These are the films that arrived in theaters to the sound of a sad trombone,
stunk up the joint for a while, and then slunk away in shame. The next time you're having an
off day on the job, just be glad your job doesn't get released to thousands of screens worldwide.
The Valiant Comics property Bloodshot, about an ex-Marine who is raised from the dead to become
a nanotech-infused super soldier, seemed like it had a chance to be a pretty good Vin Diesel movie.
Unfortunately, two things went wrong for Bloodshot on the way to box office glory.
For one thing, it was released on March 13th,
right as theaters everywhere began to close down. Secondly, it wasn't very good.
Observers also bemoaned the film's reliance on tired action movie tropes and its lack
of an emotional center, but even those who were simply along for a thrill ride left disappointed.
Reviewer Jeff Mitchell struck the killing blow with six words, writing:
"Boreshot feels like a better title."
You may be asking for it when you put the word "lazy" right there in the title of the movie,
and if the critics are to be believed, Lazy Susan lives down to its name.
Its simplistic plot follows a middle-aged sad-sack, who one day decides to stop skating
through life and make something of herself. The fact that the character is played by a
man — Sean Hayes, of Will and Grace fame — should begin to give you an idea of its many problems.
Reviewers clocked the movie for its stiff pacing, a lack of big laughs,
and the weird stunt casting of Hayes that didn't add up to much.
As Frank Scheck wrote for The Hollywood Reporter,
"It's hard to imagine exactly what Sean Hayes
was thinking [...] Lazy Susan simply feels like a mistake."
"Are you jealous, Velvet Swinson?" "I am definitely not."
Inheritance is a film with a strong cast and an amazing premise. After the death of her wealthy
father, a woman is directed to a secret bunker on the family's property, where a mysterious man
claims he was held captive for three decades. It's a scintillating setup, but most critics felt the
movie was terminally slow and boring, failing to live up to its totally bonkers potential.
"Who are you?" "I'd like to think I'm a member of the family."
Calling the screenplay "intelligence-deprived,"
Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers savaged director Vaughn Stein in his review, writing,
"His misbegotten and, yes, preposterous new movie hits
a new low that will test the patience and the sanity of anyone who sees it."
Bruce Willis is a national treasure, but he's spent a nice stretch of his
career now doing subpar work in some pretty terrible movies.
One 2020 low point is his actioner Survive the Night,
which sees him portraying a retired cop called in to save the day when the family of his son,
a surgeon, gets held hostage by a pair of robbers, demanding medical attention after
one is wounded during a heist. It's a kind of silly premise, and it's executed horribly.
"If my brother dies, I'm gonna kill you."
Jeffrey M. Anderson of Common Sense Media took everyone involved with Survive the Night
to task with a review which was probably more entertaining than the movie itself. He wrote,
"This movie looks and sounds like a real thriller, but the premise and the
characters' behaviors and interactions are so stunningly absurd that it's nearly impossible
to turn your brain off and enjoy. [...] This movie is so bad it will leave you gobsmacked."
The Last Days of American Crime must have sounded great as an elevator pitch.
As the government prepares to broadcast a signal that will rewire the brains of the populace,
making it impossible for them to commit crimes, one lowly gangster who never
managed a big score puts together a team to try to pull off... well, the last crime ever.
If that plot sounds comic book-y to you, you won't be surprised to learn that it's based on a graphic
novel by comics legend Rick Remender. But director Olivier Megaton and his cast of up-and-comers
couldn't make the pieces fit together. The flick did pull off one amazing feat, however:
with a zero percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, it failed to notch even a single positive review.
Based on a series of YA novels by Eoin Colfer,
Artemis Fowl arrived on Disney+ as one of the worst-reviewed films of the year.
"It would appear we've garnered quite a bit of interest, Artie."
Writing for RogerEbert.com, Christy Lemire called Artemis Fowl "a glossy and empty
exercise in world-building," lamenting the movie's razzle-dazzle lack of substance. As she put it,
"There's always another fearsome creature,
another giant set piece or fight scene, with a frantic score urging
the action along. There's a great deal of exertion on display but very little magic."
The film's breakneck pace came under fire from
nearly everyone who watched it, with writer Rich Cline noting,
"It's basically a three-hour script crammed into 90 minutes, so nothing quite lands."
Most ominous for its young star Ferdia Shaw — the grandson of late, legendary actor Robert
Shaw — was the assessment of News-Gazette writer Charles Koplinski, who wrote,
"Artemis Fowl is the sort of movie that kills careers."
"Good to know."
The indie mystery Darkness Falls has an interesting enough setup,
with a detective coming to suspect that his late wife, who supposedly killed herself, was in fact
killed by somebody else. Digging for answers, he finds himself on the trail of a father-and-son
serial killer team driven by their hatred of women. The movie tries to rise above cliches
and say something about society -- and that's where critics say it falls flat on its face.
Sheila O'Malley of RogerEbert.com pointed out the obvious problem with the preachy
aspirations of Darkness Falls in her blistering one-star review, writing,
"The attempt to create a 'serious' anti-misogyny message through this
shallow, improbable material — directed and written by
two men, with no complex female characters onscreen — is maybe the worst part of it."
