Soderbergh’s second take on the spy thriller is a cerebral, knotty delight.

Trust can be a particularly slippery fish. When you work in a spy agency, it’s got to frequently feel like you’re trying to land a catch with nothing to work with but your two bare hands. Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag is a knotty little chamber drama by way of spy thriller, relying on dialogue and performance over action and spectacle to spin a tight little yarn that absolutely crackles in its own unique ways. One wouldn’t be incorrect for feeling just a little bit misled by the film’s marketing, which suggests degrees of both portent and kinesis that are simply not quite present in the final product. What’s nice is that the film is unquestionably all the richer for it. Lacking almost any narrative fat whatsoever, Black Bag is a perfectly lean, laser-cut exercise in unflinching character work, marrying James Bond with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf as the script probes a series of professionally entangled relationships, the people that constitute them, and the faultlines that threaten the integrity of each.

David Koepp’s script works in perfect concert with Soderbergh’s relentlessly canny direction in all the right ways, and it’s especially refreshing to see Koepp return to form after the degree to which his script formed the critically weak link in Presence just a few months ago. Black Bag, in contrast, is a carefully built house of cards, and it’s thrilling to watch each character as they do their best to navigate its various floors while being careful not to topple the whole thing over. The film begins with a wonderfully clever misdirect, one of the only moments to suggest that we might be in for the kind of bombastic, thrilling spy yarn that an audience might be expecting. The air is somewhat quickly let out of that particular balloon, however, as the film’s proper mission statement slowly comes into focus, crystallizing for us after just a few minutes of screentime: This is going to be a series of conversations had in rooms, and those conversations are going to be had by a contingent of incredibly intelligent professional deceivers. Let the games begin.

Soderbergh’s choice to manage expectations at the outset in this way is a savvy one, as Black Bag succeeds almost specifically thanks to the ways it diverges from the expected elements of its chosen form. Spy thrillers aren’t normally allowed to feel quite so small, but what Soderbergh and Koepp’s film presupposes is…maybe they should be. Black Bag deals in distinctly high-stakes concepts but distinguishes itself through its decision to approach them from a series of small, personal vectors, tying a series of dangerously thin strings between precarious interpersonal relationships and narrative outcomes that could potentially impact millions of people. It’s one part procedural, one part espionage thriller, two parts Albee play as it becomes increasingly clear that every “who” that may have dunnit is one-half of a tremendously ill-advised office romance. It’s almost hard not to think of Archer as Koepp’s script dances nimbly between actual spy stuff and the type of emotional chamber drama that could conceivably happen at almost any workplace.

George (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) make up two halves of the power couple to end all power couples, the sun around which all the other characters—and, by extension, the film itself—orbit. Each one of the other relationships depicted has its own precarious nature, and every cast member is perfectly calibrated for getting wedged under the fingernails of its counterpoint. On an individual level, each character represents one name on a literal list of suspects handed to George in the film’s opening moments as he’s charged with determining which of his five colleagues may be responsible for the theft of a computer virus with the potential to trigger a mass casualty event. Geroge’s investigation ultimately involves everything from a dinner party laced with a powerful truth drug to a thrillingly edited series of polygraph tests as he shakes trees and looks under rocks, all while the inveterately cranky Arthur Stieglitz (Pierce Brosnan) sternly looms over the whole thing as their perpetually peeved superior.

Fassbender’s presence, quite simply put, could not possibly be a more welcome one. This and The Killer make for an interesting pair of projects to take on after his brief hiatus, and both performances make it clear that the guy isn’t even approaching rusty. His performance as George Woodhouse (his last name being another Archer connection) is all visibly clenched jaw muscles and quietly probing eyes, a questing throughfulness that is perfectly matched against Blanchette’s slinking, smirking Cheshire Cat of a performance. James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) and Dr. Zoe Vaughn (Naomie Harris) are smartly paired as a kind of aggressively postured alpha couple, while Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke) and Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela) round out the primary ensemble as a deeply toxic pair who have ostensibly found something to love int he degree to which they seem to hate each other. Koepp’s screenplay, as darkly funny as it is tightly wound, basically necessitates that the film put a key number of eggs into each individual actor’s basket, and everyone involved knocks it squarely out of the park. Their insecurities and drives are as perfectly laid out on the page as they are realized on the screen, and despite what an unclencnching relief the film’s 93-minute runtime undoubtedly feels like, it’s incredibly easy to find yourself wishing you had a way to somehow spend just a bit more time with these characters and their respective black bags.

As George’s investigation presses on, Soderbergh’s hazy cinematography leaves each character swimming in intrigue, all leaking lights and bokeh backgrounds in a way that lends the whole affair a distinctly classic feel. For a filmmaker whose restless relationship with innovation is arguably one of his defining qualities, it’s particularly refreshing to see Soderbergh put down the iPhone and play once more with such well-established cinematic forms. His camerawork is measured and restrained in a way that feels purposefully designed to allow the performances and editing to do all the heavy lifting as George picks his way through a thicket of thorny conversations and potentially misplaced loyalty. To reveal much more about the characters, their relationships, and how they all come together is to spoil some of the film’s most enjoyable moments, but rest assured—there’s more than enough fun to be wrung out of its many surprises and unexpected turns. Even without a bloated runtime, Black Bag manages to take its audience to some truly unexpected places.

With so very little to complain about, it’s hard to characterize Black Bag as anything other than a total slam dunk. An espionage thriller that trades gunplay and car chases for a series of knotty, cerebral conversations almost shouldn’t feel as exciting as Black Bag does. And yet, this isn’t even the first time Soderbergh has decided to try his hand at a certain type of well-established genre fare, only to deliver an unexpected take on the material, whose creative deviations make it more thrilling than its counterparts by an impressively wide margin (looking directly at you, Haywire). Here’s hoping this guy continues to be un-retired.

Black Bag: What Tangled Webs. was originally published in idiots_delight on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The latest entry in the cinematic Marvel canon is cowardly on almost every conceivable level.

It’s a shame that it feels like it’s been so long since any of these things seemed like real movies. Especially because—for a good while, at least—almost all of them felt like something truly special in one way or another. In 2025, though, we’ve spent as much time with the MCU as post-ironic, self-assured slop as we’ve spent reveling in its status as an unexpectedly refreshing take on some of our most enduring modern mythologies. It’s easy enough to point a finger toward the moment at which these things became products and stopped being proper films centered around real characters, and the introduction of a spate of little-enjoyed TV series into the continuity didn’t help things by further diffusing its sense of coherence. This was never supposed to feel like homework, Kevin.

