Movies & TV / Columns
The Top 10 Worst Films of 2024 (So Far)
Welcome, one and all, to part one of my Movies Mid-Year in Review for 2024! I’m your host Jeremy Thomas, and today we’re back looking at the worst films of the past six months. Keep in mind that this list is meant to be my personal opinion and not a definitive list. You’re free to disagree; you can even say my list is wrong but stating that an opinion is “wrong” is just silly. With that in mind, let’s get right into it!
2024 has certainly had its ups and downs at the movie theater. This year got off to a rough start, with a lack of heavy hitters due to strike-related delays from last year. That doesn’t mean that we’ve been bereft of good films (more on that in a few days or so), but the first half of the year did seem to be weighted a little heavier to the negative side. Fortunately, that is turning around, but the point is that we’ve had a strong (?) crop of early contenders for the worst of the year including comedy, action, horror and even a superhero film. We kick off the Mid-Year in Review by getting the bad out of the way, so let’s dive in.
Caveat: My criterion for inclusion is pretty simple: if a film was released in US theaters in any remotely significant capacity, or if it was a high-profile and marketed release on VOD or a major streaming service, then it was eligible. I don’t include films that are purely straight-to-video and may have a star or two but is essentially being shoveled out to reap in some profit on some name value. An example of a 2024 film of this nature that I didn’t include is Sunrise (Guy Pierce). There’s obviously some wiggle room on some of these and people may debate if some films are really “high-profile releases,” but that’s why it’s my list.
The only other caveat is that try as I might, I have not seen everything that was released yet this year, especially factoring in streaming services. The films that I have thus far missed that could have possibly qualified based on reputation are Miller’s Girl, Irish Wish, Horizon: An American Saga, and The Wages of Fear. For those curious, I have seen a total of 78 narrative feature films that have been released in 2024 so far.
Just Missing The Cut
• Damsel
• The Garfield Movie
• Back to Black
• Imaginary
• Atlas
#10: American Society of Magical Negroes
We start off with a film that it hurts to put on this list, because I think it had lofty aims. The problem is that The American Society of Magical Negroes doesn’t have enough backbone to see those aims to fruition. Kobi Libii’s satirical comedy is light on the satire — and frankly, it’s not doing all that much heavy lifting in the laugh department either. Taking the Magical Negro trope to task is a goal rife with potential, but Libii’s script feels either compromised by studio notes or simply unwilling to deliver any bite. It takes a very different take on the trope than is traditionally accepted – which is fine, as long as you’re using it to say something interesting. Here we get a surface exploration and a few jokes, but it doesn’t want to go much further than that. Instead, the notion of this secret society is kind of whisked away once our nervous protagonist Aren (Justice Smith, doing what he can) is on his first job working to help a generic tech bro guy (Drew Tarver, stuck in a flavorless role) find his happiness.
It’s at this point that the film drains most of its potential when it buries the main plot into a Cyrano-style romcom between Aren and his meet-cute Lizzie (An-Li Bogan, escaping relatively unscathed). The film then proceeds to fall down the romantic comedy hole. And while it checks back in with the main plot and its various themes, that has to take a backseat to building Aren and Lizzie’s connection so we want them to make it. By the time it remembers what it’s trying to do, we’re just about done and any chance to really say something seems lost.
I really question who this film was made for. If you’re educated on the trope, this isn’t really saying anything new; I may well be wrong, but I can’t imagine much in here being revelatory or cathartic to Black audiences. It kind of feels like it was softened so much that it would be palatable to the people it needs to reach but has been sanded down to the point of losing its value. I do think it looks good, and there are the bones of something interesting here. Credit also to David Alan Grier for giving a very good performance as Aren’s mentor. But it forgets that satire is hard because it needs to be willing to make people uncomfortable in order to make its point. And its unwillingness to do that is, ultimately, its biggest failing.
#9: Night Swim
Night Swim sadly set the bar low for big studio-delivered horror films in 2024, though the genre is recovering well. Bryce McGuire’s supernatural horror film was expanded from a 2014 short, something that you could probably guess at even if you weren’t aware. Some shorts simply don’t have enough meat on the bones to be expanded out to feature-length, and this is a prime example. It’s a silly concept, but that isn’t the issue; we’ve seen great films out of goofier things than “haunted swimming pool.”
The inherent problem with Night Swim is that McGuire wants his movie to be serious. And of course, not every horror film needs to be fun, but the tone is played far too straight and there isn’t enough substance to in the characters. The cast is trying but they don’t have much to work with; Wyatt Russell ends up reading like a less interesting version “Dad under supernatural influence” than those in films like Insidious and The Shining, while Kerry Condon is completely wasted in a thankless role as the concerned mother and wife. The two kids are there for the screams and nothing more and no one else makes any sort of impact.
