The Worst of 2021

I am in the middle, having finally locked the list down, of my last couple of rewatches to write the pieces that will cover the Best films of 2021 (look for that piece at the end of the week), but until then I figured we should address the... not so great achievements of the year that was. Not wanting to dwell too much in the negative, I've kept this to a bottom 5, though dishonorable mentions are also due to Red Notice, Silent Night and Jolt, all of which missed the cut by a hair's breadth.

The Worst of 2021: Bottom 5

5: He's All That [Mark Waters]

As someone who has made a habit, if not a career, out of writing about teen and coming of age movies, She's All That was never one I particularly liked. The warmed over Pygmalion tale of a popular guy taking a nerdy girl and making her prom queen felt reductive even in the 90s and, in a field then packed with better teen versions of literary classics, it never stood out.

This gender-swapped remake is worse. I'll admit to being out of touch with the social media themes (which means that star Addison Rae, making a terrible acting debut here, is an entirely new face to me), but it has many of the same problems; a weak screenplay, televisual direction and an 'outcast' who is obviously one of the hottest people in school, so it's hardly a shock when the protagonists get together. The film nods back to the original by casting its star, Rachel Leigh Cook, as Rae's mother, but inexplicably it doesn't have her play the same character she did in She's All That, which would have given some added punch to the otherwise bland mother/daughter scenes.

This might not be worst teen romcom Netflix has put out, but it's very possibly the blandest and most tedious.

4: Hinterland [Stefan Ruzowitzky]

Since his medical school set slasher Anatomy (starring a young Franka Potente), Stefan Ruzowitzky has had an up and down career, and sadly this initially promising serial killer thriller in the Seven mould is another major down.

The plot has a German soldier recently returned from the first world war recruited back into the police to investigate a series of grisly murders; fairly standard stuff, but interesting enough. The film though is irrevocably hobbled by Ruzowitzky's calamitous directorial choices, from dutch angles so prevalent that you worry the cast and sets are going to slide out of frame to the unspeakably ugly look of the film. The whole thing is shot on green screen, with CGI backgrounds in practically every shot. It's all incredibly artificial, which one could see as being the point early on, as the soldiers first arrive home, but it quickly becomes wearing because when nothing in the frame looks real, that undermines everything else about the film as well.

The cast often appears to be shoddily comped into shots that are frequently overlit, which only shows up the shortcomings of the CGI even more. Without the hideous stylistic choices this might have been a passable enough mystery thriller, with them it's an often out and out laughable disaster.  

3: For the Sake of Vicious [Reese Eveneshen, Gabriel Carter] 

It's fair to say I don't mind violence in movies, but For the Sake of Vicious essentially diagnoses its problems with its own title. This British home invasion horror in which a nurse finds her house taken over first by one seemingly crazed man and the person he's holding hostage and then by escalating waves of motorcycle-helmeted killers, establishes no purpose beyond its kills.

Points, I guess, for doing what it says on the tin, but the film is so empty of anything else that you can't care about any of the violence that is happening. None of it's fun either, this isn't a movie going for or embracing absurdity, and so the violence is just deadening and dull.

2: Crazy Samurai: 400 Vs 1 [Yuji Shimomura] 

Everything about this movie outward screams awesome. The title? Awesome. The premise? Awesome. The centrepiece? AWESOME. It all fails and fails hard. 

That centrepiece is the film's USP; a 70+ minute continuous take of the massed fight sequence that gives the film its title. For a fan of practical action, it's enough to set you drooling. Then you have to watch it. First, you'll see how low resolution it looks, in marked contrast to the brief, conventionally cut, prologue. Then you'll notice the drab colours, sparse set, and other indicators of a low budget. After that, and perhaps most damagingly, as the film gets to its second or third wave of fighters, you'll realise there were probably about 15 stuntmen on set. You'll spot them being killed and visibly rolling out of frame. You'll realise there's no progression, a tiny handful of mini-bosses but no sense of build. You'll also notice that the crowd of fighters always just attacks our 'hero' head-on, and that the choreography is both weak and lacking in variety.

Yes, this all sounded awesome, but within 10 minutes of the take starting, you'll realise that it was a terrible idea both to make and to watch it.

1: Run Hide Fight [Kyle Rankin] 

The things I watch because I'm a Radha Mitchell fan. For the record, Mitchell is wasted here playing the deceased mother of the main character, who puts in ghostly appearances to give her daughter advice during her day as, essentially, John McClane in Die Hard during a school shooting. Run Hide Fight lays out its entire structure and action in its title, what the title doesn't tell you is how repellent the film is.

Finally released in the US by Ben Shapiro's far right 'news' site The Daily Wire, this reactionary fantasy boils down all the misunderstandings about school shooters and their motives into a collection of abysmally written and acted characters, then proceeds to become, to all intents and purposes, pro guns in schools propaganda. Add to that the fact an animal was killed for real for the opening hunting scene and the coda's heroising of straight-up murder and you have a film that tops this list because it is as morally repugnant as it is ineptly made.