SHELTER

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

Much like Gerard Butler in his B-movie quality disaster flicks, Jason Statham has really carved out his niche in January-release action thrillers. It all started with the surprisingly fun The Beekeeper, which set the standard in 2024 thanks to its self-awareness as revenge trash, which somehow made it good. Now, last year’s A Working Man failed to meet that standard by being far too self-serious and thereby sucking out any chance of fun. (Also that one was actually released in March, but its original release date before being postponed was in January so I’ve decided it counts. Plus it still very much has that forgettable-January-action-thriller vibe. It should have been released in January.) With Shelter, we get a movie that sits kind of in the middle: it’s not as self-aware or quite as fun as The Beekeeper, but neither is it as gravely self-serious as A Working Man. It does have its comedic moments, thanks to a charming performance by a 14-year-old Bodhi Rae Breathnach. This plus Statham’s typical no-nonsense violence makes Shelter just compelling enough.

2026 is shaping up to be a banner year for early releases that are far better than anyone would reasonably expect them to be. Sam Raimi’s Send Help is the best example of this and the one film of this ilk most deserving of recommendation, but Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple would also qualify. Shelter is perhaps the weakest of these examples by just a slight margin, but it could also be argued that it makes the strongest case for delivering exactly what you expect of it. In any case, January and February have long been referred to as “Dumpuary” for good reason, but some filmmakers are figuring out how to make movies that fit into the genres usually reserved for this time of year but that are also actually good.

To be fair, Shelter is hardly great, but no one is expecting greatness from it, which is a key element of movies made not just simply to entertain, but to entertain simply. Statham’s previous two films featured his protagonist characters on a revenge quest, but this time director Ric Roman Waugh (who, as it happens, also directed the original Gerard Butler B-movie disaster flick Greenland) and writer Ward Parry give him a new twist this year: he’s still on a quest, but now he’s aiming to protect her from a British government that considers her a “loose end” in the framing of him as a former shadow MI6 agent.

The story and character motivations are pretty simple. Mason (Statham) has been exiled on a remote island, in hiding from a government that won’t forgive him for refusing to kill an innocent man who had worked as an informant. A man who once served with him regularly brings supplies out to him from the mainland, and has started bringing his niece, Jesse (Breathnach), along with him. And this is how Mason and Jesse meet, as she delivers the crates of supplies by rowboat from the main boat to the shore, but gets stranded on the island with him thanks to a severe rainstorm. A surprising amount of time is spent on these two alone on the island together, as Mason helps nurse Jesse’s injured ankle back to health. But when Mason is forced to take a boat to the mainland himself in order to get needed medical supplies, the British government’s far-ranging surveillance state picks him up on one of the infinite number of cameras they have access to (in this case, in the background of a TikTok video—topical!). And now, with the government alerted to his location, they descend upon the island, and this is when the action can kick into high gear.

But, does it? I’ll be fair and say there is plenty of action on Shelter, but given the kind of movie this is, I kind of wanted a little more. This movie lingers on its quiet periods a bit more than necessary. This clearly isn’t high art, so let’s just get on with what we’ve come here for. That said, a lot of the violence that does happen is pretty problematic—Shelter is wildly cavalier about collateral damage. It never seems to matter to Mason that the people he’s attacking often likely have no idea that he doesn’t really deserve what they’re attempting to do to him, and he dispatches countless numbers of them, like Star Trek “red shirts.” There is one singular villain in the hired assassin (Bally Gill) sent to kill both Mason and Jesse by the head of the shadow group Mason was once a part of (played by Bill Nighy), and we do get one moment when Mason asks him, in the middle of their climactic fight, “Do you even know why you’re doing this?” His answer: “It doesn’t matter.” Oh, he must have been reading the studio notes. This movie is less interested in providing Mason the answer to that question than in giving Mason a reason to kill everyone that gets in his way in cinematically clever ways.

I still enjoyed this movie, I want to make clear—again, it has no pretensions about what kind of movie it is. I did find it distracting how often a character would be driving a car and looking at the passenger, or at their phone, a recklessly long amount of time without looking at the road. This happens three or four times. Eyes on the road, people! I know you’re probably actually on a soundstage, but that’s no excuse.

These nitpicks would make Shelter far less fun to watch if not for the solid casting of Jason Statham, who was born to play these roles in his fifties, and Bodhi Rae Breathnach, who has easy chemistry with him (she also plays the older daughter in Hamnet, proving she has versatility as a young actor). Shelter isn’t going to blow anyone away or even exceed anyone’s expectations, but it will deliver on its promise as a B-grade action thriller.

You’ll root for this odd couple in an action movie that is just fine.

Overall: B

GREENLAND: MIGRATION

Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Special Effects: B-

Watching Father Mother Sister Brother and Greenland: Migration back to back is quite the one-two punch of bad movies—wildly different in every conceivable way, except they are bad. Oh sure, they both have their few barely-redeeming elements—again, in completely different ways—but the unredeeming qualities easily weigh them down. I wonder how many other people in the world have watched these two particular movies right after each other? Surely it’s just a small handful. Well, I’ll say this much for Greenland: Migration: at least it kept me awake.

I’m dropping the “2,” by the way, because that’s how the title card reads in the film itself. Posters and promotional materials are listing it as Greenland 2: Migration, which I don’t understand, because the two words together and unbroken actually work as a phrase, as well as a direct reference to what happens in the film. It’s arguably the only sensible artistic choice made in the final cut. And now, our hero, John Garrity (Gerard Butler), his wife, Allison (Morena Baccarin), and their now-15-year-old son Nathan (Roma Griffin Davis—not the same actor who was in the first film) are forced out of the Greenland bunker they’ve been living in for the past five years by tectonic plates causing earthquakes that tear it apart. Over the course of this film’s 98 minutes of utter preposterousness, they make their way to Southern France, where they understand an impact crater has somehow become a shield to all the storms and radiation and is lush green with life. Nobody talks about how safe this spot is from more meteors, by the way.

We’re meant to feel for this family undergoing harrowing hardships, but honestly, all things considered, John Garrity is leading a straight-up charmed life. Oh sure, he barely escapes a tsunami that we see obliterate what’s left of Greenland (a visual high point in the film), and he encounters marauders, and he nearly falls to his death in a somehow dried-up English Channel, among other things. But also, nearly every step of the way, the Garritys encounter some kind-hearted soul willing to help them out. Someone is always coming along to help them through whatever scrape they’re in, far more than would ever realistically occur in an actual post-apocalyptic wasteland. But we’re not here to think about that, we’re here to be entertained.

They even pick up a very pretty teenage French girl along the way (Nelia Da Costa), and director Ric Roman Waugh (Angel Has Fallen) is surprisingly subtle about how we definitely need these two beautiful teens to start making beautiful babies. Maybe part 3 in this franchise can be called Greenland: Copulation. It wouldn’t be any less ridiculous than anything we see in Migration, which is easily the dumbest movie I have seen in recent memory.

