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Shadow Force (2025): Joe Carnahan always has been a bit of a hit or miss filmmaker for me, though when he hits, he does tend to find the bullseye.

This piece of action cinema, though, does feel like the product of someone who can’t even be bothered to look in the direction of the target. Everything here, from the bland direct to DVD actioner look (this is not actually a direct to whatever movie), the lifeless script without character or style, the blandly generic action choreography to a script that can’t even be bothered to be interesting enough to be called clichéd, and finally the deeply dull performances by a cast that could do so much better, lacks so completely in personality and life, it’s difficult to even call this a movie. Hell, even “content” might be too friendly a description for something this lacking in soul.

Invader (2024): Certainly not lacking in personality is this brutal serial killer movie by Mickey Keating. This time around, the stylistically very varied director goes all out on jittery, nervous energy, often shaking, handheld camera that perfectly puts into picture the sense of looming threat and paranoia its main character (Vero Maynez) suffers as a foreigner in the USA. Particularly this USA, at this point in time. And though this is mostly a highly efficient, condensed, and often quite nasty, horror movie about a woman threatened by a killer, it works all too well as a mirror of how its time and place feels.

The Executioner (1974): One can’t help but hope the Japan of 1974 did feel like this Teruo Ishii action movie starring beloved Sonny Chiba as the youngest descendent of the Koga ninja clan, gone down in the world to steal a bunch of drugs from the Japanese franchise of the Mafia with a former policeman and a sex pest. For its combination of bizarre violence and the violently bizarre is pretty delightful.

Sure, Ishii has directed weirder things – he’s mostly doing Man’s Adventure with tongue planted firmly in cheek here – and Chiba has been in weirder and/or better movies, but if I’d start judging their movies, or any movies, on that bar, there’d be a very limited amount of joy to be found in my movie watching world.

As far as the world of silly, violent Toei exploitation movies go, this is doing its job of entertaining me more than just fine.

In short: The A-Team (2010)

I’m not sure this actually needs to be said, but Joe Carnahan is a weird director. Extremely talented and an able to turn his not inconsiderable budgets into true crowd pleasers (if for a very specific kind of crowd), most of what he does feels as individual and personal as any auteur-style movie you’d care to mention. Stylistically, he always uses state of the art and budget techniques of the Tony Scott school that’ll make many a critic automatically use the word “edgy”. I’d argue that, when Carnahan is on, he’s not “edgy” but a filmmaker whose films actually have an edge acquired by an uncommon mix of the ability to direct actors and use sometimes grating film techniques to often very intelligent effect. When he isn’t on, he’s making Boss Level instead of Narc.

This star-studded (Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Jessica Biel, Sharlto Copley and Patrick Wilson are certainly quite the 2010 cast list, and would still get quite a few behinds in seats ten years later) variation and prequel to many a nerd’s (including this writer’s) foundational action TV show is somewhere between the two. For my taste, the film’s at its best when it provides its cast with opportunities to play their characters outrageously larger than life or when it comes up with the silliest possible set-ups for action sequences (the thing with the flying tank wouldn’t cut realism muster in a Fast & Furious movie even today). It falters, whenever it tries to hitch the bigness or the silliness to moments of more traditional, semi-naturalistic character work, never really managing to connect the two modes properly. Which is a bit strange, since connecting the outrageous with proper, believable and serious character moments is often one of Carnahan’s biggest strengths.

Conceptually, The A-Team suffers a bit from its apparently unquenchable need to turn the strange innocence of the original series cynically violent. So this movie adaptation of a series where nobody ever died from being shot at with automatic weapons has a body count too large to calculate; in an even shittier move, it also feels the need to treat non-violence as something bad in a man that needs to be gotten rid of and disposed of while the score shits out triumphant music, turning the fun pretend violence surrounding it moment pretty sour for this viewer, and really not helping the film as a whole with its tonal difficulties.

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Come Play (2020): If you are one of those peculiar people who think The Babadook isn’t great, you might like Jacob Chase’s risible rip-off instead. After all, it does replace careful writing and thoughtful characterisation with jump scares and regurgitated tropes, grinds down the personality of the original in favour of bland slickness and basically sands down everything that’s good about the film it is ripping off into nothing, while not even acknowledging the debt officially. It’s everything that doesn’t work about contemporary mainstream horror squashed into a single film, without anything about this part of the movie universe that’s actually worthwhile and good (and there’s a lot of that to go) making an appearance.

