Nothing stings more than a missed opportunity. For me, the ‘worst’ movies, the ones I continue to talk about, are not the ones that seemed destined to be awful, but a measurement of the gap between what was and what could have been.
2022 featured many truly awful films, many of which I avoided (which is why you won’t find Jurassic World: Dominion on this list) but some I went into with great hopes only to slowly come to the sinking realization that they’d missed the mark entirely. Those are the ones worth writing about. Those are overrated.
So no, there’s no Morbius to be found here. Morbius was destined to be terrible. These, however, should have been so much more.
Without further ado, here’s some reasons to get mad at me.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Director: Rian Johnson
Starring: Daniel Craig, Kate Hudson, Dave Bautista
Rian Johnson’s Knives Out was a revelation, packed with vivid characters and sterling performances that made each unexpected twist and turn both shocking and genuinely emotional, breathing life into the locked room mystery genre.
Glass Onion fails in nearly every way that Knives Out succeeds, with an assortment of shallow and unbelievable characters that never ring true and performances that do nothing to elevate them nor make you believe they are or ever were friends, making the ham-fisted plotting that slogs along (Twin sister? Really?) hard to connect to.
As things get downright silly in the messy final act, you’ll start wonder if you were wrong about Johnson’s other work completely. Even Benoit Blanc, against all odds, loses his charm, evaporating my interest in seeing what two-word pop song title might next be followed by ‘a Knives Out mystery’.
Find more here.
The Menu
Director: Mark Mylod
Starring: Anna Taylor-Joy, Ralph Fiennes, Nicholas Hoult
When doing interviews for the last James Bond film, I learned that Ralph Fiennes, one of the greatest actors of his generation, delivered some of his key lines before the script had been completed, leading them to make up things he could potentially say in the last act on the fly they could shoehorn in once they’d figured it out.
In each of those lines, each connected to nothing in particular, Fiennes does his most to imbue them with as many layers of meaning as possible.
As Fiennes does his best to elevate this confused, puddle-deep script that never really knows for sure what its class critique actually is, I couldn’t help but think of that insight, knowing how hard they all must have been working to make this all click when there was really nothing there to begin with.
Find more here.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
Director: Tom Gormican
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal, Tiffany Haddish
In a 2014 episode of the Dan Harmon-created series Community, a class debates the merits of Nic Cage as an performer, at a time when he had seemed to move nearly permanently into the straight-to-DVD world, turning in over-the-top ridiculous performances that made otherwise forgettable movies such as the 2006 remake of the Wicker Man into cult classic curios. In 2022, we’re all in on the joke, even Cage himself, who has started adding brilliant performances such as 2021’s Pig back into the mix. It’s a pity then that the ode to that era is this too-clever-by-half film that is never as funny as it thinks it is, and undermines its own story by constantly commenting on its own machinations. Instead of making it feel more clever, it only makes you wonder why you should care about the increasingly tedious proceedings, in a film that seems curiously resentful of its imagined audience.
Find more here.
Nightmare Alley
Director: Guillermo Del Toro
Starring: Braldey Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara
Director Guillermo Del Toro is one of film history’s greatest champions, following his heroes like Martin Scorsese (he even offered to shorten his own life to add more years to Marty’s recently), but while his boldest work shows him to also be a great in his own right, it’s a shame that his most loving odes to classic Hollywood fall flat.
While Crimson Peak has its supporters and The Shape of Water somehow won all the Oscars despite being about a woman who becomes attracted to a fish monster the mental equivalent of a household pet, Nightmare Alley (released in the UAE in 2022) is his worst film yet, a remake of a much superior picture that falls apart in its second half, exposes Bradley Cooper as an incapable leading man, and is so ridiculous at points that Cate Blanchett seems to be doing a parody of her best performances.
Find more here.
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Director: Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert
Starring: Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu
Everything Everywhere All At Once is not a bad film, merely an unremarkable one, a film that aims big but likely would have been better suited as a 22-minute Rick & Morty episode.
To its credit, the film gave Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan a wonderful opportunity to showcase their versatility and put an underserviced community front and center in a commercial genre film and made it feel true.
Unfortunately, it’s also an over-long slog that often feels like it’s trying too hard on multiple fronts, and now sports a fanbase that attacks those who don’t love it as if that makes them bad people.
It’s turned the film unwittingly into one of the key examples of what a key contingent of film appreciation has become—a shallow, boring battleground where certain cultural signifiers lead groups of people (on both sides) to declare certain art a moral good to support and a moral evil to deride (or vice versa), which does nothing but do great damage to the future of art itself.
Since when do we have to appreciate art based on what it’s trying to do, rather than what it does?
Anyways, Swiss Army Man was better.
Find more here.