Top 10 Worst Films of 2021

Hello, readers! It’s that time of year again. Yes, that time in January when I get to take another good, hard, deserved swing at the worst of the worst that 2021 had to offer in film. And I got be honest, this year was… well, it was pretty bad. That’s not to say the year didn’t have plenty of good, even great, films, but sweet Mary mother of God, 2021, amid the plethora of forgettable junk, put out some rancid abominations.

So before we dive deep into this trash heap of cinematic abortions, let’s quickly run through some dishonorable mentions…

Chaos Walking, Cosmic Sin, Malcolm & Marie, Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway, The Reckoning, Reminiscence, Separation, Spiral: From the Book of Saw, The Starling and The Unforgivable.

Just consider that for a moment. Consider the fact that neither Peter Rabbit 2 nor Bruce Willis’s annual paid-to-snooze dumpster fire Cosmic Sin were bad enough to make the top 10 cut. That is how bad these 10 films really are.

Well, with that out of the way, let’s now take out the trash.

10) Tom & Jerry

It shouldn’t take much to make a good Tom & Jerry film. This isn’t Pixar or Studio Ghibli here; it’s Tom and Jerry, and much of the iconic rivalry’s charm has always been the simplicity of their back-and-forth antics. Yet director Tim Story and writer Kevin Costello doom the film to failure from the beginning by committing the grave sin of relegating the titular duo to being essentially glorified cameos in their own movie. Any sense of charm or amusement to be found in the original animated series is totally MIA in this joyless feature-length reboot. I don’t ask for much, but I’d like to think – and call me crazy for thinking this – that I’m getting Tom and Jerry in a movie titled Tom & Jerry instead of a bored Chloe Grace Moretz and Michael Pena looking absolutely clueless in front of the camera as they wait for Story to call it a wrap so they can quickly punch out and cash their paychecks. When computer-generated animals display more emotion than your real-life, actual, living-breathing human actors, then how much more red of a flag do you need alerting you that your film is a failure?

9) The Matrix Resurrections

It’s not inherently a bad idea to bring back a franchise after an extended period of time. After all, I really enjoyed Ghostbusters: Afterlife and both Mad Max: Fury Road and Blade Runner 2049 were two of the best films of their respective years. The Matrix Resurrections, however, is proof for the other end of the argument that would say some franchises are best left as they are. It’s a shame, too, ’cause both Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss come to play here. If anything, their performances had me hoping to see them in another film, maybe a rom-com, or I’ll just settle for any other film not named The Matrix Resurrections. No, the one who actually phones-it in here is director and franchise co-creator Lana Wachowski, here trying to infuse the Matrix universe with a real-world, meta approach that is so lazy and so eye-rollingly on-the-nose that the only impression I was left with is that Lana would rather be doing literally anything other than a fourth Matrix movie. Sure, it doesn’t help that the other pair of the Wachowski duo said no thanks to this (wise choice), but when the one Wachowski left standing to put together a new film puts together a film that screams they couldn’t give two flying fucks about this universe anymore – well, that’s a big problem the film can’t overcome.

Also, this won’t be the only film on this list that portrays its studio Warner Bros. as the villain. Seriously, bite the hand much?

8) Thunder Force

I’m fully aware that Melissa McCarthy is a bit divisive when it comes to viewers’ tastes in her humor, but I’m a defender of hers. I love what she’s done with Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, The Heat, Spy) and Can You Ever Forgive Me? was a fantastic showcase of her range as a dramatic actress. However, even I can’t deny her collaborations with husband Ben Falcone are terrible, and Thunder Force is the worst of them all. Starring McCarthy, Jason Bateman, Bobby Cannavale and Academy Award winners Octavia Spencer and Melissa Leo, Thunder Force manages to waste every opportunity to tap into the comic strengths of its incredibly talented cast, and fails to mine any satirical potential provided to them by this Golden Age of comic book films we’ve been living through over the past decade. What’s most frustrating, though, is that there are actually a handful of moments here that have the potential to blossom into something funny, but like all McCarthy/Falcone projects, it chooses to stop way short of capitalizing on those opportunities.

Seriously, Paul Feig, if you’re out there, quit throwing your bitchy baby tantrums over the fact that most Ghostbusters fans didn’t like your mediocre reboot and just work with McCarthy on another project already.

