It's over. It's finally over. 2024 was a year for me with changing jobs multiple times, health issues, and more personal stuff but I'm happy to say that I enjoyed one aspect at least and that was the movies! There were some really solid flicks this year and while I'll be covering all of my favorites at a later date in video form (if you're really curious I have the full list on Letterboxd) it is time to dive into one of the most mid months of movies of the year. December had a few absolute bonafide hits on its hands but it equally had some serious stinkers. I Got through 25 movies, so let's break 'em down here.
#25- Mickey and the Very Many Christmases
[Watched on Disney+]
The animation here was overall really solid, but the story just did not work in the slightest. They essentially just rip off Huey, Dewey and Louie's plot from
Mickey's Twice Upon a Christmas where Mickey wishes every day could be Christmas and then that turns out to suck. Then the addition of someone's fursona as the elf just felt super jarring when she showed up it was like something straight off of the Ideas Wiki with some weird self insert that took me out entirely. I guess for really little kids this works, but where Mickey and friends are so iconic, I hate to see these watered down specials that deliver no charm.
#24- Sonic the Hedgehog 3
[Watched in theaters]
I know this is about to get me crucified on some corners of the internet but I just don't like the
Sonic the Hedgehog movies. I went back and watched the first two after seeing this to see if maybe there's some context or something I missed that would improve it, but no, it's all exactly the same sludge.
People are toting this as the best of the trilogy and, I mean, I guess, but that doesn't make it good. Shadow's tragic backstory was undercooked and I didn't care in the slightest, Sonic and his friends are grating to listen to (and that's coming from someone who does like Ben Schwartz), and the plotline is so nonsensically stupid that there aren't even any stakes. The human characters felt like they were in a totally different movie, I hated everything about Team Sonic, I found Shadow to be a waste of a pretty neat design (though I guess he's accurate to being edgy for edge's sake) and Keanu Reeves, Idris Alba, and Jim Carrey were all just absolutely wasted here. The end credits stinger teased another character and kids in the audience audibly gasped and I genuinely could not tell you who this character was. Good for fans that enjoy this I guess, but I thought it sucked and never want to subject myself to this series again.
#23- Mary
[Watched on Netflix]
Despite my general aversion to religious movies like a
God's Not Dead or the other slop Angel Studios puts out, I do love a good Biblical epic and the story of Mary is one I thought would be pretty interesting. It had Sir Anthony Hopkins as King Herod the Great so at least something would be worth watching I thought. Unfortunately, this movie is just straight up a snooze-fest. Starting with Mary's childhood and youth makes sense and her visits from Archangel Gabriel are some decent scenes and Gabriel is equal parts intriguing and terrifying, but overall it was just super boring. The journey to Bethlehem felt completely undercooked and Mary doesn't even ride on a donkey, they just take a cart. My very catholic grandmother enjoyed the movie so maybe for religious folks this one works, but for me it was just a boring adaptation of a classic story that could've been (and has been) done way better.
#22- Kraven the Hunter
[Watched in theaters]
I'm incredibly happy that we are officially done with the Sony Spider-Man-less Universe because after
Madame Web and
Venom: The Last Dance, its last hope really was
Kraven and it did not meet that goal. I really like Kraven as a character and I think he could've been really effective as a villain hunting down Venom in his series if they weren't gonna stick Spider-man in.
Venom: The Last Dance where he's being hunted by Kraven instead of faceless CGI aliens could've really improved that movie and used Kraven well. Instead, we get good guy Kraven who hates poachers and also the Russian mob and so he takes them all out.
If the movie had stuck to the angle of him being against poachers and made it because he's all about the hunt and finds poaching to be cheating, sure, I could get behind that movie, but it seems to be because he just doesn't like hunting? That's weird. Then they drop the poaching stuff almost immediately so that he and Ariana DeBose can have ADR nightmare dialogue while hiding from The Rhino who only becomes The Rhino at the very end of the movie. Somehow, I think this is a worse Rhino than Paul Giamatti. This movie just didn't work at all, it was predictable, dumb, assassinated the characters in it, and killed a dying universe. Don't watch it.
#21- The Return
[Watched in theaters]
The Odyssey is probably among the most iconic stories in history and somehow this movie starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus is made to be so ridiculously boring. They leave out any depiction of the pantheon of gods, monsters, or anything interesting depicted in The Odyssey and just focus on an old dude going home. Greek Mythology is beloved and this movie takes a dump on it. The Odyssey should be an epic journey and this was not that at all.
#20- SpongeBob and Sandy's Country Christmas
[Watched on Paramount+]
I Stand by my point that SpongeBob should be over at this point. While this was marginally better than this year's
Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie, it's mostly because the stop motion animation here is actually really solid. The storyline about having to save Christmas because Santa gets incapacitated has been done a billion times, I simply don't like Sandy's family, and the special feels too stuffed with reference humor to be an actually interesting or fun special. I know people don't agree with me on this, but let's just wrap up the sponge once and for all, this is just a product at this point.
#19- Maria
[Watched on Netflix]
Just an absolute bore. What was with December and the boring movies? Angelina Jolie will walk out with an Oscar nomination and that's fair enough, but nothing in this movie gripped me in any way and I've essentially forgotten the entire thing already.
#18- Y2K
[Watched on VOD]
As a concept, this works, but in execution it's just an (again) boring interpretation of something that could've been really good. Y2K was a wacky idea and an electronic apocalypse as a consequence is fun, plus the movie does have some decent kills. In the first act, I didn't entirely hate this and thought it could be a fun horror comedy, but it quickly devolves as it kills off all of the fun and interesting characters and keeps around exclusively the milquetoast cookie cutter ones until you just don't care anymore by the end because all the characters you liked watching are dead. It's a bummer because I do like a dumb horror comedy but this was neither good horror nor a good comedy and had WAYYYY too much Fred Durst.
#17- Queer
[Watched in Theaters]
Flukea Guadagnino does it again because what the hell was this?
Queer really worked for me in the first act where it's just an older guy and a younger guy going through their relationship struggles in 1950s Mexico. If the movie stayed as an exploration of that dynamic and kept up the intrigue it had built, I think this could've been a decent enough time. However, around the second act Daniel Craig's character suddenly has a drug addiction he didn't seem to have before and now he and his boy toy are headed to South America to do drugs in the jungle. This portion of the film just entirely lost me and jumped the shark so much. I know it's based on a book and isn't entirely Luca's fault, but I just could not get behind the second half of this movie. It's better than
Bones and All at least, but it's certainly no
Challengers.
#16- The Wonderful World of Disney: Holiday Spectacular
[Watched on Disney+]
This doesn't even count, it's just a concert film, but I did watch it and it's on Letterboxd, so I included it. It's essentially the same as it is every year with some musical guests and Disney propaganda stuffed into a Christmas special. You know what you're getting but it's a classic way to kick off the Christmas season for my family so I had to watch it.
