The 14th Annual Reel Stinkers Awards

It's New Year's Eve.  And as the clock ticks down the final moments of 2019, and everybody gets to look to the year and decade ahead, I get to go back in time, and look at the movies that stole my money and my time the past year.

Yes, it's time once again for the Reel Stinkers Awards.  A time when I get to "honor" the worst of the worst that I sat through.  As you all know, bad movies come in all forms.  We've got blockbuster bombs, comedies with no laughs, thrillers that couldn't startle a mouse, unnecessary sequels, star vanity projects that went horribly wrong, and so much more!  I try to pick through the garbage, and find the really big stinkers.  Sure, I could easily make an entire list of cheap exploitation and low budget horror films, but where would the fun in that be?  I want to look back on the films that were big, or at least supposed to be big, and featured big talent, but still managed to fail.

As always, my "Best of the Year" article will likely come around February or so, as there are some late year releases still stuck in limited release at the moment, and will go wider during January and February.  I want to see and review as many of them as I can, so I always hold off on my Best list until then.

So, with all that out of the way, it's time to carve some cinematic turkeys!  Here's hoping that you didn't waste your money and time on them, and let us also hope that everyone involved with them will get to work on a good movie in 2020!

And now, I'm proud to give you...


THE 10 WORST FILMS OF 2019:

10. THE LION KING - With this supremely unnecessary remake, we get the story that we are all familiar with, only performed by expressionless CG puppets, rather than traditional Disney animation.  The end result is one of the strangest disconnects between form and function that I have ever seen on the big screen.  This is as soulless of a big budget production that I can imagine.  The entire cast is made up out of photo realistic computer animated animals that have been faithfully imagined to their real life counterparts, but are never once capable of showing emotion for some reason.  Of course, it would be strange to see realistic-looking animals laughing, crying, or showing human-like expressions.  That would not work here the same way it does in a hand-drawn animated feature.  But to give them constantly blank, expressionless faces is just as off-putting, if not more so.  If The Lion King is one thing, it is a story about emotion, exile and redemption.  To see it being told by a physical cast that is unable to express these, or actually any, feeling is more creepy than engaging.  This is special effects technical wizardry run amok.  The artists have obviously gone through great pains to make this movie look great, by giving us an all-animal cast and an African setting that looks real enough to touch.  But at the same time, nothing connects, because director Jon Favreau (2016's The Jungle Book remake) has decided to go far to the "Uncanny Valley" edge of realism.  The end result is pointless, and the far opposite of charming.

09. CATS - This is the closest Hollywood has ever come to replicating a hallucinatory fever dream on the big screen.  It's so odd and indescribable, it's almost worth seeing.  There's something so off about every decision director Tom Hooper (2012's Les Miserables) has made here, and yet, you can't take your eyes off of the screen.  We're probably never going to see a movie like this ever again.  At least, we should hope so.  In the original stage musical, the actors portraying the cats mostly wore elaborate costumes and spandex that emphasized flexibility for the dancing.  This being a big budget film being made in 2019, that certainly will not do.  We need "digital fur" turning the cats into some kind of mutant hybrid between human and feline.  The whole thing goes beyond the Uncanny Valley into some kind of unnatural realm where you sometimes find yourself wondering if you're really seeing what you're looking at.  For all of its weirdness, there's a certain lifelessness to Cats that I don't think is intended.  There is just no feeling or message to any of the big musical sequences.  I don't lay all the blame on the actors.  They're all talented, and doing what they can.  It's just the camera angles and the sporadic effects work sometimes make these musical numbers a curiosity more than a thrill.  We know we're supposed to be having fun watching this, but we're not.  And that right there pinpoints the film's main problem.  The people behind this were so fixated on technology and creating the illusion of cat-people that they forgot to give the music sequences and choreography the life they deserve.