There’s a peculiar quality to Greenland: Migration, that almost saves it, this sense that it barely takes itself too seriously. This is not a movie that is “in on the joke,” which in a way makes it more fun. There are plenty of laughable moments that are not intended to be. There’s a death scene in which a callback to an earlier scene is used, where Nathan recites a prayer he previously questioned. Never mind that in the scene being referenced, John is burying the body of an expendable character who had been in the car with them, and I just thought: These guys just dodged a bunch of meteors. I would not be wasting time burying a body. To say this film is filled with lapses in logic would be an understatement. In another scene, when John has run out of bullets defending his family against marauders, Allison comes to the rescue with her own gun. The thing is, we have only ever seen John get handed a gun, so where the hell did Allison get hers? I guess she pulled it out of her ass. She never seemed uncomfortable sitting on it, so color me impressed.

I should note that I am hardly the only person being much harder on Greenland: Migration than I was on the original Greenland, which was originally scheduled for release in 2020 but later released on VOD and which I did not watch myself until the VOD price went down, in February 2021. At that time, most of us were still working from home if we had jobs where that was possible, covid was still an actively scary thing, and a movie like this provided welcome escapist entertainment, even if it was a bit darker than most disaster movies. It didn’t hurt that it was relatively well paced and was better than most might have expected, particularly on a $35 million budget.

Well, Greenland: Migration had two and a half times the budget, and it is markedly worse. This time, it isn’t better than expected—it quite squarely meets expectations, and that’s not really a compliment. Gerard Butler pivoted into a full-time career of these B-movie disaster or action vehicles, several of which have actually been fun on their own terms, but we’ve reached the point where we’re getting diminishing returns even in that context.

So here’s the key difference between Greenland and Greenland: Migration. The first film used its special effects sparingly and effectively, and this film leans so much harder into the effects that their still-limited budget is even more apparent. This could have been a compelling survivalist drama if the script weren’t so deeply stupid, which means that even with what tools they had available, they could have at least entertained us with more thrilling set pieces. The greenland tsunami that we see is very early in the film, and the most thrilling sequence in it. It’s all downhill from there. Or rather, across the Atlantic Ocean, through a flooded Liverpool and a dried-out English Channel (someone explain this to me), and across war-ravaged France from there. There is a meteor shower that recalls the coolest action in the first film that’s relatively thrilling, if brief.

But in the end, something so dumb occurs that I covered my faces with my hands while saying “Oh my god.” This film has an earnestness that has no self-awareness, which makes it amusing in its way. I laughed several times. And now I can check this one off my list, and never watch it again.

I am stunned too. By how dumb this is.

Overall: C+

AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-
Special Effects: A-

I think James Cameron wants the Avatar films to be the 21st-century equivalent of the Star Wars films—a modern mythology, with the same cultural impact as well as staying power. (Some might argue that Marvel already achieved this, but their moves are not going to have the same staying power.) Cameron is such a directorial megalomaniac, he’s probably convinced these films already have that status. He would be wrong.

To be fair. it had long been widely understood that it is a mistake to underestimate James Cameron. But these movies can only run on their own steam for so long. Avatar was a monumental technical achievement in 2009, and was worthy of its Best Picture nomination (although it would have been a crime had it won). The same could be said, actually, of Avatar: The Way of Water, the sequel Cameron took 13 years to make because he was waiting for technology to advance enough so it could achieve his aims. And it’s worth repeating that The Way of Water was so stunning on a visual level, it arguably moved visual effects forward for the entire industry in a way no other film has since Jurassic Park.

So here is where we run into Avatar: Fire and Ash, only three years after the last one—usually a pretty standard duration between films and their sequels, but we all know the Avatar franchise is a different beast altogether. And the criticisms of this film as being entertaining but repetitive are fundamentally valid. With one notable exception, the characters are all the same as they were in the last film, and the things that happen onscreen offer us very little that’s new. Okay, there are some very cool new Panodorian creatures, including giant floating beasts that pull ships for travel, and vicious squid-like creatures that live in the oceans.

None of them feature as actual characters, though. The only beasts who do are the Tulkun, the highly intelligent whale-like creatures that featured prominently in The Way of Water, and do again here. And so does Quaritch (Stephen Long). And so does Captain Mick Scoresby (Brendan Cowell), who—spoiler alert!—did not die in The Way of Water after all. I walked out of this movie saying that if this series has taught us anything, it’s that any onscreen “death” cannot be trusted. More than one character in Fire and Ash meets an end that is one way or another is left ambiguous. But even if it were unambiguous, would it matter? This is a world in which “sky people” (humans from Earth) can be transformed into Na’vi and there can be an Avatar-maculate conception, after all.

Side note on the Tulkun whales: who the hell does their piercings and tattoos, anyway?

All of this is to say: if you’re looking for a 2025 blockbuster with endless opportunity for nitpicking, I present to you Avatar: Fire and Ash. I’ve barely scratched the surface here, but it’s worth mentioning that this has a franchise-record runtime of three hours and 17 minutes (exceeding The Way of Water by five minutes), and it is far less successful than its predecessor at justifying its own length. The Way of Water is easily broken up into three parts, the middle of which is world-building that easily wowed audiences; the last of which is a truly thrilling succession of action sequences. Fire and Ash attempts to building on that foundation, but does far less world-building, overindulges on action sequences, and at the sacrifice of character development.

To be fair, I was still perfectly happy to have gone to see this movie, as many of its action sequences are indeed thrilling. The visual effects are nearly as stunning as they were in the previous film; the inevitable downside to this coming out only three years later is that it’s unable to offer us anything truly novel on that front. The visual effects are the reason to see any of these movies, though, and they are what sets these films apart from others that use 3D as a cheap trick. Cameron knows how to make 3D worth the effort, and this is an extremely rare case in which I was also thrilled to see it in that format. That said, while the creature and Na’vi designs are exceptional, there are still moments when characters leap long distances and don’t quite move the way they should. It’s very subtle, but still gives them a hint of looking like video game characters rather than a believable character in a richly built universe.

In addition to Quaritch, who is really growing stale as an antagonist in all three of these movies, Fire and Ash does give us one new major villain: Varang (Oona Chaplin), leader of the Ash People, a clan of Na’vi whose forests have been decimated by a nearby volcano. This is a compelling addition to this world, especially the idea of warring clans on Pandora whose beefs actually have nothing to do with the Sky People. Except the Ash People’s motives, and especially Varang’s, are never clearly defined, and as a people they are given far less nuance than the Na’vi. At least we can understand the Na’vi as a narrative example of cultural appropriation. The Ash People are just angry and sadistic, and read a little too much like so-called “savages” of the Old West who are thought to commit unspeakable horrors against outsiders for no discernible reason.

