#50-31

Continuing with the listing of the worst movies of the decade, in my humble opinion.  Disagree?  Please.  Just stay civil.

#50.  Fifty Shades Freed.  The conclusion of perhaps the worst trilogy ever.  Fifty Shades Freed was the best of the three films.The other two are still to come.

Why does his stomach look like that?

#49.  The Legend of Hercules.  Kellan Lutz appears as the son of Zeus and a mortal woman.  That probably is all you need to know.

#48.  Pixels.  An Adam Sandler film, which is also probably all I need to say.  However, this one could have been better.  The film boasted a bunch of classic video game characters used horribly. Kevin James was the President which is nearly as odd as Donald Trump.

#47.  I, Frankenstein.  Another one that I had high hopes for only for them to be dashed.  Aaron Eckhart was the iconic monster who had to wind up in the middle of a war between gargoyles and demons.  Yeah, I’m not sure why either.

#46.  Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Long Haul.  I had liked the earlier films in this franchise and then this came along.  One of the worst films of that year, Long Haul took the immature humor to a different level.  The recasting of the roles did not help this either.

#45.  Action Point.  Johnny Knoxville running a run-down amusement park where safety is only a minor concern.  Many of the Jackass type stunts were done here too.  They aren’t funny here either.

Hey, it’s Kevin Nash!

#44.  Magic Mike XXL.  The only movie on this list that I actually walked on out.  It is this low because it is unfair to criticize it without having seen the end.  Still, I hated what I did see.  Perhaps the females in the crowd disagreed with me.

#43.  The Emoji Movie.  How are you going to make a movie starring emojis?  And how is Patrick Stewart voicing the poop emoji?  Why am I thinking about this one?

#42.  Clash of the Titans.  a huge disappointment because I loved the original from the 1970s.  Sure it was before CGI and you could tell, but it was such fun.  This one was terrible CGI too, but much more boring.

#41.  A Good Day to Die Hard.  Die Hard is one of the best action movies ever made.  This is the fifth movie in the franchise and it took John McClane to Russia to be with his son, played by Jai Courtney.  Absolutely horrendous.  The only thing hard about this one was watching it.

#40.  Anchorman 2.  I am not a fan of the original, and I dislike Will Farrell, so I was not the target audience for this long overdue sequel.  Even big fans of the original agreed that this one was lacking.

#39.  Underworld:  Awakenings.  Nearly walked out on this one and only stayed because I had gotten into it free because another film I was scheduled to watch did not work.  I stuck this one out, but regretted my choice in attending this.

#38.  Sucker Punch.  Just a horrible Zack Snyder film with a group of women in a fantasy dream world.  Loud.  Ugly.  Vicious.  More like a video game than a story.

#37.  Dumb and Dumber To.  Another sequel that waited too long to be made.  Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels reunite for this tragically unfunny film.  All the best scenes were in the trailer.  Not very many to choose from.

#36.  Vacation.  A remake of the classic comedy, this new Vacation had nothing going for it except for a funny bit from Chris Hemsworth.  The rest of the movie was juvenile and filed with drug, poop and vomit jokes.

Is Mortdecai watching some of these movies?  What is with that expression?

#35.  Mortdecai.  Johnny Depp’s low point?  Perhaps, but this weirdo detective was not charming or funny.  It was just mean-spirited and unfunny.

#34.  Assassin’s Creed.  this film, starring Michael Fassbender, was such a disappointment because some believed it would be the film to break that video game curse.  It wasn’t.  It was just too stupid.

Do you think Maggie Grace is missing LOST by now?

#33.  Taken 2.  The first Taken was so great.  Liam Neeson as a father with a particular set of skills in search of his daughter and kicking ass along the way.  That was epic.  This?  Huge drop off.

#32.  Death of a Nation.  Dinesh D’Souza and his attack piece on Barack Obama by using historical inaccuracies.  This was prior to Dinesh D’Souza and his jail time (pardoned by D. Trump).  Can’t imagine how anyone could buy the garbage this guy is peddling.

#31.  Hot Pursuit.  It is Reese Witherspoon and Sophia Vergara in a buddy comedy (using that word – comedy-  sparingly).  Hot Pursuit is about as mind-numbingly dumb as you can get and even the charismatic leads cannot help this flop.

#50-31

We have cracked into the Top 50 of the decade 2010-2019.  Again, this is my opinion and only my opinion.  Disagree?  That’s great.  I am sure you will.

Let’s continue…

#50.  Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.  This is a ballsy film.  It is more of a war epic than other Star Wars movies and it gives us a group of cool new character that are doomed from the start.  Plus, the film follows through with the finale.  I respect that.  It would have been easy to not kill them all and make up some excuse about where they were during the original trilogy, but they did not do that.

