Three Films Make A Post: Blood, sweat and tutus.

Pretty Lethal (2026): A small troupe of perpetually quarrelling ballerinas – I’d be thankful if someone could explain the minor ballerina genre movie wave of the last twelve months or so to me – get on the bad side of some Hungarian gangsters and ex-ballerina Uma Thurman and thus have to apply their skills rather differently from their usual norm. Though, it turns out, ballet is a martial art.

For easy direct-to-streaming cinema, Vicky Jewson’s little film is a decent enough watch, pleasantly short and clearly sure of the kind of thing it wants to be. I’d rather have preferred it to have taken its own silly set-up a little more seriously instead of going the lazy route of being ironic about it, but of the three “ballerinas doing violence” movies I’ve seen in the last year or so, this is at least the most entertaining. Which doesn’t say too much, but hey, I take what I can get.

Afterburn (2025): A solar flare destroyed the Eastern hemisphere, leaving Europe a mess of minor warlords and grey ruins. Treasure hunter Jake (Dave Bautista) works for the perhaps not quite as terrible would-be king of Britain (Samuel L. Jackson), somewhat unwillingly, and is tasked to liberate the Mona Lisa from the continent. The plot will involve an evil Russian general (Kristofer Hivju) with fascist world (or what’s left of it) domination on his mind, as well as a beautiful freedom fighter (Olga Kurylenko). Also, a plot twist concerning the Mona Lisa nobody will ever have seen coming (ha).

I genuinely admire both Bautista and Kurylenko quite a bit, and always feel a bit sad when they waste their talents on something like this deeply uninspired action movie by J.J. Perry. Their presence, as well as Jackson’s willingness to put some effort into even the lamest nothing of a role, do their job of pulling this from being completely uninteresting into the realm of the vaguely watchable. Though for a guy coming from stunt and action work, Perry’s not terribly adept at directing stunts and action.

Raw File (2025): I found this piece of low budget POV horror about an investigator (Monica Oprisan) and her trusty cameraman (the voice of Alexander Bishop and the camerawork of director Aaron Dobson) having a very bad night in a large apartment complex while looking into a curious suicide to be a pleasant surprise. Once this gets going, the film shows some actual ambition: neat bits and pieces of lore and worldbuilding that cross ideas of the demonic with those of high strangeness are slowly revealed, some actual action is staged, and everything is presented without overstaying its welcome, leaving me pretty happy.

In the Lost Lands (2025)

In a post-apocalyptic future that has turned into something of a weird fiction style fantasy world. Ageless witch Gray Alys (Milla Jovovich) plies her trade in what is apparently the only city left – a hellhole of slavery and inquisition-based religion ruled over by a by now very old Overlord. Alys is hunted by the inquisition, but manages to escape regularly from their clutches, and even the gallows, accidentally putting revolutionary ideas into the heads of the enslaved populace on the way.

For reasons never explained, Alys is bound to fulfil any wish somebody pays her for. The fulfilment of these wishes, as she warns as a matter of course, doesn’t usually work out as pleasantly as her customers hope.

Surprisingly even to Alys, the Overlord’s Queen (Amara Okereke) comes by with a very specific, and somewhat peculiar, wish – she wants to acquire the power of a shapeshifter. To find one to rob of his powers, Alys has to travel into the Lost Lands, the dangerous wastelands surrounding the city. She needs a guide through these places, and chooses the drifter Boyce (Dave Bautista), who just happens to be the secret lover of the Queen. On their travels, fighting their way through various dangers and hunted by a train carrying Alys’s arch enemy, the Inquisition’s main Enforcer (Arly Jover), they do of course fall in love.

In between, we pop in on the Queen and her palace intrigues.

Here I am again, enjoying a Paul W.S. Anderson movie. He’s not always making it easy – his insistence on casting his wife Jovovich who still can’t act her way out of a paper bag is certainly a particular stumbling block for me. But say what you want about the guy, he’s clearly doing the auteur thing where he puts all of his personal obsessions into his movies, and doesn’t give a crap if they are en vogue or not. He’s very much like Wes Anderson in that way, but with more monsters.