I wish Varang had more depth as a character, and certainly more autonomy. Here she’s just hungry for the power of Sky People’s military guns, and that hunger is easily manipulated by Quaritch. Thank Eywa we have the likes of Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and Kiri (Sigourney Weaver, a 76-year-old woman again doing motion-capture as a teenager) and Ronal (Kate Winslet) to serve as women characters who actually have some dimension. At least Fire and Ash passes the Bechdel Test.

Most of the time in Fire and Ash, though, there are just battles raging. One after the other, and this with multiple subplots that don’t all feel necessary. Maybe Cameron feels all of these narrative threads are vital for what’s to come in future sequels, but I’m not sure how much that matters. Kiri’s power to lock in with Eywa stayed mysterious through all of The Way of Water, and gets some further expansion and explanation here—some of which is legitimately dumb. I suppose that could be the tagline for Avatar as a franchise: “great action epics, some of which is legitimately dumb.”

Fire and Ash does bring Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) back around to his status as “Toruk Makto,” the legendary leader who unites the clans—his Leonopteryx, the giant bird-like creature he rides, is a loyal friend who is to a degree a creature-character in these films, as are, to a lesser degree, the banshees ridden by all the other Na’vi. None of this changes the problematic trope this title represents. When we hear the line, “Toruk Makto is coming!”—what. heard was: “White Savior is coming!” (Just because Jake was transformed into a blue-skinned human/Na’vi hybrid does not change what he represents in the narrative.)

And yet. And yet! This is how it is with all Avatar movies: they are riddled with flaws, particularly in the writing but also increasingly in the plotting and even the editing—but the things that are actually great about them make the flaws easier to overlook. Is that right? Perhaps not. Does James Cameron even understand a nuanced discussion of these things? I have my doubts. Is the man still a master at delivering mesmerizing entertainment? Absolutely. There is no question that I was on the edge of my seat and dazzled by Fire and Ash a whole lot of the time. I can’t say I was ever bored, in spite of the bloated runtime. What still defines this film more than anything, however, is this franchise’s diminishing returns. We can only hope that Avatar 4 will offer us something genuinely new, but being the fourth film in a series makes that a pretty tall order. It may be that we underestimate James Cameron at our own peril, but it’s starting to feel like he’s getting tired.

Overall: B

DUST BUNNY

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B

Why does nobody know about this movie? This is a movie that deserves to be known, and I can’t even remember where I heard about it. If I ever saw a trailer, it was only once. Dust Bunny opened this last weekend on 402 theater screens and it made . . . $341,283. It was #17 its opening weekend. To be a little fair, it made an average of $848 per screen (and if we average $15 per ticket that’s about 57 tickets per screening). I can tell you this much: at the showing I just went to, I was one of three people in the theater. It’s hard not to conclude that someone in the marketing department at Roadside Attractions really dropped the ball.

Granted, Dust Bunny, a dark and twisted fantasty-action-monster movie, is not the kind of movie people pack theaters to see anymore. I actually took a public transit ride, on both a light rail train and a bus, for nearly an hour to a suburban theater to see it—and I found it to be completely worth the effort. I doubt I could find another person who would feel the same. Perhaps a fair number of people will soon discover it on a streamer. I can only hope. I’m already eager to introduce it to people I’m sure will have never heard of it.

This is a pretty impressive feature film debut by writer-director Bryan Fuller, who up to now made a long career out of writing and producing television shows, from Pushing Daisies to Hannbial, not to mention no fewer than four different Star Trek series over the past three decades. Dust Bunny stars Mads Mikkelsen, who played Hannibal Lecter in the aforementioned Hannbal series. This is the one major involvement in Fuller’s past career that has a clear connection to Dust Bunny, which is a lot like a cross between Where the Wild Things Are and Kill Bill.

To be fair, I struggle to pinpoint who exactly the target audience is for Dust Bunny, unless you count—me. I am exactly the target audience for Dust Bunny, which I found utterly delightful. Its playful use of a child’s wild imagination crossed with real-world violence is very much my jam. It’s a fantasy movie, a monster movie, and an action movie all rolled up into one. It has a sensibility largely like a kids’ fantasy, with a little girl named Aurora (a wonderful Sophie Sloan) at its center. Mikkelsen plays the unnamed neighbor hitman who Aurora hires to kill the monster under her bed, who she believes ate her parents.

In the opening sequence, we see a tuft of dust floating through the air, past a city skyline that is clearly a mashup of London and New York, and into an apartment window. The camera follows it as it wafts through the apartment, picking up more tufts, until it becomes a little bunny, hiding under Aurora’s bed. Aurora is terrified, and over the course of the film, the bunny grows into a monster that lives under the floorboards of her room. The angled boards tip up in very cool ways as the dust bunny eventually breaks through the floors to eat its victims—and, spoiler alert, there are many victims.

Several scenes go by before it becomes even halfway clear what the hell is going on, but I was locked in from the first frame, with the darkly colorful production design and swooping camera movements, almost like the movie Hugo had gone through some kind of underworld filter. Aurora follows the hitman through the city, observing him from rooftops as he appears to slay a dragon—something he later insists was a group of men. Many scenes follow in which Aurora insists there is a real monster under the floor, and the hitman insists she just thinks that’s what she saw but there have been dangerous men in her apartment. Dust Bunny never wants to make clear which thing is actually going on, although it does eventually lean hard on one side, at which point I’ll admit that if it was going for metaphor, it kind of lacks clarity on that front.

But I can hardly be bothered to care, I had such a good time with this movie, from start to finish. I haven’t even mentioned Sigourney Weaver yet, who shows up as an associate of our hitman, evidently a longtime mentor, perhaps something with a deeper connection. Weaver is 76 years old now, and after seeing her clearly de-aged in the Avatar movies, it’s refreshing to see her actually looking her age. Her Laverne in Dust Bunny is both subtly and delightfully villainous; two characters get key moments in this movie involving stiletto heels, but Laverne’s hybrid pistol-heels are my favorite. There are also well-played smaller parts by The Woman King’s Sheila Atim and The Suicide Squad’s own Polka-Dot Man, David Dastmalchian.

There’s a peculiarness to the tone of Dust Bunny that really speaks to me, such as the moment we are introduced to Laverne, she suddenly opens her mouth wide in an almost grotesque way, explaining that she needs to do it in order to un-clench her jaw. Laverne spends the entire movie talking about how Aurora needs to be killed, because she’s seen the hitman’s face, and other killers are apparently after her. Eventually we learn that Aurora is a foster child now in her third family; this, I guess, makes it easier to take that who we initially assumed were her parents disappear from the movie after only a couple of scenes. Mikkelsen’s hitman has taken a liking to Aurora, which Laverne deduces is his attempt at working through his own childhood trauma.