#49.  Rise of the Planet of the Apes.  This was an unexpected pleasure.  After the failed reboot of the franchise with the Mark Wahlberg film in the 90s, I had very low expectations for this, but James Franco and the rest brought Caesar to life and made me care about them.

#48.  Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.  My favorite of the Mission Impossible series, it featured the always crazy Tom Cruise hanging himself off of a gigantic building.  We also had a good use of Jeremy Renner.

#47.  Birdman.  Michael Keaton playing a washed actor who gave up the role of a super hero, Birdman, years prior.  Hm.  Sounds familiar.  Great acting in this film, not only by Keaton, but by Edward Norton and Emma Stone as well.

#46.  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two.  The only Harry Potter movie to make this list, Deathly Hallows successfully brought the Harry Potter franchise to a close near the beginning of the decade.  The kid movie franchise had moved into a full dark and dramatic action movie.

#45.  Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  Everyone was remarkably happy to have Star Wars back again, with another chance after the prequels.  Sure The Force Awakens had several similar beats to the original Star Wars: A New Hope, but who cared?  It brought that feeling of nostalgia back to a galaxy far, far away.

#44.  Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.  No way this was as entertaining as it was.  The sequel came too long after the original and lacked Robin Williams.  Still, this film had The Rock and featured a fabulous comedic performance from Jack Black.  I was sure this would be a huge failure, and I could not have been more wrong.

#43.  John Wick.  Don’t mess with John Wick’s dog or his car.  My favorite scene in this gun-fu film was when the big bad guy found out that his son had messed with John Wick’s car and the fear was real.  That gave us, the audience, the understanding that John Wick was someone not to mess with.

#42.  How to Train Your Dragon 2.  A great animated trilogy, this one had the guts to have its main hero dragon, Toothless, while under control, kill the father of Hiccup.  While that was a ballsy move, I do think that the movie shrugged it off too quickly.  However, the fact that it happened showed you how invested this film was in creating something different.

#41.  Star Wars: The Last Jedi.  Yeah, I know there is a lot of hatred for this movie, but I do not agree.  Yes, there are some really bad parts of this movie (particularly the Canto Bight sequence), but the parts of The Last Jedi that worked were some of the best Star Wars sequences ever.  And I loved the character arc given to Luke Skywalker, despite other opinions online (be nice please).

#40.  X-Men: Days of Future Past.  The adaption of one of the greatest X-Men stories to ever appear in Marvel Comics, DoFP showed us all kinds of time travel goodness and was able to give us not only the great new Xavier and Magneto (James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender) but also the great original Xavier and Magneto (Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen).

#39.  Doctor Strange.  A great origin story for the Sorcerer Supreme of the MCU.  One of the most original films in the series, too.  I loved the ending where Strange uses his mind to defeat Dormammu instead of the typical fight.  Benedict Cumberbatch is a perfectly cast Dr. Strange.

#38.  Elvis & Nixon.  The true story (though much has been imagined) of the day when “The King” Elvis Presley went to the White House to meet with President Richard Nixon.  Michael Shannon gave us a fantastic Elvis and Kevin Spacey (though a jerk overall) was an intriguing Tricky Dick.

#37.  Searching.  Another film that I expected nothing out of only to find that it was brilliant.  John Cho plays the father of a missing girl and he is desperate to discover what had happened to her.  The gimmick was that the film showed the father only on computer screens and smartphones in his attempt to suss out what happened to his daughter.  John Cho was sensational in the role.

#36.  A Quiet Place.  There has never been a weirder theater going experience.  The theater was so enamored with the film that we were being as quiet as we could possibly be.  John Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe are amazing as the family living in this horrible future where, if you make any noise, you can wind up alien food.

#35.  Skyfall.  My favorite James Bond film of the decade, Skyfall featured a smaller story from deep in the past of the character of James Bond.  Daniel Craig hit his stride as Bond and the film was helped along by the amazing theme song by Adele.  Despite the unlikeliness of the villainous plot, Skyfall is fantastic.

#34.  Ant Man.  Who thought this would be in the top 50?  Especially after the controversy with the departure from the film by director Edgar Wright.  However, Peyton Reed stepped in to the film and created a fun, exciting, smaller (avoiding the pun) heist film that was very enjoyable.

#33.  Chef.  Jon Favreau’s fun food film. After leaving his job as a chef at a prestigious LA restaurant, Favreau started a food truck business with his son and friend.  This movie is funny, heart-warming and provides us a wonderful relationship with Favreau and his son, played by Emjay Anthony.

#32.  Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.  While it may not have reached the levels of the original, Guardians Vol. 2 has a ton of positives going for it, including some of the most emotional moments in the MCU.  The entire arc at the end of the film involving Yondu is simply gorgeous.  Plus, Kurt Russell as Ego the Living Planet is something we never knew we needed.

