MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - THE FINAL RECKONING

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B
Special Effects: A-

If you’re a Gen-Xer feeling nostalgic for movies featuring Tom Cruise in his underwear, then boy, is this your lucky weekend! He spends a lot of time in his underwear in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. I can only assume he’s eager for us all to see how fit he still is at the age of 62. With a net worth of nearly $900 million, this guy can surely afford all the necessary personal trainers and nutritionists he might need, and still I shudder to think of the time and effort that must go into maintaining a body like that. Plus, he needs that body for all the stunt work he famously does himself. I’m 49 and I can barely get up from a sitting position without groaning in pain.

Still, I’m a little stuck on the screentime Cruise spends in nothing but tight boxer briefs in this movie. At first, Ethan Hunt is running on a treadmill to prepare for a deep sea dive. Of course one of many expendable villains attacks him, and we get a fight scene entirely choreographed with Cruise in his boxer briefs. It’s like the Mission: Impossible version of the fight scene in Eastern Promises, except Cruise doesn't have the courage to go totally naked. Don’t be such a coward, Tom! You’re known for movie stunts, after all—why not truly shock everyone by going full frontal? Maybe his scrotum is the only part of his body with enough wrinkles to make him actually look his age.

A few scenes later, Ethan strips down again, this time as part of his narrow escape from a crashed submarine rolling off an ocean floor cliff. This is how we get the iconic shot of him in the fetal position, floating toward any iced-over ocean surface. Admittedly, it’s a beautiful shot, and all that bare skin effectively adds to the visual impact. This is, in fact, one of the things that impressed me most about The Final Reckoning—Fraser Taggart’s cinematography. Taggart has only four feature film credits as Cinematographer, but his last one was 2023’s Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (Part One in 2023; now just Dead Reckoning since they changed their mind about the name of this year’s movie, its own release date delayed several times, the final delay due to the 2023 actors’ strike). There are two different signature set pieces in The Final Reckoning, and the biplane chase is clearly getting the most attention. But I was most wowed by the rolling ocean-floor submarine sequence, in which Ethan is in and out of water depending on the compartment he’s in, and water flowing from one compartment to another is what causes the submarine to tilt. This sequence has a great deal of fantastic camera work, the angle we see frequently off kilter from what is actually up or down for Ethan, giving us a visceral sense of his own spatial confusion. The missiles that also roll around or fall into the water just to complicate things is icing on the cake.

This is, after all, what we come to Mission: Impossible movies for. It wasn’t so much the case in the franchise’s early years—the first Mission: Impossible was released in 1996, and although it did have some enduringly famous set pieces of its own (the wire heist; the leap from an exploding helecopter to a train—honestly the dumbest looking stunt in the entire franchise), it spent a lot more time on spycraft and, particularly in the wire heist scene, suspense. As the films have gone on, now 29 years of them, on average they have gotten better as they went. Mission: Impossible II was the most forgettable, and then, for me at least, Dead Reckoning was the first since then to dip slightly.

And this is where I seem to break from the critical consensus—people really loved Dead Reckoning two years ago, but while I still found it very entertaining, I also found it overlong (2 hours and 43 minutes is about 40 minutes too many) and too reliant on rehashing set piece concepts from earlier movies. What’s more, the visual effects during the train crash scene were too obviously CGI, to a degree not as noticeable since the aforementioned helicopter explosion in the first film.

Thus, I find myself surprised at how the critical consensus on The Final Reckoning is less enthusiastic, and yet I found myself enjoying it more. To me, this film is closer to a return to form—utterly preposterous story, sure, but the set pieces are genuinely amazing, worth the price of admission on their own. What’s more, much like Dead Reckoning, Christopher McQuarrie (who has now directed the last four of these movies) doesn’t bother wasting any of the best action on the cold open, which here has smaller stakes than in earlier films. It still opens with a clever escape, but it’s just a taste of what’s to come, a sign of better storytelling.

Granted, The Final Reckoning is also overlong (2 hours and 49 minutes is about 45 minutes too many), evidently to allow enough space for its convoluted plotting. As in the last film, this one lacks any villain with personality, because the villain is AI, or rather “The Entity,” which is somehow breaching global nations’ nuclear arsenals one by one, with the threat of igniting a nuclear war that will annihilate humanity. We do get U.S. cabinet discussions about “strategic strikes” against eight targets worldwide, as if that has any rationale at all when it would make the planet uninhabitable. Notwithstanding the objective idiocy of the premise of these movies, it’s still nice to fantasize about Angela Bassett as the U.S. President rather than the genuine dipshit president we actually have. Bassett effortlessly commands respect, at least.

The Final Reckoning works overtime to tie all the previous films together, just as Dead Reckoning did; this time we get yet another key character returning from the first film from 1996. As always, we get unlikely heroes, and Ethan loses someone he has long cared about. Given the nature of this entire franchise, the writing is serviceable but never what we come for; what it delivers are true thrills beautifully shot (my one cinematgraphy complaint being how frequently characters stand in just the right spot for just their eyes not to be in shadow). It may be too long, but it’s never dull.

