Dad Jokes: POWER BALLAD and THE BREADWINNER

Sometimes you just want to go to the movies and see a light story about plausible people in slightly implausible scenarios adjacent to real life. Like if your life had a sprinkling of movie magic over it, you might stumble into something like this, too. That’s something that Irish writer-director John Carney seems to understand well when he gets the formula exactly right in building his light dramas that are lifted to something closer to transcendence through the power of music. It was there in his intimate, casual street-busker romance from 2006, Once, and in his 80s coming-of-age garage band musical from 2016, Sing Street. And it’s there again in his latest: Power Ballad. (I guess he gets it right exactly once every ten years.) It stars Paul Rudd as an expat American singer-songwriter working as the front man to a wedding band. He gave up his dreams of stardom to settle down in a Dublin suburb with an Irish wife and daughter. But he never stopped writing. This is the part that is definitely believable. 

The slight fantasy of the movie is that his band gets a gig at the reception for the childhood best friend of a former boy band member. Wouldn’t you know it that the fading celeb (played by an aptly cast Nick Jonas) is planning a comeback and is in town to write his new album? He shows up at the wedding, jams with the band, and connects with Rudd. They have fun buddy chemistry as they share some works in progress with each other and part ways feeling good about meeting a simpatico artist. Six months later, Rudd hears one of his songs over the speakers at the local mall. The star stole his song. Carney explores the ramifications with a degree of generosity to both men, and watches as the one’s anger and the other’s guilt keep them apart. But the movie’s light tone and strain of good humor—not to mention the great original songs—make some kind of happy ending inevitable. That might keep the movie’s scope, and emotional range, small, but there’s something so deeply satisfying about watching a well-oiled sentimental script go through its paces with likable leads and catchy tunes. It’s the John Carney special. 

Even lighter and less substantial is The Breadwinner. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t satisfy in its own way. Starring and co-written by standup comedian Nate Bargatze, it’s a down-the-middle sitcom of the sort that comics of his observational, family friendly kind would do all the time in the 80s and 90s on TV and the big screen. As such, it has a throwback, even retrograde, premise. He’s a husband, a father, and a well-meaning oaf. His wife (Mandy Moore) has a great business opportunity, care of a sequence in which the Shark Tank judges play themselves. (I'd say part of the fantasy here is that her invention would even get a deal.) Now she has to leave for two weeks to launch her product, which means he needs to be the sole parent to their three adorable daughters. Hijinks ensue. If you’re already imagining burnt toast, laundry shenanigans, and driving the wrong way to school, you have the right idea. It might seem a little unusual to imagine a dad so far out of the loop these days. But this isn’t a movie about all dads; it’s a movie about this dad. And Bargatze makes a believably unaware guy. His standup works because of its low-key befuddlement, like an affable guy who’s slowly learning about how to process his own life. Though obviously his observational style relies on some intelligent comprehension, he knows how to approach everyday problems with an unassuming gee-didja-notice? attitude. He has the right slightly stunned look to sell the well-meaning confusion. 

He brings to the movie that sense of middle class bewilderment, and a gooey sentimentality about the love of family that draws a guy out of his bubble of privilege and into fuller responsibility. It helps that the kids are so cute, and the jokes are actually pretty funny—bolstered by a supporting cast including Will Forte, Colin Jost, Kate Berlant, Zach Cherry, Kumail Nanjiani. It has all the charms of the throwbacks it’s copying, with a little Everybody Loves Raymond here, a little Home Improvement there. But it has mercifully none of the gender anxiety the premise might provoke. He genuinely doesn’t mind that his wife has to be the main breadwinner and wants to help her. He’s just not used to doing without the valuable co-parenting work she’s been providing. It feels, if not exactly true to life, true to some lives. Like the Adam Sandler movies of twenty years ago, it’s cleanly shot, stuffed with silly asides, and loaded up with product placement. (Thanks, Toyota, KFC, and Walmart, I guess.) It's not vulgar or crass, just sweet and gentle. We don’t get live action comedies in theaters much, and certainly not family friendly ones. It’s nice to remember what it’s like to be in room of people chuckling along with one that gets the job done. 

