The Worst Movies Of 2022

An erotic thriller in the vein of "Fatal Attraction" and "Basic Instinct" but with none of the verve, Luis Prieto's "Shattered" stars Cameron Monaghan (Joker from "Gotham") as Chris, a recently divorced, super-wealthy tech mogul who falls for a sexy stranger in a grocery store. Beautiful, funny, kind, Sky (Lilly Krug) is just too perfect. We can see that pretty much instantly, but Chris, despite his supposedly brilliant mind, cannot. You could argue that he's blinded by her charms, but the sad truth is that the film is just poorly written, and the efforts of the ever-watchable John Malkovich (who plays Sky's sleazy landlord) are not enough to rescue it.

When Chris gets targeted in a seemingly random attack and ends up with a broken (or shattered, wink, wink) leg, Sky becomes his live-in nurse. By the time she's revealed as an unhinged home invader who's only interested in Chris for his money, we're already bored. The sex scenes that were meant to keep us entertained up until this point aren't as steamy as advertised (Austin Chronicle called Prieto's film "the smooth-crotched erotic thriller equivalent of banging a G.I. Joe and a Barbie together"), with little to no spark existing between the co-stars. That's largely down to Monaghan's millionaire being so bland and wooden that we're almost rooting for Sky once the violence starts. Krug is the best part of the movie, but she's forced to dial the craziness up to near-ridiculous levels to counteract her mannequin-like co-star.

Helmed by longtime "X-Men" writer/producer turned director Simon Kinberg, "The 355" is one of those films that really ought to have been much better than it was. This globetrotting spy flick is forward-thinking and features some top talent from around the world, but none of them can elevate "The 355" above the level of generic thriller. In fact, the presence of the likes of Jessica Chastain and Lupita Nyong'o makes the lack of thrills all the more disappointing. As for the plot, Chastain stars as Mason "Mace" Brown, a no-nonsense CIA agent who has to team up with female spies from around the globe to stop a sought-after decryption drive capable of hacking any system on Earth from falling into the wrong hands.

Chastain floated the idea of collaborating on the film while working with Kinberg on "X-Men: Dark Phoenix," the filmmaker (who made his directorial debut on the widely panned superhero flick) told IGN. "She brought it to me, and she said, 'I really want to do a female ensemble spy movie,'" he said, adding, "I love spy films." The critics did not love Kinberg's spy film, however. With such a stacked cast (Lupita Nyong'o, Penélope Cruz, Diane Kruger, and Fan Bingbing all play agents), how did "The 355" fail? The idea was a good one, it was just executed very poorly, from the clunky dialogue to the abundance of played-out action thriller cliches. "The 355" is a waste of talent and a waste of your time.

A historical fantasy that spent years in production hell, "The King's Daughter" stars Pierce Brosnan as King Louis XIV of France, who sends his men to search for a mythical mermaid (Fan Bingbing). Louis wants to live forever, and he believes the magical properties of the mermaid will make that happen. His plan gets derailed when his illegitimate daughter (Kaya Scodelario) learns of the mermaid's existence. This isn't one of those films that's so bad it's good; it's just straight-up bad. And we mean bad. January has long been a dumping ground for unwatchable movies, but "The King's Daughter" was just too terrible to fly under the radar, despite being based on a prize-winning novel.

"The King's Daughter" is an adaptation of Vonda N. McIntyre's "The Moon and the Sun," which won the Nebula Award in 1997. It's a fantastic read, but the movie does the book a huge disservice. Paramount removed the film from its release schedule just weeks before it was due to hit cinemas in 2015, with no explanation. A source close to the production told The Hollywood Reporter that the delay was due to the visual effects being incomplete and that the movie would drop in a few months. However, years would pass before it saw the light of day, and when that eventually happened, it was easy to see why it was hidden away for so long. Both Brosnan and Scodelario chew the scenery as the film meanders to an unsatisfying finish.

