Mehnificent

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.

Is it possible for a movie to trip over its own cleverness and bounce back up, grinning, clutching a Santa hat in one hand and a sawed-off shotgun in the other? Shane Black seems to think so, bless him—he’s made a career of fusing Christmas lights onto grisly pulp, stapling wisecracks to bodies before the blood dries. With “Play Dirty,” he takes Donald Westlake’s Parker, criminal mastermind, eternal sourpuss, the sort of man who’d rob his grandmother if you left her in a counting room and sends him stumbling through a minefield of Black’s signature goofball banter and Yuletide noir.

There are movies that wear their ambitions like borrowed suits a size too large, and then there is The Prosecutor, a film that struts into the courtroom with the swagger of Donnie Yen and leaves you wondering if it’s about to deliver an impassioned plea or break into a roundhouse kick. Donnie Yen, Hong Kong’s tireless apologist for action set-pieces, both acts and co-produces here, and makes his usual promise—a punch with a side of principle. Yet what we get is a genre hybrid so muddled it feels like it’s been shaken, not stirred, and then poorly strained by legal censorship.