Review – The Great Wall

Because the title would be too long if the movie was called The Great Amount of Money We Can Make If the Cast Appeals to Markets in Both the United States and China. Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal and (briefly) Willem Dafoe supplement an otherwise mostly Asian cast in what would otherwise have been a standard, big budget Chinese fantasy action movie. Mildly amusing

Review – The Equalizer (2014)

The folks who made this know the revenge movie formula and are good at sticking to it. Denzel Washington is a proven success playing the everyday Joe who falls back on his government assassin past when a friend is threatened. It’s emotionally satisfying to see him keep the upper hand pretty much the whole time, and it doesn’t exactly hurt that the villains are sex-trafficking Russian mobsters. Mildly amusing

Review – Superman (2025)

What an aggravating movie. For better or worse, a big part of Superman’s charm is that he consistently wins fights against the bad guys. But here our hero starts out on the losing end and rarely gains the upper hand until the very end. If the character needed to be reimagined this way, at least they should have used a different villain. In real life we’re all taking a constant beating from vile tech billionaires, so it would have been a lot more fun to watch Lex Bezos Musk Luthor take way more frequent lumps. And the animal peril is genuinely excessive, insufficiently offset by the meticulously happy ending. The cast of newcomers and semi-familiar faces do their best with what they’ve got, but overall this is hard to watch. See if desperate

Review – Meteor

I don’t know what’s more ludicrous: the science, the special effects, or Sean Connery playing an astrophysicist. And the fact that Connery has any competition for “worst part of the movie” should tell you just how bad the rest of it is. A giant title object speeding toward a cataclysmic rendezvous with Earth should have been the ultimate 70s-era disaster plot, complete with a cast of actors who should have had better agents. But both the problem and the solution (blowing it up with nuclear missiles) are so ridiculous that the whole thing’s impossible to take seriously (and kinda not funny enough to accept as laughably bad, though it does have its moments). What would Jordy Verrill say at a time like this? See if desperate

Review – Avalanche

This movie is a master class in how not to tell a story. The premise is paper thin, but even a solid set-up would have swiftly fallen victim to the ridiculous plot twists and thoroughly motiveless characters. The presence of big name stars – including Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow – should at least have been a triumph for the casting director. But instead the sight of competent actors struggling with epically terrible dialogue just calls more attention to how bad the script is. If you’re in the mood for something laughably awful, this should do nicely. Otherwise see if desperate

Review – Predator: Killer of Killers

The quality of both the animation and the storytelling strongly resemble extended cut scenes from a Predator-themed video game. Or maybe even more than one game. The first two subplots combine easily enough. Who wouldn’t want to see a badass viking and a badass ninja team up to battle Predators? But the protagonist of the third story is a World War Two era pilot. Within the episode, the Predator spaceship WW2 dogfight theme works well enough. But when this guy shows up in the arena of death with two hand-to-hand combat experts, it takes some awkward plot twists to effectively work him into the drama. When it comes to low-budget tack ons to famous franchises, I’ve seen worse. Mildly amusing

Review – Predator: Badlands

A wimpy Predator and the upper half of an android – both of whom talk too much – team up to locate and subdue a monster on a death planet. I found it innovative that all of the human-appearing characters are played by only two actors, which must have cut way down on the casting budget. Which is a good thing, as clearly they needed as much money as possible for the effects-intensive action sequences. The result is slick and clever without being particularly interesting. Mildly amusing

Review – Fear Below

The parts with the shark in it were fun. The rest of it was a vaguely unsatisfying 1930s era caper movie about divers trying to recover stolen gold from a van at the bottom of a muddy river. The acting and production values were good enough. Even the script was okay. It’s just that most of the story didn’t do much beyond bridging the gaps between moments when the shark swam in out of the murk and bit someone. Mildly amusing

Review – The Running Man (2025)

I’m not a big fan of movies that set up elaborate game rules and then either ignore or break them. If the plot isn’t going to follow its own established structure, then why bother making up rules to begin with? Even basic character motivation gets tossed to the wind for the sake of keeping the bullets flying and the explosions exploding. I thought the comic book silliness of the Schwarzenegger version was part of its charm, and that’s almost completely lacking here. And after one of Stephen King’s other Bachman books recently turned out to be better than expected, that just made the letdown here a little bit worse. So come for the action, but don’t feel like you have to stay for the story. Mildly amusing

Review – The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

This is a silly fantasy about British commandos in World War Two, but it’s a reasonably well crafted silly fantasy. The plot doesn’t make much sense, and the acting isn’t anyone’s finest hour. But the explosions are loud and the violent deaths of Nazis are frequent. What more can we ask from a 21st century action movie? Mildly amusing

