Benjamin Judge's judgements

Again, some of the films that are this far down the list are perfectly good films that just weren’t my sort of thing. Please don’t be offended if your favourites are here. Everyone’s different.

175: Keeper

One of those horror films where somebody will say something like, “I hope we have a nice holiday,” before opening a cupboard and having a series of horrific visions while a violin bow slowly scrapes a high pitched whine. Too much for me.

174: Frankenstein

Apologies to those of you who adore this film but I just didn’t gel with it. If it helps, I didn’t think it was bad. It just wasn’t my sort of thing.

173: Deep Cover

Perfectly fine fish-out-of-water crime comedy. Not bad. Perfectly fine.

172: Happy Gilmore 2

As with Spinal Tap II, this takes a lot of its jokes directly from the original, but unlike the actors in Spinal Tap, the cast here seem happy to be back.

171: The Thursday Murder Club

I have never, in my entire life, seen a film that so obviously needed to be a three-parter spread over the Christmas period on the BBC. I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know what was missing but it was really obvious that the plot had been simplified to the point of making the whole exercise largely pointless.

170: The Accountant 2

Ben Affleck and Jon Berthnal take on the child traffickers in this slightly Q-pilled take on the buddy action movie. It’s ok.

169: Now You See Me: Now You Don’t

It only took the makers of Now You See Me nine years to realise the sequel should have been called Now You Don’t, not Now You See Me 2. And they brought that fierce intelligence to every aspect of the plot of this film, killing Morgan Freeman’s character in a way that only moves the plot forward if you don’t think about it, everyone forgetting he was dead as they celebrated a happy ending, the decision to have the characters basically do an advert for a soft drink towards the end of the movie, with Woody Harrelson doing a full, ‘what junk are young people drinking nowadays… oh, that’s actually really good’, but in such a vague way that it was only when I tried to work out what the drink was called so I could write this review that I realised it wasn’t a craft beer. Because, I assumed, people Woody Harrelson’s age wouldn’t be fazed by pomegranate in a soft drink. He’s 64. Not 300. If you wanted to get Woody Harrelson to advertise watches you wouldn’t pitch, “Hey! Why you got a tiny wall clock on your arm? Don’t the time leak onto your fingers?” [puts on watch] “Oh boy! Now I can see the time without looking at the time wall!” would you?

168: Anaconda

This is a real “There were script problems from day one” movie. It hasn’t got a clue what it wants to be. There are too many plot lines. Too many moods. Ironically, if they had tried to do a meta reboot of Lake Placid instead of Anaconda that might have worked. But they didn’t, so it doesn’t.

167: Treading Water

This is a really good film but one that is so unremittingly bleak that I found the whole experience draining. Be warned. Not a comedy.

166: The Extraordinary Miss Flower

A sort-of meta musical based on a batch of love letters. Nice songs but the project felt a bit too intrusive for my taste. I remember finding the cards my dad and my step-mom sent to each other when I was sorting through her things after she died. It seemed really obvious to me that nobody, including me, should ever read them. They were only for them. The idea of Nick Cave reading them on film was not one that occurred to me.

165: Being Eddie

Eddie Murphy documentary. I’m not sure it gave any new information, and it is obviously telling his side of the story, but it is nice to have a reminder now and again of how good he is at his best.

164: Heads of State

Stupid action movie, raised above the average by the charisma of Idris Elba, Priyanka Chopra Jonas and John Cena. Jack Quaid has a nice cameo. Would watch a sequel.

163: Urchin

Billy Dillane gives a great performance in this slightly magic-realist story of a man falling into trouble with the law and struggling back to his feet again.

162: Wicked: For Good

In hindsight, part one of Wicked was always going to be better than part two. Eventually the problems of the source materials were going to catch up with us. 

Firstly, while Wicked has a few good songs it only has one undeniable all-time classic, and Defying Gravity is firmly stuck to the end of Act One. Musically speaking, Wicked peaks in the middle. This is noticeable with only a fifteen minute intermission between acts but conspicuous when you have waited a year. The only way round this is to write a new song, which they tried, but No Place Like Home is no Defying Gravity.

