, plus the additional expenses of hyping it up into one of the year’s most anticipated releases. This was cinematic sabotage on a historic level, and Todd Phillips made the C-suite at WB into his willing accomplices (likely due to the tax write-offs). Goddamn diabolical.

Dumbest Attempt to be Smart

Again, no shortage of candidates. Granted, I liked The American Society of Magical Negroes more than most, but I still have to admit that it was the work of an inexperienced filmmaker who couldn’t always keep his own arguments straight. But at least it was charming, which is more than I can say for Skincare. And if we’re talking about movies that totally failed to follow through on their premises, or even think about their initial premises for more than two minutes, we might as well throw I.S.S. onto the pile.

Then we’ve got the failed awards contenders. Fly Me to the Moon was tonally inconsistent. The Young Woman and the Sea was boilerplate pablum. Saturday Night was incoherent chaos that failed to do justice to the real-life people and events depicted.

But of all the would-be emperors who hyped themselves up this year, none of them showed up more shriveled and anemic and pathetically naked than Civil War. We all thought that Alex freaking Garland was incapable of making a movie this boring and brain-dead. It’s a movie with an overtly political premise that didn’t have the guts to say anything political. A movie that asks all these open-ended questions without offering any answer or statement more complex than “war is bad.” It’s outright embarrassing to see so much talent spinning its wheels in a vain attempt at making something out of nothing.

Most Disappointing Action

Well, The Killer’s Game wasted a phenomenal cast on a pathetically outdated script. And The Beekeeper might’ve been an interesting movie about the perils of online scams, if David Ayer could offer literally any other solution to any problem except for giving unlimited authority to an ubermensch and waiting until everyone is dead. But of course those movies were relative blips on the radar, compared to the radioactive failures of Borderlands and The Crow (2024).

And yet, as humiliating as those flops were, we can’t forget Argylle. Looking back over the past year, I’m hard-pressed to think of another movie that was a bigger waste of more talent (except maybe Megalopolis). Everybody knew that Matthew Vaughn of all people was going to put together a stellar spy thriller with such a deeply-stacked cast of A-list stars. Yet the movie turned out to be a laughable mess with shoddy effects and a convoluted plot that kept getting progressively worse. I’ve seen careers implode over less than this.

The “Epic Fail”

IF bit off way, way more than it bargained for, so incapable of telling a coherent story within this massive fantasy world that it could only ramble aimlessly until the runtime ran out. Speaking of fantasy epics, Damsel was a flashy and stupid waste of time, with nothing to say that we didn’t already get all the way back in the goddamn Shrek movies. (Seriously, this Netflix original got outclassed by The Princess, a Hulu original. Fucking laughable.)

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes wasn’t an outright failure, but I don’t hear anyone mentioning that movie in connection with the Andy Serkis trilogy. Similarly, Mufasa: The Lion King was a noble effort by talented filmmakers who valiantly tried to make a film that nobody asked for, and ultimately failed to make the case for why that movie earned the right to exist. In the end, both movies turned out to be exactly what they were made and marketed as: Functional name-brand products to be chewed up and spit out within a few short weeks.

But of course if we want to talk about world-class calamities built on a massive scale, we have to talk about Megalopolis. Honestly, I’m still on the fence about that one. I’m just saying, if the mainstream culture comes around on that movie in another ten or twenty years after Coppola’s passed on, it wouldn’t be the craziest thing to happen.

Instead, I’m giving this one to Borderlands, a massive pile of uninspired slop that literally nobody had any faith in. Every single actor was miscast, the reshoots did nothing to make the film any more coherent, the director checked out entirely to go make another movie while this one was in post… it’s just bad. Everything that could’ve possibly gone wrong did go wrong, yet it still got a prime summer release date and a full promotional loadout all the same. This is a work of pure malice toward the cast, the crew, the fans of the game, and the moviegoing public in general.

Most Disappointing Horror

The Exorcism probably deserves a mention here, but at least that movie came and went without doing much damage and we can all safely forget it ever happened.

