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.

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 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.