The 2020 Halfway Report Card: The Worst of the Year so Far
Please take a gander at my ultimate list of “Skip-It” films that I have gathered since the start of the film year (February 28th, 2021). Just because we are grateful to be getting back to the movies doesn’t mean we can’t hold those accountable for the steaming piles of garbage we wasted our time on. Blunt enough? Thank you.
Chaos Walking
Chaos Walking is a film with a feminist angle that would have worked better if written from a woman’s perspective. Or at least, the use of flashbacks or narrator, but the dark twist comes across as contrived. Combine this with some mildly effective special effects and little chemistry between Holland and Ridley, you get a stagnant and boring adventure film. It may as well have been called an “exposition” in the not-too-distant future.
Every Breath You Take
This is a shockingly dull ’90s inspired thriller with a twist that’s so blatantly obvious it can only inspire a response from the viewer, “Well, duh.” The script is shockingly bad, and you have to wonder, with all the films ending up on streaming networks, how Every Breath You Take not only made it to a movie studio production but didn’t get scooped up by a lifetime.
Infinite
With so many past lives to choose from, the filmmakers of Infinite still repeated the same mistakes when there should have been limitless possibilities. Instead, it’s an endless exercise in suspense-free filmmaking.
Kitty Love: An Homage to Cats
“I thought, maybe I’ll just quit,” was a line said by Gene Siskel almost thirty-some-odd years ago on one of David Letterman’s late-night incarnations. He said it after watching the Tony Danza film She’s Out of Control — which was apparently a comedy starring the Who’s the Boss star having fantasies about his daughter. I’ve never seen it, but it has to be a classic compared to Kitty Love: An Homage to Cats, a film that I can only hope was made because of limited Dutch film availability over the pandemic. If not, my best guess is the owner and operators of Ready Steady Cut are running a behavioral study on obedience.
Monday
The film equivalent of an act of self-gratification, Monday relishes in its an overinflated script and sacrifices the audience’s enjoyment.
Papadimitropoulos’s film is like having a case of the Mondays. After a while, it just feels like work.
Mortal Kombat
Mortal Kombat does offer some mind-numbing action to clear your head. However, while the fight scenes have some thrills (many are useless filler), the acting is awful, and too much time is wasted in establishing the film’s backstory, which is dumb to begin with.
Stowaway
You may argue that Stowaway deliberately underwhelms for an emotional payoff at the end of the film. The problem is that it never establishes enough of an emotional response (love or hate) for its characters or takes you on a journey that fully invests you in the story. It completely mishandles any chance of a morality play by playing it too safe. It’s such a flat experience that it made me ponder whether the world is round after all.
Wilson, we have a problem.
Thunder Force
I did a literal spit-take when I read Ready Steady Cut Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Wilson’s take on Melissa McCarthy’s horrid run. He wrote, “I’ve long held the belief that the collaborative output of Melissa McCarthy and her director husband Ben Falcone is some kind of elaborate divorce strategy.”
I have a different take. For me, Nat King Cole said it best: You call it madness, but I call it love. If anything, the professional relationship between husband and wife duo Ben Falcone and Melissa McCarthy proves one thing — She must love him so very, very much.
Tom and Jerry
The HBO Max film Tom and Jerry is painfully bad. Woefully bad. I know there is something to say about not every film being made for you or me, but this? If anyone should know the ins and outs of this duo, it’s Warner Brothers. This cartoon’s target audience seems to be tailored for those unique children whose medication has little to no effect on their attention deficit disorder.
