The Absolute Worst Movies Of 2019

It almost seems to be an unwritten Hollywood rule that for every amazing, well-crafted piece of cinema released in any given year, there must be at least one completely misguided, poorly executed, lazily written slog of a film. Some of these catch us by surprise, arriving with high expectations only to offer bitter disappointment; others, we see (or rather smell) coming a mile away. Sure, it would be unrealistic to expect every major Hollywood release to be a home run, or even a single — but every year, the studios offer up a hearty batch of pictures that (in keeping with the metaphor) strike out, then burst into flames while walking back to the dugout.

2018 gave us a surplus of absolute stinkers, and this year is shaping up to be no different. These are the horror flicks that generated more unintentional laughs than scares, the trippy sci-fi pieces that tripped and fell on their faces, the superhero blockbusters that failed to achieve liftoff, and the high-minded dramas that bypassed Prestige Town and headed straight for Facepalm City... the very worst movies of 2019.

A remake of the French film The Intouchables, The Upside endured a lengthy development process, with talent both behind and in front of the camera coming and going for the better part of five years. Then, after debuting at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival, the movie — which was produced by The Weinstein Company — sat on a shelf for the next year and a half, due to the avalanche of sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein. The drama, featuring Bryan Cranston as a paralyzed billionaire and Kevin Hart as his ex-con caretaker, was then purchased by STX Entertainment — and when it was finally released in January 2019, it was met with the mother of all shrugs.

Critics were near-unanimous in their praise for Hart's and Cranston's performances and chemistry together, and in their disdain for virtually everything else about the film. Descriptors like "hackneyed," "mawkish," and "clichéd" were thrown about with abandon, along with more involved and colorful ones like "a barely legible assemblage of incidents that only somewhat resemble a story" and "a blob of unflavored Jell-O that you're supposed to find delicious just because it went through the motions." But it was Film Inquiry's Asher Luberto (in a review headlined "The Upside: Not a Lot of It") who summed up the critical doldrums most succinctly: "You have seen it all before, and probably done better... the film [has] fallen, and can't get up."

Serenity, starring Matthew McConaughey as a fishing boat captain and Anne Hathaway as the ex-wife who shows up seeking protection from her new abusive husband, is a seedy murder mystery with a twist; the problem, unfortunately, is that the mystery isn't so tough to parse out, and the twist is absolutely ridiculous. We won't spoil it here, for the simple fact that we'd be downright embarrassed to spell it out; one wonders why writer/director Steven Knight (The Girl in the Spider's Web) didn't feel the same when finishing off his screenplay. In case you think we're being hyperbolic, consider the words of the great Rex Reed, who has seen a bad movie or two in his distinguished career.

Writing for the Observer, Reed argued, "Serenity already qualifies as the worst film of 2019. Both moronically written and directed with shocking, amateurish ineptitude by Stephen Knight, it's a pointless bomb... a sub-mental waste of time and Diane Lane... As the movie turns into a long, exasperating episode from The Twilight Zone, the dialogue induces giggles and then loud guffaws." Chicago Reader's Leah Pickett called it "a directing failure, seeing as McConaughey acts like he's in a prestige drama; his intensity clashes with the pulpy narrative and its illogical contrivances. The movie becomes even more ridiculous after its big reveal, which is obvious from early on and suggested in the opening shot." All we'll say is that said reveal isn't "it was all a dream" — it's even worse.

Paramount's animated feature Wonder Park is a first in modern cinema: it's the only major studio picture to ever be released with no credited director. You read that right — even Alan Smithee, the famed pseudonym reserved for filmmakers who disown their movies, couldn't be bothered to take credit. Original director Dylan Brown (who has worked as an animator on a laundry list of Pixar classics) was fired near the end of the film's production for "inappropriate behavior," and apparently, nobody else who worked on Wonder Park — the story of a little girl who wills the theme park of her dreams into existence — was willing to step up and take responsibility for it. There is a reason for this.

Despite an awesome voice cast featuring Mila Kunis, Ken Jeong, Matthew Broderick, and Kenan Thompson, the film suffered from terminal issues at the writing stage, seeming to be supremely unsure of its premise and even its tone. Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com called it "Melancholy in all the wrong ways... [it] only makes a strong impression when it's disturbing or saddening in a manner the film itself seems only dimly aware of," a sentiment echoed by Jake Wilson of The Age. "Children will likely find the film both boring and upsetting," he said, "a deadly combination." Perhaps the phantom director should have paid more attention during his time at Pixar: "It aspires to be Inside Out," said Empire's Ian Freer, "but falls way short."

