loaded question: what’s the worst movie you saw in 2022?

Here’s something we don’t talk anywhere near enough about during movie-awards season:

What’s the worst movie you saw in 2022?

I’m thinking specifically about 2022’s new releases — whether they were streaming only or actually in cinemas — but if there’s a mega-stinker from earlier years that you saw for the first time in 2022, I’ll take that, too.

I still have some 2022 movies left to see, but it’s tough to imagine any film outdoing “spy” “thriller” Blackbird [pictured above] for sheer terribleness. Written, directed, produced, financed by, and starring Irish-dancing impresario Michael Flatley, it is, to quote my own review:

awful: sometimes hilariously so, and sometimes it’s just plain baffling. It’s the sort of awful that comes about when a raging egomaniac is surrounded by yes men and women who daren’t tell him he’s proudly strolling down the street naked.

Blackbird’s profound badness was instantly legendary, and it looks like it will be having a regular recurring engagement at London’s cult-favorite Prince Charles Cinema. But this is not a so-bad-it’s-good flick. It’s so bad it’s B A D.

Since Blackbird was a UK-only release, I’ll also mention my second-worst film of the year, the US-only release The King’s Daughter. It’s a mysteriously bonkers fantasy in which Pierce Brosnan plays King Louis XIV, and it is, again quoting myself:

ostensibly a movie in the same way that a Victorian folly is ostensibly a Japanese temple or a medieval castle. That is: not at all. [It’s] like a themed high-school prom from 1994, and an accidental horror.

(see my still-in-progress ranking of 2022’s movies)

Your turn…

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