Visually, tonight’s Anderson has clearly become fascinated by the colours grey and brown, going for a wasteland so desaturated and woozily shot, the insane spotlight glint in Bautista’s eyes coming with its own lens flare tends to be the most colourful thing on screen. And yes, in Anderson’s world, eye glints have their own intense – and I mean intense - lens flare effect, as have torches, skulls and everything else the polishing-mad wasteland maid I assume roams the place just off-camera has polished to a sheen.

Ill-advised and ugly as it may be, this is certainly a conscious aesthetic decision, making the supposedly ugly post-apocalyptic wasteland indeed pretty damn ugly.

As ugly as his world looks, and as grimdark as things get, there’s a palpable sense of fun here that also made Monster Hunter rather enjoyable. The monsters, the incredible gothic train, the fucking werewolf, the mediaeval Mad Max costumes are all things Anderson clearly has a blast with getting on screen. Quite a bit of that enjoyment makes its way at least to this viewer. Plus, I always appreciate Bautista. See also, rule of cool.

Three Films Make A Post: Winning is all in the execution.

The Killer’s Game (2024): J.J. Perry’s undemanding action comedy mostly recommends itself through a series of increasingly strange set pieces – blandness certainly isn’t a problem here – and through featuring a bunch of actors I always have time for: Dave Bautista, Ben Kingsley, Sofie Boutella, Terry Crews, Alex Kingston, Scott Adkins (with an outrageously silly Scottish accent) and more – all seemingly having fun doing their part with comically broad stereotypes, general silliness, and bloody murder.

Bautista and Boutella are actually able to sell their romance well enough you can’t help rooting for them – that’s more than most action comedies manage, if they even try.

Project Silence (2024): Keeping with bread and butter fun, Kim Tae-gon’s film about super soldier military dogs on the rampage on a bridge mixes elements of the disaster movie with those of horror and action film, stirs in some sneering at the political caste and a bit of conspiracy business and makes an enjoyable enough movie out of it.

This isn’t one of those Korean movies that first fulfil all genre expectations to then go off into the more interesting directions they have in mind, but one that’s simply aiming to be a straightforward piece of genre cinema. It does this with enough of a sense of pace and style to never overstay its welcome.

The Sadness (2021): For thirty minutes or so, I actually found myself believing the (a couple of years ago) hype Rob Jabazz’s extreme version of the infected style zombie movie had going for it. For a time, Jabazz’s slick direction, the very human performances by leads Berant Zhu and Regina Lei, and the gratuitous (at times sexual, generally grotesque) violence really promise something rather special, but the film quickly loses steam, going off on tangents of ultra-broad satire, and the kind of edge-lord business meant to shock that these days only manages to annoy me. Still looks great, mind you, and you could probably make a great fifty minute long short from the film’s best material.

In short: Knock at the Cabin (2023)

My relationship with the films of M. Nigh Shyamalan has been long, rough, and one-sided, resulting in quite a few annoyed write-ups by me. With most directors, I’d simply have given up on their films or shelved them for a later decade (once our AI overlords abolish work for anyone but robots), and spared my imaginary readers some suffering. Thing is, on a technical level, Shyamalan has a second great film in him, he’s just not interested in making it, apparently.

Instead, we get this incredibly offensive hymn to literal sacrifice, a film that masturbates on the altar Abraham has dragged Isaac onto, and doesn’t even leave in the biblical get out of jail free card, I was only kidding, buddy. For Shyamalan, apparently worse than the godhood of the Old Testament, insists on his sacrifice. Which results in a film that exults in fulfilling the random whims of an ill-defined godhood for no reason whatsoever, instead of saying no to what the film can’t even bring itself to call a monstrosity. Ideologically and morally, this is complete opposite of the Paul Tremblay novel it supposedly adapts, by the way, and while I’m not actually much of an admirer of the writer’s body of work, that has rather more to do with his concept and execution of ambiguity rather than his books getting hot and bothered at bending the knee to abuse and monstrosity (because they do the opposite).

