Benjamin Lee

Every single decision made by Hill is bad.

Even in an oversaturated genre of increasingly diminished returns, Shelby Oaks is about as dispensable as it gets.

Films like Bride Hard, proudly recycling well-known popcorn plots without any attempt at originality, rely on heavy-lifting star power but there’s just none of that here.

There’s never the satisfying pleasure of problems being solved – just people frantically raising them and things magically coming together, a film that should be about process that doesn’t seem particularly interested in it.

At less than 80 minutes, it’s barely even a movie, more one long montage of bits that never run on long enough to be defined as scenes.

No one here seems to know what they’re doing and, more importantly, why. A strong contender for 2022’s most pointless movie.

An inevitable yet staggeringly unnecessary follow-up to the surprise horror hit turns a nifty concept into an exhaustingly convoluted mess.

It’s the worst kind of soulless committee-made product, lazy and risk-free, that need never and will never be thought of again. Infinite? Not even close.

It’s all torturously uninteresting, a plodding retread that never once explains or justifies why it made the leap from “what if?” to actual full-length movie.

The bar was low after the first, a half-assed waste of actors who deserve better, but the sequel is somehow even worse, a maddeningly unfunny string of bad decisions, the worst of which was deciding to make it in the first place.

A defiantly unbelievable and drably directed heap of quirk that’s as overstuffed as it is underpowered, a head-scratching failure for all involved.

Even outside of the script’s aggressively repetitive bigotry, the shambolic Scooby Doo plot struggles to grab even the slightest amount of attention.

A clumsy, unfunny adaptation of a much-loved literary crime series

A dull and predictable sunshine noir that wastes the time of those involved as well as ours.

There is nothing gritty or believable about any of it. The film is as dumb and schlocky as the worst of the genre, with lousy network TV effects, uninvolving action and unfunny and inelegant dialogue, its characters drowning in poorly written exposition (even if the much-memed viral line from the trailer is sadly not in the movie itself).

There’s something so soulless and ineffectual about the aggressively unnecessary Red Notice that it almost plays like a pastiche of a Hollywood blockbuster, like a bot consumed the last 20 years of studio fare and spat out a facsimile as an experiment.

There’s really nothing to see here, just another synthetic simulation of a film and a genre we used to love, less maintenance required and more complete overhaul.

A head-smashingly redundant waste of time, talent, energy and resources, a shockingly early yet entirely convincing contender for worst film of the year.

As usual it’s left entirely up to the beleaguered Johnson to make any of it even remotely watchable. She remains a compelling presence, trying her darnedest with lifeless words, but, again, she’s stranded by the energy-sucking vortex of nothingness that is Jamie Dornan. He’s better than this...but he knows it and his boredom is lazily apparent throughout.

Ghosted is content dictated by algorithm at its absolute, industry-shaming worst, so carelessly and lifelessly cobbled together that we’re inclined to believe it’s the first film created entirely by AI.

There’s zero, nay negative, fun to be had here, a potentially interesting, if not exactly original, sub-Manchurian Candidate idea (pre-programmed victims/accomplices are activated by a phone call) taken nowhere of interest.

Nothing about the film comes close to authenticity and it’s largely down to Penn’s remarkably amateurish direction.

There are no left turns or bumps along the way, just a smooth straightforward journey from cliche to cliche, boredom setting in fast.

It’s genuinely startling just how utterly wretched the finished product is and how unfit it is for a wide release.

If the devil did exist then surely he’d have the power to destroy films as dull as this.

None of it rings remotely true and his insistence on playing out so many scenes at such a high level can make it an excruciating watch.

This is carelessly made trash but worse, it’s carelessly made trash that thinks it will spawn not just a franchise but a cinematic universe.

It’s an unwieldy and messy thing, drearily directed and boringly written, taking its agenda seriously yet not providing a robust enough framework to surround it.