Trashtacular

Some action movies arrive with a bang. Others sort of slouch through the saloon doors, wipe the dust from their boots, and promptly trip over their own spurs. Day of Reckoning opens with all the promise you get from a cast headlined by Scott Adkins in a ten-gallon hat, Billy Zane dusting off his best villainous glare, and a plot that all but shouts “shootout at sundown!” Five minutes in, you realize the film isn’t actually interested in its cast, its plot, or setting fire to the screen. Instead, it’s the cinematic equivalent of some deep-fried bar snack, salty, overdone, and destined to give you regret.

Some movies limp over the finish line; The Long Walk manages to trip flat on its face and somehow keeps crawling, dead weight and all. For nearly two hours, I watched a parade of doomed teenagers shuffle alongside an endless highway, and no, this is not a lost “Hunger Games” outtake, though you’d be forgiven for thinking so - Francis Lawrence directed both. To call it familiar is to undersell déjà vu. By minute thirty, I recognized the blueprint: kids, endurance, grim spectacle, draconian rules, broadcast violence, and a regime that puts the “fun” in fundamental oppression. Only, the “fun” is nowhere in sight.

The Killer’s Game is a dumb-fun pinball machine, a high-calorie action caper that’s all elbows and B-movie brio, careening between pulp gags and neon guts, knocking you around for 90 minutes, and then blowing you a kiss on the way out the door.

If I told you I had survived Afterburn, would you believe it? Not the solar flare, though God knows, a good napalm blast might have improved things but the movie itself, which, for all its threat of global devastation, never generates enough heat or chaos to even scorch a popcorn kernel. It’s the end of the world as imagined by the world’s most slavish Second Unit directors: hulking men with enough metaphorical duck tape to keep the doors of Hollywood’s post-apocalyptic junkyard swinging well into the next ice age, and not a single brain cell set alight in the process.

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.