Movies & TV / Columns
The Top 20 Worst Films of 2022 (#10 – 1)
Image Credit: Sony Pictures
Welcome, one and all, to the second part of my Movies Year in Review for 2022! I’m your host Jeremy Thomas, and today we’ll concluding our look at the worst films of the past year. 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!
On Friday I kicked off my Worst Films of 2022 list with numbers 20 through 11. The first part of the list featured a lot of comedy and boring films, some of which had high aims but fell drastically short. The bottom 10 continues that trend with superhero flops, some highly unsuccessful horror flicks, and perhaps the most infuriating film I’ve seen in absolute years. In other words, folks: if you thought the first half was bad then hold onto your butts, because it’s only downhill from here!
Caveat: My criteria for a film qualifying for this list is simple: if a narrative film had its domestic release this past year, either theatrically or in a marketed release on VOD or a major streaming service, then it was eligible. The only other caveat is that I have tried, but have not seen everything that was released in 2022, especially factoring in streaming services. The film that I missed that could have possibly qualified based on reputation is Purple Hearts. Other than that, I feel reasonably confident I would have seen just about every movie that would have likely made the list. For those curious, I have seen a total of 184 films that were released in 2022 (up from last year’s 168).
Just Missing The Cut
• Mack & Rita
• I Wanna Dance With Somebody
• The School For Good & Evil
• Choose Or Die
• Home Team
The First Ten
20: Babylon
19: Paws Of Fury: The Legend Of Hank
18: The 355
17: Where the Crawdads Sing
16: Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
15: Amsterdam
14: Me Time
13: The Bubble
12: Redeeming Love
11: Moonfall
#10: Morbius
Outside of meming and Schadenfreude, there isn’t much that Morbius brought moviegoers in 2022. Sony has shown how firmly it’s stuck in the past when it comes to their Spider-Man Universe, with Venom fun but incredibly flawed and Morbius feeling very much like Sony’s Marvel films from the mid-2000s. Jared Leto doesn’t do an awful job as the titular doctor-turned-pseudo vampire, but the dour, blue-toned film makes it feel like this film should be crossing over with Ben Affleck’s Daredevil and Nicolas Cage’s Ghost Rider. And that goes double when you consider the sketchy CGI and poorly-sketched out characters; this film feels like a pre-MCU Marvel film in all the worst ways.
It’s an unfortunate situation, because Leto and Matt Smith deserve better for what they’re trying to put into this film. Leto keeps his worst tendencies toned down and inhabits the role well, and Smith is having a blast as movie’s villain role. However, they’re doing it in a paint-by-numbers story that is way too caught up in its own seriousness to wring any joy out of what should be a pretty fun story. No characters register outside of Morbius and Milo, and even those two divest themselves of any depth when the plot takes precedence. Adria Arjona and Jared Harris are criminally underserved as the love interest and father figure to Morbius, the nonsensical MCU connections are better left unmentioned, and in a word, the film’s visuals just look awful.
I won’t say I came into Morbius with particularly high expectations, but I hoped that even if it wasn’t good, I might find some fun hiding somewhere in the darkness. No such luck for the most part. This is maybe worth watching for Smith’s wild performance. But as an attempt to expand Sony’s Spidey cinematic universe, it’s an outright failure.
#9: Memory
Oh, Liam Neeson, why? Neeson is hardly the only star who has let his career drop off because he enjoys doing a good low-rent action film, to be fair. And more power to him; he’s able to have a good time and get paid. The issue is that of his low-rent action films, he hasn’t had a good one in a while. 2021’s The Marksman wasn’t awful, but his last actually good action-thriller was probably Non-Stop — and that was 2014.
2022 was a particularly rough year for Neeson’s resume, and we start with Memory. This generic thriller with a gimmicky twist feels exactly like the rest of Neeson’s recent films in the genre, as he plays a hitman with a conscience and early on-set dementia who takes revenge on bad people after he’s asked to kill a kid. You can at least give Neeson credit for giving some effort in the role, but Memory very much feels like a film where the studio head greenlit it without bothering to read a script because “It’s a Liam Neeson thriller, it’ll be money.” It’s clear that not many people did give the Dario Scardapane’s screenplay much attention, as the start-and-stop affair hits most of the beats you would expect out of one of those bad examples of a straight-to-video film. I’m not sure if that’s the fault of being too faithful to the Belgian film (and novel) that it’s based off of or not being faithful enough, but either way it was on Scardapane to elevate the material and he coasts through.
The most shocking thing about Memory is that it was directed by Martin Campbell, who is known for his work on the likes of Casino Royale and Goldeneye. Needless to say, this is a long way off from those days. The film only works in brief moments, and those moments are thanks to a cast should be in much better movies including Guy Pearce, Monica Bellucci, Harold Torres, Taj Atwal, and Ray Stevenson. There is a distinct lack of action in this and no thrills — marking one of Neeson’s two entries on my Worst Of list for the year.
