10 Worst Films of 2018
It’s been a year of changes around here, but it has remained a pleasure and a source of pride to be able to review films for a living. I still have six jobs and I have no job, as I like to say — it’s just that those jobs sometimes take different forms. What stays the same, though, is that many, many terrible movies come out every year. A few days ago, I posted my list of the 10 best films of 2018. Now, you get my list of the 10 worst, in alphabetical order. I really hope you didn’t have to see any of these, but if you did, just know that I commiserate. And please let me know what you’d choose for your worst-of list. Here’s to a great 2019!
“Bleeding Steel”
Poor Jackie Chan. He deserves so much better than this. Granted, he’s in his mid-60s and a few steps shy of peak form, but the lame material in “Bleeding Steel” never comes close to rising to the international superstar’s formidable talent and charm. Chan stars in this convoluted martial arts/sci-fi/comedy hybrid as a special agent who runs around trying to protect a young woman with amnesia. I feel like I’ve been afflicted by this condition myself, because I can barely recall a single detail of this movie, beyond the fact that I immediately felt the need to write it down on my worst-of list as soon as it was over. Chan could not need the work this badly.
“The Competition”
“The Competition” is the movie that inspired me to start my worst-of list this year — in January. I’m amazed that this movie exists, and that it exists today, given that it feels like it was made 20 years ago. This outdated, misogynistic and cruel romantic comedy is based on a contrived premise of whether men or women are more likely to cheat. Thora Birch and Chris Klein never feel like real people for a second, they have zero chemistry with each other and they’re stuck with painfully clunky dialogue. It shares a title with the 1980 Richard Dreyfuss/Amy Irving piano romance, but it actually has more in common with “The Room” in terms of its surreal situations and shoddy production values. It’s terrible, yet it must be seen.
Watch the What the Flick?! review here
“Dark Crimes”
Sometimes, Jim Carrey likes to get serious. The change of pace often works, as in “The Truman Show,” “Man on the Moon” or even his recent supporting role in “The Bad Batch,” in which his performance was one of the strongest elements. But this crime drama is just oppressively dour. And it is indeed dark — not just from a thematic perspective, but also from a visual one. The photo above is a great indication of what the entire somber film looks like. Carrey plays a Polish police detective whose investigation into an unsolved murder takes him down a bleak and seemingly never-ending rabbit hole. You’ll feel like the movie itself will never end, either.
“Gotti”
John Travolta IS John Gotti. And you never forget that you’re watching Travolta playing Gotti, because the wide array of aging makeup used to depict the mob boss over the years is never convincing. (Although Travolta is also essentially doing Alec Baldwin doing Donald Trump on “Saturday Night Live,” all frowny-faced and pouty and bloviating.) Director Kevin Connolly has made a Scorsese-lite crime thriller full of Mafia cliches and painfully on-the-nose musical selections. It’s bad, but it isn’t even so-bad-it’s-good as you’d like a movie at zero percent on the Tomatometer to be.
Watch the What the Flick?! review here
“A Happening of Monumental Proportions”
As an actress, Judy Greer makes every ensemble better, whether it’s in a television comedy like “Arrested Development” or a dramatic film like “The Descendants.” As a director for the first time here, she amassed an impressive ensemble of her own, but then she stranded her fellow performers with nothing to do. Allison Janney, Common, Katie Holmes, Kumail Nanjiani, Rob Riggle, John Cho, Bradley Whitford, Storm Reid and Anders Holm are among the actors whose characters clash in one of those sprawling, intertwined-lives-in-Los-Angeles movies. It’s never funny and it’s never poignant and it never achieves the sense of profound connectedness it seeks.
“The Happytime Murders”
If you’re going to see one Melissa McCarthy movie this year, this … is not it. The idea of naughty puppets drinking, smoking, cursing and having sex might have seemed delightfully subversive if it hadn’t already been explored in smarter, cleverer ways elsewhere. This is a one-joke movie and that one joke gets hammered to death. There’s puppet craft on display but the script fails to match it. I was never shocked or offended — I was just bored. McCarthy fans should check her out in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” instead.
Watch the What the Flick?! review here
“Life Itself”
Another movie that is terrible but must be experienced — along the lines of “Collateral Beauty” and “The Book of Henry” — because it is so batshit crazy. And yet, it isn’t quite enjoyable terrible enough. This sprawling and mawkish melodrama from “This Is Us” creator Dan Fogelman is straining desperately to be philosophical and profound. But aside from a couple of moments, including an Antonio Banderas monologue, this time-hopping, would-be weepy isn’t worth your time.
