WEEKEND SPECIAL: The Ten Worst Movies Of 2024

And Institution Movies

I want to start this off by saying something very important: I love the movies, and I love that I can share this with people.

In prison, there was an Institution Movie program where the staff would obtain a new DVD and play that movie on a loop for three or four days on one of the TV channels. While there were challenges – I went one year at a place with no program, and obviously procuring certain DVD’s proved difficult during COVID and the rise of streaming – I tried to avoid missing anything new. And so I sat through the worst junk you can imagine, thrilled that I was able to see something new. Sometimes it was a highly anticipated blockbuster. Sometimes it was a Dinesh D’Souza documentary. Sometimes it was a wildly-inappropriate kids movie about a horse girl. I watched as many times as I could. And because these movies would stay on for days, I’d watch some of them many times. I gladly surrendered to the absolute nonsense of “Kong: Skull Island” many times. At one point, the officers left “Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings” on for 14 straight days. Didn’t matter.

I loved watching all of these movies I’m about to discuss. Yes, I’m excited to watch them as a free man, and yes, I loved that I didn’t have to squint, or wait for someone else to change the channel, and I got to watch from beginning until the end as opposed to beginning from ten minutes in. But I just love the experience of watching movies, studying them, seeing them in a different life, getting to look through a different perspective. We’re almost done with 2024, and yet, I don’t think I’ll see anything as bad as all these movies, which I WILLINGLY experienced (I’m sure there’s stuff I’m less willing to experience that is absolutely tragic, but there remain only 24 hours in the day).

Anyway, without consideration of thoughts on criminal justice, here are the ten worst movies I saw this year.

10.) Hit Man

I fear no sacred cows. In fact, I’ll admit that I have a maybe-irrational disinterest in Richard Linklater, in his too-cool detached viewpoint, in his exceedingly-white-male identification, in his Sahara-dry sense of humor, in his choice of subject matter that accentuates the drabness of otherwise colorful material. That last one is the issue here, in that this could have been light and frothy instead of ponderous and empty.

I like that there was an effort here to address the notion of identity, of a fixed characteristic versus a changed personality. I just wish there was more of an effort to wrestle with the entrapment-tinged nature of the movie’s investigations, the idea that these bored cops are trying to bust rubes ordering hitmen off the internet because real crime is just too challenging. Instead, it just straight-up mocks “criminals” as dimwits fooled by pop culture into thinking assassins are a thing. But this is also a movie that lightheartedly ends with the horrific murder of a cop, and it never feels like that contrast is seriously entertained.

9.) Y2K

I love Kyle Mooney, and I encourage anyone uncertain about him to sample “Saturday Morning All-Star Hits”. It’s a six episode Netflix oddity created by Mooney and Ben Jones that mimics the 90’s-era kids-show blocks on Saturday morning TV, complete with of-the-era references, live-action interstitials, and note-perfect recreations of the cheap animation of the period. However, as the episodes go on, you soon understand this is Mooney’s way of coping with the end of an era, the idea that when he started getting older, his favorite shows would begin to approach endpoints (and, extra-textually, stop existing). Wildly funny, it also hints at this desperate sense of loss and aimlessness in Mooney’s work.

It’s likely after years of sketches being cut for time on “Saturday Night Live” and “S.M.A.S.H.” fading into the Netflix algorithm, directing an A24 disaster movie was a way for Mooney to try something more mainstream. I hope he doesn’t try again, not only because Mooney is such a delicate and singular weirdo, but because he has no eye or ear for this kind of movie. This is a semi-sincere sci-fi movie with a distractingly limited scope and few to no genuine laughs. It’s a gentle nerd trying to be accepted by the jocks, complete with some tongue-in-cheek reverence for the never-appealing garbage rap-rock of the era as if recent efforts to plumb that junk for misogynist messaging would simply get in the way of a good hang. Come back, Kyle Mooney.

8.) Brothers

7.) Jackpot

While it is an ugly trend to see studios selling big, broad comedies to streaming services, it’s an uglier trend for talented people who know better to be making these. “Jackpot” at least has an endearing premise, with Awkwafina as a lottery participant in a future where lottery losers place a bounty on the winner. But her chemistry with John Cena is nil, and the movie mistakes crude, clumsy violence for “slapstick”. After “Triangle Of Sadness”, just what in the hell is Dolly de Leon doing here? I will give credit to the movie for attempting to re-introduce “T.U.R.T.L.E. Power” by Partners In Kryme to the lexicon.

“Brothers”, written by Macon Blair (“I Do Not Feel At Home In This World Anymore”) and directed by Max Barbakow (“Palm Springs”) should have been much more interesting. Instead, it’s a redneck farce that, somewhat cowardly, seems entirely divorced from any sociopolitical reality. Peter Dinklage and Josh Brolin as twin brother criminals is a concept that should crackle and pop, but they’re nearly muscled-out of the picture by a bellowing, obnoxious Brendan Fraser who seems dead set on informing you his Academy Award was pure fluke. There’s a moment where a gorilla sexually assaults Brolin that would be desperate and sweaty in 1996, and maybe for that reason it shows up here, but comedy doesn’t always work via counterintuitivity.

