Amidst a busy week of caucuses and Presidential debates, America receives another blunt force reminder that lest we ever lose sight of our god-given kick-assness there will always be an action film depicting our sheer superhuman patriotic determination to take down all terrorists who threaten us.

This reminder comes in the form of London Has Fallen, the fast-paced follow-up to 2013’s Olympus Has Fallen. Though, while the inclination of action films isn’t necessarily toward truthfulness—and moviegoers’ patriotism not to be taken for granted—London Has Fallen puts American exceptionalism on so high a pedestal it’s practically the stuff of fairy tales. Audiences looking for explosions and quippy wisecracks won’t be let down, but this film will not be winning us points with our allies anytime soon. As a depiction of not only how two Americans (one of them the President) can take on a major terrorist cell, but how much more competently they do it without the help of the government officials of the country they are located in, London Has Fallen is a cartoonish action flick cashing in on the attachments its characters built in the previous film and layering on American bravado at the expense of all other nations.

Directed by Babak Najafi, an Iranian-Swedish filmmaker without much to his name, the film starts at a large wedding party in Pakistan. We meet Aamir Barkawi (Alon Moni Aboutboul), an arms dealer who advises his eldest son, who has recently offed one of their competitors, not to forget to take out their enemy’s family as well. Clearly this guy holds grudges. Next minute a drone attacks the wedding. Two years later, back in America, President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart) is two years into his second term and now very close with his Head Secret Service Agent, Mike Banning (Gerard Butler doing his best to stifle that Scottish accent), who saved his ass in the last film. Mike’s expecting a baby with wife Leah (Rhada Mitchell) and contemplating his retirement.

The unexpected death of the British Prime Minister urges the President to quickly fly off to London to attend the funeral. Banning and Secret Service Director Lynne Jacobs (Angela Bassett reprising her role) don’t like the unknowns involved in last-minute travel, but Banning’s the best of the best, and he accompanies the President to the UK. Those who’ve seen the last film (or even the trailer) will easily guess where the story heads. Barkawi has picked his moment to exact revenge for the drone attack that killed his daughter. One by one he picks off the world’s leaders as they arrive in London, destroying much of the city’s historical landmarks in the process.

His minions appear from the crowds in such high numbers it would indicate almost no one seen thus far in London is actually a citizen. The police aren’t who they seem. Motorcyclists emerge to chase down the President as Mike rushes him back to the helicopter. They aren’t in the helicopters long when missiles down them. The death toll and destruction is close to comic-book movie status. As London goes on lockdown, Mike and President Asher make their way through the streets—Mike’s apparent built-in GPS guiding them—eventually connecting with an MI6 agent Jacquelin (Charlotte Riley) who suspects a mole (there’s always a mole). Banning and President Asher continue to defeat the odds for the rest of the film.

Butler and Eckhart do have a sort of chemistry, the kind I imagine frat boys everywhere have, and watching them run around together keeps up the energy of the film. Butler’s double chin might indicate his skill-levels in sleep deprived continuous fighting shouldn’t quite be what they are in the film, but his extreme kills hold a certain satisfaction that allows one to forgive his appearance.

The film’s real faults are unsurprising. In a world where terrorism is so very real, one might think Hollywood would veer away from the hyperbolic terrorism oft depicted in action films. Whereas fairy tales use unrealistic monsters to make everyday life seem safer, these sorts of action films are starting to feel almost insensitive to the realities of the world. Barkawi is possibly the most successful terrorist ever, his recruitment efforts being apparently so amazing there is never a corner Banning runs around where he isn’t met with a ceaseless mass of terrorist drones attacking him.

Like in the first film, at one point Mike yells out “RPG,” which for the uninitiated stands for “rocket propelled grenade,” though for this weapons-illiterate viewer I’d just have soon thought he was proclaiming his entrance into a “role playing game.” The camera follows like a first-person shooter for much of the action, bullets whizzing by, explosions happening casually.

The British government and intelligence are depicted as barely capable, not only being completely oblivious beforehand that an attack is being planned, but consistently being told by the American government officials back in the U.S. what the sitch is. And as much as EVERYONE likes to see Morgan Freeman in governmental positions (here he’s now the Vice President), the whole suits-in-the-situation-room film tactic for solving major global crises just doesn’t hold up anymore.

Many could find themselves enjoying London Has Fallen, but one has to wonder if they should. By taking out other world leaders, Barkawi insinuates they are the U.S.’s “family,” a fair depiction of U.S. allies, but the casualness with which they are killed and the disrespect paid to Britain plays into an oft-used tone for action films: America is the best. Just as Mike Banning asks his MI6 friend at one point in the film about civilian losses and she remarks they are unfortunately high, as though she’s remarking on a price increase on her favorite shampoo, so is it impossible to have any real feeling for the film or its outcome. There’s nothing less patriotic than desensitizing terrorism and in an age of globalization, London Has Fallen feels stale and outdated.

Disheveled, substance-addled, and violent, former detective Akikazu Fujishima (Koji Yakusho) stumbles through life in a nebulous haze. His existence is quickly characterized as bumbling and hopeless, but his perpetual floundering is given a vague sense of direction when his ex-wife informs him that their daughter, Kanako (Nana Kamatsu), has disappeared. At first, Akikazu can barely remember her face, but as he unmasks the underworld Kanako appears to inhabit, the will to continue his search stems not from a motivation to find and reunite with her, but to punish her for her wrongdoings, even if that means killing her himself. Sinking deeper and deeper into an abyss of corruption, murder, and sexual deviancy, Akikazu begins to embody the odious patriarchal values of a prior generation. He bloodthirstily yearns to chastise his daughter, perhaps not necessarily in response to her actions, but because of a subconscious self-hatred that has manifested within him after years of neglecting her.

On a surface level, this story sounds glaringly familiar: a broken man embarks on an arduous quest with vengeance in his heart. It’s reminiscent of other, more prominent titles in the so-called “Asia Extreme” genre piloted by acclaimed filmmakers such as Takashi Miike (Audition, 13 Assassins) and Park Chan-Wook, who caused the genre to explode overseas with his popular Oldboy in 2003. This new feature by Japanese provocateur Nakashima Tetsuya (Confessions, Kamikaze Girls) is not only chalk-full of nods to Chan-Wook’s seminal film about an emotionally crippled man assembling the scattered pieces of his past, but also references classic titles such as The Searchers in its Fordian regard to reckless patriarchal rage. While Kanako certainly possesses storyline elements that parallel those at work in Confessions, Tetsuya has abandoned his formalist mise en scène for something more painterly and spontaneous. He goes as far as integrating snippets of anime, clips stylized like J-POP videos, and an opening credits sequence rife with comic book action bubbles into his scattershot visual melting pot.

Where Tetsuya occasionally falters is when he pays too much or too little attention to any given element in his seething ocean of cinematic text. One subplot involves a bullied boy (Hiroya Shimizu) in Kanako’s grade who is credited only as “I,” and serves, more or less, as narrator. The development of his infatuation with Kanako undercuts the impact of the predominant themes related through Akikazu’s presence in the narrative. Reveals along the way help illustrate Kanako’s disturbed mental state, but the victimized narrator is never imbued with much more of a purpose than to aid in manufacturing these developments. Additionally, Tetsuya forgets to punctuate his inclusion of a prowling gang of corrupt cops. They tail Akikazu not prompted by duty, but by an acerbic desire to sneer at his continued failures and injuries. Akikazu, with a persistence that often registers as mythic, is frequently shot, stabbed, and beaten throughout the film. One policeman, the hyena-like Detective Asai (Satoshi Tsumabuki), seems particularly amused by our discombobulated protagonist’s pain. As the film heads into its third act, the assumption can be made that Tetsuya is engineering this subplot in an attempt to make a statement about either Japan’s police force or Akikazu’s demons, but the cackling Asai and his robotic enforcers fade out before making an impression that bears much symbolic weight.

Even throughout sequences where his shortcomings are blatant, Tetsuya maintains a kinetic energy paralleled only by the likes of Sion Sono (who evoked a similarly raucous atmosphere in this year’s street gang musical Tokyo Tribe) and the aforementioned genre film zen master, Takashi Miike. The plot unfolds nightmarishly, fragments of horror unveiling themselves as Akikazu grapples with irremediable patriarchal madness. Koji Yakusho, the veteran actor responsible for bringing Akikazu to life, deserves credit for supplying the story with its anchor. He deftly personifies an antihero who consistently demands our attention and endorsement despite his predisposition to be an unforgivably vile human being. The full realization of Akikazu’s character as the central vantage point allows Tetsuya to indulge in a hyper-frenetic sort of mania without disorienting the audience and causing them to abandon their interest in what he has to offer. The World of Kanako, in spite of its focal faults, is a bracingly spontaneous and grippingly horrific descent into the emotional depravity that has the potential to emerge when family ceases to cohere.

Spectre, Sam Mendes‘ latest riff on the classic James Bond formula, comes with all the trimmings fans have come to expect from the undying international superspy series: Daniel Craig‘s 007 kicks henchman ass, kisses gorgeous women, sips on his famous martinis, stares death square in the face more than once, and causes some serious property damage as he visits some of the most ridiculously picturesque places on earth in search of a European big bad hellbent on world domination. It’s the same old schtick, but it’s a schtick millions have come to embrace as a moviegoing staple, one we can count on to deliver insanely expensive-looking action and a fair amount of clean-cut operatic drama. It’s a good Bond film, though there’s nothing remarkable enough about it that it’ll be a standout in the series.

As he’s liable to do, Christoph Waltz plays the film’s central villain, Oberhauser, a worldwide crime boss and tech terrorist who plans to hold humanity in his clutches via some kind of big brother surveillance system. Bond’s path to finding Oberhauser starts in Mexico City, where he causes an explosive international incident involving a helicopter spinning out of control above the city’s annual Dia de los Muertos celebration. It’s an eye-popping opener with clever staging (Bond’s life is saved by a couch) and a sky-high fight scene that’s sure to have those afraid of heights hanging onto their armrests for dear life.

Following his mid-air dance of death, Bond’s journey takes him to Rome, then back home to London, then to Austria, then to Tangier, and back to London again. Mendes doesn’t stray from the series’ touristic traditions one bit, throwing up jaw-dropping locales onto the screen rapid-fire. From the snowy peaks of Austria to the serene desert sprawl of Tangier, mother earth looks her beauty-pageant best, and she’s rocking some shiny jewelry to boot: the baddies’ fortresses look like marvels of modern architecture and the stunning cars Bond rockets around in will make you drool. Bond movies have become increasingly obsessed with suit-modeling and vista-ogling in recent years, but that’s not a bad thing. At least not yet.

Bond’s allies aren’t in short supply in his latest romp: M (Ralph Fiennes), Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), and gadget maven Q (Ben Wishaw) have all got 007’s back, though the bad guys’ eyes-everywhere tech prevents them from aiding Bond remotely. Spending the most time with him is newbie Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux), the latest addition to his ever-growing list of doomed lovers. She’s the daughter of an old villain who operated under the Oberhauser umbrella, and she insists she’s got no interest in bedding James like the rest of his international floozies. But who’s she fooling? After a romantic train ride and a close-quarters fistfight with one of Oberhauser goons (Guardians of the Galaxy‘s Dave Bautista), the sexual tension becomes too strong for even the strong-willed Madeleine to resist.

Craig’s got his Bond routine down to a science by now, hunting down his villainous prey with that same signature cold-eyed scowl he uses to make women melt. He’s a very good James Bond, but what slows him down in Spectre is his romance with Seydoux’s Madeleine, which unfolds in such a cursory fashion it’s laughable. She confesses her love for him after spending only a few days together, and even an actor of Seydoux’s talent can’t make such an unlikely leap in affection feel natural. If this is the girl Bond’s meant to consider leaving the spy life for, the writers (Neal Purvis, John Logan, Robert Wade, Jez Butterworth) don’t do enough to convince us of it.

Thankfully, the rushed romance one of only two of the film’s major downers (the other is the movie’s theme song, by Sam Smith, which is insufferable). The action set pieces are all show-stoppers, though the thrills of the opening helicopter scene are never outdone. A close-quarters fight scene between Craig, Bautista and Seydoux is a lot of fun and reminds us that Mendes doesn’t need pricey visual effects to keep us on the edge of our seats (the scene’s absence of music is a great touch that makes the brawl doubly tense). The movie isn’t exactly action-packed, though, as the explosions and car chases are used to punctuate the long stretches of character development/plot progression. Skyfall had a more striking and cohesive visual style than Spectre does (shadows and blackness are the recurring themes, but none of the inky images stick), but Mendes’ craftsmanship is never less than elegant and fully composed.

There’s a twist to Waltz’s character that I won’t spoil here, but what I will say is that he disappoints, again, by playing a villain exactly the way we all expect him to. The man’s capable of great things, but we’ve seen him play this smirking, unfazed, cold-blooded a million times before, and it’s a letdown every time he decides to stay in the pocket and not add any new dimensions to his act. Harris and Wishaw make a better effort, and it’ll be nice to continue watching them support Bond in future entries.

If Skyfall was the pinnacle of Craig’s run as Bond, Spectre signals a slight downturn and a need for the series to break new ground and redefine who James Bond is for the next generation. Mendes has made a fine movie that pays homage to Bond lore in surprising and delightful ways (there’s something off about that Oberhauser…) but it feels like the timing’s right for a change of the guard. Craig is perhaps the quintessential alpha-male Bond, always in control of his situation and surroundings; maybe it’s time for a double-0 who gets a bit more shaken and stirred in the face of danger.

In a dystopian Tokyo, 23 “tribes” (read: gangs) rule different sections of the city. These tribes range from the GiraGira Girls, a group of women including a whip-cracking dominatrix, to the Musashino Saru, a gang all about promoting peace and love. But it’s the Bukuro Wu-Ronz running everything, and their leader Big Buppa (Takeuchi Riki) is not to be messed with. Mera, one of Bukuro Wu-Ronz’s top members, starts a feud with Musashino Saru heads Tera (Ryuta Sato) and Kai (Young Dais), and the battle soon spins out of control, involving every other tribe in an epic battle to become the most powerful in the city. And did I mention it’s a hip-hop musical? Welcome to the insane world of Sion Sono and Tokyo Tribe.

But that’s not all! There’s also the presence of Sunmi (Nana Seino), a mysterious girl dragged into the gang conflict with some serious fighting skills. In fact, a lot of the cast can fight really well. This also happens to be a highly kinetic action film, with numerous fight scenes placed in between the rap songs sung by the massive cast. Sometani Shota provides help for viewers as the film’s MC, walking around scenes rapping exposition about different tribes and their feuds with other gangs. Just don’t bother actually trying to understand what the hell is going on, though. Tokyo Tribe is so dense and convoluted there are already 50 other things occurring the minute after a scene ends.

The density and hyperactivity of Sono’s style prove his film’s biggest strength and weakness. Sono, working with what looks like his biggest budget to date, packs as much as he possibly can into each frame. His shots are more ambitious, letting things play out in long, elaborate single takes, the camera moving all over the place. The set design is on a whole other level compared to Sono’s previous films as well, with so many elaborately designed locations for each tribe. And Sono never takes a moment to breathe, whipping back and forth between places, stuffing each one with as many extras and activity as possible, all while putting the camera right in the middle of it. It’s exhilarating, but at the same time incredibly exhausting

Trying to watch Tokyo Tribe for its story, nothing more than a standard gangster epic with a message about community, won’t maximize the amount of shock and joy Sono throws around on-screen. It’s the quirks and little moments that work best. Like Big Buppa’s son having a room where people act as his furniture. Or a massive karate fighter wishing someone a happy birthday as they punch them 50 feet in the air (one of the fighter’s only lines: “Take me! To! A sauna!”). Or an army tank driving around Tokyo blowing shit up. Tokyo Tribe is full of these kinds of insane, world-building moments, most of them hilariously original and bonkers beyond belief.

And even though Sono’s restlessness can get tiring at times, it doesn’t take away from the utter brilliance of Tokyo Tribe. No one injects more insanity and ideas into their films on a moment-by-moment basis the way Sono does. It was hard to imagine how Sono could outdo his previous film Why Don’t You Play in Hell?, but with Tokyo Tribe he’s outdone himself completely, and by successfully taking on musicals he feels unstoppable. With a propulsive, catchy score, Tokyo Tribe doesn’t have to try to be energetic. It breathes vivaciousness. Tokyo Tribe will leave viewers dazed, assaulted, and mortified, but by the end they’ll be begging for more.

A version of this review was originally published as part of our coverage of the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.

Olga Kurylenko is no stranger to action movies. The Ukrainian-born actress has appeared in several testosterone-fueled flicks, including 2007’s Hitman, 2014’s The November Man, 2012’s Erased, and, perhaps most famously, 2008’s James Bond entry, Quantum of Solace. But in all those films, she was a supporting player behind male stars (respectively) Timothy Olyphant, Pierce Brosnan, Aaron Eckhart, and Daniel Craig. That changes in her latest action entry, Momentum, which puts the actress’ name above the title and her character at the center of the film.

Kurylenko plays Alex Farraday, a thief called out of retirement for one last score. Though this high-tech heist nets Alex and her fellow thieves more than they bargain for. In addition to a cache of diamonds, they swipe a flash drive containing treasonous evidence against a mysterious US Senator (Morgan Freeman). Unfortunately, Alex’s identity is compromised during the heist and the Senator sends a “cleaning crew,” led by Mr. Washington (James Purefoy), to Capetown, South Africa, to kill the thieves and retrieve the drive. But Alex has other intentions.

If the biggest genre sin in film is a horror movie that isn’t scary, a close second has to be an action film that is utterly boring. This is the case with Momentum, brought to the screen by veteran camera operator-turned-rookie director Stephen S. Campanelli. To say it’s boring is not to say Campanelli doesn’t try; he does. It’s just that the screenplay (from Adam Marcus and Debra Sullivan) is a threadbare patchwork of undeveloped characters, underdeveloped ideas, and tired action tropes.

It starts with Alex and that opening gambit. While I’m all for a film fading into the heart of a tense scene already in progress, that scene needs either quick context or a hint of something more cerebral that will payoff later. The intellectualism (such as it is) of Momentum is nowhere near the latter, but the former is abandoned entirely. By the end of the heist, all we know is Alex’s crew stole diamonds (but we don’t know why); we know there is infighting between certain members of the crew (but we don’t know the history); we know Alex’s big “reveal” must be devastating since it’s suggested everyone in the bank be murdered because they saw her face (with no explanation as to why such extreme measures are necessary); and we know Alex came out of retirement for the score (but we don’t know what drove her to retire and come back). None of this is context, it’s convenience—the shortest of shortcuts.

By the end of the heist, the film feels like it’s in the second act of a sequel, like there are things that ought to already be known. They aren’t, and it cripples the film.

Those notes on Alex, by the way, are about as deep as deep as she gets (although there is one other facet that is only hinted at—again for convenience—and another that is revealed too late in the film to actually care), but she’s not alone. Of the other two key characters in this film, Mr. Washington is more caricature than character (although ultimately a pretty good baddie, thanks to Purefoy having some fun with the role), and the Senator is far too much a mystery to be believable (and a waste of Freeman’s talents).

The main plot is no better developed than the heist: Alex has a flash drive, the Senator wants the flash drive, Mr. Washington pursues Alex to retrieve the flash drive. People die in the process. There’s the movie. All that’s left is the action which, because there is nothing cohesive to attach it to, plays as an anthology of violent set-pieces connected by common characters instead of a series of high-octane conflict/resolution moments that advance a story.

That action is decent and it includes everything this type of movie should: guns and explosives, a car chase, fight scenes, etc. And while he doesn’t break any ground, Campanelli has a couple notable moments, but really nothing more than that. In fact, the best scene of the film includes one particularly effective torture scene, with the irony being the torture is only heard; yes, the best scene in the film takes place offscreen.

Put it all together and it’s not an action movie, it’s an arcade game that gives the viewer just enough character background and story information before getting out of the way of the endless cycle of moves.

As for Kurylenko, it’s hard to tell if she can rise to the challenge of carrying an action picture on her own. It’s clear she has the physicality for it, and given she is a woman playing in a genre thats dominated by men, it’s hard not to measure her against the likes of Linda Hamilton (the Terminator films), Sigourney Weaver (the Alien franchise), Charlize Theron as Furiosa from Mad Max Fury Road, and several others. It’s also unfair to do that to her, because the material those women had to work with was far superior to what Kurylenko has had to make due with here.

Momentum might have its moments, but those moments are no match for the onslaught of “meh” the rest of the picture delivers.

Master craftsman Hou Hsiao-Hsien, whose last film was over seven years ago (Flight of the Red Balloon), returns to the world cinema stage with The Assassin. It’s a grand return, one that has left many cinephiles breathless, stunned, and slightly paralyzed in its wake. For the magic he managed to conjure on screen, Hou received the Best Director award at Cannes. It’s his first dabble in the wuxia genre (traditional martial art), an integral part of Chinese culture and art history, and thanks to his perfectionist dedication to the language of cinema, history will no doubt look back on his contribution as one that’s strengthened this tradition. The immediate predecessors that come to mind, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, and House of Flying Daggers, have all been expertly cut down and defeated by the new champion of 21st century wuxia. You might have to go all the way back to the 70s, and the films of King Hu, to find a matching opponent.

Of course, I write the martial arts analogies with a cheeky smile. Hou Hsiou-Hisen’s new picture is no way competing with Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou’s films. It’s just that The Assassin is building uncharacteristic castles in a familiar sandbox, and the result is a film simultaneously beholden to a long-standing tradition and levitating in its own league. We use ‘slice of life’ to describe films in contemporary settings, dealing with contemporary problems and usually shot in that shaky cinéma vérité style, but Hou transports us to 8th century China so completely that he manages to achieve something altogether remarkable. A slice of Tang Dynasty life, shot in the equivalent of an 8th century imperial shake: the methodical to-and-fro.

With the mise-en-scène so ornately defined, and the camera swaying as if it’s a talisman suspended on an invisible string, Ping Bin Lee’s cinematography acts as sprinkled faerie dust that completes the spell. The result is total submission and immersion into the world of The Assassin. ‘Pure cinema’ is a term often overused, but here we have a film that redefines purity on screen from one everlasting moment to the next, and because of the overwhelming magnificence of image, majesty of light, and meditation of pace, the plot of the film is tough to follow on the first go-around. Made all the tougher because of Hou’s (and the four(!) other writers credited with the story) unconventional use of expository dialogue, unannounced introductions of characters and events, and lack of concern with explanation. If one imagines The Assassin as an opera, where the flow of images overwhelm the watcher just as singers’ voices do the listener, then consider the following couple of paragraphs a libretto.

The setting is 8th century China, during the decline of the Tang Dynasty, where the province of Weibo has distanced itself as the strongest threat to the Imperial Court. Tian Ji’an (Chang Chen) is the current lord of Weibo, and cousin to our assassin, Yinniang (Shu Qi). Their shared history began when Yinniang’s mother, an imperial princess, married Ji’iang’s father, in order to seal Weibo’s promise of not attacking the Court. The two children grew close and were even betrothed to one another, but when a Ming lord wanted to forge an alliance with Weibo under the condition that it be enforced by marriage, the Princess had to break her promise to Yinniang, and Tian Ji’ian was married to Lady Tian (Zhou Yun). Rebellious to the point of putting her own life in danger, Yinniang was sent away to live under the tutelage of a Master nun (Sheu Fang-Yi). The nun taught Yinniang the ways of the sword over the years, but after failing to kill a target because he was in the presence of his son, she puts the young woman’s heart to the test. Yinniang must return to Weibo, after so many years have passed, and kill Tian Ji’an.

Most of that is history, told in stoical monologues by Yinniang’s aunt, her mother’s twin sister (Mei Yong), or by Tian Ji’ian to his concubine Huji (Hsin-Ying Hsieh). The plot becomes purposefully mystified by three narrative threads that are mostly woven between frames. The first is about one of Ji’ian’s generals, Tian Xing (Lei Zhen-Yu), who arouses panic in the Weibo council and must be escorted off the premises by the Lord Provost, Ji’an’s and Yinniang’s uncle (Ni Da-Hong). The second concerns a report given to Lady Tian about Huji’s faked period blood, which in turn introduces a mysterious sorcerer (Jacques Picoux). And the third is the involvement of a nameless mirror-polisher (Satoshi Tsumabuki), who ends up playing a key role in Tian Xing’s escort. Oh, how can I forget the nameless, masked assassin who gets in Yinniang’s way?

The narrative is as cloudy as the sky that presides like a silent judge over all of these activities. Steeped in Chinese mysticism and tradition, what maneuvers emotions in The Assassin are jades, mojo’s, tales of songbirds, and unspoken acts of mercy and kindness. Dialogue isn’t used as exposition for the action we are about to see or have seen, but exposition of events long since transpired. The very first thing we see in the film is a couple of donkeys, grazing and foreshadowing the kind of attention Hou will pay nature over the next two hours. One particularly jaw-dropping take sees Yinniang meeting her Master on a mountaintop, where the movement of the clouds is as important to the scene as the blocking, dialogue, performance, and cinematography. This all-encompassing and punctilious observation is no doubt going to mystify those audience members who are so accustomed to watching a plot-driven movie. And yet, those who pay careful attention know The Assassin‘s main plot is comprehensible, albeit one fully grasped on repeat viewings.

That’s not meant to be a slight to anyone who left The Assassin slightly confused the first time out. It’s meant as a compliment to Hou and his team – from production and costume designer Wen Ying-Huang to editor Chih-Chia Huang, cinematographer Lee and all the actors (most notably Shu Qi, who embodies Yinniang so seamlessly) – for transporting us back into the past so expertly. Every piece of fabric, every lantern, and every leaf in this film feels like it belongs with purpose, carrying within it its own rich history. Hou’s takes are long, and his camera movements are never rushed, but life’s current flows through the frames of The Assassin–-in the way her uncle looks at Yinniang, behind the curtains of Huji’s quarters, in Lady Tuan’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it smile…—suffusing the picture with a mythical potency that feels remarkably present. The volatile nature of the narrative is thus a reflection of life as the ancient philosopher Lao Tzu meant it: “Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” By abiding to this philosophy so wholeheartedly, and crafting his world so meticulously, Hou has attained the rarity of a perfect film.

