Trashtacular

Some movies limp over the finish line; The Long Walk manages to trip flat on its face and somehow keeps crawling, dead weight and all. For nearly two hours, I watched a parade of doomed teenagers shuffle alongside an endless highway, and no, this is not a lost “Hunger Games” outtake, though you’d be forgiven for thinking so - Francis Lawrence directed both. To call it familiar is to undersell déjà vu. By minute thirty, I recognized the blueprint: kids, endurance, grim spectacle, draconian rules, broadcast violence, and a regime that puts the “fun” in fundamental oppression. Only, the “fun” is nowhere in sight.

“Hostage” is the kind of British miniseries that seems designed by committee to fool you into mistaking formula for craft. Its premise drips with promise: a Prime Minister (Suranne Jones) and a French President (Julie Delpy) caught in the same noose of blackmail and international intrigue, their personal and political fates entwined as the world watches. What we get, instead, is a muddled soufflé of clichés, the kind that deflates before it’s even made it to the table.

You could say that WarGames: The Dead Code is an object lesson in Hollywood’s special gift: draining the life out of a semi-classic property, embalming it in digital gloss and algorithmic plotting, and then casting it back onto the market in hopes we’ll confuse the bluish afterglow for old-fashioned excitement. If the original WarGames was a deft adolescent fever dream about the nuclear terrors and computer-age naiveté of Reagan’s America, Gillard’s 2008 “sequel” is a reminder that nostalgia is sometimes best left in mothballs. Watching The Dead Code is like sitting through a pop quiz on modern surveillance anxiety written by copy editors who just discovered what phishing is.

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.

If ever you wanted a feature-length infomercial for streaming’s law of diminishing returns, Mel Gibson’s Flight Risk is your final boarding call. In a career littered with fury, fire, and the occasional flayed highlander, Gibson’s latest lands with the exhausted thump of an airline meal tray dumped in your lap at 30,000 feet. Once, he stormed battlements and made mayhem in Aramaic; now, he strands three actors in a metal tube and expects us to call it drama.

The original Platform—the Spanish dystopian riot from 2019—arrived like an incendiary pamphlet stuffed in your lunchbox, urging you to gnaw on all that’s rotten in social hierarchy until your teeth cracked on the metaphors. I left that movie feeling as if I’d been clobbered by class struggle, seduced by horror, starved and force-fed in equal measure—and I liked it. You wandered its vertical prison with Goreng, whose backbone and dwindling hope pulled you, one slippery floor at a time, through a fable of survival so bare-boned and unyielding you could feel the jailer’s breath.