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The Top 10 Worst Movies of 2021 (So Far)

July 14, 2021 | Posted by Jeremy Thomas
TOM & JERRY

Top 10 Worst Films of 2021 (So Far)

Welcome, one and all, to part one of my Movies Mid-Year in Review for 2021! I’m your host Jeremy Thomas, and today we’ll taking a look at the worst films of the past six months before moving onto the best next week. 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!

2021 has seen the movie landscape make its moves to return to normal as the pandemic recedes. As I write this, we’re just coming off the first film in almost a year and a half to cross $80 million in its opening weekend, as well as the first to cross $150 million domestically. Still, cinema is in a weird place as studios struggle to come to grips with the new normal and streaming tries to hold onto the gains they made in 2020. 2021 thus far has seen misfires across genres and distribution models, from big-name blockbusters to would-be family comedies and more. There are some real bad movies in here (one of which ranks toward the top of the worst movies I’ve literally ever seen), so let’s brace ourselves and get into it.

Caveat: I am continuing the criteria I started using last year, which is that if a film was released in 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. 2020 examples of this include Vanquish (Morgan Freeman & Ruby Rose) and Cosmic Sin (Bruce Willis & Frank Grillo). 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 this year, especially factoring in streaming services. The films that I have thus far missed that could have possibly qualified based on reputation are Voyagers, Bliss, Blithe Spirit, American Skin, Crisis and Awake. For those curious, I have seen a total of 83 films that have been released in 2021 so far.

Just Missing The Cut

• Locked Down
• The Woman in the Window
• The Ice Road
• Mortal Kombat
• SHOOK

#10: Chaos Walking

Top Worst Films of 2020 (So Far) - Chaos Walking

I’ll say this for Chaos Walking — it certainly has a hell of a premise behind it. I’ve never read the trilogy by Patrick Ness that this sci-fi film is based on, but the idea of a world where all men’s’ thoughts are broadcast and all women seem to be dead is a strong one and I’m definitely intrigued enough to perhaps check it out at some point. But based on all the acclaim it has, I have to believe that this film does the source material a disservice. Because as intriguing as the set-up is and as talented as a cast as it has, this sure is a mediocre effort.

It feels like that has to lay at the feet of both the studio and director Doug Liman. Ness and Christopher Ford wrote the script for the film, and you can see how the ideas are valiantly struggling to get out. There are moments in the plot where you see those ideas break through but seems like most of the interesting stuff probably got sliced out in the significant reshoots it underwent due to poor test screenings. Instead, we have the base concept and then a pretty standard dystopian film that sprouts from it, which Limon turns into a generic chase movie.

The only major appeal here coming from the cast, who try their hardest. Poor Tom Holland is having a rough year so far (more on that in a bit), as he gives far better performances than his roles have deserved. Holland strikes up a good rapport with Daisy Ridley and the rest of the cast is pretty solid, but they’re trying to lift a film that has no real life to it and embodying characters who don’t have enough depth to be compelling. It would be disingenuous to say that this is a terrible film; there is some stuff to enjoy in here. It feels like a proper science fiction film and the effects are neat, but it’s all in service of something more benignly bland than this thing should really be. I didn’t hate Chaos Walking by any measure, but I will probably barely remember it before too long.

#9: Profile

Top Worst Films of 2020 (So Far) - Profile

The advent of “ScreenLife” thrillers has been an innovation of the past several years, with movies like Unfriended and Searching finding ways to breathe new life into the found footage concept. Profile dips away from the horror aspects of Unfriended to try for a more dramatic take and sadly, it’s no Searching to say the least. I acknowledge that I might be overly harsh on this one because as a reporter (albeit in a very different capacity) I see all the things that Valene Kane’s Amy is doing and am aghast — absolutely AGHAST — at how bad and reckless of a journalist she is. This is based on a true story about a reporter who tries to catfish an ISIS recruiter and I would love to see a documentary about that because I think that would be fascinating, but this? This ain’t it.

Found footage-style films generally rely on people making poor choices; after all, we need to find ways to bring conflict into a story that involves just a few people (basically two people, in this case). But it’s still stunning and insulting how many massive ethical breaches and simple mistakes Amy makes, from doing her catfishing on the same laptop she handles her personal life to pushing well past any kind of moral lines with what she’s doing. But it’s not just her; despite her seriously half-assed effort at going undercover to catfish Shazad Latif’s ISIS recruiter Bilel, he seems to buy it at every step. You could think that maybe he’s playing dumb to catch an undercover expose attempt, but no…he’s not playing. He’s just dumb.

