Movies

There are films so spectacularly, unassumingly mediocre that one can simply shrug and move on: the sort of flick that tumbles out of the streaming deluge like another pair of socks in a laundry basket you never meant to sort. Tin Soldier is not that fortunate. This is an extravaganza of delusion, an action-thriller so abject in its self-regard, so confoundingly malformed, that you don’t merely endure its two senseless hours, you wage a month-long campaign for basic comprehension and actionable relief. Failed blockbusters usually suffer the indignity of audience indifference; here, Brad Furman assembles a cadre of Oscar winners, genre veterans and nepo-baby dynamite and still manages to create something more embarrassing than a TikTok fad gone stale by noon.

If the original Jurassic Park was the cinematic equivalent of hearing Beethoven's Fifth for the first time, disruptive, awe-inspiring, and strangely primal, then this seventh fossilized entry, Jurassic World Rebirth, is what happens when you ask an algorithm to remix that symphony using only elevator chimes and the incessant crinkle of a Snickers wrapper. That wrapper, tossed by an over-caffeinated, under-written scientist in this film’s opening moments, is perhaps more memorable than anything that follows, a literal flake of trash that signals the lazy entropy setting in, not just in the movie’s security system, but in the script, direction, and spirit of this once vital franchise.

We have reached the late capitalist endgame when even a G20 summit—a gathering that, in theory, represents the convulsions and anxieties of a planet teetering on its own ambitions—becomes a stage for pallid, sticky-fingered action pablum. Patricia Riggen’s G20 strains to dress itself in the grandeur of international consequence, as if draping a polyester tablecloth over a card table could suddenly transform it into Versailles. The result, unfortunately, is not grandeur but the cinematic equivalent of a hotel conference coffee: tepid, thin, and bitterly disappointing, despite the prestigious packaging.

The Western—a genre once rooted in unspoken codes and existential sweat, where violence had gravity and redemption came at the price of a soul—has, with Gunslingers, been exhumed and sent staggering, blank-eyed, into the realm of accidental comedy. Brian Skiba, whose résumé reads more like a warning label than a track record, invites us to Redemption (the film’s town, not its trajectory). Make no mistake: there is no redemption here—except, perhaps, for Nicolas Cage, whose presence is less a saving grace than a feverish hallucination trapped in a desert heatwave.

Romantic action comedies are supposed to be soufflés—light, airy, and just a little dangerous when the temperature rises. Jonathan Eusebio’s Love Hurts instead brings us the cinematic equivalent of a microwave burrito, piping hot in patches but mostly frozen where it matters. We’re promised a gleeful riot in the key of Jackie Chan, but what this film delivers is the sound of laughter caught in the wrong throat.

Every few years, a movie comes along so eager to don the tarnished crown of “epic fantasy”—to conquer, to astonish, to graft itself onto the sagging limbs of a post-Lord of the Rings landscape—that it forgets the very sinews that hold stories together. Into the Lost Lands, Paul W.S. Anderson’s latest incursion into genre upheaval, is not so much an adventure as it is a protracted reminder that the land of cinema has indeed been lost.

There’s nothing quite as dispiriting in cinema as a film that mistakes product placement for dramatic architecture, and with iHostage, director Bobby Boermans seems to treat the glass walls and minimalist spaces of Amsterdam’s Apple Store as if they lend themselves to the gravitas of Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon. But iHostage only proves that you can’t transcend your ingredients by virtue of logos and lighting alone. This movie—as colorless as the inside of an after-hours Apple showroom—manages to turn a genre built on suspense into an extended exercise in waiting for the Genius Bar to call your name.

“Cleaner,” Martin Campbell’s latest and most ill-advised experiment in action, is the sort of movie that emerges when Hollywood so aggressively scrubs its reputation that it winds up erasing every last trace of sense, wit, or consequence. I suppose we should all take a moment here to remember, with something approaching reverence, that this is the man who resuscitated Bond twice over. Campbell, the gallant technician behind “Casino Royale,” now gives us a film whose emotional and intellectual palette can be summed up as: drab, bleak, and sticky-fingered with banality.

You could say that WarGames: The Dead Code is an object lesson in Hollywood’s special gift: draining the life out of a semi-classic property, embalming it in digital gloss and algorithmic plotting, and then casting it back onto the market in hopes we’ll confuse the bluish afterglow for old-fashioned excitement. If the original WarGames was a deft adolescent fever dream about the nuclear terrors and computer-age naiveté of Reagan’s America, Gillard’s 2008 “sequel” is a reminder that nostalgia is sometimes best left in mothballs. Watching The Dead Code is like sitting through a pop quiz on modern surveillance anxiety written by copy editors who just discovered what phishing is.

Tyler Perry’s Duplicity—now streaming on Amazon Prime Video—wants to be urgent, topical, and bracing. It arrives with all the signals of “serious intent”: brooding about justice, the jagged aftermath of police violence, and a pair of ambitious Black women set against a system that doesn’t budge for grief or outrage. There is the shape here of a vital film, but what actually transpires is a parade of perfunctory gestures and canned dramatics; it’s as if Perry had borrowed the scaffolding of a social thriller and was content to let it creak.