It’s been an interesting year for movies. The coronavirus pandemic has forced most films to either flee to 2021 or limp onto streaming services and hope for the best, which has left us with a considerably reduced slate of pop culture to discuss. That said, we still had plenty of movies come out in what will undeniably be remembered as the Worst Year Ever, and while plenty of those movies were unassailable triumphs, there were an equal number of others that accidentally delivered some of the most absurd moments in cinema history.
In the interest of both the historical record and my lifelong allegiance to dumbassery, I have collected the ten greatest movie moments of unintentional comedy of 2020. (Much as I did last year.) Even with a reduced release schedule, it was still a competitive race (the entirety of Brahms: The Boy II made a powerful argument for its inclusion but ultimately had to be left out), and while this list is by no means definitive, it is absolutely correct. Think of it like a yearbook of people accidentally killing themselves during the NBA Slam Dunk Contest in ways that somehow involve mascots.
The Invisible Man
To be clear, The Invisible Man was one of my favorite films of the year. Turning the classic Universal Monsters movie in to a story about a woman being gaslight by her abusive ex was a compelling choice. But most of the tension of the film hinges on us believing that he might be in any room, at any time, quietly biding his time until the opportune moment to strike. And that acceptance effectively creates a secondary movie, about an invisible man holding in pees and farts for hours at a time in exchange for gently frightening his ex-girlfriend. Seriously, there are a number of scares in the film that require the villain to have stood motionlessly in a room for half a day just to bonechillingly put his foot on a bedsheet at the right moment. Not to mention the fact that he clearly travels back and forth from his science mansion outside of town into San Francisco, which means he spends substantial portions of the film behind the wheel of a car while invisible. I need to see this version of the movie immediately.
The New Mutants
The New Mutants has been fighting an uphill battle almost since it was first announced. After several years of delays, we finally got to see the finished film, and were immediately reminded that no X-Men movie has actually managed to be good for nearly a decade. (I’m talking the X-Men series proper, not offshoots like Deadpool and Logan, although I think Logan is only slightly better than The New Mutants because stuff actually happens in it.) It’s a great idea for an X-Men movie that never really comes together, and after a little over an hour of watching six people repeatedly have the same conversation, a titanic Demon Bear the size of Dick’s Sporting Goods suddenly shows up and starts trying like hell to eat them, with varying degrees of success. The Demon Bear beats the absolute shit out of every single one of our heroes until Dani (Blu Hunt) wakes up from a plot-induced coma and commandingly shouts, “No!” And it listens to her. There’s some breezily-delivered gibberish about how the bear is a manifestation of her own fears, which sure, fine. But please understand that Dani addresses the Demon Bear with the same tone of voice you would use to scold a dog for jumping up on the counter to reach your Swiss Colony Beef Log. So, to recap, the climactic Act III superhero fight (which was already completely out of place) ends with Dani essentially saying, “Bad Bear!”
Extraction
I previously devoted an entire article to examining how many children Chris Hemsworth could defeat in a fight based on the evidence provided by the Netflix action film Extraction. That film’s titanic sequence, in which Hemsworth dismantles no less than five armed street urchins, remains one of the most potent surprises Hollywood has delivered since revealing Bruce Willis had been dead the whole time. The film is a heavy action-drama, tasking Hemsworth’s Tyler Rake with safely escorting a young boy named Ovi (Rudhraksh Jaiswal) out of Bangladesh. Rake also has the tragic backstory of a dead son, so the movie is placing a heavy emphasis on him being a surrogate father to Ovi, which is hilariously undercut by him suddenly windmilling his way through a gang of poverty-stricken children. Seriously, he beats these kids like they scratched his Camaro. It’s one of the most unexpected developments I’ve ever seen in an action movie, and I’m still thinking about it eight months after the film’s release.
Becky
Becky was a smaller movie that came out earlier this year about a family taken hostage by a gang of Neo-Nazis in a home invasion. Joel McHale tries his best to act, and is mercifully killed very early on, leading his precocious daughter Becky (Lulu Wilson) to Home Alone these racists with traps and hijinks scattered around the house and the surrounding woods. The movie as a whole is extremely fine, with the two standouts being Wilson as a rage-filled little girl and freaking Kevin James as the Neo-Nazi leader in one of his first (if not the first) non-comedic roles. James is appreciably intimidating as a bad guy (he is an extremely big dude), but nothing on this earth could prepare me for the finale, in which Wilson runs over his head with a lawnmower. It somehow manages to perfectly bisect his head in the most cartoonish way possible. If you retitled the film to A Howling, Bearded Kevin James Shockingly Disappears Beneath a Lawnmower, it would’ve been the highest grossing movie of 2020.
The Old Guard
The Old Guard was one of several big-budget action movies to premiere on Netflix this year. It’s a tale about immortal warriors that I found surprisingly dull except for one incredible moment. Tech bro billionaire Harry Melling (a.k.a. Dudley Dursley) has captured the Old Guard with the intent to use their blood to make a vaccine for old age, or something. He corners Andy (Charlize Theron) and Niles (KiKi Palmer) in the penthouse of his drug skyscraper at gunpoint, seemingly forgetting that Niles literally cannot die. He is bluntly reminded of this fact when Andy plants a genuine battle axe in his neck and Niles tackles him out the window, falling no less than 10,000 feet and punching through a parked car like a meteor. I stood up so fast my couch tipped over. A truly iconic series of events for Harry Potter’s shitty cousin.