6.) Poolman

I don’t think I could have any ill will towards Chris Pine, who directed this wannabe noir comedy. He tried something, it was unsuccessful, but he stuck his neck out there. Hollywood doesn’t take kindly to bellyflops, but kudos to Pine for using his considerable movie star clout on something joyfully different. That doesn’t mean I won’t ignore the fact I spent most of this movie waiting for it to start.

There’s a sense this is a more socially-conscious “Big Lebowski”, with Pine’s titular stoner on the verge of solving a mystery that, he helpfully explains, harkens back to some of the great Los Angeles noirs of all time. But the movie is also fairly clear-headed about it’s clumsy trip into nowhere, where it should have been hazy and confused – as much as Pine is trying to capture a vibe, he can’t resist sabotaging that for what he thinks is a clever gag, particularly falling from the mouth of his hashed-out himbo hero. I would watch this guy as a supporting character in someone else’s story, but not this.

5.) Werewolves

Every once in a while, a straight-to-DirectTV movie escapes onto the big screen, and it’s worth a peek. But mostly, not. Frank Grillo remains the male ideal and he stars in this piece of genre nonsense as a molecular biologist (woohoo, fancy!) attempting to figure out why an annual supermoon turns everyone into werewolves. The hope is it’ll involve a lot of testing of hypotheses, but no, it eventually results in one man in a giant werewolf suit tearing the head off another man in a giant werewolf suit.

“World-building” has become a screenwriterly fix for story problems, and there’s plenty of it here. There are underground societies, there is a throb of patriotism. None of it has anything to do with men in werewolf suits, but it’s there to distract from the lack of werewolf suit mobility as far as fight choreography, as well as the absence of any interesting actors or performers aside from the impeccable Mr. Grillo, bringing far more dignity to this film than it deserves. When he turns to a werewolf behind a machine gun and taunts “bite me”, you can only shrug your shoulders. I mean, of course.

4.) Megalopolis

3.) Joker: Folie à Deux

I wrote about this deadly duo here. I have since heard from varied viewers with different takeaways about these movies. I welcome and enjoy these alternate takes, I’m always searching for more, and I want to see the light. I’m open to attempting “Megalopolis” again. But don’t you dare drag me back into “Folie à Deux”.

2.) Unfrosted

The unquestionable nadir of the recent string of products-turned-into-movies (“Air”/”Flamin’ Hot”, etc), this insipid comedy flex only works if you want to be impressed by Jerry Seinfeld’s Rolodex. The invention of the Pop-Tart is turned into frothy, poorly-timed farce, humiliatingly acted out by a cast of seemingly dozens of name fifty and sixtysomethings who should know better and are now spending their late years continuing to mug for the cameras with faces that either no longer serve that function or ones that have been vainly surgery’d out of joke-telling.

Who was this for? All that’s missing are weaker scene transitions to turn this into the TV special event of 2002. It doesn’t even make sense for Jim Gaffigan, who thrived early in his career with a “Hot Pockets” routine, to be here trading barbs with Seinfeld, who we now realize wasn’t mocking the mundane rituals of the everyday consumer in his material but in fact was just mining merchandising labels for cheap observational gags, now coming from someone so rich he has to work to bother to observe anything attached to reality.

1.) Madame Web/Kraven The Hunter

Having seen all the movies in Sony’s Spider-Man-adjacent/absent Marvel franchise, I can conclude that this is not the work of directors. No, it should be clear by now that Sony attempted to simply gather up footage, toss it onto the desk of underpaid editors clearly processing some inner turmoil of their own, and then cross their fingers and make an Educated Wish™ that the entire affair somehow makes sense at the end of the day. You can squint and see a basic boring movie in “Kraven”, which is why the haphazard editing choices feel almost aggressively avant-guarde, chopping this up into scenes gracelessly caroming off each other like Matchbox cars while Ariana DeBose parachutes in constantly from somewhere offscreen like an MS Word paperclip. Each line of dialogue, spoken by a stacked cast of distracted actors, is a concrete summation of either the previous scene or a coming one. And each line reading from Aaron Taylor-Johnson, as the taciturn badass of the title (not at all like the terrifyingly vain braggart of the source material) feels like it’s coming out of a different accent, each one in search of some, any, character motivation.

Having viewed “Kraven”, it seems clear that the studio brainrot at Sony runs deep, and therefore “Madame Web” was not the magical CGI skybeam of ineptitude it appeared to be, just simply business as usual. Unlike the barely-watchable “Venom” threequel, this particularly cockeyed movie seems like it’s in argument with itself for its purpose of existing, boasting of a cast headed by a woman blissfully unconcerned that she seems desperate to be somewhere, anywhere else. Whereas “Kraven” feels Frankensteined out of the parts of other lousy movies, “Madame Web” feels like a thought experiment that long outlasted any actual thoughts, shifting into a belligerent rejection of its own body, complete with CGI-layered trailers for later, by-default-better films that either were never going to exist or were plucked from somewhere deep in the MCU, confirming that the multiverse actually is real. I loved, and feel honored, by every single stupid minute of that movie.