No, I’m more interested with the year’s crop of “fool’s gold” horror, the trend of movies made and marketed as highbrow intellectual horror even though the actual movie fails to say anything of substance. For instance, we got a two-fer from the Shyamalan family this year, by way of The Watchers and Trap.

Longlegs made a big deal out of itself without any coherent statement to show for it. Oddity was a neat little campfire ghost story and not much else. Azrael had precious little to offer except for the gimmick of a mute cast.

But then we have Kinds of Kindness. I realize that calling this one a “horror” might be a bit of a stretch, but I’d argue that it was made and marketed within the same lane as others in this category. More to the point, it’s borderline impossible to tell what anyone was trying to do with this picture. Yorgos Lanthimos aggressively squandered whatever goodwill he might’ve earned with Poor Things, wasting it all on this meandering pretentious wreck that’s only weird for the sake of being weird.

Most Disappointing Sci-Fi Horror

Again, I.S.S. deserves mention here, delivering a “horror” premise that loses all suspense with the blatantly obvious fact that the characters are stuck in a no-win scenario. Likewise, Venom: The Last Dance made the mistake of introducing a monster so impossibly overpowered that it can only be defeated with implausible third-act fuckery. Alien: Romulus had better luck working as a horror movie, and it might’ve worked a lot better if not for the callbacks that actively make the film worse. As for Lisa Frankenstein, that movie totally failed to find a horror/comedy tonal balance while either disregarding or actively destroying everything that made the source text a timeless classic.

Yet the clear winner here is Spaceman, the latest proof that Adam Sandler is nowhere near Oscar-caliber, regardless of how many simpletons keep screaming out “But Uncut Gems!” The premise is uninspired, the performances are all flat, and the filmmakers pathetically mishandle the concept of an astronaut who keeps talking with an alien spider who may or may not be there. It truly is astounding how the filmmakers consistently choose the most boring possible decision every time.

Most Malicious Disappointment

Whoo boy. For such a historically godawful year as this, we need something special to take the top dishonor.

Madame Web? Venom: The Last Dance? No, we all knew the “Spider-Man without Spider-Man” megafranchise experiment was dead even before 2024, and Sony themselves came out and killed it even before Kraven came out. And anyway, this was such an incomprehensibly bad year for Lionsgate, it feels only fitting that the Most Malicious Disappointment of 2024 should come from that studio.

Megalopolis? At least that movie is an interesting kind of bad. The Crow (2024) is a strong candidate, but at least it’s trying (in vain) to resuscitate a good movie. What we need is another Lionsgate movie that’s boring as shit, without a single person in the cast or crew fit for the job, with delusions of kicking off a franchise, but they decided to reboot a bad movie that nobody remembers or wants anything to do with in 2024.

Did we get a movie like that? I give you The Strangers: Chapter 1.

Here we have a movie that dredged up a forgotten terrible flick from 2008, lifting all the major plot elements and scares of that movie while somehow making them even worse. It’s tasteless, brainless, insulting, and boring… and they filmed an entire trilogy of this shit all at once. Yes, this stinker already has two sequels in the can, both of which were delayed indefinitely after the first chapter bombed.

Literally everything about this whole project was a bad idea from the very start. This is self-sabotage to the point of literally lighting cash on fire. It’s a film so perfectly emblematic of a studio that went through 2024 like the Lionsgate execs were trying to fail on purpose.

But now we move on to the Wild Rides. Stay tuned.

By Curiosity Inc.

I hold a B.S. in Bioinformatics, the only one from Pacific University's Class of '09. I was the stage-hand-in-chief of my high school drama department and I'm a bass drummer for the Last Regiment of Syncopated Drummers. I dabble in video games and I'm still pretty good at DDR. My primary hobby is going online for upcoming movie news. I am a movie buff, a movie nerd, whatever you want to call it. Comic books are another hobby, but I'm not talking about Superman or Spider-Man or those books that number in the triple-digits. I'm talking about Watchmen, Preacher, Sandman, etc. Self-contained, dramatic, intellectual stories that couldn't be accomplished in any other medium. I'm a proud son of Oregon, born and raised here. I've been just about everywhere in North and Central America and I love it right here.

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