John Travolta has accomplished many things in his career: helping to cement the popularity of disco, assisting Quentin Tarantino in reinventing the action film, and trading faces with Nic Cage, to name just a few. But 2019 saw him notch perhaps his most dubious achievement: fielding a picture which scored a big fat goose egg on Rotten Tomatoes for the third time in two years. His misbegotten biopic Gotti and woefully inept speedboat-racing thriller Speed Kills were considered by many to be the worst films of 2018, and Trading Paint — the story of father-and-son racecar drivers pitted against each other by an unscrupulous rival — is shaping up to be a strong contender for this year's title.

The 11 critics who bothered to review it trashed it mercilessly, none more so than Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post. "[Travolta's character] hops back in the driver's seat after six years on the sidelines to kick his son's butt. 'Hell, you can't write this any better!' says one of the track commentators. Yes, you can... [the racing sequences] are as exciting as a Ford Taurus trying to parallel park." Critics were uniformly puzzled over the appearance of country superstar Shania Twain as the obligatory love interest ("Maybe she just really wanted to meet Travolta," pondered one) and infuriated by the cliché-laden script from Craig R. Welch and Gary Gerani. The silver lining here: a losing streak this egregious usually means there's nowhere to go but up.

At first blush, a gender-flipped take on the 1988 comedy classic Dirty Rotten Scoundrels — which featured Michael Caine and Steve Martin as dueling conman lotharios vying over the territory of a seaside resort — seemed like a premise with a lot of potential. The Hustle also had a lot going for it: Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson in the lead roles, Veep veteran Chris Addison in the director's chair, and a script by the red-hot Jac Schaeffer (who contributed to Captain Marvel). But something apparently went quite wrong between the conception and its execution, because it debuted to some of the harshest critical drubbings of the year.

Onetime Roger Ebert cohort Richard Roeper channeled his old friend in his blistering review for the Chicago Sun-Times. "If you don't see the long con coming in this story," he wrote, "either you're not paying attention, or... No. That's the only possible explanation. Your mind wandered to thoughts of better movies playing elsewhere, perhaps right next door to this debacle... Even with a running time of 93 minutes, The Hustle felt about an hour too long." Roeper was far from the only critic to compare the machinations of the film's (ostensible) protagonists with those of the filmmakers in duping the ticket-buying public, with The Detroit News' Adam Graham perhaps nailing it the hardest: "Who's conning who here?" he asked. "In The Hustle, everyone's a sucker, most of all the audience."

Poms billed itself as an "uplifting comedy" about a group of women who start up a cheerleading squad in their retirement home, and with a premise like that, casting is everything. Fortunately, on board were screen legends Diane Keaton, Pam Grier, and Rhea Perlman, and the reviews certainly had no problems with the cast. No, the critics' issues were with virtually everything else about the film, and it may not have helped that Poms was the debut feature for both director Zara Hayes and screenwriter Shane Atkinson.

Notices took the movie to task for everything from wasting its brilliant cast to disrespecting the age group it was meant to uplift, and as noted by NPR's Ella Taylor, Hayes and Atkinson appeared over their heads in attempting to craft a feel-good comedy in which (spoilers, maybe?) the lead character's impending death is a major plot point. The duo "take on responsibilities they can't follow through on without getting into a tonal and thematic tangle," she wrote, resulting in a film that "has all the existential heft of an extended L'Oreal commercial." Rex Reed of the Observer further hammered this notion home, citing the movie's "witless script" and "petrified direction" in the service of material that's "as predictable as it is preposterous." But perhaps the biggest, most succinct burn came from Jude Dry of IndieWire, who noted that the writer/director combo have little experience in comedy... "and it shows."

The Uglydoll toy line has been around since 2001, so it seems a little late for a feature-length commercial for its many products. But UglyDolls — a capably animated flick featuring a who's-who roster of talent from the music world — was slammed by the vast majority of critics for basically being exactly that, not to mention its crime of falling back on such well-worn tropes and story beats that all but its very youngest viewers were likely to have seen every one of them a million times before.

"Corporate greed is particularly noticeable in this latest film about a popular supermarket toy because the story is so insipid and creatively lacking," wrote Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post. "The script is garbage, the voice acting is wooden, and the songs are as infectious — and deadly — as the Mister Softee jingle." Nell Minow of RogerEbert.com agreed wholeheartedly, writing, "UglyDolls is less a movie than an infomercial... [it's] supposed to be concerned with kindness, but its appreciation of individual differences is regrettably superficial and cookie-cutter." While most agreed that the film looks fine, its shallowness and obvious angle toward marketing were called out across the board, and scorn was also universally heaped upon the voice cast, proving that just because you can sing doesn't mean you can deliver an effective line reading. But perhaps its biggest offense was its failure to stand out; said Rendy Jones of Rendy Reviews, "UglyDolls may be forgettable, but... nah, that's all I got."