Captain America: Brave New World is, to put it mildly, an absolute mess of a thing. Notorious for having been rewritten and reformed within an inch of its life, Brave New World makes it almost impossible not to miss the relatively straightforward and consistently character-centric nature of the MCU’s initial iterations. Instead of a story about Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and his journey as he goes about taking on the mantle of Captain America (or what doing so might mean for him in any kind of enduring sense), the fourth solo Captain America film is mostly about an arms race and a personal vendetta unrelated to the title character, and then also Captain America is there. If anything, it’s accurate to describe Captain America’s role in this film as trying to do his best to make sure that a conflict between two other characters doesn’t get too out of hand. These other characters do not come from one of Captain America’s other movies, and their conflict does not directly involve Captain America at all. It’s as insane as it sounds—a truly baffling decision at its core, and one that utterly breaks the film from the ground up in a way that plainly underscores the degree to which Feige and Company just have no idea what to do with the characters they were left with after the wind-down of the Infinity Saga.

So, if Captain America: Brave New World is not really about Captain America at all, what is it about? Well, buckle up: This movie is actually about the continued feud between Dr. Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson) and now-President Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford), both of whom first appeared together in The Incredible Hulk, a film released in 2008. Wilson’s involvement in the film’s central conflict, then, is almost purely incidental: He’s there solely because he works with the President, who is banking super hard on an international treaty that will mean really good things for his administration and hopefully also the world. Samuel Sterns, who has been kept prisoner by Ross since 2008 (also the last time the character appeared onscreen in any capacity), is determined to upend the treaty—along with Ross’ entire presidency and reputation, by extension—before turning Ross into a Hulk and presumably having him kill a ton of innocent people. If you’re wondering what Captain America has to do with any of this, you’re correct. His presence in the film is quite literally owed only to the fact that he works with Ross, which is an incredibly perplexing idea given the history shared between the two characters. Throughout the film, other characters emphatically remind Sam that President Ross sucks, that he sucks a lot, and that he was also personally responsible for throwing Sam (and a bunch of Sam’s best friends) into a floating prison way out in the middle of an ocean somewhere. Whenever this happens, Sam simply narrows his eyes and goes, “He’s the President, OK?” and it sucks so very, very deeply.

When he’s not sniffing out the details of this weird feud between Sterns and Ross, Sam gets to hang out with his new friends Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly) and Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), who is also the new Falcon. Bradley’s presence in the film almost certainly came from a well-intentioned place, but it’s the script’s inability to dramatically reconcile what he represents as a character with Sam’s pre-stated decision to work directly with President Ross that ultimately makes things even more egregious. Rather than representing any kind of uncomfortable truth about our national past and the government’s relationship with the Black community in America, Bradley feels included for reasons that are surface-level at best, his role and presence in the film diminished in ways that can only feel deeply problematic. After spending most of his life being experimented on and then imprisoned to ensure that his illegal treatment remained a secret, Bradley’s role in Brave New World is largely limited to being turned into a mind-controlled pawn who is deployed to kill the President of the United States as part of a conflict in which he has zero direct involvement, after which point he is unceremoniously thrown in prison. An even simpler way of putting it is that Isaiah becomes an unwilling participant in some unrelated white guy’s conflict, gets locked up as punishment for it, and then is effectively forgotten for the rest of the film. It’s fucked-up enough, just on paper, to make one wonder how a character trajectory like this even made it past the scripting stage…especially after Marvel spent so much time pretty clearly telegraphing that Mackie’s outing as Captain America would more directly concern itself with America’s relationship with its Black communities. Bradley’s treatment, as such, can only feel like an outrage.

The perfunctory nature of his presence in the film also denies Lumbly the opportunity to do anything in the realm of real acting. But don’t worry! He’s absolutely not alone. Despite being the ostensible lead of this film, Mackie has frustratingly little to do: All his character’s edges have been sanded down so he can be the kind of toothless scold who tells people they still need to “respect the office” in response to hearing about all the fucked-up stuff the President has done (to him and all his pals, personally). Ramirez’s overeager presence quickly wears out its welcome, although it is pretty exciting to see him and this new bewinged version of Captain America take flight in tandem during one of the film’s admittedly more ridiculous (and yet still somehow quite watchable) action sequences. Despite the utter soullessness of the film around him, Ford seems to be having an unexpectedly good time delivering his turn as Thaddeus Ross, even if his bright spot is pretty quickly eclipsed by the utterly confounding decision (one of many featured throughout Brave New World’s two-hour runtime) to have a sleepy Tim Blake Nelson vocal fry all of his dialogue at us from an ADR booth. This is, of course, after very nakedly deleting and reshooting literally any scene that featured his character in it due to a ground-up redesign of his character’s appearance, because Marvel is normal and very good at making movies that work and doing so in a way that makes sense.

Every odd performance and confused element of Brave New World eventually gloms together into a big final showdown that has all but entirely been given away by the film’s marketing, seemingly as an intentional decision to relieve the audience of their duty to give a shit, one way or the other. Besides, once the grand finale gets started—President Ross changes into an angry Red Hulk, whom Captain America must then fight with his incredibly annoying Magic Suit—there’s no question about what’s going to happen when the next 10 minutes of screentime have passed. Nothing that’s come before this moment has suggested that anything other than the expected will ultimately come to pass: An unhealthy amount of CGI glop will be thrown up on screen and Captain America will have to say the day because, in a purely narrative sense, that’s almost literally the only thing he exists in the movie to do. The Marvel machine has worked up such an unstoppable amount of intertia that we can all plainly see where it’s going next, and Brave New World is entirely too devoid of successful character work or effective narrative stakes to keep anybody wondering in the first place. Really, the only thing left to wonder is why we’re still going to see these things.

Captain America: Brave New World: Soft Targets. was originally published in idiots_delight on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

JT Mollner’s thriller goes for grindhouse but lands on gross.