Thanks to an agreement put in place before Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe took off, Sony controls the film rights to a number of lesser-known characters from the Spider-Man canon. Sony's Spider-Man Universe has included the financially successful and critically moderately received "Venom" and "Venom: Let There Be Carnage. And in 2022, the latest entry, "Morbius" hit theaters ... earning some of the worst reviews for a film based on a comics property in more than a decade. 

An origin story of the titular "Living Vampire," "Morbius" stars Jared Leto as Michael Morbius, a scientist who cures himself of a blood disorder with an experimental treatment of his own design. Of course, he also accidentally makes himself a very special vampire, one who feasts on the blood of humans but who also has superpowers, which fuel his epic battle for the ages against Milo Morbius (Matt Smith), his surrogate brother who has the same blood disease, contracts the same powers, but becomes the evil vampire counterpart to Michael's good guy (but still totally dark, spooky, and tormented) vampire.

According to professional film critics, "Morbius" is the worst film yet in Sony's Spider-Man-adjacent cinematic universe, scoring a lowly 16% on Rotten Tomatoes. Mark Kennedy of the Associated Press called it "forgettable, often laughable" and a "poorly edited, derivative time suck," and James Berardinelli of ReelViews found it "a chore to sit through," a film devoid of "imagination, zest, and a thrill of discovery."

"Boon" is like a Charles Bronson vigilante movie from the '70s but without the cultural context, bewildering urban setting, or extreme violence, that — for better or worse — make those compelling and unique. It's also a "middle-aged guy gets revenge on bad guys" flick in the late-career Liam Neeson vein but without the charisma, star power, or grizzled slow burn of Neeson. 

Instead, "Boon" is about a hired gun named Nick Boon (played by TV cop show veteran Neal McDonough), who's seeking redemption after a long, emotionally, and psychologically toxic career as the muscle and hired killer for a criminal organization. So, he moves to a remote town in the Pacific Northwest and takes up with a nobly poor widow and her young son. But Boon realizes his new life is much like his old one when a crime lord exploits and terrorizes his new family, so he'll have to violently make things right with the world.

While less than 10 critics could even be persuaded to hit through "Boon," they all universally loathed the film, bestowing it with the rare and dubious 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. "When the budget is this low and the star power this minimal, it's best to go crazy with action, which this picture tries to avoid until the final act," said Brian Orndorf of Blu-ray.com.

"Redeeming Love," directed by the usually capable D.J. Caruso of "Disturbia" and "xXx: Return of Xander Cage," demonstrates that it's difficult to make a morally uplifting movie about a time and place intrinsically associated with debauchery and misdeeds without causing emotional and tonal whiplash. 

Set in a California Gold Rush boomtown in 1850, the film focuses on the on-the-nose-named Angel (Abigail Cowen), a young woman sold to bad men when she was a child and who grows up to be a sex worker against her will. She internalizes the abuse and is riddled with self-hatred until the good, righteous, morally upstanding Michael (Tom Lewis) appears and shows Angel that a little bit of love and attention can apparently heal any and all deep psychological wounds and make all the trauma one has experienced on a daily basis for years just melt away. In other words, "Redeeming Love" is literally and awkwardly a movie about redeeming love.

With a 12% tally on Rotten Tomatoes, critics were not moved by "Redeeming Love," which they found more emotionally manipulative than profound. The film "fails as both a compelling romance and an effective drama, failing to do its dazzling leading lady — or anyone else — justice whatsoever," said Jade Budowski of Decider.

The sixth movie in the "Jurassic Park" series and the third entry in the reboot trilogy launched in 2015 with "Jurassic World," "Jurassic World Dominion" feels designed to gobble up money the way its unhinged dinosaurs gobble up prey. But it would seem that filmmakers have returned to the formula one too many times to make a decent movie, even one that features hyper-realistic dinos and likable movie stars like Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, along with the nostalgic return of original 1993 "Jurassic Park" stars Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum. 

