Movies I Enjoyed the Most in 2019: 28-14 (Spoilers abound)

As the title says, this is the list of the movies I saw in 2019 (that came out in 2019) that I enjoyed the most. This is no indication of quality – that equally subjective list happens next.

Don’t take the numbering in this list as a straight top-bottom list of enjoyment. Instead, I’d probably group them into tiers as such:

1-5: My absolute favourites. I had so much fun with these, and realistically there’s not the much of a gap between the movies in this tier.

6-13: Also very enjoyable, but not as outright enjoyable to me as the top tier were. Still not much of a gap within this tier, and I’m glad I saw every one of these.

14-19: Also enjoyed the movies in this tier, but quality concerns started to creep in the moment the credits rolled that slightly soured the experience in ways that, say, the top tier managed to avoid. Essentially, they weren’t so much fun I let the quality concerns bugger off to the “Best Of” list, with one exception.

20-23: These had their moments, but ultimately weren’t enough to overwhelm just how bad or underwhelming the whole package was.

24-28: I left the cinema or the couch (Avengement and Cold Pursuit were direct to DVD) either disappointed, wishing I hadn’t seen them, or actively wishing the writers can never find work again.

Expect this list to be wildly different when I move to the quality side…

28) Rambo: Last Blood

The only movie on this list I actively hated. It did absolutely everything wrong – it failed at being a dark character study, it failed at being a bonkers action film, and ultimately comes off as a mean spirited waste of time. Don’t even bother seeing this one for free, it’s not fucking worth it.

27) Cold Pursuit

Another direct to dvd outing, this time for Liam Neeson. The back of the box implied it was a dark comedy deconstruction of a typical Liam Neeson film. It was none of these things. Mostly just a kind of boring revenge film that we’ve seen before, done better. Just a cheap payday for Neeson, and one you should avoid paying money for.

26) X-Men: Dark Phoenix

Another franchise that just needs to die already. Or maybe be resurrected now that Disney owns it and have hopefully sacked everyone from Fox who were involved. Such a bad, lazily written movie that even the actors involved didn’t give two shits about. And honestly, I’m happy they’re free now – if this is how they’re going to be treated, I can see why they just don’t give a shit.

About the only good thing was a couple of minutes at the very end showing yet again why Magneto is absurdly dangerous. I’m going to lament the criminal misuse of this cast…

25) Avengement

A direct to dvd showing from Scott Adkins, who I genuinely feel is probably the best western martial artist/actor in Hollywood right now. Seriously, this guy is bullshit good. Unfortunately, this movie was determined to not show any of his talents at all, opting to basically be a mostly talky standoff movie in a bar. Complete waste of time, don’t bother.

24) Rise of Skywalker

I feel like this might be the most controversial choice on my list. Overall, I did not like this movie at all. Just a pointless, meandering mess of bullshit broken up by some excellent actors desperately trying to carry the stupid. After this movie I will forevermore place JJ Abrams on the same tier of directors as Zack Snyder.

If it wasn’t for The Mandalorian this might have burned me out on Star Wars In general.

23) 6 Underground

The marriage of Ryan Reynolds and Michael Bay should have been glorious stupidity. Unfortunately, it seems Bay had more creative control than I would have liked – every time the movie or a character threatened to be interesting, Bay just had to jump in and do stupid shit that actively insulted my intelligence and broke up the flow.

It’s got some good set pieces and the cast click when they’re allowed to but yeah. Don’t spend money on this one – stick to Netflix if you must.

22) Brightburn

At first I thought this was a reasonably solid take on an evil child-superman. Then I saw The Boys, and Homelander became the best evil-Superman take I’ve seen outside of Red Son by a long way. And once that happened, the general mediocrity of the whole show kind of fell into place.

It does have some excellently done gory set pieces if you’re into that sort of thing. Ultimately though, wait for Netflix.

21) Hellboy

Speaking of actively bad movies, hoo boy. So much potential in this movie, and all of it wasted. If I had to pick another movie to compare it to, it would be Suicide Squad. It’s got the same “extended music video” vibe, a criminal misuse of its main villain, and just a general problem of trying too hard.

Had some cool bits though (Lucha Libre Nosferatu!), but ultimately not enough to make this more than a Netflix watch if you missed it.

That said, Ian McShane’s very first line of the movie was a solid contender for my “Most Gloriously Ridiculous One-Liner of 2019” award…

20) Shazam!

Blerg. Kudos to DC for getting away from Snyder’s relentless negativity concerning superheroes in general, but that’s about all the good I can give this. I will be honest though, part of this is I just don’t like movies focused on children, so I’m not exactly the target market for this. At least it wasn’t actively bad.

I’ll pay attention again when Black Adam appears.

19) Pet Sematary

A technically competent adaptation of the Stephen King novel. Unfortunately, you could probably use this as a master class for middle-of-the-road adaptations: the acting is fine, the writing is fine, the presentation is fine. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it doesn’t quite have enough to it to stamp its own identity onto the horror landscape.

I will give them points for killing the elder child instead of the toddler though. Not as a twist (the posters and trailers gave that away), but because getting the toddler to do what they wanted without CGI was basically impossible. So credit for being willing to improvise to make the film work a little better.

18) Triple Frontier

A Netflix movie about a group of ex spec-ops operators (Ben Affleck, Pedro Pascal, Charlie Hunnam, Oscar Isaac and Garret Hedlund) deciding to steal a drug lords hidden cash stockpile and retire.

Another technically competent movie with solid performances, and a pretty solid theme about why getting greedy is a problem. Ultimately though, it didn’t quite pop enough to be something special.

17) Jumanji: The Next Level

A solid sequel to Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle that managed to get around some sequel problems by having The Rock and Kevin Hart pretend to be Danny DeVito and Danny Glover respectively for 2/3 of the movie. Some reasonable set pieces, some good jokes, decent fun, but ultimately suffering a little from sequelitis.

A third movie is almost certainly on the cards given this still hit around 700mil at the box office, but they’re going to have to work hard to avoid it clunking.

16) Terminator: Dark Fate

Solid, technically competent film that unfortunately should be the final nail in the Terminator franchise. The series has just run out of steam, and hasn’t had any particularly new or challenging ideas since Terminator 2. It’s just a parade of new T-1000 but better Terminators.

Which is a shame, because the cast went pretty hard and a lot of the set pieces are really good. Gabriel Luna has an oddly chilling aspect as a Terminator that kind of plays on how Robert Patrick did the T-1000, and Mackenzie Davis was pretty cool as an augmented human. Linda Hamilton was great as cranky action-grandma, and Arnie turned in a weirdly compelling Terminator – somehow his story was probably the best new idea in the film.

But overall, I think the series just needs to end. There’s just nothing else to do.

15) Crawl

The one exception to the whole “This tier was mostly decent with some minor problems” thing I outlined earlier. This movie is absolute crap, but I watched it with my family and we were shouting at it the whole way through. We were 100% cheering the alligators on, and disappointed when the main characters got away.

So yeah, bad monster movie, but watch it with friends and start shouting and you’ll still have a good time.

14) IT Chapter 2

Solid, competently crafted, and well acted. Very well acted. Again horror gets snubbed at the Oscars – Bill Hader should have at least got a nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Ultimately though, it suffers from the limitations of adapting an existing novel, and from turning King’s non-linear book into two linear movies. We saw the Losers Club fuck Pennywise up already as kids, it drastically reduces the tension in having them come back as adults to do the same thing no matter what new tricks you throw.