Trashtacular

There’s something almost touching, almost, about a movie so desperate to wrap itself in the gravitas of “true crime” mythology that it ends up draped in wet, mildewed football scarves. “Rise of the Footsoldier” is less a film than a brute-force memory dump, a feverish scrapbook of loutish glory so in love with its subject that it never pauses to consider whether anyone else could possibly care. If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you force-fed a biopic to a slot machine, pulling the lever every time someone gets bottled or called a four-letter word, look no further.

Is there a particular word in the English language for when you watch a movie with the quiet hope that this time, the star you once admired will drag herself out of direct-to-video purgatory and surprise you? If there is, “Stolen Girl” killed it dead. It’s the sort of film that leaves you looking at the title and wishing it applied to your ticket money.

There’s a time-honored tradition in cinema, the men-versus-beast saga, that old primal dance where human muscle and nerves are pitted against Nature’s monstrous embodiment. You take a handful of plucky survivors, toss them into a cauldron with a theatrical bloodthirsty menace, and watch them squirm, sweat, and, with luck, reveal the tender, squishy stuff they’re made of. When done well, the air crackles: you’ve got tanned, panicked flesh, gnashing teeth (shark or man, take your pick), and that perfect frisson of horror and black comedy. When done poorly, as in the lamentably misnamed Beast of War, you can practically hear the rubbery props squeak and the actors yawn. The only beast here is monotony, snapping at your ankles.

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.

Remakes are Hollywood’s solution to not having an idea. But there’s a difference between creatively riffing on the bones of a classic and crawling out of the swamp with a sludge-soaked carcass, propping it up Weekend at Bernie’s-style, and calling it War of the Worlds. This “modernization”—a screenlife spectacle starring Ice Cube as the world’s most bored Department of Homeland Security desk jockey—isn’t so much an adaptation as it is an accidental satire of everything cheap and vacant in our streaming age. If the aliens had any taste, they’d have vaporized the production server before the rest of us were subjected to this deranged corporate sizzle-reel.

Rarely does a contemporary film seem so determined to embrace the art of the faceplant as A Line of Fire. This is less a motion picture than a group project nobody wanted to do, so Matt Shapira—who writes, directs, produces, and even acts—just throws himself across every role like a man possessed by the spirit of Ed Wood, minus the charm. The result? A movie that’s less “line of fire” and more a circle of hell, each ring pettier and more absurd than the last.