What we see on-screen, for the most part, in Ridley Scott‘s The Martian (based on Andy Weir’s popular sci-fi novel) is Matt Damon playing an astronaut, stranded on Mars, who must be resourceful on a resource-less planet in order to return to earth. From that simple premise spawns more entertainment than we’ve seen from Scott in years as we follow the Martian misadventures of Damon’s Mark Watney as he “sciences the shit” out of his dire situation with the (remote) help of his earth-bound astronautic team and the bright minds at NASA.

The movie’s trailers would have you expecting a white-knuckle, isolation-horror story along the lines of Gravity. I was pleasantly surprised, however (as someone who hasn’t read the book), to find a movie that’s optimistic, warm, very funny, and very much un-scary. This is much lighter material than the marketing would have you believe, and that’s a good thing.

The tone is set from the beginning with Mark and his team surveying the martian surface for, uh, science reasons. Mark rattles off smartass quips rapid-fire, and judging from his crew-mates’ joking, amused reactions, it’s clear they’re a tight-knit group. Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain) leads the team, who refer to each other on a last-name basis. Martinez (Michael Peña), Johanssen (Kate Mara), Beck (Sebastian Stan), and Vogel (Aksel Hennie) find outer-space comfort in clowning on their good buddy Watney. Suddenly, a violent rock storm barrels through the work site and a piece of equipment slams into Mark, hurtling him into the darkness. Believing their friend dead, the team leaves the planet surface before the storm tears their ship to pieces.

Despite being left to his own devices, Mark finds a way to keep yapping: returning to the Mars base, he starts keeping a video log for whoever or whatever. It mostly keeps him sane as he MacGuyvers his way through the litany of problems that comes with being stranded on an inhospitable planet. The most pressing issue initially is Mark’s limited food supply; should he eventually find a way to contact earth or his crewmates, his current stock of NASA microwaveable meals wouldn’t keep him alive long enough for a rescue team to reach him. Thankfully, Mark’s a botanist, and he figures out a way to make his own water and grow an indoor garden, which bears enough potatoes to keep him going for the foreseeable future.

Much like in Robinson Crusoe and Robert Zemeckis’ Castaway, it’s a delight to watch our hero use his brainpower and willpower to gradually build a little life for himself in a hopeless place. It also doesn’t hurt that Damon finds his groove with the smart and savvy material, adapted by Drew Goddard from the book. Some of the jokes are pretty corny, but Goddard’s always had a knack for making even the cornball-iest comedy sing. Mark’s bright-side attitude is charming: when he runs out of ketchup for his potatoes, he dips them in crushed-up Adderall and jokes bout it; when it dawns on him that, because he’s grown potatoes on Martian soil, he’s technically colonized the planet, he sticks his chin up in the air like a proud child. The movie’s nearly two-and-a-half hours long, but Damon’s so entertaining that it’s a swift, streamlined watch.

The story hops back to earth regularly, where a crowded cast of mostly insignificant NASA officials debate how to tell the grieving public that Mark Watney is not deceased, as they originally reported, as well as figure out a way to bring him back home before his food runs out or a random equipment malfunction kills him. Jeff Daniels and Chiwetel Ejiofor have the most prominent roles as the two highest ranking NASA brains, with the rest of the home planet cast filled out by the likes of Donald Glover, Sean Bean, Mackenzie Davis, Benedict Wong, and Kristen Wiig, who’s in such a nothing role it’s sad. Chastain and the rest of the crew rejoin the story later, after NASA decides how to break the news to them that their friend is still alive.

The visual effects are as spectacular as they need to be, but the movie isn’t enamored with them like too many sci-fi dramas are. Mars looks totally convincing and serene, but the focus is always on what and how Mark’s doing. In essence, Weir’s story is about the wonder and power of science and how the human spirit can unlock its true beauty. None of the action scenes rival anything you’ll see in Interstellar or Gravity, but the that’s not what this movie’s about, after all, which is refreshing. The Martian won’t please those expecting a dark, terrorizing thrill ride where the heroes are in constant peril, but it’ll make the rest of us laugh and cheer, which is something sci-fi blockbusters don’t do enough these days.

It’d be hard for anyone to poke holes in Sicario, a dark, pulpy thriller crafted exceptionally well by director Denis Villeneuve and his team. The story starts as a slow-burn mystery, following Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), a wary FBI agent slung head-first into a shady government task force mission meant to cleanse the U.S./Mexico border of drugs, corruption, and violence. As the streets fill with blood we slowly uncover, with Kate, more and more of the truth behind her new team’s blatantly unethical methods of crime-fighting, the film develops into a tense, action-packed scramble that will leave you gasping for breath.

Sicario is so confidently presented that many of its finer details may go under-appreciated. One subtlety that comes to mind is the sense of traversal Villeneuve creates to immerse us in the story’s nightmarish setting. Early in the film, we see Kate traveling with her team in a caravan of armed vehicles, rolling through the streets of Juarez en route to apprehending a suspect that may lead them to the head of the cartel. We see bodies hanging under an overpass like aging meat, their bodies mutilated, blood dried. Aerial shots of Mexico fill the screen with orange, dusty earth, emphasizing the fact that the Americans are invaders in a sprawling, buzzing hornet’s nest. Cinematographer Roger Deakins is invaluable, shooting Mexico as a forbidden place polluted by death and despair.

The care Villeneuve puts into making these sequences, in which we take time to watch the team travel from point A to point B, is the core of what makes Sicario so engrossing. The tension builds with each gruesome thing we see, each morally indefensible act Kate is forced to participate in. The storytelling evokes a sinking feeling of “I’m not supposed to be here” that makes every little moment terrifying in its own, twisted way. It’s one of those great movies that forces you to go at its pace rather than pandering to yours. It can be unbearably intense at times, which in turn makes it an unforgettable, white-knuckle experience.

Blunt is supported by two of the industry’s best, Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro. Brolin plays a Department of Defense consultant named Matt who acts as the veritable keeper of secrets on the task force’s. He’s a laid-back, Dude-like agent who only gets serious when he’s on the front lines or when Kate is badgering him for the truth. The enigmatic shadow hanging over the movie is Del Toro’s Alejandro, a skilled killer and torturer whose presence on the team worries Kate maybe more than anything. Why is he here, and who does he actually work for?

This is one of the best performances of Del Toro’s career. As Alejandro, he intimidates his prey not just by hurting them (though he does loads of that), but by invading their space. In the cramped back seat of a car, he extracts information from a corrupt cop not by punching him, but by driving his finger into his hostage’s ear canal. When the hostage refuses to talk, he leans his body weight on him, driving his shoulder up under his chin as if to say in a twisted gesture of dominance. When we learn the truth behind Alejandro’s motivations, the character and performance become even richer.

The second half of the film would be standard action fare if stood on its own, but when stood on the foundation of paranoia and confusion built in the first half, it’s volcanic, heart-stopping entertainment. The story’s revelations don’t come easy or quickly, but when they do, they’re rattling and resonant and will stick with you for days.

Matthew Heineman’s documentary Cartel Land was a shock to the system, taking us deep into the belly of the border drug war, and Sicario serves as a perfect narrative companion, exploring the seedy underworld through a more poetic, explicitly violent lens. Does the Sicario demonize Mexico? No. It considers the psychology of the people who drive the conflict that ravages those terrorized towns on the border and questions the nature of U.S. involvement. Villeneuve, his cast, and crew have made an undeniable, powerful film that works on so many levels it’s scary.

After co-writing Gravity with his father Alfonso, Jonas Cuaron has literally come down to Earth for Desierto, a survival thriller similar to Gravity except set on the border (and with a budget that was probably a fraction of his father’s film). But Desierto is first and foremost a genre film, and with a big international star in the lead it’s easy to categorize the film as “prestige grindhouse.” It’s a gritty attempt to take the hot-button issue of illegal immigration and transform it into a stalk and kill slasher on the border. The only problem is that Cuaron doesn’t have a single original idea, working with co-writer Mateo Garcia to wrap his film in the safety of conventions, thin characterizations and uninspired story beats. For a film about an unpredictable life or death scenario, Desierto plays it safe from frame one.

Moises (Gael Garcia Bernal) is in the back of a truck with over a dozen other undocumented workers traveling the desert to the U.S. The truck breaks down, and now everyone has to journey to the States on foot, a trip that should take over a day. At the same time, U.S. country boy Sam (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is out hunting rabbits with his dog Tracker and giving attitude to someone at border patrol who stops him. If the cowboy hat, pickup truck and country music blaring from his studio doesn’t give it away immediately, Sam really hates illegal immigrants (read: non-whites). And to make sure the flipside of this equation is just as simple and underdeveloped, Moises’ defending of a young female immigrant from her predatory helper quickly establishes him as the morally righteous good guy. Then, as these stories go, their paths cross, and Sam begins hunting down Moises with his dog and rifle.

At least Cuaron builds things up nicely in the first act before Sam begins shooting down one immigrant after another, utilizing the desert locale to show off some nice compositions (the opening feels like a direct lift of the opening shot from Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light). But once the bullets start flying, Desierto amounts to watching Cuaron retrace the steps of far better films. It doesn’t come as a surprise that it takes little time for Sam to slaughter every immigrant in Moises’ company except for Moises himself, and that Sam’s aim seems to be perfect except when pointing his gun at the handsome, recognizable star. It also doesn’t come as a surprise that Cuaron seems to care little about any of the supporting cast except for a young, female immigrant who manages to survive alongside Moises (Note: I tried to find the actress’ name but no actors other than Bernal and Morgan appear to get proper credit in any of the film’s publicity, which all but says these actors are just hispanic cannon fodder). The surprising thing about Desierto is not that Cuaron has essentially made a slasher film on the U.S. border, it’s that the average slasher film is more suspenseful than this.

So with absolutely nothing subversive to bring to the table, and a mostly handheld style that does very little to use any stylistic flair to up the tension, the central chase in Desierto is really stuck in neutral, going through the motions while waiting for the next obstacle to come Moises’ way. The film is typically more dull than dumb, except for one offensive part when Cuaron takes a break to have Moises and his only surviving companion tell each other their life stories. It’s an attempt to add some character development to a film sorely lacking it, but none of it is really that necessary. Even if these characters didn’t have family in the States missing them or supportive parents, the fact is that no one deserves to have some crazed cowboy blow their head off with a rifle for trying to cross a border. The basic need to survive should resonate well enough with viewers; Cuaron’s insertion of these sob stories implies he thinks it’s a point that needs to be argued. And the last thing a film this rote needs is a condescending attitude.

What is it about Jackie Chan that makes him the most lovable person on the planet? If you consider other action stars, like Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Arnold Schwarzenegger or even Bruce Lee, they just don’t exude that same cheerful charisma that Chan has. If  anyone could deliver some martial arts driven world peace, it’s him. And in his latest action epic, Dragon Blade, that’s exactly what his character, Huo An, wants to do.

Daniel Lee directs this grandiose spectacle of a historical action film and the ornate detail put into the visuals of the film are truly mesmerizing…and utterly distracting. Clearly Lee, who also wrote the film, is attempting to use the historical allure of the Silk Road and the mingling of cultures along that road to present a message of unity—no matter the rather loose historical accuracy of the events depicted or the bombast with which he presents it all. Dragon Blade is a thoroughly enjoyable film with laugh-out-loud moments, almost all of which I assume the director did not intend. The same slow motion glory with which the film’s final epic battle plays out also works to highlight every jowel-ripple moving across John Cusack’s face as he rides horseback. Proof positive that enhanced visual effects don’t always enhance a film’s quality.

Supposedly based on a historical person, Chan’s Huo An leads the Silk Road Protection Squad, peacekeepers of the Silk Road, whose mission is to prevent those many cultural clashes bound to happen on a busy trade road. In the film’s opening Chan hilariously faces off against the leader of one such clan, Cold Moon (Peng Lin), about to engage in a desert scuffle. Using fancy footwork and his forearm shield, he makes avoiding fighting this woman look amazingly intricate, showcasing that despite his age—61 and not quite doing all his own stunts anymore—Chan definitely still has it.

That crisis is averted but someone has it in for the Protection Squad and they are wrongly accused of corrupt practices and exiled to Goose Gate, a fortress along the Road in a state of disrepair. All the various cultures found in the area are represented, Hun, Indians, Turks, Mongols and more, and all are forced to work alongside each other to rebuild the city wall. Which of course leads to opportunity for the Protection Squad to use their training, albeit unappreciated by the others until the day a Roman army—led by John Cusack and his slow-mo’d jowels—shows up to invade. Huo An comes to the rescue, facing Roman leader Lucius (Cusack) in a sword fight and offering sanctuary when a sandstorm cuts their dual short.

In a rather quick turn of events, Lucius and Huo An form a sort of friendship. Lucius is traveling with deserted Roman army soldiers and a blind young Roman prince, Publius (played by Chinese child actor Jozef Waite turned blonde Roman and weirdly creepy), who is pursued by his tyrannical older brother Tiberius who has overthrown his own father and blinded his brother. In exchange for shelter and in preparation for Tiberius’s arrival, the Roman soldiers and workers of Goose Gate band together, using Roman technology to rebuild the city in a very short amount of time, and simultaneously learning the efficiency and joy of working as a team. If it wasn’t so elaborately shot and costumed, it would be a perfect fit for a Sesame Street segment.

Tiberius does indeed show up, clad in perfect Roman curls and played at his villanous best by Adrien Brody. The script shifts dramatically at this point, and after all the friendship-forming and singing—no, literally there is an extended scene where each of the different tribes sing the songs of their people and show their respects to one another—the sudden gruesomeness that ensues is dark indeed. Apparently that world peace Huo An seeks won’t happen without a fair amount of blood shed, all of which elicits laughs rather than gasps due to its over-the-top entrance into the film.

There is a satisfying showdown and large-scale battle to round out the film but once again the magnitude of it all detracts from any connection to the so-called story. Huo An remains the sole character for whom we hold any real connection, but the degree of his suffering hardly makes the battle feel worth winning. Strangely all criticism of Cusack or Brody has entirely to do with the writing material they were given and the silliness they are thrust into at moments. Amazingly, and this is of course a testament to Chan’s remarkable choreographic abilities, both men look completely at ease and totally tough in their fantastic fight scenes.

Any reason for seeing Dragon Blade lies firmly within a respect and adoration of Jackie Chan and relies on one’s ability to be patient waiting for the fight scenes. The film’s themes are as overt as a round-house kick to the face and no one who sees this film will be able to escape walking away feeling like they were subjected to the film equivalent of two hours on It’s a Small World—you know, but with blood and gore.

Jackie Chan fans can deal with the cheese that often accompanies the thrill of seeing the man in action, and those who like ornate flourishes may not mind the film’s style, but mostly this film’s biggest assets are the strange combo of Chan, Cusack and Brody and the accidental hilarity of a frilly film taking itself seriously. And perhaps there is a lesson in Dragon Blade after all. World peace may not equate to “good” guys winning over “bad” guys, or the people of the world combining in a united cause—it may simply be a matter of everyone getting over themselves and having a laugh.

I first saw Byung-Hun Lee in 2013’s Red 2, but I didn’t really take notice of the South Korean superstar until I caught the sublime I Saw the Devil while binge-watching SoKo thrillers on Netflix. While I haven’t been eager to seek his work in the two G.I. Joe films, I am a huge fan of Masquerade, a 2013 South Korean period drama in which Lee plays two roles (in a plot device similar to Ivan Reitman’s Dave, although far more serious). After this year’s disappointing Terminator: Genisys, in which he also appears, it seems Lee’s talents are better suited away from Hollywood, and probably more appreciated as well. In his latest film, Memories of the Sword, he returns to period drama in an entry in the genre that includes action, romance, and pathos.

In medieval South Korea, teenager Seol-Hee (Go-eun Kim) is being raised by her surrogate mother, teahouse owner Seol-Rang (Do-Yeon Jeon). However, Seol-Rang knows more than just making tea. She was once a great sword master but has since gone blind. Still, she has the skills to train the child in her care to be a sword master for a new generation, but one with a clear and singular purpose: when Seol-Hee turns 20, she will kill the people who killed her natural parents. What Seol-Hee doesn’t know is that Seol-Rang is one of those people. The other person is Deok-Gi (Byung-Hun Lee), a high-ranking general in the Goryeo Dynasty. But this isn’t a mere tale of revenge, and there is more to each of these characters than initially shown.

Actually, there is much, much more than meets the eye, and all of it is sensational, thanks in large part to the film’s screenplay, co-written by Ah-reum Choi and director Heung-Sik Park. This duo has written a richly crafted tale that balances concurrent themes of history and destiny. Weaving into that fabric a collection of carefully considered origin stories, paths to glory, roads to hell, romance, tragedy, and even a political coup. It has all the trappings of something gloriously Shakespearean, but the ambitious filmmakers also double-down with numerous action sequences. That the film is only a minute over two hours is nothing short of remarkable, as there is enough content here for a TV miniseries three times that long. Yet, with the exception of a pair of integral characters who could have been better developed, the story never feels like it’s rushing to get anywhere. This speaks to both the density of the material and to Park’s skill as a director.

Park doesn’t only carry a heavy load, he balances it, too. Moods in the film run the gamut. There is the joy a teenage girl feels when her skills move to another level (symbolic of puberty, really, adding a coming-of-age element to an already full slate of themes). There is the tender romance between two people fated to be together, yet fated to be apart. There are calculating political maneuvers made and passionate battles fought. There is fear. There is regret. There is a sense of tragic inevitability that ultimately casts a pall over the latter portions of the film.

In what is probably the best scene of the film, Park’s balancing act is on full display. In a heavy rain, a band of assassins attacks the home of Deok-Gi. As his men fight off the attackers in a space of land in front of the house, Deok-Gi makes a pot of tea and “hears” (via voiceover) Seol-Rang explain how to prepare perfect tea. Amidst chaos and violence, Park manages to deftly integrate a breathless education in boiling water. It’s hypnotic.

The action in that scene—and most of the action in the other scenes—does not disappoint. Park uses every hand-to-hand combat direction resource at his disposal: from blocking and choreography to razor-sharp editing and just enough wire-fu to dazzle viewers without defying belief. He also masterfully utilizes changing frame rates to slow or accelerate the action, leaving the viewer breathless from the pulsating tempo of the action. The best action scene of the bunch occurs in silhouette, when Seol-Hee infiltrates Deok-Gi’s compound and dispenses of several of his men.

Memories of the Sword is not without flaws, but I cannot remember the last time a film had me so eager to see what the next scene would bring the way this film did. I have been a fan of South Korean period dramas for some time now, and this film has earned its place in my collection of favorites.

Watching Hitman: Agent 47 feels like sitting on your friend’s couch, watching him or her play a bro-shooter, kill-em-all video game. The story sucks, the violence is fake-looking, the action is nonsensical, and there’s a general sense of detachment since you aren’t directly partaking in the melee. It’s moderately entertaining for about five minutes, and then you get the sudden, uncontrollable urge to shut the whole thing down and go grab a coffee or something.

The movie’s based on (whaddya know?) the bro-shooter, kill-em-all Hitman video game series and is directed by Aleksander Bach, a first-timer who’s mostly helmed stylish commercials. It stars Homeland‘s Rupert Friend as 47, a suit-wearing, bald-headed assassin who’s been deprogrammed by evil scientists to not feel emotion or empathy, and reprogrammed to be an unstoppable death-bringer. The program that created him was destroyed a long time ago, but now some bad dudes are plotting to revive it, and 47 makes it his mission to stop that from happening. He knows he’s a murdering asshole, and he doesn’t want them to make more murdering assholes. His name comes from the fact that he’s the 47th iteration of the diabolical experiment, and it turns out that to save the world, he has to seek the help of a newer, more deadly model.

There was another movie based on the video game (it starred Timothy Olyphant and was equally vapid and horrible), and Agent 47 makes the same mistake its predecessor did, transplanting the video game’s main character to the screen essentially unchanged. Video game heroes are traditionally blank, personality-less proxies for us to project ourselves onto, which makes them great to take control of when you want to play puppetmaster and raise some hell in a polygonal playland. But they don’t work as movie heroes because they aren’t interesting enough as characters to wrap a story around them. This, mostly, is why video game movies are generally so lousy.

At the center of the story’s super-soldier controversy is Katia (Hanna Ware), the daughter of the mad scientist who started the Hitman program and is now in hiding (Ciaran Hinds). She’s on the run because everyone, including 47, is after her, believing she’s the only one on earth who can lead them to her dad. With 47 in pursuit, she meets a man named John Smith (Zachary Quinto) who claims to be her savior (with a name like that, he’s got to be legit, right?). The movie turns into a really, really cheap Terminator knock-off for a while as Katia and John try to outrun 47, and after that schtick is over with, things devolve into generic super-spy, big-action trash.

Bach’s stuff actually looks decent most of the time: the action is organized and the cinematography is smooth. There’s no artistry to any of it, though; no edginess or innovation to the car chases, the hand-to-hand fights, or even Hitman‘s signature dual-wielding shootouts. It’s standard stuff, and with such a lifeless story backing it up, it all feels plasticky and hollow. Everything feels derivative or flat-out stolen: when 47 is being interrogated in a room full of military personnel, one of the soldiers tries to intimidate him, prompting him to robotically retort, “I’m not locked in here with you—you’re locked in here with me!”

The script isn’t notable on any front, but the actors are admirable in that they mostly try to take their job seriously. Quinto and Hinds make the movie easier to watch when they’re with us, but Ware and Friend aren’t as compelling. The special effects show that closes out the movie is underwhelming, but what hurts is that the ending teases future installments of the series.

Guy Ritchie’s never had a problem with making his movies look good. His latest, retro spy-thriller reboot The Man From U.N.C.L.E., is arguably his slickest looking movie yet. He has trouble, though, when indulging in the pleasures of his eye-popping imagery just isn’t enough to sustain our interest. It’s a magic act: he’s showing us flashy, amazing things to distract us from the fact that his (recent) movies are, at their core, typical franchise cash grabs that don’t really mean or say anything interesting. But as long as he can keep us enthralled with his stylish visual tricks, who’s to say we can’t go home happy, buzzing with ignorant bliss?

As a late-summer action romp, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is easy-peasy viewing. It’s fast, it’s fun, and it’s brimming with attitude. The television show on which it’s based ran from 1964-68 and starred Robert Vaughn as American secret operative Napoleon Solo, and David McCallum as Illya Kuryakin, his Soviet counterpart. It piggybacked on the burgeoning popularity of James Bond at the time, and while Ritchie’s movie does the same, it simultaneously—and more enthusiastically—capitalizes on the current trendiness of mod ’60s attitude and fashion brought on largely by the sucess of Mad Men.

Taking Vaughn’s place as Solo is Superman himself, Henry Cavill; filling in for McCallum is the beastly but dapper Armie Hammer. The movie opens in East Berlin, with our two heroes at odds. Solo recruits a car mechanic named Gaby (Ex Machina‘s Alicia Vikander) to aid the Americans in shutting down a Nazi crime ring with plans of nuclear world dominance. She’s a gifted mechanic, but what Solo’s interested in is her lineage: her uncle is affiliated with the bad guys, and her father’s a nuclear physicist who’s been captured by them. Before they can skedaddle and hop the Berlin wall to rejoin Solo’s extraction team, they’re intercepted by Kuryakin, who pursues them in a brisk, high-speed Road Runner chase through the moonlit Berlin streets.

Before long, Solo and Kuryakin are informed by their respective superiors that they’re to work together in bringing down the terrorists. They’re contrasting personalities make it hard for them to shed their adversarial attitudes, but Gaby does her best to ease the tension. Kuryakin’s a staunch patriot with a bad rage problem (he Hulks out from time to time), and Solo’s laid-back American arrogance goes against everything he and his people stand for.

The movie’s essentially a dick-measuring contest between the two, and idiotic as it may be, it’s a lot of fun to watch the strapping lads try to out-man each other by showing off their signature spy tricks. Cavill and Hammer are charismatic and look fantastic in the movie’s countless tailor-made European suits. As characters, Solo and Kuryakin are indefensibly shallow and one-dimensional, almost charicature-like, but in Ritchie’s world, it works. The actors aren’t so much embodying characters as they are exaggerated American and Soviet attitudes from the Cold War era. It’s not brilliantly written material, but the snappy banter is always good for a laugh. Though there’s only one English character of significance (played by Hugh Grant), Ritchie and co-writer Lionel Wigram still manage to infuse the proceedings with a generous helping of British cheekiness.

Vikander suffers the most from the surface-level writing. Her performance in Ex Machina was a revelation, and to see her reduced to a walking, talking plot device is sad. She’s given one moment: while staying in a hotel room with Kuryakin (they’re working undercover as an engaged couple), Gaby has too much to drink and starts dancing like, well, a drunk girl (a moment made all the more fun with the knowledge that Vikander is an accomplished ballerina). She loosens up the Russian’s stoic veneer by forcing him to join her in dance and then roughing him up a bit by wrestling him around the room, knocking over furniture. Alas, Ritchie is stingy with Gaby, only allowing her to let loose the one time.

The international vistas (most of the story plays out in Italy, which looks infuriatingly gorgeous) and vintage costumes and super-cool sunglasses more often than not outshine the actors. Ritchie glamorizes every piece of clothing we see, to the point where the movie stills look like they’re ripped from a fashion magazine rather than a movie. He’s confident in his visual style at this point in his career, and he knows how to make everyone and everything look great, even when zooming by the camera in a blur of color.

