Trashtacular

Every so often a movie arrives that makes you reevaluate every unkind thing you’ve ever said about a “bad” film. If The Hard Hit is an example of “five-star” cinema, then we’re truly living in the era of Yelp-ified delusion, where directors and their unpaid interns feverishly stuff the ballot box, hoping the audience won’t notice the cellophane-and-string held together beneath their fraudulent bravado. I suppose if you squint hard enough through the muddy lens of this movie, you can see why someone might mistake it for a real film—though you’d have to be cross-eyed and twelve whiskey sours deep.

Hellhound is the kind of movie that slips in through the back door of midnight cable and hopes you’re too groggy or forgiving to notice. I wish I could tell you it’s camp, or subversively bad, or even one of those so-bad-you-have-to-write-home-about-it curios, but its ambitions don’t even aim that high. No, this is a film that scrounges at the bottom of the hitman-movie barrel and comes up clutching the genre’s most threadbare clichés like a child rooting through a box of moth-eaten sweaters. It’s a weird little time capsule of every tired assassin-for-one-last-job scenario you thought moviemaking had outgrown, and somehow, it’s still marginally less humiliating than Nicolas Cage’s Bangkok Dangerous—though only just.

Carjackers is the cinematic equivalent of a fast-food burger eaten under fluorescent lighting: nothing poisonous, nothing memorable, just diet mediocrity slouching in a wrapper that pretends at rebellion. You might stumble on it, buried in the streaming bin of shame—one of those algorithmic offerings recommended after midnight when the platforms think your standards (and will to live) have flagged. The premise ought to be piquant enough to keep us awake: a ragtag band of valets and bartenders, moonlighting as amateur Robin Hoods, targeting the swollen wallets of the rich who can afford bland hotel restaurants and overpriced whiskey. When their moonlighting collides with an ill-advised “big score”—and the hotel director sends a hitman after them—you'd hope, or at least pray, for some pulse-raising chaos. Instead, buckle in: this getaway car is stuck in reverse, and the ride is more padded than perilous.

Did Frank Grillo gamble away his dignity on a late-night poker game, or did someone slip a “Bangladeshi Bond” clause into his contract between sips of cheap tequila? This is the idle question that haunts you after enduring MR-9: Do or Die, a cross-cultural concoction that plays less like a spy thriller and more like a xenophobic prank from the gods of genre schlock. Asif Akbar, the architect behind this mad cross-continental experiment (U.S. and Bangladesh mucking about like oil and water in a leaky martini shaker), seems to have mistaken trash for treasure and—amazingly—isn’t alone in that delusion.

Let us not mince words: Battle Over Britain is one of those rare cinematic crash-landings where you don’t merely see the fuselage flaming—you feel the passenger nausea, too. I adore a great war film—I’ve thrilled to every thunderous strafing run ever conjured by Hollywood’s golden generation. But what we have here is not so much a movie as an act of cinematic self-immolation, meticulously recorded and distributed (thank you, Prime) for the unwitting streaming masses.

Let us all give a moment of silence—not just for what once was the luminous Star Trek franchise, but for the unsuspecting audience, who, wandering into Section 31, finds themselves trapped in a malfunctioning holodeck, gasping for escape. If you’ve ever wondered what happens when corporate storytelling steers a beloved odyssey into the black hole of mediocrity, look no further: Section 31 is a galactic punchline with none of the set-up, and all the pratfall.