Movies

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 certain kind of movie poster, bald head gleaming, tattoos crawling across the chest, a scowl carved with care, like granite beneath floodlights that comes on like a challenge. It dares you not to take it seriously, to file it away with the endless parade of hooligan pulp, football thugs, or East End bruisers with the personality of a discarded can. And so Furioza, by all appearances, looked ready to step right into that gutter. But what a joy, what a rare, mean-spirited joy to be proven so gloriously wrong.

There’s a certain peculiar whiff that rises from this new “Toxic Avenger”, a reek of imitation, the sort of knockoff funk you get if you leave a Troma movie out in the sun and hope the radioactive stink will pass for flavor. Instead, it sours. Maybe that’s what you get when you take a perfectly naive cultural artifact, dip it in two decades of “ironic” reboot culture, and serve it up with a garnish of prosthetic gore and Peter Dinklage’s self-satisfied squint.

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.

If you had told me last year that Darren Aronofsky the celluloid high priest of psychological torment, chronicler of dancers, addicts, and whales perpetually spiraling into their own obsessions, would stage a Guy Ritchie caper comedy, “with a cat,” I’d have assumed you’d been drinking what the denizens of Paul’s Bar are serving. Yet here is Caught Stealing, a film so unrecognizable as Aronofsky’s that your main clue to his involvement is the perverse glee with which the violence arrives not with the velvet caress of fate, but like a sledgehammer wrapped in Pop Rocks.

There’s a mordant joke running through “The Killer”—practically a pulse, arranged with the precision of a Smiths beat—that might be missed by anyone still taking their assassins straight and their directors at their own promotional word. Here is David Fincher, once the feverish chronicler of men unraveling in the glow of green computer screens and kitchen fluorescents, now orchestrating a liturgy of control and cold-blooded process so sharp it’s almost a parody of itself: the assassin as Ikea monk, building murder out of flat-packed routines and hide-in-plain-sight anonymity. Nothing, not even the violence, is ever allowed to descend into real chaos—not while there are yoga stretches to be done and a running tally of BPM on the Apple Watch.

There is something interesting about the “based-on-a-true-story” thriller, that genre with which Hollywood is infatuated—it has the chance to situate historical spectacle in a slick transport suit and drive it with wild abandon under the bridge of plausibility. “The Red Sea Diving Resort,” the directorial debut of Gideon Raff, is one such film, lively and well-produced, featuring Chris Evans as a Mossad member who seems to be auditioning for a secret agent beach calendar. It makes for an agreeable, occasionally entertaining, but ultimately forgettable movie, basically the younger cousin of “Argo” who puts in some effort at the family reunion, but never once threatens to outdo its subtle origins.

Remakes are Hollywood’s solution to not having an idea. But there’s a difference between creatively riffing on the bones of a classic and crawling out of the swamp with a sludge-soaked carcass, propping it up Weekend at Bernie’s-style, and calling it War of the Worlds. This “modernization”—a screenlife spectacle starring Ice Cube as the world’s most bored Department of Homeland Security desk jockey—isn’t so much an adaptation as it is an accidental satire of everything cheap and vacant in our streaming age. If the aliens had any taste, they’d have vaporized the production server before the rest of us were subjected to this deranged corporate sizzle-reel.

Every aging franchise wants its last gasp to blow out the speakers, flood the screen, and blister the eyeballs—so it’s almost traditional that The Final Reckoning dares you to measure it against its own legend. A big, bruising spectacle trying to catch up to its own shadow, the film is cinema as a kind of decathlon, with Tom Cruise sprinting, leaping, and tumbling his way toward a finish line that never quite has the guts to feel like the end.

Rarely does a contemporary film seem so determined to embrace the art of the faceplant as A Line of Fire. This is less a motion picture than a group project nobody wanted to do, so Matt Shapira—who writes, directs, produces, and even acts—just throws himself across every role like a man possessed by the spirit of Ed Wood, minus the charm. The result? A movie that’s less “line of fire” and more a circle of hell, each ring pettier and more absurd than the last.