And so we’ve come to the end of another year on this ridiculous little planet, one that had its high points to be sure, but wasn’t lacking for low ones either. I try to keep these Needs Improvement lists more positive than negative, as the over reliance on antagonism and sheer pig headed ignorance has turned film criticism into just another brand for YouTube shouty-bros, and the last thing I want to do is contribute to the noise. The last twelve months certainly haven’t made it easy to keep an upbeat attitude, but we’re all doing our best in these uncertain times as we take a look at movies that just didn’t quite hit the mark. Let’s get started!!
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The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
I understand why a lot of Tolkien fans would appreciate this movie despite its faults. Taking it in as a mood piece that lets you slip into this world for a couple more hours is a valid way of enjoying this, but I simply could not get past how dull it was for most of its runtime. It has a solid foundation to tell an interesting story, but the dialogue and the characters let it down. There’s a lack of personality among the cast. Lots of emotions to be sure, but everyone who express them doesn’t feel like they exist outside their current predicament. This is especially problematic for our two leads as the motivations of our villain lack any sort of nuance and our hero feels thin as her stoicism and humility are presented to us in place of a personality; leaving the movie with two blocks of wood with anime eyes to revolve the story around. If it were up to me to make this work, I’d cut the whole thing down to the bone, no more than forty minutes, and make it the grand finale of a Lord of the Rings anthology. Animation collections have worked for The Matrix, Batman, Halo, even that recent Star Wars thing on Disney Plus, so why not for Tolkien? Without having to fill the space of an entire movie, the characters could stay as archetypes and legends whose actions are meant to speak louder than the words coming out of their mouths. The animation and action could be fleshed out to better suit the simplified storyline, and without having to explain as much, the characters can come off as much more proactive in the story. Perhaps my suggestions are more a testament to my own attention span, but there had to be a more interesting story to tell in Middle Earth than that one time there was a very long siege!
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Long Legs
I suppose this is my Dark Horse pick, as it earned strong reviews from critics and an even stronger box office return from audiences, but I found it to be a frustrating experience. Despite Osgood’s phenomenal sense of moody atmosphere and the similarly exceptional cinematography, it never felt like the movie took off the training wheels as it ambled along at a steady and careful pace for its entire runtime. It’s a murder mystery without being particularly off-putting or even thrilling, with everyone approaching the situation in a subdued and matter of fact energy with the exception of Nicolas Cage who does what he can to liven things up. I suppose this is all intentional and the lack of shlock is meant to contrast the brutality of the killings with how utter pointless and empty it all is, but for me, it came off like a criticism of the genre without suitably replacing what they’re stripping out. Silence of the Lambs set an incredibly high bar, as did the show Hannibal, and a large part of that success is how well it blends its brilliant writing and characters with truly ugly and sleazy stories. A movie about Satanic Panic doesn’t have to be a gore fest or even lascivious, but it does have to have a bit of edge to keep the audience from feeling too comfortable. A few small action beats peppered throughout would keep the tension up and a much stronger ending would have made up for a lot, but I think this is all a moot point since Osgood is already moving in a more pulpy direction with his next film, The Monkey, which looks like an absolute blast. Perhaps he’s gotten all the stuffiness out of his system and is ready to have some fun making a movie, which I would greatly appreciate after seeing this one.
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Borderlands
There were a couple movies this year that I thought were perfectly fine if heavily flawed, and it was between this and Madame Webb. I decided to give the latter a break since the vitriol against it got immediately disproportionate compared to its generally decent quality, and I think this movie could use a few more constructive finger wags. Decent production design and a couple of smart casting decisions were not able to make up for the mediocre writing, obnoxious editing, and the terrible casting decisions. There was certainly potential here as the games lend themselves to an over the top action comedy in the vein of Guardians of the Galaxy, but where those movies had James Gunn behind the camera, this had Eli Roth whose filmography is, charitably, a mixed bag. Maybe it was the studio putting unreasonable expectations on the project, maybe the COVID pandemic threw everything into chaos, or maybe Eli Roth is just not a great filmmaker, but the end result was a monument to averageness. Because of this, there’s no simple solution to turn this from a dud into an all-time classic. I suppose a stronger director would be the obvious answer, but that’s like saying they should have just made the movie better; not all that insightful. Let’s just say that the COVID Pandemic was not a good time to be making movies, so if we get hit with another one of those in the next four years, we should think long and hard before starting up big projects like this.
