The 14 Worst Films (and 1 TV show) I saw in 2021

It’s come to that time, where I must decide the most significant films of the year, the most impactful, the most awe-inspiring, and of course…the most dreadful.

2021 may have been an endless series of random events and delays, but one thing that was consistent was movies, and bad ones. I saw many mixed or poor movies this year, and have come to learn a lot from them. Whether it be how a setting can be misused, animation can be muddled, or how truly hilarious bad movies can be, they provided me with a learning experience at the very least.

Just not an entertaining experience.

So here’s our top 15 worst films of the year, but before thay…

Dishonourable mention – He’s All That

If I had finished this film, I am 100% bet-my-life certain that this would be on my top 15 worst of the year. Judging by the 40 minutes I managed before I broke down and shut the computer, He’s All That’s excruciating dialogue, wooden acting, awful cinematography, Tiktok humour, endless stereotypes, unlikable leads, wasted Matthew Lillard etc. etc. would have made poor Roger Ebert spin in his grave.

But I didn’t finish it, and I am at least partially ethical in only including the movies I managed to finish. I just wanted to acknowledge how bad this film was before I got to the movies I managed to get through.

15. Eternals

Director: Chloe Zhao

Cast: Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Kumail Nanjiani, Salma Hayek, Angelina Jolie

From the best film of last year to one of the worst of this year...how time flies, Miss Zhao.

Eternals is absolutely the worst film of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date, featuring terrible characters, awful action and one of the most unnecessarily bulky runtimes in film history. You will come out of this movie astounded at the stuff on screen, in that you cannot believe that a $200+ million movie could feature such basic filmmaking mistakes as not getting the actors to look away from the camera.

If this is the start of a new Marvel series, count me out. I'll go somewhere with charismatic protagonists and a plot that makes at least 5% of sense.

Well, that started with a cathartic bang. On to number 14...

14. Sweet Girl

Director: Brian Andrew Mendoza

Cast: Jason Momoa, Isabella Merced, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Amy Brenneman, Adria Arjona

If it had stuck to its generic action movie guns, Sweet Girl would have been a movie I forgot about and moved on from. But of course, it executed possibly the worst twist ever conceived in a movie in years, worse than all the ones dear M. Night Shyamalan has put out.

The problem isn’t just the stupidity of the twist, but the fact that the entire film was built to manipulate the audience on a straight-up lie. At least Shyamalan foreshadows his twists and makes them somewhat reasonable. Sweet Girl’s twist feels like a random Simpsons shitpost on the world’s most boring Twitter feed.

Aside from that, there’s nothing really relevant to say about the film’s lack of interesting characters, dumb plot, phoned-in performances or contrived editing. Just don’t watch it.

13. Doctor Who: Flux

Director: Jamie Magnus Stone, Azhur Saleem

Cast: Jodie Whittaker, Mandip Gill, John Bishop, Kevin McNally, Jacob Anderson, Sam Spruell

Watching Flux was painful. As a lifelong Doctor Who fan, I was crying seeing one of the most beloved television shows of all time fall victim to incompetence, misunderstanding and almost malicious lack of awareness. The craftsmanship and love is gone forever.

It's not just fanboy ramblings that make me hate this series. It's the general filmmaking - editing is incredibly poor, the visual effects are atrocious, alien design is laughable, and the use of stock footage and mirrored shots is hilarious. Chris Chibnall must have had an embolism writing this, because I don't understand a single thing being said or how anything happens. It's a long string of MacGuffins and random plot events that are just tossed aside for no reason.

Film and TV students should watch Flux, because in many ways, it's a textbook on what not to do.

12. Prey

Director: Thomas Sieben

Cast: David Kross, Hanno Koffler, Maria Elrich, Robert Finster, Yung Ngo, Klaus Steinbacher

Netflix has a real thing for accepting a ton of foreign language movies/TV shows from around the world and dumping them at random on their streaming service, and that was especially true in 2021. Some of them, like The Swarm, Squid Game or Blood Red Sky, were kind of entertaining. Prey was not.