#31.  The Imposter.  A documentary about a man who claims to be the long-missing son from a family in Texas.  This story is so amazing that you cannot believe that it is true.  Heck, if it were a scripted movie, you would have a difficult time stretching reality to accept it.  But it happened.  The only problem is that there is too much of an open ending and I desperately wanted to know the answer.

The Gomer Award is given to the Biggest Surprise film of 2019, the film that I did not expect to be as great as it was.  Over the years, there are few things that are better than when you go into a film with low expectations and coming out thrilled with what you have seen.

Previous Gomer Award Winners:  The Gift, Ferdinand, Edge of Tomorrow, We’re the Millers, The Campaign, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Bumblebee

So the runners-up for the Gomer this year included:  The Upside, The Curse of La Llorona, The Kid Who Would Be King, Ready or Not, I See You, Eli, Long Shot, Klaus, The Art of Self-Defense, Girl on the Third Floor, Togo.

The Gomer Award for 2019 goes to….

Crawl

I never thought that a killer alligator story would be as exciting and compelling as Crawl was.  Certainly not after seeing the trailers for it.  Yet Crawl had me anxious and on the edge of my seat the entire time.

And the other side of the coin…

There are movies where you arrive with high expectations for quality and the film just fails to reach them.  It is not even necessarily a bad movie, but it just is not a great one.  Honestly, some of the films this year received “FRESH” reviews from me, but they were a disappointment because they were not as epic as I had hoped.

Previous Winners:  In the Heart of the Sea, The Snowman, Amazing Spider-Man 2, After Earth, Dark Knight Rises, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Batman v. Superman, Christopher Robin

Runners-Up:  Hellboy, The Lion King, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, The Addams Family, Gemini Man, Cats, Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, Glass, MIB: International.

2019 Spider-Man 3 Disappointment of the Year is….

It Chapter Two

I liked It Chapter Two.  However, I LOVED the first It and I had hoped that they would bring the finale in with as much awesomeness as the original.  When you throw in the fantastic ensemble cast that the film had, the expectations only rose.  What they gave us was… it was fine.  I didn’t hate it.  But I would be lying if I didn’t say that I wasn’t disappointed.  I wanted a huge ending.  I got an okay one.

Flop.

Every year they happen.  It is the unfortunate truth that is faced by movies in Hollywood.  Some times they will lose money.  You just hope that you aren’t ever in consideration for the John Carter Memorial Award.

There are some really good films that have fallen into this category.  Heck, some people would go as far as to argue for John Carter.  Not me, mind you, but I know some think that movie gets a bad rap.

However, with some movies and their inflated budgets, they are setting themselves up for failure.  Something like Joker this year had a low budget and made a lot of money.  Large budgets make it a challenge as it is.

Other reasons for a film to be a flop could include poor scheduling, bad word of mouth, bad critical reactions, too much competition, limited appeal, too many risks, terrible marketing etc.

Previous winners:  John Carter, Alice Through the Looking Glass, The Lone Ranger, A Million Ways to Die in the West, Expendables 3, Jem and the Holograms, Pan, Rock the Casbah, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Robin Hood (2018), Mortal Engines

This year, there were some unfortunate flops.  Just this past weekend, the $100 million budgeted Cats made about 6 million in their opening weekend.  Most super hero movies do fairly well, but Hellboy this year was a huge flop.  Charlie’s Angels was extremely unsuccessful.  The Kid Who Would Be King was a lot of fun and a great movie, but it lost a lot of money.  Will Smith’s sci-fi picture, Gemini Man failed to live up to its expectations.  The Goldfinch barely made any money either, and failed to receive any support from anyone.

I was prepared to give this “award” to Terminator: Dark Fate, which did terrible and may have finally ended this franchise for once and all.  However, then there was a film that had an epic flop on its opening weekend.  A film that made $625,000 in 2000 theaters domestically.  It was one of the worst openings of all time.  As it secured its John Carter Memorial Award for 2019.

Playmobil: The Movie. 

There have some amazing people this year who have had tremendous years.  I had a difficult time actually picking out a winner for this award.  It wasn’t until late that I made a decision on who to give this award to this year.

Previous Winners:  Gal Gadot, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jennifer Lawrence, Marvel Studios, J.J. Abrams, Josh Brolin

Runners-Up:  Scarlett Johansson has had an amazing year with Endgame, Jojo Rabbit and Marriage Story.  Three amazing films with three amazing performances.  I thought about the king of late night with Stephen Colbert and his consistently funny bits on Donald Trump.  Bob Iger of Disney certainly was a possible choice since Disney has had six billion dollar movies this year and launched their streaming service Disney +.  Shia LaBeouf was in two brilliant movies in The Peanut Butter Falcon and Honey Boy.

However… the winners of the Star of the Year…

Regina King & Damon Lindelof from HBO’s Watchmen.