Secondly, Act Two of Wicked wastes a lot of time setting up The Wizard of Oz, and the makers of Wicked: For Good decided to lean into that instead of toning it down. And, to put it bluntly, to set up The Wizard of Oz, you have to fuck up a lot of the good work you did in the first film. Nessarose’s transformation from a kind student with a crush on a boy to somebody willing to force that boy into servitude only makes sense to a writer who desperately needs a Wicked Witch of the East to kill in the next five minutes. Boq’s transformation from a boy with a crush on Glinda to a boy who notices Nessarose, to a boy who suddenly likes Glinda again, to a PTSD-riddled blood-thirsty psychopath Tin Man only makes sense if you need a PTSD-riddled blood-thirsty psychopath Tin Man to encourage a child to murder somebody (which I’m not entirely sure The Wizard of Oz does). Most baffling off all, the lion cub that Elphaba and Fiyero set free from captivity in the first film is now the Cowardly Lion because them freeing him prevented him from fighting his own battles. This makes little sense to anybody who doesn’t spend their evenings on Facebook frothing about participation trophies, but even less in a film where the heroic arc of one of the leads peaks with her freeing lots of animals from captivity. Are we for or against animals being kept in tiny cages? Make your mind up, Wicked: For Good.

More concerningly, the transformation of Nessarose to the Wicked Witch of the East has a real stink of ableism about it. Worse, an ableism that has been workshopped by in-house lawyers. An if-she-flies-instead-of-walking-then-technically-we-can-say-it-isn’t-about-the-wheelchair take that is so obvious that it feels worse than just plain ignorance. 

And this isn’t isolated. The film seems less progressive than Part One. When Fiyero tells Elphaba she is beautiful, and she tells him he is lying, he tells her that he isn’t lying, just seeing things in a different way. This may be the least romantic line in film history. Dude, she is objectively beautiful. Just say, I’m not lying, you are beautiful, or, I would never lie to you, or, babe, you’re well fit innit, or… god, almost anything other than, I’m seeing things in a different way, you boob.

Everyone’s great in it, it’s well directed, the singing is beautiful, the costumes are gorgeous… If it only had a heart.

161: Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost

Quite interesting documentary.

160: Zootropolis 2

Zootropolis didn’t need a sequel. The story was done. But it made a lot of money so here we are, rolling out all your favourite characters from the first movie, to retell you their jokes. That sloth, eh? He’s slow, but he’s also fast.

Is it just me, or was there a weird sexual energy in this film? Do the makers of this film want me to fancy the Shakira gazelle? The fox and the rabbit, very clearly just friends until this movie now have a will-they won’t-they thing going on that I’m not sure anyone asked for.

Maybe it is just me.

No. It’s not. I’ve discussed this with a very clever writer friend, and she agreed that yes, there was definitely a weird sexual energy to Zootropolis 2.

159: Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

Well acted. Bit boring. There is definitely a different cut of the film somewhere because Marc Maron is in it and he barely gets a word of dialogue. I would be interested in seeing that.

158: The Alto Knights

Casting Robert De Niro as both Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, this gangster movie finally answered the question we’ve all been asking. Who would win in a fight, Robert De Niro or Robert De Niro in a hat? Not as confusing as it might have been. Kathrine Narducci as Anna Genovese is brilliant and totally steals the film. 

Incidentally, the famous Apalachin Meeting that takes part toward the end of the film was a historical event that was important to the Robert De Niro of Goodfellas and the Robert De Niro of The Family and was attended by the father of the Robert De Niro of Analyse This. A five De Niro director’s cut would be something I would be interested in. 

157: Lilo & Stitch

Another ‘live action’ remake we didn’t need. All the effects budget went on Lilo, who looks great, but the other aliens look like crap. Really charming performances by Maia Kealoha and Sydney Agudong.

156: Tron: Ares

One of the dumbest films I have ever seen, but pretty, and with a good soundtrack.

155: Death of a Unicorn

Not quite there eat-the-rich satire with a trailer that promised too much. Richard E Grant was given permission to go full Richard E Grant so worth seeing if you enjoy that sort of thing. Will Poulter, with a much more controlled (but still quite silly) performance, is the best thing in it.

154: The Long Walk

This film does as much as it can with the source material but ultimately the plot [A group of young men have to walk at a set pace until only one is left standing. The winner gets anything he wishes for, everyone else is killed.] is an idea, not a story.

153: Mickey 17

A multi-series arc’s worth of story rammed into 137 minutes. Idea after idea is introduced and then abandoned. It is exhausting.

152: Love Hurts

Ke Huy Quan does a geriaction movie. You had me at Ke Huy Quan. I wanted this film so badly that it took a long time for me to accept that what I was watching was a bit of a mess, with dialogue that didn’t quite pop and a lead mooning over a woman twenty years younger than him.

151: Crazxy

A mostly-one-man-show movie about a father who is trying to rescue his estranged daughter. It’s ok. I don’t have a lot of time for bad-dad-realises-the-error-of-his-ways plots. Normalise good dads.