Top 20 Worst Movies of the Last Decade

Given how over-the-top E. L. James’ books are, the “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogy could’ve been so bad it’s good, not unlike “Showgirls.” By removing Anastasia Steele’s ridiculous narration, though, we’re left with a vanilla romance that doesn’t even deliver the eroticism the trailers promised. When you really think about it, there isn’t that much BDSM in these movies. Most of the run time is instead dedicated to beautiful people driving fancy cars, sailing yachts, flying in private planes, and essentially indulging in the one-percent lifestyle. Then when we do get to the sensual stuff, it’s kept relatively tame. It all builds to arguably the dumbest ending of the decade in which Ana and Christian live happily ever after. Fitting?

In 1914, Winsor McCay premiered his animated short “Gertie the Dinosaur,” launching a groundbreaking art form into the mainstream. 103 years later, this art form was used to turn Sir Patrick Stewart into a taking piece of poop. McCay would be so proud! “The Emoji Movie” doesn’t even feel like a real animated feature, but rather a satire of one. Come to think of it, if smarter writers were involved, maybe this could’ve been a clever satire about product placement and Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy. Since this is a movie about a society that inhabits a device, however, it’s nothing more than a commercial, really. As Rotten Tomatoes will tell you, the whole movie can be summed up with a general prohibition sign emoji.

After “Talladega Nights” and “Step Brothers,” we were all ready for another Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly collaboration to be a laugh riot. The only mystery in “Holmes & Watson” is how so many funny people produced such a clueless – not to mention elementary - comedy. The movie basically follows the same formula as every other Will Ferrell star vehicle: an egotistical buffoon needs to learn the value of humility and friendship. This time, however, the formula is devoid of anything resembling charm, humor, or effort. In 2018, did the filmmakers seriously think that people would laugh at jokes about fake mustaches, the Titanic, and women being doctors? The fact that Sony couldn’t even pawn this inevitable bomb off on Netflix says everything.

There was a time when streaming originals seemed like the future. Now we’re not so sure, and most big movies are still being released in theaters. It’s mostly thanks to silly straight-to-streaming junk like “Ghosted.” This movie seemingly had everything going for it: a star-studded cast with Chris Evans and Ana de Armas, a big Hollywood budget, and action-packed trailers that promised lots of fun. We don't know what the heck happened. Evans and de Armas have the chemistry of two mismatched Tinder dates, and the script was almost certainly written by ChatGPT under the direction “Make the most derivative action romcom imaginable.” “Ghosted” certainly was that - by things like logic, charm, and quality assurance.

This movie was so bad that distributor Aviron Pictures[a] knew it, and they didn’t even bother with the marketing. So, despite a rather hefty budget of $25 million and huge stars in Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway, the movie came and went. And they were right. It is bad. Horrible, even. Somehow, some way, director Steven Knight managed to wrangle terrible performances out of both McConaughey and Hathaway, but it’s not like they had a great script to work with. Complete with inane dialogue and one of the dumbest plot twists in recent memory, “Serenity” is one of those movies you need to see to believe.

We don’t know how this movie had a budget of $140 million. Most of that cash must have gone to the cast, because it sure didn’t go to the visual effects. Despite a good, if non-Egyptian, cast and a truckload of cash, “Gods of Egypt” is no better than a cheap movie you’d find on the Syfy channel. And it looks worse than most of them. Aside from the ugly visuals, “Gods of Egypt” also comes equipped with incompetent direction, a terrible script, and a weirdly uncomfortable Gerard Butler hamming it up as the Egyptian God of the Desert. The Gods are going to give us a plague for this.

We don’t know why they had to remake “The Mummy” so soon. Well, we do know why. Cha-ching. Only, no cha-ching in this case. “The Mummy” was supposed to kickstart a so-called Dark Universe involving all the classic Universal monsters, because apparently we need to “Avengers”-ize every IP in existence. Tom Cruise couldn’t be less interested, probably because he’s working with a script so old it may as well be a mummy itself. The villain gets wrapped up in an awkward love triangle for some reason, and Russell Crowe pops up every so often to mumble about a secret society, so that’s about as subtle as a sandstorm. It’s less a movie and more a really expensive commercial for sequels that will never happen.

