Trashtacular

There’s something almost touching, almost, about a movie so desperate to wrap itself in the gravitas of “true crime” mythology that it ends up draped in wet, mildewed football scarves. “Rise of the Footsoldier” is less a film than a brute-force memory dump, a feverish scrapbook of loutish glory so in love with its subject that it never pauses to consider whether anyone else could possibly care. If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you force-fed a biopic to a slot machine, pulling the lever every time someone gets bottled or called a four-letter word, look no further.

It’s a peculiar sensation, one you don’t often get in the airless tomb of modern blockbuster filmmaking, to see a trussed-up B-movie artifact—half-remembered, awkwardly revered, and dragged back from the comic-book grave—paraded before us as if it were the return of a lost cinematic age. Red Sonja, the latest in the never-ending parade of intellectual property necromancy, is a movie that squints, peacocks, and then promptly trips over its own boots, all in the name of recycling an idea that, frankly, nobody much missed.

If you thought the nadir of the franchise arrived with Rebel Moon – Part One, Zack Snyder’s kitchen-sink tribute to slow motion and empty spectacle, you are in for a fascinating descent. The Scargiver emerges as less a sequel than a dare—how low can the bar go? If the first film was a parade of hollow bombast, Part Two is the mop-up: a limp, shivering attempt to wring significance out of a narrative so lifeless, you have to check your own pulse to make sure it’s not catching.

Let me begin with a confession fit for the confessional booth aboard some recycled “Star Wars” battlecruiser: I thought Zack Snyder had already bottomed out with Army of the Dead, but Rebel Moon, bless its comic-book heart, is such a spectacular act of creative bankruptcy that it deserves a new wing in the mausoleum of derivative moviemaking. If Snyder’s ambition was to create the world’s loudest, longest Hot Topic commercial—set adrift in a galaxy where all ideas are borrowed and none are cherished—then he’s staged a minor coup.