After a year and a pandemic that brought the entire entertainment industry to a standstill for months, 2021 marked the return of something close to the normal theatrical film release schedule. Even amid some of the most challenging circumstances in media history, 2021 was a big year for cinema.
The return of movies also meant the return of bad movies in a big way. You might have thought, given how long some of these titles have sat on a shelf waiting for a release because of the pandemic, that their creators could have continued working on them, tweaking their plots, refining their edits, improving their humor.
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You thought wrong! Then again, all the extra time and money in the world couldn't have fixed some of these titles, which were among the biggest creative bombs in recent memory.
In the film version, Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt play mismatched partners in search of a magic tree. They're crafted as a romantic, offbeat team like something out of a 1940s adventure movie, but their chemistry is as contrived as the film's CGI.
A very peculiar flop. It has an excellent cast, an interesting premise, an evocative dystopian world, and stunning production design – pretty much everything you'd want in modern tech noir. The only problem: Throwback is also one of the most boring movies of the century. Even the chases and fights lack energy or enthusiasm. Everything is lifeless.
Here you have Ryan Reynolds playing a video game NPC who keeps trying to kiss a girl while everyone talks about how handsome he looks. Serious; appears in almost every scene. It's as if the script was written by Reynolds' publicist.
That movie is like Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the TV meme for 125 straight minutes. It's filled with reverent homages to the props, sets, and actors of old movies. None of the new characters left any kind of positive impression.
All three main stars are attractive, talented, charming, and not a single interesting line between their characters. The bullfight scene might be the ugliest and obviously most contrived sequence in any 2021 movie.
