5 stars

dir: David Ayer

2025

Whoa whoa whoa whoa he’s A Working (Class) Man.

I’m the first to admit that when you buy a ticket to a Jason Statham movie, to act surprised that it’s like every other Jason Statham movie is a bit disingenuous, a bit deliberately naïve.

“Sure, the other twenty Statham movies I’ve seen him in have him playing an isolated stoic loner with super killing skills who comes out of retirement / obscurity to save / protect / kidnap a girl / get revenge, but then I watched the latest one and it was exactly the same as all the others!”

It’d be like watching any American movie and being amazed when guns appear.

Guns? I didn’t sign up for this!

Instead of saying this is like every other Jason Statham movie ever made, I’m just going to say it is almost indistinguishable from his last film, being The Beekeeper, except there are no bee puns at all. At All. And no Jeremy Ironses doing appalling American accents.

Speaking of which, Statham thankfully also doesn’t do an American accent, preferring to play a character that is a Brit and who served loyally for 20 years as a Royal Marines commando, killing the empire’s enemies around the globe with style, grace and presumably crumpets and cucumber sandwiches on tap.

Through this heroic work, as the gobsmackingly awful opening credit animations inform us, he bonded with his American military equivalents, a bond that has not faded yet though his service has ended, and he carries that work ethic through to his current type of employment, being hard labour.

Now, he is the working man of the title, in that he works in construction, which is fine.

I mean, if you’re a weirdo like me you could spend a whole chunk of time wondering why they went with this angle, and what it “means” to posit that a character working nobly with his hands (he’s a site manager / foreman, he doesn’t need to actually use his hands in theory). That kind of sociological pondering would amuse me perhaps the more I indulged in it, but it wouldn’t really give much of an indication as to whether this flick warrants a viewing, or whether it is terrible trash with no redeeming qualities. To point out that someone involved in this is fetishising the idea of a working class man without having any desire to depict a working class man in any way means “working man” is a costume, like “fireman”, “sexy nurse” or “stripper cop”, with no further depth to it.

dir: Russo Brothers

2025

90s nostalgia doesn’t really do much for me. This flick would seem like it’s aiming for 90s nostalgia, in the way that Stranger Things owes much of its existence and probable popularity to 80s nostalgia, and in both cases it just comes across as lazy consumerist grasping.

I guess I remember the 90s well enough to not need to revisit it through some distorted lens. Yes, I get the references, yes I remember a lot of the music and the films. No, I don’t much care for American advertising. And I still don’t think I’ve ever eaten a Twinkie, so I don’t care about them either.

I don’t think the book this was based on by Simon Stålenhag was centred around 90s nostalgia or any deep love of American consumerism. If anything, it’s main intention was to deliver gloomy, somewhat macabre graphics of an American world falling apart because of a slow-rolling apocalypse due to technology. Giant robots, gloomy landscapes, and a population absorbed into a virtual reality environment that leaves their bodies as husks strewn across a landscape traversed by a teenaged girl and a robot.

Humanity is in decline, a hive mind has emerged, and its intentions are less than benevolent. Drones from a war litter the dying landscape. It’s like The Road, but slightly more techie and with less cannibals.

The Russos take that premise and tries to deliver a Steven Spielberg film, without having the grace to craft anything interesting around that desire. They were somehow given the baffling amount of money of $320 million earth dollars to make content for their streamer of choice, being Netflix. All that money, all the freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted, and this is what they made.

dir: Ignacio Maiso

2024

This is not a sequel to The Girl With the Needle or The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo, or any of that lazy nonsense that I’m trying to imply, but it does have “Girl” in the title, and I’m on a run, lately, so.

Forgive me another digression, so soon, so frequent: I was quite saddened by the death of David Lynch recently. I had been, just before his death, and just after, watching Twin Peaks: The Return on one of the too many streaming services I am subscribed to, and enjoying it immensely, finding it now even more poignant upon his death.

And it gave me an opportunity to re-evaluate his body of work, and his approach to filmmaking, seeing as a lot of the time in the past I would often find scenes in his flicks strange, odd for oddness’s sake, or obscure / impenetrable to the point where I sometimes felt like some critics were too embarrassed to admit they had no idea what was happening in his flicks either, and were just screaming “bravo!” as loudly as they could to cover their embarrassment.

It’s only now, having read more from the man himself, and feeling like I have more of an idea as to what he was grasping for in much of his work, it feels like the strangeness that he was trying to achieve even in relatively simple scenes that would seem to go on too long, or to have stretched-out cadences, timings, beats, that he was always or at least often trying to tap into the unconscious, the dream-like, the sometimes unknowable, the horrible and the harrowing, and the beautiful and transporting, and he tried everything to achieve that, whether he got there or not.

And sometimes it maybe didn’t work, and maybe in a lot of instances it did work. Trying to do all of that in combination with trying to make something “commercially viable” always brought him into conflict with producers, tv executives, and film companies, because they don’t give a fuck about any of the above, but they do want the cachet that comes with working with someone so cool and avant garde blah blah.

So when I started watching this flick, this odd flick, and the timing felt “off”, and the editing and shot compositions seemed strange and strained, I think I was mentally in a better place to handle something weirder than usual.

dir: Todd Phillips

2024

It seems like no-one was meant to enjoy this flick. That would seem to be a strange thing to say about any flick, generally, but this flick seems so deliberately intended to undo whatever the first flick did that it seems bizarre that executives would have agreed to spend $200mill to make it and then another $100mill to market it to the world. There are few bus shelters right now in Melbourne that don’t have that film’s poster on them. They paid some sell-out muralist to cover a whole side of a building with an image of Joaquin and Gaga on it, several storeys high in the CBD.

But then, what about the film they made? I don’t know, as in I can’t pretend to have any secret knowledge of why they did what they did with this film, but I have to assume that this is exactly the film Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix wanted to make. The first one made over a billion dollars. Joaquin got a shiny golden award for Best Actor for that film.

It feels like whatever they wanted people to think about Joaquin and the character in the first flick had to be the opposite of what they get here in this anti-sequel.

Allow me to reiterate that I loathed that first film that was very successful. I did not loathe it for its success, but because I thought it was a facile and ludicrous rendering of a character (one that I don’t really care for anyway, regardless of which version is portrayed).