6 stars

dir: Zach Cregger

2025

It was, at least for me, always going to be hard for this director to follow up his last, very excellent horror flick Barbarian. It was so good and so unexpected that, yes, okay, I demand, in full Karen mode not to speak to his manager but for him to make another solid, unexpected, unpredictable flick.

I guess he did that. It was successful, more successful than Barbarian financially, and it had ads on tv and on bus shelters in my strange neck of the woods.

So why didn’t I like it that much?

There are parts of the so-called “American Experiment” that, to the people outside of America, make it look utterly insane. I’m not going to lower myself to talk about the political stuff. The gun thing, the collective shoulder shrug after each new gun massacre, the thoughts and prayers and business as usual after classrooms get shot up, and countless children die, that makes them all look collectively fucking insane.

Weapons, perversely, pops us into this national psychosis, but has nothing to do with gun violence. It’s animated by something that almost seems like one of the tragedies alluded to, but instead takes it into an unpredictable yet unfortunately unproductive direction. Because of how insanely comical the ‘solution’ is, how outside of actual human experience, for me the flick itself becomes something of a shoulder shrug, where you wonder what the point was.

The set up is fine, the explanation is meaningless.

One particular night in an unremarkable Pennsylvanian town, a bunch of kids, all from the same 3rd grade primary school classroom go missing, all bar one, being Alex (Cary Christopher). All seventeen of the kids snuck out of their homes at exactly 2.17am, and started running in the same direction, with their arms out behind them.

Everyone thinks the teacher, Justine (Julia Garner), must know something or be responsible. Everyone thinks Alex must know something, but he couldn’t be responsible, could he, and he’s not forthcoming with info.

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: Gavin O’Connor

2025

Who in the name of fuck asked for a sequel to The Accountant? Other than Ben Affleck, or Ben Affleck's accountant, can you imagine anyone writing letters to their local MP or kids in comment sections begging for another movie where Ben Affleck plays an autistic chartered accountant who also happens to have access to limitless funds and no shortage of weaponry?

Wait, that just sounds like another Batman sequel.

When I say that such a sequel is unlikely, when it clearly exists, it’s because the first movie, if you went into it blind, was a hilarious example of escalation into insane realms: it was the equivalent of finding out that the guy making your sandwich at the local deli is not only ex-SAS, but they’re undercover, and they can kill 50 trained killers with only their butter knife, but not only that, but they own all the butter knives in the world, and run all the Subway franchises, plus they have weapons everywhere, and they somehow can kill anyone they want to because they’re neuro-divergent?

The fact that the entirety of the characterisation they give for this character is that he’s autistic, and that it justifies two feature action films where he gets to kill hundreds of people is perhaps an unintended slight against an entire community of people who never asked for such slander, but also it raises the bar to a completely unrealistic level of expectation. It was bad enough back in the day when Rain Man established an unearned and unrealistic expectation that severely autistic people make up for their lack of social graces and ability to communicate by being able to count cards in Las Vegas; these contemporary flicks posit that autistic people make for great killers, hackers and super criminals just because they’re on the spectrum.

dir: Christian Zübert

2025

So now there’s another Die Hard variant, only this time it’s “German Die Hard but in the American Consulate so they speak German and English half the time, and WITH A WOMAN!”, plus she doesn’t really need to be in the building the whole time, but she chooses to, because they’ve kidnapped HER SON!

As Die Hard variants, this is ok. I don’t know why it’s made with an English-speaking (only) audience in mind, with people never speaking too much Deutsche before reverting to English at any given time, even if they’re not people known for their crisp pronunciation of the great Germanic language. I mean, Dougray Scott pretending to be an American who’s fluent in German?

His nationality is in his name, somewhat. Now, he’s playing mid-level bureaucrat middle aged villains with bad moustaches. It’s not Movember, Dougray, no excuses for that monstrosity.

The star of the show is a German actor I’m not going to pretend I’ve seen in anything else, being Jeanne Goursaud, playing Sara Wulf, an ex-special forces type person who is our main character.

Unlike a lot of films lately starring bald ex-wrestlers or bald Stathams, Sara can fuck people up royally with some okay choreography, but she often loses fights too, which is somewhat more realistic. I mean, special forces is special forces, but they’re more likely to kill a whole village through poisoning their water supply or torture civilians just for practice rather than actually have to dominate a consulate full of Marines.