Three Films Make A Post: They Say No One Can Save The World. Meet No One.

6 Underground (2019): Obviously, not being named Rex Reed, I usually talk about movies here I have stayed awake watching throughout, and seen all the way through to the bitter end. However, given the clear disrespect – if not even outright hatred - Michael Bay shows for us poor idiots watching this particular thing, and having inflicted half of it on myself, I think I do deserve at least a little compensation (like a couple of months of free Netflix, the other party responsible for this roaring garbage fire). So, even having only seen half of the film, I can most certainly say that Bay is still completely unable to stage and film action sequences, he’s even worse than he was when he shot the unparsable car chase in The Rock. Today, his action isn’t just over-edited and makes no structural sense, it has also learned to shake and strobe like a Tony Scott movie, adding the epilepsy to the headache. The “script” was written by the guys who brought us Deadpool, Zombieland and Life, so you know it was going to be some smug meta-masturbation at best, but is just probably cocaine-addled and deeply mean-spirited nonsense by writers who are so much less clever than they obviously think they are. Screw, Michael Bay, seriously.

Dog Eat Dog (2016): This Paul Schrader film with Nicolas Cage, Willem Dafoe and Christopher Matthew Cook as luckless and pretty stupid small time crooks getting themselves killed over their inability to kidnap a baby sort of fits 6 Underground. Not because it’s also one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen but because it is pretty damn mean-spirited and excessive, too, Schrader apparently trying to very belatedly make the kind of black comedy which feels heavily influenced by all those would-be Tarantinos that cropped up after Pulp Fiction. The characters are your typical Schrader troubled males with violent tendencies (or in the case of Dafoe’s aptly named “Mad Dog” more than just tendencies) but drawn with a meanness that turns them into nasty caricatures, something the film, as well as the actors clearly revels in. It’s what you call an “interesting effort” while stroking your chin thoughtfully. Also features Nicolas Cage doing a Bogart imitation, it you’re into that.


Scrooged (1988): I know, Christmas is over, but Richard Donner’s version of the old Dickens number with added media critique that still seems rather fitting today, with Bill Murray despite being in a very bad mood during production actually giving a fantastic performance, fits these other two films rather well in its often very mean-spirited vibe. Unlike the other movies in this post, it is an actual artistic success, though, and does its very best to use said mean-spiritedness to say something to, as well as do something with the audience. Even if it is only to upset us pretty terribly about humanity (our Scrooge stand-in isn’t even the worst person in the movie) and then make up for it by having Murray give a “be kind to one another” speech where he seems to be teetering at the edge of an actual breakdown. Which, I’d argue, is exactly the right way to go here, for what the more polite versions of the material tend to gloss over is that we witness a man whose every belief (nasty as those may be) has just been curb-stomped and who is trying to recreate himself as a human being live on camera.