Set four years after the events of "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom," dinosaurs now roam the world, terrorizing and hunting humans and other creatures, shooting themselves to the top of the food chain. So it's too bad the movie decides to spend a good chunk of its run time focused on an outbreak of giant locusts. Yep, that's right. In a movie where dinosaurs are running around Malta, the movie decides to talk about really big bugs — which is an, uh, "interesting" choice, to say the least.

Of course, that's not the only problem with this sequel. According to Rotten Tomatoes, "Dominion" is by far the most critically savaged trip to the "Jurassic" lands yet, amassing a woeful 30% rating. "The last time dinosaurs were subjected to a disaster this bad, there was an asteroid involved," quipped critic Tim Brayton of Alternate Ending, while many film writers were just bored and questioned the reason for the existence of yet another "Jurassic World" movie. "Ho hum," said Mark Kermode of The Observer, while Adam Nayman of The Ringer found the film "overly long and soullessly engineered."

"Big Gold Brick" tells the story of young writer Samuel Liston (Emory Cohen) as he attempts to write the biography of Floyd Deveraux (Andy Garcia), a middle-aged father the film takes great pains to let the viewers know is quirky. Nearly every event in "Big Gold Brick" is a smug contrivance. The tiresomely pretentious Samuel and the obnoxiously weird Floyd meet when the latter hits the former with his car. Samuel is then the audience surrogate into the world of Floyd's family, which "Big Gold Brick" relentlessly insists is wacky and interesting but are really just a third-rate bunch of "Royal Tenenbaums" kooks, like the metalhead who likes gore (Leonidas Castrounis), a supposedly avant-garde musician (Lucy Hale), and a never-busy attorney (Megan Fox), who, unsurprisingly and for no good reason at all, attempts to seduce the writer. And that's just some of the chaos that predictably unfolds.

Critics hated "Big Gold Brick," giving it a lowly 20% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. "Big Gold Brick" looks all right but it truly just sits there," said Nicolas Rapold of The New York Times while David Ehrlich of IndieWire called the film an "endless parade of energy-less moments connected only by the lack of life shared between them."

Kevin Hart has a lot of fans, but in his willingness to give the audience what it wants, he churns out a lot of movies — so many that their quality could be suffering. "Me Time" is Hart's third movie of 2022, and according to Rotten Tomatoes, it's the worst of his career, amassing a paltry 6% rating. 

Hart plays his usual screen character — a high-strung, wisecracking, deeply insecure regular guy. This time out, Hart portrays Sonny, a doting dad who feels he's losing his edge and is in need of some time away from his wife and children, just to himself, to do the kind of guy stuff he thinks he likes. And so, when the family is away, Sonny gets to play, calling up his estranged best friend, Huck (Mark Wahlberg), to hang out and have fun, meaning he doesn't really want or ever get the "me time" the title promises.

Wahlberg, who usually plays the uptight guy, relishes the opportunity to be the agent of chaos (and revenge) in a series of cliched, predictable scenarios where everything that can possibly go wrong totally does, in cliched, predictable ways. And then Hart repeatedly overreacts to absurd, implausible dangers. Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times found "Me Time" to be "stunningly unfunny," while Christy Lemire of FilmWeek said the movie "is so wacky, shticky, and broad, and there is not a single surprise to be had."

Andrew Dominik has constantly made movies that get to the dark and recognizably human heart of American legends. "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" was all about rendering its two titular characters as discernibly human creations rather than figures of myth. "Killing Them Softly" expanded its gaze to the very concept of hopefulness in American institutions themselves, with the movie functioning as a grim undercutting of the generally upbeat perceptions of upward mobility in this country. While going this route has worked like gangbusters for Dominik in the past, trying this approach on the life of Marilyn Monroe in "Blonde" creates a feature that's unpleasant in all the wrong ways.