McQuarrie and Cruise do give us a somewhat curious ending this go-round, something that feels very much by design: long running characters get their own moment onscreen, as if sayiny goodbye. But the story ends with nothing preventing a return to this universe of endless stunts yet again, except maybe Tom Cruise’s age. His physical prowess is still incredible, but he can only maintain that for so much longer. Maybe the next Mission: Impossible will finally find someone to pass the baton to, even if Cruise returns in something more of a supporting role. The possibilities are endless, and there’s no reason not to think this franchise will be too.

Ethan Hunt covered from head to toe—but it doesn’t last long!

Overall: B+

FIGHT OR FLIGHT

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

Fight or Flight is dumb as shit, and it’s also a blast. Because you know what? This is actually a movie with integrity. It knows what it is, it tells you what it is, and then delivers exactly what it promises. There are no pretenses here, and that is precisely what makes a movie like this work.

In less sensible hands, there would be an attempt to shoehorn some kind of unearned empathy for the characters, some sense of earnestness or wholesome sweetness—a dad just trying to show up for his little girl, or whatever. Nobody’s here for that shit! This is something first-time feature director James Madigan understands. Madigon previously worked for many years on visual effects, for the likes of Iorn Man 2 or Bill & Ted Face the Music. He’s also worked as Second Unit or Assistant Director, on films like Insurgent and The Meg. It would be tempting to say that he’s being forced to slum it here with his first feature directorial gig, except that clearly given the right opportunity, this guy knows how to deliver.

He’s also got the perfect star in Josh Hartnett, now starring in two films in as many years that qualify as slightly-elevated trash—the other one being Trap, the M. Night Shyamalan film that has its own dumb charms but ultimately fails to live up to its own promise. Fight or Flight is actually a better movie, never bothering with misguided plot turns and instead staying the course on its own pulpiness.

To be clear, there are definite lulls in Fight or Flight. But they are reliably brief, as this movie never wastes time getting to the delightfully ridiculous. Lucas (Hartnett) is a disgraced FBI agent being given a chance at redemption when he is the only person close enough to follow an elusive criminal onto a plane from Bangkok to San Francisco. Here’s the fun twist on the premise, something thankfully established early on so it’s never used as a predictable “reveal”—the “ghost,” as the elusive person is called, has a $10 million bounty on their head, and when their flight itinerary is leaked, we wind up with a large plane packed with assassins.

Who needs snakes? Hitmen (and hitwomen) will do just fine. In fact, there’s a line between straight up garbage and well-crafted trash. Fight or Flight works because it operates on its own terms, as opposed to pre-emotive fan service. The more ridiculous it got, the more fun I had—even when assassins found weapons that would never actually make their way on such a plane. I guess in some cases having characters search luggage in the cargo hold is a convenient trick. One particular weapon, which I won’t spoil even though the trailer does, effectively tops everything seen up to that point, ratcheting up the mayhem exponentially.

Fight or Flight frequently cuts back to predictably dubious agents on the ground, played by Kate Sackhoff and Julian Kostov, who are a bit wasted here. On the plane, British-Indian actor Charithra Chandran is a relative standout in a key role, ultimately holding her own in all of the in-flight hand-to-hand combat that would never really work in the confines of an airplane mid-flight. But who cares? No one is coming to a movie like this for plausibility. You want to see gushing bloodshed and dismemberment, which Fight or Flight has in spades. As well as many other weapons.

I giggled my way through this movie, tickled pink at its cartoon violence, the airplane setting giving it a seemingly novel spin akin to the much higher-profile 2022 film Bullet Train—but without the pointless indulgence in so-called character development. Fight or Flight has a perfectly respectable runtime of 102 minutes, because it knows we have no need to know that much about who these characters are. By the end, the script does throw in some token morality about slave labor used to manufacture our electronics, a plot concept so undercooked it’s barely noticeable. At least it’s heavily loaded with clever takes on implausible fight choreography, the only thing any of us have come here for, and which the crew is happy to serve.

The Not So Friendly Skies

Overall: B

THE ACCOUNTANT²

Directing: C
Acting: B
Writing: C
Cinematography: B
Editing: C+

The Accountant 2 is the kind of movie that makes me glad I have a monthly AMC subscription—I’m paying the same no matter how good or bad the movie is. Of course, my husband decided to join me for this one, which meant I did pay $15.21 for his ticket. I can’t say it was especially worth it.

When I saw The Accountant in 2016, I was quite pleasantly surprised by it, especially given its evenly mixed reviews. The circumstances were preposterous and the depictions of autism by non-autistic people dubious—but still, I found the characters charming, especially Ben Affleck as Christian, the title character who is a cross between Rain Man and Rambo, and who launders money through, you guessed it, an accounting business.

There’s no actual CPA accounting in The Accounting 2. So much for truth in advertising! The closest we get is the clever superscript “2” in the title design. At least that makes more sense than 33 years ago when some genius unveiled the title design for Alien³. “Alien cubed”? I don’t remember seeing a xenomorph packing around a pocket protector. At least Affleck’s Christian is actually pretty square. Honestly that title design is the most clever thing about The Accountant 2.

