Action

dirs.: Dan Berk & Robert Olsen

2025

What a premise! Guy who doesn’t feel pain getting caught up in crime shenanigans, somehow wins the day but is tortured, burned, shot, stabbed, mutilated and humiliated for our entertainment for an hour and fifty long, long minutes.

It’s a comedy, but in some ways it’s body horror, and really it’s not that different from other crime / action related flicks where the guy endures heaps of bodily abuse in order to get revenge / get the bad guys / avenge his dog, except instead of being brutalised but stoically persisting, like a John Wick / any Statham movie, the completely untrained main guy cops the abuse, doesn’t feel anything, but keeps going anyway.

Of course the premise is bullshit. A person with what Nathan Caine – He Feels No Pain! is most likely to succumb to is hyperthermia, or a terrible infection, or any number of undetected injuries. They don’t usually become reluctant action heroes. The condition doesn’t somehow grant immunity from severing muscle tissue, tendons or what should result in catastrophic blood loss.

But let’s not let logic slow us down now – we’re meant to be having fun!

At least, that is if your definition of fun is watching bits of some guy sheer off of his body like you’re watching a Troma film like Toxic Avenger or Street Trash from yesteryear.

I do have to admit that I’m a pretty squeamish person so that this kind of hook for a flick is no hook for me to hang anything from. I hate watching scenes of people gleefully, sadistically tormenting someone even if it is cartoonish. And the difference here is conceptual, rather than anything else. There’s a scene where one of the bad guys is doing what he thinks would cause maximum pain for the lead, by ripping his fingernails out with pliers, and while Nathan only pretends that it’s painful, as opposed to any actor in an equivalent scene pretending that it’s agony for real, doesn’t it amount to the same thing?

dir: Patricia Riggen

2025

In the immortal words of Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street, I (occasionally) love trash. I don’t love all trash, because even a grouch has to be picky sometimes, which means I am incapable of watching something like Married at First Sight without whacking myself in the face with a hammer.

But when it comes to movies, especially towards the end of the week, and especially when I’ve been drinking (which only happens at the end of the week), I don’t always feel like a 3 ½ epic about a Hungarian survivor of the Holocaust trying to build buildings in America and dodge the rapist tendencies of a billionaire played by Guy Pearce, or a long slow film about a depressed textile worker in a 17th century factory who finds relief in pricking herself with needles as an important and entirely valid commentary on social inequity and the benefits and drawbacks of alternative medicines.

No. Sometimes I just want to watch Viola Davis fuck people up.

Sure, there’s plenty of movies available where people come to a violent end at the hands of a righteous avenger, but then I heard that a new flick was coming out with Davis as the lead playing an American President pretty much in a Die Hard scenario, saving the day, making quips, giving the baddies what for.

On that count, on paper, I cannot say that this flick doesn’t deliver on exactly those counts. Viola Davis does play the American president at the annual G20 conference, where all the biggest and hottest economies getting together to figure out how they’re going to fuck over the rest of the world, this time in Cape Town South Africa.

She was formerly in the army, so her ability and willingness to kill people is backed up by story detail. It is also, since she’s referred to as a war hero, her ticket to political success in an America that this film imagines isn’t dominated by racist and sexist morons who would rather vote for an adjudicated rapist and 36 count felon whose every business has failed except for the one propping up White Supremacy. In other words, this fantasy realm is nothing like our actual world.

dir: Scott Derrickson

2025

Just as I was complaining about the kinds of films made specifically or exclusively for streaming services, I watched another movie made solely for a streaming service, being the Apple one. Compared to the other ones, almost no-one watches AppleTV+, I don’t know if you’ve noticed.

If they do, they let you know about it. If they have endlessly bored you with how much they cried watching Ted Lasso or how much they love season 2 of Severance, then they are of the happy few who bother to subscribe to it.

To the rest of the world it might as well be some obscure streaming site from Uzbekistan. This film, though, seems to have gotten some attention, reasons for which escape me, really. Neither Miles Teller nor Anja Taylor-Joy are box office draws, even if people might recognise them. The title is fairly non-illuminating nor is it arresting. A gorge. A valley. A dingly, dingly dell.

No, but this is about THE Gorge, which must have something interesting about it to justify a whole film about it, don’t you think?

Even if none of the elements are that novel, or original, the first hour of this flick, at least for me, were quite enjoyable. Ludicrous as the premise is, once I accepted it, I was able to go along with it and enjoy the interactions of the two main characters as they somehow meet cute and get to know each other before everything turns to shit.

Just like in real life.

dir: Seth Gordon

2025

I read a lot of stuff online, I guess we all do. A lot of digital ink has been spilled over people’s fears about AI supplanting everything and everyone, about algorithms doing all sorts of nefarious things in the background as we go about our lives as content consumers and aspiring collectors of experiences and tokens of those experiences.

Rarely do I feel like I’ve watched a movie that was put together by the Netflix algorithm so conclusively, in order to probably be watched by some other computers, somewhere, whilst the computers themselves doomscroll on their own phones as they wait for Skynet to emerge, inevitably, to kill off the remnants of humanity.

There is a whole genre of stuff that is not exclusive to Netflix, but seems to predominate on streaming services, so whether it was made for Netflix, Amazon or Apple TV hardly matters, hardly rates as a distinction with a difference, because they’re made so indifferently that it doesn’t matter.

You can’t tell me that there is that much of a difference between Ghosted, The Grey Man, Heart of Stone, The Mother, Red Notice, The Family Plan and whatever the hell they served up to us here. And we could blame the dulled software that was probably used to generate this oh so generic dialogue, but I’m telling you, blaming technology only takes you so far. There were clearly humans involved here, and they must shoulder all of that blame.

Most intelligent, wise, attractive people will tell you there’s little discernible difference between movies in general and those made for the streaming services. I want to tell you that there is a difference: They can achieve a soul crushing blandness cinematic releases generally avoid.