Big Screen Scares: OBSESSION and BACKROOMS

The YouTubers have arrived. We’ve occasionally had filmmakers emerge from amateur efforts on that site, for better (the Filipou brothers’ scary Talk to Me and Bring Her Back are massive leaps beyond their channel’s horror shorts) and or worse (Chris Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks is a dull, cliched, irritating horror film). Now 2026 seems to be doing its best to say there’s perhaps more promise to be plucked from those ranks of creators, like television and music videos and theater before it. Funny that so far they’re all horror, which has often been a calling card for new indie voices. It’s been mere months since play-through poster Markiplier’s independent adaptation of the video game Iron Lung turned a big profit in theaters. I found the movie a bit repetitive and disorienting, but was quite impressed by how it was effective on its own terms. He played to his strengths making a one-location movie in which he essentially sits at the controls and plays the game. Now we have two more YouTuber film debuts: Curry Barker’s Obsession and Kane Parsons’s Backrooms. Judging them on formal control and narrative ambition, it’s clear that they could be two big new talents. 

Barker’s Obsession has a simple premise: what if there was a magic wand that gave you one wish? He has this device fall into the hands of a young man (Michael Johnston) who has a crush on a girl (Inde Navarrette). He can’t quite bring himself to admit it to her, even though she’s given him multiple opportunities. Maybe he’s shy. Maybe he’s self-conscious. Maybe he’s stressed. Maybe he’s afraid of rejection. Maybe it’s a toxic stew of all of these things. He can’t be honest with himself; how could he be honest with another? He doesn’t entirely believe the magic wand—a One Wish Willow he finds by happenstance in a witchy novelty shop. But that doesn’t stop him from using it to wish the girl would “love him more than anything in the world.” Anyone whose ever read, or even heard of, “The Monkey’s Paw” can guess where this is going. She becomes demonically obsessed with him with occasionally unpredictable results (like duct taping his front door shut from the inside while he sleeps). And, dud that he is, he likes her obsessiveness. Mostly. For a while. (The tape thing gives him slight pause). 

Barker gives the movie a great creepy crawling pace and lets the two lead performances wiggle around in the premise’s discomforts. He shoots in a boxy aspect ratio and glides the camera with an eerie otherworldliness as the actors play out the inevitable tragedy. Navarrette in particular does well signaling otherworldly devotion and dissociative trauma in the same wide-eyed glances. It’s clear that the movie is aware the young man is the villain, and the girl is trapped in his wishful delusion. She’s not really in love with him, and there are weird supernatural cracks in the intensity of her clinginess. Eventually it erupts in horror gore—but the sense of surprise is pretty much gone. The shallowness of its insights catch up to it. I’m sure it’ll be a great, provocative watch for people who’ve never had thoughts about male entitlement, unhealthy relationships, or wishes-gone-wrong before. For the rest of us, it’ll be admiring the filmmaker’s chops while wishing the script had a little more meat on the bone. 

Parson’s Backrooms is an even more impressive feat. As a work of sustained mood and space it’s incredible. He builds one of those great movie places and gets a little lost in it. But who can begrudge that? I was completely enveloped by its sense of a porous boundary between the reality and surreality of its premise. To be on its wavelength practically demands leaning in to try to see around the next corner as the camera slowly turns. Based on a series of YouTube shorts he made in his teenage years—Parsons is still only 20!—it concerns those eerie liminal spaces that were all the rage in meme horror some years back. Have you ever been alone in an empty office building or a back hallway in a mall that’s been almost, but not entirely, cleared of furniture? Now imagine a maze of those rooms, inconsistently lit, with distant muffled footsteps, and an increasingly surreal sense of architecture. Halls go nowhere, doors open onto stairs, stairs lead to doors, doors lead to ramps, ramps lead to rooms that narrow to another door. You get the picture. All of it is set to ominous low rumbles and the buzz of florescent lights. It is unsettling, but pulled forward by an inquisitive momentum. What is this place? I was uneasy, but also didn't want to leave.

That’s the same sensation, and compulsion, for the lead character, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. He’s the owner of a struggling discount furniture store who discovers, late one night, that he can step through a wall in the basement and end up in this befuddling place. And then he just has to know more. The movie’s at its best as it follows these excursions, sometimes in creepy clean digital photography, sometimes in fuzzy Blair Witch-style VHS found footage aesthetics. (It’s set in a strangely convincing 1990—15 years before the director’s birth, another unsettling realization.) I honestly could’ve watched Ejiofor and his two employees, camcorder in tow, explore this space for the entire runtime. The camera creeps along with them, sending shivers with each half-glimpsed shadow in the darkness just beyond our perspective. But the movie moves perhaps too quickly to broaden the scope and jumps to some big character shifts when the mystery of the moment was enough. There’s also a therapist (Renate Reinsve) who worries that her client has lost it in delusions describing the backrooms, and has odd flashbacks implying her own traumatic backstory. She goes looking for him. Then there’s a guy in a white lab coat (Mark Duplass) who seems like he’s going to explain things, but mercifully doesn’t know much more than we do by that point. To Parson’s credit, there is no answer, but that does leave the movie saying only: Huh, look at this place. Weird, right? But, hey, this is a weird place worth seeing! 

