It’s awards season, and so many great films released in 2023 are beginning to gather well-deserved accolades from critics, professional bodies, and other industry organizations. But while we’re looking back over the cinema year-that-was, let’s not forget the movies at the other end of the spectrum.
What 2023 movie was the worst you saw?
For me, this was School of Magical Animals, a desperately terrible Harry Potter family-fantasy knockoff that got only a nominal release in the US but was a pretty big hit in its home country of Germany. My mind is still boggling at how awkwardly inept it is — I might have to review it just to exorcise it from my brain. It’s streaming on Prime in the US if you’d like a glimpse of how painfully bad it is.
A close second is the apotheosis of everything that has gone wrong with comic-book movies: The Flash, and I should probably get all my complaints about that one down on virtual paper as well.
(My ranking of 2023’s releases is here, but it’s still ongoing.)
Your turn…
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I tend to be fairly good at identifying movies I will likely hate, and thus avoiding them in the theater. Such as The Flash.
For context, I’m a lifelong comic book fan. The Flash was my favorite character as a kid. I regularly watched his (sometimes not-so-great) TV series. Yet I stayed away from this new movie.
I was close to going to see it. It actually had some good buzz, and I like Michael Keaton, and the new Supergirl looked really good. Even setting aside his repellent off-screen activities, a little bit of Miller went a long way in Justice League. Perhaps DC would be taking a Garfield Minus Garfield approach to the project and minimizing the world’s exposure to the toxic Ezra Miller?
But no, I read not only was Ezra Miller’s role still appropriately large for a title character, they had a dual role!
As I saw someone remark, when the world has decisively expressed a preference for (0 * [Ezra Miller]) in their lives, providing (2 * [Ezra Miller]) is not likely to result in great box office.
I watched the trailer for School of Magical Animals and it didn’t seem excessively awful to me, beyond the generic badness of your average kids movie these days. How is the redheaded kid? She actually seemed like a pretty appealing kid actor to me.
The only 2023 film I’ve seen so far is Renfield. Which I really wanted to like; Hoult and Awkwafina are usually good, Cage and Aghdashloo can act them into a cocked hat, the basic idea of treating the master-minion bond as a toxic relationship is good…
But it’s an original pitch by the guy who co-created The Walking Dead, turned into a script by one of the writers on Rick and Morty, and directed by the guy who directed Robot Chicken. Mister Subtlety wasn’t allowed into the writers’ room. Nothing ever goes beyond the surface. And there’s lots of comedy gore.
I would frankly have watched an entire film of Cage and Aghdashloo doing the mutual seduction dance of ancient vampire and no-illusions crime boss. Instead we got Ben Schwarz as comedy failson.
There is the kernel of a really good movie in Renfield. Pity we didn’t get that really good movie.