The plot is over-stuffed and hard to follow, but it’s never too distracting. Allegiances shift, unexpected wrenches get thrown into every plan, a romance between Gaby and Kuryakin is incessantly teased—it’s all standard espionage stuff. But you know what? It’s an entertaining movie, bottom line. Ritchie cleverly chops up and rearranges the timelines of certain events to raise questions and provide amusing revelations later: in one scene we see Gaby making a phone call to an off-screen mystery person; only later, when the information is most relevant, is it revealed who she was talking to. It’s not the most revolutionary device in the world, but the time-jumping keeps things fresh and active. Ritchie made some of the worst movies of his career with those Sherlock Holmes turd piles, but The Man From U.N.C.L.E. proves that he still knows how to wow us at the movies, even with the studio system breathing down his neck. Good on you, Mr. Ritchie—now, can you please just make another gangster flick? Pretty please?

Style will carry a film fairly far. It is, after all, a visual medium. In a genre film it’s especially useful in elevating the expected into more artistic territory. With a photographer-turned-director like first-timer Tyler Shields, style appears to be the home base and comfort zone from which his expression springs. Which makes for a unique looking film debut, but also drives home a very basic film lesson: style is swell, but story is everything. Final Girl (not to be at all confused with The Final Girls, a slasher film spoof slated for October) is Shields’ first film and while every frame exudes the talent of a man who understands lighting, costuming, coloring, and staging, he has managed to make a film that would have made an amazing photography show but is ultimately a frustratingly scarce horror film. The tale of a gorgeous young assassin facing off against four sadistic teenage boys to the death is an intriguing premise for a thriller, and yet Shields proves that premise and style can only take a film so far.

Set in some ambiguous time period where teenage boys own tuxedos and wear them to the local diner, and assassins in training wear cocktail dresses and heels, Final Girl doesn’t offer much in the way of backstory. Character motivation, it’s implied, is up to the viewers interpretation. So when the film opens with Wes Bentley interviewing a young girl and he succinctly mentions the death of his wife and child, that is apparently all the understanding we’re meant to have of why he’s chosen this newly orphaned girl, or who they are meant to work for, or how it is they choose “bad guys” to go after. It’s not much, not much at all. And in the following scenes where Veronica, played by a very blonde Abigail Breslin, goes through a series of training sessions with Wes Bentley’s William she doesn’t think to ask him all the questions that any normal viewer would have only ten minutes into the film.

While always inexplicably training in her fancy dresses and heels, Veronica is led through a series of very specific trainings: she has to exert enough energy in a choke hold to cause her mentor to pass out, she needs to rely less on her gun and more on her physical prowess, and she’s injected with an LSD-like cocktail so that she can simultaneously experience her worst fear (a fear that is sadly irrational for someone supposedly so badass) and experience what her enemy would be going through should she be able to drug him before facing off. It’s all very specific and very leading. Could it be she’ll need to do all these same things in the near future?

In an early scene we meet the four teenage boys who will soon be Veronica’s prey, led by The Hunger Games’s Alexander Ludwig. With nary an introduction its established quickly that these well-tailored gents have a bad habit of picking up pretty blondes, taking them to their hangout in the woods, and engaging in a game of cat and mouse with them before serially killing them. Why has William picked up on these boys’ hobby when local police haven’t seemed to do so? Especially with a noticeably high count of missing females in the area and a presumably easy trace back to the young men? No idea. But when Veronica shows up at the diner, blonde and appealing, the boys take the bait without question. Thus the tables turn and though she feigns fear at the beginning, Veronica uses her (very specific) skills to give the boys the revenge they deserve.

The rest of the film is split into four fight scenes between Veronica and each of the boys. Based on the limited screen time each guy has had, we know approximately one thing about each of them. Perhaps the writer, Adam Prince, thought it would be clever to define each of these young men by one particular trait, either playing with a weakness they have, or a sadistic trait they possess, but because it’s all laid out so clearly in the one shot each boy is given on their own, when those same traits are used against them by Veronica it’s hard to see much cleverness in it. Presumably, we can only work with what we’re given.

Each frame shrouded in a perfect vignette, a pool of light, and the brightest of colors popping amidst the darker backdrops, one gets the sensation after a while that they’ve seen this film before, but as a spread in Vogue. There’s no denying Shields’ photography talent, but if the point in photography is that the visual story told is succinct and intriguing, this method does not translate to a 90-minute film. Stills from the film will undoubtedly lure in viewers, but turn those perfectly staged frames into action and the energy is lost.

The dialog is pithy and unnatural, attempting to keep up that ambiguously old-timey vibe. The ending is expected but no point in searching for character arcs or discovering anything new about any of the characters that wasn’t fed to us within the film’s first 20 minutes. It’s hard to watch a talented cast look so beautiful and perform absolutely nothing of substance.

The cinematography and set design and lighting aside—since they were all performed by someone other than Shields—we can only hope that before his next foray into filmmaking Shields picks up a few tips on the basics: story and directing actors. Even in a genre as forgiving as thrillers where a little action can make up for a lot, there are necessary building blocks. Final Girl is the best-dressed girl at the party with absolutely nothing of interest to say.

One lazy afternoon when I was a kid, I came across Ranald MacDougall’s 1959 film The World, the Flesh and the Devil on UHF; I’ve been a fan of post-apocalyptic films ever since. I can’t speak to whatever deep-rooted psychological reasons fuel this in me, but what I find most interesting about the sub-genre is each filmmaker’s vision of what the future will look like after a global catastrophe, whether that disaster is natural or man-made. The latest glance at what a filmmaker thinks of the world’s bleak future can be found in Orion, from writer/director Asiel Norton.

David Arquette plays the Hunter, a man wandering alone in a desolate world known as The Rust. The shell of a large parking garage where he scavenges suggests civilization once thrived not that long ago (about a century, according to opening title cards), but the rat he is forced to trap and eat is the mascot for just how far that civilization has fallen. Meanwhile, Magus (Goran Kostic), a magician, helps deliver the baby of the Virgin (Lily Cole), but Magus disposes of the child in accordance with a ritual as documented in a large tome he possesses. The Virgin is then held captive by Magus. As the Hunter wanders, he comes across the home where Magus and the Virgin live, and the magician invites the Hunter in for a meal. While there, the Virgin desperately but discreetly asks the Hunter to help her escape. One thing Magus, the Virgin, and the Hunter all know is that there is something greater at work in the universe—a destiny for the Hunter they all will help fulfill.

Orion might take place in a post-apocalyptic world, but it isn’t a post-apocalyptic film; other than some hollowed-out buildings and some props, there is no real connection to life before the catastrophe. The story (such as it is) could have just as easily taken place in ancient Europe, and one gets the sense that the century-removed, post-apocalyptic backstory/setting was a creative decision driven by the sets available for filming. An approach of using what is available might embody the spirit of independent filmmaking, and the dilapidated buildings and other “civilization used to be here” settings all look terrific, but none of that matters if the storytelling doesn’t work.

Orion‘s storytelling doesn’t work; in fact, it’s threadbare. The construct is interesting enough: a man must fulfill his destiny, and part of that destiny is rescuing the damsel in distress whom he falls in love with. There’s a bad guy that is both the obstacle to saving the girl and yet part of the greater destiny, and there is a smaller character (the Fool, played by Maren Lord), who helps the hero. It has the potential for depth and density, but instead it is a shell of a story, like an outline sketched as a placeholder for something greater.

Norton is far more interested in reveling in his own directorial style than he is in creating anything substantive. He establishes his story, dolls it up with some mysticism, some title cards with Olde Tyme font, some nudity, and some Tarot-like storytelling device, then clings to an endless series of shaky, hand-held close-ups (close-ups that ultimately undermine any action taking place during the Hunter/Magnus battles) and long scenes of the Hunter pondering his destiny. These ponderous scenes, which include clips of what the Hunter is thinking (foretelling?) are replete with pseudo-mysterious dialogue (“He’s coming. He’s me.”) delivered via voiceover and incessantly repeated at various volume levels. It feels like watching a medieval perfume commercial.

Throw in some Christian symbolism to give the tale a little spiritual heft, and Norton wants you to think he’s made something deep. He hasn’t. He’s committed a live-action RPG to film and acted as its middling game master.

The cast is fine although mostly unchallenged by the material, with the exception of Kostic as Magus. The character, while not deep, has some scenery-chewing moments and Kostic delivers. When Norton allows the camera to occasionally open up, Lyn Moncrief’s cinematography is quite nice. It also bears repeating that that the sets are very good, along with the costumes.

Another facet of post-apocalyptic films that draws me to them is the opportunity to ponder if I could survive in that creator’s imagined realm. I like to think that in most cases I would, but if ever I were faced with the choice of dying during the apocalypse or living in Asiel Norton’s future, well, tell my family I love them.

Orion made its World Premiere on August 1st at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival. To find out more about the festival, visit www.fantasiafestival.com

The astonishing thing about Toy Story 3 [spoiler alert] is that the folks at Pixar actually convinced us, for a good 30 seconds, that Woody, Buzz, and the gang were actually going to be melted alive, turned to plasticky slush in a veritable pit of doom. The movie was made for the whole family, of course, and watching our beloved miniature friends meet such a gruesome demise is something that would never, ever happen under Disney/Pixar’s watch. And yet there we all were, clutching our armrests, tears welling up in our eyes, convinced that this was, in fact, the end.

This variety of audience manipulation has come to define the long-running Mission: Impossible franchise. Each new director and crew in charge of the series is faced with this (dare I say) impossible mission of convincing us that, this time, Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt might actually die. Selling us on this idea gets more and more difficult with each film because Ethan has been dodging bullets, falling off motorcycles and hanging off of dangerously high things for almost twenty years now, and he shows no sign of slowing. It’s a tough, tough sell.

So the question is, with Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, are Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie good salesman? Does M:I‘s fifth installment keep you on the edge of your seat, worrying that Hunt and his team may never see the light of day again? Impossibly (there I go again), it does. It doesn’t have the same heart or infectious humor of Brad Bird’s Ghost Protocol, but it follows the same winning formula, making it one of the best thrill-rides of the summer.

Hunt and his fellow members in the Impossible Mission Force (a clunky moniker, though its abbreviation, IMF, rolls off of the tongue nicely), a government-funded espionage agency, face an evil they’ve never known in The Syndicate, an international terrorist group whose primary objective is to obliterate the IMF. Taking The Syndicate down head-on proves to be a stiff challenge for Hunt and company when a meddling CIA director (Alec Baldwin) convinces the government to dissolve IMF, forcing Hunt into hiding as he plots his next move.

Left wasting their days away behind desks at the CIA are the straight-laced William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) and the klutzy, tech-savvy Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg, whose comedic timing makes him an invaluable member of the ensemble), but before long Ethan reaches out to them to help him smoke out The Syndicate. Series veteran Ving Rhames rejoins the team on their mission while series newcomer Rebecca Ferguson dips and twirls around the movie as a deadly double-agent.

Where the movie gives you your money’s worth is in its elaborately staged stunt sequences, all of which are heart-stopping. The movie opens with a shot of Cruise dangling off of the side of an airplane as it lifts off; it was all done for real, with practical effects, and with it Cruise further solidifies his status as the craziest, Evel Knievel MF’er in Hollywood, hands down. To say it’s spectacular is an understatement. But not to be outdone are the handful of other, equally impressive action scenes, which all feel equally distinct and indispensable. A showstopping set piece sees Hunt holding his breath for upwards of two minutes as he infiltrates a futuristic underwater storage unit, while a more intimate moment later in the movie sees Ferguson’s character facing off with a giant thug in a tense nocturnal knife fight. The best of the bunch is a wonderfully orchestrated assassination sequence set in an opera house, paying homage to Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much.

These mini-opuses of spy-thriller fun are so well crafted and suspenseful that we do, as I said, genuinely fear for the characters’ lives. But that fear only comes from the baseline fact that we fear for them as human beings; as characters, none of them are so endearing or lovable that we harbor a deep emotional connection. That’s Rogue Nations‘s biggest shortcoming: while the characters say witty things and obviously care for one another, we don’t get to learn much about them on a personal, hopes-and-fears level, outside their world of globe-trotting, car-chasing and evil plan-thwarting.

McQuarrie continues the theme of teamwork-over-tech launched by Bird in Ghost Protocol, though Bird frankly did it better. Again, when the imaginative gadgets and do-dads fail our heroes, they must rely on each other to save their skins. It’s this human element that made Bird’s movie so great, and while it’s still very much at the core of Rogue Nation, the message feels dampened. This is mostly due to the movie’s almost fetishistic fascination with strange-looking spy things; from a sniper rifle disguised as a brass instrument to USB drives disguised as lipstick (that one’s not even that clever), McQuarrie just can’t help but show them off. Best to leave the gadget porn to 007.

Rogue Nation isn’t the best M:I yet, but it’s easily third on the list, if not second (it’s about as good as J.J. Abrams’ M:I3). Cruise is still a nutjob, we still love watching things blow up in glorious global locales, and the cast has never been better, so why not keep the series going? As far as Hollywood cash-cow franchises go, Mission: Impossible is one I’m always happy to see pop back up at the theater. Now, the real question: What the hell are we going to dangle Tom off of next? My vote? Millennium Falcon. Crossover of the ages, right guys?! Guys?

With his sophomore effort, writer-director Nadeem Soumah delivers 6 Ways to Die, a prime contender for worst film of the year. Full of poor acting, clumsy direction and an incredibly clichéd, needlessly convoluted script, the most value this film carries is that it can act as a guidebook on how not to make a movie. It’s the kind of disaster that would be funny to watch if it weren’t so infuriatingly self-serious and devoid of any real attempts to entertain. It’s a film so poorly realized that most any other crime film, no matter the quality, would look like a masterpiece in comparison.

The film follows the execution of a multi-layered, years in the making plan in which John Doe (Vinnie Jones) seeks revenge against Sonny ‘Sundown’ Garcia (Michael Rene Walton). Sonny was once a good friend and a partner in crime to John Doe before betraying him and ascending the ranks to become the top narcotics distributor for the Colombian cartels (a fact that is mentioned several times in the film to nauseating effect). John’s plan consists of killing Sonny by taking six things from him: his freedom, his love, his reputation, his most valued possession, all his money, and his life. In one of the most mind-numbingly bizarre stylistic choices the film has to offer, the revenge plot is shown in reverse beginning with Sonny’s murder at the hands of a contract killer (Chris Jai Alex) and each step concluding with a ‘One Week Earlier’ title card until the film has finally arrived at the beginning. And with each flashback, a new character is introduced as part of the revenge plot, and as a result, another actor gets a chance to embarrass themselves under the guidance of Soumah’s poor script and direction.

As bad as the acting is, it’s hard to really dissect it seeing as how basically every character in the film is played the exact same way. Outside of Sonny’s heavily underwritten wife Steph (Dominique Swain) and the annoying tech geek Hunter (Jeff Galfer), every character is a mostly silent, brooding, intense figure. And then there’s Vinnie Jones, who essentially acts as walking exposition and only appears to relay the story of betrayal for each new flashback (yes, all six of them) with bits of new information each time. None of these actors could say they’re above typical B-movie action films, yet somehow this still feels like an incredible waste of their time.

But it’s really Soumah who is at fault here. His script is full of unnecessary clichés, a pointlessly convoluted structure, and the stiffest characters assembled on screen this year. His direction is no better. It’s as if someone took Michael Mann and stripped him of all his vision. The film reeks of a desire to look “cool” and “slick,” but it comes across as a humorless parody of that style. The opening scene with Mike Jones (Tom Sizemore) is a perfect example of this, as Soumah consistently cuts from a close-up of Sizemore to several different angled close-ups of Sizemore back-to-back-to-back as if to breathe some intensity into the scene. It’s the type of scene that plays to amusing effect in something like Robert Rodriguez’s Machete, but here is delivered with such sincerity that it feels like a joke Soumah isn’t in on. The film also features a few glaring technical issues, like when a shootout includes a few poorly exposed or color-corrected shots. It’s jarring in the worst way.

And then to top it all off, 6 Ways to Die ends with one of the most asinine, ridiculous twists that I’d say needs to be seen if it weren’t for the torturous hour and 35 minutes preceding it. This twist is so laughable, it feels insulting. 6 Ways to Die is sure to go down as one of the worst films of the year if it’s not completely overlooked, although I think that might be for the best.

The beautiful thing about old-school arcade games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Centipede is that they take passion, endurance and dedication to master. Few people on this earth are equipped with the skills to be the best at these electronic mental marathons, and these special few are basically freaks of nature (watch Seth Gordon’s modern classic The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters to fully understand their freakiness). Retro arcade gaming is an amazing, fascinating, largely undiscovered American subculture that’s deserved to be the subject of a  big-budget, big-screen vehicle for a long time. (No, Wreck-It Ralph doesn’t count; that movie’s about the games, not the gamers.)

Pixels, a movie by Chris Columbus and a product of Adam Sandler‘s Happy Madison Productions empire, is meant to be about retro gamers, but isn’t about anything at all. This movie makes no sense, has no message, isn’t funny and harbors what is easily the worst performance of Peter Dinklage‘s career. It’s a crying shame, especially for a lifelong gamer like myself, though the movie is extraordinarily impressive in one, very unexpected facet of its presentation, which I’ll save for later.

The plot is Independence Day, except woefully over-simplified and with classic video game characters playing the aliens. In a flashback to 1982 (when video arcades still existed), we meet our heroes. Sam Brenner is an good-natured arcade wizard, but he loses a NASA-sponsored gaming tournament to Eddie “The Fire Blaster” Plant, a cocky, mullet-rocking little person who smokes him at Donkey Kong. Sam’s best buddy, Will, is loyal to the end, though, and assures Sam that he’s destined for bigger things. As a consolation prize, they make a new friend at the arcade, a Napoleon Dynamite-like creature named Ludlow. This opening sequence has a great, vintage look and starts the movie on the right foot, though it’s all downhill from there.

Jump ahead to present day, and aliens that inexplicably look and behave exactly like the characters in the games Sam mastered as a kid have declared war on earth and threaten to blow our blue planet to smithereens. (Well, not exactly “smithereens”; everything the aliens touch gets “pixelated,” falling apart into neon-bright cubes of light.) Naturally (predictably), adult Sam (Sandler), Will (Kevin James), Eddie (Dinklage) and Ludlow (Josh Gad) are the only ones with enough gamer skill to save the day. (Oddly enough, Will grew up to be the President of the United States, which fast-tracked his friends to the front of the military earth-defense line.)

Nonsense incoming: When a giant, alien Pac-Man starts tearing apart New York City, he and his friends jump into color-coded cars, chasing Pac-Man through the streets and alleys as if they were the evil ghosts from the game. Sam was good at arcade games. How in the world, then, is he suddenly also a professional driver? Earlier in the movie, he’s holding a laser gun, shooting “centipedes” out of the night sky in London. I could have sworn he was a master of buttons and joysticks, not a badass gunman with perfect aim. It’s moronic. This movie isn’t about video games or gamers; it’s generic, trashy, sci-fi action shlock that prostitutes retro gaming and uses it as arbitrary window dressing. Blech.

Across the board, the cast is on their D-game. Sandler’s been playing the same, sleepy-Seth-Rogen character for the past several years, and he doesn’t break that streak here (same goes for Kevin James and his meathead routine). Michelle Monaghan plays Sandler’s love interest, and her role as a sexy government official is as demeaning and stereotypical as you’d imagine. Gad alternates between shrieking and sulking as the mentally unstable Ludlow, but his performance is more off-putting than funny.

Like I said, Dinklage is a mess: He puts on a mind-numbing accent that sounds like Barry White trying to talk like a “totally tubular” ’80s kid, and his comedic timing is near nonexistent. He says nasty things, like demanding a three-way with Serena Williams and Martha Stewart in the Lincoln Bedroom, and Columbus lingers on him forever, as if he’s positive the audience is erupting in laughter at the absurdity of it all. Instead: crickets. Not one laugh-worthy line. Not one. It’s painful to see such a great actor fail so miserably.

Family-friendly action adventures like this typically leave you with some kind of moral or encouraging message. For the life of me, I don’t know what Pixels is trying to say. All of its heroes have dreams, and at the end of the story, all those dreams come true. But they learn nothing about themselves along the way. It’s a head-scratcher trying to figure out the point of it all. You’d think, maybe, that the message would be about retro games and how, even amongst today’s more complex, technologically advanced games, they still hold up as essential gaming experiences. Nope. Spoiler alert: Sam saves the world by ditching his old-school gaming philosophies and adopting a modern gaming approach. I honestly don’t understand most of this movie.

I saved the good news for last, though it’ll only apply to those willing to shell out extra dough for a movie ticket. Pixels has some of the best 3-D glasses implementation I’ve ever seen. Seriously. Aside from a few exceptions (Pixar movies, Coraline, Avatar), I detest putting on those damn 3-D glasses, but this movie blew me away: the colors were vibrant; people’s noses looked closer to us than their ears; shots of large crowds had cavernous depth. The more obvious visual effects—like the aliens exploding into a zillion “pixels”—looked great too, but it was the subtle stuff that dropped my jaw. I really, really didn’t like this movie, but at least it’s a fun tech demonstration.

The plight of the teenage girl has been a staple for filmmakers for decades. Despite occasional attempts at changing the scenery in these films (the summer camp of 1980’s Little Darlings, the beauty pageant circuit of 1999’s Drop Dead Gorgeous, the rock-and-roll tour bus of 1982’s Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains), the most popular setting for the drama, angst, love, humor, chaos, friendship, and countless other things teen girls experience has been, and forever will be, school. The greatest teen girl films—films like 1988’s Heathers, 1995’s Clueless, and 2004’s Mean Girls, to name three—are all set in schools. This setting works so well because schools present natural opportunities for drama, angst, love, and other feelings. Throw in raging hormones, and you have near-endless narrative potential.

The latest entry that offers a learning institution as its backdrop, and features all the teenage girl backbiting of an American contemporary, comes from Japan: Mamoru Oshii’s Nowhere Girl (Tôkyô Mukokuseki Shôjo).

Ai (Nana Seino) is the misfit at her all-girl art school. She is so distant from her classmates, it’s difficult to tell if she suffers from crippling shyness or offensive aloofness, something that does her no favors in making friends. She is also far more talented than her classmates, which earns her special treatment by the school’s faculty. That special treatment includes allowing Ai to leave her classes to work on a secret art project.

This trio of factors—aloofness, talent, and preferential treatment—makes Ai the target of routine schoolgirl bullying. She rises above it, but as the harassment grows, and as one professor in particular shows his exhaustion with Ai’s special treatment, she begins to show signs she has other—more violent—talents.

If only her talents had manifested themselves earlier in the film. Even at a trim 85 minutes, Nowhere Girl is an arduous watch, suffocating under the director’s heavy-handed desire for soft, blanched, lingering shots set mostly to a placid piano score. This is the pace and tenor of the film’s first two acts. Scenes of an art class becomes watching paint dry, a character’s ponding becomes watching someone do nothing, and the uneventful becomes downright mundane. All set against the backdrop of too-soft whites and muted hues. It’s reminiscent of something from the eye of Nicolas Winding Refn, if Refn were forbidden from using color.

Visual style and pace aren’t the only problems that plague Nowhere Girl. The story, from Kentarô Yamagishi (original story) and Kei Yamamura (screenplay), is distinctly similar to another classic troubled teen-girl-centric film, 1976’s Carrie. Parallels are there (a misfit teen with mysterious abilities just can’t fit in and eventually snaps), and even the trailer suggests inspiration from the Brian De Palma film, but the story never congeals and thus is never propelled to the same places as Carrie. In fact, it’s never propelled anywhere. Dialogue, events, and character peculiarities in the first two acts are so vague, they confuse. It’s mostly made clear in the third act—to call it a “twist” is to dangle toes on the fringe of the literal meaning—but not due to deft storytelling tying it all together. Rather, there’s a sense of obligation that comes across in how it’s explained in (literally) the film’s final minutes. This movie gets the ending it wants, but it doesn’t earn that ending.

As for the meat of the third act, it is gloriously violent and the highlight of the film, with breathtaking fight choreography, intricate blocking and editing, and plenty of crimson to make a mess of all those bland settings. This is where Seino shines. While she is quite good as the despondent student in the film’s early stages, her physical presence is tremendous. The bloody fight sequence is a long one that incorporates gun, blade, and martial arts combat. The actress is up to the challenge, showing a physical deftness that rivals the skills of any modern-day action counterparts. It is highly stylized violence (in keeping with Asian action tradition), and it includes some of the best uses for human shields I’ve seen on film. Once the dust settles, it’s hard to believe the cute and quiet star is capable of packing such a punch, but pack it she does. Unfortunately, no other cast member is particularly memorable, which allows Seino to stand out all the more, but does nothing for the film overall.

Nowhere Girl is a victim of its own design. With a threadbare plot and no character development to speak of, Mamoru Oshii may have had little choice but to take the form-over-function approach. Sadly, instead of creating any sense of tension or atmosphere with his lingering lens, the director presents an exercise in tolerance for the viewer.

Nowhere Girl had its world premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival on July 21st. To find out more about the festival, visit http://www.fantasiafestival.com

Mental real estate is growing scarce as the Marvel Cinematic Universe continues to expand, introducing dozens of new characters (both super-powered and not) every year for fans to get acquainted with. Mere months after the jam-packed, super-sized Avengers: Age of Ultron hit theaters, we’re visited by the Ant-Man, a funny little fellow whose brothers in arms aren’t Asgardian gods or raging green monsters, but tiny critters skittering about, virtually invisible to the naked eye. Where does a mini-hero like Ant-Man fit into the pantheon of larger-than-life superheroes? Will anyone even notice?

