Nazis and witches in the forest. A royal hunt for a mermaid. Ridiculous use of green screen.
Oscar nominees sinking to new lows. The worst movies of 2022 have to be seen to be believed.
Except that you might scratch your eyes out if you do see them, so watch this video instead.
Here's an erotic thriller in the vein of Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct but
with none of the verve. Shattered stars Cameron Monaghan as Chris,
a recently divorced tech mogul who falls for a stranger named Sky in a grocery store.
Sky is just too perfect. That's obvious right away, but Chris can't see it. You could argue
that he's blinded by her charms, but the sad truth is that the film is just poorly written.
When Chris gets targeted in a seemingly random attack and ends up with a broken leg, Sky becomes
his live-in nurse. By the time she's revealed as an unhinged home invader who's only interested in
Chris for his money, we're already bored. The sex scenes are nowhere near as steamy as advertised,
with little to no spark shared between the co-stars. That's largely on Chris being
so profoundly bland that we're basically rooting for Sky once the violence starts.
A World War II flick with witches and an eye-patch-wearing Mickey Rourke, Warhunt
shows some promise before quickly descending into schlock. When an American cargo plane goes down in
Germany's Black Forest, Rourke's Major Johnson pulls together a team of his best men and sends
them to retrieve the precious cargo. When they get close to the crash site, they discover the bodies
of several dead Nazis bearing mysterious symbols. And when their compasses suddenly fail, they
start to suspect something supernatural. Spoiler alert: there's a coven of witches in the forest.
It's an interesting setup, but it doesn't work when all the characters are just
macho stereotypes. Warhunt at least looks pretty slick,
but it's also completely devoid of fresh ideas. As awful one-liners begin to pile up,
any goodwill that was built up in the opening stages rapidly disappears.
"Stop that crap right now!"
Helmed by longtime X-Men writer-producer-director Simon Kinberg, The 355 is the sort of film
that really should've been a lot better. This globetrotting spy flick is forward-thinking and
features some top-tier talent, but none of them can elevate this
generic thriller. If you must know the plot, it features Jessica Chastain as Mason Brown,
a no-nonsense CIA agent who has to team up with other female spies from around the globe to
prevent a decryption drive capable of hacking any system on Earth from falling into the wrong hands.
The critics weren't especially kind, and we don't blame them. Despite their considerable talents,
the cast of Lupita Nyong'o, Penélope Cruz, Diane Kruger, and Fan Bingbing couldn't do much with
the clunky dialogue or the played-out cliches. The 355 is a waste of talent and of everyone's time.
He rose to fame as a fake prince in 2019's Aladdin, but Mena Massoud plays a real prince
in 2022's The Royal Treatment. Unfortunately, it's a formulaic and forgettable Netflix rom-com.
Prince Thomas lives in a castle and has his every need attended to, but he's just a normal guy
underneath it all. He meets a hairdresser named Izzy after his assistant accidentally calls her
salon and hires her for a one-off haircut. Of course, it becomes more than a one-off.
Izzy leaves the prince's hair half-finished after witnessing a member of the royal staff
being treated poorly, and he's forced to seek her out so that she can finish. It sounds
romantic, but there's no spark here, and all the "comedy" half of the "rom-com"
is missing as well. The Royal Treatment is an undeniably humorless and tedious
affair from start to finish. Even if you're obsessed with royal romances,
there are several better options on Netflix, like A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding,
which is far from a classic, but it's Citizen Kane compared to this glorified Lifetime movie.
"Rosebud."
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 mermaid can make that happen. Alas,
his plan gets derailed when his illegitimate daughter learns of the mermaid's existence.
This isn't one of those films that's so bad it's good; it's just straight-up bad. And we mean bad.
The King's Daughter is an adaptation of the novel The Moon and the Sun,
which won the Nebula Award in 1997. It's a fantastic read, but the movie does it 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. Years passed 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,
as the whole thing just meanders before flopping to an unsatisfying finish.
In the style of the Happy Madison-produced Netflix films before it, the Kevin James-led Home Team
falls far short of funny. This gross-out sports comedy is loosely based on the real-life story
of football coach Sean Payton, who became the new offensive coordinator of his son's sixth
grade team during his one-year suspension from the NFL. It's a fascinating story, but Home Team isn't
particularly interested in the nitty-gritty. This is a PG comedy starring a bunch of kids, after
all. That would be forgivable if it were funny, but the script lacks any true laugh-out-loud
moments, as it also fails to capitalize on the potential of Payton's unlikely saga.
James plays Payton as a permanently scowling man's man who knows next to nothing about his son. And
that shouldn't come as much of a surprise to those who have seen their fair share
of Adam Sandler-produced films. As Amy Nicholson of The New York Times put it,
"The facts have been rejiggered [...] to fit the Sandman's formula:
Our hero is a seething screw-up, and everyone else is even worse."
We're not mad at Home Team, we're just disappointed. In the right hands,
it could've been a touchdown, but instead, it's a lazy comedy that just isn't worth your time.
"We get it: you fall down. You're heavy. F—ing hilarious."