We can’t imagine that Robert De Niro needs money, but then again, we don’t know why else he’d agree to star in a movie like this. The two-time Oscar winner who has portrayed the likes of Vito Corleone and Travis Bickle now plays Dick Kelly, a horny old grandpa who attends spring break with his nephew. You can imagine the types of shenanigans that occur. The movie sacrifices things like story and character development for cheap shock laughs, an unrelenting barrage of cringey one-liners and stupid sight gags that make us yearn for the day of good old fashioned fart jokes. And the less said about a 70 year old man ogling young women, the better.

This film is a beautiful exercise of studio interference ruining a director’s vision. Well, beautiful certainly isn’t the right word. The studio reportedly hated Josh Trank’s finished product, so they hastily filmed some reshoots and hired Stephen E. Rivkin[b] to alter the movie with a new edit. The behind-the-scenes drama resulted in a huge mess of a film. The plotting is all over the place, and the pacing is incomprehensibly bad, with a dirge of a story and a climax that’s over in five minutes. Seriously, this movie should be studied in film school for how not to edit a movie. And of course there’s the obviously-rushed CGI, with atrocious-looking characters and a climactic battle that takes place in a green screen void.

This movie represents everything that is wrong about the modern movie business. You’ve got your unnecessary sequel to an iconic movie that is now half a century old. You’ve got your legacy characters returning for a bit of unwanted “fan service”. And you’ve got your MCU-ification of it all, as “Believer” assembles an Avengers-like team of demon fighters to combat the evil forces. Seriously, we’re getting sick just thinking about this movie. “Believer” does not understand what makes the original “Exorcist” so great, and it contains none of its thoughtful themes, clever scares, or shocking obscenities. It’s just more of the same “possessed girl screams at people” crap that has plagued every other “Exorcist” knockoff throughout the last fifty years.

This Netflix movie was about fifteen years too late. The “Uglies” novel was published in 2005, so they really should have done this around 2012 when young adult dystopias were all the rage. Now, it just comes across as dated, despite being brand new. The undeniable talent of Joey King can’t save this ugly movie, which takes place in a future where teenagers undergo extensive plastic surgery in order to appear perfect. Subtlety isn’t exactly the name of the game when it comes to these teen dystopias, but even by those low standards, “Uglies” is about as subtle as a sledgehammer. With TikTok-tier effects, derivative social commentary, and atrocious on-the-nose dialogue, you can’t help but avert your gaze.

“Phoned in” is the best way to describe “Expendables 4.” It’s not often that you see movies so clearly unfinished as this - it’s obvious that this ugly thing was stitched together at the last minute, and probably out of unusable footage. Sylvester Stallone was barely present, and even when he did bother to show up he was clearly checked out. In fact, most of the beloved cast are painfully absent. Adding to the pain, the abysmal dialogue was almost certainly written by AI, and judging by the nightmarish lighting and visual effects, the whole movie was probably shot in a warehouse over a long weekend. It’s a cheap and incompetently made movie, not to mention a disgrace to the “Expendables” name.

We thought Eli Roth was in a new phase of his career, with “Thanksgiving” being a surprising and very welcome throwback to silly slasher movies. And then he did “Borderlands.” We’re truly at a loss for words here, as “Borderlands” is awful in nearly every conceivable way. Even by the low, low standards of video game movies, this one was truly catastrophic. It’s a baffling film, from the horrible casting all the way down to the stitched-together post-production. About half the movie is just cheap insert shots and obvious reshoots, and the other half is visual goop accompanied by the most bombastic sound mixing you’ve ever heard in your life. Props if you walked out of the theater without a migraine.

Sometimes you just have to stop and ask yourself - “What were they thinking? No, seriously, what were they thinking!?” “Cats” was doomed from the start, owing to the baffling creative decision of putting human faces on CGI cat bodies. Just do what the musical does, for crying out loud! And you know, it wouldn’t be so bad if they took their time and actually did it right, but no. The movie was released with a ton of obvious errors and unfinished CGI, forcing the studio to patch the film after it was already in theaters. Think about that for a second - we’re now in an age where studios are patching movies because they have to rush them out for Christmas. We really are doomed.

