Mehnificent

To paraphrase that old Greco-Roman epigram, blessed is the film that knows how to quit while it’s ahead. For the first forty minutes or so, Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite turns the otherwise stultifying business of Situation Room protocol and nuclear hair-trigger bureaucracy into a kind of collective nervous breakdown, cross-bred with a heist film’s mounting tension. It’s the closest she’s come to her Zero Dark Thirty high, a surgical re-immersion in the world of men and women doing “the job”, capital letters implied, even if that job looks, from without, like holding conference calls and watching red blips crawl toward American soil.

There’s a kind of tourist satisfaction, I imagine, in donning your stone-washed jeans and slouching into Green Street Hooligans like an American exchange student ordering a pint in a smoky East London pub and hoping nobody notices his accent, except of course that’s the whole point. For the length of two hours, you can be inducted into the sacred rituals of football fandom, which, in this film, are less about the beautiful game than the less beautiful art of knocking a rival’s teeth out on the pavement. In the annals of cinematic culture clash, this film gives us Elijah Wood, yes, Frodo, the most cherubic of hobbits, stumbling into the maw of West Ham United’s Green Street Elite and coming out shouting “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” Beware the man who sings showtunes after breaking someone’s nose.

Scott Adkins, God bless him, is the sort of one-man genre rescue mission only the British could produce—a demolition expert for busted action franchises and the patron saint of straight-to-streaming also-rans. In Prisoner of War, he’s parachuted (or rather crash-landed, with his jaw set to “unbreakable”) into the kind of pseudo-epic, sun-bleached World War II slog that once would have starred John Wayne—in a century when the “Great Escape” meant climbing out of Malibu traffic, not a bamboo stockade.

There’s a moment in Abel Ferrara’s “King of New York” when Christopher Walken strolls through a gloomy, blue-lit hallway, hair slicked, cheekbones gleaming, eyes burning with the privilege of a man who’s read the end of the story and knows he’s the only one left standing. Walken gives a performance so electrically odd you half expect the camera to tilt, or for the rest of the movie to collapse into a pile of glittering dust. And at times it almost does, but not for the reasons Ferrara might have intended.

There’s a certain peculiar whiff that rises from this new “Toxic Avenger”, a reek of imitation, the sort of knockoff funk you get if you leave a Troma movie out in the sun and hope the radioactive stink will pass for flavor. Instead, it sours. Maybe that’s what you get when you take a perfectly naive cultural artifact, dip it in two decades of “ironic” reboot culture, and serve it up with a garnish of prosthetic gore and Peter Dinklage’s self-satisfied squint.

If you ever wanted to see American family dysfunction tiptoe right up to the precipice, peer over, consider taking a leap into delicious manic farce, and then, ever-so-polite, decide it’d rather just shuffle a little awkwardly for ninety minutes “Adulthood” is your movie.