Weathering with You: PRESSURE

Pressure is a movie for people who’d rather doze off in a movie theater instead of falling asleep on the couch in front of the History Channel. It’s a World War II drama about the last three or four days of planning for D-Day. The epic moment is narrowed down to just a few rooms through the limited perspective of the meteorological team. At first they think it won’t be stormy weather. Then they do. The top weatherman is played by Andrew Scott. He has a nice pregnant wife at home and now he’s sequestered with the top brass barking at him to make a call. Is he sure? It’s a prediction. He’s a little worried that they don’t know how weather forecasts operate. He goes against the other top weatherman in the room (Chris Messina). General Eisenhower—a growling Brendan Fraser—looks at him with skepticism, then reluctant agreement that still bubbles up with skepticism. A storm could ruin all their planning and maybe even tip the course of the war. Damian Lewis plays a general whose reaction to hearing about the impending bad weather’s potential for delaying his invasion plans is to rant that they should just start “taking Kraut lessons now!” Scott has a great stiff upper lip and slightly teary eyes that sell the stress of being the naysayer in a situation like this. It’s a movie that, if nothing else, will make you say, yeah, I guess it would be a lot of pressure to tell the assembled Allied Commanders whether or not their closely guarded plans will be stymied by high winds. 

There’s just not much going on here beyond the obvious. First Scott has to argue it’s about to storm and the leaders growl. It’s sunny outside! They begrudgingly respect him when it starts raining a few hours later. A key scene comes late in the picture where Scott has decided that the weather is about to change. Eisenhower yells something like: “You say don’t go when it’s sunny, and to go when it’s storming!” Something tells me the real guy knew a little bit more about how weather works. But here’s a movie that’s desperately stretching to make drama out of its little corner of a massive event. I don’t doubt there was actual drama here, but the movie doesn’t much find it. Going deeper into the actual process of collecting data for their forecasts, instead of glossing over it with montage, might’ve helped. Instead we have little montages of devices and charts followed by broad scenes of flat dialogue and pat, easily resolved tensions. Director Anthony Maras has assembled a fine cast, dressed them in period costumes and set them in convincingly historical rooms. It looks and moves and sounds like a proper prestige picture, all surface polish. But screenwriter David Haig, adapting his own stage play, seems to trust the subject matter to do the heavy lifting. The movie ends with an abridged combat sequence that mostly reminds viewers of Saving Private Ryan’s much more successful balance of the personal stakes in the epic terror of combat in this very historical moment. I wanted to like a talky movie about WWII strategy. But this is a flat foregone conclusion of a movie. 

Robbin' Good: I LOVE BOOSTERS

Rapper-turned-writer/director Boots Riley has a lively imagination and a righteous sense of social satire. Together those qualities make for movies that are electric and chaotic in equal measure. His first feature was the unpredictable 2018 comedy Sorry to Bother You, in which a Black call center employee gets big bucks for deploying an unctuous “White Voice.” That hook soon spun off into wild flights of fancy that slowly diluted its emotional punch in favor of vulgar shocks. Now, nearly a decade later, we have Riley’s second film: I Love Boosters. It has more focus, and even tighter control over the filmmaking fundamentals. It’s a riotous, candy-colored story of have-nots versus a have. It also indulges in bits of magical realism until they take over and turn the movie’s heightened reality into nesting dolls of metaphorical unreality. Yet if it gets less funny as it gets more fantastical, Riley never loses interest in double, triple, quadruple underlining every satiric point. It helps ground all of its interests that the characters are such big, likable personalities. The film’s snappy start introduces us to the Boosters: a lovable group of shoplifters who sneak expensive designer clothes and accessories out of department stores for the reselling. Steal from the rich and sell at a discount to the poor. “Fashion forward philanthropy,” one says. Their ringleader is Keke Palmer, one of our most appealing leading ladies in another of her bubbly, appealing underdog roles. She has an easy, relaxed charisma and a hustling forward momentum. Her accomplices are Zola’s Taylour Paige and Mickey 17’s Naomi Ackie. They give the trio a loose, charming chemistry as they enact increasingly unlikely daring midday heists. Their determination and their friendship dovetail nicely. 

