10 Movies That Tried To Subvert Expectations (But Still Sucked)

Biopics frequently succumb to cliche, and it's never a bad thing when one tries to be more experimental - Love & Mercy, Rocketman, and I'm Not There are all good examples of this - and the 2022 biopic of Marilyn Monroe (Ana de Armas, who's great despite the material) also goes down the more avant-garde route... but not successfully.

With Blonde, despite the film's impressive cinematography, its surreal, abstract content all feels so generalized and meaningless. It drags on for almost three hours while saying pretty much nothing and having little in the way of plot or character development, making it a monument to self-indulgence. 

That's all bad enough, but what makes Blonde even worse is just how offensive it is. Despite claiming to condemn the exploitation of Marilyn Monroe, the picture does exactly that, reducing Monroe to a passive, sexualized object of the male gaze who's subjected to one brutalizing act after another. 

It also throws in a grossly offensive scene in which Monroe is sexually assaulted by John F. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson), despite there being absolutely nothing to suggest that this happened. It's fair to say that the Kennedy family has been through enough tragedy without some garbage biopic coming out with such a vile depiction of a man who isn't here to defend himself.

Writer-director Andrew Dominik is a really talented guy, and he deserves praise for trying to do a different kind of biopic. It's just a crying shame it worked out so badly, even winning the Razzie for Worst Picture.