Rich Cline of Shadows on the Wall went even farther, saying the movie's over-serious tone and
lack of subtlety ended up making it far funnier of a viewing experience than the filmmakers intended.
The sophomore feature from writer, director, and former Daily Show host Jon Stewart,
one might reasonably expect Irresistible to be a blistering political satire.
Unfortunately, the tale of a small-town election that unexpectedly steals the
national spotlight turned out to be an unfunny disappointment,
as critics found the film to be surprisingly lacking in bite.
"Can I be completely honest with you? No bull." "Be nice -- my daughter's
here." "That was your daughter with her arm up the... cow."
Nick Schager of The Daily Beast wrote in a negative review,
"[The film is] content to indulge in condescending clichés and cornball humor.
In desperate need of ruthless incisiveness, it goes soft at every turn."
Desperados seemed to have all of the elements for a successful rom-com with a hilarious premise:
A woman leaves an embarrassing, drunken message on her new boyfriend's phone,
and must go to extreme lengths to erase it. Unfortunately,
the final product ended up pandering, far-fetched, and borderline offensive.
"Would it be insane if I went to Mexico and erased the email?" "Yes."
Tomris Laffly of RogerEbert.com was among many critics who called
the flick out for its disappointing over-reliance on lowbrow humor, writing,
"This critic always craves stories centered on females
in meaty roles being unapologetically messy and problematic. But maybe there is a way to
not make it look and feel this much like an insult to women."
Detroit News' Adam Graham simply wanted a little more effort from the screenplay,
calling it out for its many cliches, "painful set pieces" and "strained life lessons."
For a film ostensibly celebrating the power of female friendship, though,
the most towering insult came from FilmWeek's Amy Nicholson, who wrote,
"This movie made me embarrassed to be a woman."
David Ayer has had a rough few years, critically speaking. After writing well-regarded flicks
like Training Day, and directing End of Watch and Fury, he turned in the massive
clunker that was 2016's Suicide Squad and the successful-but-critically-reviled Bright.
His latest effort, The Tax Collector, finds Bobby Soto and Shia LeBeouf starring as
low-level enforcers for a drug kingpin, who run afoul of their employer's competition.
The story makes for a loose framework upon which is built a never-ending series of clichés.
Carlos Aguilar of the Los Angeles Times called the film "one of the most atrocious viewing
experiences of the year," and called it out for being a, quote, "flagrantly violent,
stereotype ridden, poorly realized production."
While the movie was a hit for Netflix, critics agree -- there's a lot wrong with The Wrong Missy.
Lead actor David Spade was singled out early and often for his lack of enthusiasm in the role,
with AV Club's Ignatiy Vishnevetsky describing him
as having "the screen presence of an unenthused real estate agent."
Jonathan Wilson of Ready Steady Cut likewise slammed Spade's work,
but was equally unimpressed with his co-star Lauren Lapkus, who throws everything she's got
into bringing an immensely annoying character to life. The results are painful. The critic wrote,
"No right-minded agent would present a client with a script as diabolical
as [this] one ... except apparently whoever mismanages Lapkus's career."
Revenge thrillers are awesome, and Terry Crews is awesome,
so one would expect John Henry — which stars Crews as a gentle giant forced
to go on the bloody warpath — to at least have been... watchable. Alas,
the movie ended up as one of the rare films to draw a complete goose egg on Rotten Tomatoes,
with critics unanimously agreeing that for all its ambitions, the movie is kind of ridiculous.
The New York Times' Jeanette Catsoulis called the film "A thug-life thriller
so frequently preposterous that it almost resembles a parody."
Most of the film's problems were laid at the feet of first-time writer-director Will Forbes,
who seemed to have little idea about how to handle his star's towering screen presence.
Wrote Dominic Griffin of Spectrum Culture,
"John Henry is both uninspired and uninspiring,
a mixed bag and missed opportunity that's as confounding as it is infuriating."
The Vanished is a thriller stocked with stars who have seen better days;
its main cast includes Thomas Jane, Anne Heche,
and Jason Patric, and they all give off the distinct vibe that they'd rather be anywhere else.
Critics called out the flick's acting, writing,
and direction, but most crucially, The Vanished is a film that relies
solely on a third-act twist that nearly every observer found to be completely absurd.
Jane and Heche star as a couple whose daughter disappears on a camping trip,
delivering unconvincing performances en route to a big reveal.
Carla Hay of Culture Mix addressed the script's fatal flaws, writing,
"The plot twist is meant to elevate the story, but it just ends up sinking the movie,
which was already drowning in a swamp of implausibility."
Critic Mark Dujsik rejected the movie completely, saying,
"The Vanished is wildly and weirdly incompetent, featuring one miscalculation after another,
after another, and after another. It's an embarrassment of a movie."