Fielding a fourth installment in the Men in Black series — seven years after the previous installment, without franchise stars Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones — was a bit of a risky proposition, but the flick had two charismatic leads in Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson who had proven their amazing screen chemistry with Thor: Ragnarok. Unfortunately, it takes more than just a couple of game and talented actors to make a good movie — and despite the participation of Iron Man scribes Art Marcum and Matt Holloway and Friday director F. Gary Gray, Men in Black International fell woefully short.

Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal (in a review hilariously titled 'Humor, We Have a Problem') called the film "an industrial product recycled from the remnants of an exhausted franchise and aimed at a young audience that may not know or care what a joy the original was... a low-water mark for warm-weather entertainment." While many reviewers had praise for Hemsworth and Thompson's comedic stylings, the movie as a whole was found to be a "largely toothless and wit-free reboot," which represented "the worst entry in a franchise that should never have been a franchise in the first place." Its underwhelming action and limp gags were targeted for the most scorn, but Rohan Nahaar of Hindustan Times simply destroyed the movie and its franchise-reviving hopes with a single sentence: "MiB: International is like going to a famous chef's restaurant, and learning that they died, years ago." 

French director Luc Besson has made a career out of making ultra-stylized flicks featuring extremely formidable women, from 1990's Nikita to 1997's profoundly divisive The Fifth Element to 2014's Lucy. For his latest exploration of this theme, he recruited Russian supermodel Sasha Luss for the title role in Anna, the story of an everyday woman who happens to look like a Russian supermodel and somehow becomes a cold-blooded killer for the KGB. If it all sounds a little familiar, critics agreed — many found the film so highly reminiscent of Besson's previous work as to border on self-parody.

This may have been fine if the picture were serviceably made, but most observers found Besson to be stuck firmly in neutral with Anna, a sparsely-plotted film with a distinct lack of imagination. Said Caillou Pettis of Flickering Myth, "Anna is dull and lifeless with a tonally inconsistent script, lazy direction, and is unsure of what type of film it wants to be." The Guardian's Benjamin Lee bemoaned the flick's "overwhelming blandness," compounded by a "vacuous performance" by Luss, while Peter Sobczynski of RogerEbert.com opined that even hardcore fans of Besson will "find it hard to muster much enthusiasm for this startlingly lazy bit of by-the-numbers hackwork." The film was such a blatant misfire and tanked so hard at the box office that The Hollywood Reporter suggested that it might spell the end of Besson's career — if the numerous sexual assault allegations against the director don't end it first. 

Overcomer is the latest effort from brothers Alex and Stephen Kendrick, purveyors of faith-based flicks such as Fireproof, Courageous, and War Room. While religious dramas certainly haven't earned a reputation as being critical darlings, Overcomer — which stars Alex Kendrick as a high school basketball coach forced to switch disciplines and coach an unlikely track star to victory — irked critics big-time, owing to everything from its clunky title to its stilted performances to its relentless proselytizing. 

Mark Dujsik of RogerEbert.com channeled the site's namesake in dismantling the movie for its steadfast refusal to be, you know, an actual movie. "There's about half a movie in Overcomer," he wrote. "The other half or so is a pretty half-hearted sermon. Neither half is particularly worthwhile, and the whole is cheap, cheesy, and, to put it charitably, churchy." Variety's Nick Schager concurred, opining, "[Overcomer is] a drama that affects sensitivity while nonetheless operating as a blunt instrument. Its one-note sermonizing should help it appeal to its target audience, but those not already in the fold will likely be left unmoved."

It's an aesthetic that has come to be expected from faith-based films, but the biggest critical burn was levied by Movie Nation's Roger Moore, who was most offended by the Kendrick brothers' failure to respect their craft. "Overcomer is, I think, their worst movie. And these guys once hired Kirk Cameron," he wrote. "There's just nothing here... Even as comfort food for true believers, Overcomer cannot overcome its myriad shortcomings."

Another year, another absolute mess of a picture starring John Travolta, who at this point seems so unbelievably far from his Pulp Fiction glory days that we're beginning to wonder if he was actually in that film. A portrait of an obsessed fan (much like the the 1996 Robert DeNiro thriller The Fan, with which its title shares a curious resemblance), The Fanatic stars Travolta as an autistic guy who goes completely off the rails after being rebuffed by his favorite actor. Is this story handled with any sensitivity or nuance? Well, for readers who were fans of popular music in the late '90s and early '00s, the fact that this film was co-written and directed by Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst should tell you everything you need to know about its sensibilities.

