What if Santa was buff and had a paramilitary security team? What if imaginary friends were real? What if someone gave… someone else scars… like, out in space? On a rebellious moon?
These are all great questions, and they can all be answered simply by watching some of the most critically panned movies of 2024. Yes, we’re taking a look back at the year that was in movies that were found wanting. Here you’ll see flicks that IGN rated a 4 out of 10 or lower. And 4 means “Bad” so - yes - you’re going to see what lies beyond just being plain bad and it’ll be up to you to decide the true difference between the slightly hyperbolic “Awful” (3), “Painful” (2), and “Unbearable” (1).
Getting raked over the coals by critics doesn’t necessarily mean you’re gonna be a total financial bomb, so we’ll kick off our 4’s with Venom: The Last Dance. It was a cinematic colonic in most aspects, sure, but also a humble winner at the global box office. When all is said and done Venom 3 will have garnered close to $500 million, which is not too shabby for a movie IGN’s Tom Jorgensen said had “two left feet.” Furthermore, despite a few moments of fun, Tom said in his review that this third Venom entry was “torn between its responsibilities to big-budget comic book moviemaking and a more-focused genre story of a boy and his alien,” ultimately delivering a lackluster Lambada (timely dance reference!)
Other 4’s include the newly released-to-streaming Dear Santa, which marked a reunion between Jack Black and the Farrelly Brothers while also marking, according to Jesse Hassenger’s review, a misguided mess full of “deeply questionable story choices.”
Blumhouse’s Afraid proved that you can’t just do M3GAN without M3GAN. This preposterous smart house thriller was Zillow Gone Mild. And you know what else isn’t scary? Ice. But that’s what the Ghostbusters – both generations of Ghostbusters, that is – squared off against in Frozen Empire. Everyone knows you don’t fight ice, you just bolt from it. Like Jake Gyllenhaal did in The Day After Tomorrow when he outran cold.
You were unlikely to see Rebel Moon toys on store shelves, unlike last year when they were basically overstocked due to no one buying them.
Both The Garfield Movie and Argylle proved that this was not the year for animated cats, whether they were staunch Monday haters/lasagna lovers or just terrible looking CGI caught up in a “sluggishly paced idea-dump” of a spy caper, as our review put it.
And if you’re longing for more computer-generated critters, then look no further than John Krasinski’s IF, which A. A. Dowd wrote in his review was full of “trite platitudes,” lacking “any real insight into the adventures of growing up.” So not even the all-star cast – including Ryan Reynolds, who had a blockbuster year otherwise – could win us over. IF almost did as poorly on Rotten Tomatoes as 1996’s Bogus, which had Gérard Depardieu as the kid’s imaginary friend. So if your $100 million kids movie isn’t any better than a film where Haley Joel Osment mourns his dead parent by palling around with an invisible French magician, then you need to take everything back to formula.
More 4’s here than you can shake a stick at: Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, Kevin Costner’s dream project, probably had its producers thinking Chapter 11 (amirite?), while Megamind vs. the Doom Syndicate, My Spy: The Eternal City, The Union, My Oni Girl, Role Play, A Family Affair, and Wicked Little Letters all got blammo’d with the “Bad” label.
Meanwhile, Brad Pitt and George Clooney were unable to handsome their way out of Siddhant Adlakha calling their John Watts streaming movie, Wolfs, “half-baked” with “little humor or heart” in his review.
This holiday season you were unlikely to see Rebel Moon toys on store shelves. Not like last year when they were, basically, overstocked due to no one buying them. That’s because Zack Snyder’s two-part sci-fi epic not only failed to resonate on a pop-culture level but also, you know, critics s*** all over it. And the second half of the story, The Scargiver, which landed in April, got a 4, just like Part 1 did before it. As Hanna Ines Flint put it in her review, “The Scargiver delivers a half-baked conclusion to a well-trodden story with flimsy character studies and lackluster action.