[THIS CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE FILM STRANGE DARLING]

There is a clear reason it’s so markedly thrilling to watch an expert do crazy tricks with fire, and it’s a universally simple one: Playing with fire is incredibly dangerous to do, and if you do it without being an expert, the results are more than likely to be catastrophic. There are just certain things that shouldn’t be done without a requisite level of both forethought and expertise, and this applies in equal measure to the act of juggling a series of on-fire chainsaws as it does to, let’s say, something like writing and directing a thriller with an intentionally transgressive narrative twist at its center. They have a word to describe someone who sets about juggling on-fire chainsaws without the expertise or forethought required to do so safely: irresponsible.

It’s the only word that comes to mind as one concludes Strange Darling, JT Mollner’s deeply troubling stab at grindhouse-adjacent exploitation cinema. As one begins it, on the other hand, one might find it a challenge to do so without rolled eyes. There’s something to be said for the distance that exists between how cool it is to do a cool thing and how cool it is to announce that you’re doing or have done a cool thing, loudly and to all who will listen. It doesn’t bode well, then, that Mollner decides to open Strange Darling with a title card that proudly announces that the film has been shot entirely in 35mm. To its credit, Giovanni Ribisi’s (?!) lush photography is as textured and inviting as anyone could ask for, and it brings to life an utterly electric performance from Willa Fitzgerald. Unfortunately, these two elements are just about all the film really has going for it. Still, Strange Darling remains resolutely convinced that its hand is a winning one, failing from its very first minute to keep an expression of premature celebratory confidence off its face.

After an opening crawl that describes the community-shocking exploits of a notorious local serial killer, Strange Darling drops viewers into its own middle act, relying on their familiarity with genre tropes and an unfailing conviction that Women Are Not to Be Harmed as it convinces them that the Lady (Willa Fitzgerald) you see sprinting through the woods is indeed the victim of the Demon (Kyle Gallner) who chases her and vacuums up cocaine as he does so. A bit of cat-and-mouse pursuit follows, until we finally jump back in time (another element the film makes sure you absolutely cannot miss) to the point at which both characters actually met, smoking cigarettes and clinking drinks in the cabin of a truck outside the motel in which they will presumably soon get busy. It’s all but obvious, by now, that the film is hiding something: Why else would there be any reason to present such an ostensibly straightforward narrative in this unnecessarily convoluted way? The clear decision to futz with a narrative form that doesn’t readily invite doing so almost immediately alerts the audience to the fact that at least something isn’t quite as it seems…and it’s all the more disappointing when the most achingly obvious answer to this narrative mystery winds up being the correct one. Strange Darling relies on a particularly ugly type of presumed audience expectation to execute its cursed magic trick, and it does so in a way that feels both cheap and insulting in equal measure.

It’s a shame, too. There’s plenty to enjoy here, but almost all of it is rendered inconsequential by the unrepentant ugliness that surrounds it. Ribisi’s aforementioned work as the film’s cinematographer deserves so much better in the way of a creative companion. Mollner is quite obviously interested in evoking the look and feel of a late ’60s and early ’70s exploitation cinema — an aim made clear by his extensive use of gimmicky analogue diretorical moves like the shaky snap zoom and so forth — and Ribisi’s photography brings Oregon’s Mount Hood National Forest to vibrant life as Fitzerald sprints and bleeds and smokes her way through it. Similarly, Fitzgerald’s performance is an admirable one: She is an absolute beacon of range, with a shriekingly primal presence that makes it clear she’ll really burn the barn down as soon as she’s given something proper to work with. Opposite her, Kyle Gallner brings his usual quiet integrity to the table, spending 90 minutes tracking his way through an increasingly improbable and deadly situation and delivering some impressive physical moments while doing so.

As a “nasty little genre exercise” (a turn of phrase one can readily imagine being used to describe the film—by its director—to just about anyone who will listen), Strange Darling falls flat on its face. It’s nowhere close to the snarling, sharp-edged pressure-cooker it thinks it is, and its defensive, hands-in-the-air, “Hey, I’m just here to ask challenging questions, that’s all!” approach to the wilfully transgressive material it presents only reads as artistic cowardardice rather than some kind of impressive willingness to “go there.” Always uninterested in playing its cards close to its chest, Strange Darling clarifies early on that it’s presenting its material out of sequential order in a move that winds up being the equivalent of the movie tying its own shoes together, given the way it encourages the audience to be on the sniff for its “shocking twist” as early as possible. And don’t worry. You’ll be well in touch with that “shocking twist” absolute ages before it’s properly revealed. The math is almost hilariously easy, and the outcome of the equation is as obvious as it is ugly.

It’s one thing to expertly manipulate the audience’s expectations. It’s even arguable that, on some level, perhaps every film is supposed to do this; It’s the filmmaker’s job to manipulate us in a way that ultimately feels both rewarding and satisfying…and hopefully a little bit surprising, too. This makes it all the more galling, then, when Mollner abdicates the work that might go into properly surprising storytelling, opting instead to rely on cheap tricks and easy dramatic subterfuge. By presenting the events of the film in a nonlinear order, Strange Darling obscures its true intentions in a way that also cripples its ability to remain compelling or interesting. The result is the cinematic equivalent of showing the audience an image with which they’re familiar, clicking on a setting that inverts the colors, and then going “…eh?” with raised and expectant eyebrows, waiting for congratulations on having delivered some kind of accomplished creative curveball. Strange Darling’s angle is the equivalent of flipping a switch and calling it art, a faux-creative filter applied to something we’ve all seen before and an attempt at passing the act off as artful narrative innovation.

The film is simply an exercise in cinematic bad faith, relying on a series of deceptive temporal gimmicks to shield the audience from the mundanity and obviousness of its central “twist.” When it does finally get there, it’s only disappointing to see that so much energy has been spent in favor of a movie that dares to suggest: “What if woman bad?” There are a lot of ways to give women the chance to play challenging, subversive, and/or unconventional roles. It just feels like maybe it doesn’t take half a brain to see that this isn’t one of them. Strange Darling thinks it’s making some daring storytelling choices, but it’s really just making a series of unfortunate calls in service of what ultimately amounts to a truly ugly and irresponsible piece of work.

Strange Darling: Please Thrill Responsibly. was originally published in idiots_delight on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Few films invite their audience to consider the distance between “could” and “should” as directly and defiantly as Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus. Intended for streaming but oddly pivoted to a theatrical release in what seems like a weird inversion of the cinematic see-saw that has come to characterize this little section of the Streaming Era, Romulus represents the rare instance of one of the Big Five deciding that, no—audiences have to see this one on the big screen. For what it’s worth, they were mostly right. Romulus takes full advantage of the theatrical setting…but this makes its halfway-realized potential feel all the more frustrating.

