Trashtacular

Carjackers is the cinematic equivalent of a fast-food burger eaten under fluorescent lighting: nothing poisonous, nothing memorable, just diet mediocrity slouching in a wrapper that pretends at rebellion. You might stumble on it, buried in the streaming bin of shame—one of those algorithmic offerings recommended after midnight when the platforms think your standards (and will to live) have flagged. The premise ought to be piquant enough to keep us awake: a ragtag band of valets and bartenders, moonlighting as amateur Robin Hoods, targeting the swollen wallets of the rich who can afford bland hotel restaurants and overpriced whiskey. When their moonlighting collides with an ill-advised “big score”—and the hotel director sends a hitman after them—you'd hope, or at least pray, for some pulse-raising chaos. Instead, buckle in: this getaway car is stuck in reverse, and the ride is more padded than perilous.

I never thought I’d live to see Jean Reno in the twilight of his career forced to act opposite a snowdrift and lose. "Cold Blood Legacy" (also known simply as "Cold Blood," a name with all the intrigue of a tax filing) is the sort of movie you hope to find by accident at 2AM on cable—a tired assassin in a picturesque cabin, a mysterious young intruder, a snowstorm of clichés drifting in through every frame. What I didn’t expect: a genre film so inept, so embarrassing, that its only claim to suspense is whether any of the cast will make it to the next scene conscious.

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.

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.