Our Bottom 10 for this year starts off with an appropriately wooden entry…
10 – PINOCCHIO
2022 saw a surprising number of movies based on the classic Carlo Collodi fairy tale come out, but by far the worst one was Disney’s flat and soulless live-action take on its own animated version, which was rough to sit through even by the standards of most live-action Disney remakes (although, I haven’t seen the much-mocked one with Pauly Shore voicing the title character, and from what I hear it makes even this one look dignified).
Director Robert Zemeckis, who lately seems to have been having a rough time recapturing his own filmmaking magic between this and his mediocre 2020 adaptation of The Witches, is working under strict Disney guidelines, which is to say that it’s far more their film than it is his. It follows the 1940 animated original almost down to a tee, with the exact same dialogue, character designs, and even the similar style of vocal performances which might have sounded fine eighty years ago but are much more annoying to hear in a film made and released in 2022. At times, you can spot some of Zemeckis’s spark on display, whether it’s the nightmarish Pleasure Island sequence or a gentle turn by Tom Hanks as Geppetto, but this is primarily a Disney product, and a painfully cynical one at that (to a point where it will just stop and make direct references to other Disney films, including – of all things – Zemeckis’s own Who Framed Roger Rabbit?).
Yes, to go after Disney’s live-action remakes is low-hanging fruit for most critics, but this is one where it’s justified, since it’s about as hollow and fragile as its title character…
The world definitely needs a girl-centric take on the classic coming-of-age formula populated by Stand By Me and The Goonies, but if ever there was an argument against making one, it would be in the form of director James Ponsoldt’s awkward and utterly baffling failure of a movie.
Ponsoldt and co-writer Benjamin Percy – both, incidentally, adult men that are well into their 40s – simply have no idea how to actually write pre-adolescent girls in this modern age, and so give their one-note young protagonists the kind of unrealistic dialogue that no young person would ever have the mental capacity to speak out loud, let alone even think such thoughts to begin with. The alarming disconnect is made more apparent by the young actors’ blinding lack of chemistry, which often comes across not like these are life-long friends but like they met for the first time just before cameras started rolling. At times, you’ll have no idea what kind of movie you’re even watching, for it will suddenly switch from being this dry, light-hearted (to a fault) comedy-drama to a full-on supernatural horror movie complete with jump-scares straight out of A Nightmare on Elm Street – why Ponsoldt went in these multiple directions, ultimately going nowhere with any of them, is a mystery that isn’t worth solving.
What can be surmised is that Summering is a perfect example of how not to make a coming-of-age movie, and unfortunately makes us have to wait even longer for a competent, female-led take on the classic formula that we all desperately want to see…
Summering is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
8 – FIRESTARTER
Missed opportunities don’t come any more disappointing than with this lukewarm new take on the classic Stephen King story (previously adapted into a 1984 film starring a young Drew Barrymore in the titular pyrokinetic role), which had all the ingredients to bring the tale into a more modern light, but squandered each and every bit of its potential with a bare-bones script and an even further drive away from the source material than the previous big-screen version.
Playing out like a years-too-late X-Men spin-off by way of a particularly dull episode of The Walking Dead, director Keith Thomas’s take on the King novel removes much of the intrigue, mystery, and even the campier elements that made the original story somewhat entertaining, replacing it all with a downplayed, slower-paced festival of dullness where characters are thin, their motivations are thinner, and nothing around them makes a whole lot of sense. Like Summering, it never feels like it ever truly begins, since there’s barely a structure that allows the viewer to understand where they are in the story, and by the time it suddenly jumps into climax mode it’s far too late to get invested in anything, even for a movie about a young girl throwing massive CGI fireballs at people.
There really could have been plenty of stuff added to the modern aesthetic to make this story work with newer audiences, but when you can legitimately say that the version where George C. Scott plays a Native American bad guy is the more engaging, and surprisingly more faithful, rendition of Firestarter, you know that something’s not gone right…
Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions actually achieved the impossible this year, and made a film that for once wasn’t irritating, juvenile, reliant on crass bodily function humour, and felt like they were actually trying – but before Hustle, they were up to their wicked old ways with this lazy, half-assed, and most of all bland sports comedy.
Based very loosely on the career of disgraced NFL coach Sean Payton – who was suspended in 2012 due to a bribery scandal, an event which serves as the kick-off point here but is never addressed beyond that – this was just an excuse for Happy Madison to play into all the expected conventions of the stereotypical sports movie, but do them in a way where you can blatantly tell that nobody was putting any heart or soul into them. Happy Madison regular like Kevin James, Taylor Lautner and even Rob Schneider look as deflated as one of Tom Brady’s footballs as they half-heartedly power their way through each and every tiresome cliché known to man, and while it’s admittedly not as obnoxious as a lot of Sandler’s films can be, it’s still filled with stuff that only a three-year-old would find funny (namely a projective vomit scene to almost match the one in Triangle of Sadness).
Thankfully, it seems that Sandler and his production company might finally be starting to grow up, if Hustle is any indication – but films like Home Team are there to remind us that there’s still a long way for them to go…
While Stranger Things came back in a big way this year, so too did numerous imitators wanting to cash in on its 80s nostalgia-baiting that the series has done fairly well with so far. Some worked, some didn’t, and the one that REALLY didn’t work was this lame and scarily unfunny teen-centric outing.
It’s a comedy-horror that works as neither a comedy nor a horror, because there are exactly zero jokes that work throughout, and it sticks so closely to the tried-and-tested exorcism movie formula that it does some of the most familiar conventions without a sense of irony, rendering it exceptionally dull to watch. There isn’t any self-awareness on the part of the filmmakers; they really have just made one of those kind of schlocky, low-budget horrors you’d find in bargain bins at an 80s video store, the kind with terrible effects, wooden performances, and an era-specific aesthetic that feels cheaply cynical in the wake of the success of Stranger Things.
With no laughs and no scares, this is a pointless waste of time that practically demands to have itself exorcised…
