Trashtacular

I went into Elevation knowing it would be bad—there’s something liberating in having your low expectations met so precisely, like watching a car accelerate off a cliff with immaculate predictability. George Nolfi’s latest exercise in post-apocalyptic hand-wringing arrives already embalmed, wheeling Anthony Mackie and Morena Baccarin out like two alluring mannequins about to be discarded. It is a feat to make actors this lively feel this bored; by the end, you could almost hear the cameraman nodding off.

There is a kind of filmic purgatory, a cinema of stalled ambition and aesthetic vacancy, where the only thing more oppressive than the endless hours of tedium is the lingering sense of money misspent. Armor is not just another addition to the b-movie landfill, it’s the sound of late-career legacy clanging hollowly on the asphalt of a bridge, the celluloid equivalent of watching Sylvester Stallone doze in real time, bracketed by echoes of his own mythos and, faintly, the dying whinny of a studio accountant’s last desperate crackle.

There are times, guiltily, when you press on with a franchise not out of hope but out of a kind of cinematic masochism—a need, maybe, to see how low the bough bends before it snaps. With Largo Winch: The Price of Money, we don’t get the snap; we get the soft, damp thump of a weary branch coughing up another mediocre fruit, doomed to rot at our feet. And yet, like any movie masochist, I brushed off my sense of déjà vu, clung to my last embers of fondness for Tomer Sisley’s grifter-boy charm, and hit “play,” half in mockery, half in slender faith. What followed wasn’t so much disastrous as dispiriting, an ill-advised reunion tour playing to an empty barroom.

There’s a particular variety of agony reserved for a movie that owes you nothing but revenge for your ticket price—Dirty Angels, that screeching travesty, is the kind of picture that makes you long for the cleansing reset of a fire alarm at the multiplex. I wandered into this on the power of Eva Green’s name—Green, the bewitching sphinx of Casino Royale, the only actress in Europe who could make absinthe seem like a food group for grown-ups, a woman so regal she can elevate bad prose by the simple motion of an eyebrow. Here? I was cursing at the screen, and when the closing credits limped into view, I found out, to my horror, that this circus wasn’t the product of a neophyte director with TikTok aspirations—but Martin Campbell himself. Yes, the same Campbell who gave us GoldenEye’s gleaming coolness and Casino Royale’s athletic grace. Is there another Martin Campbell out there, brazenly collecting paychecks for things like Dirty Angels? If not, someone had better warn the Directors Guild.

Let’s not kid ourselves: there’s a certain thrill in seeing a name like Jessica Alba headline a streaming movie after years of cinematic absence—a return, we hope, on par with a Barbra Streisand coming-out concert or, hell, just a slap of fresh paint on tired walls. But nobody warned me that “Trigger Warning”—with a title practically begging for meme-ification—would showcase less a comeback than a one-way trip to career purgatory; it stumbles onto Netflix drier than a box of saltines on the wrong side of the apocalypse.

If only blasphemy could be a cinematic genre, then D.J. Caruso’s Mary would stand as its gaudy gold-plated altar—an epic exercise in misdirection, confusion, and tasteless embellishment. I approached this Netflix offering (the Nativity, retold as a streaming event!) with a faint, foolish hope: the epic biblical narrative is one of the inexhaustible wells of the popular imagination. My hope lasted exactly as long as it took for the credits to fade and for the first flagrant absurdity to rear its cartoonish head. If the soothsayers said Megalopolis would be the turkey of the year, they failed to foresee this bird—a toneless monstrosity that squawks when it ought to sing.