The whole London/New York vibe is hard to pin down given that all the characters speak with American accents, save for the hitman, who speaks with Mikkelsen’s Danish accent—something quite directly looped into a running joke about his inability to pronounce “Aurora” correctly. Clearly, Dust Bunny exists out of time and place, lending itself to the fantasy element it leans hard into. As for why the monster under Aurora’s bed is a giant bunny, I couldn’t tell you—except that it rings true as a creation of a child’s imagination. Aurora admits, after all, that she wished for the monster, and I guess she got more than she bargained for out of it. There is a key moment when the hitman says, “He’s your monster, and you’re going to have to live with it.” Aurora says she wished for the hitman as well, though she catches his attention by offering him money, the source of which I won’t spoil here. Suffice it to say that Aurora proves to be a pretty effective badass in her own right. This is a kid who not only knows where the bodies are buried but actively helps dispose of them. What more do you want?

Overall: B+

SISU: ROAD TO REVENGE

Directing: B
Acting: B-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B+

Sisu: Road to Revenge opens so similarly to the original 2022 Finnish film Sisu that, for a brief moment, I thought I had misunderstood something and somehow found myself at a rerelease of that film. The first thing you see is a title card offering the definition of the word Sisu: “a Finnish word that cannot be translated. It means a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination. Sisu manifests itself when all hope is lost.” And in both films, this is followed by voiceover narration as we see an animated map of Europe—in the case of Sisu, we learn it is 1944 as the Second World War is coming to an end; in Sisu: Road to Revenge, it is two years later, 1946, shortly after the end of the war. We learn of the land area of Finland that was ceded to the Soviet Union, forcing nearly half a million Finnish people to relocate—and that this was the homeland of our hero, Aatami (Jorma Tommila).

Once these introductory scenes are out of the way, the two films then move forward in fairly different ways. In Sisu, it began with quiet serenity while Aatami prospects for gold, ultimately interrupted with approaching Nazi carnage. In Road to Revenge, we see Aatami driving a huge truck across the border, where he finds the home of his family who was murdered by a Soviet Red Army officer. He commences with dismantling the lumber of the house, marking the pieces as needed for reassembly, and stacks it on the bed of the aforementioned huge truck.

You could say there is a sort of serenity to this early sequence as well, except that writer-director Jalmari Helander, who wrote and directed both of these movies, moves through it much more quickly. And, just as in the first film, sequences are divided up into “chapters,” most of which last no longer than a single set piece.

And here is where I really get to the point: what surprises me most about Sisu: Road to Revenge is how it’s gotten a more positive response, from both critics and audiences, than the first film. The best I can guess is that people find the action sequences, and the delightfully inventive violence that defines both films, to be even more exciting than before. For me, though, there’s something about the time the first film takes before shifting gears, and the specific tone from an international perspective that gave it a novelty that by definition cannot exist with a sequel.

There’s a bit of an irony in how I would call this a rare instance of it being actually advisable to watch the original film right before going right into watching the sequel. Because even though the films are set two years apart, they very much feel like the same movie. Helander reportedly was very deliberate in keeping the run times of these films at a tight ninety minutes because he is “not a fan of 3-hour epics” (according to IMDb.com). And yet, you could easily watch these two films back to back for a solid three hours and feel like you’re watching a single, epic story of wildly implausible but deeply entertaining revenge violence.

Indeed, in Road to Revenge, we do get a villain as the character who murdered Aatami’s family—Red Army officer Yeagor Dragunov, played by American actor Stephen Lang. This actor is the guy perhaps most notably recognized as the primary villain in both Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water, except in those movies he’s super jacked, and in Road to Revenge, his character having just been released from a prison in Siberia, he’s pretty scrawny—almost emaciated. But, the Soviets are eager to dispatch this mysterious man who has killed hundreds of men, and so they release Dragunov to “clean up the mess he made.” This leads to an inevitable showdown.

Both Sisu movies make the curious choice of shooting nearly all the dialogue in English—evidently as a means of broadening the audience potential of a film out of Finland. Lang gets by far the most lines in Road to Revenge, presumably meant to be in Russian but performed, evidently for our sake, in English. A lot of his lines are super contrived or outright stupid, to such an extent that they would have played better in Russian with English subtitles. As an evident nod of respect to Helander’s homeland, any dialogue by Finnish characters is indeed performed in Finnish with English subtitles. In Road to Revenge, this only occurs with two lines at the end of the film. Even then, Aatami himself says nothing, as a defining characteristic of both of these films is that he is a man of few words. He says only a couple of lines at the end of the original Sisu; he makes it through the entirety of Road to Revenge without saying anything at all.

Mind you, it’s pretty easy to say that if you liked Sisu, you will certainly like Sisu: Road to Revenge—especially as the latter gets to the action a lot more swiftly, as is par for the course with sequels like this. There’s a pretty great chase sequence with Aatami and several armored men on motorcycles that is basically Indiana Jones meets Mad Max. As always, Aatami sustains a great deal of injury, but a big part of the point of these films is how the blind desire for vengeance is what keeps him alive even in the direst of circumstances, even as he regularly achieves the humanly impossible, let alone the implausible.

Sisu is basically Finland’s version of a superhero franchise, albeit one that feels as though it was filtered through the sensibility of Quentin Tarantino. There are moments in Sisu that are quite emotional, though, and it never lets us forget that Aatami is still grieving the lost of his entire family at the hands of the enemy. This man does not see Nazis or Soviets as individuals, but as parts of a collective entity who wronged him. This makes it easy to root for his often gruesome killing of soldier after soldier. This happens in Road to Revenge, but of course, all as part of his path to Dragonov. This culminates in a pretty fun sequence of Aatami hacking and gunning his way through cars of men on a train headed back to Siberia.

A quick note on the special effects: some of it is very impressive in this movie, particularly wide shots of fighter jets attempting to gun down Aatami in his truck full of lumber. Other times, it’s very obvious CGI, such as the wide shots of the aforementioned train traveling through the night. At least it’s never overtly bad, and its use only ever serves the story, such as it is. This is a movie made to satisfy viewer bloodlust, and on that level, it delivers with a clever hand.

You missed a spot!

Overall: B

THE RUNNING MAN

Directing: C
Acting: C
Writing: D+
Cinematography: B
Editing: C+
Special Effects: B-

Edgar Wright has directed and co-written so many delightful movies—Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007), Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)—it’s easy to expect, or at least hope, that a new one will at least be really fun. Baby Driver (2017) was fun but did not quite reach the heights of his earlier work; and Last Night in Soho (2021) was . . . fine. You can perhaps detect a shift here, and I suppose every good director, if prolific enough, will inevitably product an outright dud.