All that leads into the end result of this movie, which is a sloppy reporter who is unqualified for what she’s trying to do clumsily playing internet catfish footsie with a gullible terrorist for two hours. I know this might sound shocking, but that’s not too engaging to watch. Timur Bekmambetov’s tricks with the story don’t do much to help here either. Kane and Latif actually give quite good performances, but it’s all in service of a movie that doesn’t deserve them. I really wanted to like this, because I enjoy the ScreenLife format, but this was a big nope for me.

#8: The Reckoning

Top Worst Films of 2020 (So Far) - The Reckoning

While the pandemic was a bad time for blockbusters trying to get released, it’s been a remarkably good time for horror. The genre has continued its resurgence over the last year and a half and some of the absolute films from 2020 and 2021 have delved into very frightening territory. Of course, it hasn’t all been great, and this period horror film is a prime example. And it hurt to see how painfully lackluster The Reckoning is, because it’s the latest filmic failing by none other than Neil Marshall. Marshall is perhaps best known to horror fans for The Descent, and to non-horror fans for directing a couple of the best episodes of Game of Thrones. A film like this, about a woman subjected to torment over false accusations of being a witch, really should be right up his alley.

And yet as much as The Reckoning has some great ideas, it doesn’t do anything with them. Marshall wrote the film with lead actress Charlotte Kirk, and it is clearly designed to have things to say about the misogynistic way that women are treated in the modern era as much as in centuries past. It does somewhat get the point across in a clumsy way, but the film built around that point alternates between dull and schlocky. The set-up is good, as Kirk’s Grace Haverstock tries to make her way following the death of her husband and gets set up by her usurer in revenge. But once Grace ends up in torment, the film bogs down in the torments used during witch trials and decides to let the torture devices largely lead the way in his metaphor, to little effect.

It would be unfair to lay all the blame at Kirk’s feet as some have, even if her performance is not quite up to the task of conveying Grace’s emotional arc. The problems fall largely in the drab production (except Kirk, who even in post-torture scenes looks disconcertingly glamorous) and the way Marshall lets the pace grind to a stop on several occasions. The dialogue rolls off unnaturally even knowing this is a period piece, and nothing really feels authentic here, including the action-filled climax which unfolds in an incredibly predictable and yet somewhat ludicrous manner. The one thing we can say as kind of a positive is that this is vaguely better than Marshall’s last film, the Hellboy reboot. But that faint praise is far more damning than anything that happens to the characters in this mess.

#7: Tom & Jerry

Top Worst Films of 2020 (So Far) - Tom & Jerry

You know, despite its ranking on this list I don’t actually hate Tom & Jerry. It’s not particularly offensive, the story is about what you’d expect of a full-length feature Tom & Jerry film, and the acting could be a hell of a lot worse. That said, not hating it isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement and on any real objective level, it’s just a bad movie. Sure, Warner Bros. didn’t necessarily make this for me; it’s a family film and I absolutely get that. But “it’s for kids” doesn’t excuse a movie from being lazy, boring, and often quite eye-rollingly irritating. I’ve said this before, but family films have had the bar raised significantly over the years and this film feels like one of those bad 1990s and early 2000s animal movies. You know the ones: Air Bud, Cats & Dogs, and most notably Garfield and Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties.

Tom & Jerry has all the hallmarks of those movies, relying on the animals for half-assed humor and hip-hop songs that don’t jive with the tone while forcing the human actors to mug constantly for the camera and do their best to deliver some level of entertainment. It works here only nominally better than the Garfield movies, in part because Chloe Grace Moretz, Michael Peña and the rest of their cast try to prop up their paper-thin, unappealing characters. Meanwhile, the titular characters go through all the motions of what a Tom & Jerry story should be, but they don’t get enough time to cut loose in the way their classic versions could.

Ultimately this all rests on the shoulders of the often-boring script by Kevin Costello, as well as the fact that director Tim Story fails to channel the energy of the original shorts. You can certainly see the appeal of doing a Tom & Jerry film, especially when you look at its $124 million gross plus HBO Max streaming success. But this whole thing probably wouldn’t have even been all that great as a quickie cartoon, much less a feature-length film, and the result is a film that lowers the bar for 2020s family films.

