Action

dir: Gareth Edwards

2025

Dinosaurs. Now people are sick of them. Now people are bored of them, apparently.

Except kids. Kids between the ages of, I dunno, 5 and 12 are still fascinated by them, but everyone else is suffering from reptilian fatigue. I guess.

These films do seem to be doing a bizarre meta-commentary on themselves. They seem to be saying “well, sure, we keep pumping these out, and your interest waxes and wanes, but maybe this time…?” The last flick, Jurassic World Dominion, described a world with an abundance, an embarrassment of riches of dinosaurs. A modern world overflowing with them. They were on the streets, in people’s breakfast cereals, on their subways; you couldn’t get away from them.

To combat the plethora of thunder lizards they hired / cast way too many people, humans (if you include Chris Pratt amongst them), including the other OGs of the franchises, being Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum (and 17 other main roles, no exaggeration). And yet when was the last time you heard anyone say anything positive about that flick other than “it was nice to see Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum again?”

I mean, these days… if you quizzed most people, they wouldn’t even be able to tell you what the last one’s title was, they’d probably just say in conversation “the last one.”

Add to that, this one, which people, if they saw it, will just refer to as the last one. As maximalist as the previous one might have sounded, in this one the dinosaurs have made a full retreat by mostly regaining their status as extinct. Only random, narratively convenient dinosaurs still live these days, and that’s mostly around the equator, mostly just doing their thing.

Those areas are marked off limits to humans, and are patrolled etc to keep them out rather than the dinos in, yet of course the characters here will need some reason to break in and be chased by dinosaurs for a couple of hours for our amusement.

It’s very much a return to the traditional model of just having people run around as much as possible as dinosaurs try to eat them. And the classic, most traditional model of this needs kids to arbitrarily be wedged into the story so that kids can be imperiled, which we enjoy more, somehow?

dir: Christopher McQuarrie

2025

Enough already.

We’ve seen enough of Tom Cruise running. We get it. You’re the boy that won’t grow up, besides being in your 60s. We further get it: you’re really fit for your age, and possibly Scientology is keeping you eternally youthful (I mean, comparatively, for someone your age). And you can run fast and jump off things and onto other things, and that you’re “famous” for doing your own stunts.

We get it. No-one’s saying you can’t do all of that stuff. We’re just saying, okay, we believe you, but that’s enough already.

These films have never been about a team of heroes who save the world from megalomaniacal villains. They have all been about one guy, called Ethan Hunt, who saves the world routinely, and then there are some hangers on. Of course they do “important” stuff, but if they weren’t around, Ethan Hunt would doubtless figure out how to save the day some other way, he just wouldn’t have someone around to explain things to (for the audience’s sake). Sure, they could have gone the Deadpool route and have had him continuously talking to the audience, but even his star power couldn’t make that that interesting for eight fucking movies.

This film completes whatever all that bullshit was that they did in the previous movie, which, if I recall, was called Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1. Terrible name for a movie, almost as bad as calling a film The Last Samurai and having Tom Cruise as the main character. In the previous film there was a really nasty guy called Gabriel (Esai Morales) who strutted around mostly killing women that Ethan Hunt had spoken to or held hands with. He did this for his own personal gratification, not generally because the plot required it. He also happened to be in league with an AI that had reached self-awareness and therefore immediately planned to kill everyone.

What would an AI want with a dead planet? No idea, but I am not as smart as theoretical AIs in films where people jump motorbikes onto trains or fight people for parachutes in biplanes or have to find things in sunken submarines in order to save us all.

dir: Len Wiseman

2025

I’m calling this film Ballerina 2025 to differentiate it from the South Korean action film Ballerina from a couple of years ago, because calling it its full title of From the World of John Wick: Ballerina is just too embarrassing except to the kinds of people who live to work in marketing. To them such a title is sweeter than crack.

The only other thing it has in common with the South Korean film from 2023 is that the film is not about a ballerina at all: that flick was about a depressed super assassin who wanted revenge against a jerk who sexually abused her only friend, leading to hundreds of deaths. This flick is about a pretend ballerina who’s really a super assassin who wants revenge on the guy who killed her father, leading to hundreds of deaths.

It is unashamedly a John Wick flick that doesn’t have John Wick as the lead that still, thanks to situating it temporarily between the 3rd and 4th movies, still has John fucking Wick in it. You know, as someone who saw the other 4 movies, I did wonder if he killed enough people back then.

Now he’s killed even more. It’s an excellent cheat. Despite the results of the 4th film in his franchise, he could be killing more people for all eternity. So what if he killed over 400 people over the course of those four flicks – he can always beat his highest score.

I don’t know if this flick was successful money-wise guaranteeing more films where someone who’s not a ballerina kills hundreds more people, but there is something to be said for a flick that illuminates / betrays the emptiness of its central conceit: It was always absurd that one person could kill literally hundreds of people at a time. And now, with even less justification, the mayhem continues, like she’s a one person IDF, mowing down countless Palestinians…

Numbers. It comes down to numbers. If the mainstay attraction of those films is a main character killing hundreds of people, then I guess a film where the protagonist maims dozens of people but only kills the main bad guy would be considered a failure. Never fear, she probably kills, I dunno, 30, 40 people here? She gets to roast a bunch of them, but also stab and shoot a whole bunch of them too.

And she does it really well. Ana de Armas is blessed with being a performer who is often as good as the film she’s in (like her roles in No Time to Die, or Knives Out), and often she puts in a better performance than the film deserves (The Gray Man, Ghosted, Dark Waters, Blonde). She’s pretty great.

(파과)

dir: Min Kyu-dong

2025

I’ve never pretended to be an expert on South Korean culture or South Korean movies, but I can definitively say that they sometimes make great films.

This isn’t one of them, but it’s important to remind yourself of that fact.

This flick is okay, though. It is essentially a South Korean take on John Wick, just with a woman of the same age in the role, and instead of killing thousands of people she only kills a hundred or so. It must be a modesty thing.

The strongest element in this flick’s favour is that it delivers exactly what the title promises: There is an older South Korean woman in this flick, and she is often shown holding a variety of knives, with which she usually kills people. Or she at least harms them greatly and gets them to reconsider the life choices that brought them to this moment in time.

On the other hand you could argue that instead of being an example of truth in advertising, that it’s actually false advertising because, like in a lot of South Korean action flicks, sure they start off with knives, but then by the end there’s guns akimbo, hammers and anything else that comes to hand involved.

There isn’t anything particularly unusual or novel about this flick, but it has something of a more melodramatic premise than these kinds of flicks usually require. I mean the aforementioned Keanu Reeves franchise used the murder of the protagonist’s dog as the starting point of a 4 movie killing spree that killed most of the (assassin) population of three continents. This flick, again about a stone cold killer, really leans in to the (fairly generic) premise of that stone cold killer having at least one thing or one person or one group of people that they really care about to justify all the wickedness that is to come.