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The Top 20 Worst Films of 2021 (#20 – 11)

January 17, 2022 | Posted by Jeremy Thomas
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City Image Credit: Sony Pictures

Top 20 Films of 2021 (#20 – 11)

Welcome, one and all, to my Movies Year in Review for 2021! I’m your host Jeremy Thomas, and today we’ll starting a look at the best and worst films of the past 12 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!

My 2021 movies year in review officially kicks off in the 411 Movie Zone! I’m back for the second year in a row after a few years off. 2021 was a year that saw movies make a big comeback after going dormant for much of 2020, and that meant a wide variety of films both good and bad from blockbusters to horror, to action-thrillers and family-friendly comedies. The rise of streaming during the pandemic meant films were more available than ever and while we got some stellar movies, there was a lot of bad too. We kick off my year in review, as always, by getting the worst out of the way and that means it’s time to start my look at the worst of the year. So today we start off with the first ten of my 20 worst movies of the last twelve months. Hold onto your butts folks, ’cause it’s gonna get bumpy.

Caveat: My criteria for a film qualifying fdor this list is simple: 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, nor relatively minor streaming releases that weren’t promoted or prominent in any major way. 2021 example the former are Vanquish (Ruby Rose & Morgan Freeman) 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 I have tried, but have not seen everything that was released in 2021, especially factoring in streaming services. The films that I missed that could have possibly qualified based on reputation are After We Fell, God’s Not Dead: We the People, He’s All That, and Separation. Other than those, I feel reasonably confident I would have seen just about every movie that would have likely made the list. For those curious, I saw a total of 163 films that were released in 2021 (up significantly from last year’s 119).

Just Missing the Cut

• Mortal Kombat
• The Ice Road
• Things Heard & Seen

#20: The 8th Night

Top 20 Worst Films of 2021 - The 8th Night

First one on my list is a movie that surprised me that it made a lot of people’s radar. Netflix has been a standout in championing foreign films oer the last couple years, including foreign genre films, as it expands its slate. That allowed a film like Kim Yoo-jung’s South Korean supernatural thriller The 8th Night to get some decent promotion upon its release earlier this year. But while it glimmers with potential, the movie — about a former exorcist drawn into an attempt to prevent a demon from regaining its power and plunging the world into eternal darkness — ends up being a serious disappointment.

That’s unfortunate too, because the cast is quite good in this. Lee Sung-min and Nam Da-reum have a great chemistry with each other as the aforementioned ex-exorcist the neophyte monk who he ends up teaming with, and Kim Yoo-jung has an excellent turn as a mysterious girl connected with the case. But the script is a travesty, throwing too many deeply unnecessary twists and turns into the story. Kim is trying to amp up the mystery here, but it’s actually the least interesting and thing going on. The dynamic between Lee and Nam as the salty guardian and his naïve, unwanted assistant is far more engaging than the smoke and mirrors, which are complicated by a convoluted mythology.

While Kim is able to serve a bit better behind the camera than he is with a pen in wringing moments of suspense and creepiness from the overabundance of nonsense, he’s not quite able to get a handle on the pace. That’s most evident in the overlong climax, which takes any final chance the film may have had at entertaining and sinks it underwater despite the best efforts of all involved. There’s glimmers of good stuff shining around the corners of The 8th Night, but it’s largely subsumed by a tired, frustrating experience on the whole.

#19: Chaos Walking

Top 20 Worst Films of 2021 - Chaos Walking

Chaos Walking was the film among the bottom 20 that potentially had the most going for it in concept. The trilogy by Patrick Ness that this film is based on has a great idea, set in a world where all men’s’ thoughts are broadcast to each other and all women are apparently dead due to a war with another species on the plant. There’s a ton of potential there, but the script that Ness co-worte with Christopher Ford doesn’t seem able to properly explore that concept.

Whether that’s the fault of the source material or the adapted script is not something I can speak to, but a big part of it seems to be due to the studio as well as director Doug Limon, a fine filmmaker who looks to have sliced the story to pieces during the reported extensive reshoots and removed most of the interesting material. Instead we get a largely generic young adult dystopian film centered on a standard chase storyline.

