5 stars

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: Jesse Armstrong

2025

Ye gods I fucking hated this movie.

But I have to be fair – I have no doubt the intention was to get us to hate these people with every fibre of our beings. After all, the writer and director of this horrible satire is Jesse Armstrong, probably best known for creating Succession: a series about a terrible media mogul and his defective children. Any resemblances to Rupert Murdoch and his cursed progeny are purely intentional.

The luxury that the series had was having the time to show these despicable characters from a number of different angles, such that the sheer enormity of their vileness could be appreciated from different perspectives, in numerous contexts, in countless ways, for years.

This here movie Mountainhead is just a movie, so we’re hopefully only ever going to have this exposure to these deeply shitty billionaires this one time for this collection of toxic minutes, 109 of them, to be exact. Amidst all of those minutes were scant moments where I didn’t want to kick my screen in.

There are some things too strange to satirise. The rise of the tech billionaires has given us these strange people to mock or, for many even stranger people, symbols to idolise, envy or bootlick. They have acquired political power through their control of social media or through the sheer magnitude of their wealth; they wield outsized influence with complete impunity, and we just shrug our shoulders, and go back to whatever it was we were doing before. Probably doomscrolling.

This stuff is well known if you’ve read any news at all over the last however many years, but the solution, unless you’re Luigi Mangioni, isn’t immediately clear. It’s one thing to joke about whipping the guillotines out, but the reality is that they are the new aristocracy, so high above us, and who’s going to lug a guillotine up into the mountains of Utah, anyway?

dir: Jaume Collet-Serra

2025

I wanted to like this. I wanted to watch a version of this kind of movie and enjoy it.

You can’t always get what you want, though, and regardless of the Rolling Stones song that’s been lying to us for so many decades, sometimes you don’t get what you need either.

This was never going to be it. Not with this director.

The central question of the movie, being who is the woman in the yard in the movie called The Woman In the Yard, is a question that is answered too many times to diminishing returns each time. It should not be like that. Who the woman in the yard is, should be irrelevant, if mainly she’s meant to inspire unease and evoke terror.

Is this an update of The Woman in Black, who just happens to be Black, terrorising a Black family? I wish I could say it was. That story has an explanation of what the people being terrorised are going through, as in the reason for it. It tells those people, obsessed with a ‘logical’ explanation for something happening that’s supernatural, and they fool themselves into thinking there’s a way out of their predicament. A rational solution to an irrational problem. They often do this in horror films.

The beauty of it is that better horror flicks only use it as another rug beneath the audience’s feet to pull out from under them when the time is right. Vengeful, enraged supernatural entities don’t always care about when you’ve dotted your Is and crossed your Ts; they want to torment people for a need for vengeance that cannot be sated. Beyond Death, beyond all reason, beyond our desperate need for rationality.

This isn’t one of the better horror flicks, so the ‘explanation’ ends up being, in the immortal words of an ancient Saturday Night Live sketch, a floor wax AND a dessert topping! And yet in writing that I feel a bit churlish, especially in terms of how seriously it seems to treat at least one part of the story.

Grief, in case you haven’t experienced it yet, and it’s unlikely that you haven’t, dear reader, is vast, as you know. Guilt is terrible, regret is awful, lots of feelings are harrowing, but grief is… so infinite does it seem that it can feel like flailing in an endless ocean with no floor and no land on the horizon.

It’s the thing with feathers and claws, yes, and plenty more clunky metaphors.

(誤判)

dir: Donnie Yen

2025

Two of my favourite tv shows from the 1990s were Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The West Wing. The longstanding joke viewers of both shows used to bandy about was “one of these shows is a fantasy about a group of competent, funny people who fight evil on a regular basis and win, and the other show is Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

No one really thought The West Wing was an actually accurate representation of life in the Oval Office, especially now that the current occupant is a feces-flinging orangutan, and we finally realise that if the worst people in the world get together, with the worst of intentions, the worst people will vote for them, with hilarity ensuing for the rest of the world, democracy be damned.

But at least it adhered to some real world aesthetics and physics. This here film The Prosecutor is possibly one of the least believable legal dramas I’ve ever seen in my life, and I say that as someone who knows nothing about the law in Hong Kong and how it is practiced.

The funniest, absolute funniest part is that this is allegedly based on a true story.

Ponder if you will this set up. There is a policeman called Fok (Donnie Yen), and he and his fellow cops take down an entire gang in an abandoned, I dunno, factory or something. They take them all the way down, as in, the opening gun battle is spectacular and vicious, even resorting to first person perspective like it’s a shooter. However, even though the boss of the gang is arrested at the scene, and nearly killed a cop (who Fok saved at the last minute, resulting in him being in traction), he gets off because of top notch lawyering.

Fok becomes so despondent at this result that he quits the Hong Kong police force, goes to uni to study law, and then 8 years later becomes a junior prosecutor, because he’s certain he could do better.