Steve’s Top 10 Worst Films of 2024

In my own small little world, the new year doesn’t fully begin until I curate my list of favorite and least favorite films from the year prior. This list was much more difficult to curate than in years past. In 2024, I merely gave one film four stars. I only saw one film I would truly consider excellent. I saw many very good to great films, but desperately few excellent ones.

That said, I still need to see a handful, including Better Man, The Brutalist, Megalopolis, and Saturday Night to name a few. Every year this exercise in some ways feels incomplete because I can’t see everything I’d like before the concept of a best/worst list feels like a dated concept so deep into the new year. It’s the cross I bear.

For some additional fun math as well, seeing as I am an AMC Stubs A-List member, my Stubs membership has resulted in me paying about $3.20/ticket this year. That’s amazing value, and if you’re someone who goes to the movies at least two or three times a month (or could see yourself going at that rate, for that matter), and have an AMC Theaters near you, you need to become a member.

Without further adieu, here are the worst movies I saw in 2024. Also included are streaming platforms where you can watch said movies.

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HONORABLE MENTION: Space Cadet: Space Cadet was so egregiously awful, so obnoxiously written, and so terribly contrived that I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. I can’t remember the last time that happened. I haven’t walked out of a movie since 2012, and being that Space Cadet was a streaming movie, the “home” button on my Roku remote was my savior. One can never know, but I’m confident if Space Cadet was a theatrical release, I would’ve left before the credits rolled.

However, being that I didn’t finish the film, I cannot include it as an official entry on my list, nor did I publish a formal review. That said, I need to forewarn others.

1. Vindicating Trump: By now, you should know what you’re getting with each passing Dinesh D’Souza documentary, whether you’re a fan or not. If you’re a fan, you’ll be delighted by the fact that somebody else not only shares your conservative views, but believes in them ardently enough to commission yet another documentary showcasing them despite each subsequent one’s impact and relevance. If you’re on the polar opposite side of the political aisle, and dislike D’Souza, his baseless arguments and ostensible aversion to facts has become something you’ve grown accustomed to ignoring over the years.

You’re silly if you think any statistics or sources will be provided. Just as silly as you are to spend money to see Vindicating Trump. Even if you’re a fan of the man, you deserve better hagiography than this, which seems so proud of its lack of substance and facts that it would fit right in at any Republican-sponsored event.

My review of Vindicating Trump

2. Not Another Church Movie: Not Another Church Movie does the impossible. It aims lower and sinks lower than even the most loathsome works from Tyler Perry, who finds himself in the film’s crosshairs. To provide context for those devout Perry fans, it makes Temptation look like Daddy’s Little Girls. As if the use of “Not Another” in the title didn’t already give it away, this is a belated, miserably cheap send-up of Perry’s filmography. Somehow, the people behind this didn’t realize that there’s no greater parody of Perry’s perpetual desire to infuse religion into broad comedy and heavy melodrama than the works of the man himself.

My review of Not Another Church Movie

3. Tarot: This insufferably lousy, derivative work of woo-woo feels like a cut-and-paste of every supernatural, PG-13 horror film. A little Ouija here, some Truth or Dare there. What sticks out from the very beginning is an utterly appalling lack of ambition from the writing/directing team of Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg. I’ll give you an analogy. The NFL Draft was last week. Imagine your team drafted a quarterback and his biggest points of reference and inspiration were Jamarcus Russell and Akili Smith.

My review of Tarot

4. Harold and the Purple Crayon: The 1955 children’s book, Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson, coupled with the lovely albeit short-lived HBO Family show in 2001, was a beautiful ode to childlike wonder and imagination. Its paper-thin premise involved a cute little boy who had the power to make anything come to life with his magical purple crayon. Johnson’s illustrations were simple yet wondrous, and I can still remember being a child, arrested by the television series with its unpredictable creations and soothing music.

Silly me for believing a film adaptation of the series that’s been in development since Christ lost his sandals would be something worth seeing.

For a film predicated upon the power of imagination, Harold and the Purple Crayon has astonishingly little of it. Harold creates many things with his titular utensil, but none of it sparks wonder. The lack of inspiration derives from the fact that this material was born to be animated, and the drawer of such creations was, appropriately, a little boy coming to grips with the power of his own mind. That subtext dissolves when the purple crayon is in the hands of someone pushing 40, and before you even make the comparison, nothing in Guion and Handelman’s script comes remotely close to the thematic power of Barbie.

