The Worst Films of 2018 - Page 3 of 3

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5. “Life Itself”
Something has gone terribly, terribly wrong with your multi-stranded, generations-spanning, interconnected-stories-of-fate-and-humanity passion project when the most convincing segment details the love triangle between a wealthy Spanish landowner (Antonio Banderas), a talented, taciturn olive-picker, and the “fourth prettiest of six sisters” (Laia Costa) who works as a waitress in her family’s restaurant in the village. And yet it is so, in Dan Fogelman‘s “Life Itself” which starts off jauntily and whimsically enough, before, in the most spectacularly misjudged tonal shift of 2018, jarringly launching us into a completely unbelievable series of events, linked in not-at-all meaningful ways. Maybe the mawkish manipulations somehow work on Fogelman’s hit TV show “This is Us” (never watched; not about to start now) but the contrivances of the script really show in a big-screen, two-hour format, where it mostly feels like watching a writer work out some serious creative ego issues as he summons characters into existence only to visit serial miseries on them like a vengeful, Old-Testament God. Worse, he throws some of our favorite actors — Oscar Isaac, Olivia Wilde, Mandy Patinkin, Olivia Cooke and Annette Bening — under the bus of his clod-hopping plotting too, with Wilde getting an especially raw deal in having to deliver — more than once — the film’s cornerstone wisdom: “Life itself is the ultimate unreliable narrator!” What if it’s the author, and not the narrator who is unreliable? Of course, I would say all this, being a white male critic who just doesn’t get what oh wait I’m not even a little bit one of those. [our review]

4. “The House That Jack Built”
[cracks knuckles, braces self] Okay then, here we go again. Lars von Trier is a director whose work has, in the past, been brilliant, provocative, infuriating, challenging, ugly, beautiful, funny, sad and inspiring, and sometimes all of those things at once. His latest film, “The House That Jack Built,” is, by contrast, vastly, horribly empty, a hollow chamber made to feel all the more cavernous by the way his self-regard and self-loathing, and his craving for attention and his contempt for those who give it echo off its walls in a never-ending monotonous roundelay. Unlike all of his previous films — whether you loved or hated them is immaterial — ‘Jack’ which stars Matt Dillon as a serial killer and Bruno Ganz as his sounding board/spirit guide, is full of endless yakking but devoid of ideas about anything outside the director’s own conflicted ego and his own back catalogue — it even culminates in a montage of his prior films. That he then adorns this vacuity with explicitly misogynistic violence, pseudo-intellectual ramblings about Nazis, Picasso, and murder-as-art, and frankly boring digressions about viticulture, is merely the no-nutritional-value icing on the cardboard cake. By all means, find a way to clothe the emperor if that brings you joy. But also maybe consider the possibility that our problematic faves are indeed capable of making bad, poor, shoddy, unworthy movies, and this might just be one of them. And no, by saying as much we will not be “playing right into his hands!” unless we truly believe that art is a game of winners and losers, and responding to it is some sort of zugzwang chess strategy, in which case well, shit, we’ve already lost. [our review]

3. “The Happytime Murders”
You can kind of see what they were going for. There’s a parallel universe in which “Team America: World Police” failed miserably, but some version of Brian, son of Jim, Henson‘s “The Happytime Murders” is a beloved classic, with an eager national student body committing whole swathes of its R-rated puppet-based zingers to memory. But that is not our universe, and in the one we’re in “The Happytime Murders” is a debacle, a grotesquely unfunny and often repellent buddy-cop/film noir pastiche built along the same lines of incisive racial allegory as Netflix’s “Bright,” which, for those of you who don’t know “Bright” is about the nastiest burn we can think of. In a grimdark LA riven with division along puppet/people lines, the people stand in for white people and the puppets for whatever marginalized racial underclass you care to ascribe, which is in itself super-dodgy given how many of the puppet characters are vacuous social-climbers, silly-string-jizzing horndogs or disposable dimwits. The astounding thing is that over the course of the 8 years or so since we first got wind of this project, no one apparently noticed how fundamentally awful the script was, aiming for smuttily transgressive but ending up at genuinely disturbing — it couldn’t have been grosser if the puppets were the actual ones used in therapy sessions to document abuse. Even Melissa McCarthy fails to find a register in which her asshole-says-what dialogue can work, electing to play it super-straight which deadens the few actually funny lines she gets, and makes even the more creative insults feel pointlessly mean-spirited. There were a few worse films in 2018, but none we wish so heartily we could un-watch.