How many movies do we need about human trafficking, anyway? I’m all for making the focus of this film the relationship between Christian and his brother, Braxton (Jon Bernthal), but is this really the context we have to put it in? An argument could be made that this film is particularly timely, what with its empathetic depictions of undocumented migrants, particularly those who get taken advantage of by actual criminals. I have no complaints about that. I just wish this movie were better.

It’s strange to me that the critical consensus on The Accountant was evenly mixed, the critical consensus on The Accountant 2 moves slightly toward mixed-positive. The first film is definitively better, and the second one brings back all but one of the first film’s principal characters, evidently just for nostalgia’s sake (J.K. Simmons as Ray King; Cynthia Addai-Robinson as Marybeth Medina; Alison Wright as the faceless voice on Christian’s phone), though some of them don’t last long. The exception is Anna Kendrick, the one principal character who does not return. Reportedly this is because of a desire to focus on the brothers’ relationship rather than have a romantic interest. I also applaud the disinclination to include romance only for its own sake.

The Accountant 2 takes way too long to get to the aforementioned relationship between the brothers, though, the first act front loaded with plot mechanics. This is at the expense of what made Christian interesting in the first place. Instead of humanizing him, we just get more of Christian’s ticks alienating people, or more pointedly, annoying his brother. It also introduces this thing called “acquired savant syndrome,” in which extraordinary skills are developed quickly after a brain injury. Enter Anaïs (Daniella Pineda), whose post-trauma skill is being one hell of an assassin.

I did find Anaïs relatively compelling, even as she proved to be a key part of convoluted story threads related to a specific family of migrants. But that’s just because I have a thing for women who kick ass, even if (and sometimes especially when) they are villainous. In the end, though, there is not enough interaction between her and the characters we care most about, and she isn’t even present in a climactic sequence involving a two-man shootout with countless men at a Juarez prison camp where they are holding kidnapped children captive. This sequence is just like those in countless other movies, and I just got bored.

I’d have liked The Accountant 2 if it had leaned more into the dynamics of Christian’s limited number of relationships. But even his budding “buddy” relationship with his brother takes a definitive backseat to both the plot and the action, which is largely rote. The same could be said of the first film, but that one had its priorities straight, helping us get to know who Christian is. The Accountant 2 doesn’t allow us to get to know him any better, and instead ultimately has him start breaking out of comfort zones in ways the first film would have us believe are highly implausible. And that movie was highly improbable to begin with. Reuniting with this character could have been a good thing if only it felt like it was building on a strong foundation, but the foundation was shaky to begin with, rendering this a sequel that’s ultimately fruitless.

Is the stiffness all our hidden guns or it it our personalities?

Overall: C+

THUNDERBOLTS*

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Special Effects: B

Thunderbolts*, like countless other Marvel Studios films before it, is both overlong and overstuffed, trying to do too much, because even after years of being exhausted by it, these movies still expect to trade on audiences’ intricate knowledge of every other wild thing that has ever happened in now-33 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Who has time for that shit?

Furthermore, there are no aliens in this movie. I only mention this because there are aliens in other MCU movies, and this one has a very brief, single line that references “when the aliens came.” But what if you’re watching this movie and you’ve never seen any of those other, “alien” ones? You’d just be left thinking: Huh?

None of the original Avengers are in Thunderbolts* either (spoiler alert!). What happened to them all, anyway? How many years ago was that? Some sacrificed themselves, I think? Some simply retired, like, to a farm or something? I honestly don’t remember, and it’s because frankly I don’t care. I’m just over here waiting for another one of the rare MCU films that actually manages a successful pivot, like Black Panther or Logan. I even liked Black Widow more than I expected to—even if it’s not quite in the same league as the aforementioned films—which is the very reason I found myself interested in Thunderbolts*, which serves as a quasi-sequel. Florence Pugh and David Harbour both return as Yelena Belva and Alexei Shastakov (“The Red Guardian”), and they are delightful characters.

They do get a bit darker here, as the themes of this film, as directed by Jake Shreier, takes a bit of a left turn into metaphors for mental health and depression. As someone who does not live with depression, I cannot truly speak to how successful the film is at this. It’s easy to imagine some people feeling like it trivializes their experiences and their struggles. Others might find it makes them feel seen. The inevitable climactic battle here takes place inside the mind of a supervillain who is a huge danger to himself and the world, but is also deeply empathetic—an unusual choice that I appreciate. Even when it doesn’t fully work, I can always respect a big swing.

Of course, the plotting also gets unnecessarily convoluted. But, if it results in by far the biggest role in an MCU film by Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the perennially dubious CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, I’m all for it. Thunderbolts* could have taken a few action sequence cuts and added more of Valentina. Nobody would have complained.

Not that I have any major complaints about Thunderbolts* as it stands. This ragtag team of misfit criminals-turned-heroes, which along with Yelena and Alexei, includes Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko), Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), and maybe also Robert Reynolds (Lewis Pullman), have chemistry. They get conveniently thrown together when Valentina sends them all to assassinate each other in a giant vault on top of a mountain where she plans to incinerate all the evidence of a shady operation which, naturally, ultimately produces our supervillain.