#8: Deep Water
Man, I miss erotic thrillers. The days of films like Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal, and Dressed to Kill have been gone for a while — understandably so in some cases, but I do adore the sleazy, seamy nature of those films. We’ll occasionally get films that try to capture that magic and occasionally they match the energy of the genre’s heyday well, but more often than not they end up falling drastically short.
Case in point: Deep Water. Adrian Lyne was one of the key people working in the field of erotic thrillers in the ’80s and ’90s, but he stepped away from the business in 2002. Deep Water was his first film since then, and it’s such an incredible misfire that I can’t understand why it made him want to return. Based on the book by Patricia Highmore, this premise — a married couple stuck in a cycle of toxic monogamy that lays wreckage to everyone around them — is solid, but the end result is a lifeless, muddled affair that retreads a lot of his previous resume with diminishing results. It doesn’t help that Lyne seems unable to recapture the magic of his best films; he shoots Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas with a workmanlike utility that shows none of his previous visual flair. The thrill of a good erotic thriller or drama is that they’re dripping with style and suspense, with menace right around the corner. Lyne’s film has not a whiff of that during the entirety of its 115-minute runtime.
The problem isn’t all on Lyne though because even if he tried, there is only so much one can do with this script. The big problem is that Vic and Melinda, the amoral central couple played by Affleck and de Armas, just aren’t very interesting. They’re two boringly damaged people doing boringly toxic and boringly criminal things, and the film doesn’t give us any insight into why. Affleck and de Armas are legitimately good in their roles but that just highlights how lacking the story and characters are. And the characters around them barely register, including the litany of boyfriends that Vic scares off (or worse) despite being played by talented actors. Ultimately, Deep Water commits the worst crime an erotic thriller can be: it’s boring.
#7: Umma
I had some fairly high hopes for Umma when I first heard about it. Sandra Oh is a fantastic actor, and the idea of her starring in a supernatural horror flick absolutely intrigued me. Unfortunately, as it turns out the film is in the entirely wrong genre. Writer-director Iris K. Shim has noble intentions with this film, which centers on an off-the-grid Korean woman living the farm life in America with her daughter when she receives word that her mother has died in Korea. Shim has some great ideas in here, exploring themes like cultural dissonance, generational trauma, and mental health. If it had played like a supernatural drama with about 100 minutes to tell its story without the need for jump scares, there would have been plenty of opportunity for a great little film.
The problem is that Umma isn’t a supernatural drama. It’s billed as a horror film and plays like one. Whether this is true or not, this feels like a case where the studio saw how much horror is tapping into trauma over the last decade or so and decided that was the more commercially viable way to go. The result is a film where Shim isn’t able to bring her good ideas to fruition, because she has to insert a jump scare every 8 – 10 minutes and thus can only lightly scratch at the thematic depth it could have hit.
It’s an unfortunate thing too, because the cast is certainly trying hard. Unfortunately, their efforts are dashed by the half-hearted jump scares and sketchy CGI effects for the ghostly mother. Any interesting moment the movie finds time for simply doesn’t get enough room to breathe or develop. The end result is a sadly-unrealized film that doesn’t hit any of the goals it aims for. In trying to toe the line between drama and horror, it failed at both and mostly ended up as a case study of unrealized potential.
#6: Prey For the Devil
Image Credit: Lionsgate
The exorcism horror film seems like a tough nut for Hollywood to crack. I love a good exorcism film, but so few of them have anything new to bring to the table. For every The Exorcist or The Exorcism of Emily Rose, there are several like The Devil Inside, The Vatican Tapes, Incarnate, Exorcist II — the list goes on. And Prey For the Devil is another one to throw on the latter pile. Robert Zappia’s screenplay takes an interesting concept — a world where the Catholic church is dealing with a rise in demonic possessions and opens schools to train priests in the Rite of Exorcisms — and does almost nothing interesting with it.
Now, I did say almost nothing. The core conceit has merit, where a nun (Jacqueline Byers) is able to convince her superiors to train her despite rules that only men can perform the rite. That notion sets up a situation where the script could look at the gender biases of the Church. However, it doesn’t do much at all with it outside of a few empty gestures to the notion. Instead, director Daniel Stamm (who directed 2010’s The Last Exorcism) amps up the jump scares and essentially rips himself off. And I know Last Exorcism has its fans, and maybe I need to see it again, but I remember not being impressed with it at the time. So to see elements of it brought whole cloth into a less well-made movie isn’t doing this one any favors.