Enter The Running Man, an exercise in squandered potential if ever there was one. Wright also has a co-writing credit here, alongside Michael Bacall, who previously collaborated with Wright on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World—a movie which, by the way, holds up surprisingly well. So what the hell happened? This The Running Man, the second adaptation of the Stephen King novel by the same name (the first having starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, in 1987), is badly written, phoned in by the actors, looks ugly, and is overlong. What person in their right mind thinks 133 minutes is a reasonable runtime for a movie like this? I saw that runtime before seeing the movie and immediately knew it didn’t bode well. A perfect runtime for a movie like this is, say, an hour and 45 minutes. (The 1987 film was an hour and 41.)

I never expected greatness from this movie, but I thought it would at least be dumb fun. It was dumb all right, though in a particularly unexpected way: this movie thinks it’s way smarter than it actually is. This is a dystopian future in which the divide between wealthy and poor is massive; “megacorps” own everything including government and law enforcement; and mass entertainment caters to the lowest denominators of profanity and dehumanizing violence—all the same beats we have seen time and time again in dystopian movies. The Running Man goes further with characters regularly ranting about the state of inequality, in ways that thoroughly ignore subtlety and never sound like anything but platitudes.

All of this shit is going in one ear and out the other of anyone watching, who are just there for escapist entertainment in an American cultural hellscape. The very existence of this film is the product of what it’s pretending to be preaching against. It’s worth noting that the one thing this movie does that we haven’t seen much of before is use AI as a plot point, with The Running Man’s gameshow manufacturing footage that isn’t real in an effort to keep the audience against the contestant—except it’s never addressed as “AI” and only ever declared “not real” in ways, again, we’ve already heard a thousand times. The only thing that could make this entire production—with a budget of $110 million—more perfectly cynical would be to learn that AI was actually used in the making of it.

I do try to find redeeming qualities, and I found a couple, though they hardly make up for what makes this movie suck. The cinematography isn’t bad, but that doesn’t mean much when the production design is so dingy and drab. Ben Richards (Glen Powell) spends a lot of time running around cities with crumbling infrastructure and complacent bureaucracy. The special effects aren’t terrible, but none of what’s decently rendered looks very good. There is evident skill but a fundamental lack of imagination. Even when we first meet Ben and his wife, Sheila (Jayme Lawson, given a truly nothing part to work with), we learn of their desperation to find medication for their young child with the flu. This is set in their tiny closet of a home surrounded by concrete walls, and the entire sequence is a deeply clunky exposition dump through their dialogue. This, along with Ben pleading with his shitty boss to get his job back, is how the film opens.

The Running Man reveals itself to be in trouble as soon as characters open their mouths. Glen Powell must be noted here, as deeply miscast in the role of a deeply disenfranchised, constantly furious man. After many roles as a romantic charmer of a leading man, I suppose it’s understandable that he’d want to be cast against type, except that he works well in those other roles and just isn’t believable here. He doesn’t feel genuine.

Naturally, as Ben spends a lot of time on the run, he crosses paths with an ensemble cast of supporting characters, including Scott Pilgrim star Michael Cera, here a surprisingly credible underground revolutionary who offers Ben aid. He’s booby trapped his large house so he can have fun with the “goons” (what everyone calls the police in this film, right down to the brief sighting of graffiti that reads AGAB) once they inevitably catch up with them. This is one of the more engaging action set pieces in the film, but for the fact that it comes along way too late and has no critical need to be included in the plot whatsoever.

The first helper Ben comes to is his old friend Molie, played by the always dependable William H. Macy, who is given far too little screen time—he’s in maybe two scenes. Sean Hayes makes a single appearance as the host of another dehumanizing gameshow called Speed the Wheel, in which we see an overweight man literally run to death on a human-sized hamster wheel. Lee Pace plays the leading “Hunter” among those professionally hired to chase down The Running Man. Pace spends most of the movie with a mask over his face, and it’s eventually taken off like a big reveal, only to show a guy whose biggest part to date has been as Brother Day on the Apple TV series Foundation.

The Running Man is just a series of misguided choices at every turn. Very late in the film, Ben takes a woman hostage played by Emilia Jones, who was previously seen as the hearing daughter of deaf parents in the 2021 Best Picture winning CODA, and much more recently as Maeve, the antagoinist’s niece in the HBO limited series Task. This resume reveals a very talented young actor who can disappear into different parts, but the only explanation I can come up with this one was that she wanted to be part of an action blockbuster.

I think I can say with confidence that The Running Man is not fated to be a blockbuster, especially once regular audiences start to see it, and do not rave about it. The closest thing to a saving grace this movie has is several fairly exciting action set pieces; once the clunky exposition was out of the way and Ben was on the run, I found myself more engaged, and thought maybe that would turn me around on the thud of a note the movie starts on. This sensation was short lived, as the writing is so inexcusably rote. Characters don’t make logical choices, but rather make dumb moves transparently designed to keep the action going. This gets ratcheted up to such ridiculousness that there’s even a gun battle in an airplane cockpit.

And all this time The Running Man is presented as though it’s confidently entertaining us, while also being thematically provocative. It definitively fails on both those fronts, ultimately serving up only rehashed ideas and recycled platitudes.

Is he angry or confused? After seeing this movie, you’ll be both!

Overall: C

PREDATOR: BADLANDS

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Special Effects: B

I would not likely have had much interest in Predator: Badlands based on its own premise alone, if not for the fact that it was directed and co-written by Dan Trachtenberg, who directed and co-wrote the quite pleasantly surprising Prey (2022)—easily the best film in the Predator franchise. Okay, fine: full disclosure, Prey was only the second straight-up Predator film I ever saw, and I saw the original, 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film so long ago I don’t even really remember it. But, I feel confident of this perspective based on critical consensus on al these films, which is generally a reliable barometer of quality. I guess I should say that “by all accounts” Prey was the best film in the franchise. It’s certainly remains the best of those I have seen.

The definition of which “Predator” films I have seen is a little murky, however, as is the degree to which Predator: Badlands should be regarded as a crossover with the (far superior) Alien franchise. The two Alien vs. Predator films are widely not regarded as canon in either franchise, the first of those being the sort of so-bad-it’s-good that I still never bothered to see its 2007 follow-up, which thus makes that one to date the only major film featuring a xenomorph that I have never seen.

