Worst movie moments of 2019
The year has been full of excellent movie moments, but there have also been some duds. These are the moments that made us groan, yawn and lose interest.
Leigh Paatsch
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John Rambo slaughters an entire Mexican drug cartel in Rambo: Last Blo o d
The violence in this picture is arguably the most vicious to ooze down a screen in 2019. Bones are snapped like toothpicks. Hearts are hacked out of chests. Heads say goodbye to shoulders.
While Rambo teeters on the brink of losing his marbles, you will be fighting with all your might not to lose your lunch.
Godzilla taking an 80-minute break from his own movie in Godzilla: King of the Monsters
Have Godzilla’s tardiness issues been seen to in King of the Monsters? Not totally. It still takes an hour or so to get the big fella into the action.
The first hour of King of the Monsters is dominated emphatically by the resurrection of Godzilla’s most infamous super-species enemies.
When Godzilla is finally roused from a deep sleep, he sets about putting this gang of gargantuan monsters back in their place.
The happy-go-lucky Darren Weir scenes in Ride Like a Girl
Disgraced ex-trainer Darren Weir appeared often (and in a disarmingly warm and positive light) as a key character in the tale of female jockey Michelle Payne’s famous Melbourne Cup victory.
Even if you’re only slightly aware of the misdeeds that saw Weir (played here by Sullivan Stapleton) banished from racing, his presence here feels like an uncomfortable distraction, to put it politely.
Any non-wedding scene in Top End Wedding
The first hour is a big fat chunk of sit-com ham that even a canned-laughter machine would have trouble chuckling at.
Poorly written and, for the most part, tackily acted, the first two acts of Top End Wedding recall those bad old days of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
This was the era where many an Australian movie comedy upped and died after mistakenly assuming local audiences were dumb as bricks and would settle for anything.
Sure, Top End Wedding does improve quite a bit once it rounds the home turn for a crowd-pleasing exchange of vows. However, in the eyes of many, it will have already run its race by then.
The group singalong in Palm Beach
Your mission from Palm Beach, should you choose to accept it, is to spend a wine-soaked, whine-riddled weekend up on Sydney’s glorious Northern Beaches.
Your host will be Bryan Brown, and for company, you shall join an exclusive entourage of mates, missuses and miscellaneous offspring.
What follows is a rolling group-therapy session for the biggest bunch of moneyed-up mopers you could ever have the misfortune to meet.
This beautifully filmed and sumptuously catered cavalcade of comfortable discomfort would be just about bearable if the acting, writing or direction could rustle anything relatable from the glam gathering.
The on-screen photocopying of The Shining by Doctor Sleep
You have to give this high-concept horror movie considerable marks for bravery.
Presenting yourself as a sequel to one of the finest, most frightening psychological thrillers of all time in the form of 1980s The Shining takes some considerable fortitude.
When paying homage to (or just as often, blatantly copying from) The Shining, Doctor Sleep does cast a faintly affecting spell.
The rest, however, emits a faintly worrying smell.
All those Beatles songs get wasted in Yesterday
Yesterday can play the biggest trump card in all of popular music — the evergreen, never-fail back catalogue of classics that belong to The Beatles.
The odd thing is, Yesterday never quite figures out how to make the most of the sizeable sonic headstart it has on the rest of the pack.
Yes, the hits of John, Paul, George and Ringo are stuffed into the screenplay like large diamonds in a small sock. But they won’t hit you hard with that day-changing, soul-lifting rush of pure pleasure embedded in the DNA of every Beatles song.
Originally published as Worst movie moments of 2019