The performances here are fine, if overly somber; Byers is doing what she can to make Sister Ann interesting despite a very cookie-cutter set of motivations, while Colin Salmon and Christian Navarro have even less to work with. Virginia Madsen is only here so that Ann can have the opportunity to info dump a ton of clunky exposition about her past. There’s a plot twist toward the end that doesn’t quite work and everything here just seems so dull and rote that you wonder why they bothered. This isn’t Devil Inside or Exorcist II bad — at least this one has an actual ending, and not one that involves a 42 year-old making out with a 17 year-old — but that’s the definition of a low bar and this ranks as one of the worst horror movies of the year.
#5: The Cellar
Much like several of the other films populating this list, The Cellar was a movie I was looking forward to. Elisha Cuthbert deserves a more successful career in Hollywood than she’s had, and the haunting little short film The Ten Steps that served as the basis for this one is quite good. However, why Cuthbert came back to horror for this bizarre mess confuses me. Brendan Muldowney gives us a perfect example of why some short films work best in that format here. You always have to expand your concept for obvious runtime reasons, and Muldowney did so by throwing quantum physics, a cursed house, scary staircases, Hebrew, math equations, a demon (who isn’t a demon) and just about every horror trope in the book together in a misguided attempt to achieve his desired final sequence.
The Cellar has a clash of ideas going on, and wild that can work, the kitchen sink method falls apart here. For a film that dives into some heady concepts around numerology and math, Muldowney doesn’t seem to have done the research needed to tie any of it together. The treatment of demonology that is scant at best, to the point that it feels as if there was some light reading on Wikipedia, followed by giving up and saying, “throw the Chick tract version of the devil in, it’ll be fine!”
While that’s a bit of a nitpick, the bigger problem is that Muldowney doesn’t really do much to invoke the essential horror elements of tension, suspense, or mood. The film looks decent when it’s not so dark as to be incomprehensible, but that’s about all it has going for it. Cuthbert gives it a game go, but everyone else is unable to elevate their paper-thin characters. The Cellar isn’t the bottom of the barrel in terms of 2022’s films, but it’s not that far off the mark either.
#4: Firestarter
The worst horror film of the year is Firestarter, and frankly it isn’t that close. I can’t imagine many people are too surprised by this one; while Stephen King adaptations have been back in vogue, they have a fairly mixed record on the whole. And remakes of films or shows based on King’s work (with the exception of the It films) have a spotty record even if you’re being generous — although though that hasn’t stopped Hollywood from pushing every one they can imagine into production.
That being said, at least the bad Stephen King movies legitimately feel like King movies. The new Firestarter feels like something else entirely. The original Firestarter may not be great, but it has some nostalgic value and a couple solid performances in it. This modified take on the material has neither element. Zack Efron may be trying here, but he’s miscast as psychic father Andy to Ryan Kiera Armstrong’s titular young pyrokinetic Charlie. And Armstrong is fine, but the script doesn’t let her do enough to elevate the material.
The failings of the script are exacerbated by director Keith Thomas’ work, which strips any potential personality out of this film with consistently bland framing and a generic tone that robs it of its potential. It’s an incredibly disappointing turn from Thomas, whose 2021 horror film The Vigil was crackling with tension and character. Thomas starts to get a little more spark to his work about midway through the film — which is just when the story begins to collapse. Once the chase for Charlie and Andy really kicks off, the script begins to cut corners willy-nilly and things barrel toward an incredibly predictable and flat finale. The supporting cast doesn’t make too much of an impression outside of Michael Greyeyes, who plays the bounty hunter sent to find Andy and Charlie. But even his role is handled poorly by the script, which doesn’t seem to know what to do with him. I’ve seen a lot of Stephen King’s films and there have been some real bad ones, but they were at least interesting. This is just…there, and that’s worse.
#3: Blacklight
Remember when I said there were two Liam Neeson films on this list? Well, here we are. I’ve never been one to buy into the idea that Neeson is coasting through the late stages of his action-thriller career. but his role as a shadowy FBI “fixer” in Blacklight is the first where it really does feel like his heart isn’t in it and he’s just doing it for the paycheck. Outside of a couple solid outbursts, he meanders his way through this lifeless political conspiracy flick as Travis Block, who uncovers a conspiracy and goes on a revenge spree.
Written and co-directed by Mark Williams, this film is the kind thing where no one talks even remotely like real people and where the daughter of Neeson’s character seems to only mildly find it concerning that he’s turned his granddaughter into the most paranoid second-grader in existence. And I mean, this isn’t the film’s biggest problem, but when a movie doesn’t try to make its title make any sense, you know it probably can’t be bothered to care about the heavy lifting. Blacklight has nothing to do with anything in the film. It was clearly chosen just because it sounds cool – which pretty much seems to sum up how this whole movie was probably conceived.
