Bottom Five Films of 2019 (1/10/2020)
- Heather German
- Jun 26, 2020
- 4 min read
2019 was, overall, an okay year for movies. There were a few gems here or there, but on the whole it didn’t really pick up until towards the end. The past couple of months have been great, but the rest of the year was a lackluster one, at least as far as the limited pool of films I saw goes.
Now that the year is over, it’s time to look back and reflect on what I saw. I’m someone who likes to get the negative out of the way first, so I’ll start with my least favorite films of 2019, and then go on to share my favorites in a later post. So with that in mind, here are my bottom five films of 2019.
Why only five? Because, in all honesty, while I didn’t see a ton of great movies compared to other years, I didn’t see a ton of terrible ones either. A lot of them wound up being more mediocre or disappointing than anything else.
Let’s get started with number 5…
5. It: Chapter Two
The first It movie, released in 2017, was a flawed but strong and faithful adaptation of Stephen King’s horror classic, balancing out shoddy pacing and an overall lack of general scariness with style, wit and a strong story with a beating heart. It: Chapter Two still keeps the poor pacing of the original, but finds itself unable to properly adapt the more difficult of the two timelines from the book, showcasing a meandering plot over reliant on flashbacks that does little to add to its fairly self-contained predecessor. It makes a bit more sense than the novel’s ending does, but it lacks the creativity and punch. I can’t say I hated this movie, as it has some legitimately strong performances and genuinely clever scares of the campy variety, but it was one of 2019’s bigger letdowns regardless.
4. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
Perhaps the year’s biggest disappointment for me was the bland and underwhelming Detective Pikachu. The trailers promised us a fun and original adventure full of heart and set in a unique world constructed around some of the more mundane aspects of Pokemon and human coexistence. Instead, what we got was a bland, cliche psuedo-noir action Blockbuster with unimaginative world building, an insufferable main character, little to no substance to speak of, and Bill Nighy spewing out repetitive monologues about Pokemon evolution so ridiculous that they completed shattered my immersion. It’s still fairly entertaining, but I was left with no desire to see it ever again.
3. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
I’m pretty baffled at the extremely enthusiastic fan response this one garnered. I was as excited as anyone to see creatures like Mothra and King Ghidorah on the big screen. In this regard, Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a success - the monsters look and feel breathtaking in both their visuals and their scope, and the film does a great job of giving them their own bits of personality. Unfortunately, all of this is let down by an overly breakneck pace combined with a story that encompasses the whole world, forcing the action to jump from location to location and monster to monster, never really giving any one setpiece or monster a proper chance to shine. Add to this an utterly idiotic storyline that takes itself far too seriously to allow for the cheesy B-movie fun that one would expect from Godzilla, and we get one of the year’s most inane blockbusters.
2. Joker
The only movie of the year that I nearly walked out on, Joker took what could have been a remarkable breath of fresh air for the superhero genre and turned it into a shallow, confused, edgy and overly-cynical film that’s nothing but miserable for everyone involved - and not in a good way. I’ve come to appreciate the craft that went into this film - the cinematography, the performances, etc. - and it has some interesting narrative tricks up its sleeve that save it from the number one spot, but it’s an overall mean-spirited film that I’m not sure I ever want to see again.
1. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
When I first saw this one, I’ll admit that I didn’t loathe it as much as I eventually did. I actually had a pretty decent time. Taken in a vacuum, The Rise of Skywalker is perfectly safe, perfectly harmless, perfectly bland popcorn fodder. But, as the finale to a trilogy, The Rise of Skywalker is everything wrong with franchise filmmaking today. It is the result of a directionless cash grab effort, and the result is a trilogy that no longer has any meaning. Any qualities of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi have been thrown out the window. In a way, it’s not the film itself but what it represents that has my ire, and what it represents is the most cynical form of filmmaking imaginable. For that reason, it’s at the very top of my list of films I’ve seen in 2019.
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