One step ahead of getting caught, and two steps ahead of bill collectors, they’re a scrappy, working class counterpoint to the stylish villain of the picture. From a leaning luxury apartment in the middle of San Francisco, a billionaire fashion designer demands her underlings find these thieves who threaten her retail empire, and further commands her Chinese sweatshops ignore safety and work harder for less to make up for her losses. Demi Moore plays her as if every line was a speech bubble in a political cartoon. She comes across as blend of Cruella de Vil and Miranda Priestly—but somehow both more evil and more believable. Riley has such a clear, totalizing vision for the movie. It has broad, almost cartoonish stylistic curlicues—editing as punchline, pop-art titles, background sight gags, Palmer hallucinating a literal ball of stresses—and then, by the second half, gives way to total fantasy. You might not expect from the small-scale opening that it’d build to a largely stop-motion action finale—let alone a supernatural creature that’s merely a minor side-character or a sci-fi device that operates at the speed of plot. But that’s Riley for you. The movie doesn’t have much of a sense of who its characters are beyond ideas in the points its scoring. But it’s fast and funny and they careen through an increasingly crowded ensemble and convoluted plot. The story’s mechanics lose a few springs and gears in the hard turns, and a finale that wraps up with a flourish of wishful thinking. But the vibrant colors and coordinated gestures and cartoon logic and vulgar jokes build to bold conceits. In an increasingly bland, homogenized cinematic landscape, I’m glad we have Riley out there making movies so distinctive, delirious, and committed to shouting sharp satiric points with style. 

Cowboy and Alien: THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU

Star Wars has always been a pulp genre melting pot. You know the litany of influences: westerns, samurai adventures, medieval fantasies, small-town drag races, WWII dogfights, creature features, space opera action serials. In the unique stirring of George Lucas’ mind, the whole production becomes a sui generis construction, a blend of his interests that’s uniquely personal for something so outsized. It’s also been a central pillar of our last several decades of pop culture production. Every science fiction fantasy blockbuster is downstream of its innovations, and the trouble with non-Lucas attempts to extend his world is getting the mix wrong. You shouldn’t make a Star Wars movie out of copying Star Wars; you should go back to the source code. What made for fun with The Mandalorian, the first live-action Star Wars television show, when it debuted on Disney+ seven years ago, was its success in making cinematic images roughly congruent with the movie series, while bottling it up in the roving bounty hunter episodic structure of so many TV westerns of yore. It had a setup to run for years. But given the sluggish pace of modern TV production we’ve only had two more seasons and a handful of vaguely connected parallel series since. We’ve also had a franchise increasingly incapable of getting a movie out of pre-production. So it is that Disney decided to get a Star Wars-shaped thing in theaters for this Memorial Day. Getting a supersized episode of the show off the ground seemed the quickest way to do so. 

Show-runner Jon Favreau helms it himself. It’s not exactly a fourth season of the show. Instead, it’s a two-hour tide-me-over. It looks like an episode of the show, although that says a lot about how TV has gotten glossier and movies have gotten flatter. Nothing much of consequence happens, but we do get to hang out with the eponymous Mandalorian bounty hunter and his tiny green Force-sensitive "Baby Yoda" ward Grogu. They’ve become iconic for a reason, with clean silhouettes and archetypal simplicity. When they first step into frame in an elaborate opening action sequence, there’s a pop of excitement. Just like in the show, they’re off on a mission that branches into side quests then weaves back into the original goal. Every twenty to thirty minutes the minor objective and setting changes while building to one overarching major objective for a climax. We fly to a snow planet to a beach planet to a swamp planet to a city planet and back again. Some locations are neatly imagined with fun whimsical details like a trip to a new location: space Chicago crawling with gangsters and fixed fights. Other locales, like goopy underground tunnels in a Hutt den, are blurry brownish-green eyesores. Favreau, a veteran of this sort of thing through Iron Man and Zathura and Cowboys & Aliens, gives the movie a bland professionalism that dutifully pushes fans' buttons. It’s very familiar and largely unsurprising, cramped and small, but manages some diverting appeal from time to time. 