McGuire clearly has talent behind the camera, as seen by the original short and a few inventive shots. Unfortunately, the character beats are so predictable that there’s little in the way of suspense and the jump scares don’t particularly work. There is a weird dip into J-horror tropes late in the film when it’s time for answers, and the joyless tone doesn’t help. Night Swim isn’t quite not so bad as to be memorably so; rather, it’s forgettable to the point that I had to struggle to remember much about it even now, six months after its release. I’ll forgive a bad horror film to some degree, but if you can’t make it memorable than it’s going straight to cinematic hell.
#8: Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver
I won’t lie; I did go into Rebel Moon – Part Two with a lot of skepticism. I’ve made no secret for how much I disliked the first film, which barely filed the serial numbers off its original pitch as a “mature” Star Wars film and bogged itself down in exposition, slow motion, paper-thin characters and a disjointed recruitment narrative. Scargiver at least doesn’t have to go through that whole rigamarole again and is a somewhat more focused story. But man, it doesn’t have much else to hang its hat on.
With The Scargiver, Snyder doubles down on the Seven Samurai storyline by setting up the obvious battle between the villagers of Veldt and the warlord (Ed Skrein, the only guy having fun in this movie). But because we need to stretch this out to a two-hour movie length, it’s time for more constant exposition dumps. We get moments of backstory of all our resistance fighters, all thrown into a single flashback-riddled scene, but they’re boilerplate backstories that keep the characters as nothing more than archetypes. There’s plenty of ruminating on the universe-wide implications of this war, but nothing beyond the monologues to reinforce it. It really just seems like Snyder is trying to fill time between the battle sequences so he can justify having split the film up.
And don’t get me wrong; those fight scenes are cool. But even then, the action is undercut by Snyder being Snyder. I know it’s cliché to criticize him for slow-motion, but that doesn’t make it less valid. We get slow-motion fake lightsaber scenes, slow-motion explosions, slow-motion leaping, slow-motion yelling, slow-motion shooting, slow-motion canteen-filling, slow-motion grain reaping, slow-motion grain threshing. I don’t know whether he just legitimately can’t think of different ways to express visuals or he’s digging in his heels against the criticism, but either way it makes for an infuriating watch.
I don’t care about any of these characters after four and a half hours of movie-watching; Snyder is too busy with his cool sequences to give me a reason to. I certainly don’t care about this universe, in which every plot twist is obvious. The only sympathy I feel for these poor characters is that they have to suffer through bad dialogue and worse wigs. The film ends with the promise of expanding the world at last, but Snyder’s already spent all the IP’s goodwill and I’m skeptical to say the least of anything that might follow.
#7: Madame Web
If I’m being honest, I think I might like Madame Web more than most. Yes, this Sony Spider-Man Universe film is a disaster, but people act like this is a worse film than Morbius and I strongly disagree. Morbius wishes it reached this film’s level of competence or entertainment, even on a “so bad it’s good” level. That, however, is not a high bar and Madame Web is neither competently made or particularly entertaining.
Madame Web fails for a number of reasons, but most notably because takes so many narrative shortcuts that it feels like the pseudo-superhero version of Chutes and Ladders. It’s telling the portion of the story before things get really interesting, as if it’s the first two episodes of a CW television series with a higher budget. And we all know that those first two episodes of superhero television tend to be really rough, so that should give you an idea of what you have here. The script is about 90% exposition and feels absolutely littered with studio notes of “add in an explanation for the audience here.”
That means there’s no room for any characterization, which is kind of a major problem for a film with all entirely new characters to audiences. Cassandra Webb and Ezekiel Sims are basic character arcs without much to establish them as unique (why is Ezekiel in a Spider-Man suit, by the way?), and the three teenagers that Cassie guides are given around two sentences of backstory each. Dakota Johnson is stuck playing the least engaging character of the protagonists — a problem, considering she’s the center of the film. And poor Sydney Sweeney is atrociously miscast, not only as a teenager at all but as in awkward shy girl role that completely wastes her charisma. Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor fare better, as their characters are actually able to be expressive.
Combine all that with some very sketchy editing and story choices that ruin the pacing (oh, let’s stop the momentum just before the third act to send Cassie to Peru for even more exposition!) and you have a film that is just a mess on the whole. The visual effects are not great, but for the Spider-Man Universe they’re actually above the median. The most frustrating part of Madame Web is that I want to see more of the three Spider-Heroes to be, but this movie has almost certainly doomed its chances unless they show up in Venom 3 as supporting appearances in an attempt to rehab them.
#6: Founders Day
Founders Day is a film that passed a lot of people by — and they’re probably better for it. Frankly, this is a little weird of a film to talk about considering recent events as of this writing. But regardless of recent incidents of political violence, this substandard slasher film doesn’t add much in the way of value, either thematically or in terms of entertainment. Erik Bloomquist’s film about a masked killer murdering people in the midst of an election wants so badly to be “Political Scream,” but that notion falls quickly apart when Bloomquist doesn’t give anything even approaching the level of character depth or notability that the greatest meta-slasher of all time does.
