The Top 5 Worst Films of 2020
2020 sucked.
It sucked so much it even took away most of our movies from us, with them running into 2021 like we all wished we could do as well.
This means I’ve barely seen anything this year, so I’m cutting down the usual Top 10 list to a Top 5. Deal with it.
Let’s get on with it!
Dishonourable Mentions: The King of Staten Island, Dolittle, Trolls World Tour, My Spy and Scoob
5. Mulan
Mulan was probably the first movie victim of the Covid-19 pandemic as it was on the cusp of being released before everything got shut down. But maybe it should have stayed unreleased instead of becoming Disney’s way of vacuuming money out of your pocket on their Disney Plus service. Even if you ignore the moral travesty of the movie being filmed, and then thanking, a region which is housing concentration camps for Uighur Muslims, the film by itself is a complete flop. Instead of building on the original cartoon and delivering us an epic, it basically goes back to the well of the chosen one. Instead of Mulan working hard to show she can be as good as the men, thus proving the message of equality, she is just amazing straight away for no particular reason. That’s not pushing the message of equality if Mulan happens to have special powers already as that’s just telling young girls they can be as good as the boys, but only if they happen to be incredibly talented. This alongside having the character of three-year-old mash potato and action shot by a cameraman who has the shakes of a tuning fork that has just been smashed by a hammer makes this one of the worst Disney remakes to date.
4. The Call of the Wild
Please stop making dog movies. I love dogs but they always end up on these lists at the end of the year. Well, I suppose you can’t really call The Call of the Wild a real dog film as no real dogs in it. Following on from Dumbo, another terrible movie, this film makes a point by having it’s animals all be CGI. This is a response to the animal cruelty accusations aimed at Hollywood and aimed especially at that time when A Dog’s Purpose tried to drown a german shepherd. But the CGI is bloody awful and you can never buy into this dog being real. This means you don’t even get any aww moments which is the whole point of a dog film. The animation is also poor as these dogs act more like they should be in a cartoon than the real world, something that makes you take the very serious story not that seriously. Add in a Harrison Ford who would rather be spending time at an Indiana Jones convention answering fans questions than being in this movie and you have a very bad film.
3. Downhill
Downhill is based on a Scandanavian film which critics that have more tolerance for establishing shots that last five minutes have said is absolutely amazing. This does not translate into the American version is worse than being stuck in a ski resort when it’s been put under lockdown due to Covid. It is so incredibly slow, I think I saw Citroen hatchbacks going quicker than this film moves in the snowy weather happening right now in Sheffield. Not much actually happens other than getting reasons why we should avoid the main characters as much as possible. Just to say, unlikable characters can be fun at times to watch as leads but not when they are just so uncharismatically awful as they are here. Then we have a soundtrack, which is a man breathing. Men breathing is bad when it comes from a random phone number and it’s bad as a movie soundtrack too. A film worthy of the Val Thorens A&E department.
2. Fantasy Island
A horror film from Blumhouse will be featuring on my Top 5 Films of 2020 list. The problem with Blumhouse and the way they make films is that while they often do have some genius creations, they do bring out some absolute rubbish. And this might be the worst film they have ever put out. Even the worst Hollywood films are usually fairly well constructed in that they make sense and the plot holes aren’t usually too obvious. Yet Fantasy Island is just a trainwreck of a movie, put together with the care and attention of a sale display at The Works. Nothing about it works, and it completely fails with its big twists. If you are going to do a twist you need it to make sense. You shouldn’t be able to call bullshit on it as soon as it is revealed, as is the case here. This is just a complete mess.
- The Hunt
We live in very political times. Just today as I write this, Donald Trump is to be impeached for the second time after encouraging a fascist mob to break into the Capitol in order to launch a coup. God those words just seem ridiculous to write out but they happened.
Even before the coup, times were tense as we went into what would end up as the final year of the Trump administration and the first year of Britain being out of the European Union. On either side of the Atlantic, these topics divided families and replaced Monopoly as the main reason the Police get called out on Christmas Day.
So if you are going to do a film with political satire, you have to make it smart, clever and have a good point. The Hunt, has none of this.
This is a film made by idiots done in the most stupid manner possible. This movie about liberal elites hunting Donald Trump fans doesn’t know what point it wants to make. I think after months of reflection on this it is trying to be like South Park with it’s ‘everyone is terrible and the best thing to be is apathetic motto’, but this is the worst time to do it. Everyone is taking a side and if you feel like people shouldn’t be, the way to do that is probably not going to be by letting stereotypes kill each other in brutal fashion.
Honestly, it’s just incredibly stupid. Politics is hard to do in a movie and this is proof it should be left in the hands of filmmakers who have at least a few brain cells to rub together. Because when you let blithering morons make films with political themes, you get this arsecrack of a movie which is as satisfying as reading an argument between two idiots on Twitter.
That’s what makes The Hunt the worst film of the year.