08. AFTER -  After started out as a romantic fan-fiction story centered around an innocent college girl having a fling with one of the members of the music group, One Direction.  It then found a life of its own, as it was published into a series of books that I have never heard of, but the poster for this movie promises is a "best-selling worldwide phenomenon".  Now we have a movie, which is a dull and lifeless string of teen drama cliches joined together to create a loose narrative, and characters who are so flat, calling them cardboard would be an insult to perfectly good packing material.  What we have here is a story as old as the hills, where a nice young girl falls for the mysterious bad boy, and finds out he's much more sensitive and romantic than he first appears.  The "One Direction" angle has been dropped, and instead we have Tessa (Josephine Langford) as the good girl, and the wonderfully-named Hardin (Hero Fiennes Tiffin, nephew of Ralph Fiennes) in the role of the dreamy bad boy who speaks with a British accent, has tattoos, wears black all the time, and likes to quote and wax poetic about classic literature.  In other words, he's the kind of "bad boy" you would see on a Disney Channel drama.  The fact that the movie asks us to take him seriously is the first of its many severe miscalculations.  I would say that After goes through the motions, but that would require the movie to actually be going somewhere.  This movie is so desperate to create drama, it has to force it into its own storyline.  Characters act like total idiots at every opportunity, or the situations are written so broadly, they come across as farce.  And yet, I'm afraid the filmmakers think they're making a serious-minded drama about young forbidden love here.  So why did the filmmakers play it so bland and safe here?  Better to make a racy movie that young girls can talk about, rather than one that is so blatantly a lifeless attempt at paying tribute to other movies.  If you're not going to be original, at least be sexy.  This movie does neither.

07. RAMBO: LAST BLOOD - Here is an action movie that wallows in misery and human suffering.  When you consider what a great action movie can do, it seems all the more cheap.  This is a genre that can provide more than great thrills and stunt work.  Films like these can be fun, cathartic, and offer escapism.  You get the sense that all director Adrian Grunberg and Sylvester Stallone (who co-wrote the script) want to do is inflect pain upon the audience.  Rambo: Last Blood devotes the first hour or so to the suffering and violence being inflected upon Rambo and his adopted family.  It then spends its last half hour in a non-stop orgy of over the top blood and gore as the hero takes revenge.  Either way, it's not much fun.  I guess we're supposed to cheer as we watch these men who raped and drugged Rambo's daughter get slaughtered like cattle, decapitated, skewered, blown to bits, tortured, and dropped into pits lined with spikes.  Frankly, I found the entire movie heavy-handed, poorly made, and kind of repulsive.  Its sole purpose is to ram the point home that there is only pain and suffering in the world, and that you can never truly be happy.  As if to ram the point home that nobody cared, the movie is badly staged, and edited in such a way that we can sometimes barely see what is happening during a lot of the action.  Further, the direction by Grunberg is uninspired, and the script by Stallone and Matthew Cirulnick is simplistic to the point that the audience is given nothing to think about.  Everyone is either tortured and miserable, or broad and horrible.  This is a bloody and exploitative movie that is disgusting instead of thrilling.

06. THE KITCHEN - This movie has the misfortune of coming out less than a year after Widows, a much better movie with the same idea of the wives of criminals taking over for their husbands.  It also has the extreme misfortune of being a very bad movie.  This is a deadly-dull crime thriller that not even the performances of the three lead actresses can lift up.  With talent like Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elizabeth Moss involved, you would think there would be more of an effort.  The movie also marks the directing debut of screenwriter Andrea Berloff, who in 2015, gave us the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Straight Outta Compton.  This time, she's taking inspiration from the DC comic book series written by Ollie Masters.  All of these elements should prove successful, but they never do.  There is a hollowness to the storytelling here, with characters who don't connect (not with each other, and not to the audience).  The plot centers on the three wives of some New York gangsters who end up getting three years in prison after attempting to pull a job that I don't quite understand how it was supposed to be successful in the first place.  The wives decide to get into the crime business themselves, and start muscling the old goons out of the protection business that they have going on around New York City.  We can see potential everywhere, if only the movie would slow down and truly show us how these three women who have had no experience in the organized crime world could rise to the top so quickly, and hire hardened street thugs to work for them.  This is simply a muddled crime drama that is nowhere near as good as it could have or should have been, especially when you look at everyone who got involved.  Perhaps this project just went wrong somewhere along the line, or maybe it got butchered in editing, as it does seem like there used to be more to this movie than what's on the screen at some point.  All I know is The Kitchen had a lot of potential, and it never gets around to using it.

05. GEMINI MAN -  Ang Lee's Gemini Man has been a script Hollywood has been trying to make for over 20 years.  The movie is built around Will Smith as an aging assassin being forced to fight against a younger clone of himself that is intended to replace him.  Supposedly the reason why it took so long for this film to go before the cameras is that the technology was not there.  If the final movie is any indication, the script wasn't quite ready to go before the cameras either.  So, it's Will Smith vs. a digitally de-aged Will Smith acting as the central gimmick of what is otherwise an overly routine and uninspired spy thriller.  If you're going to build your entire movie around a special effect as Gemini Man does, you'd better do it right, and this movie does not.  It's jarring when we look at the "younger" Will Smith, who often resembles a CG Uncanny Valley version of Smith back in his Fresh Prince days.  It's something you can't take your eyes off of, and not because of how well done it is.  It looks awkward whenever Will Smith has to share the screen with "himself", and it gets even worse when the two have to fight each other, as the action is often so frantic and dimly shot, we can barely make out what's happening.  The only thing Gemini Man has going for it is that it's not the worst movie I've seen about cloning this year.  Still, that doesn't excuse this gimmicky and ultimately unnecessary film.  Given how long this movie was in development, you'd think someone would bring up that the technology wasn't the problem, it was the lousy script.