#6: Cherry

Top Worst Films of 2020 (So Far) - Cherry

Remember how I said this was a bad year for Tom Holland thus far? I present exhibit B. Cherry is a movie that clearly wants to be a Film but isn’t sure how. Instead, it’s turned by a host of flaws into depression porn, trying to bring the audience down with its lows while not delving much beyond the surface of what those lows actually mean. And it had talent to work with, too. Holland and Ciara Bravo are actually great as the titular (actually unnamed) man based in Nico Walker and the man’s girlfriend Emily. They channel everything they have in an attempt to lift this script, which gets the lion’s share of the blame. It has an attention to characterization that would make the 1980s-era slasher films seem like full-blown character studies by comparison. We don’t know much of anything about Cherry or Emily beyond the surface words or the voiceover narration given by Holland in character. They only have depth because the actors dig as deep as they can, then go a little further. And the rest of the characters don’t even get that level of character.

It’s not all on the script, though. Joe and Anthony Russo are fine directors on a technical level, and I’m fully willing to believe they have a great drama in them, but it’s not here. They pay more attention to style than thematic storytelling and the film suffers badly as a result. It’s clear they have things to say here, and they try to lean into the themes of what the American infrastructures of war, health care, and capitalism do to the young and poor in this country. But they undermine themselves with the cool technical flourishes, and they can’t get around the fact that outside of our leads no character is interesting or admirable enough to stick. Some of their visual touches work, but others like the interstitial chapter cards just reek of an idea that was better left on the floor.

There’s too much in this story that feels too familiar to make a connection to. And one could argue that maybe this isn’t the fault of the film, being based on the life of a real guy. But even a cursory Googling makes it clear this is honestly as much fiction as it is fact. And that’s fine, but if the script is going to play that fast and loose it can avoid being so much of a series of tropes and familiar scenes strung into each other. For a 141-minute film, this film really brushes over any particular scene or detail almost as if it’s afraid to stand on its own. Holland and Bravo can walk away from this film feeling proud of their work, but otherwise Cherry is a big misfire.

#5: The Little Things

Top Worst Films of 2020 (So Far) - The Little Things

Do me a favor: go check out the poster for this January Warner Bros. release. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Okay, back now? Cool. Now, imagine that this movie didn’t have three Oscar winners that it could emblazon on said poster and tout in its trailer. Tell me if you think this script would still been put to film. Yeah, me neither. Obviously, I’m being incredibly snarky here, but that’s only because this was an early contender for Biggest Disappointment of the Year for me. I’m a big fan of the work of Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, and yes even Jared Leto. I’m also a big fan of noirish detective stories, and director John Lee Hancock has done some pretty great films that were willing to look at the dark side of human behavior. Add in the fact that this was a film Hancock has been passionate about getting made for almost 30 years, and this seemed like a slam dunk.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case at all. It quickly becomes clear soon into this muddled, shapeless story why Steven Spielberg passed on it way back in 1993: not only is it darker than Spielberg would normally go for, but the story is also a pastiche of dozens of better crime thrillers. Washington largely sleepwalks his way through the lead role of police officer Joe “Deke” Deacon, a man troubled from an unsolved case from his past that (to no one’s surprise) has a connection to a new case in his old stomping grounds of Los Angeles. This is the kind of role that Washington needs no effort to make palatable, an ability he certainly demonstrates here.

Hancock’s script offers no real thrills to the mystery that Deke is trying to solve. In fact, there’s barely any mystery; Deke just sort of lumbers through the opening of the film, colliding with the LAPD a couple of times until Leto’s character comes into focus and is clearly the killer from moment one. Leto and Rami Malek, the latter playing a hotshot detective, are doing more inspired work but there’s not enough in their characters to draw any interest and the ending is remarkably flat. There are a couple of okay visual touches in here, but this one set the early bar for the worst movies of the year.

#4: Thunder Force

Top Worst Films of 2020 (So Far) - Thunder Force

There is a point where you just have to say, “enough is enough.” And we’re way past that point for movies directed by Ben Falcone and starring Melissa McCarthy. I’m not trying to take shots at them as a couple; I’m sure they’re great and I’m very happy for them. And I fully understand that they enjoy working together. But at this point, for the sake of comedy, this professional collaboration needs to come to an end. Tammy, The Boss, Life of the Party, Superintelligence — they don’t make funny movies. And sadly, despite the dressings of an easy genre for to mock for laughs in the superhero film, Thunder Force is no different.