Predator: Badlands has no further connection to the Alien vs. Predator films, however, beyond its inclusion of “synthetics” manufactured by the Weyland-Yutani corporation, two of which are played by Elle Fanning, without whom this film would not have worked at all. There are no xenomorphs in this film, but Weyland-Yutani and its synthetics are very overt pulls from the Alien universe, and I remain unconvinced that it was necessary. Certainly plenty of other science fiction franchises have their own forms of robot characters; why not Predator? Trachtenberg goes one step further by making the Kalisk, the impossible-to-kill monster on Genna, the planet on which most of the action takes place, the “specimen” that Weyland-Yutani is seeking to capture and bring home for its bioweapons division—just as had been the xenomorphs before it, though they get no mention here.

I did enjoy Predator: Badlands, and the critical response to it has been roughly equivalent to Prey, but I very much prefer Prey. That one had a far more efficient self-containment, within only the Predator franchise, but with what I found to be a far more novel premise: the earliest Predator sent to Earth, who winds up doing battle with North American Indigenous people of the early 18th-century—and specifically, a young woman. Predator: Badlands does a lot that has never been done in a previous Predator movie, but it’s all stuff that has already been done in other film sequels: turning the villain into the hero (which we’ve now seen in many films, from Terminator 2: Judgment Day to M3GAN 2.0); giving robots human feelings; turning a dangerous creature into something merely misunderstood. Even the manner in which the villain is destroyed in Terminator 2 has a very direct echo in this film.

Which is to say: Predator: Badlands is plenty entertaining, but lacks the cultural depth of its predecessor, and is certainly less rewatchable. There is a great deal of action in Badlands, which was a big selling point—for a film like this, I will go the uncharacteristic route of saying it could have used more relentless action, based on how it’s being sold to audiences. This film also features the first Predator ever to be given a name: Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), who is immediately emblematic of the “weakness” the must be “culled” from a “Yautja” clan (Yautja being the name given to the Predator species). He is much smaller in stature than others of his kind, and when his older brother protects him from being killed by their father, their father kills the brother instead. Dek then goes on to Genna, seeking the apex predator no one has ever captured on the widely lethal planet, and planning to bring it back home as a trophy to prove his worth, and also seek revenge against his father.

It’s a lot of detail, much of which is revealed in the cold open before the opening title. All this “honor” talk among the Yautja is just another form of machoism that I have little interest in, the rest of the film slowly inching Dek away from that mindset notwithstanding. But if he returns with an even slightly altered idea of honorable behavior, to a fictional culture created specifically to be loyal to such ideas to the death, what then? Badlands doesn’t really bother with these questions. Perhaps another film in the Predator universe will, but I’m not sure how interested I’ll be.

All the Weyland-Yutani stuff aside, it’s when Dek discovers the synth Thia (Elle Fanning) that Badlands gets really interesting. This film actually has no human characters at all, as the Earth mission to Genna is comprised entirely of synths (all played by only two people: Fanning, or Cameron Brown, who plays all the “drone synths” who ultimately serve as this film’s version of Star Trek “red shirts”—nameless and easily destroyed). Thia has had a run-in with the Kalisk, and her body from the waist down is missing. Dek spends much of the film carrying Thia’s upper half on his back (this also being a clear reference to C3PO in The Empire Strikes Back). One of the better parts of Badlands is when Thia’s upper half and her lower half, still separated, work as a team fighting off the aforementioned drone synths.

Perhaps the biggest selling point of Predator: Badlands is the creature design—not so much that of Dek, who looks basically like the many other Yautja we’ve already seen, but that of the many alien species on the planet Genna, from carnivorous plants to animals, to even razor sharp blades of grass. This film is also packed with visual effects, and while I can’t say the CGI particularly wowed me, it was pretty decent. At the very least, unlike far too many other CGI-heavy films, it doesn’t look distractingly artificial.

Badlands has further twists that are not necessarily had to see coming, but at least it’s an exciting ride while it’s in motion. Dek and Thia befriend a small, monkey-like creature that later proves to be an important detail on which the plot turns; Thia names him “Bud” and he’s weirdly cute, like a cross between a chimp and a bulldog. To Badland’s credit, a great deal of impressive work went into its production, from the creation of an entire language for the Yautja by linguist Britton Watkins, to very believable animal behaviors specific to different fictional species. I’d have liked a bit more originality in the story beyond “twists” that are just rearrangements of well-trodden ideas from other films, but anyone with a thing for sci-fi action films with detailed world building is going to have a good time here.

Teamwork makes the dream work in Predator: Badlands.

Overall: B

TRON: ARES

Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Special Effects: B

I wish I had half the enthusiasm as the guy who sat three seats down from me at Tron: Ares, in a theater where about eight other people were also in attendance. This guy, though—he had a really good time. He clapped his hands excitedly every time something remotely cool appeared onscreen or there was about to be some sort of action sequences. Several times I heard him say, “Yesss!” Mind you, like me, this guy was seeing the movie by himself; there were no companions with whom to share mutual excitement. He was far from a child either; this was a young, but definitely grown, man. I couldn’t decide if he had a screw loose or if I simply envied him.

My experience of the movie was not quite the same. There’s an odd element to the Tron franchise: three films now, spanning across five decades, something for at least three separate generations. The first film was released in 1982 and enjoyed modest success—for its innovative visuals if not for a particularly compelling story. Its first sequel, Tron: Legacy, was released 28 years later, in 2010. It’s been fifteen years again since then, and now we have Tron: Ares.

The story is ostensibly different, but the basic aesthetics—really the only reason to see a Tron movie—are essentially the same. The only difference now is that instead of the human characters spending most of their time inside “The Grid” (though there is some of that), this time we get AI-generated characters who assume human form in the real world—as do the vehicles they ride, or in some cases, fly. Of course, there have to be cool looking motorcycles with plenty of neon lines all over them. These race all over a city that is never identified in the film but is quite obviously Vancouver, British Columbia.

Who even cares about Tron these days, anyway? Even people who were kids in 2010 are young adults now; young people who were into the original in 1982 are basically retirees in 2025. Predictably, just about everything you see in Tron: Ares is recycled, either from previous Tron movies or other science fiction (there’s a lot of Blade Runner vibes here—it’s a little like Jared Leto’s creepy tech CEO from Blade Runner 2049 just jumped from that movie and into this one, only now he’s “the world’s most advanced AI.” He’s also “Ares,” the title character. Anyway his performance is very similar, which is in a way amusing because we are ultimately meant to think of Ares as a hero.

There’s a whole lot that director Joachim Rønning, and a team of three script writers, could have explored with AI in Tron: Ares, but very much in keeping with the franchise, he keeps all the proceedings at a level of basic comic-book simplicity. Two rival corporations are in a race to find the “permanence code,” so that they can use their gaming companies to render objects in the real world that last more than 29 minutes before they disintegrate. Why 29 minutes? Hell if I know.

