Amazeballs

There’s a delicious, fizzy pleasure to an action comedy that knows it’s a cocktail—equal parts sweet, sour, and shamelessly silly. “Novocaine,” directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, arrives in our cinematic bloodstream like a jolt of—well, you know—something that deadens all but our delight. This is the rare studio product in which the soundtrack isn’t just wallpaper but a running vein, from the beautifully melancholic “Everybody Hurts” (R.E.M., that old-wound anthem for generation after generation of walking wounded) to the glitzy throb of “I Believe in a Thing Called Love.” It’s musical nostalgia used as time machine and emotional shortcut—and it works, sometimes earning more feeling than the plot does.

Just when you think you’ve seen every action movie variation—a relentless barrage of bullets, a battered hero bleeding patriotism in the dust, evil men with nicknames like “The Stinger”—along comes Counterattack, a film that throws itself into the jungle firefight with reckless abandon, only to get pinned down by the most familiar artillery in the screenwriter’s arsenal. If the action genre has become the cinematic equivalent of a well-worn pair of combat boots, this international effort polishes the leather but never changes the tread.

You don’t expect the second act of a pulp saga to step out dressed like a debonair European count, its American whiskey burn now decanted into a highball of perfume and precision. But “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” does just that. With Christian Gudegast at the helm again, this time the director seems less intent on breaking bottles over your head and more interested in swirling the contents around until the bouquet rises—a sequel that charges out of L.A.’s dusty streets and into a velvet-draped, neon-lit Europe, trading in bare-knuckled bravado for continental sophistication. It’s everything about the first film sanded and buffed until we can see our disbelieving reflection in every shimmering diamond.