Ranking the Movies of 2018: Week 14
'Ready Player One' drops down the list while 'Rampage' debuts.
Those who follow this column closely will notice that Ready Player One has dropped on the list. The more I sit with Ready Player One, the more I don’t care for it. I had a reckoning with my feelings about Ready Player One two weeks ago and at that time I felt that the quality of the adventure in Ready Player One was enough for me to give the movie a pass.
Then I read Nathan Rabin’s column on Ready Player One and came to agree with his point about how the movie and the book pander so desperately to geek culture while offering little more than a few cheap thrills. Skillful cheap thrills, he’s still Steven Speilberg after all, but cheap thrills nevertheless. There is a mercenary quality to the references in Ready Player One, as if each reference weren’t an organic choice but a market-tested reference assured to appeal to the core audience being flattered by Ready Player One.
Now that I have addressed my declining opinion of Ready Player One let’s talk new movies. Isle of Dogs is the top debut of the week but it’s not exactly an exciting debut. Wes Anderson’s latest pretentious art project is consistently amusing with a heartwarming story about the love and loyalty between humans and pets but there is an empty quality to the film as well, one where the film has emotion but isn’t fully invested in that emotion.
Rampage is the latest big-budget extravaganza starring the biggest movie star on the planet, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. I am a huge fan of The Rock and he’s not bad in Rampage; in fact, he’s the only good thing about this terrible movie. Rampage should be dumb fun ala Rock’s Fast & Furious movies but instead, Rampage is a tedious exercise in exposition-heavy dialogue and louder than ever sound design that, at the very least, drowns out some of the awful dialogue.
The other new release this week is the foreign relations hostage drama, Beirut starring Jon Hamm. Beirut isn’t bad but the marketing campaign is utterly bizarre. The film was released on a Wednesday with so little fanfare that the film played to thousands of empty seats across the United States. That the film was only competent is part of the answer why people skipped this one but it doesn’t explain why the film was released in theaters at all if the studio wasn’t going to support it.
Our classic on this week’s Everyone’s a Critic Movie Review Podcast was Friday the 13th in honor of the actual Friday the 13th which arrived this past Friday. Unlike the experience I had rewatching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and realizing that it is one of the most thoughtful yet terrifying movies ever made, Friday the 13th only lessens in stature on rewatch.
The emptiness at the core of Friday the 13th undermines the notion that the film was revolutionary in creating the horror tropes of today. In fairness, I can’t deny that the cheap moralizing of Friday the 13th wasn’t significantly influential in the horror genre, the bottom line about Friday the 13th is that it is just a slasher movie with no real significance behind it. The film has a mercenary air that has only become more prominent in the years since its release. The first film capitalized on Halloween and Texas Chainsaw’s bloody impact and every Friday the 13th since adapted to whatever trend was taking place in the genre in a further attempt at cashing in on empty violence.
Next week, Super Troopers and Super Troopers 2 will be joining the rankings as we have named Super Troopers as our “Classic”, heavy quotations on that word, on the show to go with the 4/20 release of Super Troopers 2. Amy Schumer will join the list as well as her new movie I Feel Pretty opens this week and finally a new movie about Human Trafficking called Traffik will also find room on this list.
New rankings below and new additions to the list are in bold type…
1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
3. Black Swan
7. Best F®iends
8. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
9. Annihilation
10. Unsane
11. Just Charlie
12. Columbus
13. The Death of Stalin
14. Hostiles
16. Boogie Nights
17. Foxy Brown
18. Becks
19. A Quiet Place
20. Game Night
21. Are We Not Cats
23. 12 Strong
24. Red Sparrow
25. Act & Punishment
28. Switching Channels
29. Actors of Sound: A Foley Artist Documentary
30. Tomb Raider
31. War Games
32. Ready Player One
34. Sheik Jackson
35. Gringo
36. Love, Simon
37. Isle of Dogs
38. Hurricane Heist
39. Samson & Delilah
40. Heat
41. Hell’s House
42. The Last Movie Star
44. Blockers
45. Early Man
46. Almost Paris
47. Bloodsport
48. Reds
49. Play Misty for Me
50. Frantic
51. Beirut
52. 7 Days in Entebbe
53. Taffin
54. Samson
55. Friday the 13th
56. Rampage
57. Last House on the Left
58. Burnt Offerings
59. Paddington 2
61. Sherlock Gnomes
62. Chappaquiddick
63. Cloverfield Paradox
64. Peter Rabbit
65. Proud Mary
66. The Mist
67. God’s Not Dead: A Light in the Darkness
68. Den of Thieves
69. Death Wish 1974
70. Death Wish 2018
71. The Commuter
73. Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built
74. Midnight Sun
75. Forever My Girl
76. Every Day
78. 15:17 to Paris
79. Truth or Dare
80. The Greasy Strangler
About the Creator
Sean Patrick
Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.
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