Movies

Some action movies arrive with a bang. Others sort of slouch through the saloon doors, wipe the dust from their boots, and promptly trip over their own spurs. Day of Reckoning opens with all the promise you get from a cast headlined by Scott Adkins in a ten-gallon hat, Billy Zane dusting off his best villainous glare, and a plot that all but shouts “shootout at sundown!” Five minutes in, you realize the film isn’t actually interested in its cast, its plot, or setting fire to the screen. Instead, it’s the cinematic equivalent of some deep-fried bar snack, salty, overdone, and destined to give you regret.

Some movies limp over the finish line; The Long Walk manages to trip flat on its face and somehow keeps crawling, dead weight and all. For nearly two hours, I watched a parade of doomed teenagers shuffle alongside an endless highway, and no, this is not a lost “Hunger Games” outtake, though you’d be forgiven for thinking so - Francis Lawrence directed both. To call it familiar is to undersell déjà vu. By minute thirty, I recognized the blueprint: kids, endurance, grim spectacle, draconian rules, broadcast violence, and a regime that puts the “fun” in fundamental oppression. Only, the “fun” is nowhere in sight.

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.

The Killer’s Game is a dumb-fun pinball machine, a high-calorie action caper that’s all elbows and B-movie brio, careening between pulp gags and neon guts, knocking you around for 90 minutes, and then blowing you a kiss on the way out the door.

If I told you I had survived Afterburn, would you believe it? Not the solar flare, though God knows, a good napalm blast might have improved things but the movie itself, which, for all its threat of global devastation, never generates enough heat or chaos to even scorch a popcorn kernel. It’s the end of the world as imagined by the world’s most slavish Second Unit directors: hulking men with enough metaphorical duck tape to keep the doors of Hollywood’s post-apocalyptic junkyard swinging well into the next ice age, and not a single brain cell set alight in the process.

There are bad movies, and then there are bad movies that drag down your evening like a wet mattress, so bloated and lumpy you wonder whose idea of a good time this was supposed to be. And then, just occasionally, there are bad movies with Scott Adkins: a category unto itself, and, for a certain breed of cinematic masochist (and I count myself among them), a kind of siren song. Green Street Hooligans 3: Never Back Down is not the sort of film that graces anyone’s “Best of the Decade” lists. But if you’ve ever found yourself shouting “Boyka!” at the TV as Adkins performs a flying scissor kick on some lumpen fool, well, perhaps you, too, have a perverse curiosity to see just how low the man will go for a paycheck.

There’s unwatchable, and then there’s Green Street Hooligans 2, a cinematic beating so persistent, so brainless, it feels not so much like a sequel as a hostage situation. The sheer fatuousness of it makes you yearn for the subtlety and wit of the “Play of the Week” sketches at your local sixth-form. It’s not just that this is a bad movie; it’s that it’s a bad idea for a movie, manufactured not with passion or even cynical cash-grab energy, but with a kind of moronic resignation. Every frame, every groaning chunk of dialogue, every pratfall masquerading as “acting” screams: we didn’t want to be here, either.

There’s something almost touching, almost, about a movie so desperate to wrap itself in the gravitas of “true crime” mythology that it ends up draped in wet, mildewed football scarves. “Rise of the Footsoldier” is less a film than a brute-force memory dump, a feverish scrapbook of loutish glory so in love with its subject that it never pauses to consider whether anyone else could possibly care. If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you force-fed a biopic to a slot machine, pulling the lever every time someone gets bottled or called a four-letter word, look no further.

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.

Is there anything sweeter than a genre picture that tries to sneak a love story past a firing squad of monsters, bioweapons, and the apocalypse itself—and half-succeeds not by brute force, but by the sheer force of its leads? Hollywood, that eternal laboratory of hybrid creatures, has never tired of shoving its pretty faces into the trenches of the end times, but Scott Derrickson’s The Gorge practically begs to ask: if the world was ending, wouldn’t you fall in love if you could? (Especially if Miles Teller was across the way with a rifle and Anya Taylor-Joy was the voice in your headset?) Well, how could you not.