My Worst 5 Movies of 2019

This was a pretty solid year for movies.  But not all can be winners.  Sometimes we have to look at what doesn’t work to appreciate what does work even more.

5. I Am Mother

Netflix has been going all out on producing sci-fi movies and TV shows lately.  Clearly they must be finding it popular, based on their secret statistics.   The problem is that they tend to just want this stuff out there as “new content” and don’t tend to focus on quality.  I Am Mother has the somewhat intriguing premise of a child being raised by a robot.  However, its not actually interested in exploring what a girl who is raised by robots would actually be like.  She just seems like a normal girl.  Its actually rather dull.

4. Alita: Battle Angel

I know that a lot of people actually really like this movie and found it to be a pleasant surprise.  I’m glad it found an audience, but I’m just not a part of that group.  I found the world-building to be lame, the storytelling sloppy, and the main character of Alita wildly inconsistent.  It looks great, but otherwise falls apart at the seams.

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3.The Laundromat

Its easy to compare this to 2015’s The Big Short, as they are both trying to explain some sort of confusing financial incident using a lot of fourth wall-breaking techniques and merging multiple stories.  But hooooboy are they different.  Where The Big Short actually helped you understand what was happening, I still don’t really know what The Laundromat was about.  The “merging stories” also seemed wildly disconnected and very unbalanced in the editing.  And it did absolutely nothing to make me care about any of it.

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2. Shazam!

If someone was to ask me ‘what is the one primary aspect of a bad movie that makes it bad?’, I would have to say the editing.  Editing is important in creating the right pacing and also adds a lot to the tone of a movie.  If these things don’t work, the film falls apart.  And this is Shazam in a nutshell.  The pacing is all over the place and there are so many extraneous and displaced scenes that it just becomes one big mess. Oh, and for trying to be DC’s fun, light-hearted movies, the jokes and gags simply fell flat.

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1. Men in Black: International

This is the epitome of soulless franchise milking.  Its “Hollywood safe” movie-making at its worst.  There is no reason to bring the Men in Black series back (not really that great a series in the first place) other than that its a recognizable product, so why not?  Its bland, its boring, its clearly made by committee; in other words, its everything that’s wrong with the movie industry right now.