On list of 2019’s 10 worst films, ‘Serenity’ is the one to watch.
Here are 10 to avoid — with one possible exception
Though it happens 5% or 10% of the time, movies generally don’t get better. When they fall apart, they’re gone. So if you’re sitting through a terrible one, walk out. It’s a wonderful feeling, like school getting out early, or calling in sick when you’re not sick. Suddenly, you’re free, earlier than you anticipated, and there are all these wonderful things you can do.
Critics, of course, can’t leave, and so I saw every last minute of the following 10 movies, which are the worst of 2019. But I wished I could leave every one of them, with the notable exception of the year’s worst film, “Serenity.” There’s a level of sheer disaster that you can’t turn away from. Nobody walks out halfway through the Zapruder film.
There’s also a level at which jawdropping cluelessness and animating selfdelusion achieve a purity akin to great art. It’s no longer a base alloy, a mix of bad and good in which the bad dominates. It’s cinematic antimatter. It’s a rare crystalline rock of precious, irreplaceable abysmality. That’s “Serenity.”
So, maybe see that one. As for the rest, just say no, like Nancy Reagan. Or “No, no, no,” like Amy Winehouse. Keep saying no until they take the thing away.
1. ‘Serenity’
This movie came out in January, and even then it was obvious that we were looking at the absolute worst movie of 2019, almost worth seeing for the pristine perfection of its dazzling awfulness. Matthew McConaughey played a tuna fisherman who smoked constantly — 14 cigarettes in 106 minutes — and almost never wore a shirt, in a movie that went from fishing saga to film noir to scifi fantasy. McConaughey’s crazy, shirtless vanity held it all together. He’s wonderfully terrible in this.
2. ‘Glass’
M. Night Shyamalan, no stranger to these worst of the year lists, must settle for second place this time out, with his story of four kidnapped cheerleaders and the attempts by genetically mutated superheroes to find them. James McAvoy played the villain, an alien known as the Beast, suffering from multiple personality disorder. McAvoy played all of the personalities to the hilt, clearly picking the wrong movie for which to try to win an Oscar.
3. ‘Rocketman’
Taron Egerton can’t sing. Great songs sounded awful. The timeline was entirely botched. Nothing in the movie was accurate, and nothing inaccurate was more interesting than the actual story, which was never told. Worst of all, Elton John’s biopic became just another tale of a drunken drug addict. In other words, they emphasized the aspect of Elton’s life that was the least original to him and ignored the talent, the career and the experiences. It’s the biggest movie disappointment of the year.
4. ‘Isn’t It Romantic?’
Rebel Wilson played a woman who suffers from low selfesteem, until she has an accident and wakes up in a musical comedy world, in which Liam Hemsworth finds her charming, and she has a gay nextdoor neighbor who’s fanatically concerned with her love life. The story’s unfunny premise put Wilson, who can be hilarious in other people’s movies, in what was essentially a straight role. Even the story’s message, that people need to love themselves more, seemed misplaced in this selfpromoting era.
5. ‘All Is True’
Oh, was this amazing — Kenneth Branagh’s fictional rendering of William Shakespeare’s retirement, in which Shakespeare comes home to Judi Dench, who was inexplicably cast as Shakespeare’s wife, despite being 28 years older than Branagh. Later, Shakespeare flirts with the 40yearold Earl of Southampton, played by 79yearold Ian McKellen, in a wig that made him look like a dragshow Rita Hayworth. The whole thing was unintentionally hilarious, including Branagh’s prosthetic forehead, which looked like Botox existed in 1613.
6. ‘The Dead Don’t Die’
The latest from Jim Jarmusch was a zombie tale, in which fracking has changed the tilt of the Earth and has caused zombies to climb out of their graves. Despite an impressive cast, the movie was entirely without vitality, just a series of knowing gestures, as if made in the naive faith that just the concept could carry it. It couldn’t. The movie was as slow and as dead as the zombies.
7. ‘The Mountain’
This sounded good — a movie starring Jeff Goldblum as a lobotomist in the 1950s. Perhaps something funny and creepy? But, no. It was a serious movie about a lobotomist in an era when lobotomies were going out of fashion, but then it shifted gears and followed his blankfaced assistant (Tye Sheridan). By the time we got scenes of a mad Frenchman raving in halfFrench and halfEnglish, the movie had gone off the rails entirely.
8. ‘Motherless Brooklyn’
Writerdirector Edward Norton starred in this long, ambitious story about a detective with Tourette’s syndrome, investigating a murder. The manifestations of Tourette’s were a movielength distraction — the other characters’ mild reactions to it are hard to believe, and while Norton tried to convey the flavor of New York City in the 1950s, he forgot to give his character a reason to pursue his investigation or a stake in its outcome.
9. ‘Red Joan’
Sophie Cookson played the young Joan and Judi Dench played the old Joan, in this story of a woman arrested for espionage several decades after giving away the secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. Not motivated by ideology so much as from confusion, Joan was a portrait of an idiot. It was worse than a waste of time. It was actively irritating, in that we were asked to feel sorry for a fullon traitor, who deserved to go to prison, even if she was 80.
10. ‘Stuber’
Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista, otherwise funny fellows, became the comic pairing from hell in this badly written and directed movie about a tough cop who has just had eye surgery. Unable to focus his eyes, he commandeers an Uber driver for a dangerous mission. This violent, dispiriting movie was as funny as you might find it if you were the Uber driver.