My Bottom Five 2018: Mark Wingerter
Look, I’m a writer. Okay? So if you’ve got a bad script, I feel bad for you, son. You’re going on the bottom of my list no matter how pretty or charismatic you might be. And that’s what each of these entires have – bad scripts. It all snowballs downhill from there.
#5: Skyscraper
A lackluster, paint-by-numbers script is one thing. But in a movie that also somehow manages to completely drain the charisma out of Rock the Dwayne Johnson? That’s as big of a disaster as…well, a skyscraper burning down. It’s all just kinda fine, and that’s a shame, because the other 2018 Rock the Dwayne movie with a dumb script, Rampage, did it so much better.
#4: Aquaman
It’s pretty. It has some impressive visuals. It’s very entertaining. And it is so, so dumb. I would have banged my head against the wall of the theater if the script wasn’t actively clunking my skull with blunt, simplistic dialogue and plot points. Thanks to James Wan and Jason Momoa, I felt like I got my money’s worth. Without them, it surely would have… wait for it… sunk.
#3: Venom
In a decade or two, when we look back at the career of Tom Hardy and talk of his acting merit, we shouldn’t just look to films like Bronson, Warrior, and Mad Max to prove his mastery. We should also look to Venom, for only an actor of the highest caliber could make a script this completely idiotic and banal be remotely interesting. Not even Michelle Williams, whom I consider one of the finest actors working today, could lift her character beyond cardboard cutout. This movie is terrible. Terrible. Yet its sole redeeming aspect is Tom Hardy’s banter with the symbiote (also voiced by Hardy). And while I do not want another Venom entry, I concede that this proves that I would watch Tom Hardy act opposite a door knob.
#2: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
I thought Jurassic World was about as lazy and uninspired as you could get in a franchise rich with possibility (to an extent). I mean, I was correct about that, but here comes Fallen Kingdom to match that laziness and add even more boneheaded ideas and plot points into the mix. Another super dino that’s also a weapon? A shoehorned-in story about human clones? A preposterously thickheaded villain? Come on. It really shouldn’t be this hard to make a solid story out of these dinosaurs. Yet, here we are.
#1: The Cloverfield Paradox
There is absolutely nothing redeeming about this movie. Not the characters, visuals, potential connection to the greater Cloverfield story. Nothing. And the latter is its greatest crime. For this single film is so bad that it may have thwarted any fan interest in what seemed like incredible possibilities within the still-a-mystery Cloverfield story. What a disaster.