Congratulations, John Travolta, you’ve made your silliest movie since “Battlefield Earth.” The script for this crime biopic reads like it was written by an A.I. bot that gathered all of its data from Italian-American stereotypes and gangster clichés. “Gotti” hits all the familiar mob movie beats, but it’s completely deprived of any humanity. When all is said and done, what do we really learn about John Gotti by watching this movie? Well, he was a mob boss, he had a family, he swore a lot… that’s about it! There’s no real insight into what made Gotti such a fascinating figure. The only thing more confused than the movie itself is the soundtrack, which includes the musical stylings of Pitbull and the theme from “Shaft.”

The superhero genre has been pretty stagnant ever since “Endgame,” and the trend of disappointing releases continued with “Kraven the Hunter.” Taking place in Sony’s “Spider-Man” universe, “Kraven” plops a relatively unknown character into viewers’ laps and desperately hopes that the star power and abs of Aaron Taylor-Johnson can make him popular. Chiseled though they are, no, it does not. All the usual flaws are here - bad special effects, obvious reshoots and ADR, horrible editing, bland script, desperate attempts to be relevant. You know how it goes. We can’t say we are “Kraven” any more of this!

“Loqueesha” is the tale of a white man who can’t get a job in radio. So, he impersonates a sassy black woman to get on the airwaves. Right… because we all know how hard it is for white males in the workforce and how women of color have everything handed to them. Honestly, how did a movie like this get made in the modern world? It’d be one thing if this was intended to be in poor taste, but the film actually tries to seriously tackle themes like cultural identity, gender inequality, and self-harm. Adding insult to injury, our protagonist is portrayed as a “wise, gentle, and kind” individual who has all the answers. Writer/producer/director/star Jeremy Saville has made the modern equivalent of 1986’s “Soul Man.”

Sometimes a movie is so terrible that it brings the internet together through a lovable collection of fantastic memes. “Morbius” was that movie, and it was the welcome balm that we all needed after two years of COVID. You know those fake trailers at the start of “Tropic Thunder”? “Morbius” is like one of those trailers, but real and 100 minutes long. It’s terrible. Awful. Unwatchable. But enough about the movie. Let’s talk about how the entire thing was posted to Twitter in 52 two-minute long videos, or how the whole script was uploaded through individual tweets. That’s just genius, and way more fun than “Morbius” could ever hope to be.

Seriously, what is Sony doing!? “Kraven,” “Morbius,” and “Madame Web” has to be the trifecta of terrible superhero movies, the terrible trilogy from Hell. Once again, we have an obscure superhero character hoping to make her big break in the movies, and once again it flounders thanks to some truly inept filmmaking. “Madame Web” has what could be the worst script in modern memory, full of gaping plot holes and truly terrible lines that we can’t believe someone actually wrote, let alone agreed to say. They actually had the nerve to reword the iconic speech from “Spider-Man!” And the less said about the atrocious editing and ADR, the better. Sony must be stopped. This can’t go on much longer…

Never before had we watched an entire movie with our mouths hanging open. That changed after “Music,” the barbaric vanity project from Sia. The singer’s longtime buddy and dancer Maddie Ziegler stars as Music Gamble, a non-verbal autistic girl who comes under the care of her troublesome half-sister. “Music” is enormously offensive in virtually every capacity. Ziegler’s casting was controversial, as was the movie’s depiction of autism and its use of restraints. And even ignoring that and the bizarre Twitter firestorm that resulted, the movie itself is also just trash, using autism as a tool to tell a schmaltzy story filled with terrible dialogue. Maybe its heart was in the right place, but that doesn’t count for much when you manage to offend everyone watching.

[a]https://youtu.be/AHIjaZlmXZQ?si=-qf5smj30K0gfhog&t=73
[b]https://youtu.be/kHkkyFu141U?si=XRsK3XzgWsV6Jkk7&t=6