The Five Most Disappointing Films Of 2019
While there were several exceptional films last year, there was also an abundance of steamy crap too. Generally, a rotten film can be easily sniffed out (like Cats, Loqueesha or The Fanatic), so some bullets were easily be dodged, but there’s always a handful that sneak through undetected. We've already shared our favorite films from last year with you, and now it's time to share our picks for the worst.
These are our picks for the five films that disappointed us the most, not a list of the objectively worst. These are films that had us pumped and didn't deliver, films that had better trailers than the finished products, films that promised something and didn't fully deliver... And these are just the films we’ve personally seen, so there’s definitely worse fare out there, we just were lucky enough to miss them.
5: Ma
We had decently high expectations about this one, since it promised an unhinged Octavia Spencer in what appeared to be a leading role, but, alas!, Ma was a pretty big letdown. It certainly aspired to bring the ruckus to the party — and occasionally, it managed to be pretty entertaining on that front — but it ultimately winds up too sloppy drunk, completely losing sight of what it’s trying to say. The film intentionally goes out of its way to be shocking and provocative, but it all falls flat because there’s no semblance of significance or substance behind its trite thrills and chills. It’s incredibly unfocused, but it does find entertaining pockets here and there, especially whenever Spencer is on screen. Although it grapples with a lot of meaty subject matter, it never sinks its teeth in and comes across more as shock for shock’s sake than anything remotely substantive. Ma has potential but it drops the ball early on, more content to fall further off the rails — in a mostly bad but sometimes entertaining way — than to ever recover.
4: Die Kinder Der Toten
Die Kinder Der Toten comes from first-time directors Kelly Copper and Pavol Liška, who decided taking on Elfriede Jelinek’s epic and “unfilmable” novel of the same name was a good idea. We had high hopes though, since the film was picked up by Fantastic Fest and was billed as an experimental zombie film — which it is, but mostly is not. This quasi-silent political satire with zombies is a peculiar exercise in experimentation, but it’s one that never fully stacks up to anything substantial, making it a collection of semi-intriguing images and not much more. Shot entirely without dialogue, Die Kinder Der Toten relies largely on its brass band score and heightened sound design to give this otherwise (un)dead film a much needed pulse. Its gritty and raw Super 8 home movie aesthetic creates a haunting atmosphere full of wet, dry, and fog-torn Austrian landscapes that help to draw a viewer in; however, its appeal quickly wears thin. Simply put, there’s not enough to keep someone engaged for 90 minutes. And that’s predominantly Die Kinder Der Toten’s problem: it’s not as interesting, enjoyable, clever, or cool as the filmmakers seem to think it is.
3: Velvet Buzzsaw
We were very excited to see that Nightcrawler writer/director Dan Gilroy would be reuniting with Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo to pop shots at L.A.’s vapid art scene. On top of that, the trailer promised black humor, a touch of the bizarre and horroresque, and, more important than anything else, Toni Collette in another horror film, but the final product failed to really live up to the hype. Velvet Buzzsaw’s premise, while not very unique, creates the opportunity for kooky fun to be had; however, the reality is that it’s just as soulless and hollow as the characters that litter its messy narrative. Dan Gilroy has fallen down from the pedestal of filmmakers to watch into the trenches of mediocrity faster than anyone could have anticipated. Nightcrawler is fantastic, but Velvet Buzzsaw isn’t anything more than a cool sounding title, extending Gilroy’s sophomore slump (Roman J. Israel, Esq., a character study thriller that, outside of a few moments, never fully delivers) into his third feature, which fails at nearly everything it sets out to do.
2: Hellboy
We were curious more than anything about The Descent director Neil Marshall helming the latest Hellboy effort. A clunky and cobbled reboot, Hellboy intentionally eschews the sophistication and pathos of del Toro’s films, replacing them with mindless buckets of blood and viscera. When all’s said and done, the film definitely rings hollow (especially when compared to del Toro’s work), and about 80% of its issues stem from Andrew Cosby’s screenplay. A whole article could be devoted to dissecting the script’s many issues, but its biggest faults by far are trying to do too much and not setting up characters or their connections in a clear or coherent way. Unlike del Toro’s films, which first focus on setting up and defining the character before delving too much into the comic book’s mythological playground of a world, Cosby drops us right into the story going a 100 miles per hour. We are fully exposed to this very large mythological and supernatural world, and the rules for it are never truly defined. It’s also too stuffed with everything imaginable: zombies, witches, giants, changelings, cat people, demons, spirits, disgustingly disfigured and contorted sorceresses, and more. It’s not going to fill you up, but it’ll douse you in blood (if you’re into that).
Before we get to our #1 pick, we'd like to acknowledge the films that weren't quite disappointing enough to make our top 5:
Without further ado, our pick for the most disappointing film of 2019 goes to...
1: The Hustle
We love Frank Oz’s delightfully charming con-man comedy, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, starring Steve Martin and Sir Michael Caine; it bulldozes the viewer with wit, class, and big belly laughs, but it’s really the performances that give it such nice definition. While we didn’t have the utmost confidence that gender-swapping modernization with Rebel Wilson and Anne Hathaway would knock our socks off, we weren’t anticipating it being quite the shamelessly tasteless cash-grab that it turned out to be. The Hustle — not to be confused with the J.Lo fronted Hustlers — becomes unbearable almost immediately, and it never finds a way to recover. It lacks any nuance or charm, presenting the audience with obnoxiously loud and loathsome characters doing incredibly uninspired and humorless things for 93-minutes. It goes through the motions at every turn, and even has the opportunity to deliver an interesting moral message, but it finds a way to incompetently undercut that too, culminating in an overall vapid experience. It rings hollow, has no real point, and objectively fails at delivering any sense of entertainment. It is nothing more than a vacuous void of laughter-free nothingness, and the actresses and the audience deserved much better, which is why it’s our pick for the most disappointing film (that we saw) last year.
Well, that's our list! Were we disappointed in a film you're strongly passionate about? Was there something more excruciating that we left off our list?! We want to know. Share your thoughts and feelings in the comments section below, and as always, remember to viddy well!