CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 9-11-26
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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review five new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, September 11th, 2026.
I should probably admit right up front that I am definitely not the audience for Practical Magic 2, because I hated the original Practical Magic when it came out in 1998. I saw it at a press screening back then, thought it was terrible, and have spent precisely zero time over the ensuing decades wondering when somebody was finally going to make another one.
Apparently, however, there is a very intense and dedicated group of fans who have been waiting almost 30 years for Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman to return as the Owens sisters. So here it is. Practical Magic 2. The sequel absolutely nobody asked for except, apparently, enough people to convince a major studio that there was money to be made.
In preparation for the press screening of the sequel, I decided to revisit the original movie for the first time in years. I figured maybe I had been too hard on it in 1998. Maybe it had aged well. Maybe I would finally understand why it developed this enormous cult following.
I made it a little over 45 minutes before I couldn't take it anymore and shut it off.
Nope. I was right the first time.
The original Practical Magic is an absolute mess, filled with stereotypical, one-dimensional characters, forced comedy, ridiculous romance and supernatural elements that never come together. It also contains an incredible number of scenes that play like 1990s music videos, with pop-song montages dropped into the movie every few minutes because apparently nobody could walk across a room in 1998 without Natalie Imbruglia playing over it.
Actor Griffin Dunne directed the movie, badly, and the whole thing wildly jumps between cute witch comedy, gooey romance, goofy magical nonsense, domestic abuse, alcoholism and murder. The tonal whiplash is incredible.
Twenty-eight years later, Practical Magic 2 somehow manages to inherit virtually every problem the first movie had while finding several brand-new ones of its own.
Sandra Bullock is back as Sally Owens, Nicole Kidman returns as her sister Gillian, and Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing return as the eccentric witch aunts Jet and Franny.
Sally's daughters, who were little girls in the original, are now adults. Antonia, played by Maisie Williams, works in medicine, while Kylie, played by Joey King, is an artist and eventually becomes the character who uncovers the family's secrets and sets most of the plot into motion.
The movie begins by explaining what happened after the supposedly happy ending of Practical Magic. Sally's second husband, Gary Hallet, played by Aidan Quinn in the original, eventually died, meaning that the Owens family curse involving love and the premature deaths of the men unfortunate enough to fall for these women wasn't actually broken.
Sally, understandably traumatized after losing another husband, decides she wants nothing more to do with magic. More importantly, she doesn't want her daughters to know anything about it, so she casts a spell that essentially erases their knowledge of their magical heritage and raises them completely unaware that they are witches.
This works until it doesn't.
Early in the movie, Aunt Jet dies (Dianne Wiest is gone about 15 minutes into the film) and leaves behind a magical book that begins revealing some of the family history Sally has spent years trying to suppress. At the same time, Kylie has fallen in love with a young man named Gideon, played by Xolo Maridueña.
Yes, Gideon. Because apparently a movie already drowning in mystical symbolism needed somebody named Gideon.
When Kylie declares her love for him, the Owens curse kicks in and Gideon winds up critically injured and comatose in a hospital. Kylie discovers that her mother has essentially lied to her throughout her entire life, learns about the curse, grabs the magical book and heads to England to trace the origins of the Owens family magic and figure out how to save Gideon.
Sally and Gillian follow her, eventually encountering Ian Wright, an eccentric scholar of magic played by Lee Pace, while Antonia stays behind at the hospital with Gideon.
Franny stays there too, which means the movie takes Maisie Williams and Stockard Channing and basically parks them in a hospital room while everybody else runs around England casting spells and dragging luggage up stairs.
And, believe me, there is a LOT of luggage.
There is an endless running gag involving Gillian bringing an absurd amount of luggage to England, resulting in scene after scene of Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock hauling gigantic suitcases up staircases everywhere they go.
The joke isn't particularly funny the first time. Then they do it again. And again. And again. By about the seventh time they're wrestling these enormous bags up another flight of stairs, I started wondering if the luggage was eventually going to get its own character arc.
That is approximately the level of comedy we're dealing with here.
Ian's introduction isn't much better. Sally and Gillian discover him completely naked and magically frozen in place, covered with tattoos, which naturally leads to jokes about his nudity, jokes about his tattoos and an extended sequence involving the women trying to reverse the spell.
Lee Pace is an actor I've always liked, and he's done this kind of whimsical supernatural material beautifully before. He was terrific on Pushing Daisies, a show that knew exactly how to combine fantasy, romance, death, eccentricity and comedy.
In fact, Pushing Daisies effortlessly achieved the tone that both Practical Magic movies desperately want and never come close to finding. There is also a none too subtle scene in this movie involving pies, that seems like it could be a reference to Pushing Daisies, but at this point...who knows?
Pace eventually becomes a potential romantic interest for Sally, which is completely unconvincing. Meanwhile, Gillian is still essentially defined as the wild sister who likes men while Sally is the responsible sister who doesn't want anything to do with romance.
There are references to Ross and Rachel from Friends, Sam and Molly from Ghost, endless speeches about love and sisterhood and magic, and dialogue that is so corny and overwritten that you occasionally can't believe professional actors are actually being forced to say it.
There is also something genuinely bizarre about the casting of Sally's daughters. Kylie was played in the original movie by Evan Rachel Wood, who is now almost 40. In Practical Magic 2, Kylie is played by Joey King, who is in her 20s.
Obviously actors get replaced in sequels all the time, especially when almost three decades have passed, but why replace the character with an actress roughly a dozen years younger than she logically should be? If Evan Rachel Wood wasn't available or didn't want to do it, fine. Cast somebody else. But cast somebody approximately the same age.
