By Happy New Year everyone! 2022 has finally come and gone and it’s certainly been an interesting year for film. We’ve seen a sense of normalcy start to return to cinemas and the new status quo has seemingly been set in stone. The theatrical window is shorter. Streaming services are getting more exclusives and carving out content in proxy wars. Box office hits are no longer the scale they were before the pandemic and plenty of movies that would have done well in previous years bombed at the box office. That doesn’t mean that it’s all doom and gloom in the world of film, but we’ll look at the positives next time. Today, we’re going to be looking back at the year and telling you what the staff at Flixist deem to be the worst movies of 2022.
Over the past year, we’ve reviewed 85 different movies from a variety of different genres and from a variety of different perspectives. That is definitely a smaller number from previous years, but that mostly comes from various outside commitments in our everyday lives. Despite our love of film, being a film critic isn’t our sole job and when push comes to shove, some of our writers needed to take a step back either due to medical issues, personal commitments, or trying to provide for our families. Everyone here at the site loves film and loves to talk about it and will still provide truthful reviews and analysis pieces for you all, but sometimes other priorities take precedence, and that was the case with 2022. Yet despite that smaller output this year, we still have a pretty solid list of titles that deserve one last reaming over the coals before we move on to 2023.
We at Flixist define our worst-reviewed movies of 2021 as films that scored a 3.5 or below. We define a 3.5 as a movie where “there is little reason to like this movie at all. It’s only saving grace is that it is not broken.” Thankfully, nothing was truly reprehensible this year that made us dip into the 1s or even 2s, which has to count for something. There were still bad movies, but they could have been a lot worse. Also, we had to have actually reviewed the movie for it to be on our list, so films like Firestarter and The Bubble have been spared. This is purely a list of the movies that we reviewed over the year and collected for one final parade of misery to send off 2021 with some style and fun.
Via: Sony
Morbius – 3.2
“Morbius is like a leech. A tiny, insignificant, blood-sucking leech that is more of an inconvenience than anything else. It tries to piggyback on popular trends but by being so inept at actually telling a cohesive action movie that it’s just visually exhausting to witness. Morbius has been delayed five times over two years and frankly should have been delayed many more times or just outright canceled. No one would have missed it and no one will care about its failure. – Jesse
Copyright: Netflix
Persuasion – 3.1
“Persuasion is, frankly, an insufferable film. It takes Austen’s introspective and timeless novel and cheapens it beyond recognition. The plot drags on and I found myself annoyed at Anne almost the entire movie. Unfortunately, Dakota Johnson is terrible in Persuasion. She constantly breaks the fourth wall to deliver a quirky line about lost love or something of the like. If this were Fleabag it would work, but Johnson’s Anne and the plot of this dreadful movie are nowhere near as intriguing as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s astounding (and honest) series.” – Sophia
Via: Netflix
“If you watch the trailer for Fistful of Vengeance, you’d be forgiven for assuming this is a high-octane action thriller with some light comedy and a buddy cop dynamic. Instead, it’s a painfully dire film with basically no chemistry between any of the leads and fight choreography that echoes all of the worst tropes of modern action filmmaking. I can’t believe an action film with one of the greatest martial artists of our generation has to resort to jump-cuts to sell itself, but that’s what we get.” – Peter
Copyright: Sony Pictures, Screen Gems
The Invitation – 3
“I’ve seen bad horror movies before, and I’ll most certainly continue to see them, but The Invitation was such a weird bad horror movie. It wasn’t laughably bad, but it seemed to be on autopilot for most of its run and confused what the assignment even was. It doesn’t tell a good love story and the horror bits are aggressively uninteresting and separated from everything else. The Invitation tries to be both and drops both of the balls at the same time and can’t be bothered to pick them back up. It just looks at them, shrugs its shoulders, and goes about its day. ” – Jesse
© Netflix
Blonde – 3
“At the end of the film, I felt empty and bored. The movie closes with a rape scene from former president John F. Kennedy and Monroe ODing on drugs and I was relieved to be done. I didn’t pick this film for review because I wanted to trash it, but because I was interested in the mystique it was building pre-release… Sadly, I can’t even muster up enough anger to feel outraged. I’m merely disappointed that I spent three hours of my life watching some director’s vanity project about how much he hates starlets in Hollywood. If not for that NC-17 rating and the stigma it carries, I’m almost certain Blonde would come and go without so much as a whisper of its existence.” – Peter