7) God’s Not Dead: We the People

Look, it’s not like I was expecting the allegorical eloquence of John Bunyan or C. S. Lewis here, but God’s Not Dead: We the People somehow managed to make its three franchise predecessors look like Ben-Hur. It’s not often that a faith-based film, of all films, is so bad that is has me begging the Lord for forgiveness during an altar call on Sunday morning, but dammit if this film didn’t break my spirit into a million pieces. This is another case of Pinnacle Peak Pictures (formerly Pure Flix) abandoning story and character for bludgeoning the message into its viewers’ heads, and every time they do so I can’t help but wonder if the target audience already believes in said message, then why feel the need to go so hard with it? And, of course, like the other three films, We the People forgoes any sort of character nuance, instead presenting us with the typical black-and-white good guys against the villains conflict. This time, though, they go blacker and whiter than they’ve ever gone before with antagonists that are such irredeemable dickholes, the characters might as well have been credited as “Scowl”, “Stink Eye” and “Resting Bitch Face”. But even they are outdone by the flawless good guys who carry themselves with such an insufferable persecution complex even a crucified Apostle Peter would tell them to chill out as he’s dangling upside-down from the cross he’s minutes away from dying on. With character arcs this flatline, who really gives a shit what the outcome is? I sure didn’t.

God may not be dead… but after seeing this film, I’m pretty certain he’ll wish he was.

6) Dear Evan Hansen

2021 was a pretty good year for musicals. Even with me not being as gung-ho on Spielberg’s West Side Story remake as everyone else seems to be, the year still gave us In the Heights and Tick, Tick… Boom! And then there’s Dear Evan Hansen, a tone-deaf, overwrought and overlong exercise in how to get everything about making a musical completely wrong. For starters, the film’s most obvious knock against it is the distracting presence of the titular teen who’s played by a man who looks old enough to have another certain Hansen named Chris walk out from around the corner to ask Evan to have a seat right over there for gawking at his high school crush. It’s the oppressively mawkish handling of such sobering themes as mental illness and suicide, though, that ultimately sinks this film. Actually, mawkish doesn’t even scratch the surface of describing the melodrama of star Ben Platt’s performance, as he’s belting it out all the way to the back balcony located in the Andromeda Galaxy. I could go on about the uninspired song numbers I forgot the second they ended, Amy Adams’s weirdly robotic performance and, worst of all, the fact that this entire premise centers around an exploitative asshole who uses a family’s tragedy to hopefully score some nookie points with the daughter he’s hot and heavy for, only to then barely face any consequences when he fesses up about his bull shit facade. And to think this film came from writer/director Stephen Chbosky, who gave us both The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Wonder, two films I really like.

Can’t quite tell where it might’ve gone wrong for him here, but it might’ve began somewhere around thinking that nothing says sing your heart out more than depression and killing yourself.

5) F9: The Fast Saga

Over the course of the box office hit Fast & Furious franchise, anyone could tell that the series was stretching the realties of what was physically possible with its action sequences, even by over-the-top action film standards. F9, however, goes so far over the edge in terms of plausibility it makes the rest of the series look like BBC’s Wonders of the Universe. Led by Vin Diesel’s trademark grumble, the team – I mean, family – takes on John Cena’s terrifying inability to act his way through a shitty script and a woefully overqualified Charlize Theron, the latter sporting a bizarre choice of hairstyle that has me convinced she must’ve gotten her film schedule here mixed up with an upcoming Mo Howard biopic. Without any delay, director Justin Lin jumps the shark so far if you’re not checked out by the time Diesel somehow manages to slingshot his car across a cliff you certainly will be by the time Ludacris and Tyrese Gibson fly a beater car into – yep, go figure – space.

Yep, I called it. All my friends scoffed when I predicted they’d hit the bottom of the barrel and have no choice but take the franchise into space, and… well – as Dr. Ian Malcolm would say, “… Well – uh – there it is.” When the Looney Tunes appear more grounded in reality than a live-action, that’s not a good sign.

Like Friday the 13th and Leprechaun before it, space may be the final frontier, but it’s also where franchises go to die.