As for the supervillain, comic book readers will likely recall why he is referred to as both “Sentry” and “The Void.” It’s easy to feel ambivalent about this character, and it’s difficult to gauge how deliberately Schreier makes that part of the point. I will say this: after countless superhero movies following the exact same beats over and over, in which a CGI-laden mega-battle occurs to save the entire planet or the entire galaxy or hell, even the universe (how about multiverses!), it’s refreshing to see one of these movies dial back the stakes and ground them, even if in this case they are largely wrapped in uncertainly executed metaphorical psychology.

Whatever turns it takes, Thunderbolts* is consistently and undeniably fun. It’s a bit drab visually, lots of shades of grey in its color palate (perhaps a deliberate choice for characters who struggle between inner light and inner darkness), and the visual effects are serviceable. Black Widow was a better movie, and the absence of Scarlett Johansson is keenly felt, but it’s also nice to spend more time with a couple of other great characters is introduced to us. The new characters feel a bit expendable overall, really, but it’s the presence of the special ones that at least slightly tips the scales in its favor.

*Made you look!

SINNERS

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Special Effects: B-

Apparently I’m a White guy who just doesn’t get it. Or at least, I didn’t at first. The deeply allegorical nature of Sinners had to be spelled out to me. A friend spelled it out, in a way that made it click for me: this is an allegory about the vampiric nature of White communities, and how they appropriate other cultures, specifically Black culture.

It’s also much more nuanced than that, of course. The line that has stayed with me perhaps the most vividly is when a vampire who has been frozen in youth for decades approaches an old man, a man who is near the end of a decades-long career singing the blues, and offers him eternal life as an alternative to dying of old age. The blues singer, actually a key character from the film just much later in life, replies: “I think I’ve seen enough of this place.” Someone in the theater shouted at the screen: “No kidding!”

Most of the action in Sinners takes place over the course of a single day, the exciting stuff deep into the film, when twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) mount the opening night of a barn converted into a juke joint in 1930s Mississippi. It may be a surprise to learn that I kept thinking about Jurassic Park, which follows a very similar narrative arc: the solid first half is nothing but setup, the second half nothing but thrilling payoff. Indeed, very little of consequence seems to be happening in the first half of Sinners, in which we spend a lot of time getting introduced to characters and learning back stories. Most notable among them are those of Smoke and Stack, who have returned after seven years in Chicago—which turned out not to be the bastion of Black freedom it was cracked up to be. “Might as well play with the devil you know,” they say.

One of the twins reconnects with an old flame, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), with whom he once had a baby who died as an infant. The other pushes away his old flame, Mary (Hailee Seinfeld), in his mind for her own protection—she’s found a “rich White husband” (a character we never meet), but by 1930s standards, she exists in a liminal racial space, due to her grandfather having been half-Black.

There’s a lot of music in Sinners, and I am happy to report that the excellent soundtrack is available, either for purchase or on a music streaming service near you. It features a lot of blues, with Irish folk music sprinkled in—writer-director Ryan Coogler, here producing his first original, non-franchise feature film since his 2013 breakthrough Fruitvale Station, has real skill for using music to both uplift and unnerve. It feels a bit pointed that the primary vampire villain in this film, a local White guy named Remmick (Jack O’Connell), sings an Irish jig in the creepiest way imaginable, several Black characters who have been turned stumble-dancing in a circle around him. This isn’t so much a judgment of traditional Irish culture—which, notably, the Black characters in Sinners openly appreciate—but rather a commentary on the very existence of rich culture actually available to White people, particularly at that time, but it’s still not enough for them. They must also consume the culture surrounding them.

Many characters we meet, get to know, and come to care about in Sinners are eventually turned into monsters. This is very much the point. It also includes two Asian-American characters, a married couple who run a general store and a grocery store on opposite sides of the same street in the local town. There’s probably a lot to unpack regarding the way these characters interact with the Black community here, but I’ll just go ahead and leave that packed, as it isn’t my bag to mess with. There is also a memorable scene, when we first see Remmick, that features members of the Choctaw Nation, having chased him to the home of a White couple he manipulates into inviting them into their home.

This, again, is rather far into the runtime of Sinners, which clocks in at 137 minutes. This is a bit longer than necessary; the aforementioned formula would have been just as effective were the two halves just an hour each. Coogler also takes a couple of moments to show off the special effects, especially as it pertains to Michael B. Jordan playing twins. Around the time we see them for the first time, we see them pass a cigarette between each other’s fingers, and the CGI effects are obvious. Mind you, I’ll never complain about getting to see more of Michael B. Jordan, but would it not have been simpler just to cast a pair of actual twins?

Coogler is an undeniable talent, though, and plenty of people are clearly eager to work for him—in this case, including Delroy Lindo as pianist Delta Slim, and even legendary blues singer Buddy Guy as the aforementioned blue singer character nearing the end of his career. Sinners is overflowing with acting talent, and one wonders how much of the film’s roughly $100 budget went to paying them—the visual effects could have used a bit more of that budget.