Unhinged
There are so, so many incredible moments in Unhinged that the Academy needs to invent several new categories just to give it the award recognition it deserves. The schlock thriller starring Russell Crowe as a deranged motorist terrorizing a young woman (Caren Pistorius) after a minor traffic dispute fizzles out in its final ten minutes, but the rest of Crowe’s rampage leading up to that point is pure hambone and it absolutely was not meant to be. Every one of his cartoonishly violent outbursts, from stabbing a man to death in the middle of a diner to literally lighting a person on fire, is like watching a vengeful circus bear running loose in Legoland – a fuzzy ball of blind violence careening through a world that is powerless to stop him.
But if I were to pick a standout moment, it would be the initial confrontation between Crowe and Pistorius, in which he pulls up next to her in the kind of pickup truck typically impounded in connection with a hate crime and demands she apologize for honking at him. The exchange is meant to be tense, as it is setting up the mayhem that is to come, but Crowe makes some Choices™ in this scene that can only come from an actor who has gone Full Brando, a landmark Crowe blazed past long ago. First, he delivers all of his lines in this scene with his lower jaw sticking out like a bulldog, mumbling in an accent that is part Southern and part fucking Neptune. The end result is a man who looks like he can vaguely smell his asshole burning and suspects you are responsible for starting the fire. If you just showed me this scene completely free of context, I could be convinced it was a Borat sequel.
Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this absolutely batshit trailer, featuring a partially in-character Crowe assuring us that not even he can believe how bananas his movie is and vaguely threatening us to go see it in theaters. This 90 second trailer is more terrifying than the entirety of Unhinged.
https://twitter.com/russellcrowe/status/1329167970212356097?s=20
The Witches
There’s a lot of strange decisions being made in Robert Zemeckis’ new adaptation of Roald Dahl’s iconic child-hating story The Witches, chief among them being the decision to do it at all. It’s hard to top the grotesque horror brought to life by Jim Henson’s puppetry in the 1990 adaptation, and Zemeckis’ take didn’t do itself any favors by being overly dependent on CGI. But by far the strangest decision was hiring Chris Rock to narrate the film. Obviously, Rock is a talented performer, but his distinct voice and delivery has been so inextricably linked with his comedy for the past three decades that it immediately colored the tone of the film. I hear his voice and I want to start laughing, so any of The Witches’ attempts at tension or drama were kind of shot after that. But even after listening to Rock’s unintentionally funny narration for the entire film, nothing could prepare me for the positively shocking reveal of an old as hell Chris Rock mouse during the film’s end credits scene. It’s like watching a juggler get hit by a bus – you want to clap, but you haven’t decided why.
Capone
Capone is simultaneously the craziest movie I have ever seen and a movie I immediately forgot about the instant it was over. I had to triple-check the internet and call several friends just to verify that it did in fact come out this year. Josh Trank’s dizzying sort-of biopic starring Tom Hardy as the infamous gangster focuses entirely on the final year or so of Capone’s life, during which he was terribly afflicted with dementia. That’s a potentially interesting film on paper, but in practice all it amounted to was several scenes of Hardy growling at phantoms and loudly shitting his pants in front of people. But by far the most shocking moment occurred in the middle of a fishing trip, with Capone out on the water with his imaginary friend Matt Dillion. Capone hooks a fish, but an alligator dashes in and snatches it before he can reel it in. Capone melts down, calls the alligator a “fucking bum” several times, and blows its head off with a breechloading shotgun. Hardy’s performance in the entire film could be described as “Yosemite Sam adjacent,” and never is that more apparent than in this brief, incandescently glorious scene.
Hillbilly Elegy
The sheer volume of accidental hilarity in Hillbilly Elegy is enough to make every struggling comedy writer within a mile of your television spontaneously cast themselves into the sea. The ham-fisted and utterly tone-deaf melodrama about a teen with kind of a hard life growing up in Ohio in the 1990s is primarily two hours of people screaming at each other broken up by scenes of Glenn Close delivering indecipherable bits of hillbilly wisdom presented as timeless truths. (Her “there are three kinds of Terminators in this world” speech is like a fake ID with Abraham Lincoln’s name on it – it buys you a few seconds, but immediately falls apart under scrutiny.) But hands down the single greatest moment occurs during a flashback, in which Close tells her drunken, abusive husband “I am going to set you on fire.” The flashback skips ahead to a later incident, in which Close’s husband is once again in a drunken stupor passed out on the couch, and Close mutters something to the effect of “I told you I was going to set you on fire” before dousing his back with lighter fluid and 100% setting him on fire. He rolls off of the couch in slow motion and his children run up to put him out. This is the hardest I have ever laughed at a movie starring Glenn Close. That single moment is funnier than every comedy released this year, combined.
Artemis Fowl
I’ve already written extensively about the astounding badness of Artemis Fowl, Disney’s $125 million adaptation of the YA novel series about a child criminal mastermind. And while there were several moments in the film that made me laugh like Sam Neill sitting in the movie theater at the end of In The Mouth of Madness, the greatest achievement of Artemis Fowl is the scene in which Josh Gad unhinges his jaw to gobble up mountains of dirt while simultaneously ejecting it from his asshole like a water fountain to douse a nearby faerie. This was undeniably intended to be funny, on paper, but the actual existential horror of a man shitting dirt into a child’s face in a $125 million Disney family film was clearly something that escaped everyone involved in the production. This is not only the funniest movie moment of 2020; it’s one of the greatest sequences that has ever been captured on film. If Josh Gad doubling over and sandblasting ass dirt across the countryside is the only thing inscribed on the tombstone of humanity, we will rest easy.