Every year, I waffle in my decision to publish a worst-of year end list or to abstain. In most instances, it is an empty exercise to contribute to the ongoing discussion over the churn and lack of creativity in the media industries, and in Hollywood in particular.
On the other hand, negativity is not only the Internet’s main reason for being; it can also be productive. With each passing year in which franchises continue to circle the box office drain, celebrities fluff themselves up in vanity projects, and cheap cash grabs slip under the cultural radar, it feels more useful to mock than to ignore. In short, standards are necessary. And the bar doesn’t have to be high, either. Something always slips under like a world class limbo competitor.
These are 10 of those films which didn’t make the grade in 2024.
10. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Despite minor improvements over the previous installment, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire proves that nostalgia-driven intellectual property maintenance has a ceiling so low that I can barely squeeze inside, let alone enjoy the space. A film like Alien: Romulus, conversely, illustrates to me that at least attempting something fun and interesting beyond just pointing to the past makes the ‘member-berries slightly more palatable. Frozen Empire, just like Afterlife, is cringe-inducing in its tight grip on past success. We need to let media objects die.
9. Argylle
There are three things that I remember about Argylle: it has a horrendous and flat aesthetic, it is roughly 114 minutes longer than its value, and a third thing. I am proud of my brain for purging this film from my memory, because I felt like I was being sensorially attacked into submission by this thing. Argylle is so bad that it caused me to retroactively reevaluate and lower my appreciation for every one of Matthew Vaughn’s other films (except for the one I haven’t seen. Is Layer Cake any good?).
8. Borderlands
I’m about to talk about laziness in the creative process, so I won’t belabor the point here. Suffice it to say that Borderlands is a chaotic mess of creatively bankrupt nonsense. It is hard to watch what is depicted onscreen and think about anything other than Lionsgate working its damnedest to manufacture the money-printing machine that the studio desperately needs right now. Instead of achieving this franchise tentpole, the film is an Ambien pill swallowed dry.
I may cut this more slack than some who savaged the film online, but make no mistake: Borderlands is not something you ever need to watch. Go for a hike. Read a book. Sip a nice glass of wine and watch the sun set. Hell, play Borderlands 2 on that old Xbox 360 in your basement if the thing still boots up. Any of these will be a better use of your time.
7. Unfrosted
I’ll be as lazy with this critique as Jerry Seinfeld appears to have been making Unfrosted. It is un-funny.
6. Madame Web
The online response to Sony’s Spider-Man side hustle has elevated the tenuously-connected, Marvel-adjacent films into a state of pure meme. Morbius was the laughing stock of 2022, so much so that the studio thought it could cash-in on the joke by re-releasing the film to theaters. The joke continued to be on them, as the memes caused the movie to bomb a second time.
Where Morbius was a drab and mind-numbingly dull experiment in attempting to convince audiences that a character they’d never heard of was worth paying attention to, Madame Web is a wild and wooly and occasionally hilarious experiment in attempting to convince audiences that a character they’ve never heard of is worth paying attention to. At least Madame Web made me laugh.
5. This is Me…Now
You certainly cannot fault Jennifer Lopez’s visual album vanity project This is Me…Now for being audacious. J-Lo is certainly swinging for the fences with this one. But the film is difficult to take seriously. The exercise is so immediately absurd that it is a struggle to process it in real time. Gaudy and cheap-looking effects, self-absorbed and self-righteous lyrics, and a hefty production budget merely for the sake of propping up a celebrity love story…none of it screams “relatable.” And I may simply be too far outside the pop music bubble to adequately judge, but most of the music sounds far less inspired than the ambitious visual presentation, no?
4. Night Swim
2024 was a wild year for horror films. Plenty horror projects intriguingly explored the boundaries of the genre’s conventions (to varied success)—Longlegs, In a Violent Nature, The Substance, Mads, Oddity, MaXXXine, hell even Abigail. Then there are the troublemakers: the cash grabs, lazy swings, and outright rejects. Early in the year, I naively believed the haunted swimming pool movie would be the low point. But at least Night Swim has characters and a functional (albeit wholly boring) plot.
3. AfraAId
Part of my neanderthal brain wants to prohibit AfrAId from inclusion on this list, simply because its glaring mistakes often yield uproarious laughter. The script of this be-afraid-of-the-big-bad-tech movie is so stilted and ill-informed about its own technophobia that it can only be met with chuckles and/or groans. Given the ever-increasing ubiquity of AI technology in the everyday lives of many, the nonsensical and didactic depiction of “artificial intelligence” in Weitz’s film is quaint at best. What’s worse: the film flies in the face of good speculative fiction when it pulls opportunistically and reductively from the headlines instead of envisioning a potential future.
2. The Strangers: Chapter 1
The Strangers: Chapter 1 may be the most inessential and uncalled for soft reboot of a franchise in history. The 2008 film The Strangers has grown its cult status over time, so I can understand the studio impulse to reiterate the property and cash in on the fanbase. However, employing Renny Harlin to remake the nearly plotless home invasion film without adding hardly anything new or exciting is a horrendous decision. The only worst decision I can think of is greenlighting three “Chapters” at the same time…maybe by Chapter 3 Tamara will finally be home.
1. Tarot
In a year of horror genre duds, no title dud-ed harder than Tarot, a low-budget teen scream programmer that boldly answers the question: In a media world dominated by intellectual property, does tarot count? The film thankfully does not sequel-bait with some cringe attempt to franchise the Major Arcana. At the same time, Tarot is the least memorable horror film in recent memory. Calling it lazy misses the point, as the drab aesthetic and lame scares come off as intentionally miserable. A financially successful venture for Sony Pictures, Tarot feels like a box office calculation with paper-thin creative juice.
As always, thanks for reading!
—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)
CineFiles Movie Reviews 