Top 10 Favorite 2014 Movies
It has been 10 years since 2014 and while I like some of the best movies of the 2010s, several of them are from 2014. Today I thought I would share my 10 favorite movies of 2014. Let’s get started!
10. John Wick: I’m fairly new to the John Wick franchise, I only watched the movie for the first time prior to the fourth film coming out. This is a very cool franchise with great action and great world building. We don’t get a lot of action movies nowadays, it wasn’t the genre it was back in the 80s and 90s. There’s a few action franchises that are great, John Wick and Mission Impossible being the notable ones to talk about. The action choreography in John Wick is simply fantastic, they do such incredible stunt work and it’s so impressive that Keanu Reeves started this franchise in his late 40s and is doing all of this crazy over the top stuff. Another aspect this film nailed was the world building, they created this world that you want to spend more time in. Every sequel explored more of this, we saw more of it. With the fourth film probably being the final film in the franchise, it’s a franchise that lends itself to spin-offs. This film did a fantastic job of laying the groundwork for this world. This is a movie that has so many aspects about it that are simply fantastic, it’s a great action movie.
9. How to Train Your Dragon 2: I’ve never been a massive fan of the How to Train Your Dragon trilogy. It’s not a franchise that I grew up with, the third film was the only film I saw in the theater. But I think the second film is easily the best of the bunch and it blends everything together so well. The first film did great world building with this world of Vikings and their relationship to dragons. This film can expand upon that, if the first film was a story about a father and a son. This one introduces Hiccup’s mother, so it’s a mother and son story. There’s some new emotional beats that come with that, we understand her relationship with Hiccup and his father. It also takes The Empire Strikes Back sequel approach, so it’s a darker story with a bigger threat, where you feel the stakes of the threat. They add in several new characters, nice new additions to the film. They don’t over shadow the characters we know from the first film but they just flesh out this world. This is a great animated movie that is my favorite of the trilogy.
8. Edge of Tomorrow: This is a perfect example of a movie that I want a sequel to. This might be Tom Cruise’s most underrated movie, the movie didn’t do a great job of marketing just how fun the movie is. So the movie kind of disappointed at the box office, it’s a shame because this is a fantastic blockbuster that is incredibly entertaining. It’s a time loop sci-fi action movie where Tom Cruise is trying to stop an alien invasion, but every time he dies he resets back to the same starting point. So he’s trying to get to point B to stop the alien invasion. It repeats certain events over and over again, but it’s constantly entertaining. Tom Cruise is playing against type in this movie, normally he’s playing a very confident hero. Here, he’s playing the opposite; he's a bit of a coward and a reluctant hero. This was my introduction to Emily Blunt and she’s fantastic, she’s holding her own against Tom Cruise in the movie. The set-up for the plot, there’s a lot of very interesting directions you can go with for a sequel.
7. Big Hero 6: A Disney animated movie that doesn’t follow the typical Disney formula but is one of Disney’s best. It’s something so different, it’s adapted from a Marvel comic book mixed with the heart and soul of Disney and you get something special. This is another movie that I really want a sequel to and there’s so much you can do with a sequel. It’s a world of superheroes set in a futuristic world so there’s a lot of stories you can tell. The movie has one of the best comedic relief side characters with Baymax, who’s just so quotable and likable. You just love Baymax as a character and you want more with him. You want more of the dynamic between Hiro and Baymax, it follows a lot of tropes but does the tropes really well. There’s also several iconic and super memorable sequences from beginning to end, all of them either make me laugh or cry. This is the type of animated movie that is a bit more my thing and it’s easily one of the best films of 2014.
6. X-Men: Days of Future Past: I’m currently making my way through the X-Men movies. I haven't rewatched this movie yet, but I will in the near future. This is a movie that I’ve always loved and I think it’s one of the best X-Men films to date. They found a story that makes sense that combines the original set of films with the prequel films. They use time travel and Wolverine to tell this story and it all works so well. It’s so much fun to be able to see Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy interact with each other on screen. I love those scenes. The movie is filled with fantastic and memorable sequences, the big one to talk about is The Pentagon sequence with Quicksilver, the music that plays and what Quicksilver does is so memorable. But all through-out the film you get these sequences where every one of our heroes get a time and a moment to shine. I love the music here, the visuals are top notch. This is everything I want from an X-Men movie. It’s the biggest film of the franchise, but it’s able to contain all of it and tell a coherent and layered story.
