Battleship Pretension’s Ten Worst Films of 2023

10. Renfield

​​What makes Renfield so deserving of a spot on this ‘worst of the year’ list is how little fun it is to watch. You have the ingredients for a so-bad-its-good (Vampire’s Kiss) or even just a crazy-fun (Kickass) movie, but Renfield never even comes close to either of those categories. Despite a colorful, over-the-top action sequence every ten to fifteen minutes, the film is utterly lifeless. A talented cast including duel Nicholas’ (Hoult and Cage), Awkwafina, Ben Schwartz, and Shohreh Aghdashloo cannot overcome the flat jokes, the paper thin plot, or lazy attempt to modernize a classic. Other recent (if not entirely successful) Dracula adaptations like The Invitation and The Last Voyage of the Demeter, at least bring some energy, excitement, and real horror to their modern retellings. All the neon sets and body paint in the world could not breathe life into the boring disappointment. I didn’t sit down to watch Renfield thinking I was going to watch art, but I did expect to have fun and enjoy myself but instead I was bored and frustrated.

9. No Hard Feelings

In a year filled with a decent number of success stories in the effort to rehabilitate the mid-budget, star-driven crowdpleaser, No Hard Feelings stands out as one of the more commercially-successful entries to nevertheless fail to please. Famous most for getting Jennifer Lawrence nude on a beach, it recaptured the raunchiness of turn-of-the-millennium sex comedies with none of their raw inspiration. Oscillating uncomfortably between pure unfiltered hijinks and clumsy lobs toward sentimentality, each character is a logline and every joke is waiting for a better pass.

8. 65

Spaceman versus dinosaurs, and it’s not simple B-movie fun? What the hell happened here? Adam Driver already got the contractually obligated blockbuster sci-fi series out of his system, but apparently, the 7′ 9″ Oscar nominee wanted to head back into the world of long hours while shooting in front of green screens with tennis balls. But again, who would say “No” to playing an astronaut taking on prehistoric lizard birds? Well, sadly, it just wasn’t as fun as we’d hoped. Filmmaking duo Scott Beck and Bryan Woods rode to acclaim with their initial script for A Quiet Place and followed that with their own directorial effort, the fun horror maze slasher film – Haunt – and yet, they feel out of their depth here. Good ideas abound, including an early reveal given up by the title and poster (“It was earth, all along!”), but not even the lean runtime can assist in staving off the boredom of watching Driver’s 8′ 4″ character go through the motions of solving his predicament. I always wonder why Jurassic Park didn’t lead to more instances of dinosaurs being featured in major studio films, and then I see something like 65 to show me how much can go wrong in making that exciting in hands that extend beyond The Beard and his cohorts. Worst of all for this movie, however, that whole Earth reveal ends up meaning absolutely nothing in the context of this story beyond allowing the viewer to go, “Oh, that’s neat,” before scrolling to the next piece of Netflix content to watch (as this film hit the streaming service rather quickly). Does this mean we’ll never see Caveman vs. Nuclear Physicist, featuring the 9′ 5″ star once again leaning into what a quick paycheck can afford? It’s hard to say, but I can at least hope I don’t have to club that one, too, when looking back on the missed opportunity.

7. Shazam! Fury of the Gods

Proving the infrequently-recognized adage that some ideas are only good once, Fury of the Gods both fails to distinguish itself from its predecessor and carries the general air of a long third act from that film, which in fact already had a pretty tight third act. Where the first film really came into its own by bringing the family together for the finale, this one rather clumsily axes out the rest of the family for a Billy Batson solo run. It becomes small at precisely the moment it’s trying to feel biggest. While hardly the nadir of the worst year yet for superhero cinema (we’ll get there in a bit), Fury of the Gods demonstrated the hubris of drifting on your good vibes.

6. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

There’s a saying that goes something like “everything that’s old is new again.” Though usually reserved for societal trends in fashion or technology, I think it’s safe to invoke this phrase for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny with a tweak: “everything that’s new is getting old.” As Disney has previously and repeatedly shown us with its forays in the Star Wars universe, “new” does not necessarily mean fresh, inspired, or even all that interesting. Even if we were willing to  forgive the trope of “aged hero unwilling to accept life has passed him by,” what makes Dial of Destiny’s sin an unforgivable one is how it attempts to explore that concept with modern filmmaking tools that are simultaneously new and already tired: overuse of CGI set pieces and deaging its lead. Forsaking the practicality of stunts and action set pieces that made Spielberg’s original trilogy so engaging and endearing highlights the dissonance of seeing a tired actor portraying a tired character in an action-adventure movie that seems either incapable of or uninterested in striving for more than “hey, remember how much you loved this character?” fan service. 