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IF
IF is owned by Paramount Pictures
Directed by John Krasinski
The mere concept of imagination took a real beating this year between that awful Purple Crayon movie and this one. I decided to go with this one over Harold because, frankly, I had nothing constructive to say about it. Here, there at least seemed to be a vision to build on and a cast who looked like they wanted to be there, so it gets a spot on the list. I can’t say I’ve been all that impressed with John Krasinski’s career as either an actor or a filmmaker, and this whole movie is the perfect encapsulation of why I’ve been left wanting. It’s a movie about imagination that lacks humanity, as the whole thing is far too precious to feel authentic. It’s the kind of movie that adults make to nurture their kids instead of engaging with them on their level. It’s condescending and that sense of being talked down to never went away despite Krasinski’s best efforts to make a movie as appealing to all audiences as possible. The result of this is somehow more embarrassing than it sounds, because it doesn’t even seem to be aimed at kids, with Krasinski’s stylistic choices and the script’s uneven focus putting far too much weight on the adults in the movie. I can’t claim to know what The Youth is up to these days, but I doubt many of them will care much for the star-sudded cast playing the imaginary characters; at least not as much as the old fogies taking their kids to this and who the filmmakers, consciously or not, are the true target audience here. Every generation of grownups thinks that they need to mold their kids into fully functioning and emotionally well-adjusted adults, but all the gimmicks and forced wholesomeness that we shove on them never really connects. You can get your kid one of those LeapFrog education consoles which they’ll get bored with quickly, or you can get them the kind of games all their friends have while also taking the time to study with them. Similarly, you don’t need a movie like this to tell your kid how to survive the crushing weight of adulthood when we ourselves are barely holding on by a thread and making mediocre slop like this. Just be a good example to them and let them watch Skibidi Toilet in moderation. Oh what, like our generation didn’t spend hours watching the Badger Dance?
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Argylle
Argyle is owned by Paramount Pictures
Directed by
I’m a huge James Bond fan and I love a good spy movie, but this just isn’t that. It might just be the most disappointing movie I saw this year, as I came in with little knowledge and moderate expectations for a fun action film and instead was greeted with an extremely frustrating waste of time; one that is way too long, far too convoluted for a movie this simple. Like a lot of Matthew Vaughn’s work, it’s got an off-putting air of smug superiority, but where the Kingsman movies temper that with sharp scripts and fun action scenes, this is just rather dull and so it can’t distract you from its less pleasant elements. It feels like the intent was to be a deconstruction of the over the top spy genre, but in execution, it’s just another example of it; albeit one that keeps undercutting itself because it thinks doing so make it look smarter. Instead, it’s entirely predictable with a plot that hits every cliché in the book without doing anything novel or subversive with them. It manages to have exactly one clever moment with an unexpected twist regarding the villains, but even this is handled poorly as it’s not allowed to play out in any satisfying way and is instead discarded as soon as it’s revealed. A movie can get away with being smug about other films in its genre as long as it’s presenting a better alternative, and that’s where the movie simply fails to justify its own existence. Aside from the competency of the action set pieces and some of the performances here and there, it’s not only less than almost every Bond film, but I’d even put it on the level of the lower rent parodies like Keeping Up with the Joneses or The Spy Who Dumped Me. Vaughn is a talented filmmaker, but a movie like this exposes too many of his flaws, and I think he’s better off making movies he sincerely enjoys rather than satires of ones he doesn’t.