And speaking of Looney Tunes…

4) Space Jam: A New Legacy

Much like the aforementioned Tom & Jerry, 2021 provided us with another film that clearly showed it had no idea how to utilize its iconic animated characters. And much like The Matrix Resurrections, Warner Bros. is again treated like dicks in the movie they are bankrolling. Sure, I may be Team Jordan over Team LeBron, but here’s the thing. I didn’t find the original Space Jam all that special, so it’s not like I was stubbornly dug-in and automatically averse to a new reboot/sequel. Yet Space Jam: A New Legacy is so soulless and void of any creativity whatsoever you’ll gain a whole new appreciation for the MJ version that you may have thought you never had. Along with the missused assembling of classic Looney Tunes characters, Warner Bros. throws everything including the kitchen sink at the audience by cramming in every WB-owned character as cameos, then doing absolutely nothing with them, which ultimately leaves you wondering if you sat through a Space Jam film or a 2-hour advertisement for Warner Bros. Even the most diehard Lebron supporter will most likely walk away from watching him struggle to act as himself hoping the NBA superstar doesn’t quit his dayjob to pursue a career in film.

But, hey, how often are you gonna see Baby Jane Hudson and Mad Max appear in the same film?

3) Long Weekend

Long Weekend is not only the title of this film, but also an apt description of what it felt like sitting through this irritatingly cutesy meet-cute between our leading loser and the most manic, pixiest and dreamiest of all manic pixie dream girls he falls head over heels in love with. Then faster than you can scream “Owww! Whiplash”, the film jerks the steering wheel over into sci-fi, time-travel territory and couldn’t fumble those two disparate genres any harder. Not that the two are inherently incompatible, but the film fails to conjoin them the way the tone wildly bounces between cloying sentamentalism so sticky sweet it could make you gag and downer plot turns involving mental illness that treat the topic like a cheap gimmick. Worse, a film this bad actually had the balls to whip out a third-act Tully-esque twist that is totally unearned. Or does it matter when the film then follows up that twist by giving the twist its own twist? Eh – who cares?

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, this most definitely is not.

2) Bliss

Won’t lie, Bliss is certainly ambitious, incredibly ambitious even, but one could say so are meth addicts tweaking out on a city-wide dumpster dive adventure for random treasure. And like meth addiction, Bliss is an erratic mess. Something had to have gotten lost in translation between conceptualization to visualization, and not even the onscreen talents of Salma Hayek and Owen Wilson are able to makeup for the horrendously convoluted nature of its “What’s real and what’s simulation?” plot. Not that writer/director Mike Cahill is to be faulted for lack of trying in explaining said plot as he spends most of the film attempting to explain the faulty logic behind the premise, so much so that Bliss might as well have been renamed Exposition Dump. Some have speculated that the film is a metaphor for drug addiction. I’m not too sure; in fact, I’m not even sure if the film is sure. All I do know is that Bliss had me convinced I was tripping on drugs when watching it. At the very least, Wilson and I were able to share one thing in common, and that’s the perpetual state of confusion we both appeared to be in.

… Woooow.

Well, readers, we’ve finally made it to the very bottom, the lowest of the lows, the ninth circle of hell, the very, absolute worst of 2021. And, you know, God bless Bliss. It clung to that top prize for as long as it could, since February even… and then December rolled on up, and well…

Drum roll, please…

1) Don’t Look Up

I really wanted to like this film. You have a proven director in Adam McKay (The Big Short, Vice), arguably the biggest cast assembled in any film you’ll see in 2021, and trailers that sold the film so well… yet as William Hurt once said in A History of Violence, “… How do you fuck that up? … HOOOOW… DO YOU FUCK! THAT! UP??!!!!” Given the premise and stellar cast (featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep, Timothee Chalamet, just to name a few), the potential for satirical gold is right there on a gift-wrapped platter for the film to just take, yet McKay fashions together a comedy that features absolutely no laughs, a world-ending conflict that somehow manages to contain no credible stakes and social commentary that is so fucking smug and obnoxiously on-the-nose you’ll roll your eyes right out of the sockets. Maybe that was McKay’s intention, but like those behind the Sharknado films claiming it’s meant to be yet having no excuse as to why they are bad at how they about being bad, McKay has no excuse for the laziness, and certainly has no excuse for treating his audience like simpleton idiots in the way has the film hold their hands and explain in obvious manner what the film is supposed to be about at every fucking turn. Needless to say, I expected much better.

For sure, DiCaprio’s one of my favorite actors, but not since Romeo + Juliet have I ever rooted harder for the tragedy to win out over his character.

Well, there you have it, readers. Those are my picks and I’m sticking to them. What are some of your picks for worst of 2021? Feel to comment below and let me know.

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