Alien: Romulus is, unfortunately, about as uneven as it gets. Despite being directly tuned into the proper wavelengths of the franchise during its most successful sequences, the film remains markedly hamstrung by an odd series of creative choices throughout. The end result feels like the work of a creative team that seems to whip back and forth between clearly misunderstanding the franchise’s simplest genetic footprints and then wildly over-betting on their mastery of the same, from one moment to the next. Álvarez and his team very clearly have an undeniable lock on things like mood and tone, both of which are brought to life by inspired photography and gorgeous production design. Unfortunately, the things Romulus gets right end up working to throw the things it gets wrong into even sharper relief.

For one, Romulus critically forgets that an Alien movie is supposed to be tired. The people in these films are fucking exhausted. So there is an immediate bit of yuck dropped into the most recognized aspects of the franchise’s patented yum when Álvarez makes the choice to cast the film almost entirely with performers who have yet to exit their twenties. This is a problem in a couple of different directions, as it’s easily observed that an obvious hallmark of the franchise is the presence of convincingly weary, middle-aged character actors with distinctly interesting faces. Whether it’s Harry Dean Stanton playing a 40-year-old 75-year-old in the first one or Ron Perlman playing it doesn’t matter who in the fourth one, these movies are fundamentally brought to life by characters who look like they need a cup of coffee and are also fucking sick of space. Instead of any of that, Romulus offers up a series of Hip-Coded Twentysomethings.

Lucky for us, Spaeny and Jonsson acquit themselves impressively, even if they do so on weirdly opposite ends of the spectrum: She does a ton with the relatively little she is actually given to do, while his undeniable chops make some ultimately thin material go a delightfully long way. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast fails to fare nearly as well, with performances that range from “there” to “move-impactingly bad.”

Álvarez certainly makes sure that they’re shot handsomely—the visuals here are some of the film’s most winning elements—but this is ultimately counterbalanced by a series of truly misguided creative decisions. To be clear, when Romulus is on, it’s really fucking on. The problem is that Álvarez consistently manages to take the wind out of his own sales, deflating all of his most successful choices before they get the chance to characterize the film in any kind of meaningful way. Moments that will truly leave marks on your armrest are rendered frustratingly inert, undone by choices that, if they’re not simply annoying, border on being downright artistically egregious.

Had:
• Thrills
• Chills
• Spills

Needed:
• Character work
• At least one sweaty, tired guy

Unfortunately:
• A creature design that genuinely made the audience laugh

Alien: Romulus: Half Measures. was originally published in idiots_delight on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Fred Durst’s commentary on the audience/entertainer relationship goes about exactly how you think it will.

Movies seem to be constantly caught in the tension between their ability to exist as both art and entertainment. Hell, it’s not even that uncommon to encounter those who would insist that the two are mutually exclusive, although this is a sentiment usually deployed from a more defensive position, utilized alongside a denial that movies need to even be “about anything” to begin with, can’t we just turn our brains off and enjoy something for once, geez. And in a way, this isn’t incorrect. While almost every movie is “about” something more than the collection of sentences that summarizes its plot, knowledge of subtext is almost never a prerequisite for enjoyment.

And yet, ownership over the things we watch, what those things mean, and how they mean the things they mean seems to be a ridiculously fervent concern here in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Nineteen. The relationships between our entertainment, its creators, and those creators’ intentions have grown increasingly complicated, and it’s probably safe to suggest that the Internet hasn’t super helped, giving an outlet to many of our worst tendencies and modes of self-expression, when it comes to interacting with the things we love.

And guess what! Fred Durst isn’t super helping either.

His latest film The Fanatic is nothing short of a parade of baffling choices, both on screen and off, in which Durst and lead actor John Travolta (here playing Moose, a character whose first line of film-opening dialogue is, “I can’t talk long, I gotta poo”) are apparently locked in an eighty-eight-minute-long battle to see who can make the most insane possible storytelling and/or filmmaking decision and then commit that decision to film that it may be seen however many times by brave souls who would dare to replay it in the comfort of their own homes.

The Fanatic, in other words, is an absolute fucking party of a film: An almost poetic surrendering of logic and cohesion and feasibility, in favor of a rapidly spiraling descent into half-baked thematic conversation as wrought by a guy who once made an entire record and then named it after an asshole. This is a film about the intricacies of the interplay between art and its audience, as written and directed by someone who also once wrote a song about how sometimes you’re just so angry that you want to smash as much shit as you can find, and in as violent a way as possible.

And it really shows, in some of the most astonishing ways possible.

Perhaps the best part is how apparent the final product makes it that this production was fully convinced it had somehow caught lightning in a bottle. Most specifically, this refers to the absolutely unforgivable number of times the film displays a sorely misplaced confidence in its choice to stop dead in its tracks and just let Travolta do his thing, the moments during which he was clearly just told to go ahead and improv consistently standing in jaw-droppingly stark contrast to just about any other frame of the entire film.

Self-indulgence, if nothing else, is The Fanatic’s defining trait: This is a movie that reeks of someone convinced they have Something To Say, but lacking any of the discipline or planning or even formal understanding as to how that thing might be said well on film. Travolta’s Moose (afflicted with an unspecified Movie Mental Illness whose acting signifiers are about as insulting as just about anything else in this hour-and-a-half long whirlwind of questionable choices) gets increasingly obsessive over apparent horror icon Hunter Dunbar (Devon Sawa) before…it all just sort of spirals out of control? I suppose? There’s no better way to describe the plot, try as one might: Its mechanics are incredibly difficult to follow, story connections made in the most tenuous of terms and lacking any semblance of internal cohesion, such that the experience becomes less about following an arc from one moment to the next and more about simply digging your fingernails deep into the arms of your chair and living through a series of increasingly bizarre moments that almost seem to challenge your recollection in the following days.

Am I correctly remembering that at one point Travolta’s character play-acts a series of weird movie scenes that his famous movie star prisoner simply doesn’t seem to recognize at all? (I am.) Was there, in fact, a scene in which Travolta, while walking down a random street in the middle of Los Angeles, essentially runs into every major supporting character from the movie, one by one, each of them joining the conversation as though the movie had just turned into some surreal, R-rated, Limp Bizkit version of Our Town? (There was.) Was I fever dreaming a moment in which the film establishes its setting by having a background extra scream “WE ARE IN HOLLYWOOD!” because the production had clearly run out of time to shoot in California and had relocated to Alabama? (I was not.)