5. Whiplash: If X-Men: Days of Future Past is this big epic movie stretching multiple decades with a big ensemble of characters. Whiplash is like the complete opposite of that, this is a film with a fraction of the amount of actors in Days of Future Past, but it’s better and more effective. If you were to describe the plot to someone it’s about competitive jazz drumming, it wouldn’t sound interesting at all. You’d be confused as to why that got made into a movie. Damian Chazelle was able to work his magic and tell a story about a character pursuing greatness in a way where you don’t like either one of your lead characters. Both characters are so unlikable, you hate them, you despise them but that’s what makes it interesting and compelling. You’re watching these two incredibly unlikable characters put them at odds with each other and you see their worst qualities come out more and more. J.K. Simmons gives a career best performance, Oscar well deserved if you ask me. This was Damian Chazelle’s directorial debut and it’s pretty fantastic.
4. Guardians of the Galaxy: When they first announced that James Gunn was going to be directing a space adventure movie about a talking raccoon and a talking tree, starring the chubby side character from Parks and Recreation, it sounded like a terrible idea. It’s 10 years later and it wasn’t a terrible idea, it was a rather good idea. To this day, it’s one of the MCU’s best movies, one of its funniest movies, and one of the most heartfelt movies. I would actually argue this is the funniest movie in the MCU, everytime I watch it I’m laughing out loud from beginning to end. The comedic timing of Chris Pratt mixed with James Gunn’s sense of humor just works for me. James Gunn was able to tell a story that sounds so ridiculous on paper, but tell a film about outcasts coming together and forming a family. So when a talking tree says “We Are Groot” instead of “I Am Groot”, you start getting emotional, it’s one of the most emotional deaths in the MCU. It also has one of the best soundtracks of all time, probably the best soundtrack of the 21st century.
3. The LEGO Movie: This movie wins the award for the film I’ve seen the most times in the theater. I saw this film four times in the theater within the first month of it coming out. That’s how much I loved the movie when it came out and I still love this movie. This movie proves how great of a creative team Lord and Miller are, where they tell this crazy and wacky story about LEGOs filled with cameos from every property they could get. But always manage to tell a story that has a lot of heart and big emotions. It’s very much a chosen one story with a hero’s journey for the lead character, we see him grow and change in the movie. The movie has great pay off as you move into the third act of the film. You get a great sense of humor in the film, with a rapid amount of jokes referencing pop culture and just very witty dialogue. Where they create this joke of “honey, where are my pants?” and it’s this incredibly memorable line. 2014 was the year of Chris Pratt. This was his final film before Guardians of the Galaxy. That movie really made him an A-lister. These two movies are arguably his best movies to date.
2. Captain America: The Winter Soldier: Another fantastic and top tier MCU movie and one that is a genre blender. It mixes the comic book movie genre with a political spy thriller tone and vibe over the entire thing. They very wisely told this story with Steve Rogers as the lead character. Steve Rogers is introduced in The First Avenger in a world where it’s very black and white, there’s very clear good guys and very clear bad guys. But with this movie, it’s much more unclear who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. It causes Steve to go against what he believes in, what he knows and he’s just the perfect character for this story. This also was The Russo Brother’s first MCU movie and they made a mark on the franchise and genre. They delivered a movie that is complex and thrilling from beginning to end with some of the MCU’s best action. The elevator fight is the big one to talk about it, it just shows how badass Steve Rogers is. The fight on the Lamerian Star is also fantastic. You get a finale that is one of the most emotional MCU movies where we see Steve Rogers having to fight his friend, Bucky Barnes. It’s one of the MCU’s best movies and it’s one of the best movies ever made.
1. Gone Girl: I’ve said it many times before. David Fincher is one of my favorite directors of all time, might even be my favorite. He has so many fantastic movies that are some of my favorites of all time. One of these great movies would be Gone Girl, a movie that allows David Fincher to play around in the genre that made him famous. It's a dark mystery thriller, where from the very beginning of the film you’re wondering what happened to the wife and why. This movie has one of the best usages of an unreliable narrator I’ve ever seen. The audience is presented with certain information, but later we learn the true meaning behind it. So there’s several twists and turns in the film that keep you guessing. You don’t know what’s about to happen, you think you have the film figured out then it switches up on you and does something different. The film can also have a nice sharp sense of humor inside of it, it’s not overplayed, it never undermines the tension of a scene. But it’s used just the right amounts to lighten up certain scenes. There’s a lot of competition from this year of movies, but when I look back on the best movies of 2014. Gone Girl is the one I’m going with, it’s simply fantastic and one of my favorite movies ever made.
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