Portrayed here by Ana de Armas, "Blonde" just doesn't offer all that much interesting insight into the psychology of Monroe nor into the factors that made her existence a living hell. Despite featuring an incredibly game and gusto performance from de Armas, "Blonde" rarely gives her much interesting material to work with. Despite featuring conceptually interesting visual flourishes like every-shifting aspect rations and color schemes, "Blonde" isn't even all that compelling in its imagery, with the sharp visual sensibilities of Dominik's earlier works being disappointingly absent here. One would be much better off just revisiting Dominik's high points as an artist in "Killing Them Softly" rather than trudging through the creative stumbles of "Blonde."

Writer/director David O. Russell shot for the moon with "Amsterdam," which brought together a staggering ensemble of talent (ranging from Christian Bale to Taylor Swift) to portray the various players in a dark comedy set in the early decades of the 20th century. The whole enterprise is plagued by, among other shortcomings, an inescapable sense of lifelessness, particularly in the cinematography and half-hearted deliveries of seemingly big jokes. It also turns out that bringing together so many famous actors isn't all that compelling if you don't give them something interesting to do. Who cares if Mike Myers and Michael Shannon are rubbing shoulders if they aren't doing anything memorable in their screen time?

The flaws in "Amsterdam" are endless, right down to Christian Bale's performance, which pulls off the hat trick of being both too hammy and severely lacking in a discernible personality. Worst of all, though, is its runtime, which stretches out the movie's thin plot for roughly 135 minutes. There really is no advantage to such a prolonged length beyond making one even more conscious of this feature's various flaws. All of the big names Russell secured for "Amsterdam's" cast may have looked snazzy on a poster, but none of them were able to salvage this startingly empty disaster.

In his time as an actor, Russell Crowe has headlined several acclaimed films, including "The Insider," "Gladiator," and "The Nice Guys." Unfortunately, his second feature-length directorial effort, "Poker Face," wasn't greeted with the same level of acclaim. On the contrary, this suspense thriller was met with disdain from critics, who largely found this title to be an utterly forgettable outing. Crowe has often made incredibly bold choices as a performer that, love them or hate them, do ensure his work as an actor sticks around in your mind. By contrast, "Poker Face" has been largely criticized for being so generic.

The most critical flaw highlighted time and time again in the reviews for "Poker Face" is that it's a designed to be a movie that keeps you on the edge of your seat, yet its storyline — involving a group of childhood friends playing a life-or-death card game — and characters are incredibly predictable. Nothing in here is all that innovative nor effective at conjuring up suspense. The mostly listless performances from the supporting cast, which includes Liam Hemsworth (who's supposed Crowe's childhood best friend), also garnered negative marks. As an actor, Crowe's reputation is largely unimpeachable. His skills in that area, though, are sorely missing when it came to his filmmaking chops on "Poker Face."

Whether it's in the form of Dr. Seuss' classic storybook, the beloved TV special, or its many cinematic adaptations, "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" is a holiday institution. It features a powerful and heartwarming story about a furry green monster who endeavors to ruin Christmas for the town of Whoville, only to enthusiastically embrace the holiday after experiencing the warmth and love of a child. Up until that last-minute twist into sweetness, however, the tale is a gleefully subversive Christmas present about a horrible creature with evil intent. "The Mean One," a horror parody of the celebrated story, takes this portion of the yarn in a very different direction.

"The Mean One" is violent, bloody, and terrifying slasher movie that just barely evades copyright violation. The titular Mean One (David Howard Thornton) – as in, "You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch" — dresses up like Santa and terrorizes a mountain town one Christmas Eve, slaughtering a family in the night. Two decades later, the only survivor, Cindy You-Know-Who (Krystle Martin), returns to the scene of the crime. She aims to ruin Christmas for the Mean One by murdering him.

According to critics, "The Mean One" doesn't really work as a horror movie or a satire. "The Mean One comes without scares, it comes without style," wrote Chad Collins of Dread Central. "It comes without much of anything at all." Vikram Murthi of IndieWire declared, "It's almost as if there was an explicit directive not to crack any jokes, let alone exhibit any pleasure."