Trashtacular

Some action movies arrive with a bang. Others sort of slouch through the saloon doors, wipe the dust from their boots, and promptly trip over their own spurs. Day of Reckoning opens with all the promise you get from a cast headlined by Scott Adkins in a ten-gallon hat, Billy Zane dusting off his best villainous glare, and a plot that all but shouts “shootout at sundown!” Five minutes in, you realize the film isn’t actually interested in its cast, its plot, or setting fire to the screen. Instead, it’s the cinematic equivalent of some deep-fried bar snack, salty, overdone, and destined to give you regret.

Some movies limp over the finish line; The Long Walk manages to trip flat on its face and somehow keeps crawling, dead weight and all. For nearly two hours, I watched a parade of doomed teenagers shuffle alongside an endless highway, and no, this is not a lost “Hunger Games” outtake, though you’d be forgiven for thinking so - Francis Lawrence directed both. To call it familiar is to undersell déjà vu. By minute thirty, I recognized the blueprint: kids, endurance, grim spectacle, draconian rules, broadcast violence, and a regime that puts the “fun” in fundamental oppression. Only, the “fun” is nowhere in sight.

If I told you I had survived Afterburn, would you believe it? Not the solar flare, though God knows, a good napalm blast might have improved things but the movie itself, which, for all its threat of global devastation, never generates enough heat or chaos to even scorch a popcorn kernel. It’s the end of the world as imagined by the world’s most slavish Second Unit directors: hulking men with enough metaphorical duck tape to keep the doors of Hollywood’s post-apocalyptic junkyard swinging well into the next ice age, and not a single brain cell set alight in the process.

Is there a particular word in the English language for when you watch a movie with the quiet hope that this time, the star you once admired will drag herself out of direct-to-video purgatory and surprise you? If there is, “Stolen Girl” killed it dead. It’s the sort of film that leaves you looking at the title and wishing it applied to your ticket money.

There’s a time-honored tradition in cinema, the men-versus-beast saga, that old primal dance where human muscle and nerves are pitted against Nature’s monstrous embodiment. You take a handful of plucky survivors, toss them into a cauldron with a theatrical bloodthirsty menace, and watch them squirm, sweat, and, with luck, reveal the tender, squishy stuff they’re made of. When done well, the air crackles: you’ve got tanned, panicked flesh, gnashing teeth (shark or man, take your pick), and that perfect frisson of horror and black comedy. When done poorly, as in the lamentably misnamed Beast of War, you can practically hear the rubbery props squeak and the actors yawn. The only beast here is monotony, snapping at your ankles.

If you ever wondered what would happen if you left a beloved childhood character unattended in a leaky canoe, drifting down the stagnant waters of cheap horror, Popeye’s Revenge arises as your answer — but not so much with a punch as with a dispirited flop. Somebody somewhere, perhaps haunted by the nightmares of public domain, gazed at E.C. Segar’s iconic spinach-munching sailor and thought, “Why not transmogrify him into a slasher villain?” Why not, indeed.