Perhaps the world just isn't ready to laugh at the collective trauma that was the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Bubble marks a major misfire for its director, master of comedy Judd Apatow. The story is about
the chaotic production of Cliff Beasts 6: Battle for Everest: Memories of a Requiem,
a crummy blockbuster franchise movie shooting during COVID-19 lockdowns.
This requires the cast of spoiled stars to stay in their rooms, act against green screens,
and endure health protocols, all of which they snottily bristle against.
Simply put, The Bubble is a certifiable dud. Perhaps its biggest sin is that
despite one of the most formidable casts of comedically skilled actors ever assembled,
it doesn't provide nearly enough laughs. As Katie Rife of Polygon mercilessly described it,
"The Bubble is composed mainly of long,
excruciating sequences where everyone is trying very hard and producing zero laughs,
like people trying to start a fire by rubbing two wet sticks together."
Thanks to an agreement put in place before Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe took off, Sony
controls the film rights to several lesser-known characters from the Spider-Man canon. This has
resulted in the two somewhat well-received Venom flicks, but then in 2022, we were
subjected to Morbius. It stars human punchline Jared Leto as "living vampire" Michael Morbius,
a scientist who cures himself of a blood disorder with an experimental treatment of his own design.
"Hello! I'm-a Morbius. I'm a very scary vampire. A-boo! I'm gonna suck your blood."
Michael also accidentally makes himself a very special vampire, as he feasts on the blood of
humans and also has superpowers. This fuels his epic battle for the ages against Milo,
his surrogate brother who has the same blood disease and contracts the same powers but becomes
the evil counterpart to Michael's good vampire. Currently, Morbius is the worst-reviewed film
yet in Sony's Spider-Man-adjacent cinematic universe, and we have to agree with that
assessment. You'll be begging to have all the blood drained out of your arteries while watching.
Boon is like a Charles Bronson 70s vigilante movie but without the cultural context,
bewildering urban setting, or extreme violence that for better or worse made those flicks
compelling and unique. It's also basically a late-career Liam Neeson-style revenge flick,
but without Neeson's charisma or star power. Instead, Boon is about a hired gun
named Nick Boon, played by TV cop show veteran Neal McDonough, who's seeking redemption after
a long and toxic career as the muscle and hired killer for a criminal organization.
Boon moves to a remote town in the Pacific Northwest and takes up with a poor widow
and her young son. But he realizes that his new life is much like his old one when a crime lord
terrorizes his new family, thereby forcing him to violently make things right with the world.
Not too many critics even bothered to review Boon,
but those who did basically hated it. As Brian Orndorf of Blu-ray.com scoffed,
"When the budget is this low and the star power this minimal,
it's best to go crazy with action, which this picture tries to avoid until the final act."
The makers of Measure of Revenge seemed to be motivated by a desire to craft a
film as seedy as possible but without the quirky characters or daring plot
necessary to justify a descent into the grimiest parts of human existence.
But ultimately, they just made a by-the-numbers revenge fantasy.
Oscar winner Melissa Leo plays Lillian Cooper, a legendary Broadway actress about to retire whose
son is found dead, supposedly from an accidental drug overdose. But Lillian has her doubts,
so she becomes a one-woman, mystery-solving, criminal-punishing army. That army doubles in
size when she forms a strange partnership with Bella Thorne as Taz, her son's dealer
who may have all the answers. Perhaps the only reason to watch Measure of Revenge is to try to
figure out how someone like Leo ended up in it. As Michael Nordine of Variety posited,
"Viewers are likely to spend more time wondering how she came to be
involved with such a shoestring production than sympathizing with her character."
"I'm not blaming anyone."
Redeeming Love demonstrates that it's difficult to make a morally uplifting movie about a time and
place intrinsically associated with debauchery without causing serious tonal whiplash.
Set in a California Gold Rush boomtown in 1850, the film focuses on the on-the-nose-named Angel,
a young woman sold to bad men when she was a child who grows up to be a sex
worker against her will. She internalizes the abuse and is riddled with self-hatred
until the morally upstanding Michael appears and shows Angel that a little bit of love and
attention can apparently heal any and all deep psychological wounds. In other words,
Redeeming Love is literally, and quite awkwardly, a movie about redeeming love.
As you can imagine, critics were not especially kind towards Redeeming Love,
which they found more manipulative than profound. As Jade Budowski of Decider declared,
"Redeeming Love fails as both a compelling romance and an effective drama,
failing to do its dazzling leading lady — or anyone else — justice whatsoever."
In 2022, horror master Jason Blum and Oscar winner Akiva Goldsman
supervised a remake of a mediocre adaptation of a lesser effort from Stephen King.
You might remember Goldsman from his work on The Dark Tower, another bomb based on a King novel.
Like the 1984 version, the 2022 Firestarter tells the story of parents Andy and Vicky
dealing with their young daughter Charlie, who has the ability to start fires with her mind
thanks to some evil government experimentation. They've successfully spent their lives on the
lam from the agents who wish to capture Charlie and weaponize her powers. The young girl has
been able to keep her ability in check for most of her life, but not so much anymore.
Critics across the board pretty much agreed that the new Firestarter was not
just unnecessary but also unequivocally terrible. As Nick Schager of The Daily Beast put it,
"The only mood conjured by this dud is one of extreme torpor."
"Fire bad!"
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