And all of this is really just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There is an absolute embarrassment of riches to be enjoyed here, each one more head scratching and sincere than the last one, both of those qualities existing in an incredible tandem with one another. The Fanatic is a near-perfect reflection of its two primary creative figures: a pair one-time zeitgeist figureheads, decades removed from the time of their relevancy, each of them trying desperately to figure out how they might once again interface with a culture that’s long since left them behind. It’d be more depressing if the results weren’t just so relentlessly entertaining.

The Fanatic: All the Subtlety of a Sledgehammer. was originally published in idiots_delight on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Noah Hawley’s directorial debut is an engaging watch that ultimately fails to deliver on its promises.

There’s a cognitive shift that impacts some astronauts who have been to outer space, the ability to see our planet from such a removed perspective granting them a sort of cosmically-imbued insight into the fragility of our collective being and the pettiness of that which motivates us to fuss and fight the way we so frequently do. It sounds, when it’s described by those who have known it, like a truly enlightening experience — one that could have untold ripples, radiating outwards and deep into their lives. It’s something that sounds like truly rich story material, especially when thematically dovetailed with the real-life story of two NASA astronauts and their disastrous affair.

So why, then, does Lucy in the Sky have such a difficult time connecting its ending to its beginning in a way that feels more significant than the sum of its parts? Everyone involved does fine work, and the film is an unquestionably engaging watch…and yet, at its close it feels frustratingly scattered and incidental, in a way that fails to deliver on the relatively weighty promises suggested by such aggressive Filmmaking choices.

Unsurprisingly, co-writer and director Noah Hawley’s feature debut is about as stylistically rich as it gets (sometimes in ways that might irritate certain viewers), but upon further reflection, one can’t really help but feel as though at least some of that style came at the critical expense of some much-needed substance. None of which is to say that Lucy in the Sky feels like an empty film, or one whose construction is anything even close to incompetent. Not by a long shot. Hawley’s loose adaptation of an actual (super bonkers) event is undeniably compelling, bolstered by mostly-sharp directorial styling and an impressively constricted performance from Natalie Portman (as the fictional Lucy Cola).

Her work here is top-notch, which is why it’s so unfortunate that the film ultimately winds up feeling as incidental as it does, suffering (strangely enough) from a need to zoom in even further and tell us not just more about its lead character, but about why she’s feeling and acting the way that she is. Not like we can’t all grok that it’s got to be pretty fucking cool to go into outer space, no matter how long you’re there. But the mechanics of Cola’s downward spiral are left feeling largely incomplete and scattershot: Was this her very first mission into space? Did she not experience anything like this the previous times? It’s one thing to tell us that Cola is dealing with something she’s not even sure how to put into words, but Lucy in the Sky troublingly seems content to leave her disconnect at “space is dope as hell and everything else is boring as shit in comparison,” expecting the audience to understand that this is enough for her to trash her entire career and still-blossoming marriage to her sweetheart of a husband (Dan Stevens).

Unable to cope with how unsatisfying she finds life back on earth, Lucy begins an affair with Jon Hamm’s Mark Goodwin, described appropriately by Stevens’ character at one point as being “a divorced action figure.” This seems to do the trick for her to a certain degree, but things truly begin to unravel when Lucy realizes that Mark might not be as committed to their tryst as she had hoped, and begins to suffer the professional ramifications that ultimately come along with her reactions to that realization. Zazie Beetz makes entirely too few appearances as the object of Mark’s secondary affection, making this two movies to be released in the same weekend in which her talents are unforgivably wasted. It’s odd that a film so thematically concerned with perspective would do so wrong by the one it chooses through which to tell its story, but that feels like the ultimate problem with Lucy in the Sky. We understand that Lucy feels the need to act out and end up tanking her entire life, but the frustratingly wide-lense storytelling perspective simply doesn’t go deep enough into her motivations, both before and after her time in outer space, that we might understand how they’ve changed this time around, or why they’ve done so. It simply isn’t sufficient to just tell us that space is powerfully cool enough to sew these seeds, but Lucy in the Sky feels as though it forgets to dive deep enough in a way that might realistically motivate Lucy’s character and her actions. As such, the ending winds up feeling strangely divorced from the beginning, some sort of storytelling quantum leap having moved us from the start of one arc to the finish of another.

At a certain point, Lucy in the Sky picks up an almost alarming amount of momentum, positively rocketing from beat to beat as we’re whipped through Cola’s personal breakdown, but failing in crucial places to dramatically inform said breakdown in a way that feels satisfying. One gets the inescapable feeling that the story’s more intricately personal mechanics were put on the back burner in favor of an increased amount of stylistic derring-do, as Lucy in the Sky is an absolute parade of shifting aspect ratios and intentionally interesting compositional choices. All the impressionism on display makes not only for a deeply engaging watch, but also smartly frames Lucy in the Sky as more of a character study than a plot-oriented piece. Unfortunately, this becomes exactly why the problems with Lucy’s characterization ultimately cripple the film in such a way. There’s a lot to like here, but an almost undeserved emptiness that settles over the whole thing once it’s over. All that stylism just needed to be wrought in service of something a little tighter.

Lucy in the Sky: Overviews. was originally published in idiots_delight on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Joaquin Phoenix turns in a fine performance in a well-made film with an ugly, irresponsible message.

Joker is the kind of film that can easily put one at a loss for a place to even start talking about it. Do we first discuss its at-times strikingly artful composition? The undeniably affecting performance, or the (mostly) genuinely engaging story over which these trimmings are draped? Or do we ignore those aspects of the film in favor of talking mostly about what an ugly, irresponsible, and gutlessly petulant message it has, all that art and color and weight loss and subtext funneled into the service of something truly vile and repugnant?

It’s a strange feeling, to be so aggressively confronted by the vast distance between the quality of the ideas present in this film, and that of the competency with which they’re realized on screen. Even if it is a little bit My First Prestige movie from time to time (or a lot of the time). Joker is unafraid to be, among other things, shockingly on the nose, eventually reaching a moment in its climax where its main character almost seems frustrated that the audience isn’t quite grasping the film’s message in the way that he wants, so he throws away any and all subtextual artifice to simply scream its thesis statement at us, in a way that my description here does not really exaggerate whatsoever.