There’s a bit more “legacy” stuff in here, just to create some tenuous connective tissue between the films. Evan Peters plays Julian Dillinger, grandson of Ed Dillinger, who had been the antagonist of the first film. Somehow Gillian Anderson was convinced to play Elisabeth Dillinger, Ed’s daughter and Julian’s mother, even though she isn’t given anywhere near enough to do. She just spends all her screen time fretting about how her son is fucking everything up. They’re all entwined with Dillinger Systems, the corporation to which ENCOM, at which Ed Dillinger had previously been CEO. Are you following this? None of it matters!

Ares is created by Julian; Ares becomes self-aware rather quickly; somehow other programs in the same system stay loyal to Julian as they take on human forms and ultimately hunt down both Ares and Eve (Greta Lee), the ENCOM CEO who has found the “permanence code” in an old system in the middle of snowy mountains somewhere. It’s all a big, beautiful mess.

Well, I don’t know if it’s beautiful. Plenty of the sequences are pretty cool to look at, but most of Tron: Ares also looks like the result of an AI prompt to “create a Tron sequel.” I had been impressed with the visual effects in Tron: Legacy more than anything else, and the effects here are . . . fine. I’ll forget this entire movie by next week. I can barely remember that last one. It was something to do, I guess. The visuals are decent but hardly stand apart from other effects-heavy movies; there’s nothing new here, in the story or in the visuals, to make the film in any way forward-thinking or particularly memorable.

It held my attention, I’ll give it that—but that’s a pretty low bar. The critical consensus with Ares is basically the same as that with Legacy (definitively mixed), but it feels to me like clearly diminishing returns. To say that this is brainless entertainment is an understatement. You don’t have to be above average intelligence to sense that nothing in this movie reflects any understanding whatsoever of how computers (or AI, for that matter) actually work. This is just a film capitalizing on both a surprisingly enduring franchise and the zeitgeisty concept of artificial intelligence. The 2001 Spielberg film AI: Artificial Intelligence had—and still has—far more compelling, provocative, and interesting things to say in its first five minutes than this movie does its entire runtime. And that was two and a half decades ago.

Granted, people don’t go to Tron expecting a “thinker.” I just have this naive idea that a script that makes AI its hero might have something interesting to say about it. The most interesting thing that happens here is when Ares finds himself inside the 1980s version of “The Grid” and meets an aged version of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges—the only actor to appear in all three films).

At least Legacy had a great Daft Punk soundtrack going for it. Daft Punk have since disbanded; this new film uses Nine Inch Nails for its soundtrack. Not even this is all that forward-thinking, frankly. Using Trent Reznor for the soundtrack to The Social Network was the product of innovative thinking; now it’s just another generic soundtrack with propulsive beats to ride along with neon motorycles. I guess that’s all some people need. It was clearly all the guy three seats down from me needed. Oh, to be that easy to please.

It’s mentioned more than once that Ares was the Greek god of war. I’d have loved for that to become actually relevant.

Overall: C+

NOBODY 2

Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B

When Nobody was released in 2021, it worked perhaps better than it deserved: released in May, it was the first movie I saw in the theater since covid stay-home orders had begun 14 months before. There was something freeing about the experience, both the return to normalcy for us movie lovers, and the violent release of pent-up tension that unfolded in the plot, about a guy with a problem resisting an urge to pick fights—but always with good (sort of) on his side. It also established Bob Odenkirk as the latest in a line of unlikely older-man action heroes.

Odenkirk was 58 when Nobody was released, which makes him 61 now. That film also featured Connie Nielsen as his wife, Becca; Christopher Lloyd as his dad, David; and RZA as Harry, his brother—all of whom return for Nobody 2. Even Gage Munroe and Paisley Cadorath return as Hutch and Becca’s children, who are quickly established at the beginning of the film as increasingly frustrated by their dad’s absence—but not as much as Becca.

Nodody was hokey and contrived as hell, but lots of fun not just in spite of but because of that: it was a movie that made no bones about what it was, and that’s what made it work. It was kind of a blast. Nobody 2 has a bit of a problem in that it simply attempts to replicate what the first movie did, giving it the feel of a copy of a copy. Nothing is innovated here, and the film seems to serve little purpose other than to stage ultra-violent combat sequences at a rickety amusement park.

Hitch and Harry were taken there once as kids by their dad, you see, and it was the one family vacation they ever took—something Hutch is attempting to replicate by returning there with his own wife and kids. Naturally, what else is replicated is how the dad gets sucked back into old habits there, particularly when an asshole employee swats his daughter upside the back of the head. This results in violent retribution that is so wildly out of proportion, the movie quickly stopped being fun for me. Acting in self-defense is one thing, even when it’s excessive, but in response to a swat on the head? Bashing a guy’s head through an arcade game?

Nobody 2 attempts to make this behavior okay—for the sake of the audience, anyway; Becca doesn’t approve, at least not at first—by having Hutch admit to Wyatt (John Ortiz), the park owner, that “I lost my shit,” but in response to what still qualifies as assault against his daughter: “What would you do?” Wyatt, the park owner who starts off as a potential adversary after his son and Hutch’s son get into a scuffle (this is what starts it all), seems to ponder this briefly and then basically give Hutch a pass.

But there are some truly wild characters we have yet to meet. There’s the local sheriff, Abel (Colin Hanks, at 47 looking shockingly like his father in middle-age), ridiculously corrupt and acting as a sort of middle-man between Wyatt, who oversees an underground drug operation for which the amusement park is a front (seems unduly complicated), and the most bonkers character of all, Lendina, played with unselfconscious relish by Sharon Stone. She’s the boss of this entire operation, a ruthless woman about whom a character might say “She’s wiped out entire bloodlines for less.” Funny how Hutch can wipe out her henchmen like they are, you know, nothing but story props.

I won’t lie, I had kind of a good time with Nobody 2. That can happen when you just surrender to what a movie is, in this case a moderately amusing action movie with modest ambitions and zero pretense. That doesn’t make this movie good, and this is just a rehash of a previous film that barely succeeded on such flimsy merits. Nobody might still hold up, actually—but it was the kind of movie that worked precisely because it shouldn’t, but it was saved by great fight choreography and charismatic performers. The performers are mostly the same in Nobody 2, but the premise and especially the villains are so ridiculous that it sometimes took me out of the movie. Every supporting character in Nobody 2 is not only a caricature, but practically a cartoon.

But, if you just want to see a bunch of people get dismembered and blown up in an amusement park, I suppose you’ll have a great time.

Fire in the hole! In the plot hole!

Overall: C+

THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Special Effects: B-

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has clearly aged past its prime. It feels a little like the “cinematic universe” equivalent of a middle-aged guy prone to reminiscing about his glory days as a high school football star.

To be fair, I never fully locked into the “MCU” project the way millions of fans did. I am a fan of movies, not of genre, which means I can appreciate the special ones that break the mold (Black Panther, Logan, even Thor: Ragnarok) but can easily forget about the rest—and there is a lot of the rest. This new Fantastic Four movie isn’t seriously bad, even if it is still definitively dumb; it’s merely average at best, which makes it slip right into that same steady stream of superhero mediocrity.

