Zach’s Top 5 Worst Movies of 2019
- Dark Phoenix: The Fox X-Men franchise came to a sputtering, gasping end this past summer with one of the worst superhero movies ever made. It seemed like there was nowhere to go but up after the disaster of X-Men: Apocalypse but Dark Phoenix is somehow worse, with some of the most egregious lack of continuity in a series rife with it and failing to learn the lessons of The Last Stand, a movie that also failed to properly convey the depth and scope of the Dark Phoenix saga. Everyone feels like they would rather be doing anything else besides being in this movie and the action feels lazy and rehashed from better X movies. Hopefully, in a few years, Disney will be able to give the X-Men a proper reboot and we can all forget this movie ever happened.
- The Tracker: This Dolph Lundgren snoozefest kind of represents all of the terrible DTV action we saw this year, along with stuff like The Driver and Hard Night Falling. On-Demand and DTV action has seen a lot of great stuff in recent years, mostly from Scott Adkins, and Dolph has had some fun movies in that arena as well but The Tracker is definitely not one of them. Literally, almost nothing happens for the entire film and what little action there is is barely up to the standard of a mediocre TV show and, despite being barely 90 minutes long, it feels like an eternity when you are watching it.
- Godzilla: King of the Monsters: This one is extremely painful because it seemed like this was going to be one of the best movies of the summer based on the excellent trailers but it turned out to be a messy disaster. Visually, there are some stunning shots and sequences in this sequel but everything that isn’t Godzilla or the other Kaiju is either excruciatingly boring or incredibly stupid and unfortunately, the human cast and their convoluted plot is a majority of the film. There’s an incredibly dumb McGuffin and characters are constantly making stupid or baffling decisions, or in the case of a wasted Charles Dance, not really doing anything at all. There’s also a strange decision to make King Ghidorah generate hurricanes, so a lot of the Kaiju battles are taking place at night with rain and wind that is obscuring the action and making it difficult to tell what the hell is happening. It’s like they tried to overcompensate for the complaints of not enough Godzilla in the 2014 movie but this is too far in the other direction. Hopefully, Godzilla vs Kong will find the right balance and deliver a kaiju royal rumble we want and deserve.
- Gemini Man: Gemini Man was less a full thought out movie and more a tech demo for technology that most people really don’t want, that being 60 FPS cinema. Ang Lee is really trying to push cinematic tech and there were parts in Gemini Man seeing it in theaters where it felt like you were more looking out a window and not looking at a screen was very impressive but the movie itself is so generic and boring as far as espionage action goes, even with the Will Smith vs Will Smith gimmick. If you’ve seen anything similar, like the Bourne movies, you’ll be able to know exactly what is coming before it happens every time. The CG younger Will Smith is an impressive step forward in deaging tech but all the technological wizardry doesn’t coalesce into a fun or exciting movie.
- Batman: Hush: One of best Batman stories seemed like it was going to be an extremely solid animated adaptation but Batman: Hush has one of the most inexplicable changes in recent memory, completely changing the main villain of the story for what seems like no reason other than to piss off fans of the comics. If you haven’t seen the animated movie I won’t spoil the identity of the villainous Hush here but it’s such a random choice that feels less like the writers were trying to do something new and fresh and more like they just threw a dart at a dartboard of Batman rogues and made whoever they hit Hush. The Hush of the comics had a personal connection to Bruce Wayne that made him much more interesting and that is all completely gone from this animated version.