Mehnificent

If the original Happy Gilmore was the cinematic equivalent of being blindsided by a pie in the face. A pie filled with golf balls, beer, and genuine pathos, then Happy Gilmore 2 is what happens when someone throws three pies at you at once, turns the sprinklers on mid-swing, and then asks if you remember the taste of the original filling. It’s a legacy sequel that, for all its Frankensteinian splicing of silly and serious, still manages to resurrect Sandler’s battered but buoyant Happy with enough vigor to remind us why we ever rooted for this idiot savant and his primal swing.

There’s a particular genre of moviegoing now, call it Franchise Bereavement, where, sitting eyes glazed before the flickering remnants of a once-vital series, you feel less the thrill of pulp than the mournful exhumation of directorial intention, a séance with the ghost of what you thought the movies could be. Ballerina, advertised as “From the World of John Wick,” is less a spin-off than a séance, summoning the spirit of Keanu’s elegiac carnage into a low-lit mausoleum of hurried excess and retrofitted backstory. If its audience’s expectations are sufficiently modest, second-tier shootouts for the matinee crowd, wickless but still faintly smoldering, perhaps it delivers. But in the clear light, you see the grout, and the cracks: this is franchise hand-me-down, draped hastily around Ana de Armas like a borrowed cloak she’s expected to dignify.

If The Amateur is what happens when “Mr. Robot” and “Jason Bourne” cross DNA with too little care for the ugly offspring, this is a child born of genre cliché and laughs in the face of plausibility. Call it Mr. Squirrel: The Euro-Tour of Absurdity, Rami Malek’s twitchy everyman hacking government files by day and unmasked terrorism by night, in a world where Interpol has apparently decided to go on holiday, the CIA chases its own tail, and not a single Parisian security official or Spanish detective can be bothered to even blink at an American cryptographer detonating pools and bodies in their midst.

There’s a particular sound that reverberates in the mind when you realize that even your dependable genre heroes have begun to phone it in, a sort of dull, metallic clank, like the start of a fight scene you hoped would end differently. With Diablo, Scott Adkins charges in alongside Marko Zaror for a billed “assassin-laced redemption movie on steroids.” But what crashes onto the screen isn’t a revelation or even a sturdy brawl in the rain; it’s more like a day shift at a cookie-cutter action factory, misfiring on every cylinder except, occasionally, the one that relates to punches and kicks.

How delicious, in this era of franchise bloat and less-than-simple sequels, to be handed a second helping that leaves you sated rather than queasy. If Paul Feig's Another Simple Favor is a cocktail, it's one shaken with a confidence, a dash of vermouth and a twist of lemon, sipped poolside in Capri while the bodies float by (sometimes literally, sometimes, more enjoyably, in spirit). Rarely does a film invite the audience to marvel at its gorgeous surface and still let them dive, giggling, into its undertow. Here, we have that rare, effervescent tonic: a thriller that dresses up as a comedy, or the other way 'round; a parade of “thrills” that remembers to be, above all, fun.

There are films that, like a splashy dinner party hosted between power surges, seem to teeter joyfully on the brink of self-immolation: too bright, too eager, altogether too much. A Simple Favor, Paul Feig’s giddy, knowing leap into nonsensical noir (with quotation marks around both “noir” and “knowing”), belongs to that breed. One watches it, if one watches it at all, and I admit I was blissfully unaware of its existence until the 2025 sequel crept up like a podcast auto-play, and feels at once the tug of modern anxieties and the shriek of a fashionista’s ringtone: Are we to be shocked, amused, or both at these women’s deadly games of friendship and deception?