04. THE INTRUDER - This is a flaccid thriller that tells the story of two of the dumbest people I have seen in the movies in a long time who buy a house from an obvious psychopath, and then seem surprised that the guy turns out to be, yes, a psychopath who has a an unhealthy obsession with his massive and secluded home.  This is a movie where it's almost essential that the audience scream at the characters up on the screen, because they keep on intentionally doing the wrong thing over and over.  The psycho in this movie is Charlie, and he's played by Dennis Quaid.  Now, Quaid is an immensely likable actor, and he is completely miscast.  He tries to unnerve us with his performance by narrowing his eyes, and wearing a phony, toothy grin.  He wears that forced grin on his face so much, it almost looks like he's auditioning to play The Joker.  He then proceeds to menace a young couple who buy his beloved home, and continuously miss his evil intentions.  Time and time again, the characters in The Intruder are forced to act like oblivious morons in order for there to even be a movie in the first place.  I would say a good idea for a parody of this film would be to have the answers staring the characters in the face, and they just keep on ignoring them.  However, that's exactly how this supposedly-serious thriller plays out.  Speaking of which, calling this a "thriller" is generous, as the movie in no way creates any tension in any way, shape or form.  From the first frame to the very last shot, The Intruder has been sloppily thrown together with little care.  Everyone who signed up to be a part of this needs to have a long, sad talk with their agent.

03. REPLICAS - This is the first film about human cloning that I can remember that does not take any real stance or view on the subject.  Not once does the movie slow down to examine the ethical and moral questions, and instead stumbles full-speed ahead into a boring chase movie where the scientist has to protect his clone family from government agents.  This is a movie that barely seems to be able to generate enough energy to exist.  The only moments where it comes to life are some unintentionally comical moments that are sprinkled throughout, though not enough to make this a "so bad it's good" guilty pleasure.  Keanu Reeves sleepwalks through the movie as Will Foster, a neuroscientist who clones his family in his underground lab after a tragic car accident.  I'm not sure if it's due to Reeves' barely there performance, or the cheap screenplay, but Will seems to take the death of his entire family with what can only be called casual indifference. Rarely has a movie treated the whole concept of cloning the dead with such passive indifference.  Will is playing with the laws of nature, but he treats it as if it's just another day at the office.  Replicas is an insultingly idiotic approach to an intriguing idea.  And just what is this movie trying to say about cloning in the first place?  As far as I can tell, nothing.  There are no consequences, no repercussions, and no moment where Will seems to be in doubt about what he is doing, and later what he has done.  According to this movie, cloning his dead wife and kids and keeping secrets from them is the best thing Will ever did, and it probably even saved his marriage.   It's rare to have a movie that is so infuriatingly stupid, and yet deadly dull at the same time.  Replicas somehow manages to pull off both feats, which I guess is kind of impressive, but for all the wrong reasons.

02. THE GOLDFINCH - John Crowley's The Goldfinch has an air of self-importance to it that it does not earn or deserve.  It's a pompous and ponderous slog through a plot that should be emotional, yet never is.  That's because all vitality and life seems to have been drained from every aspect of the production.  The performances, the confused out of sequence narrative, and especially the interminable two and a half hour running time all add up into an experience that is dead in the water from the word "go".  The film is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Donna Tartt, and while the narrative is more or less the same, nothing else from Tartt's original work has survived in the translation.  All nuance, character, and naturally the wording of the novel is missing.  What we have left is a lifeless and dreary reenactment of events from the book that hold almost no distinction or dramatic weight.  In telling the story of the main character's journey from a childhood tragedy to a haunted adult, nothing connects in the slightest, and anyone who has not read the original novel is likely to be confused, and also wonder why this story is so acclaimed in its original form.  All the complexities and nuances have been stripped away.  In the original novel, the main character narrated in the first-person and shared his inner thoughts.  Here, he comes across as an empty void of a character that we never get to know, and simply reacts to everything and everyone around him.  Because of this, The Goldfinch not only lacks any kind of emotion that an audience can connect with, it also doesn't make a damn bit of sense at times.  The time-jumping, out of sequence narrative has little rhyme or reason, and plays more like an act of confusion rather than a stylistic choice.  This is a failed prestige project that certainly looks beautiful and has attracted some strong talent, but to what end when you're not even going to bother to tell the story properly?