Warner Bros. Animation also contributed heavily to our 4 rankings, dropping both Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Part Two and Three in 2024. Both released on digital, 4K UHD, and Blu-ray, these two movies concluded this particular adaptation of the famous ‘80s DC Comics storyline, Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Part Two, reviewed by Jesse Schedeen, was called “a lackluster follow-up to an already flawed opening act” while Part Three, reviewed by Hayden Mears, was stamped with “messy,” “forgettable,” and a “poor send-off for Kevin Conroy’s Batman.” Damn, that’s harsher than when Joker called Batman “Fatman.” Honestly, I’d never recover.
The Borderlands movie didn’t get the lowest score here at IGN, as it kicks off our 3’s, but it’s gonna get the spotlight here for sure. Not just at IGN where stalwart soldiers have been covering the game franchise for a whopping 15 years, but in Hollyweird in general, where it now stands alongside famous flops that can be called out by name. Yup, it’s Waterworld levels of disaster.
And that just sucks because a good-ass movie could be mined from Borderlands. You wouldn’t even need A-listers and/or Oscar-winners to star in it (though that was a particularly odd cherry on top). You just need to keep the Vault Hunters as Vault Hunters and have them run around shooting everything while cracking wise and taking lives. Not the overcooked lore-blunder we got, featuring a miserably Frankenstein’d script, weeks of reshoots, two years of sitting on the shelf, and Cate Blanchett sounding like she’s in a different movie than everyone else. Or is she in the right movie and everyone else is wrong? Who can say? If there was ever a time to do one of those hypothetical “one character is human and every other character is a Muppet” movies, this was it.
A miserably Frankenstein’d script, weeks of reshoots, two years of sitting on the shelf, and Cate Blanchett sounding like she’s in a different movie than everyone else.
“An abysmal waste of a beloved franchise that takes a kooky band of murderous misfits and drains the life out of their first adventure together,” is what Matt Donato wrote in his review. The franchise’s trademark gallows humor gets steamrolled while its “uniquely deranged themes are replaced by recycled blandness geared toward mass marketability.” Borderlands tried too hard to be Guardians of the Galaxy but that’s never what the games were, despite some similarities on paper. And now we’re left with a “catastrophic disappointment that plays like hacked-to-pieces studio slop.”
Speaking of studio slop… Red One. The Rock’s big holiday dud that, well, may get forgotten and forgiven quickly because of how HUGE Moana 2 is. So while Red One – which was originally supposed to be a streaming movie for Prime Video (and certainly feels like it) – is underperforming, Dwayne Johnson’s big animated sequel is kicking ass and taking names.
Still, Red One, our second 3 here, features “mismatched stars with a whole lot of shockingly inconsistent special effects, preaching a sentimental yuletide message even as it looks like the height of soulless commercialization.” A.A. Dowd also mentioned, in his IGN review, that “only those who find the thought of Santa needing a bodyguard or the North Pole becoming a high-tech compound inherently hilarious are guaranteed many laughs from this largely charmless holiday blockbuster.”
By the way, by the time this article goes up Red One will probably be on Prime Video. Where it should’ve entered the world to begin with.
The other 3’s from 2024 were Netflix slog Damsel, the haphazard Harold and the Purple Crayon, and horror prequel The Strangers: Chapter 1, which Lena Wilson called in her review a “mind-numbing reboot” with stupid main characters that pales in comparison to 2008’s The Strangers (and even 2018’s The Strangers: Prey at Night).
Nothing was given a 1 this past year (fingers crossed for an “Unbearable” in 2025) but there are a couple 2’s, both coming from the world of horror. Tarot wound up making a nice profit despite being a “lazy Final Destination knockoff” and The Exorcism, starring Russell Crowe, was light on frights and high on “bewildering edits.” As Jarrod Jones wrote, “The Exorcism is compromised by its unfortunate postproduction saga” producing “undercooked genre crud.”
But let’s not forget, just last year Russell Crowe was in The Pope’s Exorcist, which was shlocky but fun, in an unlimited breadsticks kind of way. So if you simply must watch Maximus Decimus Meridius vanquish demons, that’s the way to go. Plus, he rides a scooter while Faith No More’s “We Care A Lot” blasts in the background and not much more is needed for true cinema.
What were the worst movies of 2024 in your opinion? Let’s discuss in the comments!
Continue reading...