Probably not. Peyton Reed‘s Ant-Man is a respectably entertaining cog in the MCU machine, but it does little to set itself apart from its beefier big brothers. It’s got things other Marvel movies don’t: it’s a heist movie; Ant-Man’s the first superhero father (Hawkeye’s a secret agent!); the action is small-scale (and very easy to follow). But Reed ain’t foolin’ nobody. This is as formulaic a movie as Marvel’s ever produced. Its third act is a lot of fun, but everything beyond that feels safe, as if the movie is afraid to dive into the loony ideas it dips its toes into (James Gunn‘s Guardians of the Galaxy dove straight into the deep end, positioning it as the cooler, edgier alternative to the Avengers). If only all superhero movies could be as courageous as their mighty protags.

Michael Douglas anchors the film as Hank Pym, a scientist who in the ’70s invented a super suit that grants its wearer the ability to shrink down to bug size while retaining the strength of a 200-pound man, essentially making him (or her) the stealthiest, most dangerous super soldier the world’s ever seen. Fearing the chaos that would ensue should the technology fall into the wrong hands, Hank hides his invention away to never be found again. Fast-forward to present-day, and it’s found, again, by his former protégé, Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), who’s taken over PymTech and plans to unleash an army of shrinking suits on the world.

Unwilling to let his ass-kicking daughter, Hope (Evangeline Lilly) don his old suit, he employs talented thief Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) to infiltrate Cross’ labs and steal back the dangerous tech and end this mess. Scott’s just been released from prison and has vowed to give up his former life of crime, but Hank promises to help him reunite with his young daughter (Abby Ryder Forston), who lives with Scott’s ex-wife, Maggie (Judy Greer, underutilized again) and her husband (Bobby Cannavale). Unable to secure a clean job due to his dirty record, Scott agrees to take on the proverbial “one last job.”

Formulaic. Formulaic. You can smell the tropes from a mile away. Just as the plot gets set in motion, the film screeches to a halt as we watch Scott learn to use the Ant-Man suit and speak to ants with his mind (it’s a protracted training montage). Running parallel is a story of father-daughter resentment, which comes to a head in a terrifically acted scene between Lilly and Douglas that nonetheless makes you feel absolutely lousy in an otherwise largely comedic affair.

Rudd always seems to know how to make a scene funny, but seldom do I find his smartass-ness downright hilarious. He’s a comedian of modest talents, though he’s well-rounded and handsome enough to make him a viable leading man. He gets a passing grade. His greatest strength as an actor is that he’s pretty hard not to like, which in the case of a movie like Ant-Man comes in handy: we genuinely want to see him reunited with his daughter. (Just for the record, Ryder Forston is insanely adorable; she’s missing her two front teeth, so none of us stand a chance.)

The surprise standouts of the cast are Tip “T.I.” Harris and Michael Peña, who play Scott’s bumbling burglar buddies. Peña’s comedic delivery is off-the-charts good, and he actually sort of makes Rudd look bad; Rudd’s jokes get mild chuckles while Peña’s makes the audience explode with laughter. Stoll has a great look, his powerful frame and villainously bald head making him more physically imposing than your typical mad scientist. If you blink, you’ll miss his best moment: somberly, like an abandoned child, he asks his former mentor why he pushed him away. Hank replies, “Because I saw too much of myself.” The movie’s pervading theme is one of the passing of generations, which stimulates little thought and doesn’t lend the movie much richness. It does, at least, give the story a solid foundation.

Thankfully, the movie gets really darned good once the big heist gets underway. After an hour or so of mediocrity, things really click into place; the action becomes more playful and inventive, and the actors start to let loose (especially Peña’s character, who sucks so bad at going undercover he just starts clocking security guards left and right and talking smack over their unconscious bodies). The final battle takes place in a little girl’s bedroom, and the ensuing visual gags are wildly entertaining and super funny. Ant-Man‘s micro-comedy isn’t as funny as the stuff Pixar did with the Toy Story franchise, but it comes close, which is a major compliment.

If Ant-Man‘s finale wasn’t so great, I wouldn’t hesitate to suggest you skip the movie entirely. References to other movies in the MCU (a certain winged Avenger makes a guest appearance) are cute and fun, though your enjoyment of that stuff depends on your geekiness level. Edgar Wright had an infamous falling-out with Marvel Studios partway through production and was replaced by Reed, and I wonder if the balls Ant-Man seems to be lacking went away along with the Shaun of the Dead mastermind.

Sound mixing is one of those things that’s easy to take for granted in a film. It’s hardly noticeable when proper mixing produces a good balance of dialogue, background music, and sound effects. But take just one of those elements out of the mix, and the entire production becomes unbalanced, making it difficult to concentrate on the story, or anything else for that matter. In Pablo Fendrik’s Ardor, a slow-burning jungle western, there’s very little substance offered in the film, which only increases the awareness of its poor sound design.

Set in an uncomfortably quiet Argentinean rainforest, a mysterious man named Kai (played by a shirtless Gael García Bernal) emerges from the Paraná River to protect a family of farmers against ruthless mercenaries. These armed men capture the family’s daughter Vania (Alice Braga) as a way to force the family to sell their property. Kai shows up to the rescue motivated by the death of his own family in a similar situation. Preferring to let his actions do the talking, Kai silently defends the land from the gunmen using an arsenal of handmade weaponry and tactical traps.

Most of what’s heard in Ardor are background noises: fire crackling, birds chirping, the jungle floor crunching, and the occasional cry from a gory death. But the film doesn’t have much in the forefront of the sound mix to act as a counterbalance to the ambient sounds. Without enough speaking parts or background music to help keep the sound mix balanced, much of Ardor is noticeably muted. Even the film’s gunfights and action sequences feel surprisingly noiseless, making them come across as dull.

Even without the sound issues, the fight sequences are so painstakingly unrealistic they’re hard to take seriously. At one point, Kai escapes in a canoe from not just one but two men shooting at him from point-blank range, yet they only manage to put a bullet hole in his canoe and shoot the oar out of his hand. And when Kai gets the brilliant idea of laying down flat in the canoe, the gunmen immediately throw in the towel and stop shooting. It’s a scene that would feel more at home in an old cartoon.

While most of the film involves characters either hunting or being hunted, it unfolds like a slow-motion chase. Everyone lacks the motivation to get to their destination in any kind of hurry. And fight scenes go unresolved for plot reasons, making Ardor drag on needlessly in order to fill time. With proper pacing, these moments could have had tension and felt more cinematic.

One redeeming quality of Ardor is its attractive cinematography. Taking advantage of the lush tropical backdrop, the film captures the sun-soaked jungle and its dense vegetation as if it were a character itself. There are also some captivating close-ups of a roaming jaguar, whose spiritual bond with Kai adds a mystical element to the story.

Ardor attempts to create a modern twist on the western genre by using a jungle setting and adding in some magical realism, but it falls short due to poor execution. Although it provides plenty of atmosphere, the film severely lacks in just about every other area. Not even a gifted actor such as Gael García Bernal (No, Bad Education, Y Tu Mamá También), who’s usually great in everything, can elevate a film that offers so little to work with. The result is an eco-friendly jungle western with a tedious narrative, predictable outcomes, confusing allusions, and an underwhelming conclusion.

The problem with reboots and remakes of great movie franchises is that, about 90 percent of the time, they get caught up in paying homage to their predecessors, recalling the original’s most iconic scenes and doing them half as well. Terminator: Genisys falls neatly into this category of uninspired fan service cash grabs, but to its credit, it’s the cream of the crop when it comes to Hollywood schlock. It’s a well-oiled, inoffensive thrill machine that doesn’t approximate T1 and T2‘s entertainment value by a zillion miles, but is by and large a painless, easily-digestible summer action movie starring the former king of summer action movies.

Arnold Schwarzenegger (I will from this point forward only refer to him as “Ahnold,” because I must) has reinvented his career in recent years by shedding all self-seriousness and making movies (as far as we can tell) for the fun of it. He acknowledges that he’s 67 years old and no longer pilots his career with a macho-bullshit attitude, and that’s really, really endearing. This newly acquired “old guy” appeal is the best thing about this fifth installment of the long-running Terminator franchise, in which he reprises his role as the T-800, though this time with a paternal twist (as strange as that sounds). Will hearing Ahnold say “I’ll be back” ever get old? His new catchphrase, “Old. Not obsolete,” might be the best answer to that question. Ahnold isn’t as badass or relevant as he was twenty years ago, but heaven knows he’s still fun to watch.

Director Alan Taylor’s picture begins with the series’ most familiar scenario. We start in a machine-ravaged 2029 and find human resistance leader John Connor (Jason Clarke) sending his right-hand man, Sgt. Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney), back in time to protect (and knock up) his mother, Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke). History gets skewed, however, as Kyle arrives in an already-altered 1984 in which Miss Connor is a far-from-fragile machine killer who’s been protected since childhood by a T-800 she calls “Pops” (Ahnold). From this point forward the film becomes both a continuation of the original mythology and a reboot of sorts, a la JJ Abrams’ 2009 stab at Star Trek. It sees Sarah and Kyle launched forward to 2017 to destroy Skynet, which has taken the form of a popular life-management operating system called “Genisys,” before the world-wiping “judgment day” ever happens.

It comes as no surprise the movie is packed wall-to-wall with time-travel explication, mostly administered by the socially ill-equipped Pops (in Ahnold’s iconic Austrian monotone, of course). Kyle hurtles from 2029, to 1984, to 2017, where he finds himself in the awkward situation of learning that his mentor is actually his son, whose mother is the girl he’s been manipulated to fall in love with for years, but just met yesterday. There are alternate timelines, memories from impossible pasts, flashbacks to the future—the mind boggles! But not too much. Taylor actually does a great job of making the time-travel loopiness easy to follow, though the humor mined from it is pretty lame; watching Kyle agonize over timeline logistics is grating, especially when he makes the obligatory “Say it in English!” joke.

The movie never gets stopped dead by the bullets of exposition because the action is piled on so relentlessly. It’s all pretty standard fare: big, meaty explosions; buses doing somersaults in slow motion; San Francisco getting brutally demolished (seriously, what’s with Hollywood’s current obsession with wiping out SF?). The action, like the plot, is comprehensible and well presented, but doesn’t bring a whole lot to the table in terms of artistry or innovation. (An effect that sees the newest terminator incarnation leaving shadows of itself behind while breaking free from an MRI is the sole exception.) Taylor simply doesn’t have the knack for over-the-top action Cameron does, though fans will be happy with some of the movie’s shameless recalls to the originals (“old” Ahnold throwing fists with CGI young Ahnold is awesome).

The father-daughter-new boyfriend dynamic between the three leads is amusing, but it fails to launch emotionally. It’s good for laughs from time to time (Kyle and Pops exchanging impudent glares as they race to fill ammo clips in an unspoken “best guardian” competition), but the movie’s dramatic climax is a stinker that goes nowhere fast. The actors are serviceable (Courtney is a much better villain than hero, as seen in the Divergent series), with Ahnold’s robot-failing-at-acting-human schtick being the most memorable character impression we’re left with. There’s a levity to the material that may infuriate those who hoped for a grittier kind of doomsday movie, though I found it welcome.

Terminator: Genisys is a bridge to the future in that it captures the feel (not the greatness) of T1 and T2 while laying the groundwork for a full departure from the old mythology in forthcoming installments. J.K. Simmons makes an appearance as the only surprise in a mostly unsurprising movie, playing a ruffled cop who’s spent decades obsessing over a life-changing experience he had with a deadly robot in 1984. He’s a warm representation of the legions of fans who’ve been in love with the Terminator series since 1984’s The Terminator; the childlike smile on his face while in the presence of Sarah Connor, John Connor, Kyle Reese and the T-800 says it all.

Before we get into this, let’s first talk about Samuel L. Jackson. Let’s talk about how he was, for a time, the highest-grossing actor of all time and still hangs out in the top 5. Let’s talk about how the man has acted in over 160 films; about how at 67 years old he’s still playing the badass in charge in movies like, well, every Marvel movie for one where he’s basically the leader of the superhero pack as Nick Fury. And all with no superpowers, only an eye patch and a degree in kicking ass. Let’s focus on all these good things before we remember that Samuel L. Jackson has never played the President of the United States in a film…until now. He’s been a Jedi already for Pete’s sake. What’s unfortunate for the great Mr. Jackson, is that the first time he chooses (or is offered) to play the President is for a film that truly underutilizes the talent he possesses. Heck, Samuel L. Jackson took on the seemingly insurmountable task of facing off against snakes on an aircraft and turned camp into cult history, so why have we never entrusted him with the (fake) care of the most powerful country in the world until now?

What makes even less sense is that the film in question, Big Game, is directed by a man, Jalmari Helander, who has already created what can only be defined as a Finnish cult Christmas-horror film, Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. So here’s a man with some experience in turning ridiculousness into something fun. Big Game is neither ridiculous or fun. This is a film full of talented actors (Felicity Huffman, Jim Broadbent, and Victor Garber are all featured in addition to Samuel L. Jackson), who are given low-substance dialogue and the essence of a plot in what is essentially a high budget National Geographic explosion pic.

The film tidily leads us through its third-grade reading level script with dozens of aerial shots of the Nordic mountains. Then on to Air Force One where President William Alan Moore (Jackson) laments the day’s headlines—no explanation for how the current printed paper could make its way onto an aircraft flying over Finland; we couldn’t have written in an iPad here?—that exclaim how poorly he’s tracking in the approval polls. He jokes with his head of secret service, Morris (Ray Stevenson), about how he’d rather take a bullet than never eat a cookie again. An insensitive thing to say to a man who obviously very recently took a bullet for the President—wait, a President who underwent an assassination attempt is polling low?—and conveniently expresses his regret for forcing Morris into retirement in the near future. Morris doesn’t seem too happy about the forced career move. He could be wearing a shirt that reads “Traitor” at this point and it wouldn’t be more obvious where the film is going.

Meanwhile, on the ground below in Finland, Oskari (Onni Tommila), a boy on the brink of 13 goes with his father to the wilderness to begin his rite of passage in their community: a solo hunt where he’ll prove himself a man by bagging a large animal or come back to embarrassment. Without much faith from his father, Oskari takes off on his four-wheeler. The young man gets bigger game than he could have imagined, however, when Morris’s partnership with a terrorist, Hazar (Mehmet Kurtulus), brings down Air Force One and the President escapes in a capsule that the boy stumbles upon. This short action sequence of the film, albeit the catalyst for the film’s entire plot, focuses on spectacle with nary a thought for consistency. For one, the President has only just risen for the day and dressed, unable even to finish putting his shoes on, when Morris ushers him off the plane, and yet all the next frames involve the plane going down in the night-darkened forest. I mean, I get it, explosions look much better in the dark, but it’s a weird discrepancy. Morris’s means of ensuring no one can get to the President is also too simple, and one has to wonder why some people die so easily and yet Morris deliberately makes killing the President more difficult.

But in a film titled Big Game, it’s reasonable to expect the action will focus on “the hunt.” So, Oskari finds the President, and they banter about him not recognizing the most recognizable man in the world—a little funny since he’s played by a highly recognizable actor. Oskari proceeds to keep the President alive, using his camping skills and bonding with President Moore over his fears of disappointing his father. There’s a lot of talk of bravery in its many forms. Then the very next morning the bad guys show up and immediately overtake the President. Well, so much for “the hunt” theory. They are about to cart the President off when Oskari finds his bravery and swoops in to save the President.

Back in the U.S. the assembled leaders watch all of what’s taking place via satellite like it’s some sort of movie, no one taking any real action only sipping on their coffee, eating their takeout food, and putting on their worried faces. Victor Garber is the Vice President and he does a good job yelling maniacally in frustration. Jim Broadbent has an excellent intelligent deadpan, and yet as the retired “best CIA agent” the country ever had, he mostly keeps his cool while stating the obvious while everyone ogles. This depiction of American political-military efforts, if enacted in real life, would have meant our demise as a country long ago.

With explosions galore and enough aerial widescreen shots to make up an impressive Finland tourist video, Big Game has a fair amount of spectacle, but all of its substance lies hidden away within the treasure troves of talent possessed by its widely underutilized cast. As an actor who’s proven he can lead films to success when given enough freedom, it’s astonishing how passive a character Samuel L. Jackson plays in this film. The man isn’t even given any good one-liners to laugh at. Tommila ends up being the real star, so younger audiences may find appeal in the film, but he plays Oskari as always serious, there’s no real youthful playfulness found within the film. There’s also hardly any stakes. The terrorist should be the most frightening aspect of the film, and yet he literally has no agenda, no real reason for choosing to capture and kill the most powerful man in the world.

Big Game benefits from its location’s beauty, and it will earn a certain draw with Samuel L. Jackson on its poster, but Helander has definitely missed a chance to play up the campy action potential of Jackson, the premise, and a script with built-in inanity.

Now more than ever, it seems as though the general public sympathizes with those forced to commit criminal acts in order to provide for their families. With the current economic climate in the United States, people who would otherwise live their lives on the straight and narrow now seem more inclined to turn towards illegal activity in order to pay their bills. As a result, we as a society seem more likely to connect with characters who, despite being generally good people, find themselves in shady situations. Thus is the case with Jay Martin’s 7 Minutes, a typical “heist gone wrong” film that, for better or worse, focuses more on the events leading up to a robbery than the actual robbery itself.

After being laid off from his job, Sam (Luke Mitchell) grows desperate to make enough money to provide for his girlfriend Kate (Leven Rambin) and their unborn child. His brother Mike (Jason Ritter) suggests getting into the drug dealing business with him. Along with their friend Owen (Zane Holtz), the brothers begin peddling weed and ecstasy. But when a deal goes wrong, the trio is forced to recoup the lost money or face serious consequences at the hands of a drug kingpin. With no other choices in sight, they decide to rob their local bank, and as is generally the case with untrained criminals, things don’t go quite as planned.

As more and more characters enter into the situation, the film flashes back to the events that led to everyone becoming involved in the heist. While the bank robbery lasts only seven minutes (hence the title), the flashback sequences comprise a majority of the film’s running time. A bumbling police officer, a scumbag thief, and a shady businessman all end up inside the bank during the heist, resulting in Sam, Mike, and Owen losing complete control of the situation.

You’ve seen 7 Minutes before. It follows the same blueprint as a number of similar crime thrillers, but does so well enough to constitute a viewing for fans of such genre films. Stylistically, the film is like a strange mixture of Bad Turn Worse (another Starz release) and the opening and closing sequences of Pulp Fiction. Martin utilizes a delightfully southern, small town vibe throughout the film, and the idea that everybody knows everybody comes into play on more than one occasion.

Performances are solid across the board, with Leven Rambin stealing the show every time she appears onscreen. Mitchell, Ritter, and Holtz play off each other very well as the “looks, brains, and muscle,” respectively. Joel Murray and the legendary Kris Kristofferson appear in minor roles, though they are both relatively underused. As an ensemble, though, the characters genuinely feel like members of a small community with some serious issues.

The only glaring issue with 7 Minutes is the considerable amount of fluff in the flashback sequences. In the midst of a high-action scene, nothing grinds down on an audience’s attention span like cutting to a low-energy, dialogue heavy flashback. Martin’s reasoning for this is admirable. He clearly wants viewers to connect with the characters as much as possible, but the pacing just isn’t quite there because of the inconvenient timing of the flashbacks. The time jumps only answer questions no one would bother asking, making their presence feel irrelevant.

It definitely doesn’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to heist thrillers, but 7 Minutes is a fun romp for film fans who just can’t get enough of watching bumbling criminals struggle to successfully commit a crime. Experienced filmgoers will be able to predict this one from a mile away, and sure, quite a few movies with a similar plot have come along in recent memory, but 7 Minutes manages to be enjoyable despite its issues. If you think you’ll have a good time with this one, you’re probably going to have a good time.

It’s the near future and a wrongfully imprisoned ex-soldier named Rick Tyler (Dominic Purcell) is given a shot at freedom. Chosen for the extremity of his supposed crimes, he is dropped into a brutal game show called “Turkey Shoot.” The object is simple: survive. Four “shooters” of varied talents are assigned to each level, hunting the convict and aiming to stop him from reaching a designated endpoint within a specific amount of time. Depending on when you grew up, this might sound like a rip-off of The Running Man or The Hunger Games, while in actuality, it’s an update on the cult classic exploitation film, Turkey Shoot (aka Escape 2000). As such, one can only hope for some fun stunts and a cheekily employed b-grade storyline, but there is neither creativity nor camp in Elimination Game, and the film winds up being just as forgettable and generically awful as its American re-titling.

There are several basic plotlines to director Jon Hewitt’s on-screen world, but none of them is given enough attention. On the one hand, we have a government conspiracy against our framed hero inciting his need to clear his name. On the other, we have two crucial relationships and their relevant backstories: A romantic one between Tyler and his rescuer, Jill (Viva Bianca) and an antagonistic one with former friend and celebrated Turkey Shoot sniper, “Ramrod” (Robert Taylor). The third thread competing for attention is the most interesting, which is the game show iteself, which provides the action of the film as well its satire. In theory there is plenty going on in the film, but the total refusal of the writers to make anything more than the obvious out of each of these familiar themes renders the entire film as more dumb and meaningless then its complicated premise may suggest.

Elimination Game’s lack of detail is mind-boggling, especially considering the possibilities of the Turkey Shoot game. Here is where the real action of the film lies, not to mention where the stakes lay the highest and yet it’s constantly neglected. Each round in the show is terribly brief, as Tyler cuts through one heavily armed opponent after another, improbably evading point-blank gunfire and miraculously healing from whatever wounds he suffers. To give an idea of the action’s hastiness, the first round lasts all of 8 minutes and the climactic round pitting our protagonist against an entire city of potential shooters (what an awesomely absurd setup!) is dealt with in a speedy montage.

Of all the missed opportunities, the lazily designed enemies are what sting the most. Cheesy monikers like “Killshot,” “Golgotha” and “Armageddon” fit right into the ridiculous world on display and the hosts’ enthusiastic intros promise a crazy and diverse crew of bosses to defeat, but their flesh and blood representations never live up to the hype. A Japanese woman with precisely honed ninja skills. An American longbow specialist. A beefy, Turkish wrestler-type with a proclivity for the scimitar. This is just a smattering of what Turkey Shoot has in store, but when put into the field, the rivals are completely underutilized. Most are dispatched within moments of their first encounter and not a single one-liner or personality trait can be spotted among them.

The flavorless aesthetic extends to all things outside the game show as well. Matters of character are skimmed over and histories are vague. Rick and Jill’s relationship stands out in particular, as it is frequently taken for granted, an obligatory sex scene being the only thing that denotes any kind of passion between them. Few if any characters are given much to work with, but the actors contribute very little personal flair. Robert Taylor appears bored and Dominic Purcell is a charisma vacuum in the leading role, serving as nothing more than a scowling sack of muscles. Perfectly bland in every way, the film doesn’t even deliver on a visual level as an ugly grey color scheme dominates throughout.

If I were to stop at this point, I’d be leaving the impression that Elimination Game is a mediocre and tedious mess of bargain bin quality. But there’s one more thing that elevates it from mere mediocrity to infuriating ineptitude. It’s the jaw-dropping incoherence. In many B-action movies, the audience is asked to accept a lot of ludicrous happenings, but when it comes to Elimination Game, the requests are unreasonable, doubly so because of the seriousness with which it carries itself. The holes in logic are so blatantly obvious and so easily fixable that one has to wonder if the script was ever given a second draft. This is more than just plot quirks; it’s spatial coherence as well. Why’s, when’s and how’s pile up on every action scene and queries like “How do you go from being in the middle of a highway car chase to running around in a city within two shots?” are never answered with even the slightest bit of verbal justification. Considering the straightforwardness of the story and its action, confusing things so much seems like it would be difficult, but Jon Hewitt somehow pulls it off. If that’s an accomplishment, then I guess it’s the only one the film has to its name.

A thumbs-down is a no-brainer here, but if you do decide to check out Elimination Game, be sure to set your expectations low (as in below ground level). For those tickled by threadbare tales of tough and grizzled men punching and kicking their way to justice, the film might manage to hold interest, but I’m doubtful it’ll do anything more.

In the advertising for Brad Peyton‘s natural disaster flick San Andreas, there’s an unspoken promise. It’s one of unbridled tectonic terror and eye-popping structural devastation, the sort of stuff we used to lap up like thirsty dogs every summer in the ’90s, when disaster movies came out seemingly every week. In this respect, San Andreas makes good on its promise, with a sizable chunk of its nearly 2-hour runtime dedicated to demonstrating in painful detail the effects of a series of earthquakes that rattles California and reduces San Francisco to a pile of urban mush.

But there’s another, deeper promise that comes as a package deal with all of the NorCal mass destruction: death (minor spoilers inbound). Earthquakes and tsunamis are frightening because they kill us, simple as that. The script written by Carlton Cuse (Lost) has a major flaw in that nobody of consequence dies. Aside from a bit player meeting a heroic demise early on, every death we see involves either an extra (typically computer generated) or a character whose death Cuse makes one hundred percent certain will not make us sad. The establishing of stakes and value of life is the difference between a bad disaster movie and a good one, and on this front San Andreas bites the dust.

Dwayne Johnson plays Ray, a rescue helicopter pilot for the Los Angeles Fire Department. He’s a family man, though that’s been a stressful role to upkeep as of late as his family’s been recently fractured. He and his wife, Emma (Carla Gugino) are in the process of getting a divorce. What’s worse, Emma’s getting ready to move in with her millionaire developer boyfriend, Daniel (Ioan Gruffudd), and she’s taking she and Ray’s daughter, Blake (Alexandra Daddario), with her. This obviously doesn’t sit well with Ray, who’s a ball of pent-up frustration and regret, but he’s got lives to save.

When a “swarm” of earthquakes surges up the San Andreas fault from Los Angeles to the Bay Area, Ray and Emma reunite to save their daughter, who’s flown up with Daniel to the soon-to-be-flattened San Francisco. Daniel, of course, reveals himself to be a sniveling villain who leaves Blake for dead in a pile of rubble. Thankfully, while her parents race against the clock to make their way up the coastline, Blake befriends two British brothers (Hugo Johnstone-Burt and Art Parkinson), who aid and accompany her in her mission to find higher ground in the hilly city by the bay.

