My Worst 5 Movies of 2018

I have a confession to make: I did not like the 2018 movie year as a whole.  I mean, of course there were films I really liked, as we will see when I post my top ten of the year list, but for some reasons I ended up seeing lots of movies that simply didn’t work for me.  Am I becoming more bitter, am I seeing the wrong movies, or are mainstream movies actually getting worse like the cinema Cassandra’s have been warning for years?  I actually debated whether or not to do a full top ten for my worst movies list this year, as I easily could have filled it.  But I decided to keep my pessimism contained within these five slots as usual.

5. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

I am a fan of the Harry Potter series, both the books and the films, but I just cannot get on board with this spin-off franchise.  Its so bleak and dull.  This one in particular, the second of however many they are planning to milk this for, is especially dismal.  The story was confusing: full of stuff they did not convince me to care about, and the villain in question, Grindelwald himself, was not engaging.  I do not like the way Johnny Depp portrays him.  Frankly, this was a poor casting decision altogether.  The story demands a charismatic antagonist, but we just don’t get such here.

4. Tomb Raider

Tomb Raider is the poster child for modern generic action movies.   Its very by-the-numbers with no real life of its own whatsoever.  All I remember from the action scenes is that she loves to jump and grab on to over-hangings.  Otherwise this is very prosaic and forgettable.  Tomb Raider feels like it really has just come from a studio blockbuster-generating machine.

3. Life of the Party

I’ve been saying it for a while, but mainstream comedies are in a serious rut this decade.  They have become so formulaic and stale.  There are fewer and fewer genuine laughs that grow from the premise and more attempts at displaced, random humour.  This one sees Melissa McCarthy as a sweater-wearing mom going back to college with her daughter.  Its bad.  Her character is wildly inconsistent and the situations she finds herself in are eye-rolling.  Someone needs to come save film comedy…

2. The Cloverfield Paradox

Netflix tried to surprise everyone by dropping this the very same day it was announced during the Superbowl.  Would have been great, had the movie they tried this promotion with been worth the hype.  But instead they gave us a highly derivative sci-fi film chock full of confusion and shaky logic.  Something to do with melding parallel universes that allow someone to lose an arm without any blood loss.  And then they decided to throw in a connection to Cloverfield in a completely separate, ancillary story cause, you know, cinematic universes and all that!

1. Ready Player One

It hurts me to have a Spielberg film top this list, but Ready Player One was such an atrociously bad movie I still have trouble believing that he was actually the one at the helm. RPO is an absolute mess.  It looks awful, is full of terrible plot points, and comes off as incredibly full of itself with all of its nostalgic callbacks and references.  I think I lost count with how many times my eyes rolled when I was watching it.

This movie was full of unearned moments, boring action scenes, and trashy visuals.  It has that problem of trying so badly to be cool that tends to bother me a lot.  Its been a while since I’ve seen this, and I never got around to writing a full review for it, so a lot of the more specific details that bothered me are slipping my mind now.  But I do know there were plenty.  For the time being however, I am comfortable declaring this as the worst movie I saw in 2018.