The Worst Movies of 2018

The AV Club just released their worst movies of 2018 list, I’ll be honest I didn’t see a lot of movies in the last year but some of them are already on Netflix. Judging from the fact that I tried to watch ‘Future World’ and lost interest 20 minutes in AND it comes in at #6 on the list, I think I’ll probably take their recommendations to heart. I was definitely NOT surprised to see ‘The Happytime Murders’ on the list…as much as I love Melissa McCarthy, that just looked horrible from minute one. You can find the entire list here!

1. Gotti. Much like the Dapper Don himself, this execrable mob biopic makes no bones about being bad. We’re talking about a movie that opens with John Travolta turning to the camera in the oh-I-didn’t-see-you-there style of an old Christmas special to declare: “Let me tell you somethin’: New York is the greatest f**kin’ city in the world.”
2. The Death of a Nation. There’s exactly one halfway-reasonable point in Dinesh D’Souza’s latest breathlessly dishonest, ineptly assembled “documentary,” and it’s that there’s probably not much to be gained politically in openly insulting every person who voted for Donald Trump. The irony is that the director’s whole rhetorical approach is an insult to the collective intelligence of that same demographic, because his “evidence”—bald-faced lies, impossible leaps in logic, blatant historical distortions—doesn’t hold up to a second of scrutiny.
3. Life Itself. A subplot about one character’s graduate thesis in comparative lit (thrilling!) suggests that Dan Fogelman has never read a book. The This Is Uscreator’s grasp of human life and behavior is similarly questionable.
4. Fifty Shades Freed. “The climax” of the franchise turned out to be the worst of the bunch. Opening with a blandly opulent wedding that feeds into a montage of Christian (Jamie Dornan) and Ana (the criminally underserved Dakota Johnson) scampering through sexy rich-person hideaways across Europe, the film wastes no time in demonstrating that the politics are still garbage, the story still borderline incomprehensible, and the sex unforgivably dull.
5. Dark Crimes. Dark Crimes is everything critics accused Hostel of being: a plodding, exploitative, pointless provocation that fetishizes misogynist violence and caricatures Eastern Europe as a grim, perpetually overcast hellhole where reading books composed primarily of explicit descriptions of sexualized femicide is apparently a mainstream pastime.
6. Future World. Listen, taking Lucy Liu and Snoop Dogg and Milla Jovovich and Method Man out to the desert to play Mad Max sounds fun. No one is debating that. But why make the rest of us sit through it? Directed by the unfortunately prolific James Franco and his frequent collaborator Bruce Thierry Cheung, Future World has the feel of a post-apocalyptic-themed bachelor party captured on film—meaning, as is always the case when watching someone else’s home movies, this looks like it was a lot more interesting to make than it is to watch.
7. The Outsider. Netflix’s original movies sometimes seem to have been generated not so much by its fabled algorithm as via Mad Libs: A [foreign genre] story set in [time period] and starring [Oscar-winning actor]. Whatever the rationale, it resulted in something that few subscribers could have fervently desired: a yakuza story set in the 1950s and starring Jared Leto.
8. Mute. An Amish bartender rendered silent by one of those boating accidents the Amish always seem to be getting themselves into. Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux sporting monumentally awful hairpieces as a pair of black-market surgeons named Cactus Bill and Duck, whose low-key homoerotic vibe may or may not allude to something more. A non-sequitur set piece featuring a well-hung sex-bot. On paper, Duncan Jones’ big swing for the sci-fi fences contains all the makings of the best kind of bad movie: a massively flawed work of intimately personal, mad-prophet ambition. What a betrayal, then, that this malfunctioning Blade Runner replicant can’t even work up the energy to be the right kind of incompetent.
9. The Darkest Minds. What if X-Men took place mostly in parking lots and on backroads? That’s the scintillating question answered by The Darkest Minds, a botched cloning attempt by the X-Men’s own home studio.
10. The Happytime Murders. It’s a “comedy” that operates on the principle that Muppets saying swear words is always funny, no matter how many times you do it, and the result is not only persistently dumb and overwhelmingly unfunny but repetitive as well. There might be something to the idea of making Muppet movies for adults, but this? This isn’t it.