Bolstering the parents’ drive to save their daughter is the dark memory of their other daughter, Mallory, who died in a river rafting accident years before. Aside from providing grandiose views of buildings toppling into each other like sky-high dominos, the 9.6 quake at the center of the movie also serves to shake up the repressed guilt and sorrow Ray’s bottled up inside since his daughter’s death, feelings that contributed heavily to he and Emma’s divorce. This is meant to be touching, but really, it’s just another way for the film to tiptoe around death. While tragic, Mallory’s death is a red herring, a plot device designed to give the story gravity without actually killing off a character we actually get to know. Nice try, Cuse, but no cigar.

The film’s obligatory scientific expert is played by Paul Giamatti, who’s cast perfectly. The “expert” character’s job in any disaster film is to sell us on the seriousness and consequences of the impending events. Giamatti does a bang-up job, especially when he screams at his fellow seismologists at Cal Tech to “TAKE COVER!” whenever he senses an incoming tremor. His character develops technology that’s able to predict the time and magnitude of earthquakes, but of course, it’s too little too late. It’s essentially a detail written in as an excuse for him to deliver the “here comes the Big One” speech, a speech which obviously can’t be made in real life since seismologists have no way of predicting when the next “Big One” will strike.

The images of destruction the filmmakers and visual effects teams conjure up look great. I’m a Bay Area boy, but there was a sadistic thrill in watching the landmarks and buildings I’ve grown up with smashed into oblivion. Some memorable shots: the Bay Bridge twisting and contorting so violently it takes the shape of a DNA strand; a gang of boats racing up a towering tsunami to make it to the other side before it crests; a long shot of Emma frantically scrambling to the roof of a crumbling building. These sequences, exhilarating as they are, are strung together so poorly by the narrative that they offer no more enjoyment than a Universal Studios theme park ride.

When Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson left the world of professional wrestling to conquer Hollywood, everyone laughed (including me, a lifelong WWE fan). When he started, he was awful (The Scorpion King is an unwatchable shlock-fest). But San Andreas is yet further proof that “Rocky” has proven everybody wrong: he ties with Giamatti as best actor in the movie. (That’s not for lack of competition, either, as the rest of the cast do a great job themselves.) He nails not just the action scenes, but the somber ones where he laments the loss of his daughter.

His casting feels a bit off, though. He’s got more muscle on him than everyone else in the movie combined, but he rarely gets to use them. Mostly, we see him driving things: helicopters, trucks, boats—you name it. I don’t want to see him drive stuff; I want to see him smash stuff! He punches one guy and moves the occasional semi-heavy thing out of the way. I’m not saying Johnson should be hitting things in every movie. But in this movie, more physicality would have been nice.

[Spoiler warning #2.] San Andreas is just one kill away from being pretty good. If just one of the main five characters had died, it would have made a world of difference. The effects are great and the destruction is extensive, but the loss of someone we care about is the one thing that could have truly sold us on the weight of it all. Instead, Peyton and Cuse are gun-shy and baby us like over-protective parents covering their children’s eyes during the “scary” parts. The scariest thing about San Andreas is that, as a depiction of such wide-spread death and devastation, it only elicits a half-hearted shrug.

Immediately after watching John Maclean’s feature film debut, Slow West, I had a nagging feeling that his film style reminded me of another director. I couldn’t nail down his exact style, which is bright but gruesome, gritty but aesthetically pleasing, serious but absolutely hilarious. It didn’t hit me until after some serious thought who the best director to compare him to is. I hesitate to say it, given the high profile comparison, but Maclean has an approach that feels very similar to Wes Anderson. They both take characters that could be easy to simply laugh at, but whose heartfelt conviction is too winning to deny. They both pay close attention to the details of art direction. Heck, there is even a random moment of French-speaking, poetic love-pondering among strangers—very Anderson-esque. Both Anderson and Maclean have a level of self-awareness that adds an intriguing edge and humor. In the case of Slow West, this self-awareness lifts the film up beyond what, on the surface, could have been a run of the mill western with off-beat characters. Instead, what Maclean presents is a campfire tale just bizarre enough to believe and beautiful enough to entrance.

Young, Scottish, and totally out of his element, Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is making his way across turn of the century wild Colorado, heading west in pursuit of his love, Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius). A wonder that he’s survived as long as he has, Jay happens upon Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender) as Silas holds up a Native-killing ex-soldier in the woods. Silas convinces Jay he’ll never make it to his true love alone and offers to take him for a fee. Jay, shaken by this recent encounter, sees his logic and agrees. They take off together, Jay trying to get to know his new trail partner, Silas making it clear he’s a loner.

Their first stop, at a tiny supply depot, turns unexpectedly violent when a poor immigrant family attempts to hold the general store up to steal money. Things escalate, in this brilliantly directed scene, to a bloody end. But this is life in the Wild West, death is all too common. Jay leaves the situation shaken, but stronger. Silas’s obvious lack of conscience, however, troubles Jay. Jay attempts to go out on his own, running into a kindly German writing a book on the diminishing Native American culture and population. “Theft,” he claims. Jay’s faith in the goodness of people seems momentarily renewed. Until he wakes up alone on the ground, all of his things stolen. Not the only example of humorous irony in Slow West. It’s used in abundance throughout, always with a subtle cleverness that makes for unexpected laughs at unassuming moments.

Unbeknownst to Jay, Rose and her father John (Game of Thrones’ Rory McCann aka The Hound) have a price on their heads, and Silas is actually a bounty hunter. Jay is leading Silas right to her. He isn’t the only outlaw interested in the high reward, however. As the paths of these lawless men cross, more about Silas’s past comes out, and his evolving personal integrity. To Silas, Jay’s undying love, (though it may be misplaced), and virtue are signs of the possibility of decent humanity in the West.

As the various bounty hunters descend upon Rose and her father—one a priestly-looking silent type with a sniper-looking rifle, the other Silas’s old mentor, the fur-coated Payne (Ben Mendelsohn)—it becomes an all out shoot out between the competing parties, as Jay rushes to defend his love.

The film is maybe less fairy tale and more cautionary tale, but the storytelling presented in the film is excellent. Not to mention peppered with Tarantino-quality fighting and deaths. But where Tarantino makes us laugh as reaction to his choreographed gore, Maclean’s humor is a bit higher brow. And the entire thing is infused with an honest and hefty measure of heart. It’s a difficult balance of emotions, and masterfully executed.

Fassbender, while never disappointing when presenting as cold and curt, turns out to have some decent comedic timing. Smit-McPhee takes the cake. His baby-face certainly makes his naive boy-in-love believable, but he adds a wise-beyond-his-years soulfulness that takes Jay beyond pathetic and upward to sweet and charming. The one most likely to be buzzed about after the film releases is newcomer Caren Pistorius as Rose, who holds very little screen-time but owns it when she has it.

Everyone’s on their A-game, including Jed Kurzel and his score (whose abilities to enhance ho-hum genre music we’ve most recently enjoyed in The Babadook). Slow West is the perfect example of a first time filmmaker who knows what he wants and how to invoke talent, making for a visionary and excellently finessed film. With a literal body count at the end, Maclean ties all his loose ends in the satisfying way of most parables. But, like he does throughout his film, what makes it ultimately so entertaining is how much the film goes against expectations, and for a Western—a genre filled with expectation—that’s no small feat.

A version of this review first appeared as part of our Tribeca 2015 coverage. 

It’s a world gone mad in Mad Max: Fury Road, and director George Miller wastes no time establishing the no holds barred, kill or be killed state of living in his post-apocalyptic vision. A brief montage of sound clips outlining civilization’s downfall plays before Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) shows up, looking over a desert wasteland before fleeing in his car. He’s chased down and captured by a few “War Boys,” devout followers and henchmen of Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). Joe is the cultlike leader of The Citadel, a desert city where he controls the oil, water and food supply. He’s barely living, with most of his body made up of machinery designed to keep him alive, and he rules over his impoverished masses with no mercy.

Just as Max is taken prisoner, Joe sends out his War Rig (a massive truck/war machine) to get gasoline from their supplier. The truck is driven by Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), whose shaved head and black war paint immediately establish her as someone not to be messed with. She drives off, but at a certain point makes an unexpected detour. Joe and his minions soon realize that Furiosa has taken Joe’s five young wives (called “breeders,” for reasons that should be obvious), and his only chances at getting a male heir, with her, prompting Joe to chase her down with everything he’s got.

And with that, Mad Max: Fury Road starts its nearly two hour long car chase, with Furiosa and her five companions driving across the desert in the hopes of escaping Joe’s fast-approaching army of cars and War Boys. Max winds up tagging along with Nux (Nicholas Hoult), a dying War Boy hoping he can go out in a blaze of glory.

It’s hard not to see the onslaught of marketing for Mad Max: Fury Road and believe that the film will represent some sort of transgressive alternative to the usual homogeneous pile of tentpoles unleashed every summer. Fury Road only delivers on that promise to some degree; the production design offers plenty of neat things to gawk at, implying there’s plenty more to this world than what’s on screen, and the minimal exposition is a breath of fresh air. What’s disappointing is how much of Miller’s film feels familiar and formulaic. It’s the same old story, just dressed up in a spiky, oversaturated outfit.

It’s not that Miller is just copying and pasting another film’s plot—I’m having a hard time thinking of any other movies where ghoulish men hunt down their leader’s pregnant sex slaves. The familiarity comes from the structure and story beats, which emulate what’s been done plenty of times before: character development and themes boiled down to one word statements (survival for Max, redemption for Furiosa), a romantic subplot with no bearing on anything, a second act tragedy putting our protagonists’ success in doubt, and a “crazy” last minute plan acting as a transition into the final act and climax. And when your film literally moves down a straight line through a flat, two-colour landscape, a lack of variety will drag things down considerably.

Action films with a simple, one-track mindset can be far from a bad thing (both The Raid: Redemption and Dredd are great, recent examples of the KISS principle in action), but Fury Road never successfully establishes any stakes. It’s easy to know where and how things will end up, and for that reason it’s easy to detach from the onscreen spectacle. There’s a point in the climactic car chase where Furiosa comes face-to-face with Joe, and angrily says “Remember me?!” It’s played as a cool, kick-ass moment, but I found it a strange thing to say, considering this is the first time both characters actually share the screen together. There’s no weight or purpose to this moment, but it falls in line with the expectations and structure of an action film, so it has to be there. That safeness, that feeling of Miller eccentrically colouring within the lines, is Fury Road’s downfall. It’s a world gone mad, but this film is anything but.

Three years ago, Joss Whedon was given an awesome set of toys to play with: a bounding, hulking man-beast; a crimson-haired femme fatale; a hammer-wielding Norse god; a deadly archer super-spy; a ballistic man made of iron; a patriotic super soldier; Samuel L. Jackson with an eyepatch. He had a big sandbox to play in, too; 2012’s The Avengers ran a whopping 2 hours and 20 minutes, giving him plenty of room to smash his new toys together, give them quippy things to say and conjure up some villains (alien invaders and a smirking, meddling trickster) for them to save the world from. It was big, it was loud, it was a hell of a lot of fun, and all us kids standing around the sandbox showered him with applause once the dust settled and the show was over. Then, he called it a day, putting his action figures away until his next grand production of geek theater.

That brings us to The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Whedon‘s hotly anticipated encore performance. The super-sequel has got everything you’d expect: insane action scenes, clever one-liners, high-stakes drama and geeky easter eggs galore. It’s exciting to have Whedon return to the MCU playground, but there’s a problem: he’s got about twice as many toys as he did last time. Suddenly, the sandbox seems a bit crowded. With four major storylines going on simultaneously and a staggering number of superheroes and villains to keep track of, Marvel Studios’ latest summer blockbuster feels stretched too thin.

On the other hand, it never feels jumbled or messy; Whedon is a seasoned storyteller, and he somehow manages to make this tightly packed mega movie feel pretty well-organized, streamlined and easy to follow. He never loses command of his band of heroes, but what he’s lacking is prioritization. Each of the nine (!) primary characters is given a rich backstory and emotional arc to explore, which sounds cool until you realize that, due to time constraints, they have a mere handful of scenes to get the job done. As a result, the storylines feel abbreviated across the board.

It’s unfortunate, because there’s some really interesting stuff going on here that could have used more time. Robert Downey Jr.‘s Tony Stark sets up the main conflict early on, strutting unknowingly into a world of tech trouble when he and The Hulk himself, Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), inadvertently birth Ultron (the villain of the film’s subtitle, voiced by James Spader), a sentient A.I. designed to protect the world, but who instead decides to purge it of the “poison” that is humankind. What hath Stark wrought? A.I. panic is fascinating, relevant subject matter that Whedon unfortunately has precious little time to explore (look to Alex Garland’s recent Ex Machina for deeper insight).

Where Whedon excels is at building his characters in quick strokes with tasty details that stick to the back of your brain like bits of candy. It’s amusing, for example, when you realize that Ultron has somehow inherited Stark’s glib, quick-fire sense of humor: When a group of scientists run away from him screaming after he brutally murders several of their colleagues, he sarcastically pleads, “Wait! Guys?!” as if he’d made an innocuous party foul. The tyrannical robot is clearly his father’s son, and yet throws a fit at the slightest notion that he’s anything like his genius-billionaire-playboy-philanthropist daddy. Whedon’s always been great at giving his villains a human dimension (Buffy fans holler), and Ultron is no exception.

Iron Man’s robo-baby issues aside, the relationships between he and the rest of the Avengers are deepened and expanded. Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Dr. Banner explore further the flirtation teased in the first film, providing an unexpected taste of romance. Captain America (Chris Evans) takes issue with Stark’s reckless exploitation of technology (setting the foundation for the impending Civil War), and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) does some extraneous soul-searching that’s mostly there to set up his next solo movie. Franchise newcomers Elizabeth Olsen and Aaron Taylor-Johnson join the fray as Wanda and Pietro Maximoff, a pair of “enhanced” twins who carry a deep-seated vendetta against Tony Stark.

Surprisingly, the film’s most poignant presence is that of Jeremy Renner‘s Hawkeye, who’s been significantly upgraded from his second-tier role in the first movie. We get to see a bit of his refreshingly ordinary home life; his wife is played by Linda Cardellini, who gives a terrific, grounded performance that comes completely out of left field. Through Hawkeye, who’s essentially a man amongst gods, Whedon defines both the story’s stakes and what being an Avenger truly means.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the thing most ticket-buyers will be paying to see: the action. The sweet, sweet, fist-pumping, “I can’t believe I’m seeing this” action. The movie opens with a snowy raid on a Hydra fortress in the fictitious Eastern European country of Sokovia. There’s a slo-mo shot (featured prominently in the trailers) of all six heroes charging through hoards of Hydra henchman phalanx-style, each Avenger locked in the most badass action pose you’ve ever seen. It’s ridiculously cool. On the other end of the film, we see Iron Man, Thor, and their new buddy, a monk-like floating android called Vision (Paul Bettany), attacking Ultron with laser beams and lightning bolts in unison. Again, ridiculously cool!

Moments like these are so slathered in comic-book awesomesauce my inner geek spontaneously combusted with excitement. Yes, the action can be a bit hollow and flashy, like watching the Harlem Globetrotters light up the court. But you know what? I love the freaking Harlem Globetrotters! (Especially when they were on Gilligan’s Island!) If I’m being honest, I could watch Iron Man pile-drive The Hulk through a skyscraper over and over without a word of complaint.

Avengers: Age of Ultron has no obligation to be the be-all-end-all epic most people want it to be. In reality, it’s nothing more than the action-packed culmination of three years-worth of superhero solo movies, and that’s fine by me. I did have problems with how evenly the narrative focus was spread across the main characters (I’d have much preferred Thor’s lame side story be cut in favor of more “Hawkeye at home” time), and I do feel like the existential quandary embodied by Ultron could have been fleshed out more.

But then I think about a fantastic party scene early in the movie in which the gang make a fun wager to see who can lift Thor’s precious Asgardian hammer, Mjolnir. Cap gives it a wiggle; a look of panic flashes across Thor’s face. The friends exchange Whedon-esque banter, sip some bubbly, talk a little trash and share some laughs as they use their incredible powers for cheap entertainment. It’s lighthearted, juvenile fun. Can’t be mad at that.

Teddy Chan’s martial arts crime movie Kung Fu Killer is like the Hong Kong industry’s version of an NBA All-Star Game: It’s fun to watch the best-of-the-best whoop on each other, but it’s also a largely low-stakes affair with few long-term implications. Boasting a packed roster of Hong Kong legends, the film is a gauntlet exhibition of martial arts mayhem, but it leaves a lot to be desired in the style department: Though well choreographed, the fight scenes are shot in a way that feels pedestrian when compared to the Raid series or The Grandmaster. It’s a kung fu smorgasbord brimming with action that somehow still leaves your stomach rumbling.

The movie is structured as a serial killer procedural, the killer in question played by Wang Baoqiang. He’s a multi-disciplined martial arts master who’s hunting down the best single-disciplined masters (e.g. kickboxing, grappling, weaponed) and beating them at their own game (Mr. Weapons gets his throat slit; Mr. Grappler gets thrown out a window). It’s sort of like a Game of Death role reversal: instead of a hero hunting down baddies one by one, it’s a baddie picking off (and apart) the good guys. The killer’s back story is a cluster of clichés (like the rest of the movie), his defining characteristic being his club foot which he’s disciplined himself to use to his advantage in combat. Other than that, he’s nothing more than a store brand psycho.

He picks off the martial arts experts like cherries from a cherry tree, and the only one who can stop him is…Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. But that would hardly be a fair fight, so instead we get normal person-sized ass-kicker and Ip Man star Donnie Yen, who plays kung fu instructor Hahou Mo. Locked up in prison for involuntary manslaughter, Mo is given an opportunity at freedom by a plucky police detective (Charlie Yeung, turning in the movie’s best non-combat performance) who enlists him to track down the hobbling killer and fight him to the death.

The plot is a thin-as-rice-paper excuse to zip from one fight scene to the next. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World comes to mind as the killer confronts each of the fighters on his list in their coincidentally cool-looking natural habitats. Baoqiang fights the martial artists (each played by a wushu flick regular making a quick cameo) in a cramped tattoo parlor, on top of a giant hanging skeleton art exhibit, on an action movie set (ha ha), and high above the city streets, in the obligatory rooftop chase/fight set piece. Each set is a fun playground for the actors to have fun with and get inventive, but they all feel contrived and cheesy looking, like stages pulled straight out of Street Fighter II.

The climactic final battle between Mo and the killer is fought in the middle of a busy street at night, cars and big rigs zooming by as the blitzing warriors duck, dive and dodge around the traffic, throwing cyclonic strikes all the while. The fight choreography is elaborately staged and undeniably impressive both athletically and artistically, but the way everything is filmed feels a bit detached; the camera spins and swirls and dives in and out of the action, but it never gets intimate enough with the violence. Despite terribly violent things happening all the time, none of it feels as brutal or pulverizing as it should. We should wince and squirm when people get sliced by a sword or shot in the gut, but Kung Fu Killer elicits no such reaction.

I’m admittedly far (very, very far) from a wushu movie aficionado, but the wire work Chan’s movie at times looks ridiculous to me. Instead of accentuating natural movements, the actors just dart from side to side, up and down, barely using their feet. I’m not against stretching the laws of gravity at all (I usually think it looks awesome), but there are moments in Kung Fu Killer when the actors look like they’re being tugged around by giant invisible hands. It’s a preference thing; after watching the smash-mouth action in the Ong-bak and Raid series, floaty wire work just feels more sterile and unexciting to me. Maybe it’s a phase, or maybe I’m just a no-good noob, but I would have liked to see Chan and his team get their hands a little dirtier.

The “aging action hero” trend that is all the rage today is a blessing and a curse for me. I grew up watching most of these guys in the ’80s, so it’s great to see the action stars of my youth still going strong today. That said, many of the films they make today leave much to be desired in terms overall quality, often heavily relying on the name recognition of the star as a strategy for success. Coming into my screening of Skin Trade, I had concerns. A good action film is challenging to make under the best of circumstances, but with an independent budget, that challenge is exponentially greater. Plus, the film’s star, Dolph Lundgren, might have his roots in old school action films (The Punisher, Universal Soldier), but he has neither the name recognition nor the resume to carry a film like Stallone or Schwarzenegger.

In Skin Trade, Lundgren plays Nick Cassidy, a New Jersey detective on the hunt for Serbian crime lord Viktor Dragovic (Ron Perlman). Dragovic and his four sons run a massive human trafficking ring out of Bangkok. When Nick kills one of Dragovic’s sons, the mobster retaliates by killing Nick’s wife and daughter. With nothing left to live for and nothing to lose, Nick travels to Thailand to seek revenge.

It’s there Nick meets Tony Vitayakul (Tony Jaa), a Bangkok cop looking to bust up the same ring. Nick and Tony’s early encounters aren’t very friendly, though, and making matters more difficult for them is FBI Agent Eddie Reed (Michael Jai White). Reed is sent to Thailand to retrieve the vengeful Nick, but the agent might have ulterior motives of his own.

My concerns, for the most part, were unfounded. Skin Trade, from director Ekachai Uekrongtham, is a solid action flick that does a good job blending old and new styles of action while sticking to the fundamentals of the genre.

From the (old) West comes that ’80s style of shoot ’em up/run ’em down/beat ’em up action, including an obligatory (yet still effective) scene in a shipyard at nighttime. Lundgren, no less barrel-chested at 57 than he was at 27, is in his element here. He’s a cop with a singular focus who can run, fight, and shoot. Once his family is killed he becomes the vengeful anti-hero, a construct that is the stuff of ’80s classics. Top it off with a gruff police captain played by action veteran Peter “Robocop” Weller and it’s a fine homage.

From the (new) East comes Jaa and that modern style of fast-paced, up-close martial arts combat. Jaa’s opening gambit is a great one-against-many fight sequence in one room that ends the way most American action films won’t but many Asian ones do. Satisfying to watch, particularly early in the film, though I won’t spoil it with specifics. Also keeping with Asian action themes is a grittier, more exploitative tale than many western counterparts would tell.

On their own, these two heroes are entertaining. Once they get together—deep into the film and in no way via an action equivalent of a meet-cute—they are terrific. They have a chemistry between them that works, their styles complement each other without trying too hard, and, with nearly a foot difference in height between them, they’re an amusing duo.

From a technical perspective, director Uekrongtham and editor Victor Du Bois do a very good job staging, framing, shooting, and cutting the film to maximize their leads’ strengths while minimizing the effects of the stars’ ages.

That aside, two things greatly hinder the film from being the next great action find (a la last year’s John Wick). The first is the script. Lundgren co-wrote the screenplay with Gabriel Dowrick and Steven Elder, neither of whom have a feature screenwriting credit to their name prior to this. It shows. While the trio understand how to properly construct and combine the contrasting action styles, the weak plot and clunky dialogue suggest they all watched a lot of action movies and simply mimicked.

The film’s other hinderance is its villain. He’s straight out of central casting with no injection of originality whatsoever. Perlman—who got his start in the ’80s—does the best he can with the character (and his kind of Slavic accent), but the veteran actor has very little to work with.

I had a lot of fun watching Skin Trade, and if they make a sequel where Lundgren and Jaa are in the film together from the beginning, I’m buying tickets.

Set in pre-colonial New Zealand, The Dead Lands follows a Maori boy (James Rolleston) who recruits a legendary warrior (Lawrence Makoare) to help him avenge his tribe and father, who were slaughtered in a violent act of treachery. Directed by Toa Fraser, the film is a brutal, grimy tale of revenge that focuses on Maori martial arts, a form of combat seldom, if ever, seen on-screen. It’s a rare representation of New Zealand culture in its purest form, as well as a thrilling beat-’em-up in the vein of ’80s and ’90s action classics like Rambo and Predator. We recently spoke to Fraser about representing New Zealand cinema, his partnership with Gareth Evans and the Raid crew, the tradition of physical expression in New Zealand, actors acting with their bodies, constraints fueling creativity, and much more.

The Dead Lands is out in limited release today.

Coming from an American perspective, The Dead Lands is unique on several levels, especially because my familiarity with the Maori is so limited.
Me and all the cast grew up watching Terminator 2 and Commando, so from our point of view, it was an opportunity to tell a story in our world in a way that we wanted to when we were kids, playing with broomsticks and smacking each other over the head, wondering what it would be like to be one of our ancestors. There’s a great storytelling tradition we grew up with, stories from the Pacific that have been handed down from generation to generation. They were told in a particular kind of way, and they often had this ghostly quality to them, as well as an athletic, muscly quality. We wanted to tell the story in the way our ancestors might have if they had access to the tools and equipment we have these days.

The film’s mostly been talked about as an action movie, and while it is, I think it’s better categorized as a martial arts movie. Is that fair?
Yeah, sure. We worked with XYZ Films on this and Gareth Evans was really helpful to me. I had a great couple of conversations with him. All of those Raid guys have been very supportive of us. There was this really awesome sort of conversation across the ocean between Indonesia and New Zealand during pre-production. New Zealand kind of sits in the middle of Western and Eastern storytelling traditions.

The fighting is really in-your-face and intimate, really small-scale.
We wanted to do that. There was a way to make this film with a bigger budget, with helicopter shots and wires and slow motion, but we wanted to keep it bare-bones, raw, and real, but with a graphic novel quality as well. It’s a film that draws from many influences across the world.

If I’m being honest, I’ve lived a very sheltered life. I’ve never been in a real fight, and I haven’t inflicted much physical harm on anyone else. So watching your characters, whose lives and culture are so ingrained in violence, is really fascinating to me. Can you talk about the psychology of your characters, who answer the call to violence so readily?
I suppose the most important thing that springs to mind while listening to you speak is this idea of there being a sense of a code of violence and combat in this world. That was really important to us when we were making the movie. There’s not just fighting, but a lot of pre-fight theatricality and dance and posturing, that tongue-waggling stuff, which is as important as the fighting, almost. My experience growing up as a teenager in Auckland…I was involved in fights growing up. It was quite a part of our culture. We were really aware that violence was a major part of the language of this movie, but at the same time we wanted to talk about the code around it as well.