All of that would be acceptable for a pleasantly mediocre time if it wasn’t so absolutely boring. Much like Memory, this action thriller has only the barest minimum of action, save for a third-act sequence that isn’t particularly well-shot. Much of the remaining runtime focuses on the film’s weakest part: the plot, which involves the most threadbare shadow conspiracy ever invented for a film. There’s a lot of threats, a lot of talking around what’s going on, and a lot of politics and journalism coming out of the mouths of adults that would be high school level at best. It all adds up to one of the worst Liam Neeson films yet and a viewing experience that seems far longer than its 105-minute runtime.
#2: The King’s Daughter
Sometimes, studios pull the plug on films or shelve them, and it feels like a disappointment. It may be for financial reasons (see: Batgirl), studio changeovers (Gambit) or a variety of other reasons, but we always wonder what those films would have been like. The King’s Daughter was an example of a film that got yanked but then finally released — and now we know exactly why it was pulled. The fantasy romantic drama was filmed in 2014 and yanked just three weeks before a planned wide release to “finish visual effects.” It wasn’t heard from until Gravitas Ventures bought it from Paramount, a decision that seems head-scratching considering what we got.
The King’s Daughter, a chopped-up and loose adaptation of the novel The Moon and the Sun, is a structural mess from start to finish. Pierce Brosnan and Scodelario are playing cliched arcs as King Louis XVI and his fictional secret daughter Marie-Josephe, Louis brings Marie to court to be his composer, right around the time he’s captured a mermaid to sacrifice for immortality’s sake. Marie and the mermaid (a CGI’d Fan Bingbing) become friends and you can guess where it goes from there. It’s not entirely clear how much blame writers Barry Berman and James Schamus should have, as the film’s painful editing work barely leaves any sense of cohesion intact and appears to have cut whole chunks of the story out.
But even what we have is just not good here. The dialogue is generally flat, and characterization — including Benjamin Walker’s sailor/love interest, William Hurt’s priest and especially Pablo Schreiber’s evil scientist/fan of ritual sacrifice — is pat. Director Sean McNamara is doing plenty wrong here as well; he’s more interested in slow motion glamour shots of people at court than anything approaching a vision. And to make matters worse, the $40 million budget and extra eight years they had to fix any visual effects didn’t help Bingbing’s mermaid look good at all. If we didn’t have Marie-Josephe and Hurt’s character regularly arguing that the mermaid has a soul, it would be hard to believe it’s true based on how she’s presented both visually and a character. While I can see why this movie got made, I can’t fathom how it ultimately got released in this final, supremely uninteresting form, but it was very nearly the worst film of 2022.
#1: Blonde
Image Credit: Netflix
Blonde is such a weird film to put on this list, and especially at #1 because there is a not-insignificant chance (though far from a sure thing) that Ana de Armas could be getting an Oscar nomination for it. And make no mistake: de Armas would deserve such a nod, because without her this would be a much, MUCH worse movie. I’m a Marilyn Monroe fan, and I was very curious to see how director Andrew Dominik would oversee this fictional retelling of the film icon’s life. Marilyn’s story has been told almost every possible way over the years, and while I hadn’t read the fictionalized “biography” by Joyce Carol Oates that this was based off, I was willing to see what they would do here.
The end result of their labors is a work that, while I have seen a small handful of worse films in the past several years, infuriated me more than any of them. De Armas is an absolutely radiant star who captures the essence of Dominik’s version of Monroe. She gets just about everything perfect here, interpreting the actress through the lens of the script as needed and displaying an incredible attempt to lend the film veracity. It’s just too bad that just about everything else in this 167-minute endurance trial of misery porn is completely risible.
Dominik uses Oates’ novel as his “bible” here and basically comes up with the central thesis as “Marilyn Monroe had daddy issues, and was lonely and sad because of that and a sense of abandonment as a child, and also celebrity and being exploited. But mostly probably the daddy issues.” Which, sure. But that’s nothing new, and Dominik doesn’t do anything interesting with it. Instead, he just piles on the tragedy, including sexual assault, miscarriages, abortions, an abusive Joe DiMaggio, drugs, mental health issues, being betrayed by men — you name it. And it’s all filmed in as seamy a way as possible.
And look, I’m the first person to say that biopics don’t need to be 100% factual. If you want facts, watch a documentary; if you want a narrative story, accept dramatic license. Dominik’s dramatic license doesn’t add any value; there is no greater point here to be seen other than watching Monroe be emotionally, psychically, physically and sexually battered and abused. Dominik wants to hold up the camera to show that Monroe was being exploited, but more often he’s the one being exploitative and he doesn’t seem to how to depict exploitation without doing it himself. I don’t doubt that he wants to make us angry for Marilyn’s sake, and he succeeded. But I was already angry for Marilyn’s sake at the way she was treated in life. Now I’m angry at him for adding to the pile.
And that will do it for this! Join me next as, with the bad out of the way, we take a look at the best films of the year. 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.
