Trashtacular

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.

If only blasphemy could be a cinematic genre, then D.J. Caruso’s Mary would stand as its gaudy gold-plated altar—an epic exercise in misdirection, confusion, and tasteless embellishment. I approached this Netflix offering (the Nativity, retold as a streaming event!) with a faint, foolish hope: the epic biblical narrative is one of the inexhaustible wells of the popular imagination. My hope lasted exactly as long as it took for the credits to fade and for the first flagrant absurdity to rear its cartoonish head. If the soothsayers said Megalopolis would be the turkey of the year, they failed to foresee this bird—a toneless monstrosity that squawks when it ought to sing.

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.

What a joyless, magnificent mess of unintended comedy this is, a late-period fever dream so overloaded with Significance and “cinematic history” that it’s hard to know if Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis comes to us as a time capsule from the future of movies, or as the smoldering effluence of Hollywood’s oldest, dearest delusions.

You sit in the theater—nervous, skeptical, weirdly hopeful. If ever a movie dared the audience to ask “why ARE we doing this?” before the lights even dim, it’s Joker: Folie à Deux: a sequel that announces itself with a musical number, fingers everyone in the eye (twice for the trouble), and then dares you to care.