Lazily hiding itself under a cloak of half-baked social commentary about class disparity amid the crumbling infrastructure of a dying city, Joker is really just a story built to justify one man’s violent outburst, once he realizes the world won’t be giving him the thing he’s decided he deserves to be given. Perhaps even more glaringly audacious is the readiness with which that brand of impotent, unearned rage is mapped onto the wider social tensions experienced during moments like the Occupy Wall Street movement, or others more directly related to police violence.

In what amounts to George Costanza: The Movie, only he murders a few people by the end, Joker is a pile-on of the laziest sort, in which the hapless Arthur Fleck just can’t seem to catch a break, despite being a totally good and normal dude, we guess? We’re not sure. The movie never bothers to tell us if or why Arthur deserves any of the things he wants; it’s apparently just enough for us to know the depths his rage can (and will) reach when he is ultimately unable to get them. If you can think of it happening to a Hapless Schlub Character, it happens in this movie. He loses his shitty job. His living situation is bleak. The girl doesn’t like him. He’s bad at standup. Eventually, all these different pitches combine into a frequency that Arthur can no longer stand, and he’s pushed to the point of lashing out by way of murdering three Wall Street types on a subway. This is apparently enough to trigger an Anonymous/Occupy Wall Street hybrid social movement that allows Arthur to then serve as a sort of clumsy synecdoche for a larger, more justified type of cultural rage that the film never comes close to earning, instead focusing on Arthur’s failure to get the stuff he wants in life, despite having not really earned it or anything.

If I’m sounding repetitive, that might be for a reason. Cyclical by design, this movie is a repeating exercise in frustration and denial, Arthur slowly making his way down a spiral of despondency and repression until finally snapping…and not in a way that isn’t engaging, if I’m being completely honest. For all its empty messaging and vapid edgelord bullshit, Joker is a still a well-constructed and exceedingly well-shot film.

And then there’s Joaquin.

It’s hard to approach a performance like this one as part of a general audience, free of any preconceptions that might be grafted onto it from literal months of hearing what a transformative masterwork it is. And it is certainly transformative. Joaquin is Acting here, and he’s doing a lot of it: He disappears deep into Fleck, all sinew and bones and spavined angles that I’m still not certain weren’t prosthetics in places, yet retaining an almost otherworldly fluidity of motion. His body control and ability to commit to character are undeniable here, but it’s hard to tell where the fault lies when it ultimately fails to become something more than the simple sum of its parts. Editing could possibly be at issue here, but something about Phoenix’s performance as Fleck never seems to grow or evolve in a meaningful way, instead just playing the same note—quiet, seething rage under an awkwardly needy Little Lord Fauntleroy exterior—to the hilt, pushing it until its breaking point, at which it very suddenly shifts gears into something else. Fleck’s arc is easily tracked within the script, but his performance seems to have substituted moments in which he might grow into a new version of himself with…dancing. Lots and lots of dancing. So much dancing that it becomes hard to say whether Phoenix’s performance ever actually evolves along with his character, instead feeling stuck on the same track in a way that contradicts its reception so far.

It doesn’t help that his performance is so isolated within the film, either. Nobody else gets enough to do here, and long stretches of screen time devoted to letting Phoenix just Act are compelling, but threaten Joker’s momentum in places. Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, and Brett Cullen all do fine work with their nine lines apiece, but it’s positively criminal to use this little of Shea Wigham in any film.

Still, when they do show up, the supporting players all look fantastic, as there’s no denying that Todd Phillips and cinematographer Lawrence Sher shot a hell of a film. Their vision of Gotham is handsomely photographed, and Phillips’ camera frequently finds what truly feels like the most compelling (if, at times, also the most obvious) choice when it comes to the framing and composition of his action. Fleck’s world is all wet and mildew, and a sort of gun-metal monochromatic color palate reveals itself as a surprisingly canny counterpoint when set against Joker’s brief flashes of shocking, vibrant color. It’s an unexpected treat, how good this film looks, right down to the subtlety of the design choices in the Joker makeup Fleck ultimately winds up donning.

It’s almost enough to make you forget that there’s no real reason for him to be donning it in the first place, as this character’s trajectory is tied to anything having to do with the DC mythology in a way that’s tenuous at best. Anything explicitly making this character “The Joker” could have been cut from the film with zero consequence; the literal only thing that Fleck ever does that categorizes him in this way is exist in the same city and time period as a little boy we’re told is Bruce Wayne.

It’s a telling detail, that this film has to stretch its premise so far to even justify its existence within the larger pantheon of cultural storytelling into which it has so inelegantly forced itself, and it speaks to this emperor’s distinct lack of clothes. This isn’t a prestige picture; this is a strident screed about how It’s Everyone Else’s Fault. This isn’t a Joker origin story; it’s a movie about a guy who kills a few people and then also there’s clown makeup. There are no big ideas to be had here; this is a feature-length temper tantrum.

Joker: White Lies. was originally published in idiots_delight on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The recently revived Wall-Crawler wrestles with responsibility in another engaging, yet empty entry in the MCU canon.

It’s tough to envy the folks responsible for writing the movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. On the one hand, there’s an easy case to be made for how fun it must be to play in that particular IP sandbox — it can’t be anything other than a total blast to mess around with power sets, chart courses for future storylines, and work within such a deeply-established lore. On the other hand, though, sits the very distinct problem that plagues a number of these films: How do you tell a decent story, with well-formed characters who go on legitimate emotional journeys, when it’s all but mandated that at least 45 minutes of that story must consist of just…out-and-out action?

By now the MCU contains enough entires that it’s almost a statistical guarantee that at least a few of them will have figured out how to solve this particular equation. And yet the ones that have done so have clearly done it with an intentionality that goes well beyond a simple numbers game. The MCU’s talent pool has successfully integrated action and emotion enough times to make it sort of apparent that these movies fall into to two camps: the Serious Ones and the Fun Ones. Spider-Man: Far From Home sits firmly in the latter camp, but in a way that leaves it feeling unfortunately airless upon any real reflection. Make no mistake: Holland is operating at peak charm capacity, the supporting cast is delightful, and it’s one of the more decidedly engaging entries in terms of its action and visuals. But, not unlike Homecoming, it wraps up in a way that fails to really have anything to say about, or provide any emotional connection to the actual story it so busily tells.