Following a group of douchebags as they run through the woods hunted down by a sniper, Prey is a uniformly boring German thriller with nothing interesting to do or say. Set in a forest that lacks any kind of atmosphere as it mostly consists of roads and empty space (and you can clearly see houses in the background in several shots), Prey struggles to maintain interest as unlikable leads get shot by the year’s most hilariously underwhelming villain.

Really, the only feeling you’ll be able to muster is a desire to punch everyone in the face (especially the brother character, who looks like Jai Courtney’s German clone.)

11. Dynasty Warriors

Nice icypole.

Director: Roy Chow

Cast: Louis Koo, Carina Lau, Wang Kai, Tony Yang, Han Geng, Justin Cheung, Gulnazar, Ray Lui

I swear to God, there are no real people who have actually played the Dynasty Warriors games. They seem like a theoretical concept, never being nominated for game awards and always looking like some fake Steam ripoff every time I see a clip from them. And the same goes for the Dynasty Warriors movie, a film which has less logs on Letterboxd than a direct-to-video Brazilian ripoff of Kung Fu Panda.

Looking like a parody of Disney’s remake of Mulan, Dynasty Warriors provides possibly the most lifeless depiction of Chinese historical action since Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s intentionally unfulfilling The Assassin. Bloated with endless exposition and featuring no sense of pacing whatsoever, the film fails as an entertaining actioner both because it’s boring and the action resembles a terrible Source Filmmaker project. Additionally, the entire film feels like a small excerpt from a long and terribly complex Bible with every pivotal moment or significant event removed from it.

This film will have no dynasty or sequels, I’m sure of that.

10. The Woman in the Window

Director: Joe Wright

Cast: Amy Adams, Fred Hechinger, Gary Oldman, Wyatt Russell, Julianne Moore, Jennifer Jason Leigh

Joe Wright finds himself in an odd rut where he’s directed two Best Picture nominees, a great Austen adaptation, one of the decade’s most unique action movies, the best episode of Black Mirror – and still puts out crap like this.

Somehow both boring and unintentionally hilarious, The Woman in the Window strands Amy Adams in a knockoff of Rear Window where every decision makes no sense and the unreliable narrator protagonist comes off like an utter jerk. Featuring probably the worst antagonist of any film this year in Fred Hechinger’s terrible slasher teenager, The Woman in the Window is an embarrassment for the sheer overload of talent involved. I cannot believe some of the stuff that occurred in this movie.

Amy Adams is trying, but to quote Harley Quinn from Arkham City, you should have tried harder.

9. Infinite

Director: Antoine Fuqua

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Sophie Cookson, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jason Mantzoukas

Infinite is the perfect face of Paramount’s new streaming service – lazy, derivative, ripping off anything it can get its hands on, and not offering anything interesting for those looking for good content.

Led by a robot shaped like Mark Wahlberg, Antoine Fuqua’s latest is a massive misfire. Its ADHD-written screenplay bounces between plot points and characters with almost no connective tissue, leaving gaping plot holes, scenes which contradict the logic they just set up, and no real sense of cohesion. Action is nonsensical, production design is completely whack, and everything is meaningless in this lazy portmanteau of The Matrix and The Bourne Identity.

I hope that Paramount+ burns for its lazy content, and that Paramount overall loses money, because if it’s going to put out crap like this, it deserves it.

8. Black Island

Director: Miguel Alexandre

Cast: Philip Froissant, Alice Dwyer, Hanns Zischler, Mercedes Müller

I’m proud that I watched this one, because my review on Letterboxd for it was the second-most liked review for the film. I like that my commentary was appreciated, and that people paid attention to it. But in retrospect, I’m also disappointed that I watched this, because it was shit.

Black Island’s nonsensical mis en scene is obvious from the get-go with embarrassingly bad ADR and unintentional hilarity, and ramps up even further as this turgid erotic thriller continues. Laughably bad in almost every way, from its stilted performances to its joke of a plot to even the musical score, Black Island is truly dreadful, and doesn’t deserve to carry the same name as a Tintin comic.

Perhaps the worst element of this film, though? The title doesn’t even make any sense anyway, because you never realise the movie takes place on an island, and to call it a “black island” is inaccurate because no-one on it is evil. Where’s the beef on this title, y’all?

