It had somehow missed me that 6 Underground was a Michael Bay film, from the title I’d also assumed it an (early) Fast and the Furious/ Gone in 60 Seconds vibe, I was incredibly wrong, it is late stage Fast & Furious meets late stage Ubisoft game. The film is packed to the rafters with puns and jokes, along with several subplots that imply it wants to be more. It has this underlying desperation to have meaning, which it never achieves and it’s not even particularly funny. The politics of the film are (naturally) totally unhinged, Ryan Reynolds, who’s first on screen appearance is essentially a red bull advert, plays a billionaire who wants to make the world a better place. The road to this is clear, you fake your own death, get 5 other people to fake their deaths, then kill 9 bad people, you also mow down a lot of civilians and others, but they don’t count. This construction is very video game which continues into the visuals, there’s a lot of rag doll physics, all of the characters in the team have a ‘thing’ and all the missions play out with unlimited bad guys spawning until the ‘good guys’ have completed a required objective. Worse of all, it’s aping a Ubisoft game, the neon, the comical bad guy, the terrible dialog, it’s all very familiar and bad.

I think the politics of the movie are revealing, but not surprising, Michael Bay thinks American interventionism doesn’t go far enough? who could have guessed that… The film is also nearly entirely shot in Dubai, the ugly hideous excess of the city is perfect for Bay. He is as capable as usual, turning what he has into slightly less than the sum of it’s parts, but Dubai is less than nothing, it’s a plastic feeling city at the best of times, combined supporting cast that are underutilised you end up with a bland film. Reynolds is just playing himself as always, for me that’s gotten old, but I think even if you really loved him you’d still bounce off this.

There is this really weird bit where they use the THX deep note to break a bunch of windows as part of an ambush. Like if you can find that on YouTube maybe watch it? This sequence felt like an extended in joke, with a load of other disconnected and soulless movie references.

Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham is Batman meets Lovecraft, which sounds like pop culture Mad Libs, if you have to do capes vs tentacles, Batman does seem like a good fit, detectives are an intrinsic part of the genre Lovecraft created. But it still feels more like a concept you’d find printed on a teeshirt, not an entire film. The first half of the result is very exposition heavy, setting the scene in a Prohibition era Gotham and introducing various Batman and DC staples with minor Lovecraftian twists attached. Particularly memorable is Oliver Queen (Green Arrow), the performance is heavily inspired by John Mcafee and he’s reframed as a Crusader themed hero who uses a quiver of the arrows used to kill Saint Sebastian. Which is really weird and cool, it’s not a direction they’re going to take outside of a one shot alt-universe thing like this and it’s surely what people go in looking for.

There are so many of these DC animated features, it’s a very specific formula with a style that’s becoming a little dated. I don’t expect everything to have the production and ideas of Into the Spider-Verse, but I want to see more experimentation. That said, there kinda just isn’t another context where you’d see Batman crawling into a giant eldridge vagina below Gotham, at least not in an official release. Seeing Bruce punch tentacle monsters is worth something, (although sadly most of the bad guys are just big guys). The idea’s explored are fun and while it’s done in a little bit of a self serious way, but it’s a good time.

Indulgence is the name of the game in A Cure for Wellness, it is too long but that’s forgivable, the pacing is trashy, but incredibly beautiful to look at. I’m willing to forgive a lot, because it’s nice to see a director go all in on something like this, Gore Verbinski’s filmography is otherwise littered with Pirates of the Caribbean sequels and stuff like The Weather Man, which I remember enjoying, but nothing much else of. This is a strong film with some good ideas and you’ll probably think you’ve got the ending/premise pretty quickly, for some that’s a turn off, but it is kinda just part of these more experiential horror films. I was expecting it to have some more left in the tank to get me with later, so it was disappointing when it didn’t. The feeling of the movie and it’s design are worth it, it’s just it doesn’t pull though in the very end of the last act.

Mia Goth and Jason Isaacs are characteristically fantastic, each putting their entire whole pussy into their roles. Goth is haunting, the film hinging on her pulling off naive and complex character, something she has perfected. With Isaacs you can feel the work he’s done fleshing this character out, the stuff we don’t directly see, the essence of him is all behind his eyes, it’s wonderful work. The Hospital, the primary location, is a character in itself, it’s spaces opening up in plausible but impossible ways. It’s borrowing a lot from Kubrick (what in this genre isn’t), but it’s not just the Overlook 2, it has a feel of it’s own. A lot of work has been done to make something low-key hostile, it’s very backrooms, very unsettling.

I don’t know if I’m recommending this, if you like these kinda horror films it’s either on your radar or you’ve seen it. If not, this isn’t a good onramp for them Midsommar is a lot better.