These are all great questions, and they can all be answered simply by watching some of the most critically panned movies of 2024. Yes, we’re taking a look back at the year that was in movies that were found wanting. Here you’ll see flicks that IGN rated a 4 out of 10 or lower. And 4 means “Bad” so - yes - you’re going to see what lies beyond just being plain bad and it’ll be up to you to decide the true difference between the slightly hyperbolic “Awful” (3), “Painful” (2), and “Unbearable” (1).
(Hopefully) The Last Dance
Getting raked over the coals by critics doesn’t necessarily mean you’re gonna be a total financial bomb, so we’ll kick off our 4’s with Venom: The Last Dance. It was a cinematic colonic in most aspects, sure, but also a humble winner at the global box office. When all is said and done Venom 3 will have garnered close to $500 million, which is not too shabby for a movie IGN’s Tom Jorgensen said had “two left feet.” Furthermore, despite a few moments of fun, Tom said in his review that this third Venom entry was “torn between its responsibilities to big-budget comic book moviemaking and a more-focused genre story of a boy and his alien,” ultimately delivering a lackluster Lambada (timely dance reference!)
Other 4’s include the newly released-to-streaming Dear Santa, which marked a reunion between Jack Black and the Farrelly Brothers while also marking, according to Jesse Hassenger’s review, a misguided mess full of “deeply questionable story choices.”
Blumhouse’s Afraid proved that you can’t just do M3GAN without M3GAN. This preposterous smart house thriller was Zillow Gone Mild. And you know what else isn’t scary? Ice. But that’s what the Ghostbusters – both generations of Ghostbusters, that is – squared off against in Frozen Empire. Everyone knows you don’t fight ice, you just bolt from it. Like Jake Gyllenhaal did in The Day After Tomorrow when he outran cold.
You were unlikely to see Rebel Moon toys on store shelves, unlike last year when they were basically overstocked due to no one buying them.
Both The Garfield Movie and Argylle proved that this was not the year for animated cats, whether they were staunch Monday haters/lasagna lovers or just terrible looking CGI caught up in a “sluggishly paced idea-dump” of a spy caper, as our review put it.
And if you’re longing for more computer-generated critters, then look no further than John Krasinski’s IF, which A. A. Dowd wrote in his review was full of “trite platitudes,” lacking “any real insight into the adventures of growing up.” So not even the all-star cast – including Ryan Reynolds, who had a blockbuster year otherwise – could win us over. IF almost did as poorly on Rotten Tomatoes as 1996’s Bogus, which had Gérard Depardieu as the kid’s imaginary friend. So if your $100 million kids movie isn’t any better than a film where Haley Joel Osment mourns his dead parent by palling around with an invisible French magician, then you need to take everything back to formula.
More 4’s here than you can shake a stick at: Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, Kevin Costner’s dream project, probably had its producers thinking Chapter 11 (amirite?), while Megamind vs. the Doom Syndicate, My Spy: The Eternal City, The Union, My Oni Girl, Role Play, A Family Affair, and Wicked Little Letters all got blammo’d with the “Bad” label.
Meanwhile, Brad Pitt and George Clooney were unable to handsome their way out of Siddhant Adlakha calling their John Watts streaming movie, Wolfs, “half-baked” with “little humor or heart” in his review.
This holiday season you were unlikely to see Rebel Moon toys on store shelves. Not like last year when they were, basically, overstocked due to no one buying them. That’s because Zack Snyder’s two-part sci-fi epic not only failed to resonate on a pop-culture level but also, you know, critics s*** all over it. And the second half of the story, The Scargiver, which landed in April, got a 4, just like Part 1 did before it. As Hanna Ines Flint put it in her review, “The Scargiver delivers a half-baked conclusion to a well-trodden story with flimsy character studies and lackluster action.
Crisis on Infinite Ughh
Warner Bros. Animation also contributed heavily to our 4 rankings, dropping both Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Part Two and Three in 2024. Both released on digital, 4K UHD, and Blu-ray, these two movies concluded this particular adaptation of the famous ‘80s DC Comics storyline, Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Part Two, reviewed by Jesse Schedeen, was called “a lackluster follow-up to an already flawed opening act” while Part Three, reviewed by Hayden Mears, was stamped with “messy,” “forgettable,” and a “poor send-off for Kevin Conroy’s Batman.” Damn, that’s harsher than when Joker called Batman “Fatman.” Honestly, I’d never recover.
