Giant locusts? Lifeless CGI? A poorly made Exorcist rip-off? Bad movies get released all the
time, and we suffered through them so you don't have to. Here are the worst films of 2022.
The sixth movie in the Jurassic Park series and the third entry in the reboot trilogy
launched in 2015, Jurassic World Dominion feels designed to gobble up money the way its unhinged
dinosaurs gobble up prey. But it would seem that filmmakers have returned to the formula
one too many times to make a decent movie, even one that features hyper-realistic dinos.
Set four years after the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,
dinosaurs now roam the world, terrorizing and hunting humans and other creatures,
shooting themselves to the top of the food chain. So it's too bad the movie decides
to spend a good chunk of its run time focused on an outbreak of giant locusts.
Of course, that's not the only problem with this sequel. According to Rotten Tomatoes,
Dominion is by far the most critically savaged trip to the Jurassic lands yet,
amassing a woeful 30% rating. Critic Tim Brayton of Alternate Ending wrote of the movie,
"The last time dinosaurs were subjected to a disaster this bad,
there was an asteroid involved."
After some promising short films, Anna Gutto made her feature screenwriting and directorial
debut with Paradise Highway. One couldn't ask for a better cast for their first big movie,
as it stars likable action mainstay Frank Grillo and two Academy Award
winners in the legendary Morgan Freeman and Juliette Binoche. The problem is,
this talent is woefully miscast. In order to save her brother from peril,
Southern trucker Sally is forced to transport illegal cargo, which turns out to be a little kid.
"A kid had been in this cage."
Grillo isn't in the movie much, existing primarily as a disembodied voice on one end
of a phone line. Binoche just isn't believable as a tough, foul-mouthed woman of the road. Freeman,
despite being well over 80 years old, plays a hard-as-nails FBI agent.
Paradise Highway also suffers from a lurid plot: It's seedy, salacious for the sake
of being salacious, and even exploitative. The story should allow for intensity, but it never
comes to pass. The New York Times dinged the movie for a lack of interesting tension. Most
other critics concurred, as Paradise Highway earned a truly dismal Rotten Tomatoes score.
Big Gold Brick tells the story of young writer Samuel Liston as he attempts to write the
biography of Floyd Deveraux, a middle-aged father the film takes great pains to let the viewers know
is quirky. Nearly every event in Big Gold Brick is a smug contrivance. The tiresomely pretentious
Samuel and the obnoxiously weird Floyd meet when the latter hits the former with his car. Samuel
is then the audience surrogate into the world of Floyd's family, which Big Gold Brick relentlessly
insists is wacky and interesting but are really just a third-rate bunch of Royal Tenenbaums kooks.
Critics hated Big Gold Brick, giving it a lowly 20% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Disney's live-action remakes of its classic animated features have had far from a flawless
critical track record. But even the subpar quality of previous outings couldn't have
prepared people for the studio's underwhelming new take on Pinocchio. Helmed by Robert Zemeckis,
this 2022 update on Pinocchio didn't offer anything to improve on the film it was remaking,
instead replacing the complicated tone of the original feature with
lifeless CGI and dumb bits of modern comedy.
The idea to render this iteration of the little wooden boy as such a
passive figure was just one of many baffling concepts in this remake,
which also suffered from an overabundance of CGI and a terrible reimagining of Jiminy Cricket.
Worst of all, this project roped in and wasted the valuable time of Tom Hanks,
who was conscripted to play Geppetto. His presence doesn't enliven the film so much as
it reminds audiences how every artist assembled here could've spent their time far more wisely.
"Jumping jeepers! He's alive!"
If there's any major upside to this new version of Pinocchio, it's that it made the stop-motion
animated Guillermo del Toro take on this same fairy tale all the easier to appreciate when it
dropped a few months later. Until the end of time,
people will be trying to recapture the lighting-in-a-bottle success of The Exorcist.
"The power of Christ compels you. The power of Christ compels you."
That horror movie made exorcisms a go-to practice to hinge new films around, though despite the
ubiquity of such titles, few have managed to even come close to the quality of The Exorcist. Even
many of the sequels to that William Friedkin horror film have been disappointingly shallow
rather than frightening. Unfortunately for moviegoers looking for solid horror cinema,
Prey for the Devil is yet another forgettable dud in the expansive canon of Exorcist knock-offs.
It's no surprise that critics have been heavily disappointed with the meager scares
Prey for the Devil offers up, with specifical criticism being lobbed at how derivative its
atmosphere is of other exorcism movies, as well as a disjointed narrative that's more
distracting than eerie. Worst of all are the repeated criticisms that Prey for the Devil is,
above all else, monotonous rather than memorably bad. The movie's mechanical
approach to becoming the Exorcist of 2022 means that it's simply tedious — a
lifeless rehash of the past, too lacking in a pulse to deliver idiosyncratic shortcomings.
"You got my invitation."