For long-term fans of the whole franchise, it’s recognizably similar to the small-scale stories tossed off as comic book one-shots or short stories in anthologies during the 1990s Expanded Universe of multimedia spin-offs. Realizing that helps tamp down expectations and allows the movie its best chance of working for you. It’s a light, inessential doodling in the margins of the main storylines. Stormtroopers get shot. We meet lots of little aliens with funny voices. Sigourney Weaver appears for a few moments, barely longer than she’s in the trailer. A couple minor characters from a different show get killed off. X-wings swoop in at the last second. It has all the noises and lights you’d expect from the franchise. Ludwig Göransson’s score bangs and wails with suitable techno-spaghetti western flair. Mando looks cool as takes down waves of bad guys. Grogu’s puppeteered for maximum affecting cuteness and growing power. And yet for this we go to the theater? It can’t help but feel like a diminishment of the franchise from a mythic cycle to just another thing to see. When shows like the literate, political Andor and the vibrant, kinetic Maul: Shadow Lord have kept the series’ vitality alive through streaming, it’s a shame going back to the movies for this universe feels so inconsequential and small.

Pop Goes Her Heart:BILLIE EILISH: HIT ME HARD AND SOFT (LIVE IN 3D) and MOTHER MARY

James Cameron approaches a Billie Eilish concert like he does deep sea creatures or the Titanic wreckage. He’s gone to see it and wants to tell us: huh, would you look at that? The cinematographic curiosity ends at the level of procuring the footage. His documentaries—Aliens of the Deep, Ghosts of the Abyss, and now this—are chronicles of interesting sights presented with cutting edge technology. In the case of Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D), it’s a pretty standard concert movie in form. We see her perform songs largely uncut, with lights and lasers and pyrotechnics and, of course, her own charismatic performance in the center of the dazzle. These are intercut with lots of obtrusive closeups of weeping fans, and sequences that cut away to behind-the-scenes moments that are interesting only as far as a skimming the surface of the rigamarole of modern stardom can be. Eilish is undeniably a great stage presence and her music is largely catchy and earnestly felt, whether upbeat dance bangers or slow-tempo confessional ballads. What Cameron does in the film’s best moments is set up his tech and let it capture her in action. He shot in the high frame rate 3D he’s been developing with his Avatar movies. Here that format’s hyper-detailed deep focus and lack of motion blur somehow looks natural. Concert movies are perhaps its ideal use case. Paired with booming sound the crystalline images take on a real immediacy. It captures every sweep of the light show and climaxes with a dazzling dimensional clarity to the typical end-of-concert confetti blizzard.

If the movie fails to cohere much as a movie per se—the interviews are too shallow, the behind-the-scenes too sparing, the focus a little too scattered, the performances a little too chopped up—it’s still quite a tech demo, and a decent look at a star in this particular moment of her career. For a more in-depth view of her story and personality along with musical performances, there’s R.J. Cutler’s documentary Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry. For a more straightforward concert movie, there’s Robert Rodriguez’s Happier Than Ever. (Now having worked with both Cameron and Rodriguez, one wonders if she’d like to make Alita: Battle Angel 2 happen.) This particular movie simply shows why she’s one of our most appealing pop stars. She has great songs sung well, and great stage swagger, comfortable in her typical Kevin Smith-style jersey and shorts. And the movie’s at least a little bit about the parasocial dynamic of modern music fans. It looks at the tearful fans who talk about her with unrestrained awe—pure and earnest. One boy says she’s better than therapy. At the end a girl is crying as the camera pushes in on her. From off screen we hear Cameron’s chipper question: “How’d you like the show?” Duh. 

A scarier look at modern pop stardom is in the spooky, folkloric Mother Mary. Writer-director David Lowery takes his penchant for making movies that feel like eerie campfire stories and turns it on a diva in crisis. She’s Mother Mary, played by Anne Hathaway in a startlingly complicated portrayal that’s both imperious showbiz razzle-dazzle surface and deeply wounded vulnerability churning beneath. In need of a new dress right away, she attempts to reconcile with an old friend (Michaela Coel) who used to be her chief designer and visual collaborator before some unspoken falling out, or maybe betrayal. But it turns out the wound in their friendship has come to haunt them both in the intervening years. The movie proceeds as a two-hander between the women as they talk it out in a cold, dim, drafty barn, spending their time alternately needling and needing each other. Their conversation, bleeding inevitably toward magical realism, is interrupted for elaborate concert flashback sequences that exist with blinding spotlight on Mother Mary in impressive regal headdress and sequined bodysuits, surrounded by impressive implication of screaming fans in the dark, illuminated by flashing lights. 

