My apologies to my regular readers for the gap in coverage recently. I’ve been dealing with an annoying and persistent medical issue that has sapped me of energy. In addition to that, I’ve been completing post-production on my directorial debut, which has dominated my schedule for the past few months. As such, I’ve let myself get a little bit lazy on the film review front, which is also why I’m jamming three capsules into one piece.
The good news is twofold: I now have the proper meds and am finally on the mend. Also, in a week or two, I will have a completed film on my hands that my team and I will be entering into festivals and such. I cannot wait for you to see it.
The bad news is that the three movies I’m covering today are … not great.
Well, to be fair, one of them is entertaining despite being a messy misfire, but the others are outright bad. I will start with the messy misfire and descend from there.
Mercy (dir. Timur Bekmambetov)
Chris Pratt (spokesman for the prayer app HALLOW) has become a bit of a punchline lately, and for good reason: The titleholder of “worst Chris” has gone from a lovable, chubby Everyman to a cookie cutter Hollywood elite in record time. This isn’t to say he’s not talented — in fact, I’d say he’s very talented — just that his meteoric rise to superstardom has resulted in the man behind the face losing touch with what got him to the top of the mountain in the first place. And it’s this loss of Everyman status that proves to be the fundamental flaw of Mercy, a race-against-the-clock thriller that is (slightly) better than its awful reputation.
Pratt plays Detective Chris Raven, a supporter of the latest in criminal justice technology where artificial intelligence serves as judge, jury, and executioner. In this futuristic world, the accused are strapped to a chair, placed in front of a giant screen, and given 90 minutes to prove their innocence to an AI entity (Rebecca Ferguson). If they fail to drop their perceived guilty percentage to a rate of reasonable doubt, a sonic impulse explodes their brain or something.
Raven, who really is named that, awakes to find himself strapped to the chair with no memory of the crime he’s been accused of committing. Namely, the murder of his wife. He declares his innocence, but the computer doesn’t care. It’s just a computer. A super attractive computer. Ooh-la-la-bleep-bloop-blorp.
The construction of the film is frequently ingenious, even if the script, which telegraphs the true identity of the killer with the subtlety of a punch to the mouth, is powerfully dumb. Bekmambetov has carved out a niche of making and producing high-concept screen-life and screen-life adjacent thrillers to mixed results, so it’s no surprise he manages to make Mercy both visually interesting and quite suspenseful despite being, at its core, a chamber piece. The high-concept execution is used well enough that the increasingly hare-brained plot developments all feel par for the course.
The weakness here comes from Pratt himself. Not in the performance department — he’s mostly solid short of a few moments where you can tell they just sat him in a chair and had him read context-free lines into camera — but in the fact that his aforementioned Everyman status has faded. He’s too recognizable and too shiny and smooth for a role like this. And since he spends most of the film strapped to a chair, it’s not like his action star qualities are ever put to use. What I’m saying is that as a 2026 thriller, this is a rote programmer, but had it been made 40 years ago and starred Treat Williams (and a supporting role from Xander Berkeley) it would have become a boutique blu-ray release by now.
Shelter (dir. Ric Roman Waugh)
Jason Statham movies used to be a lot more fun. When operating on a slightly unhinged wavelength, everyone’s favorite former professional diver has a wild-eyed charm that cannot be denied. But recently, his films have dialed down the cheekiness and taken a more serious, brooding tone that doesn’t serve the star very well. Such is the case with Shelter, the next in a long line of films that feature the star punching, kicking, and bone-snapping his way through countless baddies all in service of an unbreakable moral code that makes his brand of violence okay in the eyes of the audience.
Here he plays Mason (ha!), a mysterious loner who lives off the grid on a deserted Scottish island. He spends his time staring off into the distance, playing chess against no one, and staring off into the distance some more. His groceries are delivered by a precocious kid for some reason, and he rebuffs every one of her attempts to learn more about him. Then one day the boat she and her uncle use to visit the island sinks, and now Mason has a child on his hands. This chain of events leads to Mason’s face popping up in the feed of a massive surveillance effort tied to his mysterious past, and now a bunch of people have to kill him. As these things go, this means that he also has to kill them.
You know the drill. You’ve seen this movie 100 times, and 75 of those times it starred Jason Statham.
This is director Ric Roman Waugh’s second movie this month (and as a purveyor of “January movies” this is appropriate), and much like Greenland: Migration, the filmmaker’s knack for “Nickelbaction cinema” is in full display. The action is frequently exciting, even with the star’s age beginning to show during the fisticuffs. The story functions well enough to give the action a reason to exist. Unfortunately the pacing is way off. The first hour or so is a total slog, and it all takes place in such a dreary setting that no amount of cinematographic know-how could ever hope to elevate it. As we learn more about our hero, and his relationship with the young girl develops into a “found family” sort of thing, the film begins to compel, but it’s too little too late, despite a strong performance from Bodhi Rae Breathnach as the strong-willed youth. Still, the final act is quite thrilling, leading to a final showdown that hearkens back to the Statham movies of old.
The Wrecking Crew (dir. Angel Manuel Soto)
It’s admittedly quite cool to live at a time when our leading action stars are middle-aged men of color who by all reports seem to be good dudes, but it’s also a time when the streamers, eager to save money on licensing fees, are hell bent on creating massive libraries of low-effort, easy-to-consume original films with enough recognizable star power for passive viewers to press play and then fold laundry while they kinda-sorta pay attention.
The unfortunate side effect of creating films that work even if you don’t pay attention to them is that often times it results in a film that doesn’t work unless you aren’t paying attention to it. Films such as these adhere to a formula that a viewer can trust, while also providing ample opportunity for characters to explain what they’re about to do, what they are currently doing, and what they just did. Over and over and over again.
The Wrecking Crew is a standard buddy comedy, featuring Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa as estranged brothers thrust back together after their father’s mysterious death. Bautista is a bit more strait-laced than his brother, and as a result, they don’t really get along. Otherwise they’re pretty much the same person, which makes for a weak version of the typical “personality clash” element of a buddy comedy. The other element missing from the buddy template is the comedy. This film features a dearth of jokes, with many of them clearly having been added via a post-production punch-up/ADR session.
Perhaps the most glaring omission from this comedy is chemistry. It saddens me to report that our leads, both wonderfully charismatic and talented guys, have absolutely none. The time they share onscreen (see: the bulk of the film) is filled with dud after dud of failed attempts at banter and bonding. Unless they are coming to blows (which happens once, and totally rocks), every scene is inert.
The action is passable. After a surprisingly brutal and effective fight scene between Momoa and a pair of Yakuza goons, what follows is a perfunctory series of rubbery, CGI car chases, functional gun play, and fight scenes of middling dynamism. It’s the type of stuff that you take a break from folding laundry to look at for a minute while thinking “oh cool, the pictures are moving,” before returning to your chores. This is, quite sadly, exactly what the filmmakers intended.
