Movies

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 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.

Some films put you in a vice and tighten, click by click, until you’re not sure if you’re gasping from shock or from the giddy pleasure of being so expertly, so utterly manipulated. “Gone Girl,” that lurid psychothriller by David Fincher, wears its heart (if one can call it a heart: more like a bloodied, glinting knife) on its sleeve. This is the rare mainstream film that seduces us into collusion with its sociopath, pats our leg, and whispers, “Let me show you how deep the rabbit hole goes, don’t be squeamish, darling, it’s just your happily ever after with its throat slit.”

How do you make a disaster film in 2020, when going outside to check the mailbox felt like auditioning for “Contagion 2”? The answer, in “Greenland,” is with impressive restraint: it’s a comet-disaster movie that, instead of blowing up the White House for the nineteenth time, asks you to remember to bring your son’s insulin.

Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel is that rare confection—delicate in the details, unashamedly artificial, and yet so lovingly precise that each shot seems to have been placed by a court jeweler. Watching it, I found myself seduced, not by plot in the traditional sense, but by the madcap energy of images that kept assembling themselves before my eyes like intricate pastries in a display window. Every frame could hang comfortably—if not always respectfully—beside the garish masterworks of the fictional Zubrowkan aristocracy. To call Anderson’s style a signature is almost too tame; the man works in flourishes, borders, and uproarious symmetry, composing each sequence as if it’s to be beamed through time, immune to the half-life decay of fashion. I can say, with a degree of confidence seldom afforded to contemporary cinema, that The Grand Budapest Hotel will look as good—and taste as odd—in a century as it does today.

There is a peculiar kind of pride to be found in a series that wears its lineage on its sleeve, and with Gatao: Like Father Like Son, we have reached the origin myth: the gangster saga’s answer to the Book of Genesis. Ray Jiang’s fourth foray into the Gatao universe is not so much a mere prequel as a ritual exhumation, painstakingly unearthing the sturdy bones of grudge, loyalty, and ambition that have propped up the franchise through three films already.

The gangster film has long been a proving ground for young countries and unsettled hearts—an arena where braggadocio and blood, pride and punishment, come clattering together under the guise of masculine ritual. But with Gatao: The Last Stray, director Jui-Chih Chiang offers something rarer: a film that embraces the genre’s traditions only to sidestep its usual temptations, trading operatic violence for introspection and carving out, amidst the noise, a corner for genuine feeling.

One sits down for Gatao 2: Rise of the King expecting, at most, a competent riff on the familiar gangster recipe—a pinch of violence here, a patina of brotherhood there, all slathered in the genre’s lacquer of betrayal and blood. What director Yen Cheng-Kuo delivers is something else: a movie that moves with the heedless energy of a street brawl, inhaling the cologne of loyalty and machismo until you’re nearly suffocated—and, to its credit, occasionally exhilarated—by the heady fumes of its own ambition.