On the surface, Thunder Force looks like a solid enough concept to work: pair McCarthy, who I will always argue is a gifted comedienne, with the always-great Octavia Spencer and let them play with the foibles of a superhero film. And yet, the result is 107 minutes of pure “meh” and boredom. McCarthy plays the same character she usually does in the blue collar, socially awkward loser who finds herself in over her head. This time it’s because of a world where all sociopaths get superpowers and she’s one of the only superheroes (thanks to her blundering). This is every other Falcone & McCarthy movie we’ve seen, given a superhero coat of paint. That means plenty of ad libs, overexplaining the jokes, and weird awkward humor. It also means McCarthy’s character spends most of her time making not-funny pop culture jokes while everyone else trying desperately to make the humor work.

As is the norm, pretty much everyone is wasted in this. Spencer is able to work off McCarthy reasonably well, but the supporting cast including Bobby Cannavale, Jason Bateman, Pom Klementieff, Melissa Leo, and Taylor Mosby have basically nothing to do. The pace is absolutely awful at times, the action doesn’t work. It all just seems to be going through the motions, snagging the lowest-hanging fruit and barely even harvesting them. I really hope McCarthy goes back to more adventurous fare because this kind of thing has been beneath her for a long, long time.

#3: Infinite

Top Worst Films of 2020 (So Far) - Infinite

The first half of 2021 is littered with bad movies from good directors. We’ve already been over many of them: Neil Marshall, the Russos, Timur Bekmambetov, Doug Limon. But Antoine Fuqua — this one kinda hurts. Fuqua is the man who made Training Day along with fun movies like Olympus Has Fallen, The Equalizer, the Magnificent Seven remake, and such. Even on those occasions where his films lack any depth or weight, they’re generally still able to figure out what fun or tension are. Infinite has very little of either, nor much of anything else that makes sense.

But really, I can’t blame that on Fuqua, who is hamstrung an incomprehensible script by Ian Shorr. Shore adapted a novel by D. Eric Maikranz, and that may have been the first error because this feels like the kind of story that plays better in prose than on screen. The issues are evident from the start when Mark Wahlberg delivers a monologue trying to set down the setting’s premise: basically, that Infinites are people who remember all their reincarnations and a bad Infinite is trying to end the world, so the good Infinites are trying to stop them. It quickly gets very overly complex from there, with Mark Wahlberg playing an Infinite who knows where the doomsday device is but doesn’t remember because it was his past incarnation. So a bunch of good Infinites must help him do so before the bad guy gets to him and finds it.

That’s…a lot for a premise. And yet, it still doesn’t even explain half of the nonsense in this film, which is dragged down by constant exposition that the cast has to unfurl while still sounding like characters. Chiwetel Ejiofor is the villain, and his motivation makes no sense for a host of reasons, nor does his ridiculous weapon that can trap souls in microchips. (Don’t ask me to explain, the movie sure doesn’t.) And listen, nonsense action films can be fun. I love a ton of them. But this one is killed by the constant need to explain everything, not to mention the fact that the goofy action scenes aren’t that fun. And poor Mark Wahlberg is so miscast that makes my body ache, with his performance seeming like it’s in another film entirely He doesn’t feel like an Infinite — he feels like Mark Wahlberg wondering how he got onto this set. There may be a couple of fun moments, but they’re so few and far between that this is just infuriatingly boring, which may be its worst crime of all.

#2: The Unholy

Top Worst Films of 2020 (So Far) - The Unholy

I’m always willing to give a horror film a shot, because let’s be honest: a lot of horror flicks that look potentially bad turn out to be pretty damned good. And a horror film has Jeffrey Dean Morgan, William Sadler, and Cary Elwes in it? Well, now you’ve got my attention. Unfortunately, that’s all that The Unholy has, and some of that doesn’t turn out to be a positive. Religion has always been a staple of the horror genre, all the way back to Haxan in 1922 and most famously in The Exorcist and its ilk. So it’s no surprise that Evan Spiliotopoulos would see potential in adapting James Herbert’s 1983 novel Shrine, but oh my is this a misfire from start to finish.