I talk about this a lot: I think not enough attention is given to actors who act with their bodies. I think your actors are phenomenally expressive storytellers with their bodies.
That’s awesome. A great compliment. That comes from theater as much as anything else. A lot of these guys come from a theater tradition. In fact, there was a production of Troilus and Cressida in Maori at Shakespeare’s Globe in London about a year and a half before we made this movie, and a lot of the actors that were involved in that, their performances inspired the production of our movie. When we were in L.A. last week, James Cameron gave Xavier Horan a similar compliment. He said, “He moves so well.” It was a beautiful compliment. Our culture is very physically expressive: We love rugby and dancing, and it’s a very strong way of expressing ourselves, through physicality.

Whenever you’re watching the Academy Awards and they show clips of the acting nominees, we only ever see them doing these dialogue scenes in little rooms. We never see someone praised for expressing themselves with their bodies.
I did a dance film before this, Giselle, and I worked closely with Ethan Stiefel on that, the great American choreographer. He’s a martial arts guy himself, so we talked a lot about, for this film, the body language of a warrior and what he thought a warrior would move like. Low center of gravity, a lot of weight in the knees. I totally agree with you.

I think Lawrence Makoare’s physical stuff is great. Whether he’s beating people up or laying on the ground hurt, he’s a great storyteller. What discussions did you have with him about his physical performance before shooting?
I didn’t really know what kind of movie I was going to make until Lawrence came in and did his audition. He did a performance of one of the emotional scenes that was pretty good. I gave him a tiny bit of direction, and his next version was amazing. We all sat around on the floor crying. Lawrence, referring to his tears, said, “Don’t you think this will make me weaker?” I said, “No, it makes you stronger.” He was a long way away physically and linguistically from where he wanted to be for that character, so I trained with him and a trainer for four weeks. It was hell. When it came to shooting, we didn’t have to talk much. We had each others’ back.

You’ve said that movies done in pre-colonialism New Zealand don’t really exist, and that it’s an untapped time in history. Would you like to revisit the time period again?
I loved making this movie, and it’s very much in the tradition of the stories we grew up with. In terms of New Zealand cinema, this is only the second full-length feature film in Maori. We were very aware that we were tentatively opening a door, and we worked hard to make sure the door was opened properly.

You’ve also said that you’re a big proponent of creativity being born of constraints. Can you give me a specific example of how constraints helped your creativity on this film?
I guess I mentioned it before, but going for a very brutal, dusty, sweaty, bloody kind of style was born out of constraints. We didn’t have a massive budget, so we didn’t have drone cameras or helicopter shots. The whole ethos was born of a tight schedule and a desire to tell a story in a way that we feel is very much a part of us.

There’s a nighttime fight scene in the film that looks incredible.
That was a real collaboration over months to get that scene to look right, from the beautiful location of Piha Beach in Auckland to the post-production facilities in London. Raukura Turei, who plays Mehe, the only female warrior in the movie, had a big sense of responsibility herself. When she rehearsed the scene she was doing it on a nice clean floor, but I forgot to tell her we’d be doing it in a stream and that there would be rocks under her feet. But the real key to the look of that scene was Leon Narbey’s great cinematography, but also a very talented colorist in London named Sam Chynoweth. Grading and coloring movies is such a massive part of the process these days. When I found out he was working in the building, I said, “We need that guy!” Turns out Sam was one of the guys who colored The LEGO Movie, which is one of the massive achievements in visual pizazz in the last ten years. He worked really hard. We actually shot that scene in daytime. If you’re into the look of that scene, it’s largely down to a modest guy in a post-production place in London.

The word “cliché” is not necessarily a bad word, despite how much people use it to deride a film (including myself). When cliché gets thrown around as a criticism, it’s meant as a knock for going down a familiar, and therefore stale, route. But clichés can still work, because it’s all about the execution. Toa Fraser’s The Dead Lands, an ’80s-inspired action/adventure about a son avenging his father’s death, has cliché written all over it, but Fraser, along with screenwriter Glenn Standring, transplant this story to a setting that’s never been done on film before. The change is a welcome one, but it can only take the material so far.

The film takes place in pre-colonial New Zealand, when Maori natives ruled the lands. In a matter of minutes, Fraser establishes the central conflict. During a peacekeeping mission between two opposing tribes, visiting tribal head Wirepa (Te Kohe Tuhaka) desecrates ancestral bones as a deliberate act of war. Hongi (James Rolleston), the teenage son of tribal chief Tane (George Henare), witnesses the act, but can’t do anything to warn his family; Wirepa and his men massacre Tane’s tribe, with Hongi barely escaping the slaughter. Now as the only man left in his tribe, Hongi goes off to hunt down and kill Wirepa to avenge his father’s death.

But how can a skinny, untrained 15-year-old boy defeat a vicious warrior? Hongi ventures into the titular Dead Lands, a nearby area that no one enters out of fear for their life. There’s a legend that the tribe who used to live on the land were killed and eaten by a monster, and anyone who goes into the Dead Lands will wind up suffering the same fate. Hongi meets the monster (Lawrence Makoare, credited only as ‘The Warrior’), a hulking man who gleefully feasts on the flesh of his victims. For reasons that the film vaguely alludes to (a secret that naturally has to come out by the third act), The Warrior agrees to help Hongi kill Wirepa, who just so happens to be arrogantly taking a shortcut through the Dead Lands back to his home.

The fact that Fraser and Standring went so far as to film The Dead Lands entirely in the native Maori language is admirable, and their respect for the traditions and culture of their characters is what elevates the film above a standard action film. Now, granted, anyone expecting The Dead Lands to be an accurate representation of the Maori way of life 500 years ago will come away disappointed; Fraser’s primary intention here is to deliver an entertaining piece of action. But the New Zealand location, along with the Maori’s distinct fighting style and philosophy, one that has both sides mutually respecting each other, give this film a sense of time and place that’s entirely its own.

Unfortunately, the familiar story and character beats drag Fraser’s film down, along with its poor pacing in the second half. A lengthy detour in the narrative pops up when Hongi and The Warrior meet a woman in the forest, with the entire sequence dedicated to getting The Warrior to come clean about his mysterious past. It’s an overlong and unnecessary section, building up to a reveal that isn’t particularly surprising. Thankfully the stellar cast, especially Makoare, keep things moving during the weaker segments, and Fraser’s frenetically crafted action sequences will please any action fan. But this is still a clichéd action film, albeit one with some intriguing elements. It’s the same old ride, just packaged in a more interesting way, and for that reason The Dead Lands can only offer minor pleasures.

Invincible action stars are out of fashion. In the ’80s and ’90s we paid bookoo bucks to watch beefcakes like Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Van Damme buzzsaw through bad guys by the thousands. Today, we’ve got Liam Neeson, Denzel Washington, and even Helen Mirren (all sexagenarians) playing highly-skilled death dealers, raking in the action blockbuster bucks formerly reserved for men with glistening, 24-inch biceps (the old muscle-heads are clinging on for dear life, but their flame has dwindled considerably). French director Pierre Morel more or less started the “aging action star” trend with Taken, and now he’s giving Sean Penn the “Neeson” treatment with The Gunman, an international action thriller that unfortunately won’t be Penn’s springboard into genre superstardom because frankly, the movie’s sort of a bummer.

A lot of the film’s mopey vibe comes from Penn’s face. You know that first ten minutes after you wake up from a nap when you’re a groggy, unresponsive asshole? That’s what Penn’s like for most of the movie. He looks really, really miserable all the time, and it rubs off on you. His character, Jim Terrier, is at his happiest at the movie’s outset: It’s 2006 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Jim, an American private security guard, has got a smokin’ hot girlfriend, Annie (Jasmine Trinca), a humanitarian aid worker whose group Jim and his team protects. They’re supposed to share a deep love connection, but they come off more like intense shag-buddies.

What Annie doesn’t know is, Jim’s real job is as a sniper for a mercenary group, led by their friend, Felix (Javier Bardem), who’s got a less-than-secret crush on Annie. Conveniently, a secret mission involving Jim assassinating a government mining minister provides Felix the perfect opportunity to steal Annie away: after the hit Jim is ordered to leave the country without so much as a goodbye to dear Annie, who’s left to save lives in the middle of the Congolese civil war without her man.

Skip forward eight years and Jim’s back in the DRC, digging wells to help provide water for the locals, and surfing on his downtime. An odd scene sees a shirtless Penn hit the waves for a while and run up the beach when he realizes he’s late for work. It’s odd because it plays like documentary footage of Penn vacationing in Africa, and is a laughably blatant excuse to show off the gym-rat pecs and abs he worked so hard on for the movie. Anyway, a group of men with guns show up to one of Jim’s dig sites screaming, “Where’s the white man?!”, a deadly run-in that sends him on a quest across Europe to hunt down his demons and atone for his sins. When he finds Felix married to Annie in Barcelona, things get personal.

From here, it’s old-guy action-thriller 101. There are double-crosses, verbal dick-measuring contests with Felix and an assortment of other tough guys, neck-snapping, choking, hiding, shooting, reunion sex…everything you expect, nothing more, nothing less. There’s a wrinkle in the plot involving Jim developing a harmful protein growth in his head due to the hard knocks he took during his time as a contract killer, but the only consequence of this contrivance is that Jim occasionally looks super constipated and then passes out at the worst possible moments (i.e. when baddies are around).

Though every step of the way the movie feels telegraphed and unsurprising, the good thing is Morel knows how to shoot and stage action scenes very, very well. The fights feel weighty and un-rushed, and some sequences are pretty inventive, like when Jim and Annie are trapped in a villa bathroom with all entrances blocked by grunts and Jim starts a fire to make good his escape. It’s always better to see Morel’s characters MacGuyver their way out of situations rather than Rambo their way out, and thankfully we get a few instances of the former to break up what otherwise is a movie that sleepwalks through genre tropes Morel helped establish with Taken.

Speaking of Taken, what made that movie work was that there was a sense of fun and adventure and locomotion to it, three things Gunman sorely lacks. Even when things are exploding or Penn is roughing up bad guys who deserve their comeuppance, the movie just never feels all that exciting. The film’s overriding tone is one of sadness and regret, and the plot revolves around characters who, across the board, are pretty big jerk-holes. There’s no ending to Jim’s story that would feel satisfactory because it’s hard to feel compassion for a guy who curses his old days as a killer one minute, and the next proceeds to mass murder dozens of men with finesse, precision, and flair.

Trinca’s character doesn’t sweeten the pot either. She’s written as a narrow-minded, sassy prize for Jim and Felix to fight over, which is a shame, because Trinca’s a hell of an actress. The rest of the cast are excellent as well and are often the only thing keeping the film afloat. Though Jim Terrier is far from a great role, Penn’s still a captivating screen presence. Mark Rylance, Idris Elba, and Ray Winstone have a few scenes each and have some fun, with Rylance (a decorated British stage actor) being the most memorable of all, modifying his voice with a gravely croak to hint at his character’s violent backstory.

Bardem has a lot of fun as Felix, playing him like a drunk, semi-incompetent Bond villain. He and Penn share some good exchanges, but it isn’t enough to save the film from its misery. The Gunman takes itself way too seriously. Maybe Penn—who received producer and screenplay credit for the film—let too much of his method-actor intensity seep into the film. Morel’s got style and class, and it’d be nice to see him out of his comfort zone with his next project.

Surprise: The action scenes in Insurgent, the follow-up to 2014’s dystopian sci-fi sensation Divergent (as if you haven’t heard), are actually pretty good. Take a late, trippy scene in which our returning, plucky heroine, Tris (Shailene Woodley), sprints after her mom (Ashley Judd), who’s trapped in a room on fire and detached from its building, floating away toward the horizon. Tris scrambles across rooftops and clings to hanging electrical wires, rubble whizzing by her face, as the mass of concrete and broken plumbing threatens to fly off into the stratosphere like a child’s lost balloon. It’s a thrilling, urgent sequence that manages to feel dangerous despite it taking place within a virtual landscape. (Tris’ mom is dead and, you know, rooms don’t fly. I’ll explain in a bit.) If only Insurgent were a straight-up action movie, it may have stood a chance.

But alas, those familiar with the first film and Veronica Roth’s hit young adult book series on which the franchise is based know that the series’ focus lies not in exciting set pieces, but in an ill-conceived mythology centered on a walled-in city (formerly Chicago) that herds people into factions based on predominant personality traits. A few moments of thought reveals this faction system to be laughably illogical and impractical, and yet it there it is, the bubble of idiocy within which all of the film’s events are informed and take place. So, while the action is entertaining when judged on its own, it always leads us back to the story’s dimwitted conceit. Practicality isn’t a storytelling prerequisite (especially when it comes to sci-fi), but there’s a point where suspending one’s disbelief so actively and extensively becomes a mind-numbing chore. Just like its predecessor, Insurgent is a head-scratcher from beginning to end, further cementing the series as the inferior alternative to the mighty Hunger Games juggernaut.

Things pick up shortly after the events of the first film, with Tris and her boyfriend, Four (Theo James), sharing a light chat and a kiss on a farming compound overseen by Amity (the pacifist faction), where they’re hiding from the military forces of Jeanine (Kate Winslet), the leader of Erudite (the rich, entitled faction). Her death, Tris thinks, is the key to city-wide peace, or something. Joining the killing-machine lovebirds on the farm are Peter (Miles Teller), Tris’ Dauntless arch-rival, and Caleb (Ansel Elgort), her formerly Erudite brother, but the four hideaways get quickly disbanded when a tank-driving hoard of Jeanine’s troops, led by merciless Dauntless turncoat Eric (Jai Courtney), raids the compound in search of Tris.

Oh, that Tris. She’s so special. Jeanine’s hunting her down because she found a mysterious box in Tris’ old Abnegation home. She needs a Divergent—someone who carries the primary traits of all five factions—to open it: Contained within is a message from the architects of the city (not Chicago, the new city, the one based on segregation), and only when someone endures all five faction-themed “sims” (that floating room deal was the Dauntless sim) will its contents be revealed. There are plenty of Divergents running around, but none that Jeanine’s managed to capture have thus far been able to survive the five virtual trials. She needs a special Divergent. The best Divergent. Who do you think that could be? Hm?!!

The main appeal of female-centric young adult series like Twilight, Hunger Games, and Divergent is that they provide young girls with a powerful, brave, sought-after, special heroine to project themselves onto, thereby feeding into their wildest center-of-the-universe fantasies. Allegory is the vessel by which these stories deliver their coming-of-age messages (Insurgent‘s happens to be one of self-forgiveness), but the problem with Roth is that she piles on so much on-the-nose allegory and symbolism that her messages feel hokey and forced and obtuse. The film’s cast is talented for days, and its director, Robert Schwentke, despite having a hit-or-miss catalogue (Flightplan, R.I.P.D., RED), has proven to be a very capable filmmaker. Everyone involved is capable of making good stuff, but what ultimately does them in is the shoddy source material.

The actors are pros put forth a decent effort, though it’s clear some of them would jump ship if they could. Teller and Elgort, who’ve each found major success in the 12 months since the first film, feel a bit overqualified for their roles at this point, but they make lemons out of lemonade, particularly Teller, who plays a great, love-to-hate-him turncoat weasel. He’s always a welcome on-screen presence, especially when he manages to squeeze some real humor out of otherwise lifeless scenes with nothing but a sarcastic eyebrow raise or a shifty glance. Woodley doesn’t do the action hero thing as well as Jennifer Lawrence does, but she’s better at looking vulnerable: when she’s in pain or letting out a heartened battle cry, her voice shakes and then cracks a bit, kind of like Sia when she belts out the chorus of “Chandelier”.

Though their performances feel uninspired across the board, the older actors lend the film some gravitas. Winslet plays Jeanine as a straight-up sociopath authority figure, showing no remorse for subjecting innocent Divergents to her evil experiments (though technically, the city’s founders designed The Box and how to open it, so are they evil too?), and Naomi Watts shows up as Four’s thought-to-be-dead, insurrectionist mother and leader of a group the heroes fall in with called the “factionless” (they’re essentially the opposite of Divergents). What’s strange is—and forgive me if this sounds lewd—Watts (who looks insanely good for her age) seems to have more sexual chemistry with James than Woodley does, despite playing his mom. Just throwing that out there. Octavia Spencer pops up for a second as the leader of Amnity, but she’s quickly forgotten before she can make an impression.

The visual effects are impressive, especially during the inevitable simulation set pieces, though the digital effects team seems to have a strange fascination with floating rubble (tons and tons of frozen-in-time rubble). What stands out more is the tangible stuff, the fight and action choreography, which is way better than it has any right to be. A nighttime Erudite vs. Dauntless ambush sequence is the best moment in the entire series, as it actually convinces you that there are human lives at stake (instead of miraculously dodging a zillion bullets, people actually get shot).

Without spoiling too much, I will say that the forthcoming two entries in the series, the Allegiant two-parter, have hope of not being bogged down by the same nonsensical premise as the first movies. But as far as Insurgent is concerned, it’s still stuck in the muck. The reveal of what’s inside “the box” is so dumb it hurts to think about. It simply doesn’t make any sense, which seems to be this series’ unintended overriding theme. Funny thing is, during the climax, Woodley actually says, “I know it doesn’t make any sense, but you have to trust me,” to Four as he stares at her quizzically. That was worth a chuckle. If you’re able to push aside the confused machinations of the larger plot during the scenes of flashy violence, you may be able to find a bit of enjoyment in Insurgent. Beyond that, there isn’t much nice to say.

Sean Penn bulks up, whoops some ass and atones for his sins in The Gunman, a dark thriller with a stacked cast, directed by Taken helmer Pierre Morel. Penn plays Jim Terrier, a sniper mercenary who, years after carrying out a high-profile assassination in the Congo and abandoning the love of his life, must chase demons from his past across Europe and reconcile with his lost lover. Fans of Morel’s measured, cerebral approach to action will find the French director staying true to form as he gives Penn the Liam Neeson “grizzled tough-guy” treatment. Javier Bardem, Jasmine Trinca, Ray Winstone, Mark Rylance, and Idris Elba round out the cast.

While visiting San Francisco Morel sat with us to talk about his psychological approach to action; the mentality of men who kill; Sean Penn’s intensity on set; Mark Rylance’s raspy voice; his inability to settle down in a single location; and more.

One of my favorite sports journalists said something fascinating recently. He talked about how most people would like to think that, if their family or significant other were threatened on the street, they wouldn’t hesitate to protect them and inflict violence on the attacker. But in fact, most people aren’t able to do it. It takes a certain type of person who is capable of answering that call to violence at the drop of a hat. You’ve made a few movies about men with this capacity. What do you understand about the mindset of this kind of person?
I don’t know this kind of person, but the characters we’re portraying are what we all wish to be. It’s that fantasy: If my kids were threatened, I would immediately react and do what needs to be done. Many people cannot do that. But in a perfect world, we’d love to. Making these characters in movies is a way to personify our hopes and expectations of ourselves, which we may never fulfill.

It’s a bit strange to watch these men mass murder people. I think your movies are concerned with the psychology of that more than most action movies. I know you don’t consider your films straight-up action movies, and one of the things that allows your work to transcend that genre is your cerebral approach. Your action sequences aren’t necessarily about head-to-head fighting or brute strength. These guys are stuck in a corner, and they have to maneuver their way out with their brain.
I love that kind of thing. It is an action movie — it’s entertaining — but it’s not just that. It’s about the psychology of these guys and what leads them to do what they do. That’s more interesting than action for action’s sake to me. There are several layers of complexity in guys who actually do this kind of business. We met a few guys who do that kind of business.

Snipers?
Yeah. Snipers, black ops. They have a mindset. For those who have been close to danger, they have a mindset to get out of dangerous situations. It requires being very well prepared, also. It’s not something you can improvise, I don’t think. If you’re stuck in the middle of a massive fight and you’re not trained for that, you’re like a rabbit in headlights. If you’re trained, you can get out of it. The movie’s about that, but it’s also about the other side of it. There’s a cost to that kind of [mindset], a psychological and physical cost. The cost of killing is something that takes its toll on you, I think.

We see both mental and physical repercussions to Terrier’s work. Is his brain condition in the movie a real thing?
It is. It’s the same condition you find in football players or boxers. It’s repeated concussions that ruin the brain, causing it to create bad proteins that build up and disable your ability to act and function properly. It’s not a psychological condition like PTSD; it’s a physical condition. It impairs your ability to move, so if a crisis occurs in the middle of a fight, it impairs the hero’s ability to fight. It was interesting to us to give flaws to our hero. I like heroes that are human and have issues, not superheroes. If you know already that he’s going to win, what’s the point?

I enjoyed Mr. Rylance’s performance. Did he alter his voice a bit for the role? It’s wonderful.
People don’t necessarily know Mark Rylance because he’s a British stage actor, one of the most gifted stage actors of his generation. Sean had never done action, and Mark hadn’t either. He wanted to build a different kind of characters. In a few shots, you can see there’s a big scar on his neck, and he imagined he’d been hurt in combat before, so he modified his voice. That was his backstory for his character.

Mr. Penn got in great shape for the movie. You can tell he put a lot of work in at the gym. Is he intense to be around? He seems to take his craft very, very seriously.
One of the things that makes him so talented is that he doesn’t compromise. He’s a gifted actor, and he doesn’t compromise, so when he’s in character, he’s one hundred percent that character. He works hard. It’s easy to work with him because we had great connections and moments on set. We had early-stage conversations about what the movie’s about, who the character is, what his journey is, what his arc is, so on set you just make adjustments on an already great performance.

He and Javier have good chemistry.
It’s interesting to see them work together. They come from different schools, I’d say. Sean is method acting to the core, and Javier is from Spain so he has a different approach to acting. But ultimately, however they built their characters, the chemistry was pretty intense.

Do you enjoy putting your characters in hopeless situations and then try to plot out how they’ll fight or think their way out of it? Is that fun to you?
Yeah, it’s always fun. You work on the floor plans for your sets, like, “Okay, they’re coming in from here and over there…what do you do [escape]?” Cool action pieces are fun. I love them.

What new skills have you acquired on this film as a director?
I don’t know. I learn every time. Every day is a new experience. You learn many things on each film, but I haven’t analyzed that yet.

Is it a subconscious thing?
Completely. Very instinctive. I’m not very intelligent. [laughs]

I’ve seen and read a lot of your interviews. You seem to very much love what you do and get a lot of joy from filmmaking.
It’s fun. What’s not to love in making movies? Come on! It’s fantastic. It’s less a job than it is a passion. I watch movies as much as I can. You have to be a movie lover before you can make movies. I love movies, so I’m happy on the set.

And filming in these beautiful places doesn’t hurt, I’m sure.
That’s another part of me. I can’t settle anywhere more than a few months. [laughs] It’s a big problem of mine. But yeah, we moved a lot. We went to Spain for this movie, mostly. Barcelona is a pretty cool city, a beautiful city, and a really easy place to shoot. Wherever you put your camera is going to look good. [laughs] We shot in South Africa, which is probably the easiest part of Africa to shoot in, because it has an existing industry. It’s a world on its own, I think. Gorgeous.

A novel idea seven years ago, the “old-guy action star” gimmick is finally starting to, well, grow old. Liam Neeson and Taken opened the door for many a grizzled, tough-guy screen vet to walk through and inject their career with a nasty shot of testosterone. Sylvester Stallone gathered a gaggle of his veiny, thick-necked buddies to cash in on the trend with the Expendables series, and Taken director is teaming up with a bulked-up Sean Penn in the impending action thriller The Gunman. The Expendables was a ton of stupid fun, but its subsequent sequels didn’t capture the same campy, gun-crazy indulgence. The “old-guy action star” sub-sub-genre is on its last legs, to the point where you can hear people groan when they walk by movie posters with Mr. Neeson on the cover, looking hard and brandishing a pistol. “Whatcha think this one’s gonna be about, bro?” Hardy-har-har!

The Taken series has followed the same downward trend in quality as Sly’s Expendables, but on the side Neeson’s been making another line of action movies, all directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. Non-Stop and Unknown stuck firmly to convention, but actually weren’t half bad; the action was well-shot, the dialogue was slightly silly in a good way, and the acting was super solid (one can never accuse Neeson of phoning it in — he’s a consummate pro). Now, the duo are back with Run All Night, another clichéd shoot-‘em-up flavored this time by themes of revenge and old-school New Yawk masculinity. It’s about on par with the pair’s previous collaborations, which isn’t a bad thing; despite the triteness of it all, the quality of work by all parties elevates the film well above the schlocky action-movie turds cinephiles habitually avoid at the cinemas.

Pitted against each other in a bloody night-long war are Neeson’s Jimmy Conlin, a boozer ex-hitman, and his mob-boss childhood friend, Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris). When Shawn’s reckless, greedy son (Boyd Holbrook) tries to kill Jimmy’s estranged limo-driver son, Mike (Joel Kinnaman), Jimmy’s forced to pull the trigger on his best friend’s boy. As a trade, Shawn sends out his goons (including Common, playing Price, a stealthy, dapper assassin) in full force to kill Mike, forcing Jimmy to protect his son through the night, evading the henchman, Price, and the police until he can figure out how to fix things. Mike, a father and husband himself, is far from compliant, however, as he’s carried around a deep resentment for his murderous dad since he abandoned the family years ago.

While on the run Jimmy paints the city streets with blood (cop blood, mob blood, his own blood) as he and Mike dart around the city. Several opportunities arise for Mike to spill some plasma of his own, but Jimmy insists he not pull the trigger. “You’ll be no better than me,” he warns his next of kin. The breakneck action sequences are well-edited and staged, though the best bits come when Collet-Serra slows things down and gets inventive, like when Jimmy infiltrates Shawn’s social club or when the old friends have a hide-and-seek shootout at a train yard. In these instances Jimmy uses creative thinking to eliminate the baddies as opposed to his quick trigger finger; it’s a nice change of pace.