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The Crow
Perhaps if you compare this to everything Crow related since the original Brandon Lee movie, then it doesn’t look so bad. I never saw the sequels, the TV series, or played any of the games, so all I have is the original movie to go off of which is still the only reason we’re getting this remake in the first place, and in that regard it feel spectacularly short. As terrible as this movie was, however, I do want to give it some slack for the tough position it was in. Not only is it a remake of a beloved classic film, it’s also a remake of a very dated classic film, so not it was bound to annoy old fans who can’t get over the Brandon Lee film as well as alienate modern audiences who simply don’t relate to the material. The only audience who could possibly care about a remake are dead set against it from the outset, so what could have been done to save it? Probably nothing given how thoroughly audiences rejected it, but I do think that this could have worked if they tried to look forward in the way the nineties film did instead of looking back to try and recreate it. If you want The Crow to work for anyone under the age of forty, you have to let go of all the iconography and get back to what made it connect with audiences. Heartbroken kids, cathartic violence, and a trendy aesthetic which Goth no longer is. There are signs of self-awareness in the movie as it tries to update some of the material, but unfortunately, the most modern thing about this is its eye on franchise building that leaves the movie lost and adrift; not interesting enough to be its own thing, not faithful enough to satisfy old fans, and lacks a sense of closure to leave general audiences happy. If you want an example of something like this done worse, it’s at least better than Venom: The Last Dance, which I couldn’t be bothered to review and probably would have topped a Worst list if I was doing one of those. That movie was irredeemably broken from the get-go, and I have no interest in trying to clean up Sony’s messes after they’ve clearly given up. This, I was disappointed in because the idea has potential and there are enough sparks of originality to tell me that they weren’t completely phoning it in, even if the studio seems to have buried it under a mountain of cynicism.
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Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
This isn’t a numbered list, but if there’s one movie that drove me up a wall this year, it was yet another Ghostbusters movie trying to beat the deadest of dead horses for one more payday. Some have viewed this as an extended episode of the animated series, but even that feels overly generous, as a TV show at least knows how to tell a complete story from beginning to end. If you want an example of everything wrong with the franchise minded state of Hollywood, you need not look at Disney, Star Wars, or even DC, but at this which was built from the ground up to be anything but a movie. Carve a chunk out here to throw a bone at everyone who was still holding out for a Ghostbusters three, carve a chunk out there to set the stage for a spin-off for all the secondary characters, and let’s see if we can throw in a few more gadgets for Spirit Halloween to sell next year. It’s so overstuffed with nonsense that the Frozen Empire of the title doesn’t occur until about ten minutes before the movie ends, and I can’t think of a better indictment of this brand than for one of the movies being this embarrassed to be here at all. Afterlife was better than this because as its fan service was subtle and tame compared to what we get here, and it’s far below the 2016 version which can stand on its own as a fun comedy and doesn’t feel utterly shackled to the whims of an increasingly temperamental fan base. You want to fix Ghostbusters? Throw everything in the trash and start again. Full reboot, no returning characters, and maybe lean into the horror aspects as the fans seem to appreciate the darker elements of the lore, and it perhaps gives you more to work with when coming up with sequels. Would that be any good? Honestly, it’d probably just be another Conjuring series with slightly more elaborate equipment, but anything is better than playing the same hits over and over again for a dwindling audience of Gen Xers. I hope the last two movies scratched whatever itch left them so upset about never getting that third movie; otherwise they’re just going to stay mad because I doubt it’s getting any better from here. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong and the next time they drag the original cast out for one of these will yield the franchise’s best entry yet, but something tells me you’re not getting Bill Murray back in the suit without a fight.
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And with that, we can finally purge ourselves of the negative feelings for 2024 and focus on what was great about it when we talk about the best movies of the year! Agree with what I had to say about these movies? Feel that I’m completely off base with my criticisms? Let me know in the comments below!
The Reviewers Unite 