Trashtacular

Let’s not beat around the casket: “Absolution,” Hans Petter Moland’s all-American exercise in adrift action-thriller posturing, is a movie that feels as if it started forgetting itself somewhere around the opening credits and never found its way home. If movies could check their pockets and realize they’d left the keys in the wrong genre, here’s a film that would be stuck on the curb, repeating “Where did I park?” to a passing parade of indifference.

By all rights, Borderlands should have been a pyrotechnic delight—a giddy, over-caffeinated bullet-train of pulp chaos and gonzo world-building, driven by the acid irreverence of its video game namesake. Instead, what Eli Roth has delivered is an improbable feat: a science fiction action comedy that is simultaneously cacophonous and catatonically dull. Sitting there, under the suffocating weight of so much squandered star power, I found myself awash in a unique mixture of irritation and melancholy—a sort of cinematic Stockholm syndrome, except nobody falls in love with the captor. I simply prayed for release.

If you thought the nadir of the franchise arrived with Rebel Moon – Part One, Zack Snyder’s kitchen-sink tribute to slow motion and empty spectacle, you are in for a fascinating descent. The Scargiver emerges as less a sequel than a dare—how low can the bar go? If the first film was a parade of hollow bombast, Part Two is the mop-up: a limp, shivering attempt to wring significance out of a narrative so lifeless, you have to check your own pulse to make sure it’s not catching.

What a joyless, magnificent mess of unintended comedy this is, a late-period fever dream so overloaded with Significance and “cinematic history” that it’s hard to know if Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis comes to us as a time capsule from the future of movies, or as the smoldering effluence of Hollywood’s oldest, dearest delusions.

Is there a modern moviegoing ritual more reliable than the late-career star vehicle disguised as an “action farce”? I settled in for Cash Out, hoping perhaps for the electric surge of genuine idiocy—something so audaciously silly it loops all the way back to fun. Instead, what I got was a master class in professional inertia: a movie so locked inside its own clichés that you can almost hear the screen yawning back at you.

If you squint at “Canary Black” from the comfort of your own living room—martini glass in hand, perhaps just a little self-consciously nostalgic for the days when spies sparkled and plots had pulse—it might almost pass for a movie. But move in closer, and it’s not so much a cinematic vessel as a soggy, deflating float at the tail end of a parade nobody bothered to attend. What drifts our way, bobbing with all the vigor of a limp flag at half-mast, is the kind of leftover, just-add-water espionage pulp that’s been through every possible recycling bin in Hollywood’s backlot. How many screenwriters were left, we wonder, dangling in the subzero editing bay, before someone finally called it “done”? Deep beneath the chilled surface, “Canary Black” is home to a whole hothouse of misjudged directorial flora: plotting with the finesse of errant GPS, fight scenes borrowed (badly) from late-night aerobics reruns, and a costume budget that feels stitched together entirely from off-season Halloween aisle clearance. Yet here stands Kate Beckinsale, the plucky center of the swirling mediocrity, determined to wear her “notice me, I’m lethal” energy like a badge and a bludgeon.