However it got made, I have a strong feeling that Sinners would be particularly rewarding upon rewatch. Much is made of how music can conjure both darkness and light, and within the context of ancestral wisdom, from the past and into the future. A particularly great scene liberalizes this, when the performance of a blues song morphs into other genres—both that resulted in the invention of the blues, and what later would not have existed without it. Coogler’s cinematographer, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, swoops and weaves the camera through the revelry in the juke joint full of people forgetting their pain for just a moment, lost in the music, nameless characters passing here and there, in the dress and playing the instruments of cultures from different times and different continents, from Africa to America and from centuries past to the Great Depression, and on to the eras of rap and hiphop. Sinners references many times, places and cultures that have come and gone in specific ways I personally have no power to put my finger on, but on a thematic level, I can at least appreciate that something profound is at work.

Brace yourselves—for something both familiar and unprecedented.

Overall: B+

NOVOCAINE

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

The best thing Novocaine has going for it is its clever and innovative premise: an Assitant Manager at a bank breaks the streak of an incredibly sheltered life to go on a wildly dangerous quest to save his crush from bank robber hostages—something he’s uniquely able to do because he has a genetic condition that prevents him from feeling pain.

What this means is two things. First, for an action comedy, Novocaine gets surprisingly graphic and gory. Second, for a mid-tier movie like this, Novocaine is genuinely funny, often precisely because of the graphic gore. Some of it actually reminded me of the 2023 comic gore fest Cocaine Bear, which actually put some viewers off because it relied so heavily on violence as comedy, but I got a big kick out of it.

Novocaine spends more time getting comedy out of its character relationships, to varying effect. Jack Quaid is well cast as Nate, the man with the “Novocaine” nickname. We learn that he grew up sheltered because it’s so easy for him to get injured and not realize it—he even avoids eating solid foods for fear of biting his tongue off (and when he is finally convinced to try a bite of cherry pie, I was really afraid that was what actually would happen). Quaid embodies the put-upon recluse well, although the full body of tattoos (all drawn on my Nate himself) strains believability. Plus, he has real charisma with Amber Midthunder, who plays the object of Nate’s crush at the bank, Sherry.

The bank robbers, though, are to a person thinly drawn, utterly contrived villains who fail to be interesting despite the best efforts of the people playing them—including Jack Nicholson’s son, Ray Nicholson. Between him and Quaid, who is the son of Randy Quaid and Meg Ryan, Novocaine is quite the “nepo baby” movie. But if an actor has the juice, it doesn’t matter who their parents are. It’s easy to see potential in Nicholson, but it would be nice to see him cast as a character whose motivations actually make sense. In Novocaine, his Simon character kills people indiscriminately both during and after the bank robbery, racking up a body count with no interrogation whatsoever into what’s behind his behavior. No sane criminal who has actually had multiple successful heists already would act so recklessly, but here I guess he serves as a potentially lethal danger to a protagonist who can withstand massive injury without blinking an eye.

Speaking of which, co-directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, and writer Lars Jacobson, are fairly careful about making sure Nate’s injuries actually last and don’t magically disappear. This does happen a bit with cuts and bruises on his face—Quaid is the star, after all—but the burns on his hand after sticking it in boiling oil last the rest of the film, sometimes taking other characters aback. An injury to his leg has him limping thereafter. And by the climactic sequence at the end of the film, Nate is finding ways to use his own injuries as weapons.

And this is all we’re going to Novocaine to see, really: the comic violence and clever gore that comes with a guy on a dangerous mission who can’t feel pain. That, and Jack Quaid himself. Few other actors would be as good a fit for Nate, a guy who is fearful and cautious until he is driven to put his body through the ringer. There’s a twist about halfway through that I did not see coming but which I’m sure others will see a mile away. It does make the story more interesting, but in a way that is severely limited by a pack of one-dimensional villains whose motivations only get halfway to making sense about half the time.

The trick to this movie—and most action comedies, really—is to go in with expectations properly calibrated. I certainly expected nothing special out of Novocaine, and that is precisely what I got. But it’s also very well paced and consistently funny, which is how a movie that could easily have fallen flat manages to work. Sometimes you just want solid entertainment even if it’s ultimately forgettable.

Nate never gives a handout because this just might be what he gets back.

Overall: B

LOVE HURTS

Directing: C-
Acting: C-
Writing: F
Cinematography: C+
Editing: C+

Ke Huy Quan deserves a successful, fun, smart action movie that proves he’s bankable beyond the stunning alignment of stars that was Everything Everywhere All at Once. We’re now three years beyond that film, and Quan has been cast in the starring role of the action comedy Love Hurts, which is . . . not that movie.

It’s difficult to express precisely how bad this movie is. To be fair, there was some talent that went into it—Quan himself is in it, after all, and he’s the one person in it giving a passable performance. But oh my god, the script! Something truly unexpected comes to mind: the old Christian quote about how Jesus answered when asked how much he loves us: “This much, he answered: then he stretched out his arms and died.” Time to flip the script, so to speak: that’s how much I hated the writing in this movie. I should really be admitted into a hospital.

Love Hurts was written by a team of three writers, whom I will do the courtesy of not naming here. The possibility that any of them might be proud of this work makes me despair for humanity. I could have written a better script in a single evening with one hand tied behind my back. While on a triple dose of Ambien.

