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.

Tyler Perry’s Duplicity—now streaming on Amazon Prime Video—wants to be urgent, topical, and bracing. It arrives with all the signals of “serious intent”: brooding about justice, the jagged aftermath of police violence, and a pair of ambitious Black women set against a system that doesn’t budge for grief or outrage. There is the shape here of a vital film, but what actually transpires is a parade of perfunctory gestures and canned dramatics; it’s as if Perry had borrowed the scaffolding of a social thriller and was content to let it creak.

There’s a particular variety of agony reserved for a movie that owes you nothing but revenge for your ticket price—Dirty Angels, that screeching travesty, is the kind of picture that makes you long for the cleansing reset of a fire alarm at the multiplex. I wandered into this on the power of Eva Green’s name—Green, the bewitching sphinx of Casino Royale, the only actress in Europe who could make absinthe seem like a food group for grown-ups, a woman so regal she can elevate bad prose by the simple motion of an eyebrow. Here? I was cursing at the screen, and when the closing credits limped into view, I found out, to my horror, that this circus wasn’t the product of a neophyte director with TikTok aspirations—but Martin Campbell himself. Yes, the same Campbell who gave us GoldenEye’s gleaming coolness and Casino Royale’s athletic grace. Is there another Martin Campbell out there, brazenly collecting paychecks for things like Dirty Angels? If not, someone had better warn the Directors Guild.