I just finished Watchmen and it was brilliant.  It was heavily because of the writing of Damon Lindelof and the performance of Regina King.  Lindelof was able to do something that many people (including myself) believed was unnecessary and unneeded.  He took the story he wanted to write and he placed it squarely into the world of the Watchmen and never blinked.  It was a brilliant work.  Regina King brought Angela Abar (aka Sister Night) to life and was the absolute heart of the show.

Congrats to these two.

Star of the Decade.

With the decade coming to a close, who was the star of the decade?  One name came to my mind when I was thinking about who to award this to and one name only.

Robert Downey Jr.

RBJ is the godfather of the MCU, no matter how much he denies that fact.  His success is what made this series so successful and he brought so much emotion to Avengers: Endgame.  Tony Stark’s arch was beautifully planned out and played to a tee by RDJ.

I saw a movie yesterday that would have fallen on this list (Cats), but it will not appear here since I saw it after the list was completed.  It would probably wind up in the Top 10 eventually.

#70-51

#70.  Jupiter Ascending.  A sci-fi fantasy that swings for the fence, but whiffs too much.  Eddie Redmayne was a disaster here in a performance that some thought might cost him the Oscar for Theory of Everything.  Lots of dumbness and too much world building crammed in it.

#69.  Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters.  Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton in a inane fantasy based loosely on the fairy tale.  The movie was dark and really uninteresting.

#68.  After Earth.  Will Smith and his son Jaden starred in this M. Night Shyamalan flop from 2013.  Will and his son crash land on an alien planet in this sci-fi romp.

#67.  Captive State.  The people of Chicago need to decide whether or not to raise up and revolt against the occupying aliens.  There is not much about said aliens actually.

#66.  Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2.  The first Paul Blart was a guilty pleasure of mine.  The second one, not so much.  Paul leaves the mall for a security conference in Las Vegas.

#65. Alpha.  The story of the first boy and his dog.  I found this to be just so boring and such a manipulative tale.  It may have looked nice, but the story was lacking.

#64.  Max Steel.  A superhero story no one ever wanted to see.  A teen finds the Max Steel armor and fights off those trying to reclaim it.

#63.  Suspiria.  A horror movie from 2018 that I just did not enjoy.  Lots of people disagree with that. but I just disliked this.

#62.  Dracula Untold.  There have been plenty of attempts to revitalized Dracula, but this is one more failure at that.  It was an attempt to give us the origin of Drac as we meet Vlad III.  Not good.

#61.  The Darkest Hour. A dull and uninspiring sci-fi/action movie with a group of young people in Russia.  An invisible force arrived on the earth to send the planet into darkness.  The film was in darkness too.

#60.  Exodus: Gods and Kings.  Ugh.  Just a terrible film dealing with the old sword and sandals now.  The CGI is atrocious and hilarious.  Moses and Ramses  try to save Egypt from the rule of the evil Sethi, their father.

#59.  Replicas.  Keanu Reeves loses his family in a tragic accident and decides to clone them in an attempt to recreate them.  There are some serious god issues here.

#58.  The 15:17 to Paris.  Clint Eastwood tried to tell this story with the actual people involved in the real life event.  Poor choice.  There was also just not enough of the situation for a full length movie.

#57.  Independence Day: Resurgence.  The sequel to the classic 80s film was just a total flop.  The film was dumb, the characters were boring and cardboard and the ones from the original film were wasted.

#56.  Transcendence.  A failure of the movie was unexpected.  However, the Johnny Depp vehicle was dull and lifeless.  It was hard to understand and had a typical B-movie plot/theme.

#55.  The Bye Bye Man.  One of the terrible monster/horror movies of the decade where the Bye Bye Man would come and kill you if you thought about him or said his name. Thought about him?  Seems fairly hard to avoid, unlike th emovie.

#54.  Bad Teacher.  Cameron Diaz appeared as a teacher who drank, slept around and looked to score with the hot substitute, Justin Timberlake.  I hate those movies that have no basis in reality when it comes to education and Bad Teacher was one of those.

#53.  Green Lantern.  Ryan Reynolds hates this movie.  At least he sure seems to as he keeps making jokes about it in Deadpool movies.  I knew this film did not have a chance as soon as I saw Parallax.  It was such a terrible looking CGI creature that I was laughing at it immediately.  Not a good start.

#52.  Early Man.  I hated this animated movie.  It took early man and had them play soccer.  Yep, soccer.  I regretted going to this movie within the first ten minutes.  It felt like a long time before it finally ended.

#51,  Pitch Perfect 3.  The first two were fine.  The first one was downright original and surprisingly good.  By the time we reached Pitch Perfect 3, the gimmick had run its course and they were trying to stick the Bellas into a weird action story. It was bad.