Review – Kings of the Sun

What a weird movie. George “that guy from West Side Story” Chakiris plays a Mayan king who leads his people away from foreign invaders and then in turn invades the land of another group somewhere on the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico. For an extra dose of what-the-hell, Yul Brynner plays the leader of the indigenous people who must now fend off the invasion. It looked like they spent a lot of money making this without giving a lot of thought to whether anyone would actually want to see it, so it’s kind of a shame that this is at best a footnote in some otherwise legendary careers. Mildly amusing

Review – The Marvels

Yeah, this one’s pretty goofy. And though the humor doesn’t always work, it at least deserves an E for effort. Typical of the experience was the sequence in which space alien cats temporarily devour the crew of a space station while “Memories” plays on the soundtrack. And though I long for a day when it won’t be necessary to type this anymore, this production is noteworthy for having three female protagonists none of whom self-actualize or otherwise depend on men to achieve their goals. Mildly amusing

Review – Fantastic Four: First Steps

The source material for Fantastic Four movies could have been written by Stephen King, based on how many terrible movies have been made out of it. This time around the story is a run-of-the-mill retelling of the Galactus plot line with minor twists (a female Silver Surfer, the Thing as a muttering goof rather than a rocky orange rage monster). The real killer here is the art direction. The somewhere-else-in-the-multiverse aesthetic reeks of the Tomorrowland sections of Disney theme parks, somehow equally rooted in a past that never was and a future that never will be. The 1940s, 1960s and 2020s blend awkwardly at best, which doesn’t make the off-putting characters any more approachable. Pity, too. They spent a lot on the cast and the effects. See if desperate

Review – The Minotaur (1961)

Aside from a mercifully brief appearance by a sorry excuse for the title beast, this is little more than an Italian sword-and-sandals soap opera from the early 60s. See if desperate

Review – Red Ghost: Nazi Hunter

This movie’s worth it for the first five minutes alone. Killer opening aside, this is a typically Russian blend of gory action and slapstick comedy, an approach only the Russians themselves could get away with applying to Operation Barbarossa. Worth seeing

Review – War of the Worlds (2020)

This time around the Martians (or whatever they are) attack Earth during the pandemic, and they’re after our data. I’d add “for reasons that aren’t exactly clear,” but then nothing in this whole movie makes much sense. Alien motives aren’t really the worst of it. If you’ve been pining away for a long Zoom call in which the hero spends more time fussing with his family than attending to his national security duties (which seem kinda important given the circumstances), then pine no longer. See if desperate

Review – Aces High

Though I didn’t intend this at the outset, this turned out to be the first of two different adaptations of the same story that I watched back to back. This effort from 1976 relocates R.C. Sherriff’s World War One play from the trenches to the Royal Flying Corps, but otherwise the story remains largely the same. Malcolm McDowell stars as a cynical commander trying to manage naive rookies, a PTSD’d pilot and other woes amid the war’s blend of grim death and trivial melodrama. The movie is also notable for its impressive (however combat-unrealistic) aerial stunt work. Mildly amusing

Review – Gladiator 2

What happened to Ridley Scott? He used to be really good at storytelling. But this grandiose flop is anything but. It’s fidgety, moving from one brief, unrelated scene to the next with the attention span of a pre-teen child living on a diet of Pop Tarts and Pepsi. Fans of actual Roman history will find this particularly hard to follow; the plot ostensibly includes historical figures and yet the movie intersects with reality only by coincidence. I was particularly taken with the part where Caracalla makes his pet monkey and the bad guy co-consuls. After the emperor and the villain are both slain (spoiler alert, to the extent that’s a spoiler), shouldn’t that make the monkey the next monarch? Actually, Gladiator 3: Monkey Emperor might well prove to be a better outing. See if desperate

Review – Twisters

The original was one of those odd movies that’s insanely popular when it first comes out and then disappears almost entirely. This sequel skipped the first part and went straight to obscurity after some initial interest during its theatrical run. The effects are good, which is fortunate because they’re the clear star of the show. The rest of the movie is a parade of threadbare excuses for getting dangerously close to dangerous storms. Mildly amusing

Review – Vlad the Impaler

Every once in awhile you owe it to yourself to watch a propaganda movie from another nation. That way you can clearly see the witless stupidity without the cultural pressure to uncritically accept the story and its morals. So if you don’t happen to be Turkish, this should be a good choice for you. A 15th century commando squad working for Mehmet the Conqueror goes in search of revenge against Vlad Tepes. Dracula is nobody’s notion of a benevolent ruler, which makes him a natural bad guy from the Muslim perspective. Still, this is so cartoonishly dumb that it almost makes him look good. See if desperate