Mehnificent

There’s a special kind of letdown reserved for sequels to movies that had no business being as bracing as they were. The Accountant (2016) was, in its own chilly way, a genre cocktail so sharp it could clean wounds, a pulpy thriller where Ben Affleck’s Christian Wolff moved through the world with the precision of a human abacus lashed to a suppressed scream. The violence, when it landed, felt both willed and suffered; every bruise, a mark on his actuarial soul. It was a film content to be odd, morose, even embarrassing in its sincerity, neurosis and action stitched together with genuine ache for difference.

There are films that amuse and films that aspire, and then there are the corporate offspring, movies conceived in committee meetings, designed to be clicked, not felt. A Minecraft Movie isn’t just brand extension, it’s brand substitution: a video game adaptation that doesn’t so much build as prefab, a film that wears the pixelated mask of Minecraft but, beneath the surface, runs the codebase of something else entirely. It is, in the argot of the very medium it adapts, a reskin. Or, to use a more distressing analogy from contemporary gaming: Fallout 4 on the bones of Skyrim, everything familiar, just differently textured.

Oh dear, it’s always a little heartbreaking to watch a film trundle out its aspirations with confetti and sashes, only to trip over its own parade float and land face-first in the mud. Founders Day wants so much to be a cheeky contribution to the crowded boudoir of holiday slashers, a genre already thick with gore-soaked in-jokes and severed limbs of irony, but the result is the sort of limp, confounding spectacle which leaves you dazed at the exit, wondering whether you’ve seen a movie at all or simply sat through a particularly aggressive PTA meeting with unfortunate casualties.

Of all the ways an already mediocre American Western might earn its place in the history books, Rust, Joel Souza’s 2024 genre exercise, had the misfortune of being immortalized by catastrophe rather than by the merits it so earnestly (and so transparently) seeks. Released under a pall as heavy as Wyoming’s own lowering skies, Rust cannot be written about, really, in isolation; the fatal shadow of Halyna Hutchins’ death seeps into every frame, blurring what might have been a straight-plodding piece of entertainment into a cultural memento mori.

What does it mean for a gangster film—not just in Taiwan, but anywhere in the world—to recite all the liturgies of brotherhood, blood, and betrayal, but leave you with nothing more than the memory of flickering shadows on a wall? Joe Lee’s Gatao (2015) is exactly that: a movie that earnestly checks the boxes of triad cinema, hoping to conjure up some of the lurid energy that made Hong Kong’s Young and Dangerous a pop touchstone—but ending up more like a karaoke version sung after midnight, charming in its recognizability, but never threatening to set the night on fire.

Bill Duke’s Deep Cover wears its neon-lit grime like a badge of honor—a garish, stylized crime thriller dressed up in the trappings of hardboiled noir and early-’90s urban anxiety. If the movie’s mood—the slick rain on Los Angeles streets, the burnished cathedrals of vice, and the snaking synth-and-hip-hop soundtrack—is its raison d’être, then what we get, ultimately, is exactly that: a heady, immersive surface that is always beckoning, yet never really giving.