The whole production is a cohesive design. The songs are euphoric modern pop at its best. These could be Swift or Gaga or Eilish. They’re catchy and pulse-pounding and match the darkness in her character. Written by producer Jack Antonoff, responsible as anyone for the sound of the last decade, and Charli XCX, whose party-girl brattiness is also a key tone for hit modern music, the songs’ verisimilitude goes a long way toward selling the movie’s gnarled low-key fantasy. But they wouldn’t work so well if not for Hathaway’s performance. She’s credible as a pop star toggling between performative persona and raw interpersonal nerve. And this performance bounces so perfectly off of Coel’s steely wounded pride and confident control. Together their shared haunting winds its way to inevitable surrealist metaphors that threaten to overwhelm the simplicity with literalness cloaked as ambiguity (and vice versa). But this is a Lowery film through and through. He makes Hollywood pictures shaped like art house films (The Green Knight, A Ghost Story, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints), compelling hooks populated with movie stars told with a slow-drip mood. And he makes art house films inside Hollywood pictures (Pete’s Dragon, The Old Man and the Gun, Peter Pan & Wendy), broadly appealing movie star movies with a sadder, slower mode inside. Mary is more the former. It’s a talky, haunted, elliptical movie about the psychosis of stardom. 

Playing Games: THE SUPER MARIO GALAXY MOVIE and MORTAL KOMBAT II

Video game fans in general seem quite appreciative of the latest wave of video game movies. They’re slavishly devoted to their inspirations’ iconography and gameplay, and seem to have built their stories out of the same dynamics that take you level to level with the barest connective tissue between sequences. That’s certainly the case with Illumination’s The Super Mario Galaxy Movie which, unlike the Sonic’s attempts to build actual movies out of the run-fast simplicity of the side-scrolling games, is content to build out settings and characters first and foremost. It returns us to the Mushroom Kingdom where Princess Peach and Toad go off to search outer space for the missing Princess Rosalia. In their absence, Mario and Luigi are supposed to take care of the castle. Wouldn’t you know it? That’s when Bowser Jr attacks and knocks them into a cosmic journey of their own. The movie was clearly worked out backwards from which places and peoples from the Nintendo world the filmmakers wanted to highlight. Here’s a spaceport. Here’s a casino shaped like a cube in which every side has its own gravity. (That one’s kinda neat.) Here’s a giant bee. Here’s a hellish amusement park. There’s no rhyme nor reason to the stops on the journey, and rather than building characters arcs or dramatic tension or adventurous momentum, it accumulates a sense of just one thing after another. It even weirdly skimps on the first film’s most popular element — Jack Black’s Bowser. He gets an undernourished plot and the only time he’s even close to singing a song to follow up his absurdly popular “Peaches,” the movie cuts him off for a joke. Still, the movie is quickly paced and easy to look at. It has the rounded edges and pleasant colors and Pavlovian sound effects that’ll flatter fans of all ilks. 

A far more unpleasant experience is Mortal Kombat II, which once again saves for the very end everyone’s favorite part of the game—the theme song. The journey there is bone-headedly simple. The Mortal Kombat tournament starts up again. Several challengers have to outlast a guy with a big hammer. None do. Until one does. For fans of the classic arcade fighting game that might be enough to see the character strut out in live action again. But for a franchise that’s indebted to both cheap-o Hollywood fantasy filmmaking and vintage Hong Kong fighting pictures, this entry is woefully under imagined. Despite adding Karl Urban to play fan favorite Cage, the characters in this sequel to a reboot might as well be a flat pile of pixels. The choreography feels perfunctory and repetitive. The escalations and resolutions of the fights feel arbitrary. And every sequence appears to have been shot on a tiny set in which almost everything on the frame, including parts of the actors, is some sort of digital effect. It’s so flat and claustrophobic that even the typical ponderous exposition about the fate of the world feels small. It makes one yearn for the comparatively classical cornball charms of the original Paul W.S. Anderson adaptation from the 90s, the only one of these movies close to good. Sure, that one was cheaply made and narratively simplistic, too. But at least its effects and action had energy and atmosphere. (And it put the theme song first, starting things on literally the right note.) This one’s just endless bland repetition.