Apart from its moral bankruptcy (and when do you find me complaining about a film’s morality?), and some bizarre ideas (the “four human qualities” are apparently malice, nurture, healing and guidance, whatever that’s supposed to mean), the film suffers from another problem as well: namely, while I approve of Shyamalan’s decision to for once eschew his beloved, idiot, plot twist in the end, thus we get a film where everything that happens in it is laid out right at its beginning, and is indeed happening as advertised, which really isn’t how a narrative is supposed to work, last I checked. Given this, the film feels drawn out and draggy, shambling to its enraging foregone conclusion with little dramatic tension, however dramatic the score by Herdís Stefánsdóttir swells.

That this thing wastes a great performance by Dave Bautista only adds further insult to injury.

Army of the Dead (2021)

After a zombie outbreak (of ragers and shamblers) in the city, Las Vegas has been quarantined, surrounded by a wall of construction containers. There’s also some business about a refugee camp surrounding the city that seems very much like the film (rightfully) sticking it to ICE. The – most probably very orange – president of the US has decided to finally just nuke the city, just in time for the 4th of July.

Shady billionaire Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) hires zombie war hero turned diner cook Scott Ward (Dave Bautista) for a little project that really needs to happen before the end of Vegas: secretly – and highly illegally – getting rather a lot of money out of a casino vault.

Scott’s team is going to consist of old friends and partners as well as the mandatory wild cards. As with all heists, problems arise: Scott’s estranged daughter (Ella Purnell) tags along to rescue a friend from the city, there’s treachery in the ranks (committed by exactly the guy everyone expects to betray them), and the zombies turn out rather less mindless than they should be; also Frank Frazetta fans.

How much or how little one likes Zack Snyder’s Netflix zombierama Army of the Dead will probably depend on one’s willingness to survive the huge amounts of self-indulgence on display. This is most definitely a film made by a guy who’d be the wacky one in a comedy act, desperately needing a straight person in the editing room to say no to him. Because there’s nobody of that description around, Snyder puts whatever the hell he thinks is cool into the film, if it’s good for the movie as a whole or not. This certainly leads to a film that’s going to surprise a viewer quite regularly – sometimes with how daft Snyder is actually getting, at other times causing admiration for pretty much the same thing. It’s not terribly good for the film as a dramatic unit, lending everything a stop and start pacing as well as lacking focus.

On the plus side, this also makes Army of the Dead a film that’s very seldom boring, full as it is of genuinely cool zombie world building, a Siegfried and Roy tiger gone very right indeed, visual homages to Frank Frazetta, and a tendency to in turns completely lean into genre tropes, in others to playfully and very consciously go out of the way to not fulfil them.

Tonally, the film’s all over the place, turning from the goofiest low brow humour imaginable to perfectly serious attempts at character work at the drop of a hat, apparently relishing idiotic jokes and needlessly deep back stories equally, clearly following the maximalist rule that when much is good than too much can only be better. Really, it’s a cheesy metal cover made movie, often actually as cool as it believes to be, at other times so dumb it is rather charming.

In between the veritable shower of the very very dumb and the actually rather pointlessly clever, Snyder has also packed quite a few great action scenes. In fact, in the hands of filmmakers willing to set themselves some limits, decide which of four films happening at the same time they are actually trying to make, and focus on making it, this could have been one of the great action horror movies. In practice, Army of the Dead is a whole lot of fun and deeply stupid as well as clever ideas thrown into a mixer and then shot by a guy who does know how to make any old crap look slick. Is it a “good” movie? Probably not, but it’s so entertaining in its lack of inhibitions and so full of its director’s personal obsessions, it certainly is a very fun one indeed. Depending on the day you had, that can be quite a bit better than a good one.

