Trashtacular

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.

Rarely does a contemporary film seem so determined to embrace the art of the faceplant as A Line of Fire. This is less a motion picture than a group project nobody wanted to do, so Matt Shapira—who writes, directs, produces, and even acts—just throws himself across every role like a man possessed by the spirit of Ed Wood, minus the charm. The result? A movie that’s less “line of fire” and more a circle of hell, each ring pettier and more absurd than the last.

Certain movies don’t entertain; they happen to you—a mugging in the parking lot of your own expectations. “Aftermath” is that kind of disaster: a movie so resolutely, invincibly witless that it may single-handedly set the action thriller back to before the invention of the bridge. Patrick Lussier’s slab of hostage nonsense is something you don’t so much watch as endure, like a flood in your basement when all you wanted was a cold shower.

I went into Alarum thinking, perhaps out of misplaced optimism, or just that basic human longing for improvement, that it has to be better than Armor, the last shitty Randal Emmett movie with Stallone. But you know what? It's not! If cinema is meant to offer us hope and reinvention, here is a sequel in spirit, though not in name, that squanders even that. To its defence, Alarum brings a few new weak spots to the autopsy table, but much of the decay is depressingly familiar.

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.

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.