BLANDora… nope. Wait! PanSNOREa! (Nailed it!)
The Borderlands movie didn’t get the lowest score here at IGN, as it kicks off our 3’s, but it’s gonna get the spotlight here for sure. Not just at IGN where stalwart soldiers have been covering the game franchise for a whopping 15 years, but in Hollyweird in general, where it now stands alongside famous flops that can be called out by name. Yup, it’s Waterworld levels of disaster.
And that just sucks because a good-ass movie could be mined from Borderlands. You wouldn’t even need A-listers and/or Oscar-winners to star in it (though that was a particularly odd cherry on top). You just need to keep the Vault Hunters as Vault Hunters and have them run around shooting everything while cracking wise and taking lives. Not the overcooked lore-blunder we got, featuring a miserably Frankenstein’d script, weeks of reshoots, two years of sitting on the shelf, and Cate Blanchett sounding like she’s in a different movie than everyone else. Or is she in the right movie and everyone else is wrong? Who can say? If there was ever a time to do one of those hypothetical “one character is human and every other character is a Muppet” movies, this was it.
A miserably Frankenstein’d script, weeks of reshoots, two years of sitting on the shelf, and Cate Blanchett sounding like she’s in a different movie than everyone else.
“An abysmal waste of a beloved franchise that takes a kooky band of murderous misfits and drains the life out of their first adventure together,” is what Matt Donato wrote in his review. The franchise’s trademark gallows humor gets steamrolled while its “uniquely deranged themes are replaced by recycled blandness geared toward mass marketability.” Borderlands tried too hard to be Guardians of the Galaxy but that’s never what the games were, despite some similarities on paper. And now we’re left with a “catastrophic disappointment that plays like hacked-to-pieces studio slop.”
Red Three
Speaking of studio slop… Red One. The Rock’s big holiday dud that, well, may get forgotten and forgiven quickly because of how HUGE Moana 2 is. So while Red One – which was originally supposed to be a streaming movie for Prime Video (and certainly feels like it) – is underperforming, Dwayne Johnson’s big animated sequel is kicking ass and taking names.
Still, Red One, our second 3 here, features “mismatched stars with a whole lot of shockingly inconsistent special effects, preaching a sentimental yuletide message even as it looks like the height of soulless commercialization.” A.A. Dowd also mentioned, in his IGN review, that “only those who find the thought of Santa needing a bodyguard or the North Pole becoming a high-tech compound inherently hilarious are guaranteed many laughs from this largely charmless holiday blockbuster.”
By the way, by the time this article goes up Red One will probably be on Prime Video. Where it should’ve entered the world to begin with.
The other 3’s from 2024 were Netflix slog Damsel, the haphazard Harold and the Purple Crayon, and horror prequel The Strangers: Chapter 1, which Lena Wilson called in her review a “mind-numbing reboot” with stupid main characters that pales in comparison to 2008’s The Strangers (and even 2018’s The Strangers: Prey at Night).
The Power of Christ Compels 2
Nothing was given a 1 this past year (fingers crossed for an “Unbearable” in 2025) but there are a couple 2’s, both coming from the world of horror. Tarot wound up making a nice profit despite being a “lazy Final Destination knockoff” and The Exorcism, starring Russell Crowe, was light on frights and high on “bewildering edits.” As Jarrod Jones wrote, “The Exorcism is compromised by its unfortunate postproduction saga” producing “undercooked genre crud.”
But let’s not forget, just last year Russell Crowe was in The Pope’s Exorcist, which was shlocky but fun, in an unlimited breadsticks kind of way. So if you simply must watch Maximus Decimus Meridius vanquish demons, that’s the way to go. Plus, he rides a scooter while Faith No More’s “We Care A Lot” blasts in the background and not much more is needed for true cinema.
What were the worst movies of 2024 in your opinion? Let’s discuss in the comments!
Continue reading...