In a way, the film’s total, nearly aggressive, blandness is some kind of achievement, I’m sure, but not one anyone should be proud of.

Boss Level (2020): By all rights, a film by Joe Carnahan about Frank Grillo as a man of violence with the usual problems finding himself caught in a time loop, fighting ridiculous caricatures again and again, should at the very least be a pretty fun watch. It never really was one for me, though. The film’s ironic use of clichés is never actually as smart and funny as it apparently believes it is, and the attempts of making an audience connect with Grillo’s character suffer heavily from him being a vapid idiot and an arsehole (and not the interesting kind) whose rise to heroism is something the film declares instead of actually doing anything to convince the audience of.

The action is perfectly okay, but I wish the filmmakers had taken a good hard look at a lot of low budget action movies with basic plots but heavy emotional stakes, skipped the ironic sneer, and instead learned something from them about how to creatively turn violence into an expression of a dozen different emotions.

Moonshine County Express (1977): Hicksploitation and carsploitation have never been my greatest loves in exploitation cinema, so I’m not sure if my enjoying Gus Trikonis’s example of the form more than most would be a recommendation to anyone who actually likes the sub-genre. It’s certainly always nice to find a female-led (Susan Howard, Claudia Jennings and Maureen McCormick) exploitation film that takes said females’ attempts at taking vengeance on the killers of her dead dad (Morgan Woodward working for William Conrad are the guilty parties) seriously, adding John Saxon as the male helper, but really not making him terribly effectual or useful, and letting the villains and the women drive the plot.

Stylistically, Trikonis moves convincingly from mid-70s style brutal-ish shoot-outs, to corny but mostly inoffensive humour, to a bit of drama, and to the mandatory car chases and back again, letting things get a little weird from time to time as they should be in exploitation cinema, yet finding his way back from there, too.

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Harry Brown (2009): For a time there, Daniel Barber’s film about an elderly ex-marine turning vigilante played by Michael Caine, had me thinking it was trying to say something actually interesting about the rights, wrongs and consequences of vigilantism but in the end, it all turns out to be your usual reactionary fantasy about killing the poor and the supposed inefficiency of the law in doing that, not exactly something I have much of a taste for when it doesn’t go so over the top I can stop taking it seriously. This one doesn’t go over the top, but it is also just not terribly great as a crime thriller. The only truly memorable thing is a performance by Caine that suggests a load of emotions and ideas that don’t actually seem to be in the script, Caine showing a touching vulnerability that doesn’t often ring this true in movies about aging and elderly men of violence.

Gosford Park (2001): Keeping with great old men, this is one of Robert Altman’s final films as a director (and his last truly good one, I believe). Usually, the idea of an American playing with elements of the British country house mystery suggests a bumbling tourist not getting anything about class, but this being Altman, that fear didn’t even come up for me. And rightly so, for Altman uses the form (well, the parts of the form that interest him – this is a film that’s half over before the murder happens, and rightly so) to not just explore the British class system between the wars, or the way it already shows cracks, but is most concerned about the way the lives of people intersect in a society that puts the borders between the rich, the poor, and the working rich particularly high, finding heart-breaking moments that prove a murder to be much less important than basically everything else going on around it. Altman also has time for moments of acerbic whit, nods to popular culture of the age (Ivor Novello is one of the characters, as well as a fictionalized producer of Charlie Chan films), all filled with life by a thoroughly brilliant cast and by his accustomed way with organizing large numbers of characters in an intellectually and emotionally impactful way.


Narc (2002): Joe Carnahan’s neo noirish crime film about a former undercover cop (Jason Patric) who accidentally killed a baby during a wild shoot-out pressed into investigating the murder of another undercover cop, and teaming up with the other undercover’s former friend (Ray Liotta), a man even more damaged and violent – and possibly worse – then himself is certainly not a Robert Altman film in style or thought. Apart from a handful of scenes when Carnahan falls into the worst kind of “hey, look at me! I have a digital editing suite” filmmaking, this is a wonderful film. Heated, grim, and appropriately violent, Narc portrays the characters’ world as a cesspool of cruelty and corruption yet also finds time to give even the most minor drug dealer a human personality, does good by fantastic lead performances and also has a really well-constructed mystery at its heart whose solution plays expertly with the audience expectations of the genre savvy without feeling smug.