Robert Abele of The Wrap penned a positively Ebert-esque takedown of the film, seeming to take its very existence as a personal affront. "[The Fanatic] is a brainless, exploitative folly which gives John Travolta free rein to mine the history of cringe-worthy autism portrayals for an offensively garish Frankenstein pantomime of unhinged obsession," he wrote. "It ultimately suggests this side-career of Durst's should be well and truly snuffed out." While some critics acknowledged that Durst's ostensible message concerning toxic fandom was one worthy of hearing, nearly all agreed that the ineptness with which it was delivered rendered The Fanatic borderline unwatchable. Wrote Aisle Seat's Mike McGranaghan, "Fred Durst has made a garbage masterpiece. As for Travolta... The Fanatic makes Gotti look like Goodfellas."

It's always tricky adapting an acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel for the screen, but Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch — the complex, thematically dense story of a young man trying to come to terms with his mother's death in a terrorist bombing — was always going to be trickier than most. Unfortunately, the material proved to be a bit too heavy for director John Crowley (Brooklyn) and screenwriter Peter Straughan (The Snowman), who squandered the talents of a heavyweight cast in service of a flat, inexcusably boring adaptation.

It wasn't that the filmmakers didn't follow the blueprint laid out in the novel; it was the lack of skill and finesse with which they did so. The Atlantic's David Sims summed up the general consensus nicely, writing, "The film suffers from both an excessive faithfulness to its source and a general failure to translate that material into anything close to a gripping onscreen narrative... Watching The Goldfinch is like having the plot of a novel read to you — not the novel itself, but merely its long and winding synopsis, a bite-size summary that still manages to feel endless." 

Most reviewers agreed that the flick's meandering pace, dearth of emotion, and assembly line feel made it a challenging watch in all the wrong ways — but perhaps the most painful zinger was lobbed by Graeme Tuckett of Stuff: "[The Goldfinch] is a facsimile of a good film," he wrote. "Or perhaps a parody of one."

Lucy in the Sky is a movie that had all of the ingredients for success. Its director, Noah Hawley, is one of the creative minds behind the acclaimed TV series Legion and Fargo, and its stellar cast includes Natalie Portman in the lead, along with Jon Hamm (Mad Men), Zazie Beetz (Joker), Tig Notaro (Star Trek: Discovery), and the great Ellen Burstyn (House of Cards) in supporting roles. Its atmospheric trailers promised a dose of thought-provoking sci-fi weirdness along the lines of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar — but the film itself failed to live up to that promise, delivering instead a confused, muddled mess.

In panning the film, more than one critic observed that tone isn't everything if you have no message, and the flick was also taken to task early and often for dramatizing bizarre real-life events in a way that only serves to make them less interesting. While Portman was uniformly judged to have given it her all, perhaps she should not have; wrote Third Coast Review's Steven Prokopy, "Portman's strong performance here is part of the film's problem. She stands out in surroundings that don't rise to her level, and as a result, Lucy in the Sky is... a disappointment." Many expressed bewilderment that Hawley, whose television work has never been anything other than top-notch, would turn in such an unfocused, lackluster effort — when they weren't simply dragging the flick with zingers like "Picture yourself at a film in a theater... trying not to fall asleep."

John Cena has begun to come into his own as a movie star of late, with well-received turns in flicks like Bumblebee and Blockers. But Playing with Fire, in which he portrays a fireman forced to care for three siblings displaced by a wildfire, represented a bit of a step back for the star — or rather, a stumbling face-plant.

Critics lamented that while the flick at least had the potential to be harmless, formulaic family entertainment, terrible writing and weird pacing rendered it less than watchable. Katie Walsh of the Los Angeles Times systematically dismantled the film in her review: "The framing and composition is dire; there's no sense of rhythm or flow, and characters constantly appear and disappear at random," she wrote. "But it's the writing that truly fails the film and characters... It's all random and unearned, so it makes sense that most of the humor involves spraying or splattering [Cena's character] with excrement or lighter fluid or soap or fire extinguisher spray: All the more opportunity for [him] to take off his shirt." 

Most critics similarly raked the film over the coals for being rote, predictable, unfunny, and borderline-incompetently made — but it was RogerEbert.com's Christy Lemire, channeling the great Ebert himself, who perhaps took it down the hardest. "[Playing with Fire is nothing but] a series of wacky antics with little concern for continuity, logic or pacing," she wrote. "Don't believe me? Just watch. Or better yet, don't."