It’s almost worse that the premise could have actually worked. Marvin Gable (Quan) is a real estate agent who has reinvented himself after a life of crime working with his brother, Alvin (Daniel Wu), who has sent several of his goons after Marv after hearing that Rose (Ariana DeBose), who was supposed to have been killed for stealing from Alvin, is actually alive and has returned. Hardly original, true—but it doesn’t have to be. All that’s needed is some chemistry, charisma, and wit, and you have the makings of passable entertainment. But Quan has no chemistry with DeBose; all of the supporting actors have zero charisma; and the story is completely witless. I suppose I should be fair. I did laugh a couple of times when it was unintentionally funny.

Did I mention that Alvin’s nickname is “Knuckles”? Or that Sean Astin shows up, quite randomly, as Marv’s boss with a cowboy hat and an exaggerated Southern accent?

Everything that happens in Love Hurts is unbearably rote and obvious. Every character exists as nothing more than an exposition factory. Given the streamer’s executive notes to creators that characters should repeatedly say aloud what they are doing, this should have been released on Netflix. I’d say that why anyone would waste their time seeing this movie in the theater escapes me, except that’s precisely what I just did. There were four other people in the theater. All those empty seats were the sensible choice. The rest of us need a wellness check.

I knew this movie was headed nowhere good as soon as it began, with excessive voiceover narration, declaring Valentine’s Day a day full of delightful surprises. Marv gets on the phone with depressive his assistant, Ashley (Lio Tipton), who is getting ready for the office Valentine’s Day party. What office ever throws a party for Valentine’s Day?

Three of Knuckles’s henchmen get what pass for subplots in this movie. One, “The Raven,” becomes a love interest for Ashley when she discovers his book of poetry. Then there are Otis and King, played by André Eriksen and Marshawn Lynch respectively, who spend a lot of time shooting guns at people but not hitting their targets, with one exception that is played for one of the many laughs that fall flat. I don’t fault anyone for being a fan of Marshawn Lynch, he seems like a delightful enough guy, but that does not make him a good actor. His relatively unnatural line readings could perhaps be forgiven if not for nearly every other performance being phoned in. Seahawks fans might get a minor kick out of hearing Lynch literally say “Beast mode!” when he tackles someone during a fight, but to me it felt like an Easter egg in the wrong basket. Anyway, King keeps giving Otis advice on how to mend his relationship with his wife and, you don’t care, do you? God knows I didn’t.

If Love Hurts has any redeeming quality, it’s the fight choreography—this is the only time the movie stops being oppressively stupid and becomes genuinely fun. But these moments are fleeting, largely because we don’t get nearly enough of them. While they are happening, the fight choreography flits between clever and corny, but appears to have been done practically, if sometimes obscured by frenetic cinematography. But it’s as though these martial arts exist in a different movie. If only they did.

Ke Huy Quan, to his credit, is the best thing in this movie, which isn’t saying much for a film that so brazenly sets the bar low. The bar is in the basement. It’s in the Earth’s core. But Quan is game and appears to be having fun. Still, I have to wonder about his judgment. The fact that all of these actors read this script and thought it was worth shooting makes me wonder about their reading comprehension.

Maybe this was a test, for all of us. Where is the reward? I sat through an 83-minute movie that felt like an eternity and all I got was this ridiculous review.

Yes, that is correct. This movie misses the mark.

Overall: D+

GLADIATOR II

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Special Effects: C

Protip: don’t rewatch the original film just days before seeing its “legacyquel” that’s being released decades later. I keep making this mistake. I watched Twister right before seeing Twisters; I watched Beetlejuice right before seeing Beetlejuice Beetlejuice; I watched Gladiator right before seeing Gladiator II. The only consistent purpose this seems to serve is how the new film definitively fails to live up to the first.

You see where I’m going with this. Even more than the other examples, Gladiator II follows all the same basic story beats as its far superior, Best Picture-winning predecessor from 2000. The comparisons to The Force Awakens and Top Gun Maverick are apt—and I’d throw in Alien: Romulus as well, given how its story directly mirrors the original Alien from 1979. These movies do what they do with varying success, although it should be noted that Gladiator II does it with the least success.

Does this mean I wasn’t entertained? Absolutely not. My answer to Russell Crowe’s Maximus from the original film, when he asks the immortal line “Are you not entertained!” is an emphatic, I am. Granted, in this film Paul Mescal’s Lucius asks a question with similar delivery from the middle of an arena when he asks, “Is this how Rome treats its heroes!” It doesn’t land with quite the same import but I guess you can’t have everything.

Gladiator II is, overall . . . fine. But this is its greatest weakness, because the original Gladiator was so much better than that. It had an iconic hero in Russell Crowe’s Maximus; it had an iconic villain in Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus. It also had an undeniable movie star at its center, and the closest to that we get in Gladiator II is Denzel Washington—as the most notable scheming villain, among several. It should be noted that Washington is the best thing and most fun person to watch in this movie. Paul Mescal as Lucius the conquered and enslaved gladiator, and Pedro Pascal as the Roman General who is the target of Lucius’s vengeance, are both capable and talented actors but neither quite rise to what director Ridley Scott is clearly aiming to replicate with them. I hesitate to say it’s their fault, given that the script is one of the weakest elements of this film.

