Back in Action

Make Action Great Again and Again
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.
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