You have to feel for the cast, who are trying their hardest but are let down by this cut. Tom Holland may have closed out the year strong with Spider-Man: No Way Home but 2021 started out rough for him as he gives a much better performance than his role deserved. He has a good rapport with Daisy Ridley, and the rest of the cast is pretty solid on the whole. The problem comes when it becomes clear that they’re trying to keep this film alive when there’s really no pulse there and embodying characters who don’t have enough depth to be compelling. The neat effects are only momentary distractions from a movie that is way more benignly bland than it should be.

#18: Woman in the Window

Top 20 Worst Films of 2021 - Woman in the Window

Despite what it may seem here, I don’t think Netflix had a particularly bad year for their original film releases. In fact, when we get to the Best Of list, you’ll see at least three entries from the streaming company on it. But they certainly had some clunkers too, and that brings us to Woman in the Window. Joe Wright’s adaptation of A. J. Finn’s 2018 thriller is centered around a great performance from Amy Adams, but doesn’t have anything else to keep it aloft. And make no mistake: Adams is far better than this movie deserves by a long shot. As Anna Fox, a child psychologist with severe agrophobia, Adams manages that careful battle between brittle and steely needed to embody this kind of a character and she makes a lot of the noir tropes built into this character palatable.

But the rest of it is a bit of a disaster. The script comes off as about one step too close to a Lifetime movie — and that’s a perfectly fine style of film, but that’s clearly not the vibe that Joe Wright is going for. Wright wants to be Brian De Palma without the eroticism, but at the same time he’s working with a script that is basically a take on Rear Window. That means he’s paying homage to De Palma by playing homage to Hitchcock, and it doesn’t work nearly as well as that sounds. The rest of the performances are a mixed bag; Julianne Moore is good enough, but many of the other performances clash with the tone for a strange, off-putting hodge-podge.

Perhaps this film’s biggest crime, however, is the fact that it won’t lean into being the sleazy fun that it clearly needs to be. There’s no shame in being trashy; it’s a tone that De Palma excelled in. Here, we have the right plot points but the wrong take on it all. That leaves us with a film that acts like it should be grounded in its suspense, but then throws several ridiculous twists in its way. Adams isn’t enough to save this film, which is a shame because she deserves better than she got.

#17: Profile

Top 20 Worst Films of 2021 - Profile

I realize that ScreenLife thrillers aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. Films that are set entirely on digital screens like Unfriended and Searching are too gimmicky for some, and I get that. For my part, I really appreciate the format as a way to breathe new life into the found footage concept. But like any genre, it can’t carry a film on it’s own and Profile is a perfect example of that. Director Timur Bekmambetov veers away from the horror genre for a more dramatic thriller-style film and sad to say, it’s definitely no Searching.

It’s easy to see what Bekmambetov, who co-wrote the film with Britt Poulton and Olga Kharina, was trying to do here. There’s an interesting thread surrounding the cat-and-mouse game that journalist Amy Whitaker (Valene Kane) plays with Shazad Latif’s ISIS recruiter Bilel, and basing it off Anna Erelle’s non-fiction book In The Skin of a Jihadist adds weight to the story. I would love to see a a documentary about the real story, because I think that would be fascinating.

But this? This is a mess. Kane and Latif actually give quite good performances, but their characters defy logic at every turn. Amy is a stunningly bad, reckless journalist and while found footage-style films generally rely on people making poor choices, the amount of massive ethical breaches and simple mistakes she makes are insulting to the audience. And it isn’t just her as despite her seriously half-assed effort at going undercover to catfish Bilel, he seems to buy it at every step. He’s not playing dumb, which means the film is basically 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 engaging to watch. I really wanted to like this, because I enjoy the ScreenLife format, but this was a big nope.

#16: Tom & Jerry

Top 20 Worst Films of 2021 - Tom & Jerry

Despite it being on my worst of list, I don’t hate Tom & Jerry. There’s a difference between whether you like a film or not, and whether it’s good or not. And while I certainly don’t like this CGI and live-action hybrid, I don’t think it’s offensive and the story is about what you’d expect. That said, it’s a bad movie on any real objective level. I realize that Warner Bros. didn’t really make this movie for someone like me; it’s a family film. But that genre doesn’t get to be a shield for a movie lazy, boring, and often irritating film to hide behind.