One might be tempted to celebrate the amount of queerness thrown into Gladiator II—until you realize it is exclusive to queer-coding villainous characters. Washington’s Macrinus, who is clawing his own way from a distant past in slavery with eyes on the throne, reveals himself to be bisexual, wears gold earrings, and always wears colorful, flowing robes. Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger play twin Emperors Geta and Caracalla, both of them presented as effete, one of them with a clingy male concubinus. And again, this young emperors are both villainous as well, but neither comes across so much as formidable as like a couple of fickle little dipshits.

These details are all unfortunate but relatively subtle; I was entertained enough not to be too bothered by it, at least until I had more time to reflect on it once the film ended. There’s a lot of gladiatorial combat, of course, and several large-scale battle sequences, and if there is any place where Ridley Scott shines, it is here. And if you can watch this without a vivid recollection of its better predecessor, the performances are compelling, especially among the three leads, as well as that of Connie Nielsen as Lucilla, one of three characters (and two actors) who return here from the first film.

The Colosseum gladiator scenes, however, must be called out in their ridiculousness. Ridley Scott used real tigers in one of the gladiator battle scenes in the 2000 film, and apparently felt it was important to “up the ante” this time—over and over again—but never with anything real. We get to see baboons, a rhinoceros, and even sharks, all of them transparent CGI. It’s difficult to care about the supposed danger characters face if they are effectively battling a cartoon. The sharks, for instance, dart around the water like they’re in a video game. The Colosseum apparently really did get filled with water to host mock naval battles as entertainment, but that’s the extent of the realism here. How the hell could the Romans ever have transport all these giant sharks to the Colosseum anyway, let alone captured them live in the open ocean?

Yeah, yeah: it’s just a movie, right? Suspension of disbelief still has its own boundaries, and those boundaries can be strained. Still, most of the time I watched Gladiator II, I adopted that very frame of mind: it’s just a movie, and in spite of all these details I can easily pick apart, I’m having a good time. I can’t say I was disappointed in it, mostly because I enjoy the actors, they play well off each other, and their performances do manage to elevate the lesser material, at least to a degree. The script lacks the tightness of the 2000 film, doubly unfortunate give the degree to which it simply attempts to replicate it—but, it was still compelling enough to follow. This is a 148-minute film and I never got bored. Will I ever go out of my way to watch it again, or recommend it to anyone else? Not likely.

Gladiator II was an adequate way to spend a Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t great. The key point here is that simply re-watching the original Gladiator was time much better spent.

Not a fully accurate representation of The Colosseum.

Overall: B-

THE KILLER'S GAME

Directing: C
Acting: B-
Writing: C+
Cinematography: C+
Editing: B

When it comes to a movie like The Killer’s Game, going in with seriously low expectations is an effective way not to hate it.

I hardly loved it either, mind you. This is a transparent ripoff of John Wick, with its own gimmick: Instead of a hitman avenging the death of his wife and his dog, we get a hitman who contracts a hit on himself after finding out he has a terminal disease, only to find out he’s been misdiagnosed. He’s going to live after all! Except, the other assassins—and one in particular—are bent on “honoring the contract.”

This would all be more fun if The Killer’s Game could be watched cold, with none of this known beforehand. The problem is, there’s nothing else interesting enough about this movie to pique anyone’s interest. What other reason is there to watch it? Even with this twist made crystal clear in trailers, it landed in theaters last movie with a thud, coming in at #6 and earning a paltry $2.6 million at the box office.

With a better script, The Killer’s Game might have worked. Instead, wedged in between some action choreography that is actually pretty good, it veers perilously close to self-parody. Leaning a tad more into earnestness, or even in the other direction into over parody, might have been an improvement. What we get, in this film directed by (of course) John Wick stuntman J.J. Perry, are characters who actually utter lines heard in countless other movies to the pint of ridiculous, with a straight face. When Ben Kingsley, as Dave Bautista’s hitman mentor, says “Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” not only is it played as preposterously profound, it’s at least the third time we hear a line that dumb and overdone.

Ben Kingsley, even at age 80, clearly just likes to work. Sometimes he’s amazing (Sexy Beast, Hugo), and other times . . . not so much. This is one of those other times. Don’t get me wrong; the B-minus level acting in this movie is the best thing it has going for it when we aren’t being treated to creative gruesome hit jobs. Granted, Perry ups the ante with each introduction of a new assassin or team of assassins. But then it goes so far that we wind up with Chilean martial artist and actor Mark Zaror as “El Botas,” doing a kind of one-man tango, complete with boot spurs as lethal weapons, as he cuts through his victims.

There is also more than just a splash of Kill Bill in this movie, with stylized introductions of characters with fun names, and blood gushing out all over the place. We get plenty of broken bones and dismemberment and bodies blown apart, some of it in a church—where, conveniently, there happens to be a priest handy when a couple decides on the fly that they want to get married. But not before the hitman must confess the entirety of his sins!

