Trashtacular

There are films so spectacularly, unassumingly mediocre that one can simply shrug and move on: the sort of flick that tumbles out of the streaming deluge like another pair of socks in a laundry basket you never meant to sort. Tin Soldier is not that fortunate. This is an extravaganza of delusion, an action-thriller so abject in its self-regard, so confoundingly malformed, that you don’t merely endure its two senseless hours, you wage a month-long campaign for basic comprehension and actionable relief. Failed blockbusters usually suffer the indignity of audience indifference; here, Brad Furman assembles a cadre of Oscar winners, genre veterans and nepo-baby dynamite and still manages to create something more embarrassing than a TikTok fad gone stale by noon.

Just when I thought Martin Campbell had hit rock bottom with Dirty Angels, he’s here holding a pickaxe and a Windex bottle—eager to show us there’s still a few nihilistic layers of schlock to be excavated. Cleaner, the glumly titled thriller that lands with a persuasive thud in the cinematic calendar of 2025, is—let’s be fair—marginally less apocalyptic than last year’s disaster. But that’s only because, after Dirty Angels, even an hour trapped in an actual landfill would feel “kind of a mess” but oddly refreshing.

Let’s not kid ourselves: there’s a certain thrill in seeing a name like Jessica Alba headline a streaming movie after years of cinematic absence—a return, we hope, on par with a Barbra Streisand coming-out concert or, hell, just a slap of fresh paint on tired walls. But nobody warned me that “Trigger Warning”—with a title practically begging for meme-ification—would showcase less a comeback than a one-way trip to career purgatory; it stumbles onto Netflix drier than a box of saltines on the wrong side of the apocalypse.