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John Cena has made some good movies, and he has made some absolute dross. One of the latter is the 2011 movie The Reunion, which has found a surprising new audience since landing on Tubi this month. The film falls very much into the category that made many question whether Cena could make it as an actor, with the wrestler-turned-actor's attempt to deliver a nuanced performance falling mostly flat. Cena plays Sam, a suspended cop who gets caught up in a dangerous scheme while attempting to claim the inheritance left to him and his siblings by their late father. To many, the nuance was very much lost, and this was not the John Cena that would end up leading several huge franchise projects a decade later.

When it came out, The Reunion was one of Cena’s first movies, and, as would be pointed out by several critics, it was one of several critical bombs.

A “Jacob’s Ladder”-ish paranoid thriller arriving just in time to find conspiracy theories plunked right in the middle of post-election American politics, “Wander” only muddies the water further. This latest collaboration between director April Mullen and writer Tim Doiron offers yet another unpredictable shift, but pushes its idiosyncrasies off a cliff before establishing any narrative terra firma.

There is some pleasure to be had in watching an atypically frenetic Aaron Eckhart as a Ptsd-afflicted loner wading deep into possibly-imagined evildoings in the Southwest, with Tommy Lee Jones and Heather Graham also welcome as two allies. Still, the film’s hyperbolic style and convoluted storytelling tend to exhaust patience rather than build intrigue, making for a muddle whose too-many twists and turns ultimately seem meaningless as well as implausible. Saban Films is releasing the Canadian co-production to American audiences via digital, on demand and available theaters Dec. 4.

At the town limits of desert hamlet Wander,...