Bruce Willis returns to the list with another late-career detour into the kinds of movies
you find in a gas station bargain bin. This time, he's headlining Hard Kill,
a brain-dead thriller which managed to "achieve" a 0 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The plot, such as it is, involves a group of mercenaries trying to bring down a
mad computer hacker before he can start World War III, but that hardly matters;
every single critic tasked with viewing it had nothing but massive volumes of scorn to heap on
the film from director Matt Eskandari, who also directed Willis in the reviled Survive the Night.
Reviewers seemed to have a lot more fun writing about Hard Kill than they did
watching it. The Hollywood Reporter's Frank Scheck wrote,
"[Willis] seems to have settled on making listless appearances in forgettable B-movie action movies
as a retirement funding plan... the unimaginatively titled Hard Kill was
filmed in a mere ten days, making you wonder how they spent eight of them."
Frank Swietek of One Guy's Opinion went even pithier with his assessment, proclaiming,
"The title of this noisy, stupid, totally boring bomb should really be Hard Watch."
Money Plane is a pretty stupid action movie that features Frasier star Kelsey
Grammer as a sinister crime boss named "The Rumble." That's kind of all you need to know.
"I'm the baddest motherf----- on the planet. I am Darius Grouch III,
The Rumble, and I am taking down the money plane. Now bring me my money!"
This ludicrous tale of a heist involving a flying high-stakes casino
baffled critics in 2020, including Nick Schager of The Daily Beast,
who simply couldn't wrap his head around the movie's absurd premise.
Meanwhile, Peter Sobczynski of eFilm Critic was disappointed
that the movie didn't lean more into that absurdity. He wrote,
"Look, I do not object to the fact that Money Plane is trying to be
the most self-consciously dopey movie of recent memory. What I object to is
that the whole thing is too stupid and lazy to accomplish even that not-exactly-lofty goal."
Everybody loves Ron Perlman. There's nobody better at playing gruff, badass types,
he's got a great sense of humor, and he loves engaging fans on social media. Unfortunately,
he failed to engage anyone with Run with the Hunted, in which he plays a private
investigator and mentor to a woman determined to find the boy who saved her life as a child.
From that seemingly innocuous premise springs a bizarrely violent picture which doesn't quite
seem to know what kind of film it wants to be — or, indeed, if it should have been a
film at all. Run with the Hunted is another 2020 inductee in Rotten Tomatoes' 0% club
with not a lot to recommend it. As Peter Canavese of the Celluloid Dreams podcast opined,
"[The movie] feels like a TV season's worth of script had to be hacked down to 90 minutes,
resulting in incoherent near-pointlessness."
Nobody ever accused the self-help book The Secret of being ripe for a rom-com adaptation,
but that didn't prevent veteran genre director Andy Tennant from
giving it a shot with The Secret: Dare to Dream.
Assembling a surprisingly appealing cast which includes Katie Holmes,
Jerry O' Connell, and Josh Lucas, Tennant shoehorned the book's message of...
well, achieving your heart's desires by wishing really hard into a maudlin romance that wouldn't
have worked even without its connection to its questionable source material.
In what amounts to a critical napalming, Adam Graham of Detroit News wrote,
"The Secret: Dare to Dream is a gauze-covered, soft-peddled, vaguely spiritual tale of cosmic
happenstance [...] innocent and innocuous enough to make Nicholas Sparks look like David Lynch."
Writing for Decider, Jade Budowski acknowledged that
the movie steers more toward comedy than wisdom, writing,
"For a movie intended to be inspiring, there is so
little about this that feels genuinely uplifting that it's almost comical."
David Bowie is one of the most remarkable and fascinating
entertainers of all time, totally deserving of a movie that showcases his life. One day,
somebody may make that movie. Until then, there's Stardust.
The movie is about a brief period in the life of the rock star starring Johnny Flynn, an actor and
musician who bears so little a resemblance to Bowie that it's actually distracting.
Stardust specifically concerns a young Bowie's American tour in 1971
and his creation of the Ziggy Stardust persona. Actually, Stardust can't even
really claim to be that, because at the outset, audiences are informed that it's a speculative
work of primarily fiction — and it's a giant disappointment unworthy of its inspiration.
As a final insult, filmmakers also failed to secure the rights to any of Bowie's songs,
making the movie, as Barry Hertz of The Globe and Mail put it, "a pointless exercise."
There are a few things about The War with Grandpa that are more than a little unsettling.
The film suggests that family bonds are extremely fragile,
liable to collapse under the weight of the pettiest of squabbles. It's a strained and
labored comedy that makes it hard for the audience to root for anyone — or laugh at much of anything.
Tweenage Peter is so entitled that he completely lacks any sympathy or
empathy whatsoever for Grandpa Ed, and decides to start a prank war with the
old guy, despite the fact that he's a grieving, increasingly frail widower.
Meanwhile, Grandpa Ed is a veteran, and not one to back down, which leads him to
escalate the prank war against his grandson in a way that you hope no real person ever would.
Insubstantial and unlikable, Peter Travers of Good Morning America calls The War with Grandpa
"barely passable piffle," while Bilge Ebiri, writing for Vulture,
says that the movie, quote, "seems to vanish from the mind even as you're watching it."
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