5. Theater Camp

To be fair, Theater Camp isn’t atrocious – bad comedies can be really painful, and this one doesn’t get to that level. There are good, genuine laughs. The big problem is that they’re too few and far between. The movie runs out of ideas quickly and finds itself coming back to the same wells time and time again, with, unsurprisingly, diminishing results. The worst of these is using the homosexuality of the campers as its own punchline, which besides being lazy, is an uncomfortable choice from a movie that feels by and for the LGBTQ+ community. Another problem is that it often feels untrue to the documentary form. The best mockumentaries rely heavily on improvisation. There’s too little of it here, and when there is, it feels messy, and not funny enough. It starts with potential, but in the end, can’t deliver what it needs to. 

4. Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire

What started out as a pitch for a new movie that takes place in the Star Wars universe, Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire (the ego on Zack Snyder for thinking up a dumb title like this) actually turned into a self-important, glossy, and vapid Star Wars ripoff movie instead. I can see why Lucasfilm rejected the pitch. I can just imagine Kathleen Kennedy turning it down and thinking to herself, “We already have Star Wars. Why do we need a dumb version of the same movie?”

What took George Lucas one movie to tell a story of a young rebel standing up against an evil empire with a band of misfits, Snyder has the audacity to take three movies (THREE MOVIES!!) to ostensibly tell the exact same story — only dumber and in slow motion. Rebel Moon proves that Snyder shouldn’t direct movies anymore and perhaps his talents are best suited in production design and cinematography.

3. Cocaine Bear

Listen, elsewhere, I wrote about my desire to see a fun version of a premise involving spaceman versus dinosaurs, so it’s not as though the idea of a ferocious black bear made highly aggressive by a botched drug run involving cocaine wouldn’t appeal to me. Sadly, while there’s one standout sequence that makes it feel as though the movie built out from (the ambulance chase), Cocaine Bear feels like a poser. By that, I mean director Elizabeth Banks (who has yet to direct something I enjoyed) has made a movie that wants to harken back to the days of exploitation cinema, let alone 80s horror flicks, but without knowing what that really means. It’s dressed up to play like an early Sam Raimi flick but all over the place in execution. The bear looks fine, and the film delivers a few moments of gory fun, but even with the R-rating, the movie holds back on gnarlier bear maulings while doubling down on unnecessary characters. This film is so heavily populated that it becomes a drag trying to keep up yet not finding many of the performances all that entertaining. Alden Ehrenreich seems to be channeling that Coen Brothers energy that put him higher on people’s radar, yet he’s underserved by everything happening around him. Keri Russell, at first, seems like she’s stepping up to have fun, but the movie wastes what she can bring. Character actress Margo Martindale gets what movie she’s in, but Cocaine Bear gets rid of her fairly early. The film is also really poorly edited, from awkward shot choices to random time jumps that feel like the movie is making up for entirely deleted subplots. Is this really what we deserve for the final major studio film performance from Ray Liotta? I don’t think so, and there’s not nearly enough of O’Shea Jackson Jr. beating up 80s punk kids in campground bathrooms to make up for it. 

2. Ghosted

Martin Scorsese warned us. A phalanx of streaming services all seeking to serve metrics over merits have sunk audiences in a quagmire of quantity in which “content” manufactured for pacifying the most eyeballs all at once and in perpetuity is that status quo. This approach to movies means that the next thing has to be out by the time the previous next thing has been consumed and thus, we get titles like Ghosted, a film that seems executed on the guidance of an algorithm programmed to pump out movies at assembly line pace: Attractive Stars + Critically Acclaimed Director x Action Set Piece = Movie. What makes Ghosted so atrocious isn’t how bad one or more elements is, per se, but how emblematic it is of the plague of content that exists simply to keep you on one streaming service over another for a few hours. Is there charm? Yes. Is there well-choreographed action? Yes. Is the story coherent? Yes. Will you remember anything about this movie 24 hours after watching it? Absolutely not. In a day and age where discerning audiences are growing tired of tropes, retreads, and callbacks, Ghosted is the “well, THAT happened!” of action movies.

1. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Stripped of all the slight distinctiveness 2015’s Ant-Man and 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp possessed, Quantumania is the summation of all of Marvel’s shortcomings, a brilliantly flaccid kick-off to The Year Audiences Finally Got Sick of Superheroes. One can tolerate, in isolation, the terrible jokes, nobody being in the same room, bad VFX comps, emptily busy backgrounds, gray color scheme, action with no momentum or kick to it, and kid superheroes that have come to define the MCU. All at once, they’re too much to bear. Worse yet, the central story – a wayward father reconnects with his daughter! – is barely present, as the two start from the baseline of most parent/teen relationships, and while the less said about the film’s attempts to build Kang the Conquerer up the better, it’s so disinterested in the prospect, the “who” of it all hardly matters. Michael Douglas looked like he was filmed out over the course of a long weekend, about as long as it took this to vanish from our collective interest.