My review of Harold and the Purple Crayon

5. Bob Marley: One Love: This opening sets the stage for a movie that, contrary to recent biopics like Bohemian Rhapsody and Elvis, carves out a specific, pivotal time in a legend’s career rather than race through his/her life in 120 minutes or less. I call this a bait-and-switch because Bob Marley: One Love turns what could be a small but elaborate canvas into a morass of faintly rendered sketches. This is a film so frustratingly underwritten, to the point of incoherence, that a work of equal length featuring nothing more than Marley noodling on his guitar might’ve given us more insight into the man himself.

My review of Bob Marley: One Love

6. Reagan: Ronald Reagan’s longstanding lore in the eyes of the conservative populous is largely attributable to the way in which his successors, to this day, see his simplistic and broadly generalized view of American life as something even remotely replicable in present times. That’s because Reagan’s America worked for only a portion of the country. Dedicated to keeping crime off the street and relegating it to the White House, with 138 officials in his administration indicted, Reagan not only sat back and watched AIDS kill millions of Americans, he gut unions and reduced the power of the individual laborer, kickstarted a fruitless war on drugs, offered millions of minorities a prison cell as a consequence, and undid leaner taxes and more take-home pay for working Americans as the cherry on top.

Obviously, those who diligently worked for many years to make Reagan possible have no interest in an even-handed expose of their titular titan. This rose-colored glasses drama plays more like a tribute film than a serious work of cinema as it offers easily digestible moments that tell you how to feel and show you an intimate look at the process of mythmaking.

My review of Reagan

7. The Garfield Movie: You don’t need a magnifying glass to be able to discern the appeal of the long-running Garfield comic strip by Jim Davis. Garfield’s eternal appeal stems from his laziness, apathetic attitude to the world around him, his fleeting interest in his adopted brother, a dog named Odie, his sarcastic comments, and of course, his insatiable appetite for lasagna. Granted, these ingredients themselves are difficult to sustain a 90-minute movie on their own, but I’d go out on a limb and say we cat lovers are more than content to watch a hangout movie featuring Garfield, Odie, and their human owner Jon.

So, why on Earth do screenwriters Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove, and David Reynolds instead drop Garfield and Odie into a cockamamie kidnapping plot that eventually has them trying to navigate a dangerous factory farm in pursuit of milk? When The Garfield Movie isn’t having the titular cat slobbering over Italian delicacies, it hurls a needlessly busy, overly dark plot at its viewers; one that is filled with drab colors and dark story beats that, worse than scare, are liable to bore younger viewers.

My review of The Garfield Movie

8. God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust: The kindest thing I can say about God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust? It’s not as repugnant nor as morally bankrupt as its predecessor.

For me to expect a God’s Not Dead sequel to be anything more than an alarmist political screed draped in Christian wish-fulfillment is downright misguided. These are films that spend their energy waxing paranoid about the disappearance of Christianity in public education. We the People, by far the series’ most loathsome installment, decided to get bent-out-of-shape over the nonexistent war the US government was waging on homeschooling.

On that note, In God We Trust gets one thing right: we deserve better politicians.

My review of God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust

9. Moana 2: Moana 2 is so bad, it recalls The Jungle Book 2 in the realm of unfortunate Disney sequels that somehow earned the privilege of gracing thousands of theater screens. That this was originally conceptualized to be a limited series on Disney+ is all you need to know about a flat and uninspired follow-up to one of many Mouse House gems from the 2010s. Such works as Wreck-It Ralph and Zootopia are distant memories, as Disney has spent the following decade suggesting there might not be a more creatively bankrupt powerhouse operating today.

My review of Moana 2

10. Back to Black: Back to Black is a borderline disgrace of a biopic defined by disrespect to its artist and passionless filmmaking. Just when you thought Bob Marley: One Love was the genre’s low-point of the year, Sam Taylor-Johnson’s film gives a textbook lesson on how to turn a superstar’s life into a rote bore for two hours.

Nearly a decade ago, A24 distributed what will likely be the defining cinematic work of Amy Winehouse in Amy. It’s a documentary predicated on archival footage, live performances, and once-never-before-seen home movies of the woman herself. It asks complicated questions without much help from talking heads to boot. It’s also streaming on Max. Your time would be better spent learning about the real Amy Winehouse by seeing the real Amy Winehouse and not another contemptible project that’s primary goal appears to be upping her streaming numbers so the powers that be can continue to lick every dollar they make off of a dead woman.

My review of Back to Black