In a lot of ways, Tom & Jerry has all the hallmarks of the bad 1990s and early 2000s animal family movies. You know the ones; they relied on the almost human-acting animals for half-assed humor and used hip-hop songs that don’t jive with the tone, all the while forcing the human actors to mug for the camera at every turn. The formula works here only marginally better here than it did for the Garfield movies, saddling Chloe Grace Moretz, Michael Peña and the rest of their cast with paper-thin and unappealing characters. Meanwhile, the titular characters go through all the motions of what a Tom & Jerry story should be, with plenty of chase vignettes that fall short while the rest of the film just serves as the weak connecting tissue

The failure here rests on the shoulders of the script by Kevin Costello that barely makes an effort to go through the motions, along with director Tim Story’s inability channel the wacky energy of the original shorts. You can certainly see the appeal of doing a Tom & Jerry film, especially when you look at its box office revenue. 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.

#15: The Reckoning

Top 20 Worst Films of 2021 - The Reckoning

While it took blockbusters a while to get back on track during the pandemic, horror has been trucking along quite nicely. The genre has been on quite a resurgence over the last couple of years and some of the best film from 2020 and 2021 have aimed to terrify. Sadly, it hasn’t all been Night Houses, Possessors and Dark and Wickeds. Case in point: Neil Marshall’s period horror flick The Reckoning. It’s painful to see how badly Marshall — best known horror fans for The Descent, and to non-horror fans for directing a couple of the best episodes of Game of Thrones — tripped up with this cringey #MeToo take on the torture porn genre.

A film like this, which stars Charlotte Kirk as a woman subjected to torment over false accusations of being a witch, really should be right up Marshell’s alley. And yet as much as The Reckoning has some great ideas, it doesn’t do anything with them. Marshall wrote the film with Kirk, and it is clearly designed to do two things: make Kirk a star, and say some things about the misogynistic way that women are treated in both the modern era and in centuries past. It does somewhat get that point across in its own clumsy way, but the film built around that point swings wildly between dull and schlocky. The opening act is actually solid as Kirk’s Grace tries to survive following the death of her husband, before she 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.

While Kirk isn’t up to delivering Grace’s emotional arc, she doesn’t deserve all of the blame here by any measure. Instead the problems fall largely in the drab production (except Kirk, who even in post-torture scenes looks disconcertingly glamorous) and in the way Marshall lets the pace grind to a stop several times. This is an example of a period film where the dialogue feels like dialogue and comes unnaturally off the tongue, and nothing else really feels authentic either. That includes the action-filled climax, which unfolds in a predictable and yet ludicrous manner. The one thing I 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 hefty misstep.

#14: Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City

Top 20 Worst Films of 2021 - Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City

We all knew that there would come a time when the Resident Evil franchise would be rebooted. Both the film franchise and the video game series it was based upon have been far too profitable and have too big of fanbases for Hollywood to stay away from it for too long. And if we’re being honest, most of us probably expected it to not be great. I’m always willing to give a film a chance, and we got all the right hype in the lead-up for this film. I very much liked Johannes Roberts’ 47 Meters Down and The Strangers: Prey at Night, so there was a part of me that hoped this would be better than I expected.

And look, I’m all for a fun, cheesy reboot of a video game franchise, but even by those standards this was a flop. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City shoots itself in the foot by trying to wed two games into one movie. Roberts wanted to make a more faithful adaptation of the game, but the first two games don’t have enough story individually. And together, it’s too much story. That results in Roberts’ script being all over the place as it tries to follow the two narratives. And whether it’s the infected takeover of Raccoon City or the police department investigating the old creepy house, neither narrative serves its characters well.

The cast does what they can for the most part, but these are barely even one-dimensional characters that often trade their video game characteristics for less appealing ones. Roberts tosses in elements like Lisa Trevor without giving her a proper explanation, so unless you’re an active fan of the games it doesn’t make sense. Meanwhile, he’s so busy busy cramming in 1998 references and fan-service that he loses sight of the story. But hey, if you want pointless references to the Ashford Twins and monologues about Planet Hollywood and Blockbuster, you’ve got that I suppose?

To add to the issues, the film features some questionable lighting choices and some pretty awful CGI. Listen, this isn’t the worst live-action Resident Evil film out there, because Retribution and The Final Chapter exist. But it sure isn’t good either.

#13: Demonic

Top 20 Worst Films of 2021 - Demonic

It’s been a long time since somone’s fallen off a cliff after their first film as hard as Neill Blomkamp. Yes, District 9 was a great sci-fi film in 2009. But that was clearly his peak and he’s been on a steady downward slide through 2013’s ho-hum Elysium, 2015’s style-over-substance Chappie, and now Demonic. It’s clear that Blomkamp had some big ideas for this film. But it’s equally clear that he didn’t have much of an idea on how to use those ideas to their potential.

