Trashtacular

If we’ve learned anything from the last decade of action movies, it’s that the genre survives on reinventions of silence—moody loners, voiceless avengers, and, now, a deaf cop lumbering through another hour of plot-optional philosophy about justice in America. Brad Anderson’s “The Silent Hour” arrives with a grandiose hush, promising that, if we just listen hard enough, we’ll hear something new. But what we get is less revelation and more the faint clatter of old clichés, recycled under the guise of representation.

You sit in the theater—nervous, skeptical, weirdly hopeful. If ever a movie dared the audience to ask “why ARE we doing this?” before the lights even dim, it’s Joker: Folie à Deux: a sequel that announces itself with a musical number, fingers everyone in the eye (twice for the trouble), and then dares you to care.

The original Platform—the Spanish dystopian riot from 2019—arrived like an incendiary pamphlet stuffed in your lunchbox, urging you to gnaw on all that’s rotten in social hierarchy until your teeth cracked on the metaphors. I left that movie feeling as if I’d been clobbered by class struggle, seduced by horror, starved and force-fed in equal measure—and I liked it. You wandered its vertical prison with Goreng, whose backbone and dwindling hope pulled you, one slippery floor at a time, through a fable of survival so bare-boned and unyielding you could feel the jailer’s breath.

Let’s not kid ourselves with polite hedging: “Classified” isn’t a calamity—it’s the industrial accident of modern cinema, a three-car pile-up in the middle of a screenplay dust storm. If negative stars were an option, I’d be petitioning for a rating system that allowed for black holes, just to properly suck the memory of this thing from my mind.