Listen to the What the Flick?! Podcast episode here
“The Nutcracker and the Four Realms”
The dresses are pretty. I’ll say that much. But for the most part, this garish and unwieldy incarnation of the classic “Nutcracker” fable is a colossal waste of the considerable time and money that clearly went into it. I wish the entire thing had been Misty Copeland and Sergei Polunin dancing in their tantalizingly brief ballet segments. Even watching them rehearse for 99 minutes would have been more enjoyable. There’s a whole lot more going on here, though, and it’s rarely magical.
“Welcome to Marwen”
This might actually be the worst movie of the year. Certainly, other films on this list had far shoddier execution. But Robert Zemeckis’ narrative feature version of the great 2010 documentary “Marwencol” has such great aspirations thematically and visually that it makes the result feel like even more of a failure. Zemeckis takes an intimate story of suffering and healing and smothers it with his trademark technical wizardry, and the tonal shifts he makes are consistently jarring. “Welcome to Marwen” is based on the true story of a man who recovered from a devastating beating by building an elaborate World War II town in his yard, bringing it to life with dolls and vivid details and turning it all into art through his photography. Steve Carell finds a few moments of pained, vulnerable truth here and there, but too often is stuck shouting at hallucinations.
Listen to the What the Flick?! Podcast episode here
“Winchester”
If you have insomnia or you’d just like a warm, 90-minute nap in the middle of the day, this dark and dull horror movie might just do the trick — and I’m guessing that’s not what it intended. Helen Mirren bafflingly said yes to playing the heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune who keeps adding rooms to her mansion to ward off the ghosts of the people who’ve died because of her family’s firearms. It’s never scary and it looks like crap. Mirren actually is barely in the movie. And like Jackie Chan at the beginning of this list, she couldn’t possibly need the work this badly.
Watch the What the Flick?! review here
UPDATE 12/20/18: An astute reader points out that I forgot “Show Dogs.”
“Show Dogs” is indeed terrible, even by the low, low standards of the live-action, talking animal movie. “Dude, it was horrible!” Nic exclaimed this morning when I mentioned this omission to him. I think we’d both forgotten that it even existed. But it does, albeit in a slightly different form than the one we saw. The distributor agreed to remove scenes in which a police dog (voiced by Ludacris) who’s gone undercover at a pageant learns to block out the discomfort of having his genitals groped during the competition. Children’s advocacy groups argued that the movie normalized unwanted genital touching. But this is just one of its many, many transgressions.
Well I have to feel a bit gratitude here because I did followed your reviews and avoided most of these films except Winchester.
Interesting enough I didn’t planned to see it at all but Mark Kermode panned the film in such a an interesting way that I got curious about it and… Let me put it this way, the loud noises kept waking me up
Thanks for the link to WTF review… you guys SERIOUSLY need to get back on YouTube!!
Why didn’t you include Show Dogs? You gave it 0.5 stars out of Four Stars, not one critic has put the film on their worst of 2018 list yet and by the way, it came under fire for featuring scenes that normalized child grooming and pedophilia.
I actually forgot that it existed!
Thank you for replying. Show Dogs is my pick for the worst movie of 2018. It was cataclysmicly unfunny and impossible to sit through and why does Raja Gosnell keep punishing us?
The Happytime Murders might quite possibly be the worst film I’ve ever seen
The worst of lists are always more fun than the best of lists, at least for people like me. But probably not for the critics 🙂
Life Itself was complete rubbish. But I thought Death of a Nation and Red Sparrow were absolutely the biggest piles of trash I saw this year. Thankfully I didn’t see the rest of these on your list.
I only seen Happytime Murders and I feel the need to defend it. It’s not good but not really bad, somewhere in the middle. I would put Little Italy on the list. The movie that feels it should’ve came out in the 90s with Anakin Skywalker.
I can’t believe that this is even possible but “Show Dogs” is now the second worst movie of 2018 because I just saw a 90-minute horror show known “Holmes & Watson”. This feeble, childish and brutally unfunny Sherlock Holmes parody makes “Sherlock Gnomes” look like a veritable masterpiece. I love Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly but this horrific trainwreck will be a colossal stain on their careers forever. It’s not only the worst film of 2018, it’s also one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.
At the time it had a 94 on Rotten Tomatoes and a fun Sean of the Dead–looking preview, but after just a few minutes into Anna and the Apocalypse, my friend heard me say an inauspicious, “Uh oh…”. My hope of why it did not make your helpful list is due to your being spared this kidnapping of 132 minutes of your lives.
So psyched about Breakfast All Day❣️❣️