Morgan at least is serviceable here in the lead role, that of a disgraced journalist who stumbles upon a story about a girl blessed with the apparent powers of a saint and inspiring a legion of followers. He and Sadler are the best part about this abysmal work, which stumbles through its plot points with all the grace of a drunken elephant. It’s not even remotely shocking when the young girl (an okay Cricket Brown) displays some concerning traits, as the film doesn’t try to hide anything of its secrets very hard. In fact, it gives most of them away due to its opening scene. As the film barrels along toward an obvious and inevitable conclusion, all we as the viewers can do is count how many of our predictions will come true. The answer is: most of them.

And don’t get me wrong; you don’t need a ton of surprises to make a good film, horror or not. Predictable has worked on many an occasion. But it’s the ham-handed, shallow way Spiliotopoulos’ script deals with its characters and themes which fails the story. Spiliotopoulos isn’t any better behind the camera, with a complete lack of scares and some truly, truly dire use of CGI. Cary Elwes’ Irish accent as a Catholic Bishop is very bad, and the character is too mustache-twirling for Elwes to breathe any life into him. Simultaneously frightless, preachy, and dull, The Unholy is a horror film that is well left buried under its tree.

#1: Music

Top Worst Films of 2020 (So Far) - Music

There is so much to say about Sia’s directorial debut Music and how bad it is, it would take an entire column all of its own. I wrote a much longer review when I first watched in April that you can see here if you want more detailed thoughts on how and why this misses the mark, but in the interests of brevity (too late), I’ll try my best to boil it down. The easiest thing to say about this film is that it’s an utterly wrongheaded, irresponsible, misguided, offensively bad, and simply offensive mess of a movie that fails on every conceivable level, but that doesn’t even quite describe the awfulness appropriately. There was a lot of controversy around how the pop star handled early criticism of what was seen in trailers, but we won’t get into that because there’s more than enough examples within the finished film as to why this thing is the worst movie not only of the year, but of remotely recent memory.

What vaguely passes for a screenplay in this movie was written by Sia and children’s author Dallas Clayton, based on a one-page story the former wrote in 2007. Maybe it wasn’t a disaster that absolutely everything wrong, but the script has no such luck. Instead, it presents its titular character, a severely autistic young woman, not as a person but as a hurdle for the real main character in Kate Hudson’s Zu. Zu is a recovering alcoholic who deals prescription drugs to make money and has to take care of Music (Maddie Ziegler) when their grandmother dies suddenly. It’s not hard to guess where this goes from there: Music is presented as the saintly creature that, by taking responsibility for her, causes Zu to learn to becomes a better person. It’s Rain Man, but without the super-casino skills, with extra pretension, and with less sensitivity. This is certainly not to say that you can’t portray nonverbal autistic characters; far from it. But it should be handled in a way that doesn’t feel indistinguishable from a (hypothetical) performance designed to mock such people.

To be clear, I’m not saying that Sia was trying to mock people on the autism spectrum in any way. That the complete lack of personification of Music is well-meaning, however, doesn’t make it any less awful. Ziegler — who is not autistic — affects an exaggerated performance that goes way over the top. That’s not on the young actress; it was on Sia to bring in the proper people to do this type of character justice. That the film also uses prone restraint a couple of times, a process which has been criticized for causing injury and even killing autistic people before. These scenes were roundly criticized in the lead-up to the release and Sia said they would be removed as well as a disclaimer added, then didn’t do so. The level of irresponsibility to film said scenes, receive criticism about them, promise to remove them and included a disclaimer and then do neither, brings this film from passively reprehensible to actively so.

Now let’s take all of that mess, and pile on the rest of the problems that come with this being such a bad movie from any critical level. The plot is basically a collection of tropes strung along, one after the other. Sia’s direction goes for a gritty, realistic tone that she fails to fit tonally with the fantastical musical sequences that are intended to give us insight into Music’s mindset, which are equal parts pretentious and useless in helping us understand her The dialogue is bad, the characterization of anyone not named Zu is one-dimensional, and the tone is so wildly uneven that it’s hard to tell at times if it’s trying to be funny or is just unintentionally so. This film would be ripe for The Room-style midnight matinees if it weren’t so depressing. This is not only the worst movie of the year, but also one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen in almost 45 years of life.

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.