Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom -- My first impression is that the writing of the script for this movie may have been crowdsourced to children ages 6-10. I doubt that is really the case. What I do think happened is that it came from prompting an early version of AI, something a good deal less sophisticated than Chat GPT4. What an incomprehensible mish-mash of tone and action. It is as close to completely incoherent as a movie can be without being a series of totally randomized sequences. I can think of no principle of good screen writing that was employed here. The description of Dumpster Fire could not be more apt. No good will come from this movie to anyone associated with it. It should not have been released. Wow. Just wow.
Fast X -- In contrast Fast X is roughly on the same plane of quality, but it embraces its own absurdity in such a way that it is at least inoffensive. Movies like this are pure background noise, only meriting partial attention. But everyone involved seems like they are having a good time -- I wouldn't doubt this group, having done these movies for years -- is probably a fun bunch to get together. I have no idea what the plot was, or whether there was any semblance of character arcs. Like I said, a bit of eye-candy to have on in the background and never to be thought of again.
Road House -- Another step up in the genre, mostly due to the fine performance of Jake Gyllenhall. Given the state of reboots and sequels in Hollywood I would have expected this to be borderline offensive -- see: Justified: City Primeval, Many Saints of Newark, pretty much anything Star Wars or Star Trek -- but it was actually not bad. They kept the right amount of irreverence and absurdity of the original (although, sadly, no one is ever told to "be nice") while making you hate the villain and identify with the hero. BTW, a key villain in this is Conor MacGregor, an MMA fighter who is making his acting debut playing a psycho. Since he is clearly half-psycho in real life, "acting" is a stretch. Anyway, it's Gyllenhall who provides what redemption there is with a pitch perfect performance of a normal, friendly-looking dude who can just happen to beat the snot out of anyone else on the planet. Overall "meh", but I might watch it again if I land on it when I'm channel surfing.
Note the escalation in the three action flicks discussed here: from Dumpster Fire to Inoffensive to Not Bad. That is where we are now. At one point in the not too distant past I declared the action film as the predominant art form of our time, for better or (more likely) worse. If I recall correctly, I suggested the action supremacy started with The Matrix and peaked with Infinity War. I stand by that, but even I am stunned by how quickly has come the fall.
