Zach’s Top 5 Worst Movies of 2022

As 2022 comes to an end, I always try to highlight the best and worst of the year in movies.  There was plenty of great stuff in theaters and on streaming over the year but this list is the movies that disappointed, missed the mark, or were flat-out terrible from 2022.  Read on to find out what I thought were the Top 5 Worst Movies of 2022.

1. Morbius: I saw Morbius twice this year, once in theaters and once for our Halloween commentary and it just gets worse each time you see it.  Jared Leto has pretty much no charisma or personality as Dr. Michael Morbius and the entire movie was clearly cut to pieces and reedited multiple times, with massive elements taken out or dropped in, like Tyrese’s robot arm or the inexplicably terrible appearance of Michael Keaton’s Vulture, which is definitely in the running for the worst post-credits sequences in movie history.  The one shining light is Matt Smith, who seemed to recognize how terrible the movie he was in was and decided not to give a shit and do whatever crazy nonsense he wanted.  There’s never any good explanation for Morbius’ powers and they keep adding in new ones when convenient, which is definitely how you want to introduce your new superhero/anti-hero to audiences.  The look of Morbius in full vamp mode and his ridiculous guzzling of real and fake blood also makes the character a joke almost from the beginning.  If all the future Sony Spider-Man adjacent movies are like this, god help us.
2. Halloween Ends: A few people are probably going to have this in their favorite movies of the year for its subversion of Halloween expectations but I thought Halloween Ends was just a terrible, confusing mess of a movie.  Pretty much ignoring everything that was already set up in the prior two Halloween movies from David Gordon Green, characters like Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) are completely reset and their character arcs discarded while we’re expected to care about a new character, Corey (Rohan Campbell), who has never appeared in the previous movies but becomes the main character as he descends into darkness following a horrific Halloween tragedy.  Michael Myers is barely in the movie and acts completely against everything we’ve known about him, like taking on an apprentice/partner for his murder or being pathetically defeated by Corey for his mask.  The final battle between Laurie and Michael is OK but it definitely feels tacked on and unearned based on the story of this movie and it really feels like this whole trilogy was not thought out and sort of put together haphazardly as it went along.  If this is the final time we see characters like Michael Myers or Laurie Strode, what a pathetic way for them to go out.
3. Moonfall: Between this and Independence Day: Resurgence a few years ago, Roland Emmerich has truly hit rock bottom in his brand of massive disaster blockbusters.  Moonfall is just stupid, not in a fun way but in a “this hurts my brain it’s so stupid” way.  When the Moon begins to plummet from its orbit, it causes massive disasters and insane gravitational fluctuations on Earth and a desperate mission to go up there and figure out some way to stop it is put into motion.  Emmerich uses most of the same disaster imagery he’s used countless times before and what was once cool and exciting in the mid-90s to early 00’s is now boring and repetitive and he also still has the same terrible, poorly written characters that he’s had countless times before, full of daddy issues, broken marriages and other cliches.  Somehow the movie just continues to get more and more stupid until you find out the true nature of the Moon and a blatant setup for a sequel that will never happen to cap off a mind-numbingly stupid movie that deserved to be one of the biggest bombs in box office history.
4. Blacklight/Memory: Kind of tied as they are extremely similar, Blacklight and Memory should be the final nail in the coffin that the age of Liam Neeson action movies needs to come to and end.  Taken is an all-time action classic and lots of the movies he did shortly after that were fun as well but between Blacklight and Memory, the seams have turned into massive cracks.  Neeson is an elderly man and he physically cannot really do that much anymore in terms of action, no matter how fast the editing is or how much the music tries to make it seem exciting.  Neeson can still deliver a threatening speech but he has to put his gun back into the holster for good and do stuff that isn’t this sad.  The Marksman, with it’s Shootist vibes, was a much better fit but these movies trying, and failing, to match the level of action and intensity of Taken are pretty much doomed from the start.  Of the two, Memory is probably the better of the two but not by much.
5. Jurassic World: Dominion: If this is truly the final chapter in the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World franchise, then shame on Universal for going from one of the greatest movies ever made with the original Jurassic Park to this terrible nonsense.  Much like Halloween Ends, also a Universal joint, Dominion utterly fails to pick up the obvious plot threads from it’s predecessor, which was dinosaurs loose around the world, and instead comes up with the inexplicable idea to background the dinosaurs in favor of genetically modified locusts.  Whoever decided people would be excited over that instead of hunting dinosaurs in major cities and locations around the world needs to be fired.  They also, for some reason, double down on the weirdest plot thread of the entire franchise, that Maisie Lockwood is a cloned human, and it somehow gets even weirder than you may have thought possible.  Outside of the sequence in Malta where you see the movie that maybe this could have been, it’s just a lazy rehash of prior ideas mixed with terrible new ones, like the aforementioned locusts, and it easily one of the worst, if not the worst, movie in the Jurassic franchise.

Dishonorable Mentions:

• The 355
• White Elephant
• The Invitation