There’s a peculiar ache that settles in when a franchise that used to blitz your nerve endings with every punch decides—politely, apologetically—not to hit you at all. “The Roundup: Punishment” is that strange aftertaste: the fourth swing from a series that once left you reeling, but now feels like watching a once-great bar brawler retire into paperwork and Pilates.
Let’s talk about Boy Kills World—or, more precisely, let’s talk about a movie that doesn’t so much arrive as come crashing through your door, boots muddy, eyes wild, trailing the scent of a thousand better revenge flicks but insistently upbeat about its own nonsensical mayhem. Moritz Mohr, with the zeal of a film school grad who snorted every frame of John Wick and then washed it down with an energy drink, seems thrilled—no, positively giddy—to show us just how many ways he can make Bill Skarsgård break bodies in electric-neon slow motion. You don’t so much watch Boy Kills World as survive it, battered by waves of choreographed carnage, tongue-in-cheek nonsense, and so much color-grading you start craving sunglasses.
Why is it that M. Night Shyamalan, who once roped us in with dead people whispering in the suburbs and left us breathless with a simple color-red, now insists on leading us into suspense-free rooms where the walls seem made of cardboard and the only thing at stake is your patience? Knock at the Cabin (2023) is his latest parlor trick gone flat—a film that opens the curtain on big, end-of-the-world parables only to serve up a dish that’s tepid, tidy, and quietly deflating.
Let’s be honest: “The Vault” wants to be your next favorite heist movie, but it can’t even manage to lift your pulse. Directed by Jaume Balagueró, this Spanish exercise in genre mimicry gathers up all the usual suspects—plucky prodigy, world-weary ringleader, hacker-by-numbers—and puts them through a series of motions so familiar, you could swear you’ve wandered into a bank robbery rehearsal dinner.
With a title that should promise whiplash-inducing emerald spectacle—witches crooning, spellbooks ablaze, and enough glitter to bankrupt a drag parade—I traipsed into Jon M. Chu’s “Wicked” salivating for a good bewitching. Stacked with a director who once spun “Crazy Rich Asians” into a fuchsia daydream and fronted by the goddess-voiced Cynthia Erivo (Elphaba) and pop pixie Ariana Grande (Glinda), this screen adaptation had every excuse to split the difference between “The Wizard of Oz” and a Manhattan karaoke bar at four a.m. But you know the old line: Don’t judge a broomstick by its bristles. Within minutes, I could tell this wasn’t the yellow brick road—just a treadmill in Technicolor.
Let’s lay the cards on the table: when a film’s opening proposition is “Jason Statham fights a giant prehistoric shark—again,” you’d best suspend seriousness at the door. The first movie, that improbable waterlogged delight, understood this bargain: it wore its teeth with a wink, tipping its hat to every Jaws-obsessed twelve-year-old (and the ones lurking in every adult). So, of course, Hollywood—in its infinite wisdom—gives us the sequel, the bigger, dumber, and, oh yes, shoddier Meg 2: The Trench. It’s customary. It’s almost a civic obligation. Haven’t we earned our right to a shit sequel?