Movies

If you thought the nadir of the franchise arrived with Rebel Moon – Part One, Zack Snyder’s kitchen-sink tribute to slow motion and empty spectacle, you are in for a fascinating descent. The Scargiver emerges as less a sequel than a dare—how low can the bar go? If the first film was a parade of hollow bombast, Part Two is the mop-up: a limp, shivering attempt to wring significance out of a narrative so lifeless, you have to check your own pulse to make sure it’s not catching.

Let me begin with a confession fit for the confessional booth aboard some recycled “Star Wars” battlecruiser: I thought Zack Snyder had already bottomed out with Army of the Dead, but Rebel Moon, bless its comic-book heart, is such a spectacular act of creative bankruptcy that it deserves a new wing in the mausoleum of derivative moviemaking. If Snyder’s ambition was to create the world’s loudest, longest Hot Topic commercial—set adrift in a galaxy where all ideas are borrowed and none are cherished—then he’s staged a minor coup.

What a joyless, magnificent mess of unintended comedy this is, a late-period fever dream so overloaded with Significance and “cinematic history” that it’s hard to know if Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis comes to us as a time capsule from the future of movies, or as the smoldering effluence of Hollywood’s oldest, dearest delusions.

Is there a modern moviegoing ritual more reliable than the late-career star vehicle disguised as an “action farce”? I settled in for Cash Out, hoping perhaps for the electric surge of genuine idiocy—something so audaciously silly it loops all the way back to fun. Instead, what I got was a master class in professional inertia: a movie so locked inside its own clichés that you can almost hear the screen yawning back at you.

Is there such a thing as an action movie that's so determined to hit all the familiar spy beats that it becomes more like a blender set to “purée” than a piece of entertainment? With Legacy of Lies—Scott Adkins’s latest detour on the rocky road of genre pictures—the answer is an exhausting yes. Here’s a film that promises sleek muscle and instead delivers a plate of last week’s leftovers, reheated until even the flavor of violence goes flat.

If you squint at “Canary Black” from the comfort of your own living room—martini glass in hand, perhaps just a little self-consciously nostalgic for the days when spies sparkled and plots had pulse—it might almost pass for a movie. But move in closer, and it’s not so much a cinematic vessel as a soggy, deflating float at the tail end of a parade nobody bothered to attend. What drifts our way, bobbing with all the vigor of a limp flag at half-mast, is the kind of leftover, just-add-water espionage pulp that’s been through every possible recycling bin in Hollywood’s backlot. How many screenwriters were left, we wonder, dangling in the subzero editing bay, before someone finally called it “done”? Deep beneath the chilled surface, “Canary Black” is home to a whole hothouse of misjudged directorial flora: plotting with the finesse of errant GPS, fight scenes borrowed (badly) from late-night aerobics reruns, and a costume budget that feels stitched together entirely from off-season Halloween aisle clearance. Yet here stands Kate Beckinsale, the plucky center of the swirling mediocrity, determined to wear her “notice me, I’m lethal” energy like a badge and a bludgeon.

If we’ve learned anything from the last decade of action movies, it’s that the genre survives on reinventions of silence—moody loners, voiceless avengers, and, now, a deaf cop lumbering through another hour of plot-optional philosophy about justice in America. Brad Anderson’s “The Silent Hour” arrives with a grandiose hush, promising that, if we just listen hard enough, we’ll hear something new. But what we get is less revelation and more the faint clatter of old clichés, recycled under the guise of representation.

You sit in the theater—nervous, skeptical, weirdly hopeful. If ever a movie dared the audience to ask “why ARE we doing this?” before the lights even dim, it’s Joker: Folie à Deux: a sequel that announces itself with a musical number, fingers everyone in the eye (twice for the trouble), and then dares you to care.

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.

Let’s not kid ourselves with polite hedging: “Classified” isn’t a calamity—it’s the industrial accident of modern cinema, a three-car pile-up in the middle of a screenplay dust storm. If negative stars were an option, I’d be petitioning for a rating system that allowed for black holes, just to properly suck the memory of this thing from my mind.