A Working Man (2025): Unlike quite a few other friends of Stathamsploitation, I already hated David Ayer’s last cooperation with the guy, The Beekeeper. Little did I know that their next cooperation would be this thing. With writing credits for Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Dixon (the former trying to jump on the MAGA train to make up for his ever decreasing talent, the latter once a writer whose right-wing bullshit accepted a certain degree of real-world complexity, but certainly isn’t that anymore) and consequently this contains more QAnon/MAGA dog whistles than whatever they call it when they cart Trump out to spew hateful nonsense.
It’s also a surprisingly bad action movie, full of fights without any physical impact, indifferent action direction and a lack of energy that makes it painfully dull. Even Statham deserves better.
Ash (2025): Flying Lotus has certainly seen Event Horizon, played the Dead Space games and is into a bit of gore from time to time. There’s not a single original idea in the whole of the film, and it could certainly have used another editing go by somebody who isn’t tripping all of the time, but in its undemanding low budget SF horror way, this is pretty good fun. If nothing else, this has a sense of aesthetics it is all too willing to show off.
Captain America: Brave New World (2025): I am by far not as angry at this stage of Marvel Studios’ output as a lot of other people appear to be, so I actually went into the fourth Captain America movie with hopes on being entertained by a perhaps mildly politicized superhero tale.
Which I actually was for two thirds of the film’s running time, until it broke down into two separate climaxes that really would have needed to be turned into one for the film to work and a series of four(?) epilogues that also could have been fruitfully turned into one by – gasp – having more than two characters at a time interact with each other. But hey, at least it’s the film where Captain America punches an orange president.
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