I can’t help but compare this film to Superman, the DC competitor also currently in theaters, and although I have ultimately decided The Fantastic Four: First Steps is better, the difference is negligible. The thing is, there were things I hated more about Superman (it’s mind-numbingly stupid script) but there were also things liked a lot more about Superman (its far better casting; Krypto the Superdog, overused as he was). Its worse qualities tip the scale, which is perhaps ironic because at least Superman kept me awake. I nodded off multiple times during The Fantastic Four.

Some of my issues with this movie, admittedly, are fully justifiable inclusions in a movie based on a superhero comic book—I’m just not into these things, this idea that the heroes are for all intents and purposes gods, and therefore any presentation of stakes is fully an illusion. This is the case whether it’s in a comic book or a movie, and is perhaps a big reason I never got into comic books. I never get invested in the heroes’ success because their success is guaranteed—particularly in the first in an expected line of sequels.

I am also aware that The Fantastic Four is a bit notorious as a franchise, in that this film is the fourth—nice coincidence there—attempt at cinematic adaptation, at least if you count the 1994 production that never got released theatrically but can now be found online. A second attempt that did get theatrical release, and even did well at the box office (to the tune of $333 million worldwide), came out in 2005, with a nearly-as successful sequel in 2007. The second reboot, starring Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, and Jamie Bell, tanked both critically (27 out of 100 on MetaCritic) and commercially ($56 million domestic). I never saw any one of these movies because I couldn’t be bothered to care, but I certainly know that none of them were regarded as a particularly good adaptation.

All that is to say: there was a lot riding on The Fantastic Four: First Steps, both with fans of this particular group of superheroes and with the future of Marvel Studios broadly. This is film is performing relatively well, although that success is mitigated by a $200 million budget—and this, frankly, is one of my problems with the movie. Why am I not actually seeing that money put to use, or at least put to use well, onscreen? James Cameron spent $400 million to make Avatar: The Way of Water, but that was money well spent, with visual effects so astonishing they largely made up for a frustratingly simpleminded script. The problem with movies like both Superman 2025 and The Fantastic Four: First Steps is that they have both the money and the means, and it still feels like everyone is phoning it in.

This is nitpicky, but I don’t care: the Fantastic Four have a car that flies. There is a scene in this movie where a couple of them rush in this car to the scene of some mayhem, and the car quickly stops in the air in time to skid on the ground a couple of feet, and the occupants pop right out and just keep walking like the badasses they think they are. There’s no fumbling, no recalibrating their balance, no visual acknowledgement of the physics of sudden changes in velocity—in short, it looks unnatural, because it is: bodies would never move this way, except in the results of rushed VFX. And it’s distracting when, even in a fantastical world like this, something looks straight up fake when it is clearly not meant to. There are so many things that look like this in effects-heavy movies these days, and within ten years people will rewatch this stuff and feel the same effects as we do today when watching stop-motion effects in 1930s films. Except in this case, it’s not because of any limitation of technology—it’s because people can’t be bothered to take the time to get it right.

Granted, The Fantastic Four: First Steps would not be much improved even if the effects were perfected. I found Julia Garner as the Silver Surfer to be the most compelling character—also referred to as “the herald of Galactus,” she scouts planets for the godlike Galactus (Ralph Ineson) to consume, in exchange for him sparing her home planet. Garner does a lot with a part that is limited both in screen time and in physicality: the Silver Surfer sports a body encased in silver, making her look rather like the villain from Terminator 2: Judgment Day (this may be a reference lost on you if you are younger than 30). The entire plot surrounds the Fantastic Four’s efforts to stop Galactus, and get the Silver Surfer out of their way of doing so, but in broad execution it’s all packed with so many lapses in logic that I lost count.

There’s also a subplot involving “Mole Man,” as played by Paul Walter Hauser, a talented actor who is wasted in this bit part about a rival to the Fantastic Four who ultimately comes to their aid by allowing all of New York City to evacuate—not to some area outside the city, that would make too much sense, but to his underground city of “Subterranea.” This happens after all but one of the “bridges” to another dimension around the world are destroyed, which is why Galactus must be lured to the only one still standing, conveniently for this plot, right in Times Square. And this is the only reason “Subterranea” factors into the plot at all.

As for the Fantastic Four themselves, and the actors who play them, this is a bit of a mixed bag. The overexposure of Pedro Pascal continues, as he is cast as Reed Richards, “Mister Fantastic,” clearly coded as the “head of the family,” and meant to be some wild genius, as he writes equations on chalkboards that I am sure look like gibberish to any actual genius. Also, for a genius, he sure spends a lot of the movie befuddled about what to do. I can’t say he has the greatest chemistry with Vanessa Kirby, who shines as rival to Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible movies, but here adopts an American accent for Sue Storm, the “Invisible Woman,” a part that basically exists so she can give birth in space, to a baby with as-yet-unknown superpowers (but Galactus sure wants him!). Joseph Quinn has arguably the most charisma out of the bunch, as Sue’s brother, Johnny Storm, “The Human Torch.” And Ebon Moss-Bachrach all but disappears as a personality inside the CGI suit of Reed’s best friend Ben Grimm, “The Thing.”

Much is made of Reed’s genius invention of teleportation, which he demonstrates successfully with an egg and then explains doing the same with Planet Earth should be just as easy because the difference is just “a matter of scale.” The problem is, even though it’s immediately made clear that this cast of characters exist in a different universe than ours, Reed’s teleportation scheme never explains exactly where he’ll teleport Earth to, and spoiler alert, Earth never gets teleported at all by the end of this movie. And let’s not even get started on this movie’s countless inconsistencies of scale. Except, perhaps, for this question: if Galactus is meant to consume an entire planet, why is he the size of a skyscraper?

Much like Krypto from Superman, I did enjoy H.E.R.B.I.E. (“Humanoid Experimental Robot B-Type Integrated Electronics”), Reed’s lovable robot assistant. And unlike Krypto, H.E.R.B.I.E. is not overused. Indeed, one of the better things about The Fantastic Four: First Steps is its successful sidestepping of self-indulgence: mercifully, this film doesn’t even clock in at a full two hours (its runtime is 114 minutes). Just because it’s not overstuffed doesn’t mean it’s not still a bit of a mess—a judgement I make fully aware that it’s largely informed by how tired I am of superhero-movie tropes. There have just been so many of these superhero moves over so many decades now, I truly long to see ones that stand apart with narrative innovation. Pinning any hopes for such a thing with this movie would be a mistake.

I don’t know, maybe try stepping in a different direction.

Overall: B-