10. First Man, dir. Damien Chazelle
When La La Land director Damien Chazelle’s First Man opened the Venice film festival earlier this year, it was heaped with glowing reviews by a gaggle of overexcited American critics. Maybe it’s not hard to see why. First Man, like Steven Spielberg’s similarly overwrought and underwhelming The Post, is pure ‘Murica porn, a throwback picture obsessed with the days when the U.S. wasn’t internationally considered a heaving den of scumbags and fascists.
Watch the First Man trailer here:
But even more than that, First Man is thunderingly inept. The performances are universally uninteresting – Ryan Gosling tries his best to play Neil Armstrong as a quiet, private man thrust into the spotlight, but instead comes across as eye-wateringly dull; Claire Foy flaps and fusses her way through a performance hampered by a script that couldn’t give a shit about her; and a gaggle of famous supporting players pass through the thing like a pack of deer caught in headlights.
It’s worth noting as well that Chazelle is now four for four on films about boring men who must cast aside their underwritten female partners in order to achieve success. The only thing less interesting than his self-satisfied directorial style, clearly, are his ethics.
9. Skyscraper, dir. Rawson Marshall Thurber
Look, nobody said Skyscraper, a Die Hard rip-off pumped with two litres of Monster energy drink and half a metric tonne of ‘roids, had to be Shakespeare. Dreck of this hamfisted extremity can have an alluring quality all of its own; think the distinctly underrated Universal Soldier series, or the direct-to-video auterism of Asylum’s anti-art classics.
Watch the Skyscraper trailer here:
But unlike those garbage classics, Skyscraper has an uncomfortably knowing quality. This isn’t sincere trash: this is trash as churned out by a corporation, full of irritatingly sly winks to the audience and the critics, and hurt by ineptly photographed action sequences.
Take it from us, Dwayne Johnson: you don’t need to make this many movies. Fire your agent, show a little discretion when it comes to picking scripts, and avoid smears of shit like this one.
8. Ghosthunter, dir. Ben Lawrence
Ghosthunter isn’t like most of the films on this list. It is, particularly in its opening third, stylishly and competently lensed, and director Ben Lawrence sets up his real-life protagonist – Jason King, a security agent and part-time ghosthunter whose murky history is pockmarked with trauma – with some level of skill.
But things quickly fall apart. Within half an hour, Lawrence has revealed himself to be an astonishingly pretentious and cruel filmmaker, needlessly inserting himself into the action as a self-aggrandizing supposed centre of calm and rationality. Worse still, he quickly turns on Jason, filming long and uncomfortable sequences in which he needles the security guard with no awareness or empathy for his past.
Watch the Ghosthunter trailer here:
Ghosthunter is not a warts and all portrait; it’s a public trial by fire, utterly unpleasant to watch, and without a moral centre. King’s story is a complicated, nuanced one, and Lawrence reveals himself to be the least competent director to tell it.
7. That’s Not My Dog, dir. Dean Murphy
To be fair, That’s Not My Dog is only just a movie. An excruciating, 90-minute long documentary/fiction hybrid, it sees the increasingly unlikeable Shane Jacobson preside over a party of D-list comedians telling painfully unfunny, overlong jokes, intercut with a series of unashamed close-ups of the beer and chip brands that funded this trainwreck.
Watch the That’s Not My Dog trailer here:
That’s it. Aside from a few hastily shot conversations between Jacobson and his father, nothing happens in That’s Not My Dog. Jokes are told; comedians mull around; corporate debts to Red Rock Deli-branded snacks are paid.
There’s no need to seek out That’s Not My Dog on home video. You can replicate the experience of watching the film in your own backyard. Just invite over a gaggle of Australia’s least funny comedians, Shane Jacobson’s dad, and then stand there for 90-unbearable minutes.
6. The Cloverfield Paradox, dir. Julius Onah
The only impressive thing about The Cloverfield Paradox is how quickly it has managed to squander the huge amount of goodwill critics and audiences alike had towards J. J. Abrams’ mystery box-style Cloverfield franchise. The third entry in the previously flawless franchise, it’s an achingly dull Alien/Sunshine/Solaris clone, an ugly, confused film that only really remembers what it’s meant to be about in its final shot.
Watch the trailer for The Cloverfield Paradox here:
That’s not entirely director Julius Onah’s fault: the thing has clearly been scissored to pieces by frantic and disappointed studio heads, as whole subplots go nowhere, and character motivations are impossibly confused, all leading up to one of the most amusingly inert climaxes in recent memory. This ain’t it, chief.
5. The Rachel Divide, dir. Laura Brownson
Look, we didn’t actually need a documentary about Rachel Dolezal – the press-desperate disgraced academic and activist hurts a range of important causes whenever her name surfaces in conversation, and her story isn’t actually as complicated as her defenders make it seem. But we certainly didn’t need a documentary as hideously biased and dramatically muddled as The Rachel Divide, a ham-fisted attempt to generate some sympathy for the arch manipulator and controversy-generator.
Watch The Rachel Divide trailer here:
Only token efforts are made to explain why Dolezal was so roundly criticised; for the most part, Dolezal is the narrator of this story, and the (considered, important) points of her critics are treated like so much fussy internet hate-mobbing.At the very least, the film manages to be insightful in how clearly and accidentally it portrays Dolezal as a narcissistic sociopath, a woman willing to damage the lives of her children even as they are literally begging for her to stop.