Spidey’s second solo outing is mostly set during Peter’s class trip to Europe, giving the film an excuse to bounce between foreign locales just about any time there’s a new plot beat, which keeps things fresh even if the changes in location amounts to little more than repeated splashes of new window-dressing. Having been brought back into existence, along with most of his classmates, relatively recently (and having gone into deep space to fight an intergalactic despot just before that), Peter understandably just wants to take a break and hang out with his friends. Given that he’s Peter Parker, though, he’s stuck between wanting to be a kid and that whole power/responsibility thing. This time around, that responsibility takes the form of four inter-dimensional Elementals that have recently crossed over into our reality thanks to Thanos’ Snap. Some dude named Quentin Beck made his way into our dimension along with these Elementals, and (given that this movie seems to forget that the MCU now has like, 50 different powered individuals running around in it) Nick Fury absolutely needs Spider-Man to team up with him so they can put an end to the threat together. Alongside all of this, Peter wrestles with the weight of being the heir apparent to Iron Man’s legacy, while also wanting little more than to try and establish an emotional connection with MJ.

Herein lies one of the main problems: This movie is so desperately strapped for time that it literally has to open with Peter explaining, in dialogue, that he likes MJ now, apparently relying on noting more than the audience’s understanding of these two characters to make this offscreen development believable. It’s incredibly lucky that both Holland and Zendaya (who’s given criminally little to do in this) are talented enough to really make this work, but it’s also tough not to recoil when Peter basically looks into the camera and shouts “OH YEAH, BY THE WAY I LIKE MJ NOW INSTEAD OF LIZ.” This film, crucially, tells when it needs to be showing, its dramatic wings having very obviously been clipped by what feels like studio-mandated action. And while much of it is as about as visually-engaging as it gets, the film ends with a conspicuous lack of emotional engagement that should have come along with it.

Moments that feel ripe for emotional development are unfortunately sidelined in favor of previz-borne antics, with one specific mid-film moment that feels like it’s a perfect place for Peter to wrestle with his difficult combination of grief and duty instead veering sharply left, and into a slapstick action beat that really could have been completely excised from the final film without impacting its plot in the slightest. In a movie where characters are reduced to simply stating their emotional developments out loud, stuff like this feels particularly egregious.

Still: It should be stressed that these are what we’ll call Post-Movie Problems. This is the bullshit that bugs you after you’ve left the theater and started to really pull things apart, because while it’s running? Spider-Man: Far From Home is a goddamn delight. It’s a bummer that Ned, MJ, and the rest of Peter’s classmates are reduced to little more than running gags, but it’s also hard to stay bummed when these running gags are so relentlessly entertaining. Sure, it’s annoying that Ned gets a movie-long recurring joke instead of any kind of actual characterization, but it’s worth noting that this particular recurring joke culminates in a truly hilarious payoff that is almost good enough to justify the trade.

All this being the case, it still wouldn’t have killed this movie to give us at least one single other character for Peter to work with. Everybody who doesn’t own a Spider-Man costume is very much just reduced to a list of traits and behaviors (in another of the film’s more egregious moments, a key player’s entire deal is spewed out in an info-dump monologue delivered to a room that is literally only populated by people who already know all of this information), and the result is that Peter winds up feeling like someone who just has things happen to him, even though he…wishes they wouldn’t?

Despite boasting some of the most visually-engaging action sequences this side of Doctor Strange, Far From Home winds up feeling disappointingly weightless. It’s all empty calories, but sweetened by an absolutely undeniable charm thanks to a cleverly witty script and the towering talents of its onscreen performers (Bitchy Gyllenhaal is a total treasure). Far From Home may be little more than candy, but it’s a tasty enough treat I’ll probably snack on again and again.

Oh, and also…

• Lots of supporting characters “get more to do” in the sense that they’re just given more jokes…but this works like gangbusters, especially for Martin Starr.
• I genuinely don’t know how I feel about either of those end-credits scenes.
• PLEASE GIVE ZENDAYA/MJ AN ACTUAL CHARACTER ARC TO PLAY OUT, SHE IS FAR TOO TALENTED FOR THIS WEIGHTLESS NONSENSE.

Spider-Man: Far From Homecoming. was originally published in idiots_delight on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“I’m simply saying that life, uh…finds a way.”

In the days or weeks that follow a viewing of Claire Denis’ incredible High Life, it’s weirdly easy to get that iconic Jurassic Park quote stuck in your head. More specifically applicable to this sci-fi tone poem, though, is the little speech that precedes it. It’s certainly less memorable than that classic Ian Malcolm capper, but it offers an interesting take on the philosophy that surprisingly grounds both films:

…the kind of control you’re attempting, it’s not possible. If there’s one thing that the history of evolution has taught us, it’s that life will not be contained. Life breaks free. It expands to new territories, and it crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously.

Each character in Denis’ film attempts, in some way, to exert a sort of mastery over their own biological nature, and in studying the methods by which each character interfaces with the inescapability of the conditions of their own existence, High Life delivers a bracing reflection on the messily stubborn, and often chaotic uncontrollability of life itself.

Set in a spaceship whose interior is about as ascetic as the yawning void of deep space through which it floats, circling the drain around an enormous black hole, High Life follows a group of convicts sent on a dangerous—and likely one-way—trip to potentially discover a new energy source. Saddled with a cynical lie instead of the actual purpose they were promised (whether there even was a mission to begin with is dubious at best), these people are left more or less to their own devices, their condition mirrored, at one point, by the inhabitants of another experimental ship they randomly bump into during their orbit.

Over the course of the film, Juliette Binoche’s Dr. Dibs, the mission’s de facto leader, reduces the ship’s handful of occupants to a collection of controls and variables in a series of experiments that see her madly working to create life in places where it was simply never meant to exist. Her attempts at transposing biological life outside of its intended boundaries is met with predictably disastrous, upsetting results. Mia Goth’s Boyse, Robert Pattinson’s Monte, André Benjamin’s Tcherny, and a few other background players are all set loose in Denis’ fishbowl of an environment, and it’s not long before their raw and uncontrolled natures begin to impact one another in sometimes shocking ways.