Demonic is a possession film that’s full of some very big swings. Centering on a woman whose mother was convicted for a killing spree who may or may not have been under evil influence, the movie features everything from virtual simulation telepathy to Vatican black ops teams with holy relic weapons. It’s all so wild that it should be a blast, and yet there’s very little done with any of them. They’re introduced, utilized half-heartedly, and then thrown away as side notes to an otherwise unengaging story about a woman coming to terms with the fact that her mother’s heinous crimes were not her own to commit.

Blomkamp wrote the script here as he always does, and there’s no other way to put it than to say it’s bad. The dialogue is more wooden than a 1600s pirate ship, and the barely sketched-out characters give the cast nothing to work with all the way through to the by-the-numbers climax. Blomkamp doesn’t have the budget to make his effects work and the direction is workmanlike at the absolute best. There are a couple of silly good moments in this, and the opening act does have a couple genuinely creepy bits. But on the whole, Demonic is a complete and utter misfire that hopefully those relatively few of us who watched it will have forgotten about soon enough.

#12: The Addams Family 2

Top 20 Worst Films of 2021 - The Addams Family 2

I promise, I don’t hate family films as a whole. There were actually some very, very good ones released in 2021 — and not just Disney/Pixar ones, either. But as I said before, being “for families” doesn’t mean you get to just half-heartedly throw a bunch of lazy formulas onto an established property and call it a day. That’s exactly what happens with The Addams Family 2, which takes the middling efforts of the first animated film and decides to double down.

I’m not going to lie; this is a property that is near and dear to me, so I won’t deny I’m a bit protective. But there have been many very kid-friendly takes that I thought worked well. And whether they worked well or not, they’ve all had one thing in common: they’re weird, offbeat, outside of the norm projects. If there’s one thing that The Addams Family franchise doesn’t need, it’s becoming a brightly colored road trip that is tonally indistinguishable from Despicable Me or Hotel Transylvania. But that’s what we got with this film.

And listen, I get those franchises are successful. I enjoy them quite a bit for what they are. But not everything needs to be forced into that box, and Charles Addams’ delightfully grotesque family works precisely BECAUSE they can’t be boxed in. I pity the voice cast, who are working with a lame script that takes the family on said road trip while questioning if Wednesday really is an Addams — essentially a rehash of the first movie. And neither the road trip nor the Wednesday subplot are engaging at all. The gags probably work for kids but not for adults and to be frank, this is the franchise I least want to see using pop songs for immediately-dated cultural relevancy. Nothing here works, and my hope is that this franchise dies so we can turn our attention to hoping that Wednesday series on Netflix works out better.

#11: Cherry

Top 20 Worst Films of 2021 - Cherry

Remember how I said the start of the year was a bad one for Tom Holland? Welcome to exhibit B. Cherry is a movie that clearly wants to be a Film, but isn’t sure how to get there. Instead it settles for becoming depression porn as it does its utmost to bring the audience down with its emotional lows, while not delving very far into what those lows actually mean. And it had real talent to work with, too. Holland and Ciara Bravo are quite good as the titular man (based on real-life bank robber Nico Walker) and his girlfriend Emily. They channel their all in an attempt to bring some substance out of the script, which gets the lion’s share of the blame. Angela Russo-Otstot and Jessica Goldberg’s screenplay has an attention to characterization that would make lower-tier 1980s-era slashers seem like in-depth character studies by comparison. We don’t know much of anything about Cherry or Emily beyond the surface of their words, or the overbearing narration given by Holland. 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 skilled directors on a technical level and I think they a great drama in them. This is not it. They pay more attention to style than storytelling. And while it’s clear they have things to say here about what the American infrastructures of war, health care, and capitalism do to the young and poor in this country, they undermine themselves with the cool technical flourishes. They also 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 a certain level of pretension that does this thing no favors.

It doesn’t help that story feels remarkably familiar and by-the-numbers, thanks in no small part to the desire to fictionalize much of Walker’s story (as even a cursory Googling makes clear). 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 running time, 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 waste of everyone’s time.

And that will do it for part one! Join me once again later this week as we count down the worst of the worst with numbers ten through one. Until then, don’t forget to read the many other great columns, news articles and more here at 411mania.com! JT out.