2023's worst movies: Franchise and arthouse failures, streaming debacles

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 20 (UPI) -- You didn't need to go to the theaters to see some of the worst movies of the year.

Streaming originals have been a force in Hollywood for at least 10 years now, so perhaps it is a sign that they've made it when major streaming titles can join vapid blockbusters among the worst of the year.

Even arthouse offerings had some letdowns, from usually reliable filmmakers like Wes Anderson and Emerald Fennell. Perhaps nothing this year was as frustrating as last year's The Bubble, or as toxic as Ticket to Paradise, but this list is still rather dire. Don't worry, the best of the year comes Thursday. Find links to our full reviews for more elaboration.

Thankfully, Disney will run out of animated movies to remake in live action sooner than later. Until it does, there are sure to be more lackluster obligatory entries like this than blockbusters like Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast. While not as disastrous as last year's Pinocchio, Peter Pan and Wendy still takes all the fun and excitement out of the animated adaptation.

Though there is certainly more craft on display than in many of the streaming movies below, the script mistakes musings for poignancy and convoluted narrative tricks for whimsy. It makes the craft more frustrating to see it applied to a meandering plot with unfocused themes. This is by comparison to Wes Anderson's own signature style in previous superior efforts.

The world of rich snobs isn't all that interesting to begin with. It completely falls apart when it treats an interloper's machinations as some sort of profound takedown. Shock value becomes shock for its own sake, therefore devoid of impact.

With the sequel to a bad comedy, one can expect to see more of the same. Vacation Friends 2 is perhaps even worse because it adds more annoying characters and presumes to further the core ensemble's relationships, while failing to do so and failing to invent clever, funny situations for them.

When big comedy energy goes too far, it feels more like being attacked than entertained. It's even worse when it's all intensity and no material. This movie substitutes dancing for jokes because every time characters are dancing, they don't have to be clever. And yet, the actors still had to learn the choreography. What a waste when a body swap comedy contains more dances than jokes about characters being in the wrong body. And if siblings being forced to kiss while inhabiting their parents' bodies sounds hilarious, then you're probably one of the filmmakers behind Family Switch.

A remake doesn't have to be better than the original. It need only be entertaining in its own right. This remake doesn't seem to get what was funny about the original, and seems scared to tackle its touchiest subjects.

As proof that some things are better left to the imagination, Ant-Man spent an entire movie in the Quantum Realm, the legendary microscopic subspace teased in previous movies. It's especially misguided when Ant-Man's main super power is shrinking. Sending him to a subatomic world renders his power moot. Plus, the film separates the heroes for side quests and substitutes nonsense exposition for the franchise's comedy.

This sequel turned a joyously silly monster movie into a boring, convoluted mess. There will probably be a Meg 3, but it's clear the original was a fluke.

Movies this bad certainly come out in theaters, but the fact that it's a streaming original highlights a problem with new companies trying to copy successful formulas. They've got charismatic leads with Ana De Armas as an action heroine and Chris Evans, her needy love interest, but their interactions are more cringe-worthy than adorable. It truly feels like robots mimicking human behavior, or at least the human behavior they saw in movies, while the action scenes barely have a pulse.

UPI's review complained that most of the movie looked like the actors were performing in front of screens. Behind-the-scenes materials show that perhaps some of those sequences were, in fact, shot on location. That makes it even worse. If they're adding so much digital tweaking that even location work looks fake, what is even the point?

Thanks. I’ve not seen any of the movies on this list. Asteroid City was one that I noticed at the time but haven’t been energized to watch. I may get around to it. The others? Nah.

I’m still thinking through my “Best of 2023” list. It’s been a down year for movies, and next year will be worse because the strikes have pushed so much back.

I’ve not seen enough 2023 films yet to be able to come up with a top ten to recommend. Nefarious and The Sound of Freedom are watchable though pretty heavy handed RightWorld message films. Both of them are a bit too close to propaganda films for comfort, but both are wielding sledgehammers and are on our side of the Great Divide.

Oppenheimer was much better than I had expected. I thought it tried hard to be fair to the problem of lifelong communist associations — and his decision to lie about them — that led to Oppenheimer’s downfall. I would have developed some things a bit differently, but the film does try to play fair. The (very short) nude scene was entirely gratuitous, and Christopher Nolan should be ashamed of himself for enstupidating himself and saying he was compelled to do it by the demands of “art,” there being no other way to dramatize intense passion. Maybe the studio suits forced his hand.

The Holdovers and American Fiction are excellent. All freepers should see them (preferably in a theater), simply in order to cast a vote in favor of morally and intellectually serious adult films — i.e., the kind of movies that too many here insist aren’t made anymore.

I thought Renfield was funny. It’s not meant to be serious or uplifting; it’s just a comic romp through vampire lore, and building the film around a codependency meeting was an hilarious twist. All Al-Anon and Al-Anon adjacent people should see this.

Love at First Sight is a complete surprise. You will look it up, see that it is billed as a Netflix romcom (though it’s not really a romcom, and that’s important), and conclude — probably not for the first time — that Sphinx has gone crazy. But hold your fire for a minute. The movie is obviously packaged for 16-30 year old girls and young ladies in the funk about the general worthlessness of their boyfriends and ex-boyfriends. Think of the dateless wonders sitting on the couch with their girlfriends looking for something corny, sweet and escapist on a Friday night. The movie’s vibes will convince you in about 30 seconds that this is not your kind of movie, as will the trailer. But if you put aside your genre preferences and pay attention to the subtext, you will be surprised. EVERY beat of the movie, without exception, affirms a committed marriage as an aspirational ideal and key to living a happy and fulfilled life.

If you told the target audience that they were about to sit through a 90 minute homily on good values, correct life goals, making good choices, keeping promises, and walking the straight and narrow path, most of them would probably run screaming from the room. So the message is disguised: corny/comic framing, a bouncy, bubblegum pop soundtrack, romcomish banana peels aplenty to keep everyone off balance, and some pixie dust and comic fairytale/Shakespearean elements thrown in. No sex. No nudity. No toxic relationship baggage or messy exes involved. I am willing to bet a cup of coffee and a box of donuts that this will be the most 100 percent wholesome movie that most of the target audience will see this year — and most of them will not realize what they’ve just watched, even when the fairy godmother sledgehammers the message home in the final scene. And THAT is how cultural subversion works.

If you do watch it — it’s only 90 minutes and it’s briskly paced — well, no spoilers, but do note that four marriages are depicted, and all four are important. (Four marriages: one ending, one just beginning, one a flat-out miracle, and one yet to come; we see only the first 24 hours after the meet cute, and the rest is related in about three sentences by the fairy godmother in an epilogue spoken as “The Beginning” scrolls across the screen, just before the end credits start to roll.) And it is worth knowing that some major changes were made to the source material — a best-selling 2011 YA romance novel called The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight — to hammer all four marriages into the formula described above. I don’t think that was an accident; I dn’t know if the screenwriter was channeling John Bunyan, but she ended up writing a sermon disguised as an allegory disguised as a fairytale. It’s probably not your kind of movie, but it is your kind of message.

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