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.

In short: The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)

In the near future, the world is on the brink of war – or really, a lot of wars everywhere – caused by an energy crisis. There is still one international attempt at solving the world’s energy troubles in form of a highly experimental particle accelerator built in Earth’s orbit. However, the crew of scientists (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, David Oyelowo, Daniel Brühl, John Ortiz, Chris O’Dowd, Aksel Hennie, Zhan Ziyi) can’t quite seem to crack the problem. Time is running out, and tensions between the crew members as well as on Earth rise. Things really start to go to crap when one of the last possible attempts with the accelerator actually seems to succeeds, only with something happening to the station that turns things decidedly weird. Not to speak of the little fact that our protagonists seem to have lost Earth.

Ironically, that isn’t even the most troubling problem our protagonists now encounter. The station seems to take on a life of its own, its walls shifting and moving and even starting to become a bit nippy. And let’s not even talk about the woman (Elizabeth Debicki) the crew finds in one of the station’s walls who says she’s a member of the team. A member nobody seems to remember, but who sometimes appears and disappears in photographs of the crew, for that matter.

After five minutes of intense hype, Julius Onah’s Netflix entry in the Cloverfield universe got a right critical drubbing from mainstream critics. Me, I found myself enjoying the film just fine, sometimes even more than that, but I can understand why not only mainstream critics but also people who actually have a clue about fantastic genre film aren’t terribly happy with the movie at hand. It is, after all, impossible to deny that Paradox does waste quite a few interesting ideas and a wonderful cast on a very standard plot with a very standard finale and on in general not terribly interesting characters. There’s much more – and much stranger things – to be done with its conceit of alternative universes and I wish the film had given more characters than just Mbatha-Raw’s reason to be emotionally involved with the alternative universe they find themselves in. Or, you know, had brought them into a universe that’s just stranger than the one we got.

On the other hand, the actors are good fun in the roles they actually have, and the plot, while not as interesting as I would have hoped for, does hit its standard beats expertly enough. I also like the way the film kinda-sorta explains how the different Cloverfield films might relate to one another in a way that leaves the door wide open for the following Cloverfields to do whatever the hell they want.


Because I’m me, I can’t end this without mentioning the utter glee I felt once the business about the arm (the film’s true hero) started. There’s something to be said about a film that dares to do something so silly (some would say goofy) and even make it important to the plot.