Action

dir: Frank E. Flowers

2026

Pirates! Remember when we, and by “we” I mean I used to look forward to movies about pirates doing piratical things? I loved and love pirates to bits.

Pirates of Penzance, Captain Blood, Treasure Island, Cutthroat Island, The Pirates!: Band of Misfits, Yellowbeard , Our Flag Means Death, Black Sails the list is endless and that’s a great thing! Who doesn’t love / isn’t sick of ‘Talk Like a Pirate’ Day? Maybe that’s showing my Western privilege: not everyone, admittedly, has the luxury of irritating their co-workers only on that one day a year by summoning their heartiest “Yarghs!!!”

And so many games I’ve played over so many years, especially the classic Sid Meir’s Pirates!, the original and best, and the Port Royale series, and more recently Sea of Thieves, Assassins’ Creed: Black Flag and Skull and Bones, absolute time sinks, all of them.

Can’t get enough of the stuff. And then there was that film, what was it called, oh yeah something about Pirates of the Caribbean, and their Black Pearl that happened to be under a Curse. Remember when (briefly) Jack Sparrow was everywhere, and Johnny Depp was the biggest star in the world and they were paying him $25 million dollars a movie?

And then all the other increasingly terrible movies came out in the series, and we started hating all that bullshit, and more importantly, at least for me, we found out Depp was an abusive alcoholic piece of shit who not only abused his former partner(s) but also hired PR firms to blacken their names and to engage bot farms to generate so much negative publicity on social media about them that the victims became hated targets, and the perpetrator sailed away, scot free like always?

Ah, those were the days. I can’t talk about those flicks anymore because I refuse to talk further about that piece of shit, and I refuse to watch any future movie he’s in, so where does that leave me? Like the sheeple fucking basic bitch that I am, it leaves me saying “the first Pirates OTC movie was great, they should make more action pirate-y movies!”

And they did! For Amazon! (boo, Jeffrey Bezos, I boo what you’re doing)

And even if they say it’s set on an island called Cayman Brac in the Caribbean, at the tail end of the Golden Age of Piracy, when most countries that could be colonised had been by the European powers, it was clearly made last year or so in Queensland! So yay patriotism.

dir: Edgar Wright

2025

This was never a good idea. It wasn’t a success the first time. I’m not saying you can’t remake a movie, because, that’s like 90 per cent of movies these days, but if you couldn’t make a movie work with Arnie in the lead role, what makes you think remaking it with a blancmange, a sculpted lump of tofu like Glen Powell is going to crack the box office?

The original Running Man from 1987 had Arnold in his prime, and it still died at the box office, because audiences weren’t ready to see him star in weird sci-fi adjacent corporate tv satires yet. I mean, there are probably a stack of other reasons why it didn’t delight audiences and make lots of money, but that has to be the main one. Plus audiences, mostly made up of morons, didn’t like watching a movie that mocked them for loving game shows, and telling them they’re morons who consume the dumbest media because they’re sadistic braying donkeys who love watching people die in horrible ways.

What has changed since then? Not much, really.

The most disappointing aspect of this whole endeavour is having Edgar Wright direct such an uninspiring ‘property’. He’s so great and brilliant everywhere else! He’s even delivered multiple parodies of these kinds of movies before, and yet now, as penance, they forced him, perhaps at gunpoint to make an uninspired straight version of the kind of Hollywood movie we thought he probably despised.

This is, for me, the most memorable part of the original Running Man - it’s not Arnie one-liners like “Well that hit the spot” or “he had to split” or “that boy’s one mean motherfucker” uttered by a sweet old lady, or any of the action, strange clothing choices or any other nonsense that happens: it’s the scene where two women are at a vending machine, and, to show how expensive things are in the “future”, being 2017, a can of Coke costs $6, and one of the ladies grunts over how many coins she has to feed into the machine to get her precious drink.

Six bucks? At least they got one thing right about the horrible future they envisaged way back in the 1980s. They got absolutely everything else wrong, though.