4. Humanity, dir. John L. Spencer
Remember when Ricky Gervais was entertaining? Nah, me neither. The man’s been a vile purveyor of simple shock tactics for years now. Even his attention-gathering Golden Globes monologue was glorified mud-slinging, needlessly cruel and hacky in its delivery.
But the man’s past instances of hate speech pale in comparison to Humanity, a Netflix-backed special that sees Gervais reserve particular ire for trans people, and the growing movement that calls for increased understanding and empathy for all forms of self-expression.
Watch the Humanity trailer here:
And yet maybe Gervais’ rabid desire to offend and upset would be less nakedly cruel if Humanity was even slightly funny. But it’s not. Most of the material here would be booed even off cyber-dens of villainy like 4chan, and the darkest, dankest corners of Reddit. It’s hatespeech as delivered by your most grating, obnoxious uncle. One would think if you’re going to spend that much time writing a show designed to be cruel, and painful, and custom-designed to trigger trauma, you’d remember to put a laugh in there? Just one?
3. Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again!, dir. Ol Parker
The first Mamma Mia was a surprisingly capable little musical. It was a glossy, heartfelt little belter, that, sure, had its significant structural problems, but that boasted a strange, boomer-baiting appeal entirely of its own. The whole thing was saturated in white wine, speckled with Greek sunlight, and filled with rich, homogeneous white people complaining about rich, homogenous white people problems . It was cinematic comfort food, plain and simple.
The same cannot be said of its lopsided, utterly unfeeling sequel. Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again! as its inadvertently exasperated sounding title implies, is comfort food as co-written by a committee. Rustling around the very bottom of ABBA’s sonic barrel, filled with noname dullards who look as though they have escaped from a H&M advert, and hampered by the bizarre intricacies of its lead actors’ contracts (didn’t wanna commit to a full shooting schedule, Meryl?) it’s straight-to-DVD dreck that somehow snuck itself into cinemas.
Watch the trailer for Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again! here:
I am of course very willing to admit that I am not the target market for this film. But it’s worth pointing out that I saw this film with my mother, who this film was empirically made for. Halfway through, during yet another interminable musical sequence, set to an ABBA song she could only half remember, she placed her head in her hands, groaned, and hollered ‘My god’, as though she had just witnessed a war crime.
2. Ready Player One, dir. Steven Spielberg
Ready Player One holds the distinction of being one of the ugliest films of the year both aesthetically and ethically. From its glossy, Minecraft-referencing opening to its chaotic, dramatically inept end, it’s about as attractive to watch as a streaked mile of horseshit. Borrowing from the playbook of his mate Robert Zemeckis, Spielberg transforms his leads into a barnyard full of First Life characters; they’re drooling, pixellated horrors, each more egregious than the last. For a film supposedly about the potential divinity of online living, this thing sure does look like literal hell.
Watch the Ready Player One trailer here:
Worse still, it’s a potentially accidental acknowledgement of the worst of fanboy impulses: a glorification of fuckboi culture peppered with entitled young white men, and the “damaged” young women that they teach to love again. There’s no plot or character development to speak of; lines like, ‘Reality is the only thing that is real’ abound; and the squandered cast blink and gape as though they can’t for a second understand what’s unfurling around them. Spielberg’s worst film since his last one, which was also about as fun as a hernia.
1. The BBQ, dir. Stephen Amis
From our review: “Like Rocky rewritten by Milo Yiannopoulos, The BBQ is what could generously be described as an underdog story. The film follows the exploits of meat enthusiast Dazza Cook (Jacobson) who, shortly after accidentally poisoning his friends and family with expired prawns, finds himself entered into an international barbecue competition. Guided by a grizzled and hard-drinking master chef (Szubanski), he battles an arrogant rival (Feildel), a domineering father-in-law, and the expectations of all that have long doubted him.
Oh, and the French. See, Dazza, loveable, grizzly larrikin that he is, can’t stand poncey Europeans. Neither can the film’s director and co-writer Stephen Amis, it seems – one character outright calls French people “dirty”, and Feildel’s character is a marble-mouthed, horse meat-eating stereotype.
Not that Amis necessarily discriminates – he hates all non-Australian people equally. A pack of Swedes are depicted as Ikea loving ABBA-types; an Indian neighbour who speaks in broken English is unnaturally obsessed with turmeric; and the film’s Mister Miyagi stand-in, a stern Japanese chef and cattle farmer, spends his time practising karate, wielding a miniature samurai sword and generally acting like a cliché plucked from a discarded Hey Hey It’s Saturday routine.
It is hard to explain how continually and catastrophically wrong-footed The BBQ is. One racist, ugly joke follows the other at such an unbelievable clip that you’re barely done picking your jaw up off the floor before you’ve gotta drop it again. It’s a film that seethes with a barely contained hate; a film with utter contempt for women, for gay people – even for vegans. Everyone is hypocritical, and dumb, and twisted, and weird, except for Dazza and his son, two shining bastions of ’Strayan maleness that succeed just as all those freaks around them fail.”