Writer and director David O. Russell shot for the moon with Amsterdam,
which brought together a staggering ensemble of talent to portray the various players in a dark
comedy set in the early decades of the 20th century. The whole enterprise is plagued by,
among other shortcomings, an inescapable sense of lifelessness, particularly in the cinematography
and half-hearted deliveries of seemingly big jokes. It also turns out that bringing together
so many famous actors isn't all that compelling if you don't give them something interesting to do.
The flaws in Amsterdam are endless, right down to Christian Bale's performance, which pulls
off the hat trick of being both too hammy and severely lacking in a discernible personality.
"That's what we've become? A moment of weakness?"
Worst of all, though, is its runtime, which stretches out the movie's thin plot for roughly
135 minutes. There really is no advantage to such a prolonged length beyond making one even more
conscious of this feature's various flaws. All of the big names Russell secured for Amsterdam's cast
may have looked snazzy on a poster, but none of them were able to salvage this empty disaster.
Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend offers up its take on the life of Ferruccio Lamborghini
and specifically his drive to defeat rival Enzo Ferrari during the Geneva Grand Prix.
Ford v Ferrari demonstrated in 2019 that dudes engaging in automobile-focused rivalries can be
quite exciting and compelling, but Lamborghini offered the disastrous flipside to that feature.
"What's it take?"
"Well it takes something money can't buy."
"Money can buy speed."
"Well it isn't about speed."
This title, written and directed by Bobby Moresco, was critically savaged upon its release and
largely dismissed as a disposable, tedious motion picture. Top of the list of recurring critiques
about the movie is how Lamborghini doesn't offer much insight or unique perspectives
on its central subject. There's nothing in here, either narratively or visually,
to make Lamborghini stand out from countless other similar biopics. The performances from
actors like Frank Grillo get slightly better marks than other aspects of the production,
but even these performers can't keep a film this dismal afloat. Whether you're looking for
a movie that offers something new to say about the life of Ferruccio Lamborghini or just an
exciting movie about cars, Lamborghini is bound to leave you disappointed.
In his time as an actor, Russell Crowe has headlined several acclaimed films. Unfortunately,
his second feature-length directorial effort, Poker Face, wasn't greeted with the same level of
acclaim. On the contrary, this suspense thriller was met with disdain from critics, who largely
found this title to be an utterly forgettable outing. Crowe has often made incredibly bold
choices as a performer that, love them or hate them, do ensure his work as an actor sticks
around in your mind. By contrast, Poker Face has been largely criticized for being so generic.
The most critical flaw highlighted time and time again in the reviews for Poker
Face is that it's designed to be a movie that keeps you on the edge of your seat,
yet its storyline and characters are incredibly predictable. Nothing in here is
all that innovative nor effective at conjuring up suspense. The mostly listless performances
from the supporting cast, which includes Liam Hemsworth, also garnered negative marks. As
an actor, Crowe's reputation is largely unimpeachable. His skills in that area,
though, are sorely missing when it came to his filmmaking chops on Poker Face.
A historical fantasy that spent years in production hell, The King's Daughter stars Pierce
Brosnan as King Louis XIV of France, who sends his men to search for a mythical mermaid. Louis
wants to live forever, and he believes the magical properties of the mermaid will make that happen.
His plan gets derailed when his illegitimate daughter learns of the mermaid's existence.
"This place is so beautiful."
This isn't one of those films that's so bad it's good; it's just straight-up bad. And we
mean bad. January has long been a dumping ground for unwatchable movies, but The King's Daughter
was just too terrible to fly under the radar, despite being based on a prize-winning novel.
The King's Daughter is an adaptation of the book The Moon and the Sun, which won the Nebula Award
in 1997. It's a fantastic read, but the movie does the book a huge disservice. Paramount removed
the film from its release schedule just weeks before it was due to hit cinemas in 2015, with
no explanation. A source close to the production told The Hollywood Reporter that the delay was due
to the visual effects being incomplete and that the movie would drop in a few months. However,
years would pass before it saw the light of day, and when that eventually happened,
it was easy to see why it was hidden away for so long. The big stars chew the scenery as the
film meanders to an unsatisfying finish. Sony's Spider-Man Universe has included the
financially successful and critically moderately received Venom and Venom:
Let There Be Carnage. And in 2022, the latest entry, Morbius hit theaters,
earning some of the worst reviews for a film based on a comics property in more than a decade.
An origin story of the titular Living Vampire, Morbius stars Jared Leto as Michael Morbius,
a scientist who cures himself of a blood disorder with an experimental treatment of his
own design. Of course, he also accidentally makes himself a special kind of vampire,
one who feasts on the blood of humans but who also has superpowers. These powers fuel his epic battle
for the ages against Milo Morbius, his surrogate brother who has the same blood disease, contracts
the same powers, but becomes the monstrous vampire counterpart to Michael's dark heroism.
"Let's have some fun."
According to professional film critics, Morbius is the worst film yet in Sony's
Spider-Man-adjacent cinematic universe, scoring a lowly 16% on Rotten Tomatoes.