I won’t deny that I actually had a bit of fun watching The Killer’s Game. But that only works when there’s nothing better to choose from in theaters, and we’re setting a pretty low bar here. Bautista is barely serviceable as a leading man playing an actual human (as opposed to, say, an alien, or a Harkonnen), but the fact that he’s so giant and jacked it’s almost otherworldly makes it a challenge to accept him as someone who is in any way normal. Not that a hitman is normal, although a big part of the plot here is how he falls in love with a professional dancer played by Sofia Boutella. When they were shown in bed together, all I could think about is how dangerous it would be for them to literally sleep together, when he could just roll over and crush her to death.

The most frustrating thing about The Killer’s Game is its wasted potential. No one goes into a movie like this expecting high art—we’re here to watch people maim and kill each other. That’s the standard by which it should be judged: how well that is executed. Sadly, even by that metric, it’s pretty substandard, a constant riff on themes and concepts from far better influences that this movie completely fails to innovate in any way.

Dave Bautista demonstrates his acting range.

Overall: C+

BORDERLANDS

Directing: D+
Acting: C-
Writing: D
Cinematography: C+
Editing: C
Special Effects: C

There are so many things wrong with Borderlands, it’s hard to know where to begin—but, much as it pains me to do so, I am going to start with Cate Blanchett. Who knew she was even capable of bad acting, let alone being possibly the worst performance in this movie? Granted, an absolutely abysmal script—cowritten by director Eli Roth and Joe Abercrombie—didn’t do her any favors, but Blanchett is an actor of such talent and stature that one could reasonably expect her to elevate the material. Instead, it’s the opposite.

A big problem—among, oh my god, so many—is that Blanchett was cast in a movie like this to begin with. No one can blame her for wanting to have a little fun, but can she not recognize quality fun? Perhaps not. She’s like an alien trying and failing to act human in this part. It’s as though she spent decades playing parts with genuine gravitas, then dipped her toes into the pool of blockbusters—in this case, specifically video game adaptation—and discovered she had no idea what she was doing.

This brings me to Jamie Lee Curtis, who perhaps thought this was a the logical next step after the wild and brilliant ride that was Everything Everywhere All at Once. But when her charaacter, Tannis, is introduced a fair amount of time into the movie, we are literally warned that she is an “oddball” and “says a lot of weird things.” She then proceeds to spend the rest of the movie never saying anything particualarly weird at all. The oddest thing about her is a pair of dark protective glasses, and Curtis’s line delivery that has a incongruous dash of childlike chipperness. What, exactly, are these people doing?

Floudering in a narrative sink hole, that’s what. It’s truly depressing so see the likes to Cate Blanchett, after spending way too long with pointlessly expository voiceover narration, sit down at a bar and utter the words, '“I’m too old for this shit.” We have heard that line so many times in so many movies, it’s no wonder she says it with no conviction whatsoever.

It’s slightly ironic, then, that it’s the cast who aren’t such huge movie stars who better hold the camera in Borderlands. To be fair, Kevin Hart is a huge star too—as a comedian. He isn’t particularly funny here (almost no one is), but he has fairly natural delivery as Roland, the guy who kidnaps a young woman from what appears to be a space ship prison (this is never explained). That woman is “Tiny Tina,” played by Ariana Greenblatt, who gives the best performance in this movie—not that that’s a high bar. But least when she’s not hampered by leaden dialogue, she’s both compelling and fun, exuding a genuine charisma.

Blanchett plays Lilith, a bounty hunter hired to retrieve Tiny Tina for a corporate mogul (Edgar Ramírez) who may or may not be her father. When Lilith returns to her “shithole” planet of Pandora (very original) in search of Tina, she discovers a snarky robot named Claptrap who is programmed, to his own dismay, to serve Lility until her death. And Claptrap, while hardly the best movie robot in history, is the one consistently good thing in this movie. His lines, and particularly Jack Black’s delivery voicing him, got a good number of giggles out of me.

The production design, mostly rendered by subpar CGI, is very junkyard inspired, decaying husks of appliances and vehicles covered in graffiti, this being the general vibe of Pandora, where legend says there is a “vault” that holds the secrets to human potential once under the protection of an ancient alien race, or some such nonsense. The tone that Eli Roth is clearly going for is very much like the seminal 1997 Luc Besson film The Fifth Element. Except that movie had a director who knew what he was doing, it had a cast of natural movie stars who understood the assignment, and most importantly, it had an assured handle on both pacing and wit. Borderlands has none of these things. If not for Claptrap, I’d say it was completely witless. And not all of Claptrap’s lines land successfully either; he’s just got a greater success rate than any of the other characters combined.

The most frustrating thing about Borderlands is that it actually could have been good. Being silly doesn't inherently mean bad, but it needs just the right calibration. It’s not just that Borderlands is all spectacle and no substance. It’s that overall it rings hollow. The characters have all the dimension of video game characters left dormant, with no one even playing them—even while they move and speak. There’s nothing driving this story but going through the motions. At one point Lilith walks past an abandoned park merry-go-round and I wished I could have just spent two hours riding that instead. It would have been objectively more rewarding.

Behold, the hole they will never dig themselves out of.

Overall: C-