2. “Gotti”
Imagine you wanted to make “Goodfellas” but instead of being Martin Scorsese and having filmmaking talent you were E from “Entourage” and had a bunch of Four Loko and a deal with Rogaine. Such seems to have been the lot of Kevin Connolly when the bottle being twirled to decide who got the hon-uh of directing “Gotti” spun past Barry Levinson, Joe Johnston and Nick Cassavetes and ground to a halt pointing at him. Connolly’s “Gotti” is everything you’ve heard about since the film’s dirty-secret, one-showing-only, smallest-venue premiere in Cannes, and more, an utterly tone deaf, ineptly made, mesmerizingly performed hagiography of the notorious mobster, murderer and head of Noo Yawk Siddy’s Gambino crime family. John Travolta plays Gotti with a level of stiff-necked commitment to terrible material that we haven’t witnessed from him since “Battlefield Earth,” and maybe Connolly scored a twofer because Travolta’s wife, Kelly Preston, plays Victoria Gotti (“I love yooz!” she squawks at her incarcerated husband at one point and you can really feel the naturalism). And don’t worry, it’s no spoiler to reveal that Gotti went to prison, since he himself lets slip as much in an already notorious prologue in which, breaking the fourth wall with as much insouciance as Gotti broke faces, Travolta addresses the camera explaining how “Dis life ends one of two ways, dead or in jail. I did both.” That’s right, he did jail and he did dead and this richly grammatical beyond-the-grave monologue is basically Connolly’s riff on “Sunset Boulevard,” wily cinephile that he is! Honestly “Gotti” is sort of a blast, if only because you know you’re watching a hall-of-famer howler, and if you forget for even a second, along will come a heinous Pitbull needle drop to remind you. Listen to me, and listen to me good, you ain’t never gonnuh see anudduh movie like this if you live to be 5,000.

1. “London Fields”
These films are the worst of the year, but perhaps only Mathew Cullen‘s adaptation of Martin Amis‘ celebrated 1989 novel (possibly alongside “Gotti”) truly has a shout at being considered among the worst films of all time. An extravagantly execrable adaptation of a lurid, louche, and labyrinthine blast of a book, it’s been a bete noire around these parts ever since it was announced that the role of darts-playing trash-philosophizing weasel Keith Talent, one of the great literary characters, would be played by acting’s Jim Sturgess. He proves all our fears correct by turning in one of the very worst, leering, cackling, ham-bone performances of 2018, though it’s a photo finish with Amber Heard who plays the femme fatale “murderee” Nicola Six as more personification of “thigh gap” than character, slinking pliably around an unconvincingly peri-apocalyptic London of cheap, small riots and hastily ginned-up civil unrest. Also emerging deeply scathed are Theo James who plays Nicola’s other potential murderer/suitor (was ever such a handsome man so insanely forgettable?); Billy Bob Thornton as the dying writer chronicling it all; and of course, Johnny Depp, who in showing up (wackily dressed, for a change) in an Amber Heard movie, clues you in to just how long ago this thing was shot. It’s a nadir for everyone concerned, even Amis whose work has never been well adapted for screen, but who chooses this film of all of them to grace with a cameo — though oddly not as his own fictional avatar Mark Asprey, who is played by Jason Isaacs. Oh, look, none of it makes any sense even to an erstwhile devotee of the book, and I say “erstwhile” because this movie is the kind of bad that seeps back up the pipe and pollutes the memory of the source material. Cullen even agrees: he insists the released version was butchered by the distributor and that his director’s cut will be revealed for the masterwork it is at some point in the future, but I honestly do not see how that is possible unless the two versions do not share one single continuous 10-second stretch of footage.

In addition to those mentioned in the intro, we’d like to give a dishonorable unmention to the following: “Super Troopers 2,” “Acrimony,” “The Mule” (though not enough of us have seen it yet to truly decide), “Night School,” “God’s Not Dead: A Light In The Darkness,” “Life of the Party,” “Game Over Man,” “Slender Man,” “Unbroken: Path to Redemption” (NB there was an “Unbroken II”!), “Johnny English Strikes Again,” “Hunterkiller,” “Peppermint,” “Father of the Year,” “Insidious: The Last Key,” “Rampage,” “Pacific Rim: Uprising,” “The Nun,” and “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.” And we’d also like to raise a last, solitary, middle finger to Dinesh D’Souza’s “Death of a Nation” which we made the conscious decision not to cover because life is too short, 2018 already too fucked up, and that man is a moron. Rejoin us back on our regular celebratory programming tomorrow, with all our ill humors exorcised.

–With Oli Lyttelton & Rodrigo Perez