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.

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 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.

You walk into The Meg half ready to sneer, armed with all your righteous cineaste skepticism: here comes Jason Statham wrestling a dinosaur fish, and if that’s not enough to send you running for Bergman, nothing is. I wanted to hate it. Honestly, I did. And so, the first surprise: it’s possible, in this perverse landscape where studios toss millions at shark movies, to actually enjoy yourself despite yourself. The shame isn’t the ludicrous premise or the overblown CGI — it’s how you’re grinning by the time the third aquatic monstrosity explodes out of the Pacific, Statham bracing himself for another winking one-liner.

When George Clooney and Brad Pitt show up together in a movie these days, it’s like old royalty strutting through Times Square in sunglasses: you don’t care why they’re there, you just want to watch them soak up every inch of spotlight. That’s Wolfs—Jon Watts’s breezy, over-familiar caper where the plot is more a rumor than a skeleton, but the charm is thick enough to swim in. Was I enthralled? Not exactly. But did I have a hell of a time? Absolutely. This is the sort of picture that glides on charisma and the friction of two megawatt stars shoulder-bumping through a city that knows how to keep its secrets tucked behind neon and hotel doors.

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 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.