But that’s aiming too high. Honestly, even a comparison to Urban Legend would be an insult to the latter film. The political aspects are just window dressing, and they’re the only thing that distinguishes this from dozens upon dozens of middling post-Scream slashers. When the first major twist drops and there are 45 minutes to go, you know that you’re in for a convoluted final act — and that’s exactly what we get here, all leading to an awful coda that rings as hollow as the 100 minutes that preceded it.
Bloomquist struggle to find the proper tone throughout the movie, a matter not at all helped by the fact that the adult characters are going for farcical horror comedy while the teens are playing things straight. The kills are bloody but not inventive in the slightest, the killer’s masked look feels like a knock-off, and any intrigue is wrung out of the film by the last act reveals. As to the themes, we get it — both sides of the political spectrum are performative and inauthentic. This isn’t anything new, and saying it isn’t brave if you’re not going to do anything with it. In the end, this just feels like a massive missed opportunity that deserves a vote of no-confidence.
#5: The Exorcism
It feels a little harsh to bust on The Exorcism for being a bad movie. Not because it’s good, but because it’s so obviously a personal film to Joshua John Miller. Miller is the son of Jason Miller, who played Father Karras in The Exorcist, and it’s an impossible not to see a lot of the younger Miller in this movie about a actor with the last name of Miller who takes on the role of a priest in an exorcism film called The Georgetown Project (The Exorcist being famously set in Georgetown). And yet, as much as I wanted to connect with this movie I just couldn’t.
There are small moments in The Exorcism that work — mostly in the first act when it explores the fractured relationship between Russell Crowe’s Anthony and his daughter/PA Lee (played by Ryan Simpkins), or Lee’s burgeoning friendship (and perhaps more) with Chloe Bailey’s actress Blake. But too quickly, the film drifts away from that focus every time it remembers that it’s a horror film and not a family drama. And the horror is where it falls apart. Miller employs all the standard exorcism movie plot beats in pretty short order, distinguishable only because of the meta aspect of the film being made, and a backstory plot point around Anthony’s childhood trauma is not executed well at all.
The cast is fine; it’s the characters they’re playing that don’t work. Adam Goldberg’s director is a monster without anything else to him and Sam Worthington is barely there as fellow actor Joe. David Hyde Pierce is a welcome presence as the on-set Catholic priest acting as a consultant, but he gets lost like the rest of the characters once we hit the obvious final act. The tone tries to build up suspense but there’s never any sense of surprise or tension because we have a very good idea what’s going to happen and are just going through the motions to get there. If you’re aching for a Russell Crowe exorcism movie, watch The Pope’s Exorcist because at least that one has Crowe buzzing around on a scooter. This isn’t scary and isn’t entertaining; it’s just sad, and ultimately a chore to get through.
#4: Trigger Warning
I’m not one to dismiss Netflix’s action films out of hand. Yes, they’ve had a number of stumbles, but there have been a few fairly entertaining ones. Trigger Warning is not one of them. Jessica Alba certainly has what it takes to be an action star for the service; she delivers competent work here as a Special Forces op returning home following her father’s mysterious death to discover corruption in the small town. But like Jennifer Lopez and Gal Gadot’s Netflix efforts, she is saddled does neither her nor the rest of the cast any favors at all.
Trigger Warning’s screenplay was done by Josh Olson, John Brancato, and Halley Wegryn Gross – and frankly, it feels like a movie cobbled together by three separate writers. The core conceit is good, but the jumbled plot elements give no opportunity for any sort of characters to spark. We don’t learn all that much about Alba’s Parker outside of a bit of trauma and some ham-fisted flashback sequences and the rest of the characters get even less. As the screenplay stumbles its way through the plot elements, there’s rarely any time for anything to stick. It’s one scene after another, sewn roughly together by decent but bog-standard action sequences.
Alba is great when it comes time to kick ass, and she lends her charm to making Parker more interesting than she is on the page. However, she can’t work her way around the gaps between the plot beats. There’s a political undertone here that comes off extremely undercooked, and a few bits of dialogue around it seems extremely out of place in a film that doesn’t appear interested in engaging in those themes. And not for nothing, but the title has nothing to do with the movie; it feels like an executive Googled “action movie name generator” and chose the buzziest, most pithy sounding one. There’s just not enough here worth watching between the action, the pacing is all sorts of off, and it all just ends up being a massive letdown. I’d like to see Alba stretch her action muscles a bit more, but this? This ain’t it.
