Trashtacular

Did Frank Grillo gamble away his dignity on a late-night poker game, or did someone slip a “Bangladeshi Bond” clause into his contract between sips of cheap tequila? This is the idle question that haunts you after enduring MR-9: Do or Die, a cross-cultural concoction that plays less like a spy thriller and more like a xenophobic prank from the gods of genre schlock. Asif Akbar, the architect behind this mad cross-continental experiment (U.S. and Bangladesh mucking about like oil and water in a leaky martini shaker), seems to have mistaken trash for treasure and—amazingly—isn’t alone in that delusion.

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.

Trash, pure and unfiltered. “Man with No Past” is a cinematic blackout—if the goal was to have the audience identify deeply with the protagonist’s amnesia, consider it an unqualified triumph. You won’t just forget where you are; you’ll begin to forget why you ever loved movies in the first place.

Sony’s “Kraven the Hunter” doesn’t so much pounce as lurch onto the scene—a feral miscalculation, claws unsheathed but utterly declawed by its own stupidity. If cinema is indeed a jungle, this is the lost, mange-ridden coyote wandering the outskirts, yapping for attention and finding only echoes. What’s left of the Marvel-machine’s dignity is here chewed up and spat out with a wet, unceremonious plop.

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.

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.