Top 10 and Worst Films of 2018

Howdy everybody and welcome to my third annual movie of the year awards! The first installment covered 2014 through 2016 you can check out by clicking here, and you can view 2017’s edition by clicking here! For films released in 2018 I managed to view 31 live action movies, seven animated features and four documentaries! With that out of the way, let us get onto the 2018 rankings!

Top 10 Films of 2018

10) Mile 22
9) Equalizer 2
8) Creed 2
7) Deadpool 2
6) Game Night
5) Hotel Artemis
4) Avengers Infinity War – Part One
3) Mission Impossible: Fallout
2) Skyscraper
1) The Mule

Quick shoutouts to Ready Player One and The Old Man and the Gun for being honorable mentions and just missing out on the rankings. Mile 22 surprised me with its nonstop thrills and intensity, and Wahlberg was excitingly unpredictable in his performance! Both Equalizer 2 and Creed 2 were worthy sequels, but both did not surpass the high marks set by their predecessors. I do dig that Denzel is now a Lyft driver though and the retelling of Rocky IV in Creed 2 was still nostalgic fun for me and it was great seeing Rocky and Drago square off again, but in managerial form! Deadpool 2 fared about how I thought it would, and was right up there in terms of quality of laughs and fourth-wall breaking fun that the first one delivered. I loved the X-Force implementation as well as Cable and the X-Men cameo was absolute totes! I could not bring myself to see the PG-13 remix at the end of the year. I hope Disney carries him over to the MCU when they wrap up the FOX acquisition.

Game Night was probably the sleeper hit of the year for me, mostly due to my low expectations from the hokey trailers I saw going into it, but somehow it tickled all the right funny bones for me and I lost it several times throughout it. Hotel Artemis is a night of hard-asses putting their differences to the side and survive a ubiquitous mob from hell that I ate right up! I loved the first part of the Infinity War and the long building duel with Thanos delivered! The cliffhanger has me jonesing for part two later this year! So much mayhem happened in MI: Fallout that I forgot nearly all of it, but I do recall loving the bathroom fight and continuous death-defying stunts and action that transpired throughout. Skyscraper is a guilty pleasure for me, and it still held up on my second viewing recently that you can find out all about in my review by clicking here. Ultimately, I am a huge Clint Eastwood fan, so pardon my bias as him acting on-screen for the first time in five years in another five star performance in The Mule is was stood out the most for me in 2018. How the hell does Clint still pull off these killer performances in front of and behind-the-camera at his age!? Major props to him!

Best Documentary - HBO’s Andre the Giant

It was a toss-up between the Andre doc and Won’t You Be My Neighbor that tells about the life and times of Mr. Rogers. Both are great, I only have glancing memories of the old Mr. Rogers show as I was never an avid viewer of it as a kid, but I still very much enjoyed the full tale it told. HBO killed it though with their Andre doc and they brought in tons of talent to showcase many perspectives I knew and did not know of Andre’s life. I do not have Showtime and wanted to see the Mauro Ranollo bi-polar documentary, so I am going to have to track it down on demand somewhere. I am getting awful and falling behind on ESPN’s latest 30 for 30 docs and never caught some of their 2018 releases I wanted to see on Buster Douglas and Junior Seau.

Best Animated - Wreck-It Ralph 2: Ralph Breaks the Internet

I think 2018 marked a record for most viewed amount of same-year released animated films with seven. Half of them were the straight-to-video DC films that are usually of high quality. Their take on the Death of Superman is what stood out the most to me. I was glad to see a DC animated film go to the theaters for once with Teen Titans Go…To the Movies standing out above the usual direct-to-video fare and being surprisingly better than it had any right to be. Enter the Spider-Verse also really shocked me and I was going to hold off on viewing it until I heard several people with high-buzz on it proclaiming it as their top overall film of the year. I would not go that high, but I dug its evolved CG animation style and its unique take on the ‘Spider-Verse’….though it did turned into a bit of a mess at times with so many alternate dimensions to keep tabs of.

My top two animated films were Incredibles 2 and Wreck-It Ralph 2. I am surprised it took nearly 14 years for an Incredibles sequel. This one outperformed the original in every way and I was all in on it from beginning to end. The Wreck-It Ralph sequel gets my top honors for animated feature of the year. It follows similar format of the original with obligatory nostalgic arcade memories for the first 15 minutes before primarily taking place in an original world for the remainder. Disney’s CG take on the Internet and the GTA-clone worlds the sequel takes place in though is something I can sink my teeth into this time around and the Magoffin they are after is vastly more intriguing than the original film’s plot so congrats to Wreck-It Ralph 2 for being my animated movie of the year!

Worst/Least Enjoyable Films of 2018

3) The Ritual
2) The Cloverfield Paradox
1) Annihilation

All three of these are Netflix funded thriller/scare flicks. Ritual I kind of liked for the first half of the film, but when the scares and antagonists’ finally got revealed and explained it completely wrecked it for me. Cloverfield Paradox is an awful spaceship thriller with only a brief throwaway reference to the original film to tie it all together. Annihilation rubbed me the wrong way during its entire run-time. I got countless things to nitpick and tear apart through it. I understand though a lot of people are a fan of it so I do not want to ruin that for you so suffice it to say there are too many cheap production tricks and eyebrow raising questions that go without answers and I was never so nonstop furious at a movie throughout since Suicide Squad. Save people from turning into trees because Natalie Portman sure as hell cannot…...sheesh what a waste that entire film is.
That is it for films for 2018, thank you for indulging me once again!