The Worst Films of 2022

An awful movie can be boring. Or it can be paralyzingly, head-scratchingly WTF incoherent. Or it can be whimsically annoying and in love with that very aspect of itself. David O. Russell’s bizarre fiasco manages the dubious distinction of being all three at once. From the start, as Christian Bale (in one fugly make-up evolution too far) and John David Washington natter at each other about an impending autopsy for reasons that entirely elude the audience, the film can’t seem to make up its mind what it’s about. Set in a 1930s America that looks like it’s under glass, “Amsterdam” reveals Bale, Washington and Margot Robbie to be part of the least sizzling of love triangles — but the real plot is about an attempted fascist takeover, which actually happened. By the time the film gets there, you wish that Russell could just start over with that reality and ditch the twee misfire he made up.

When an animated sequel serves no more purpose than a cash cow that’s being milked dry, it can be a weirdly lifeless affair. Maybe that’s why the fifth entry in the “Despicable Me” series feels like the 105th. When you sit down to watch it, you at least know this much: Minions gonna Minion. But even for this one-time “Minions” fan, they’ve worn out their gobbldygook welcome — and so has Gru, presented here as an 11-year-old who dreams of becoming a supervillain…but that’s the whole problem. He’s already decided what he’s going to be, robbing the story of its “rise” factor and making Gru seem as if he always knew it was his destiny to be a McDonald’s action figure.

What if they made a cannibal youthquake fantasy and nobody cared? This YA-road-movie-meets-fashion-show, starring Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell as flesh-eaters who aren’t zombies (seriously, they’re nice! and sexy! and dull!), came out of the Venice Film Festival like a house of “Twilight” hype on fire. It landed with a thud, because audiences discovered that for two hours and 10 minutes almost nothing actually happens. We have more than enough time to gawk at the oversize holes in Chalamet’s jeans, which reveal a set of bones nearly as bare as the script.

Why remake one of the worst Stephen King movies of the ’80s? To prove that you can make an even worse version of it. That’s called the horror of IP. The 1984 Drew Barrymore movie played off one of King’s metaphors for unstoppable rage, but the new version is overstocked with conspiratorial plot turns that are very cut-and-dried kindling. The sets explode into oversize blazes, but the movie never catches fire.

George Miller is a visionary director when he’s making “Mad Max” films. The rest of the time, not so much. His grandly hollow adaptation of an A.S. Byatt short story is a multi-tiered fable that time-trips through history while reducing it to a kind of overstuffed bric-à-brac store. Tilda Swinton plays a repressed “narratologist” (i.e., the story is going to deconstruct itself!), and Idris Elba is the jolly djinn who grants her three wishes. You may wish this labor of love were less of a labor to sit through, and that the romantic climax didn’t appear to drop in from a different movie entirely.

Playing a star as iconic and incandescent as Marilyn Monroe is no easy task, so casting was always going to be a problem for Andrew Dominik’s soul-crushing NC-17 adaptation of the Joyce Carol Oates novel. Accent issues aside, Ana de Armas manages better than most (in one scene, analyzing Arthur Miller’s “Magda,” she’s actually quite good), but it’s the director’s one-dimensional take on Marilyn, which reduces this complex and unknowable woman to victim status, that makes the role so shallow. More troubling still is the way Dominik constructs his oppressively “tasteful” interpretation (quite different from Oates’ more empathetic reading) around famous images of the star, insidiously ensuring that anytime we see the original photos again, they’ll be tainted by subconscious associations with this ugly, ungenerous portrait.

At his best (usually paired with “Delicatessen” co-director Marc Caro), “Amélie” auteur Jean-Pierre Jeunet makes elaborate Rube Goldberg-style contraptions: bright, shiny movies with lots of moving parts that buzz and whirl for a time before falling neatly into place. “Bigbug” represents what happens when that formula short-circuits, subjecting audiences to all the chatter and noise, minus the inventive emotional payoff. Jeunet lost his mojo long ago, I’m afraid, but he’s still a big name, which probably explains why Netflix greenlit this aggressively unfunny near-future comedy, which takes place almost entirely in a robot-operated suburban home. The automatic doors have jammed, trapping us indoors with a host of insufferable characters, which would be unpleasant under any circumstances, but feels especially noxious amid pandemic-induced lockdown memories.

Speaking of lockdown “comedies,” Netflix had another dud in Judd Apatow’s painful industry spoof, in which the cast of the umpteenth installment in a braindead franchise winds up stuck in a posh English hotel together. I’m glad the “Bros” producer managed to get through the pandemic surrounded by funny people, but by the time the film hit Netflix, the joke seemed played out. Even “Borat” breakout Maria Bakalova is wasted. The movie they’re making, “Cliff Beasts 6,” is clearly a riff on the “Jurassic World” movies, and while others would surely put the last film in that due-to-be-extinct series on their Worst Films list ahead of this one, “Dominion” was actually the first of the sequels since “The Lost World” that worked for me.

In the tradition of James Cameron (whose not-bad, but surprisingly unimaginative return to Pandora was the biggest letdown of 2022 for this “Avatar” admirer), VFX veteran Joseph Kosinski sets himself up for seemingly impossible tasks. When he succeeds, the results can be mind-blowing (“Top Gun: Maverick”), but he was a terrible match to adapt George Saunders’ medical experimentation satire. So were “Deadpool” screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. The original New Yorker story has a very tricky tone, featuring drug tests that can make subjects fall in love instantly … or murder someone when a different chemical is introduced. Kosinski miscasts Chris Hemsworth as the mad scientist and sets what should have been a low-key indie in what looks like a Bond villain’s lair.

A dream cast of top female talents — including Penélope Cruz, Lupita Nyong’o and Jessica Chastain — teamed up to prove that spy movies aren’t exclusively a boys’ game. They weren’t the first to try it (“La Femme Nikita” director Luc Besson has spent his entire career demonstrating as much), but they had the bad fortune of trusting Simon Kinberg to direct. This is the guy who botched the last “X-Men” movie, and here, he takes an Oscar-lauded cast and makes them look foolish. The man can’t choreograph action, and the result is laughably phony, like watching kids posed up behind doorframes, finger-guns cocked, yelling “pew pew” as they pantomime shooting one another. Simple fix: Hire Joseph Kosinski for the sequel. It’s far better suited to his sensibility and skillset.

The legacy of John Waters runs strong in these two stink bombs, which count on shock to stand out from the glut of same-samey genre movies. Trouble is, 50 years ago, “Pink Flamingos” set the bad-taste bar so high that no-budget knuckleheads are obliged to go even more extreme to get noticed today. Belgian siblings Harpo and Lenny Guit’s “Mother Schmuckers” was selected for the pandemic-nixed Sundance 2021 Midnight lineup, where its crude dookie-eating, dog-diddling shenanigans (picture a live-action Beavis and Butthead movie) failed to create much of a reaction. I hesitate to say what happens in “Worms,” which did attract a certain perverse following out of Fantasia, testing the limits with an infant sex doll and squirm-inducing new drug craze.