Worst Movies of 2022

Spoiler Alert: if you are making a list of the worst movies of 2022 and Blonde isn’t on the list, you’ve failed to make a worst of the year list. Andrew Dominik’s horrific abuse of the life of Marilyn Monroe may have the wonderful Ana De Armas but it also contains a scene where the camera is supposedly inside Marilyn’s vagina to document the loss of one of the babies that Marilyn lost in childbirth. And that’s not the most offensive thing in the movie.

Obviously, if I am accompanying the entries on this list with a paragraph about why I have included them, I WILL be mentioning Blonde again. As for other entries on this list, I have leaned toward movies that received a theatrical release. That may not be the case for all of these entries, I see you there Netflix, you’re represented here, but it is the case for the most part. Why? Because it’s my list and movies like The World Ends at Camp Z or The Curse of La Patasola are terrible movies but no one has heard of them so why bother dunking on them beyond what I have already written.

With that in mind, here is my list of the Worst of 2022

10. Jurassic World Dominion

Bad year for big movies. There are a couple of really big titles on this list that made a lot of money while being absolutely undeserving of such success. The badly aging Jurassic World franchise reached its nadir in 2022 when the producers attempted to revive the franchise by appealing to nostalgia for Jurassic Park. The sweaty, sad, desperation in this effort is palpable and makes Jurassic World Dominion a tough watch.

9. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

I’m absolutely going to die on this hill. I hate Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness so much that I wrote 5000 words about why I hated it so much. Linked here, and here. I loathe what director Sam Raimi did with the character of The Scarlet Witch played by the brilliant Elizabeth Olson. Making her the villain of Multiverse of Madness undid so much of the great work that had been done with the character in the Avengers movie and in the tremendous Disney Plus series, Wandavision. Unforgivable.

8. The Bubble

I’ve always supported director Judd Apatow but The Bubble is so awful that even as a fan of Apatow, I could not defend it. The Bubble is a miserable movie populated by miserable characters in an equally miserable plot centered on the behind the scenes drama of a bad Hollywood movie. That this movie stars the radiant Karen Gillan and still manages to be unwatchable is a testament to how truly awful it truly is.

7. Win a Trip to Browntown

Breaking the trend of big budget movies with big stars, Win a Trip to Browntown earns a place on this list for being a naked attempt at becoming infamous and for being an objectively bad movie. If the title confounds you, I will enlighten you. The ‘Browntown’ of the title is a reference to anal sex. The hideous premise of this movie is that if a man is able to lose a certain amount of weight his wife will allow him to have anal sex with her. This is undoubtedly a gross attempt to gain internet infamy for ticket sales or rentals. I’m glad that based on the information available this mercenary marketing based move failed.

6. Get Away if You Can

I love Ed Harris, he’s one of the greats. Supporting actors don’t get much more dynamic and charismatic as Ed Harris. How he ended up in a movie as insufferable as Get Away if You Can is beyond me. He must have been held at gunpoint. In the worst performance of his lengthy career, Harris plays a needlessly cruel father to an insufferable young man and his equally insufferable girlfriend trapped on first a boat and then a deserted island with nothing to distract from how insufferable they are.

5. Desperate Hour

Naomi Watts and Phillp Noyce’s drama, The Desperate Hour, ends up high on the list of worst of 2022 because each is too smart and too talented to have been part of such a terrible idea for a movie. The Desperate Hour is a speculative thriller about a school shooting shot during the height of the COVID pandemic. This left Watts alone on screen for the entire movie, driving the plot via her phone and snatches of dialogue captured on a dodgy cell connection. That would be an interesting challenge if not for a plot that so clumsily and foolishly speculates on a school shooting to create a popcorn suspense thriller. Ugh

4. Ambulance

It’s never a surprise when a Michael Bay movie ends up on a worst of the year list. His style over substance and noise over story approach destroys my senses every single time. I loathe Bay’s style of action and with him dragging the awesome Jake Gyllenhaal and rising star Yahya Abdul Mateen II into his terrible nonsense, I was destined to hate Ambulance enough to put it high on this list.

3. Mack & Rita

Every time Diane Keaton makes a new comedy I reserve a space for her on the worst of the year list. The lovely, living legend has the single worst sense of humor on the planet. Her vision of comedy is broad and tiresome, bad taste gags about getting old. How is she not sick of making the same old lady jokes in movie after movie, after movie. I tired of this after 2001. She’s still making the same awful jokes more than 2 decades later. How? Why? Mack & Rita is populated with thuddingly dimwitted gags about Keaton’s character becoming an Instagram influencer but she’s old, what a dilemma. Makes me want to throw up just thinking about it.

2. Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Why Netflix decided to trample on the legend of, arguably, the greatest horror movie of all time has everything to do with cash and only cash. This boneheaded cash grab attempts to drag the legend of Leatherface into the modern era by having Leatherface murdering new age entrepreneurs and influencers who aim to ‘cancel’ him for trying to murder dozens of people with his chainsaw. If the mercenary cash grab wasn’t bad enough, the lazy cliche of influencer culture is the true nail in the coffin for this awful update.

1. Blonde

Obviously, there simply wasn’t another movie that I hated more than Blonde in 2022. Not only is the movie poorly made, it’s deeply unethical, immoral and unnecessarily cruel to a woman to someone who is no longer alive to defend themselves. Recently, Nathan Rabin wrote a pair of articles about two movies that were made about actress Jean Harlow. Those two movies, both called Harlow, were released within months of each other and somehow seemed to be trying to top each other in being cruel to a dead movie star. Blonde is their modern equivalent, a needlessly vicious attack on a late legend. Question for Andrew Dominik, did Marilyn Monroe’s ghost murder your dog or do you just hate all women? Honestly, I am trying to understand why you felt the need to invent brutal lies about someone you’ve seemingly never met and have seemingly no emotional connection to. You do realize Marilyn Monroe was an actual human being and not merely a punching bag for emotionally stunted men to use to explore their severe emotional problems right?

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