Sure, neo-liberalism and corporatism dominated society to a ridiculous extent, but we haven’t had food riots yet (in the States at least). There is the war in Venezuela to look forward to, though.

From the vantage point of the 1980s, they really did imagine that the dystopias of the future would look and feel like the 70s, just with odder clothing, resource shortages, pastel colours and perms as far as the eye could see.

Is Arnie good in the original flick? Of course not, but what does that matter, when has that ever mattered with Arnie? He’s fucking Arnie! That’s his superpower, his calling card and his motivation for everything.

The original also tries to tackle the idea of a group of revolutionaries trying to take on their corporate masters in order to cast off the shackles of oppression, but it’s a whole underground militia. What links there are between the masters of television and the political powers / military junta is not clear, just that it all blurs together In THE FUTURE!

Here, it’s far more explicit that the regime in charge that produces a program as dumb as this one is in cahoots with a privatised corporate police force called the NCG that brutalises whoever the Running Man show wants brutalised, and anyone else as well for good measure.

If the premise of the first flick was somewhat far-fetched; that the most important and viewed program of all time was one in which criminals are hunted and executed by ‘heroic’ hunters, this flick pushes things in an even less believable direction given people’s relationship with linear television these days: people religiously watching one program where three victims are selected, demonised by the program makers, and then graphically executed on camera.

Would people watch that? Of course they would. But what is this thing called ‘television’ they keep referring to? No-one watches that now, so why would they be watching it in the future?

dir: Timo Tjahjanto

2025

Nobody 2 is maybe the sequel nobody wanted to a film called Nobody, which someone wanted because it was a minor hit. Premised with “what if you had a middle aged guy bored with his life who decides to go on John Wick- like rampages just for shits and giggles and because his family think he’s pathetic?” it really struck a chord with shlubs and schlemiels everywhere.

Wow, what a premise. So in the first flick the main guy was bored, enervated, listless, a lump to his wife and kids, going through the motions, despite having been at an earlier point in his life a government sanctioned killer of killers. He decides to come out of retirement not because of any crisis or because anyone killed his dog or anything; it’s just because he’s bored.

And he beats up some Russians, which leads to needing to kill more Russians, and by the end he has to kill all the Russians. And then everyone; wife, children, dog, they are satisfied and grateful, and Hutch (Bob Odenkirk) gives up his boring job and goes back to killing people full time. Everybody’s happy!

This sequel is predicated on the premise that even someone really good at killing would get bored of his job eventually. It entirely replicates the whole basis of the first flick, being that Hutch is working in such a dedicated fashion that it’s indistinguishable from the mundane job he was previously doing down at the cracker factory that left him disconnected from his family and dissatisfied with life in general. So, it’s exactly where the first one started from, but it tenders a different solution to his existential malaise this time: maybe a holiday from all the killings will help Hutch reconnect with his family, by actually spending time with them?

dir: Gerald Johnstone

2025

M3GAN 2.0 is a terrible title. I mean, M3GAN was a terrible title too, since where does it leave them to go in a third instalment? Nowhere! You can’t “do” M3GAN again even if it would make visual sense, or M3GAN 3.0 even if it makes this distorted type of number plate mental “sense” where people use 4s instead of As or 3s instead of Es.

Every time I have to look at it I sarcastically mumble to myself “huh, Mah-three-gan too” like I’m one of the idiots from Beavis and Butthead. Which possibly accounts for some of my troubles on public transport recently.

It’s painful. Like watching someone have to come up with a password that has one uppercase letter and a number and a non-alphanumeric symbol in order to proceed, and The System keeps rejecting it.

It makes me shudder just seeing it. Anyway, after the surprise super success of the first film, which was about a foster mother farming out her parental responsibilities to a complicated “mobile” device, and having the whole world punished for it, they made this one. I don’t think the title of the 3rd one is going to be much of an issue, since this sequel tanked so hard.

The first one made hundreds of millions. This one despite following the Terminator 2: Judgement Day template, made tens of millions of dollars. Flicks that make tens of millions don’t get sequels these days.