Three Films Make A Post: Human traffickers beware.

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.

Bright (2017)

Los Angeles, in an Urban Fantasy world humanity shares with orc, elves and other typical fantasy creatures, and where some Dark Lord or other did Dark Lord-y things two thousand years ago, with only the orcs taking his side (a decision that has hounded their descendants ever since). Somehow, the place is still the same LA we know from a thousand movies and TV shows – with some very minor changes - but that’s Urban Fantasy, the least imaginative sub-genre concerned with the fantastic for you. Street cop Daryl Ward (Will Smith) is just returning from sick leave following getting shot, and he’s not a happy man. Being partnered up with the first orc managing to become a police officer, Nick Jakoby (the great Joel Edgerton) hadn’t been exactly to Ward’s taste already, but Nick’s inability to apprehend the orc who shot Ward really makes the always pretty grumpy human extra-grumpy.

To be fair to the man, Ward is probably the least orc-racist cop in town. Jakoby for his part doesn’t just have to cope with daily racism by humans but also with the fact that his nature as an “unblooded” orc (even filing down his excellent orc teeth “to fit in”) and a cop makes him anathema to orc society too. But, since this is a buddy cop movie, there will soon come quite a bit of outward pressure to turn the squabbling cops into a proper couple: they stumble onto the trail of a lost magic wand (in this world about as dangerous as an H-bomb), the elf who stole it (Lucy Fry), and the evil sorceress who actually owns it (Noomi Rapace, giving one of her by now patented fun villain performances), among other things. Lots of violence ensues, one-liners are uttered.

I’ve seen Bright described as one of the worst films of 2017 by more than one critic, which rather suggests these guys and gals haven’t seen all that many films during the year, or aren’t able to appreciate David Ayer’s Netflix big budget film for what it is: a pretty traditional buddy cop action movie (with a bit of comedy mixed in, of course) that just happens to include fantasy elements to mix things up a little. As such, it’s not terribly intelligent a movie, and its explorations of racism and police violence are paper thin, but that’s really not what this sort of film is about. Rather, it belongs to a genre all about men who can only express their tender feelings towards one another via squabbling, one-liners, and physical violence, and the quality of whose films is consequently measured by the fun-ness of the squabbling, the hilarity (intentional or un) of the one-liners, and the quality of the action sequences.

And I have to say, the squabbling is pretty fun – in part thanks to the delivery of old squabbling pro Will Smith and the always delightful Joel Edgerton –, the one-liners are cheesy, and the action set pieces are loud, varied, and sometimes downright exciting (turns out evil elves/elfs are pretty much supervillains while our poor heroes are only normally human/orcish, and not even the Batman kind of normal). That Ayer knows how to direct an action sequence was what made the last third of his generally misguided Suicide Squad watchable; here, the action is embedded in a script that may lack in depth but which certainly is much more focused than that of the DC movie (at least it knows what the film at hand is actually supposed to be about), providing Ayers with a much better environment to work to his strengths in this regard, something he does well and repeatedly.


There’s really not much more to Bright, but for my tastes, it ends up a thoroughly entertaining bit of popcorn cinema.

In short: Suicide Squad (2016)

Like all DC superhero movies not directed by Christopher Nolan, David Ayer’s Suicide Squad is at times tough going, full of awkward tonal shifts, scenes that don’t serve any function beyond making the film longer (I shudder to think what the “extended cut” adds to a film that’s at least twenty minutes too long already), and featuring cameos from Affleck-Batman (which is to say, the Batman who is only not worse than the Clooney version because he’s not in Joel Schumacher films) and Jared Leto, the first movie Joker that can only be described as boring and would-be edgy.

There are numerous script problems. Namely, the first twenty minutes are a barrage of exposition and horrible dialogue, followed by ten minutes of posturing (the film’s pretty heavy on assumed coolness through posing anyway) before something akin to a plot evolves. And then there’s the sad fact that the thing clearly doesn’t know what to do with most of its characters (hint: copy more and better from Ostrander and Yale’s run on the comics next time), leaving the actors hanging – they might just as well have called the film “Deadshot & Harley & Some Other Guys”.

On the positive side, Will Smith is a much better Deadshot than I expected, even though I much prefer the suicidally depressed version of the character to the “killer who has a daughter and is therefore likeable” trope the film goes for, and Margot Robbie makes a fine Harley in search of a better Joker.

Generally, the film’s second hour works much better than first one, mostly because it finally stops with the introductions and the exposition and starts to show us the characters actually doing stuff instead of telling us that they are some day going to do stuff or once have done stuff. The action’s not particularly great or inventive going by superhero blockbuster standards but it’s also not the embarrassment of the action in Deadpool (which, unlike apparently everyone else, I loathed quite a bit) or the boring never-ending carnage of Dawn of the Justice League. And while the writing generally stays clichéd as all get-out (even for a genre that thrives on its clichés), it does at the very least hit the right clichés in the end. Why, there are even a handful of scenes that suggest a more interesting film about redemption and hitting monsters with baseball bats.

I don’t know how to call a film whose first hour is a tedious mess and whose second one is perfectly decent popcorn cinema, but Suicide Squad is that movie.