Three Films Make A Rather Grumpy Post: Buckle up for a ***** ride

Stuber (2019): Well, at least that tagline is honest about the quality of the movie, which is a bit of a shame seeing how much I usually enjoy the body of work of many of people in front of the camera here. But what good is an action comedy with a script (by Tripper Clancy) that can hardly land any joke even if most of them come out of Kumail Nanjiani’s and Dave Bautista’s mouths, two gentlemen with excellent comedic timing? And what good is an action comedy whose direction (by Michael Dowse) is so bland, it completely wastes some perfectly good set-ups for violence and shouting (as well as Bautista’s and Iko Uwais’s talents in this regard)? This one’s really only recommended to people who think the title is funny, methinks.

Portals (2019): To stay very much in the same realm, the abilities of the directors behind this weird SF horror anthology – or at least three out of four of them, namely Eduardo Sánchez, Liam O’Donnell and Timo Tjahjanto – stand in inverse proportion to the quality of their movie. All segments here share more or less the same problems, featuring characters who aren’t fleshed out enough for the psychological aspects of the horror to work, a weird threat feels rather more generic than actually weird, and little sense of actual tension to anything happening. There’s not much for any audience to actually care about here, nor does the film present any idea that feels even the faintest bit fleshed out. Tjahjanto’s segment is probably the strongest because it does at least have a tiny bit of dramatic pull, but it’s still disappointingly mediocre. On the plus side, at least it’s not a bro horror anthology.


Vox Lux (2018): Let’s finish this as grumpily as we started, with Brady Corbet’s – also director of the much superior The Childhood of a Leader – anti-pop movie full of songs that may mirror the most insipid side of mainstream pop music but too much in loathing with it to come up with songs for its protagonist that could still believably be hits. One can’t help but think that Sia, who is responsible for the songs, just used old songs of her own deigned too bad to put them out under her own name. Our main character Celeste starts as something of a human being but increasingly turns into a caricature, something that’s not at all helped but the most misguided performance by the usually extremely capable Natalie Portman I’ve ever seen. Structurally and stylistically, the film is more straining to acquire an artsy patina instead of actually doing anything artistically interesting. I also can’t help but raise an eyebrow at a film that so clearly wants to criticize the commodification of pain in popular culture but actually does exactly the same thing, just with an expression of general loathing for said culture on its face.

In short: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

If you’re looking for a counter-argument to the idea that the big commercial movie universes suppress all individual directorial expression, the Guardians movies are your most obvious starting point, seeing as their tone and style fit exactly into the oeuvre of James Gunn. Witness the way crude and blunt humour sometimes hide the rather more clever jokes the film makes; or just watch how cynical little asides so often glide into moments of actual human emotion that are just as important for the film as the big set pieces and explosions are. And these are pretty damn important to the film, it’s just that Gunn clearly sees no qualitative difference between the loud and the quiet, the goofy and the clever. Blockbuster cinema here means a film that sets out to fulfil all kinds of different expectations, not to be all things to all people, but because being a bit messy and complicated and rich is what this sort of filmmaking should be about.

One might argue that the film’s thematic concerns about families of choice, of blood and of chance are not the most original ones but I suspect very much most members of the film’s audience will have found themselves involved in one or more of these kinds of families, and can certainly connect to some of what’s going on under the loud, beautiful and bonkers surface; which is more than I can say about these “universal”, important films beloved by mid-brow criticism that are inevitably about the sex life of rich people or academics. Plus, Gunn really doubles down when he uses well-worn tropes – one just has to look at the shape, form and dimension the standard “killing of the father” takes on in this film. It’s big in the best way.


But what really does make this such a wonderful film is how much care Gunn takes with the small things. It’s not just the nearly absurd number of throwaway gags going on in the background (and certainly not stopping with the end credits), it’s how tiny dialogue moments from the first Guardians are given greater meaning (and ambiguity) through just as tiny throw-away lines here, how there’s always a little more going on in every scene than the most direct reading of it suggests.