01. SERENITY - This  has the look of an A-List thriller.  And with talent like Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jason Clarke, Djimon Hounsou, and Diane Lane, it has the cast of an A-List thriller.  But what are we to make of the script, which is filled with dialogue only a screenwriter could love.  Much like John Travolta's Battlefield Earth, or the infamous adaptation of The Scarlet Letter that featured Demi Moore, this is one of those movies that gets laughs, even though it's not trying to be funny in the slightest.  It wants to be a noir drama about lost love, hidden secrets, murder plots, and suspicious characters, including a business man who seems to be stalking McConaughey everywhere he goes.  But that's not all.  It also wants to be a Moby-Dick like story of obsession, as McConaughey's character tries desperately to catch a tuna that has alluded him for years.  But that's still not all!  It also wants to be the worst episode of The Twilight Zone you've ever seen, with a massive third act twist that is supposed to make us question everything that's come before, but only makes us roar with laughter, or at least roll our eyes if we're more polite.  None of these plot pieces connect, and the way that writer-director Steven Knight weaves them together is borderline incompetent.  This is one of those movies where the audience gathers outside the cinema when it's done, and tries to sort together what they've just witnessed, like onlookers of a traffic accident.  As the plot builds and quickly spirals into sheer insanity, you just have to ask yourself, did anyone read the script in advance?  Did this dialogue actually sound good on paper?  Did nobody take one look at it, and realize it was total claptrap?  Did the invaluable Diane Lane really say yes to a role where she's introduced by having rough sex with McConaughey, then spends a majority of the film looking out her bedroom window, wondering where her cat has gone off to?  Why does the dialogue sound so leaden in this movie?  What possessed anyone to think this movie was releasable?  Serenity generates these questions, but gives no answers.  With these big stars attached, and a mysterious trailer that hints at big reveals, you might think that this is a dark adult thriller.  Don't be fooled.  It's nothing more than a dumb live action cartoon posing as an adult thriller.


Well, that covers the Top 10, but I am far from finished.  It's time to cover the Dishonorable Mentions, the films that were bad, but not quite bad enough to break into the top spots.  Don't let that fool you into thinking these movies are somehow better than what's come before, however.  You should avoid any and all movies that appear on this list.  With that said, let's roll out the next batch of stinkers!

DISHONORABLE MENTIONS:

Escape Room, The Prodigy, Hotel Mumbai, Hellboy, The Hustle, Dark Phoenix, Men in Black International, Anna, Stuber, The Art of Racing in the Rain, Angel Has Fallen, Zombieland: Double Tap, Countdown, Playing with Fire, Charlie's Angels, Jumanji: The Next Level, Black Christmas


INDIVIDUAL REEL STINKERS AWARDS:


WORST SEQUEL:
Rambo: Last Blood

MOST UNNECESSARY SEQUEL:
Men in Black International

WORST REMAKE:
The Lion King

WORST PERFORMANCE BY AN A-LIST ACTOR/ACTRESS:
A half-asleep James Earl Jones reprising his role in The Lion King

OVERALL WORST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR/ACTRESS:
Keanu Reeves in Replicas

WORST IDEA FOR A MOVIE THAT NEVER COULD HAVE WORKED:
Cats

REPEAT OFFENDERS (ACTORS WHO APPEARED IN MORE THAN ONE STINKER IN 2019):

Anne Hathaway in Serenity and The Hustle
Kumail Nanjiani in Men in Black: International and Stuber
Luke Wilson in The Goldfinch and Zombieland: Double Tap
Thomas Middleditch in Replicas and Zombieland: Double Tap
Rebel Wilson in The Hustle and Cats

WORST ON-SCREEN TEAM:

Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson in Men in Black International

STUDIO THAT RELEASED THE MOST STINKERS IN 2019:

Sony Entertainment for bringing us Escape Room, The Intruder, Men in Black International, Zombieland: Double Tap, Charlie's Angels and Jumanji: The Next Level

Well, that's the worst of 2019 in a nutshell.  Time to look ahead to 2020, and hope for the best.  Have a wonderful and safe new year, everybody!

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