7. Bliss

Director: Mike Cahill

Cast: Owen Wilson, Salma Hayek, Ronny Chieng, Bill Nye

It takes incredible conviction, an army of yes men, sheer ignorance and/or miserable luck to make something as misguided as Bliss. Somehow achieving the exact opposite of everything it’s trying to do, Mike Cahill’s vaultingly ambitious movie needed a helload of re-tooling before it was released, and it didn’t get it.

Owen Wilson is (wow)fully miscast as an everyman who gets dragged into a drug-addiction allegory/sci-fi thriller by a similarly miscast Salma Hayek, as both of them act as though every surface they touch is covered in a different variety of psychotic drug. Unable to maintain a single thought for more than a minute, Bliss aims for a feeling of serene confusion, but instead comes across as annoyingly confounding, as random information is thrown around with no proper context and the screen is lit up with ugly cinematography and production design.

It’s clear Cahill had a good idea, as he managed to get real-life thinking men Bill Nye and Slavoj Žižek in the cast somehow. But it really doesn’t come through.

6. America: The Motion Picture

Director: Matt Thompson

Cast: Channing Tatum, Jason Mantzoukas, Olivia Munn, Bobby Moynihan, Judy Greer, Will Forte, Andy Samberg

America: The Motion Picture is one of the worst animated films I have ever seen in my entire life. And I’ve seen The Little Panda Fighter, both Happily Never After's, and Space Chimps.

Boasting not one lick of wit or originality, America is content to ride on endless dick and stereotype jokes that the 90’s wore out, while only faintly alluding to whatever passes for social commentary in today’s pot-shot climate. You will be groaning 5 minutes in as the 5th historical anachronism tries to make you laugh without an inch of cleverness, while real comedy is stranded in the dust or rode into the ground. Meanwhile, the actual animation is dominated by ugly browns and greens that blur into an unholy mess whenever the camera moves (a problem that no animated movie has actually had since Who Framed Roger Rabbit solved it in 1988 – not even The Little Panda Fighter.)

Worst of all, there is no use of America’s historical context for humour aside from a snide anachronism or a dick joke. It not only feels like a wasted opportunity, but it feels massively disrespectful, as though the efforts of millions of people who worked towards making the world a better place was only worth mockery and contempt. I hated this movie, and I never want to see it again.

5. Cinderella

Director: Kay Cannon

Cast: Camilla Cabello, Nicholas Galitzine, Idina Menzel, Pierce Brosnan, Minnie Driver, Billy Porter

Throughout the entirety of Cinderella’s 113 minutes, I was staring at my laptop open-mouthed at the audacity of the filmmakers to release something as shitty as this. I was legitimately in disbelief – I thought it was a practical joke, or an expensive parody. But no, this was the movie they actually released to paying consumers.

Take every single Oscar category, including the technical categories, and then stomp and urinate on them. That is what Cinderella is – the writing is uncanny, the acting is from another dimension, the visuals are from Windows XP, the music is less appealing than YouTube earrape videos, and even the fundamentals of sound and costume design look like they came from a Friedberg-and-Seltzer crapfest.

Even worse, Cinderella is aggressively cynical and smug, flipping off viewers by pandering to small children and young girls with random popular catchphrases and modern music. It comes off like a calculated attempt to make a robotic remake and reap millions of dollars, and I cannot believe it actually exists.

4. Things Heard and Seen

Director: Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini

Cast: Amanda Seyfried, James Norton, Natalia Dyer, Karen Allen

Things Heard and Seen got bad reviews, but generally way better reviews than most films on this list. Many cited that this horror-drama movie had themes of domestic violence, toxic masculinity and women’s empowerment, and therefore, it was interesting. To put this in context, this would be like saying a potato that’s brown can fly a spacecraft – the two are completely superfluous, and the contention makes no inherent sense.

Things Heard and Seen is an inaccurate title, because there are no things to be heard and seen – absolutely duck-all happens in this movie until 5 minutes before the credits, where the film just ends. Before then, the audience is stuck watching a high-school version of a Bergman drama, where actors look like they’re awkwardly asking their mother for sexual advice in every shot, music is non-existent, themes are poorly conveyed, nothing of interest is shown or displayed, and the direction is so flat it leaves me dismayed.

