Action

dir: Ángel Manuel Soto

2023

It wasn’t as terrible as I thought it would be.

That’s not saying much, admittedly. The new low bar that was created when they released that awful Flash movie earlier this year (unless it was all just a bad dream) means that some things just have to be passable, and have nice people delivering dialogue in an okay manner in order to be pretty good in comparison.

This flick doesn’t have Ezra Miller in it, not even a tiny cameo. Not even a picture of him. So that’s extra points right there. It has a charming and eager young chap in the lead role of Jaime Reyes / Blue Beetle, in the form of Xolo Maridueña. He has a lovely / embarrassing family surrounding him, and truth be told all the best bits of the film are or involve Jaime and his family.

That being said, even with all the elements of Latin / Mexican culture wedged into it, this kind of cultural cringe comedy is as generic as can be, whether it’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Fresh Off the Boat or whatever the hell they’re doing here. They say that you can’t be what you don’t see (representation), but I wonder how well they do with representing aspects of Latin culture in specific ways (but generic enough not to alienate the gringos), since I’m not from that culture.

Unfortunately, there’s also George Lopez. George fucking Lopez. If you don’t know who he is, and you haven’t endured his stand-up, or seen him in terrible things, you might think “who is this old man shouting at clouds all the time?” If you do know who he is, well, I feel your pain.

The plot is so generic. The villain, Victoria Kord, played by Susan Sarandon, is so generic and unmemorable that I feel like saying “that’s nice, dear” whenever I think of her on-screen moments. The villain’s henchman is also very generic, in that it’s a shouty chap called Carapax (Raoul Max Trujillo), but he at least looks terrifying regardless of what armour he’s wearing.

He’s a mean looking motherfucker, and so always plays mean looking motherfuckers. If he and Danny Trejo had a baby together, it would look like Tommy Lee Jones.

(범죄도시3
犯罪都市3
Beomjoedosi3)

dir: Lee Sang-yong

2023

This film, with the most generic of titles, is the third in a series.

None of that matters.

Here, at least in a country outside of South Korea, the title is the ineffable The Roundup: No Way Out. The title is purest nonsense. There is no rounding up of anyone or anything. Nothing is rounded up or down. There are no horrible herbicides from Monsanto or Bayer sprayed on any plants during the course of the film. There is no Taking Down or Up of anything either. And there are multiple ways out. It could just as easily have been called The Takedown Roundup Countdown Electric Boogaloo Part Three

None of that matters.

It’s set mostly in Seoul and Incheon, and has to do with Korean and Japanese criminals fighting over some mythical drug, and killing a whole bunch of people, with plot machinations and double crosses and people wanting this or that.

Doesn’t matter.

The lead in this series of films is Ma Dong-seok. His cop character in these films is called Detective Ma Seok-do, which is everyone involved taking the piss. Ma Dong-seok also goes by Don Le, and is somehow one of the biggest stars of Korean action cinema. He was even in that darned Marvel Eternals movie that no-one liked.

The only thing that matters is that Detective Ma, a fat middle-aged guy who wears the same tracksuit throughout the entire film, punches people.

He punches them really hard. He punches them so hard that he can pretty much warp reality with the force of his mighty fists.

dir: Louis Leterrier

2023

It’s pretty shit, even for this profoundly dumb movie series.

Of course, one has to grade entries in the Fast & the Furious franchise on an incredibly generous curve, but still, by any reasonable measure this movie Fast X is a major fail.

They do give Dom Toretto more screen time than they have in a long while, but… No, it’s nice to see him again, and to hear his endless excuses as to why Brian can’t help or how he just talked to Brian a few seconds ago, and maybe he’s just offscreen somewhere doing something important.

The most important and baffling thing in these films is that any character shown to have died onscreen is eventually revealed to be less than dead. To be immortal. Essentially unkillable. So whenever any scene slows down, and the music gets sad, and they start talking about someone who’s dead in a mournful way, I’m like “The fuck are you doing? I’ll bet you anything that whoever will be revealed at a climactic moment to still be alive”.

And they did it again at the end of this stupid film, when a certain character who died, I dunno, four films ago is revealed to still be alive.

You may think, well, who gives a fuck. You would be right. Why are you always so handsome / attractive, stylish and right all the time? What’s your secret?

Whatever it is, I don’t have access to your level of wonderfulness, the ability to blithely accept the lack of ideas and death of inspiration that the perpetual reuse of old rope and older tropes represents in billion dollar franchises. The GDP of a nation is spent making these films, and they still can’t do anything more clever than “You’ll never believe who they’re going to resurrect NEXT!”

dir: Nida Manzoor

2023

There were only two things this flick needed to entice me in – I heard it was a solid action movie (which is a lie), and I heard it was directed by the woman responsible for the great tv series We Are Lady Parts, about a group of observant Muslim girls in Britain wanting to play in a punk band together.

As far as I’m concerned, give Nida Manzoor all the moneys and let her make whatever the hell she wants. I daresay it will be entertaining.

Polite Society is not what I thought it would be, and that is totally fine. It is much funnier and much sillier than I thought it would be.

And that is absolutely fine too. I am probably not the target market for this flick, and I do not find that threatening or disconcerting at all.

Ria (Priya Kansara) is a bundle of nerves and energy. She very clearly has her life’s path figured out. She trains for, and wants more than anything, to become a stuntwoman, and to fight on screen in the movies.

In the movie’s only implausibility, she writes multiple emails to an actual stuntwoman, being Eunice Huthart, in ways that suggest the prime example of a ‘parasocial relationship’, like where regular humans think they’re friends with famous people just because they’ve got access to them on social media.

Other than that, Ria is totally fine and not at all delusional. I actually enjoyed that element of her one-sided correspondence, because to me it was more a reminder of Jack Nicholson’s character in About Schmidt writing letters to a young boy overseas he sponsors, starting all his letters with “Dear Ndugu”, after which he’d start ranting and raving about people and stuff little Ndugu couldn’t possibly understand or know about or relate to. We got to see it as a welcome example of just how self-involved Schmidt was, not as any comment on Ndugu, who was just a boy, and someone we never see. Though he’s probably A Man now…

She is absolutely going to be a stuntwoman, and her older sister Lina (Ritu Arya), who recently dropped out of art college and seems very depressed, is absolutely going to be a successful artist.

They are from a Pakistani-British background, which carries with it certain expectations, mostly being that, being female in a conservative and overly “polite society”, means they really can’t expect to end up as stuntwomen and artists, respectively.