What’s frustrating, though, is a pestering visual effect in which we zoom from a sky-high view of the city down to street level to meet back up with the characters. It’s jarring (the effect is wholly unconvincing), cheesy, and provides zero geographical context to the proceedings. What’s worse, it’s used again and again, as if it’s critical we know exactly where in NYC they are at every moment. I don’t get it.

The acting’s spot-on, though. Neeson plays “that guy” again — you know, the guy with the “particular set of skills” — but he still manages to make things relatively interesting. Add in Harris as his sparring partner and you’ve got a slobber-knocker on your hands; with ease, the pair make it believable that they hate and love each other to pieces at the same time. Nick Nolte makes a strange cameo as Jimmy’s brother, probably to up the gruff appeal another few notches (as if Neeson and Harris weren’t gruff enough). Kinnaman is decent, if a tad one-note, but almost stealing the show is Vincent D’Onofrio, playing an NYPD detective with his own agenda, obsessed with getting Jimmy to confess to the murders of his past victims.

When you’ve got a cast with this much on-screen mileage between them and a talented director with a confident style, it’s kind of a can’t-lose situation, though that’s not to say Run All Night is a big winner. Those with an affinity for explosions and violence and old-timers proving they can still be macho, there’s a whole lot to like here. I’m not sure how many more action romps Neeson’s got left in him (probably more than is reasonable), but if he keeps on truckin’ down the road of movie badass-dom, let’s hope he brings Collet-Serra along for the ride.

Heist movies have long been a staple of cinema. Classics like The Killing and The Sting to more recent successes such as Ocean’s Eleven & Inside Man implement a reliable backlog of tropes from Caper Crews to the “One Last Job” approach. Typically, the standouts in the genre find clever, memorable twists on the familiar. They distinguish themselves with distinctive characters, and charming performances. Kidnapping Mr. Heineken‘s Caper Crew features nicknames like “Brakes” and “Cat”, two lead actors last considered movie stars at the turn of the decade, and Sir Anthony Hopkins slumming it in an irritatingly underwritten role.

This new film from Swedish director Daniel Alfredson (who directed both sequels to the Swedish The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) recreates the true story behind what was at the time the largest ransom ever paid for an individual. In 1983, five Dutch criminals kidnapped the CEO of the Heineken Company Freddy Heineken, one of the richest men in the Netherlands, as well as his driver, holding them both for 21 days before collecting a 16 million Euro ransom. Perhaps recognizing that Sir Anthony Hopkins is the movie’s strongest asset, the film opens on him as Freddy Heineken, berating one of his kidnappers. His character disappears then until well into the film’s second act, as the plot jumps back to over a year before the kidnapping.

The ragtag group of friends who pulled off one of the most lucrative kidnappings ever is lead by their man with a plan Cor (Jim Sturgess) and a not-very-loose-cannon in Willem (Sam Worthington). At the onset, Cor, Willem, and their buddies run low-level schemes together with uneven success, only aware of Freddy Heineken through reputation and Willem’s father’s past employment at Heineken. Eventually Cor pitches the idea of the kidnapping as one big, last job in order to set the friends up with a substantial cash haul. The ethics of graduating to kidnappers meets no resistance, they are criminals after all, and with barely any deliberation the gang makes plans to abduct Freddy Heineken for ransom. Before Kidnapping Mr. Heineken bothers to slow down and personify its main characters, the heist is well into its recon phase.

Allowing the caper crew time to plan their abduction is the closest Kidnapping Mr. Heineken comes to building tension. As quickly as it becomes clear to us that these petty criminals are in over their heads, the characters realize they can utilize their relative inexperience to throw off authorities through clever planning. This methodical section only covers the first few scenes, after which Kidnapping relies (unsuccessfully) on the interpersonal group dynamics to hold your attention. By this point, the film has barely even bothered to identify its central characters by name. I found myself making up names for the roles based on actors’ physical traits. “Cool Guy” consistently sported a leather jacket and “The Hair” wore copious amounts of styling gel. “The Hair” might have actually been “Brakes” but my nickname was easier to remember.

Eventually Kidnapping Mr. Heineken stumbles onto an intriguing subplot when abductee Freddy Heineken reacts to his dilemma without concern. Fundamentally a businessman, Heineken understands his situation to be a business transaction and largely complies with his captors while making occasional requests for Chinese food delivery. The kidnappers are caught off guard that their mission has left Freddy unshaken, and they waver on whether or not to trust Heineken, who repeatedly insists the kidnappers will get paid. This thread isn’t explored fully and the Heineken character doesn’t pay off as Hopkins, the most engaging actor of this project, leaves the film with a whimper, not a bang.

Part of the issue with Kidnapping Mr. Heineken is how the movie overlooks its characters’ immorality. The whole story is structured to suggest the kidnappers are the film’s heroes, but never provides a reason to get invested aside from their continued presence on-screen. It seems to want you to think these poor, young men discovered a way to cash-in without consequence, disregarding their treatment of the completely innocent Heineken and his largely unseen family. Only when the plot requires these friends to consider murdering one of the men does Kidnapping Mr. Heineken seem to comprehend the questionable ethics of its story, but like most of the film’s plot developments, the moment skirts past and the characters feel no immediate ramifications.

Ultimately the progressing plotline forces the kidnappers to separate leading to the film’s suggestion that the best thing they shared was friendship. If the logic of that transition seems clumsy that’s because it’s handled clumsily in the film. While Kidnapping Mr. Heineken’s heist film construct provides a unique angle to approach a recognizable genre, the inherent issues in treating its felonious characters with reverence makes their objective difficult to root for (most of the real life figures depicted in the movie returned to other crime after their involvement in this kidnapping). The slickness with which the film has been assembled makes Kidnapping Mr. Heineken easy to watch and mildly entertaining, but the lack of narrative cohesion ultimately leads to the the film’s unraveling.

The crew behind Freddy Heineken’s abduction in 1983 would ultimately be caught and have their earnings stripped away. As depicted in Kidnapping Mr. Heineken, these events feel uninteresting, and inconsequential.

In 2010, Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass, based on the Mark Millar comic book, sent up, honored, and brutalized the super hero/crimefighter mythos. With Kingsman: The Secret Service, another comic book adaptation, Vaughn and Millar do the same for the myth of the English gentleman superspy; tailored suits, martinis, highly improbable action set pieces, flamboyant criminal masterminds–no cliché is safe. It’s a sadistic 21st-century attitude adjustment for the sub-genre that Bond built, a gory, vulgar, hilarious frenzy of a movie. It’s a bit of a mess, with wonky pacing and several underdeveloped ideas, but it’s got the same appeal as a rickety wooden roller coaster: it’s dangerous and questionably constructed, but that makes it exciting and fun, in a perverse, death-wish sort of way.

Those who’ve watched the misleading trailer for the film and expect an elegant, international spy thriller populated by posh English fellows will be thrown for a loop, and I’m pretty sure Vaughn’s laughing his ass off about it. It’s apparent that you’re getting more than you bargained for from the get-go, when a man gets split in half, dome-to-balls, by a blade-footed female assassin (Sofia Boutella), his halves flopping to the floor like sliced bread. The assassin works for the film’s big-bad, an American psycho-billionaire with a Mike Tyson lisp named Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson), who’s scheming to cleanse the world via bloodlust-inducing microchips.

The only ones who can stop him are Kingsman, an independent espionage league made up of dapper chaps who speak the Queen’s English, have Arthurian codenames, and have a secret stockpile of deadly gadgets (bulletproof umbrellas, cigarette-lighter grenades) hidden behind a secret door in a Savile Row tailor shop. Colin Firth plays Harry Hart (codename “Galahad”), a Kingsman who, in the movie’s first scene, leads his team on a Middle East interrogation mission that ends with the death of his protégé. 17 years later, another Kingsman dies on a mission (the poor “sliced bread” guy, “Lancelot”), and Harry must find his replacement. He chooses his deceased protégé’s now-adult son, Eggsy (Taron Egerton), to be his new recruit and, potentially, the new Lancelot. The parkour-practicing Eggsy leaps at the opportunity; since his father’s death, he and his delirious mom have been stuck in a ratty apartment, having to put up with his drunk stepdad’s abuse on the daily. He’s had a tough upbringing and is thoroughly rough around the edges, a far cry from the immaculately-dressed and composed Harry or Arthur (Michael Caine), the dignified leader of Kingsman, but he’s willing to learn the ways.

When Harry brings Eggsy back to Kingsman HQ to meet the other young candidates for the Lancelot position (Oxford-educated snobs who look down on Eggsy’s working-class pedigree), the film goes the teenage-bootcamp route, á la Ender’s Game, Harry Potter, and Vaughn’s own X-Men: First Class. Eggsy’s interactions with the sniveling bullies (his only friend is Roxy, played by Sophie Cookson, the sole girl in the group) aren’t nearly as entertaining and easy as his scenes with Firth. The superspy training segments, which include a superfluous synchronized skydive and an exercise in seduction that has “deleted scene” written all over it, are the least engaging bits of the movie, and always seem to drag on longer than you’d like.

Business picks up when Harry is attacked whilst investigating Valentine’s operation, and from there the film gets injected with a giant shot of frenetic mega-violence akin to the films of Neveldine and Taylor (Crank, Gamer), which I happen to get a kick out of despite them being widely panned by critics and audiences alike for their excessive use of blood and mutilation. Vaughn’s bravura scene involves Harry, brainwashed by one of Valentine’s microchips, going on a rampage through a Kentucky church, slaughtering dozens of white supremacists in a flurry of gun ballet, set to “Free Bird”. Depending on your taste in action movies, you’ll either find it disgraceful and repulsive or gloriously entertaining. I fell on the side of the latter, and while Kingsman is a largely indulgent and sometimes shallow affair, I couldn’t help but have a good time. The bite of the goriest moments is also alleviated by the film’s cheeky, jocular tone; it’s not taking itself too seriously, and we’re not meant to either.

There are some seeds of ideas peppered throughout the script (written by Vaughn and regular collaborator Jane Goldman) that are meant to turn the notion of the spy-thriller on its head, but they aren’t given enough time to grow. When Jackson’s Valentine breaks away from the Bond-villain stereotype by shooting one of the main characters in the head instead of inexplicably imprisoning them, he hits the nail squarely on the head when he taunts, “This isn’t that kind of movie” (a line that’s revisited later in a similar context). It’s true that this isn’t your average spy movie by any measure, but it isn’t a revelatory twist on the sub-genre either. When a great stand-up comedian like Chris Rock or the late Richard Pryor exposes the absurdity of a subject on stage, like racism or the government or sexism, they do it from all angles, with no mercy, dissecting and dissecting until there’s nothing left but a bloody pulp. Then, they provide new insight that reveals the real truth of the matter. Kingsman forgets to do that last part.

Vaughn is a filmmaker of flair, and with Kingsman he struts his stuff like there’s no tomorrow. Whenever violence erupts, it’s with the force and magnitude of a supervolcano, and though the cuts and zooms are frequent, they never become redundant, and the staging is well organized. The film jumps around a lot (across the globe, across themes), but Eggsy and Harry are the glue that keeps the film from spinning out of control. Egerton’ street-smart swagger just right, and though the movie isn’t exactly brimming with heart or sentimentality, he manages to imbue it with a sense of youthful nobility. Through the success of his previous films, Vaughn’s earned the prerogative to make the kind of movies he wants to make, throwing convention to the wind. He’s not going to please everyone with Kingsman, but there’s no doubt he’s pleased himself. It’s a treat for genre nuts with a fondness for the grotesque, silly, and outlandish, its cult status is sure to grow with time.

After two movies worth of Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and his stubby dwarf friends trudging across Middle Earth to the lair of the fearsome dragon Smaug, Peter Jackson’s distended Hobbit prequels come to an end with The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, an action-packed last hurrah that sadly feels too reiterative and scattershot to chalk up the trilogy as anything but unworthy. Those who (understandably) come expecting a massive battle royale between hoards of dwarves, elves, men, and orcs will no doubt be satisfied, but those of us less inclined to settle for mindless decapitation, long battlefield camera swoops, and Orlando Bloom surfing on random objects will feel underwhelmed by the film’s lack of emotional depth.

Five Armies opens on a rousing note, with what could have (or should have) been The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug‘s climax: the vain, malevolent dragon Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, whose voice booms out of the speakers like thunder) torches the village of Lake-town, whose ill-equipped denizens have been dreading his arrival, with fiery vengeance (and breath), threatening to reduce every inch of the seaside locale to ashes and embers. Smaug is a remarkable achievement in digital effects, almost on par with Gollum. After raining hellfire and brimstone on the poor villagers, a heroic family man and archer (Luke Evans) manages to best the beast in a one-on-one showdown. From here the film sadly takes a permanent dip.

The charismatic Smaug’s end is a fitting one (it’s the film’s most exciting sequence by far) but with him out of the picture, it leaves us without a lead villain. Dwarf leader Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) takes up the “Big Bad” throne, as he rescinds his promise to share the dragon’s treasure (whose dark properties seem to have corrupted him) with the survivors of the Lake-town attack, who desperately need the gold to rebuild what’s left of the village. They helped him get to the Lonely Mountain in the first place, after all.

The elven army, led by Thranduil (Lee Pace), shows up to claim a piece of the treasure, too, but Thorin’s having none of it, ordering his handful of loyal dwarf warriors to barricade the doors and calling for reinforcements from back home to fight the men and elf armies off for him. Then, a hoard of Orcs (and later, an army of…bats, or something; it isn’t really clear) shows up to crank the intensity up to eleven. It’s a massive, all-out skirmish for the rest of the film, and if you’ve seen The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, you’ll probably be hit with a big whiff of deja vu at this point.

It’s hard not to get caught up in all the sword clashing, giant military formations, grunting orcs and dwarfs (the elves don’t grunt as much), and other battle scene ridiculousness, especially if the thought of arranging five buckets of army men on your living room floor on Christmas morning and then smashing them all to hell in your pajamas still sounds fun to you. I’m still a kid at heart, so how could I resist a good melee? I can’t deny that I had a good bit of fun. The problem here is, it all feels very much like the open-field battle scene at the end of The Return of the King, and has inherited most of the same problems: it’s frantic, hard to follow (there are too many protagonists to keep track of), and way, way too long. It’s all so overblown that the (halfway decent) character work that builds up to the war almost feels like a means to an end, a 90-minute excuse to show you giant CGI orcs toppling over onto CGI warthogs.

There’s another issue I’ve had with Jackson’s Hobbit movies that’s as rampant as ever in Five Armies. The way Jackson films deaths, specifically when the good guys kill the bad guys, is so over-sensationalized and exploitative that at some points it feels as mind-numbing one of the Saw films. An orc vaults up toward Legolas, who’s standing on a higher platform in Lake-town. He uses his two short swords like scissors to behead the baddy and lets the severed head rest on his blades as the rest of the carcass falls to the water. I can understand how this can come off as pretty cool to some people, but to me, kills like this feel a little…trashy.

The Hobbit movies sure do look and feel like their Lord of the Rings big brothers, but there’s something off about them. It’s the little things: while some the original trilogy’s scenes glow with a majestic golden hue (like the ones in Rivendell), Hobbit‘s golden hues look more piss-yellow. (Gross, I know, but watch the films and tell me I’m wrong. Looks like piss.) But the larger issue here is that Hobbit‘s heroes and their plights aren’t all that compelling. Ian McKellen looks tired as hell in his sixth series outing as Gandalf; Freeman, who’s barely in the movie, can’t touch Elijah Wood’s brilliant turn as Frodo; Evangeline Lilly’s elf-lady has a crush on a dwarf that ends awkwardly; and Bloom’s just thrown in there to look pretty and perform unnecessarily acrobatic mass murder.

Five Armies‘ saving grace is Thorin, whose inner-struggle with his lust for power and gold is delivered incredibly well by Armitage. What bigger villain is there than greed itself? The war at the foot of the Lonely Mountain is nothing compared to the war going on inside Thorin’s mind and soul. It’s a great, intimate story told by a fine actor, but it unfortunately gets drowned out by all the noise.

Following the money-doubling strategy that maximized the lucrativeness of the Harry Potter and Twilight franchises, the third book in Suzanne Collins’ dystopian-epic Hunger Games series has been split into two movies, the first of which, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, hits theaters today. Halving the franchise’s third act is a smart business move no doubt, but there’s an artistic compromise involved that Mockingjay‘s shortcomings can largely be attributed to. This doesn’t feel like a fully-formed movie; it feels like an episode, a placeholder, a transient experience that’ll get you excited for the series’ explosive conclusion, but doesn’t offer much sustenance on its own to encourage revisiting (unlike its excellent, re-watchable predecessor, Catching Fire). The movie’s abrupt, randomly-placed ending is frustrating and off-putting because, well, it happens in the middle of the book. It’s not an ending at all, really. But hey, in the big-budget landscape of Hollywood, where two tickets are better than one, them’s the breaks.

Mockingjay is the darkest entry in the series, in more ways than one. Gone this time around are the glitz, pageantry, and blood-soaked spectacle of the games themselves, with fierce rabble-rouser Katniss Everdeen’s defiance of the tyrannical President Snow instead taking center stage. Katniss has been positioned (whether she likes it or not) as the symbol for the brewing insurgency sparked by her survival of two Hunger Games in a row, and throughout the film we follow her as she grows into her new role as “The Mockingjay”, the rebellion’s goddess of war.

The film largely takes place within the bowels of District 13, a forgotten, underground compound that looks like a dreary doomsday silo and now acts as headquarters for the rebel forces. Running the show down below are the benevolent President Coin (Julianne Moore, a series newbie) and Capitol turncoat Plutarch (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who together use Katniss and her image to stoke the flames of the revolution. Also roaming the halls of District 13 is former Hunger Games fashion consultant Effie (Elizabeth Banks), who misses her giant wigs and is none too pleased by the drab jumpsuits she’s now forced to wear.

J-Law’s casting as the durable, tormented Katniss continues to be the franchise’s greatest boon. She has a knack for making scenes that, while perhaps silly on the page, come off as totally convincing on screen. In a scene that serves as both an exhibition of her acting skills and a meta examination of the franchise’s mass appeal, Katniss, dressed in warrior-queen armor and standing in front of a green screen, awkwardly postures and regurgitates cheesy lines for a rebel propaganda video. It’s all good for a laugh, but it also succinctly expresses how unready she is to be a revolutionary symbol, as well as how distressed and divided she is on the inside. Also affecting are recurring scenes in which a watery-eyed Katniss is tortured by broadcasted videos of baker boy Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), who’s being held captive by President Snow (again played by the naturally dastardly-looking Donald Sutherland) and is looking more sickly with each televised appearance.

Moments like these–in which the characters act in front of a camera to further a political agenda, echoing the duplicitous nature of politics in our own society–are a trademark of the series. The device is growing a little stale, but the message still rings true. The key theme here, though, is liberation from oppression. Peppered throughout the film are sequences of citizens fighting back against Capitol forces, as well as images of mass slaughter (a rebel raid on a Capitol dam is breathtaking). The amount of action in Mockingjay is considerably less than its predecessors, as the focus here is more on the larger costs of war rather than intimate acts of violence. (That isn’t to say the film isn’t violent, though: a multi-district execution scene’s lurid presentation is particularly startling.) The stakes feel high, and that’s a good thing.

What isn’t so good, however, are the film’s momentum-less pacing and shapeless plot. The story never finds its purpose, because its purpose lies in another movie, which we won’t see until next year. The climax we’re given around the series’ most insipid sub-plot: the love triangle between Katniss, Peeta, and Gale (Liam Hemsworth). The thing that appeals to me most about Katniss as a character (besides her being a legitimately dangerous badass) is that, unlike most other Hollywood heroines, her existence isn’t defined by her romantic life. In fact, she barely has one! She’s more than compelling enough on her own, and to be honest, it’s hard to think of more uninteresting characters than Gale and Peeta, whose personalities are virtually interchangeable. They’re both heroic, they both really love Katniss. One’s tall, one’s small. Blah, blah, blah. Who needs ’em? To be fair, the the story isn’t so fascinated with the boys. But in this film more than the others, I questioned whether or not I care about them at all.

There’s a lot of talking in Mockingjay: talking in rooms, talking on rubble, talking at TV screens. No one is given much to do besides skulk and strategize in their drab living quarters and war rooms. It’s obvious that underneath all of the motivational speeches and propaganda videos, what this movie is really meant to do is bide time until Part 2 hits next year. I’m willing to bet that, in the grand scheme of things, Mockingjay won’t be viewed as such a trudge of a movie. I’m hoping Part 2 blows us away and gives Part 1 some much-needed context and payoff. I just wish I didn’t have to wait so long to gulp down the chaser for this bland, bitter drink of a film.

If you’re familiar with Dan Stevens, it’s probably with his work on Downton Abbey as the kind-hearted English gentleman Matthew Crawley. Other than that, his career is largely a blank slate, with most of us having no preconceived notions about him as an actor. This absence of expectation is a key ingredient in Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett’s The Guest, the director-writer duo’s evocative, comic-thriller follow-up to their new-gen horror romp You’re Next, in which Stevens plays a blue-eyed mystery man who we can’t quite pin down. He’s a handsome, polite Kentucky boy with enough charm to make you weak in the knees, but there’s also an intensity, a menace lurking deep inside those unblinking baby blues that’ll make your knees buckle from fright. Try as you might, you can’t unglue your eyes from his, and whether he uses his good looks or his bare hands, one thing’s for sure: he’s a killer.

Things get set in motion in typical horror movie fashion–the ring of a doorbell. Standing at the door is David (Stevens), a freshly-discharged war veteran who’s come to the home of Laura Peterson (Sheila Kelley) to fulfill an oath he made to her dead son Caleb, his former comrade, to tell the family how much Caleb loved them. He speaks to her tenderly, and she’s overwhelmed when she sees David standing next to her son in a photo of their brigade. David only means to pass through their small New Mexico town on his way to Florida, but Laura insists he stay with them for a couple days in Caleb’s old room. With Southern humility and a kind smile, he accepts the offer. “Thank you, ma’am.”

Less trusting of their new guest is Laura’s family. Her husband, Spencer (Leland Orser), fears David may have PTSD. Their introverted teenage son, Luke (Brendan Meyer), feels uncomfortable around him (as he does most people), and their daughter, Anna (Maika Monroe), is the most skeptical of all, dismissing David’s story of how he knew her brother with a laugh.

Despite starting off on shaky ground with the Petersons, David slowly begins to ingratiate himself into their world: He shares late night beers with Spencer, beats up bullies for Luke, and uses his, um….pectoral assets…to get Anna swooning so hard she makes him a mix tape. But as the audience, we have a slightly better sense of David’s true character. Whenever he’s alone, sitting on his fallen comrade’s bed with the lights off, moonlight streaming through the window, he looks soulless, sitting so still, for so long, it’s bone-chilling.

Wingard and Barrett never give us the slightest peek into what’s going on inside David’s head, a brilliant choice that makes the film devilishly fun as we try to decipher what his true intentions are. Many of his actions indicate he’s genuinely here to help the Petersons, but as gruesome acts of violence start popping up around town (the victim’s of which are all tied to the family), we wonder what David’s angle really is.

What’s unique about The Guest is how chameleonic and nimble it is in terms of tone and genre. It’ll make you laugh to tears (Stevens’ bone-dry comedic timing is on-point, holding his icy stare hilariously longer than you expect), and it’ll then slip gracefully into horror/thriller mode, overwhelming you with nerve-racking suspense. It’s an action movie, a parable on PTSD and government neglect of veterans, a Hitchcockian character study (look up Hitch’s first major film, The Lodger), and a loving throwback to ’80s horror (the synths used in the score are the same ones Carpenter used in the Halloween series). This isn’t a mere pastiche, though–it’s more cohesive and well-crafted than that, turning genre conventions upside-down and toying with our expectations.

Who else, I wonder, could have played the seductive, cyborg-like David as well as Stevens? This is the perfect time in the Brit’s career to be playing this particular role. Had someone like, say, Ryan Gosling been cast as David, the mystery would be lost. Gosling has the ability and good looks to play the part no question, but we know the guy too well. We know the type of roles he gravitates to, and his face is too linked with his celebrity to achieve the sense of mystery the role of David requires. Stevens, on the other hand, has never, ever been seen on screen in a role like this. His chiseled physique is intimidating and alluring (he was a tad fluffier on Downton), and from those deadly eyes there is no escape. This is new ground for him, new ground for us, and we can see him as nothing but a wildcard, a monster we’ll never know.

You’re Next was a playful, muscly riff on home invasion horror, as is The Guest. But with their new film, Wingard and Barrett add layers upon layers of flavor to the recipe, whipping homages to The Terminator, Halloween, and The Stepfather together into a deliciously pulpy 99-minute thrill ride. There’s nothing quite like it, and as a great man once said, hold on to your butts: This prolific writer-director dream team has got plenty more in store for us in the coming years. I’m sweating in anticipation.

The Guest trailer

Sylvester Stallone and his band of aging muscle-buddies probably had a blast making The Expendables 3, the latest by-product of Sly trying to help his pals out with a nice little payday in the twilight of their careers. Audiences get the wrong end of the deal, however, as the film is a messy action schlock that symbolizes the death knell for a franchise that’s worn out its welcome. The shameless appeal of the first Expendables–old action stars from the ’80s and ’90s teaming up to form a middle-aged super team–has long-since lost its sizzle, and Sly knows it: Here, he’s brought in a group of hot young actors into the fold to give the franchise a much-needed shot of vigor, but to no avail. Cursed by its PG-13 rating, The Expendables has lost too much blood (literally) and liveliness.

