Blandest Movies of 2023

The reality is that a lot of movies are just mediocre, kind of meh. They weren’t terrible but they were also nothing special. These were just movies that came out this year. They didn’t inspire me nor did they make me violently ill. So this is that list. This is the list of the most mediocre movies of 2023. These will be going from most to least interesting in a very relative manner.

A Haunting in Venice

This one seems obvious. As a Pirot story goes it was very not good. They really kind of butchered his character. Not sure anyone on the writing team has ever read a book before. The mystery itself was also kind of confused. Like all the story beats made sense but they just weren’t executed very well. That said, the cinematography was awesome. The movie was visually stunning and very interesting to watch but it just wasn’t enough to save the movie from mediocrity.

Maybe I Do

I liked this movie, I thought the story was great, the casting was fantastic. It was witty and funny. And all of the individual elements were executed very well. The only real flaw was that this movie struggled as an adaptation. So the story was adapted from a stage play but it didn’t feel like it was actually adapted. The staging was clearly fixed for film but the monologues and the delivery was still very live theatre. Now as someone trained in live theatre that wouldn’t be a bad thing if I had seen it live. The problem is that if you are adapting something into a different medium you need to understand the rules and structure of that medium and abide by those rules.

Knock at the Cabin

As far as M. Night Shyamalan movies go this is his best one in about a decade. The story was great, Dave Bautista gave a truly incredible and shocking performance. As far as professional wrestlers turned actors go he is absolutely the best one. He’s also the only one I look at as a proper actor. The only thing that lands this movie on the mediocre list is the fact that I haven’t thought about it since I saw it. I wrote a review and it exited my mind. The best movies of the year I have thought about several times a day since I saw them.

Wonka

Look Chalamet was definitely the right choice for Wonka. I thought the casting was very good. I thought that visually it was one of the most beautiful movies of the year. Truly fantastic visuals. That said Wonka was a musical…it was a musical with genuinely terrible music. There were maybe 3-4 songs that weren’t truly awful and Chalamet, as wonderful of an actor as he is, can not sing. You casted someone who couldn’t sing as the lead in a musical, and then hired no one to do the singing for him. A musical with bad music is just a major bummer.

Antman and Wasp: Quantumania

Last but not least the worst Marvel movie of the year. Was it truly terrible? No of course not but it also wasn’t good. The sheer amount of CGI in that movie was enough to give me a headache. There were so many places where they could have used practical effects and it probably would have looked better and they just chose not to. The decision to recast Cassie was wrong. And the story was trying to do too many things at once. It should have focused on Janet and Kang. We didn't need everything else also happening.