Movies

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 it possible for a movie to trip over its own cleverness and bounce back up, grinning, clutching a Santa hat in one hand and a sawed-off shotgun in the other? Shane Black seems to think so, bless him—he’s made a career of fusing Christmas lights onto grisly pulp, stapling wisecracks to bodies before the blood dries. With “Play Dirty,” he takes Donald Westlake’s Parker, criminal mastermind, eternal sourpuss, the sort of man who’d rob his grandmother if you left her in a counting room and sends him stumbling through a minefield of Black’s signature goofball banter and Yuletide noir.

If you ever wondered what would happen if you left a beloved childhood character unattended in a leaky canoe, drifting down the stagnant waters of cheap horror, Popeye’s Revenge arises as your answer — but not so much with a punch as with a dispirited flop. Somebody somewhere, perhaps haunted by the nightmares of public domain, gazed at E.C. Segar’s iconic spinach-munching sailor and thought, “Why not transmogrify him into a slasher villain?” Why not, indeed.

Primitive War lurches to life as if someone siphoned the lunacy from Platoon, spliced it with the animal anarchism of Jurassic Park, set the blender to “puree,” and handed the results not to Spielberg and Oliver Stone, but an upstart Aussie with a larcenous joy in genre. If you stroll into Luke Sparke’s dino-in-the-jungle opus expecting a childish rerun or Syfy-channel barrel-scraping, prepare for a rude, exuberant awakening. This is a film that knows exactly how daft its premise sounds but, by some ferocious, inexplicable alchemy, ends up giving the last three Jurassic World movies a savage trouncing.

There are movies that wear their ambitions like borrowed suits a size too large, and then there is The Prosecutor, a film that struts into the courtroom with the swagger of Donnie Yen and leaves you wondering if it’s about to deliver an impassioned plea or break into a roundhouse kick. Donnie Yen, Hong Kong’s tireless apologist for action set-pieces, both acts and co-produces here, and makes his usual promise—a punch with a side of principle. Yet what we get is a genre hybrid so muddled it feels like it’s been shaken, not stirred, and then poorly strained by legal censorship.

Is there a deeper, more queasy thrill in American war movies than Oliver Stone’s Platoon? Here, the old Hollywood war drum—once a loopy rhythm of self-sacrifice and pyrotechnic heroics—gets drowned out by the thump of jungle rot, by the insectile chitter of paranoia, and above all, by a sense that Vietnam will never release those it swallows. Released in 1986—ten years after the helicopter rotors beat their retreat from Saigon—this is a film that refuses to let the audience clap themselves on the back; Stone, carrying the scars and the nightmares of his own tour, rewrites the Book of War as a catalogue of wounds, psychological and otherwise.

How do you make a biopic about Vladimir Putin, the ogre of our current news cycle? If you’re Patryk Vega, you hammer it together with such reckless abandon that you’d think you’d stumbled into a Cold War-themed escape room designed by circus clowns. Nobody expects nuance, perhaps, but nobody expects this—a cinematic vodka shot that leaves you not so much woozy as existentially seasick. This is not the movie Putin deserves; it’s the movie assigned to late-night cable purgatory, a cautionary tale for future film students and insomniacs alike.

Let’s be honest: it takes a particular kind of foolhardy courage—or maybe the sweet-mad gambler’s spirit of the real movie-lover—to watch a disaster picture about a storm-tossed plane while you’re actually on one, ricocheting through the clouds. The world outside your window is rattling with electricity, each jolt of turbulence a drumroll for the next on-screen catastrophe, and all you’re braced for is to be tossed overboard by a couple of hours of mechanical clichés. But Jean-François Richet’s “Plane”—wrapped up in its 2023 action-thriller drag—delivers a jolt of its own: it lifts you right out of the seat-gripping dread and into something damn near rapturous. By the time Gerard Butler and Mike Colter are wrestling fate on a jungle runway, your heart isn’t just in your throat—it’s applauding.

There are dreadful movies, there are glorious ones, and then there are those—like this laugh-riot of a mockbuster—that leap into the yawning abyss between, flailing their cardboard limbs, and come up gasping, ridiculous, and (miraculously!) alive. Planet Dune isn't just bad. It's an epic car crash, a filmic yard sale, a Walmart-brand space opera that dares—gallingly—to sidle up to the grandeur of Villeneuve’s Dune and ask, “Can I copy your homework?”

The original Platform—the Spanish dystopian riot from 2019—arrived like an incendiary pamphlet stuffed in your lunchbox, urging you to gnaw on all that’s rotten in social hierarchy until your teeth cracked on the metaphors. I left that movie feeling as if I’d been clobbered by class struggle, seduced by horror, starved and force-fed in equal measure—and I liked it. You wandered its vertical prison with Goreng, whose backbone and dwindling hope pulled you, one slippery floor at a time, through a fable of survival so bare-boned and unyielding you could feel the jailer’s breath.