The film opens with Stallone’s Barney Ross leading his team of globe-trotting, government employed mercenaries (including series vets Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, and Jason Statham) on a rescue mission. Doctor Death (Wesley Snipes), a long lost teammate and friend of Barney’s, is being transported on a maximum security locomotive and, using a helicopter, big guns, and bigger balls, the Expendables manage to free the knife-savvy, old-school killer. The sequence pales in comparison to the train action scenes in Skyfall and Fast Five. Hell, even Toy Story 3 puts it to shame. But sadly, despite its mediocrity, the explosive train sequence winds up being the most entertaining set piece in the film. In other words, it’s all downhill from here.

Doctor Death, who’s been imprisoned for 8 years, has a little trouble integrating himself into the group, as all his old teammates (save for Barney) have been replaced. He trades barbs with Statham’s Lee Christmas, boastfully referring to himself as “the knife before Christmas” (hardy-har-har). Snipes’ snappy braggadocio wears thin quickly. No matter, though, because his storyline gets booted to the background for the remainder of the film. Let’s be honest; the writers just needed to get Snipes into the fray somehow so that he could kick and punch and jump off of high things.

Following Doctor Death’s recruitment, the Expendables carry out a routine mission that goes South when Barney spots Conrad Stonebanks (Mel Gibson), an old nemesis he thought dead. Deeming his team too old and beat-up to continue doing the government’s dirty work, Barney disbands them and subs in a younger team of tech-savvy killers played by UFC champ Ronda Rousey, boxing champ Victor Ortiz, and handsome newbies Glen Powell and Kellan Lutz. Call them “Team Viagra”. When the new team flubs their mission and are apprehended by Stonebanks, Barney and the old-fart-ables band together to rescue the young blood.

The film upholds the franchise tradition of delivering a ridiculously beefy cast: series mainstays Terry Crews and Jet Li return; Antonio Banderas pops up in an unintentionally grating role as a chatty, wannabe Expendable; Kelsey Grammar plays a gruff old-timer who helps Barney recruit the kids; Harrison Ford plays Barney’s government boss; and, of course, good ol’ Arnold makes an inexplicable appearance. Grammar brings the film down to earth (in a good way) in his brief appearance, and Gibson exhibits the same entertaining mega-villain gusto he brought to the table in Machete Kills, but no one else impresses.

The series is desperate to create snappy new one-liners like Sly and Ah-nold’s greatest hits (“Get to de choppa!” gets a shout-out), but they’re all duds. What’s worse, each new, lame catchphrase gets repeated for no reason at all. For instance, in an early scene, real-life badass Rousey beats up some D-bags in a club. Upon disposing of the jerks, she looks down and growls “Men” in a faux-feminist scoff. Later in the film, she beats up another jerk, looks down at him, and growls, “MEN”. It’s the same exact joke, repeated in the same context, for no reason. These demonstrations of the law of diminishing returns are actually a good metaphor for the Expendables franchise as a whole.

The charm of the first Expendables was its transparency; the first film was a blatant invitation to indulge in famous tough guys kicking ass and making things go boom. It was uninhibited fun, and the fact that the script was poorly written meant little in the grand scheme of things. It was fetishistic, kill-’em-all ecstasy. Expendables 3 is no fun, with its muted colors and piles of grey rubble adding to the numbing effect of the nonsensical action. Director Patrick Hughes shot most of the film in Bulgaria, and you can tell; the film is meant to take place in several locations across the globe, but none of them look authentic. The locales all sort of mush together, much like how the myriad stars mush together and the endless, forgettable kills mush together. 126 minutes of action movie mush is hard to keep down. More like, “The Indedibles”.

The Expedables 3 trailer

Most people–hell, most comic book readers–have little to no knowledge of the Guardians of the Galaxy, a team of misfit, cosmic Marvel superheroes introduced in print in 1969. James Gunn, the director of Marvel Studios’ film adaptation of the D-list franchise, has a similar level of notoriety, with his work (Slither, Super) mostly only familiar to indie and indie-horror geeks. Why would Marvel take such a risk, dumping millions of dollars into producing a movie with minimal name recognition?

Well, let’s look at it from this angle: What if all of the scumbag bounty hunters, smugglers, and monstrous brutes from Star Wars got their own movie? What if you infused it with the attitudinal, irreverent humor from the first Iron Man movie, cranked up to 11? And what if you slapped on a bitchin’ ’70s soundtrack on top of it all, just for the hell of it? That’s Gunn’s film in a nutshell, and it’s totally awesome, off-the-wall, sci-fi fun. Marvel knew they had a gem on their hands, and with Guardians of the Galaxy they’ve unleashed on us a hell of a good time at the movies. And a talking tree. And a talking raccoon. And Chris Pratt’s abs.

Pratt plays Peter Quill, an earthling abducted as a child in the ’80s who now thieves, gets laid, and causes a general ruckus across the galaxy in his spaceship, the Milano (named after Gunn’s childhood crush, Alyssa Milano). We meet Quill (or Star-Lord, a self-appointed moniker he desperately hopes will catch on) in treasure-hunter mode, looking to loot a mysterious sphere from a tomb on a seemingly deserted, dusty alien planet. He navigates the rocky terrain with some clumsy of rocket shoes, a bug-like space mask, and his trusty Walkman, which cues Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love”, the first of the film’s many retro-tastic tunes only Gunn has the cajones to blanket a multi-million dollar movie in. In an homage to Raiders of the Lost Ark, Quill steals the sphere, eludes laser-toting baddies, hops back into the Milano, where he’s startled by a drowsy one-night-stand he forgot spent the night. Whoops.

Quill bands together with all manner of galactic riffraff to protect the sphere from warmonger Ronan the Accuser, the film’s dark, creepy big-bad played by an imposing Lee Pace who has evil intentions of using the thing to destroy the planet Xandar. Quill’s band of outcasts are Gamora (Zoe Saldana), the green-skinned, badass daughter of Thanos, the biggest villain in the galaxy; Drax the Destroyer (hulking WWE alumni Dave Bautista), who’s hellbent on avenging the death of his family at the hands of Ronan; Rocket (Bradley Cooper), a genetically engineered talking Raccoon with a heavy-artillery fetish and a Joe Pesci temper, and his amiable tree-creature BFF, Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel).

Pratt is the absolute right man for the job, with the film’s subversive, witty material playing precisely to his strengths. Fans of his work in Parks and Recreation are guaranteed Guardians ticket-buyers, and they won’t be disappointed. Diesel and Cooper (with great help from the talented visual effects team) make Rocket and Groot an irresistibly lovable on-screen duo, and almost steal the show altogether. Bautista surprisingly hangs right in there with his more experienced cast mates, drawing just as many laughs with Drax’s lack of capacity for sarcasm and metaphor. Saldana often gets lost in the noise, as the other Guardians’ unique, colorful personalities make the more conventionally sketched Gomora feel a little stale.

Guardians is refreshingly detached from Marvel’s flood of Avengers movies (though it does technically exist in the same universe), offering up an edgier, funnier brand of superhero action. The film feels even more like Star Wars than J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek reboot did, delivering big-time adventure while being thoughtful enough to highlight the well-written core-character relationships above all else. The action is sufficiently epic and more brutal than any Marvel movie before, with even the good-natured Groot doling out heaping helpings of bone-crushing violence. (A scene in which the gentle giant pulverizes a group of hapless grunts mirrors Hulk smashing up Loki in Avengers, but gets an even bigger laugh.)

Gunn does a great job of preserving his wacky indie sensibilities and incorporating them seamlessly into a giant, crowd-pleasing blockbuster film, a feat that takes more finesse than his Troma-boy resume may lead you to believe he’s capable of. While it isn’t as out-there as Slither or Super, Guardians feels like a Gunn film through and through.

The film hits a few tonal stumbles along the way, with the heavier dramatic scenes between the core characters feeling slightly out of place. (A tortured existential outburst by Rocket feels the most awkward, though it’s effectively acted by Cooper and the animators.) The myriad supporting characters–Glenn Close as the leader of Nova Corps, Xandar’s police force; John C. Reilly as a Nova Corps officer; Benicio Del Toro, in a brief appearance as the Liberace-like Collector–are good fun, though they’re too great in number for any to make a lasting impression. Michael Rooker’s Yondu, Quill’s venomous abductor and adopted father figure, sticks out amongst the supporters with his wicked volitility.

Visually, Gunn and DP Ben Davis use every color of the rainbow to give Guardians a distinctive sci-fi look, with each detailed environment looking more imaginative than the last. This is an oddball movie that’s as funny as Galaxy Quest and as thrilling as any Marvel movie that’s come before, and it’s cause for excitement for the futures of both Marvel Studios and Gunn’s career.

Guardians of the Galaxy trailer

In a film like Lucy, Luc Besson’s new existential action flick starring Scarlett Johansson, the stakes are everything. High stakes, forged through effective storytelling, can imbue even the sleepiest action scene with an invaluable sense of urgency, excitement, and suspense. Lucy‘s fatal flaw is that it’s one of only a handful of films where the stakes actually diminish as the film progresses, as the human aspects of the story are abandoned in lieu of big ideas that evoke nothing, emotionally. The film doesn’t even suffice as a dumb-fun action movie; it spends too much time shoving its ideas down your throat, and the “action” scenes are disposable. You’d be better off watching Besson’s much better “super-woman” film, The Fifth Element.

Let’s talk about that (much better) film’s heroine, Leeloo Dallas (multipass), played by Milla Jovovich: She’s a super-skilled, “perfect” warrior, but as the story unfolds, she learns about humanity; she discovers laughter, trust, sacrifice, and love. As she transitions from humanoid to human, we fall for her, because in her journey we see ourselves and our life story. Johansson’s Lucy is the inverse of Leeloo, transforming from a vulnerable, relatable girl to a detached, invulnerable…”it”. We don’t understand “it”. We can’t connect with “it”. We don’t care what happens to “it”, so why should we care about where the film is going? It’s a bridge to nowhere, rendering its revelations and meditations inconsequential.

We meet Lucy in a tight bind; a (soon to be ex) boyfriend has forced her (via sneaky handcuff application) to deliver a mysterious briefcase to a man called Mr. Jang (Min-sik Choi) in a hotel in Taipei, where she’s studying abroad. When she meets Mr. Jang in his hotel room, he’s surrounded by generic-looking thugs, there are dead bodies on the ground, and his suit and face are stained with fresh blood. Besson intercuts Lucy’s predicament with shots of a lion hunting a gazelle, a tired metaphor revisited throughout the film, meant to signify that this story exists on an ultimate, grand stage unstuck from time and space. Terrance Malick did it better in The Tree of Life.

To avoid spoilers, let’s just say Mr. Jang imposes his will on Lucy, and she ends up overdosing on a new, neon-purple drug that allows her to use more than 10% of her brain’s capacity, the ceiling that no human has yet to exceed. (The “10% brain capacity” factoid is utterly erroneous, but this is sci-fi, so it’d be unfair to hold this inaccuracy against the film; scientific absurdity is allowed and welcome.)

Lucy’s condition–in which her brain power gradually increases, granting her supernatural powers like telekinesis, and the ability to control time and matter–is explained at painful length by Morgan Freeman throughout the movie. He plays a professor or scientist of some sort, and whatever mental image of him in that role just popped in your head is exactly what you’ll see in the movie. Morgan Freeman does everything Morgan Freeman does, except one, sorely missed thing. Why do you cast him in a movie? Usually (and Lucy is no exception), it’s to add gravity and credibility to the film. He adds neither of those here, so all his performance amounts to is a Mount Everest of insufferable exposition.

As Lucy’s powers grow, she hemorrhages her humanity, and the film follows suit. As she loses more and more of herself–ascending to a higher existence out in the ether, disposing of every baddie that stands in her way with a flick of a wrist–our reasons to care for her vanish into thin air. She even kills innocent people, for goodness sake.

The film’s trailer promised a pulse-pounding cross between Kill Bill and Carrie, with Lucy displaying myriad feats of superhuman badassery. These showcase sequences under-deliver entirely, with all of them being either a formless mess (a shoehorned car chase, an overwhelmingly ordinary hallway shootout), or a sterile special effects expo (time manipulation and anti-grav shots). To top it all off, the film has one of the most uncomfortable, cold-as-ice movie kisses I’ve ever seen. Besson may please some with Lucy‘s visual fireworks and veneer of profundity, but it’ll leave most feeling empty inside, hungry for an action flick with real bite.

Lucy trailer

The most renowned Jewish film festival in the world, the 34th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, kicks off tomorrow night at the Castro Theater for a three-week run of stunning, independent films from across the globe. Through every genre of cinema–from action, to documentary, to comedy, to romance–the festival’s line-up celebrates Jewish-ness for people from all walks of life to enjoy and embrace.

18 countries are represented in the festival’s 70-film line-up, which includes 7 world premieres. Housing the screenings are several theaters across the Bay Area, including Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater and New Parkway, the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, CinéArts in Palo Alto, and more.

Opening the festival is The Green Prince, a poignant docu by Nadav Schirman that follows the journey of Mosab Hasaan Yousef, a young Palestinian who grew up hating Israelites. Following being captured by the Israeli security service, the Shin Bet, he comes to realize the true brutality of his own people’s tactics, from suicide bombings to needless torture, compelling him to work for Israel as a spy, the greatest shame known to Palestinians. Pepe Danquart’s sweeping narrative drama Run Boy Run, the festival’s centerpiece narrative picture, tells the story of a young boy struggling to survive in the fields and forests of wartime Poland, evading Nazis and scrounging for food and meeting strangers–both helpful and harmful–along the way.

Diversity is a key theme throughout the festival, exploring subjects that reach beyond the Jewish community, but viewing them from a Jewish perspective. Hannah Espia’s Transit, which screens this Friday at the Castro, follows the hard lives of Filipino workers in Tel Aviv who are under constant threat of deportation. The Village of Peace, a docu by filmmakers Ben Schuder and Niko Philipides, takes us inside the titular community in the Negev Desert, founded by African Americans from Chicago in the ’60s who journeyed a great distance to make a place for themselves in the Promised Land.

On the lighter side of the festival are several comedic films. In Arlo and Julie , by director Steve Mims, a quirky couple in Austin begin receiving a series of envelopes in the mail, with each containing puzzle pieces to a larger jigsaw. Part romance, mystery, and comedy, the film is a lighthearted affair with a great cast and a charming vintage soundtrack. Capturing comedy as a tool for healing is Comedy Warriors, a documentary about military veterans who cope with their injuries by facing their fears in front of an audience and doing stand-up comedy. Seasoned comedians like Lewis Black, B.J. Novak, and Bob Saget act as the soldiers’ mentors, guiding them on their journey to becoming successful comedians.

A personal favorite for me, Julie Cohen’s tight docu The Sturgeon Queens outlines the history of Russ & Daughters, one of New York’s best Jewish smoked fish shops, celebrating its 100-year anniversary this year. Narrated by long-time customers, the film tempts us with delicious-looking food and glowing endorsements by celebrity R&D devotees (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mario Batali), creating a loving portrait of one of the city’s most charming old-school institutions.

Receiving the 2014 Freedom of Expression Award is Theodore Bikel, who will be in attendance for the July 31st screening of Theodore Bikel: In the Shoes of Sholem Aleichem at the Castro.

For tickets and more info, visit sfjff.org. Stay tuned for interviews and reviews from the festival.

The mob drama may be played out, but that doesn’t stop writer/director Joe Basile from taking a crack at the all too familiar genre. West End takes place in New Jersey, a fact the film repeatedly likes to mention throughout. Vic Trevi (Neal Bledsoe) returns home after his father Victor (Eric Roberts), a mobster out of jail after getting busted for racketeering, gets brutally gunned down in a mob hit. Vic’s father went to jail when he was a kid, leaving his Uncle John (Peter Onorati) to take care of him and his mother Mary (Isabella Hofmann). Once Vic got old enough, he left his family behind to become a lawyer in Florida, never speaking to them again until now. Needless to say the family reunion is an awkward one.

It doesn’t take long before Vic gets offered to work with the family business. Vic accepts, and in no time he’s getting his hands dirty when Uncle John starts killing any men involved with Victor’s death. To make matters more complicated, Vic isn’t actually there to mourn his father; he’s an undercover FBI agent, sent by his superiors to bust his family’s operation. Will Vic succeed in taking down his family? Will he get found out and pay the ultimate price? Will he choose family over justice? Your first guesses to these questions are probably on the money.

West End isn’t the sort of film trying to subvert expectations or defy clichés. It plays into the tropes of the mob drama with ease, and more or less plays out exactly as expected. That familiarity actually helps West End at some points. It’s somewhat admirable to see Basile, who used his own funds along with local New Jersey businesses to pay for the production, pull off such a straight-laced mob movie. Of course, that kind of straightforward approach also hurts the film. Its plot sounds like it came out of a Grand Theft Auto sequel, with plenty of sequences feeling like live-action cut scenes.

That level of artificiality mostly comes from Basile’s script, filled with the sort of expository conversations only seen in the movies. Buddy (Joe Nieves), a childhood friend of Vic’s, is first seen offering condolences to Mary. “He loved you like his own,” she says, and Buddy replies with “One of the perks of being friends with your son.” Later on, Buddy tells Vic about his wife Lauren (Melissa Archer). “She was your high school sweetheart, you left, we fell in love, now here we are.” These kinds of hilariously awkward attempts to fill in backstory continue throughout the film. When Mary repeatedly tells Vic she’s his mother, it’s hard to tell if it’s a term of affection or if Basile is reminding viewers of Mary’s relationship to the protagonist.

Clunky screenplay aside, West End is serviceable enough. The Jersey locations add plenty of character to the feature, along with Clayton Combe and Timothy Naylor’s cinematography. Bledsoe and the cast do a pretty good job as well, giving their roles enough of a natural quality to not make them feel like complete archetypes. But these kinds of qualities can only go so far, and ultimately don’t save West End from becoming a tired retread.

It’s hard to watch Snowpiercer without thinking about the last several months of controversy surrounding it. The film, an international production by Korean director Bong Joon-Ho (Memories of Murder, The Host, Mother), had its distribution rights bought up by Harvey Weinstein for the US. The trouble started when it was revealed that Weinstein, feeling the film wouldn’t be understood by midwestern audiences, wanted to cut at least 20 minutes from Bong’s preferred cut. After months of small updates on the matter, an agreement was finally made. Weinstein would release the final cut of Snowpiercer without any alterations, but it would be a limited release instead of a wide one.

The story behind Snowpiercer‘s release, despite having a happy ending, unfortunately changed the way people approach the film. After months of battles over editing, viewers will quietly debate over whether or not Weinstein’s suggestions weren’t exactly so out of line. It’s a shame because, tossing all surrounding controversy aside, Snowpiercer is quite entertaining. It’s a blockbuster in a single location, with enough quirks and artistry to remind audiences how a film like this could only be made outside of the Hollywood studio system. It’s a flawed and sometimes messy film from time to time, but in a manner that’s more risky and exciting instead of frustrating and incompetent.

In the near future, a chemical intended to lower the world’s temperatures ends up working so well that it brings about a new ice age. It’s impossible to live outside, and the small number of remaining survivors live on the titular train. The Snowpiercer travels around the world endlessly, and a highly enforced class system is in place on the train to maintain order. The story starts in 2031, 17 years after the train began running, in the tail section. The tail is reserved for the lower class citizens, with its inhabitants living in squalor with nothing to eat but gelatinous protein bars. Curtis (Chris Evans) and Edgar (Jamie Bell) are in the process of leading a revolt against the oppressive forces from the front of the train, which we only get brief glimpses of from the bizarre characters that visit the back of the train from time to time (this includes a brilliant Tilda Swinton in a performance that single-handedly elevates the entire film).

Curtis and his cohorts (including Octavia Spencer, John Hurt and Bong Joon-Ho regular Song Kang-Ho) successfully overpower security forces in the tail section, thus beginning their journey to confront Wilford, the mysterious engineer making sure the train operates smoothly. Bong, who’s known for his masterful ability to throw abrupt tonal shifts into his work without losing audiences, thrives in his film’s setting. Each train car acts as its own little universe, giving Bong an excuse to change the film’s dynamic while expanding its scale. A huge action sequence can be followed with a bizarre, expository visit to the train’s school, followed by a tense fight scene with almost no dialogue. These sequences, which also show off the incredible set design, are handled with aplomb, and make sure that Snowpiercer never spares a stale moment.

Snowpiercer isn’t without its flaws though. The script, adapted from a French graphic novel by Bong and Kelly Masterson, isn’t exactly subtle with some of its ideas (Early on Curtis says “I’m not a leader”, a line that stamps LEADER in big letters on his forehead), and some elements are introduced for no apparent reason (one character’s clairvoyant abilities is ignored almost immediately after it’s introduced). Still, Bong’s political commentary on the need for oppression to survive is far more interesting of a topic for this kind of film, and the way he expands his film’s scope toward the end is quite entertaining. Snowpiercer may not be the masterpiece that people were hoping for, but that shouldn’t take away from the fact that it’s a hell of a fun ride.

Snowpiercer trailer

Welsh-born filmmaker Gareth Evans’ The Raid: Redemtion shook up the martial arts movie genre in 2011 with its exhilarating action, scintillating fight choreography, and no-holds-barred brutality. The film didn’t have much of a plot to speak of: A police raid on an apartment building filled with deadly gangsters doesn’t go as planned, and voila! We’ve got a killer action movie. Droves of martial arts movie devotees flocked to Evans’ mini-masterpiece of bodily destruction, and now he’s followed it up with The Raid 2: Berandal, a sprawling film (it’s an hour longer) with an expanded narrative element and, impossibly, better fight scenes than the original.

Picking up right where the first film left off, we rejoin ass-kicking rookie cop Rama (Iko Uwais), who’s thrown into a new mission before he can wipe the dried blood from his fists. He’s sent behind bars undercover to earn the trust of Uco (Arifin Putra), the arrogant only son of crime lord Bangun (Tio Pakusodewo). After saving Uco’s skin a few times (most notably during an incredible prison riot sequence set in a muddier than muddy courtyard), Rama (now going by the name Yuda) becomes his right-hand man and earns himself a spot as a henchman in Bangun’s mob after serving his 4-year sentence in the slammer. Making this absurd commitment to his undercover work even more difficult is the fact that he’s left his family to fend for themselves, missing a big chunk of his son’s childhood. While Rama is under Bangun’s employ, a gang war erupts, stemming from a few shady dealings made by Uco, who’s been obsessed with the fact that he’s relegated to diminutive tasks by his father despite being the sole heir to the throne. Amid the chaos, Rama discovers that the cops he works for may be as unscrupulous as the criminals.

While The Raid takes place over the course of a day, The Raid 2 covers several years and locations, and narratively, the scale and depth Evans adds here is staggering. The intricacies of the gang dynamics, set against the backdrop of Bangun and Uco’s father-son conflict and the even larger Sisyphean tale of Rama, can be overwhelming at times. When your adrenaline is still running high following a fight scene and you’re chomping at the bit for more, it’s hard to keep your brain focused on the finer plot details which, if you miss too many, can pile up and make it hard to keep track. Once all is said and done, the overall shape of the story comes across clearly, but some expositional segments feel disposable, especially when sandwiched in between the film’s amazing fight sequences.

The fights are so breathless, so immaculately constructed and filmed that it bandages any negative impact the inflated story has on the experience. Uwais is marvelous on screen, moving at light speed, with pinpoint precision and controlled viciousness. It must take a world of focus and practice to pull of the superhuman choreography Uwais and his team have designed, but every move he and the supporting fighters make looks spontaneous and urgent.

And urgency is what informs Evans’ camera, which is as nimble and mobile as the actors. In an amazing shot, a man is sprinting toward the camera and then suddenly jumps laterally, crashing through a window and landing on his side on the ground. Evans twists the camera with the actor, falling from vertical to horizontal, a kinetic, jaw-dropping effect. He’s a brilliant action director and editor, always knowing exactly what to show, how long to show it, and how to make each blow look unimaginably painful. Cinematographers Matt Flannery and Dimas Imam Subhono, who also worked on the first film, have outdone themselves here, making the tornado-like fights easy to follow and coherent.

The gore factor is high here, even higher than its bloody predecessor. Body parts are twisted and turned the wrong way, skin is slashed, and heads get caved in by a variety of deadly instruments (including a baseball bat, swung by the aptly, hilariously named Baseball Bat Man). This is midnight horror movie-level stuff, for sure. The sheer variety of the fights stands out, with each scenario giving Uwais and his dance partners something different to do. There are fights in cramped spaces like a bathroom stall and the backseat of a car; there are wide-open brawls in flat arenas like the aforementioned riot scene, and in vertical arenas like a night club with cascading balconies; and there’s even a car chase that may be the most violent since Tarantino’s Death Proof.

The crowning jewel of the film, however, is the climactic one-on-one kitchen fight scene, which is perhaps the best I’ve ever seen. It’s a beautiful crescendo of intricate exchanges, false stops, and ferocious flashes of violence. What’s most impressive is that the scene is long, but in a good way: We feel exhausted ourselves watching them devote every fiber of their being to the battle, and as it goes on and on, the characters seem to develop an inexplicable wordless bond as kindred warriors born to battle each other at that very moment. It’s strangely emotional and completely riveting. The Raid 2 is a gloriously savage affair that ups the ante more than any action movie in recent memory.

The Raid 2 trailer

2011’s The Raid: Redemption was an adrenaline-pumping, relentless martial arts movie that wowed action movie lovers and garnered a ravenous fan following. With The Raid 2: Berandal, director Gareth Evans manages to make the fight scenes even more intense and intricate this time around, a tall task following the high bar set by the first film. He’s deepened the drama as well, giving lead star Iko Uwais some dramatic dialog scenes to sink his teeth into in between ass-kicking.

We got a chance to sit with Gareth and Iko in San Francisco and chat about how The Raid 2‘s story was actually written before The Raid‘s, out-doing the first film’s already over-the-top choreography, Gareth’s take on violence in film, Iko using his real life family for inspiration, and more. Check out parts 1 and 2 of our conversation below.

Part 1

Part 2