#3: Tarot
I’ve seen worse horror films in the past few years than Tarot, but I’m not sure if any have been as sincerely aggravating. This bit of supernatural horror about cursed tarot cards laying waste to a group of New York college students who dared do readings from it has one of the worst screenplays I can remember in a long time. I could run down all the issues — the way it throws in characters who are shallow even by lackluster horror standards, the deeply cringeworthy dialogue and eyeroll-worthy backstory of our bland protagonist Haley, the way the titular cursed fate-reading deck doesn’t follow its own rules, and much more. But that doesn’t do the film proper justice. After all, there is no shortage of these kinds of issues in other horror films, and some of them even end up entertaining in a way.
The problem with Tarot isn’t the specific issues; it’s how deep each of those issues are. Writing-directing team Spenser Cohen and Nicholas Adams devolve every iffy horror trope into their most frustrating iterations, to the point that it is almost impressive how many trope they hit, how many narrative shortcuts they take, and how much narrative logic gets defenestrated in the final act in favor of bland set pieces. When the group of friends being killed off for using the cursed deck Google “horoscope deaths” and randomly click on the second link down to find the single person on Earth they need lives easily within driving distance, it’s funny but not intentionally so. Instead, this film’s version of “funny” is Jacob Batalon’s insufferable comedic relief character of Paxton, and everything else is played dead serious.
The only thing Tarot has going for it is its solid cast and some semi-decent creature designs. But those are undercut by the cast having nothing to dig into with their characters, as well as uninspired use of the tarot-inspired creatures, who just pounce on their victims for the most part. Every character is done dirty in this, to the point that I began to wonder how much had been cut out because there had to be something explaining these narrative leaps. This is one of the laziest, most eye-rolling examples of studio horror I remember seeing in quite some time.
#2: History Of Evil
History of Evil is basically “What if The Shining was anti-fascist but also awful?” This rote, painfully dull horror flick is set in a world where right-wing fascism has taken over America, and a fairly generic resistance leader (a perfectly adequate Jackie Cruz) escapes from unjust imprisonment only to find herself in a racist and misogynist haunted house with her daughter, her husband (Paul Wesley, painfully miscast) and a guide (Rhonda Johnson Dents, also solid) en route to a safe zone.
There’s actually some real potential for this kind of a movie, but it doesn’t go anywhere. It’s constrained by its budget to be sure, but it also feels like first-time feature writer-director Bo Mirhosseni had a great idea but didn’t know where to take it after that. It so shamelessly rips off The Shining with one major plot element that it doesn’t feel like homage; it just plays as “This worked for King so I’m gonna use it.”
There are a few moments of decent imagery here, but nothing else has a chance to shine. The cast is working with what they have, which isn’t much; I can’t hold too much against Wesley because he doesn’t get a chance to go wild with the role. The atmosphere is stifled by the dreadful pacing and the film is wrapped up in an exceedingly anti-climactic way to boot. Shudder gets too much crap for its original and exclusive films output, but this rightfully belongs in the bin.
#1: Not Another Church Movie
There is an incredibly wide berth between the #2 movie on this list and #1. Not Another Church Movie is the kind of movie that is so bad, it makes other spoof films look better in comparison because you realize that it’s not as easy to pull the genre off as you might think. Johnny Mack’s directorial effort ostensibly tries to take the piss out of Tyler Perry movies, but it mostly just shows that Mack is no Tyler Perry — and that’s coming from someone who isn’t generally a fan of Perry’s films. The plot, such as it is, revolves around God (played by Jamie Foxx in his worst career decision to date) demanding a movie from a not-at-all-veiled characterization of Perry (Kevin Daniels) named “Tyler Pherry.” That’s what this movie thinks is clever.
None of this works. Not a single moment, not a single line, nothing. The script has its own Madea, named “Madude” — again, it thinks this is a hilarious joke — and those scenes try to spoof the Madea movies except for that they’re just worse versions of Madea scenes without any parodical nature to them. Mikey Rourke is here as the devil, because why not, alongside Vivica A. Fox, Tisha Campbell, Jasmine Guy and a ton of other cast members who should be in at least better material than this. Many of the jokes are the instantly-dated and the performances are half-hearted at best, with most of the cast seemingly here to collect a paycheck and nothing more.
It’s very clear that Mack has no experience on the directorial side, as he’s in over his head in just about every respect. The editing is all off-kilter, there’s no cohesive sense of tone, and things just randomly sort of happen throughout. For years, I was steadfast in my opinion that nothing came particularly close to the 2009 travesty Meet the Spartans for the worst movie I’ve ever seen, but it finally has competition. Expect to see this in the same spot when the end of the year rolls around, because I can’t possibly believe there is a worse movie set to be released in 2024.
And that will do it for this! Join me next week (or perhaps sooner!) as, with the bad out of the way, we take a look at the best films of the year thus far. Until then, have a good one and don’t forget to read the many other great columns, news articles and more here at 411mania.com! JT out.