Aside from one moment which caused me a gale of unintentional laughter, Things Heard and Seen has absolutely nothing interesting to offer whatsoever – you could take a nap at any point in this movie and when you wake up, nothing will have changed. It is such an offensively dull movie that only ever scored points from people for what it superficially promised, rather than what it actually executed.

3. Thunder Force

Director: Ben Falcone

Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Octavia Spencer, Melissa Leo, Jason Bateman, Bobby Cannavale

The worst thing any movie can be is passionless. A movie can be misguided like Bliss, or empty like Things Heard and Seen, or nonsensical like Infinite, but the absolute worst is passionless, cynical or disingenuous. Thunder Force is a passionless insult to every aspect of the movie industry, and I hope that everyone who was responsible for it is insulted or ashamed by it.

Much like Cinderella, Thunder Force aims to make its mark through lazy messaging and pandering, meaning that it regularly dumps insulting loads of random information on its audience to try and get them to care about the character’s political directions rather than their moral ones. Meanwhile, Falcone and McCarthy’s misguided filmmaking style makes every scene in this movie feel like a bargain-bin product rather than a properly financed movie that creative people worked on. It’s incredibly difficult to convey how anger-inducing the film is for those who want to work in the film industry, as it routinely sends a message that your effort is valued far less than your political standing or the marketability of your product.

Do not watch this film. It may have been marketed as a cheap, PG fun comedy, but it is a disgusting insult to everything I stand for as someone who values hard, creative workers in the industry.

2. Home Sweet Home Alone

Director: Dan Mazer

Cast: Archie Yates, Ellie Kemper, Rob Delaney, Aisling Bea, Kenan Thompson

Home Sweet Home Alone’s greatest achievement is that it takes one of the most endearingly positive films about childhood of all time and remakes it into a cynical corporate product about what the 1% perceives as “adulthood”. I may be sounding unnecessarily political here, but it’s true – this feels like a wealthy millionaire saw Home Alone and, anguished about a slightly too-hot bath, decided to remake it for an audience of idiots.

Cynicism and greed oozes out of every scene of this movie, as everyone is transformed into transactional, sadistic and cruel archetypes meant to come off as amusing. Without a single likable character and such a bleak, privileged outlook, Home Sweet Home Alone is catastrophically unwatchable and vindictive.

That’s not even mentioning the inherent failures as a film – the awful production design, the many gaps in logic, the terrible visuals and cinematography, acting from an SNL sketch, and editing that defies belief in its poor quality. Everything about this feels like a cheap commercial on Fox News – ignorant, poorly made and thoroughly cynical under the disguise of “cheer”.

But believe it or not, there was one more movie this year that was not the passionless, universally unpleasant Home Sweet Home Alone that was nevertheless much worse. And that was…

1. Cosmic Sin

Director: Edward Drake

Cast: Bruce Willis, Frank Grillo, Brandon Thomas Lee, Corey Large, C.J. Perry, Costas Mandylor

Cosmic Sin left me in tears of laughter from its opening scene, as it randomly put up a series of static cards waving over the entirety of human space history in the worst possible font, while also not conveying any useful information whatsoever. Following this abysmal opening, every single element of this movie left me in a state of either paralysed boredom or relentless cheer, even down to the fundamentals of sound design.

Starring Bruce Willis (who so clearly doesn’t want to be anywhere near this movie), Frank Grillo (who’s much better than this) and a bunch of Australians for some reason, Cosmic Sin rambles between incompetent sci-fi shoot ‘em up and parable about genocide which seems to suggest that it’s better to just massacre a species than negotiate with them. If this were a more competent movie, I would be more offended and confused by the portrayal of inter-species war and genocide, but I was constantly distracted by how the filmmakers just stuck some glow-sticks on the side of a wall to make it look “futuristic”.

Stuck in a whirlpool of awful dialogue, terrible acting, laughable direction, weak sound design, casual sexism, excruciating production design, Adobe green screen and villains more hilarious than intimidating, Cosmic Sin is without a doubt the worst movie of the year. It deserves less than its 3% Rotten Tomatoes rating.

And that was the worst of the year. What did you think?

Well, I'll see you next week with the best-of list so I can clear the poison out of me.