Bryan Cranston and Chip in Argylle. Photo / Universal Pictures
Bryan Cranston and Chip in Argylle. Photo / Universal Pictures
Review by Michael O'Sullivan
OPINION
While there was plenty of fanfare around film in 2024 (do Wicked, The Substance, and Challengers ring a bell?), there were also more than a few duds. From Gladiator II to The Garfield Movie, these were the 13 worst films of the year, according to The Washington Post’s team of critics.
Great films are few and far between. The vast majority of movies slosh around in a grey sea of mediocrity that stretches from the archipelago of All Right to the shores of Satisfactory. The truly awful can be just as hard to identify as the magnificent.
So we’ve made it easy for you. These are the 13 worst-reviewed movies of 2024, a baker’s dozen of cinematic dreck that our critics could not muster more than a star and a half for.
You’re welcome. We sat through them so you don’t have to. But if you insist on suffering, too, read on. We’ll tell you where you can find them.
“The interminable, bullet-pocked cube of zirconium spy whimsy called Argylle comes to us from director Matthew Vaughn, master of the hollow jape and laddish smirk. If you enjoyed Layer Cake (2004), Kick-Ass (2010) and the three Kingsman movies (2014-2021), you may or may not enjoy his latest action comedy, which takes a familiar premise and beats it to within an inch of its life over 139 longminutes. I’ve had headaches that were shorter and more pleasant.” — Ty Burr
Where to watch: Apple TV, Apple TV+, YouTube
Arthur the King
“Regrettably, there are no gambles in this crossbreed of sports movie and doggy drama that dutifully — and lazily — stays on course from beginning to end. Heartstrings are tugged, dogs are adored and it’s all inoffensively inspirational.” — Thomas Floyd
Mark Wahlberg in “Arthur the King.” Photo / Carlos Rodriguez / Lionsgate
The Beekeeper
In a violent revenge fantasy, Jason Statham plays Adam Clay, a man of mystery whose nemesis urges his goons to go Goodfellas on the title character. “It’s a laughably inapt comparison to raise, even incidentally. But at a recent screening of the film, it would not be the last time an allusion would arise to a far, far better way to spend your time. Some viewers walked out comparing Beekeeper to the John Wick franchise, a sacrilegious reference that is accurate only in the broadest, clumsiest sense. Both are stories of grisly vengeance, true. But if the Wick filmography, in all its stylised, balletic, hyper-choreographed mayhem and glory, is Swan Lake — and it is — then The Beekeeper is So You Think You Can Dance.” — Michael O’Sullivan
Where to watch: Apple TV, Neon, Prime Video, YouTube
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
A reunion with the characters from a 40-year-old Eddie Murphy action comedy and its two sequels “is the cinematic equivalent of trying on your prom suit from 1984. Maybe it still fits, but not in the places it used to, and if you try to moonwalk, you’ll probably get a hernia.” — Ty Burr
Where to watch: Netflix
Drive-Away Dolls
Starring Margaret Qualley and Beanie Feldstein, the solo fiction directorial debut of Ethan Coen “is a decidedly mixed bagatelle of B-movie riffs, late-’90s anti-style, lesbian raunch and re-treads of beloved Coen classics. As a fast-paced, bawdy road comedy, this isn’t an inauspicious debut as much as a curiously flimsy and forgettable one. Your mileage may vary to the point of completely sputtering out.” — Ann Hornaday
Where to watch: Apple TV, Neon, Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube
The Front Room
In general, the humour in this psychological horror-comedy about a young woman (Brandy Norwood) coping with the arrival of her husband’s incontinent, racist stepmother, played by Kathryn Hunter, “depends almost entirely on the degree to which you find bodily excretions and/or eruptions funny: urination, defecation, lactation, vomit, blood, spittle, phlegm and gas. In several scenes, characters are holding their noses.” — Michael O’Sullivan
Where to watch: Neon (arriving January 15)
The Garfield Movie
Mark Dindal’s animated comedy built around a cartoon cat character who doesn’t want to move or change “reworks Garfield into a tragic hero equal parts Arthur Miller and Tom Cruise — an abandoned kitten with daddy issues who’s willing to backflip off a speeding train. Made for an audience mostly too young to have held the funny pages of a newspaper, it’s a madcap heist flick that feels like someone grabbed a random screenplay and scrawled ‘Garfield’ at the top.” — Amy Nicholson
“Set 16 years after Gladiator and featuring whichever of the original cast aren’t dead or unbribable, the new film has all the opulence of the first film but none of the majesty. It’s an epic without a purpose and therefore fine for a lazy Sunday streaming in a few months. After that, Gladiator II will find its true purpose playing on multiple screens in the TV aisle at Costco.” — TyBurr
Paul Mescal, left, and Pedro Pascal in “Gladiator II.” Photo / Aidan Monaghan / Paramount Pictures
The Greatest Hits
What would it take to improve this romantic fantasy that enlists time travel as the primary obstacle keeping two people from getting together? “For one thing, a music-rights budget that allowed for songs an average filmgoer might recognise, rather than tracks from the back 40 of Spotify or a disco remix of Roxy Music’s To Turn You On. For another, a script that avoids dialogue clunkers such as ‘There’s a reason that in some languages, the word for love and the word for suffering is the same.’ (I Googled it — didn’t findany.)” — Ty Burr
If you’re already a subscriber to Apple TV Plus and have absolutely nothing else to do, this crime comedy about two meatheads hired to rob an election night victory party is worth a look. “(You’ll lose a few brain cells, but fewer than you would with mostreality TV.) [Matt] Damon is very nearly moving as the smarter and more decent of the meatheads, a man with too many debts, a son he’s embarrassed to see and major suicidal ideation. [Casey] Affleck’s Cobby, by contrast, is the kind of classic Greater Boston Irish American mook who can’t stop running his mouth even with a bullet in his shoulder. The role has its amusements, but Cobby’s just a feature-length version of the Dunkin’ Donuts Masshole Affleck played in a Saturday Night Liveparody commercial, and the character bounces off Damon’s depressive Rory with a thud.” — Ty Burr
Where to watch: Apple TV+
Lisa Frankenstein
This forgettable and regrettable comedy about the titular Lisa, a teenager who befriends a reanimated corpse, is “all supposed to be played for laughs, but in the hands of screenwriter Diablo Cody (who won an Oscar for the overpraised 2007 teen-pregnancy comedy Juno), it’s tinged with her signature brand of punny, decidedly unfunny humour and glib, pseudo-edgy jokes about feminine hygiene and sexuality. (Lisa’s last name is Swallows. You do the math.)” — Ann Hornaday
Where to watch: Apple TV, Neon, Prime Video
Reagan
“Dennis Quaid is an acceptable simulacrum in the title role, apple-cheeked and husky-voiced, but Ronald ‘Dutch’ Reagan had a folksy surface charisma that was a huge part of his appeal, and that proves impossible to replicate. Quaid offers a congenial impersonation with little depth, in part because depth is not what we wanted (or got) from Reagan. The performance is a fitting centrepiece in a movie that plays like an overlong Classics Illustrated version of a biography, or something of which Jack Warner, Reagan’s old boss in Hollywood, would approve.” — Ty Burr
Penelope Ann Miller and Dennis Quaid in “Reagan.” Photo / Rob Batzdorff / Rawhide Pictures
Road House
An “exercise in B-movie exploitation,” the remake of the 1989 movie about a bar bouncer stars Jake Gyllenhaal in the role made famous by Patrick Swayze. “If Road House were more fun, if it didn’t trot out its fight sequences with such workmanlike regularity, it might have attained the kitschy greatness of its predecessor.” — Ann Hornaday
