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.

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.

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.

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.

What kind of mad, magnificent nerve does it take to thread blues, Jim Crow, juke joints, and bloody fanged vampires into a single, haunted hymn, then have the whole thing vibrate with a weary, unvarnished soul? In “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s blood-spattered Delta opera, the answer is: more nerve than most directors have in their little fingers. For a movie that starts off with the horror bag’s oldest two-bit trick, jump cuts and sulfurous flashbacks, as if auditioning to be the next entry in The Conjuring Industrial Complex, this one slinks out of its corner, trades its fangs for a microphone, and spins its story so slow and deep you could fall into it and drown in its music. Ten minutes in, I nearly scoffed. Ninety minutes later, I was reeling, what fuckery is this?

Is there a particular word in the English language for when you watch a movie with the quiet hope that this time, the star you once admired will drag herself out of direct-to-video purgatory and surprise you? If there is, “Stolen Girl” killed it dead. It’s the sort of film that leaves you looking at the title and wishing it applied to your ticket money.

Sequels, by design, are inheritances, too often, like any suspect will, they squander the family fortune on wasted violence and reheated melodrama. For a while, Inside Furioza looks set to repeat the pattern: the first act unspools with the weight and momentum of last year’s pierogi, and you fear it’ll languish in the shadow of its predecessor’s best moments. But then, almost as if the movie itself sobers up, the violence starts to matter, the betrayals burn, and the familiar bruised psychology of this franchise kicks in hard.

There’s a time-honored tradition in cinema, the men-versus-beast saga, that old primal dance where human muscle and nerves are pitted against Nature’s monstrous embodiment. You take a handful of plucky survivors, toss them into a cauldron with a theatrical bloodthirsty menace, and watch them squirm, sweat, and, with luck, reveal the tender, squishy stuff they’re made of. When done well, the air crackles: you’ve got tanned, panicked flesh, gnashing teeth (shark or man, take your pick), and that perfect frisson of horror and black comedy. When done poorly, as in the lamentably misnamed Beast of War, you can practically hear the rubbery props squeak and the actors yawn. The only beast here is monotony, snapping at your ankles.