High Life isn’t an easy film, and it’s certainly not one that’s interested much in any traditional kind of entertainment. Denis is here to ask complex questions of her audience, and she does so with the confidence of an artist unconcerned with the pleasurability of her output. This is the work of a filmmaker in full command of her craft, and she marshals not just an impressive sense of mood from her even-handed camerawork and spartan set design, but also a set of precision-calibrated performances from Pattinson, Goth, and Binoche. Kubrick is maybe the most obvious antecedent for a minimalist, space-set meditation on the very nature of life itself…but rather than call to mind the work of other filmmakers, Denis’ film sings with originality. High Life is science fiction only in the most superficial of senses, deftly utilizing the genre’s trappings and settings to explore the immutability of the forces that make us who — and what—we are.

For all this high-minded philosophizing, it’s easy to forget that this is also a movie that contains a “fuckbox.” It’s a movie in which a character straight up steals bodily fluids from another (in just one example of its preoccupation with fluids and the way they indicate our humanity). It’s also a movie with the cutest goddamn baby I’ve maybe ever seen in my life. High Life is a bizarre chimera, a film that insists on being many things, but never in a way that detracts from the impressive sum total of its parts.

It’s oppressive, challenging, mystifying, and at times terrifying: a space-set mood piece with a minimalist approach to visuals and storytelling, balanced by a maximalist approach to deep thoughts and existential questions. Perhaps the film’s biggest hook is its insistence on suggesting that the audience consider those questions on its own; High Life grows and grows, taking on rewarding new shapes as it’s mulled over, post-viewing. And mulled-over it will be, as this film all but demands preoccupation, pulling viewers in and refusing to let go like the imposing black hole at its center.

Oh, and also…

• Robert Pattinson is unquestionably on his way to becoming One of the Greats.
• For the most part High Life plays it muted and meditative…but when it decides to get horrifying, holy shit does it get horrifying.
• Mia Goth’s fascinating career choices almost always result in excellent performances, regardless of the overall quality of the flicks in which they’re contained.

High Life: Get Me Bodied. was originally published in idiots_delight on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

John Woo serves up an energy drink in movie form.

Hey everyone, it’s franchise time! The newest iteration of the neverending Mission: Impossible series is upon us, because it looks like someone forgot to get their ritual sacrifice right yet again this year. We’re going to keep getting these movies until the Elder Gods are appeased, it looks like, so we might as well have fun with ’em.

“The one with the Limp Bizkit song” applies perfectly to this movie, in every possible way the phrase might be interpreted.

This movie wants so bad to know if you remember the first one, but before you’ve even finished answering it’s like, “GOOD, BECAUSE FUCK THAT MOVIE,” and you’ve suddenly been overpowered by chugging guitar riffs and Tom Cruise’s hair, which received second billing in this film.

Welcome to Mission: Impossible 2.

Look, the first Mission: Impossible was, for the most part, an underhanded and heady espionage thriller, and everyone knows how fucking boring that shit is. Critically acclaimed? More like shittily framed, am I right? (Seriously, who even is Brian De Palma and why can’t he frame a shot right? Why aren’t there more birds? Why isn’t there more choppy, post-production slow motion?) Mission: Impossible 2 is the cure for the exercise in restraint and nuance that is predecessor didn’t even really bother being, undoing just about everything that made the first film in this franchise interesting by cranking it all way up to 15.

Almost literally every single thing about Mission: Impossible is amplified in John Woo’s bugfuck crazy 2000 sequel, and holy shit, what an egregious pile of hot garbage the result turns out to be. This movie’s plot makes even less sense than the first one, which was intentionally twisty and misleading (but still managed to be pretty coherent and relatively easy to put together, if you were paying attention). I wasn’t kidding when I said that literally everything about this movie got cranked up to full capacity. This happened whether it made sense to do so or not. Convoluted spy plot in the first film? Fuck you, straight-up incoherent corporate pharmaceutical intrigue in the second one. Thinly-sketched turncoat villain in the first film? Fuck you! A cartoonishly evil and sadistic bad guy in this one, who is literally still working for the good guys when he’s introduced at the start of the film, and whose motives for turning bad are very literally never mentioned, even in passing. A simpering, incapable sole female character who only exists to be batted around between the desires of two men in the first film? Yeah, fuck you, lots more of that shit in this one.

And so on and so forth. Mission: Impossible 2 finds Tom Cruise at the height of his hubris and power, seemingly intent on undoing every conscious decision that made the first movie special. THIS Ethan Hunt fucks, ladies and gentlemen. THIS Ethan Hunt knows fourteen different flying spin kicks and if he can find some more bad guys, he can’t wait to show you the rest of them. THIS Ethan Hunt shoots stuff, and you better believe your sweet ass he shoots stuff SO, so good. This Ethan Hunt mugs and smirks and spins and flips his way through the entire fucking film, to the point where another character even comments on how annoying it is (in what feels distinctly like an ad-lib, no less). Dougray Scott chews scenery like he’s convinced he’ll never work again, and even Thandie Newton is denied the chance to acquit herself nobly, at times framed such that her breasts are literally the only part of her body visible on screen (next to Tom Cruise’s face, of course).

Plagued by unintentional hilarity and constant overdirection, this movie is a fucking can of Surge in cinematic form, reeking of a clear reaction to all the nonsense that happened in the year or two before its release. Specifically The Matrix and GoldenEye, both of which are snaked time and time again by this weird hodgepodge of cultural reference points. Mission: Impossible 2 is clearly going for an “American James Bond” vibe, to the degree that the villain has his very own actual lair. Which is interesting, because as mentioned, the audience is explicitly informed that the bad guy was actually a good guy up until about 30 minutes before the start of the film.

This movie is just a rainforest of bad decisions: strange and lumbering performances hidden under a thick canopy of terrible choices and purely reactionary filmmaking that can’t help but reveal itself as such over and over again. In its own shambling way, it’s paradoxically more interesting than its predecessor, if only because each scene seems to offer up a new and even-more-baffling series of shitty calls. It’s unquestionably the one we’d all like to forget, but it’s exactly the things that give it this quality which also lend it its only redeeming aspect. This film is a time capsule of the highest order, each guitar chug a nail through the foot of whatever actual cultural relevance might have enabled it to move forward in time. Instead, Mission: Impossible 2 sits firmly stuck in the moment of its creation, a relic of the new millennium and all the dumb crap we thought was cool at the time. The only good news is that it’s as easy forget as the rest of that other crap was, too.

NB: This originally appeared at devisemag.com on July 23, 2018.

Mission: Impossible 2 Unleashes a Heavenly Host of Spin Kicks and Farts. was originally published in idiots_delight on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.