Instead, the movie essentially rewrites the age of the character, which also changes the relationship between Sally and her daughters. It feels suspiciously like some strange Hollywood casting magic designed to make the next generation younger and, by extension, make Bullock and Kidman seem younger.
Of all the supernatural events in Practical Magic 2, this may be the one that requires the biggest suspension of disbelief.
It is also fascinating to see Bullock and Kidman together again because of how radically their careers have changed since 1998. When the original Practical Magic was released, Bullock was the much bigger mainstream movie star.
Kidman had already given a terrific performance in Gus Van Sant's To Die For, but this was before Eyes Wide Shut and before the extraordinary run of work that eventually established her as one of the most respected actresses of her generation. At the time, she was still frequently treated as Tom Cruise's beautiful wife who also acted.
That certainly isn't how anybody thinks about Nicole Kidman now. Over the decades she has consistently taken risks and done challenging, interesting, award-winning work in movies and television.
Bullock has done some very good work too (she's terrific in Gravity) although, yes, she won an Oscar for The Blind Side, which is a terrible movie and a performance that absolutely did not deserve an Academy Award.
What is interesting here is watching two enormously successful actresses who have traveled very different career paths return to something they made nearly 30 years ago. Kidman, in particular, seems to know exactly what kind of movie she's in and basically coasts through it. And why wouldn't she?
Having Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing back should be a major asset because both are terrific actresses and were among the most enjoyable things about the original. Instead, Wiest disappears almost immediately and Channing is criminally wasted.
You have Stockard Channing in your movie. USE HER. Don't stick her in a hospital room for enormous stretches of the running time while other characters carry suitcases around England.
Once the story really gets going in England, the plot becomes increasingly convoluted, with warlocks, ancestral magic, hidden family history, spells, curses and eventually a giant climax filled with smoke, monsters, ravens and all kinds of supernatural chaos.
Thomas Lockland, played by Solly McLeod, enters the picture as a dark warlock with his own connection to Kylie's powers, and eventually the movie becomes so overloaded with mythology and magical rules that explaining all of it would be considerably more exhausting than simply watching it. And watching it is pretty exhausting.
The movie runs well over two hours and has absolutely no reason to. It feels at least 45 minutes too long, and once it reaches what appears to be its ending, another ending begins. Then another. And another.
By the time I thought we were somewhere around Ending Number 14, I had completely checked out. It just WOULD NOT END.
Director Susanne Bier is a talented Danish filmmaker who won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for In a Better World, but she also previously worked with Bullock on Bird Box, the ridiculous Netflix thriller in which Bullock spent much of the movie blindfolded.
There is something about the uneasy tone of that movie that carries over here. Bier never figures out how to balance the comedy, romance, fantasy and genuine death surrounding these characters.
The special-effects sequences don't have any magic to them, the comedy consistently lands with a thud, and none of the relationships have enough emotional weight to make the melodrama work.
The movie also repeats another irritating habit from the original: endless pop-song montages. Olivia Rodrigo turns up on the soundtrack. Mazzy Star's gorgeous "Fade Into You" gets covered. And then the movie commits an offense I took personally by using Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" during an incredibly corny sequence involving Jet.
Look, "Landslide" is one of my favorite songs of all time. It is a gorgeous song. It has been used beautifully in movies and television, and, strangely enough, one of my favorite uses of it was on South Park, where Trey Parker found exactly the right emotional context for it.
Here, it feels like somebody said, "Well, Stevie Nicks has that whole witchy thing going on, right? PUT 'LANDSLIDE' IN THE WITCH MOVIE!" The result is so obvious and manipulative that instead of becoming emotional, I started laughing.
And, yes, Harry Nilsson's "Coconut" eventually shows up again because of course it does. You can't make Practical Magic 2 without reminding everybody about the midnight margaritas sequence from the first movie. That would apparently violate some kind of Warner Bros. witch law.
None of these callbacks can disguise what Practical Magic 2 actually is: a soulless cash grab built around nostalgia for a movie that wasn't very good in the first place. It doesn't work as a romance. It doesn't work as a comedy. It doesn't work as a supernatural fantasy.
It doesn't work as a movie about sisters, mothers and daughters. It doesn't work as an exploration of grief or aging or generational trauma. Hell, it doesn't even really work as an England travelogue, although there are a couple of nice shots of an abandoned castle.
The strange thing is that almost 30 years could have given this sequel a reason to exist. There is potentially something interesting in revisiting Sally and Gillian as older women, watching them deal with daughters who have grown up, examining what happens when one generation tries to protect the next by hiding painful family history, and exploring how relationships between sisters, mothers, daughters and aunts change over decades.
There is a real movie somewhere inside that idea. Unfortunately, Practical Magic 2 isn't interested enough in any of it. It would rather give us naked Lee Pace jokes, magical smoke, suitcase gags, pop-song montages and another helping of "Coconut."
I hated the original Practical Magic in 1998. I tried watching it again before seeing this movie and couldn't even finish it. Somehow, Practical Magic 2 is worse.
I know the first movie has developed an intensely loyal following over the years, and maybe those fans will simply be thrilled to see Bullock, Kidman, Wiest and Channing together again.
But after waiting nearly three decades, I can't imagine even the most devoted fans not being disappointed by something this lazy, confused, overlong and painfully unfunny.
I wasn't waiting 28 years for Practical Magic 2, but after sitting through it, I certainly felt like I had been.
One of the worst movies of 2026. - ⭐️
Paul Greengrass is one of those filmmakers whose movies you can almost physically feel while you're watching them. He is a great kinetic director, somebody who knows how to throw you directly into chaos without making that chaos incomprehensible, and he has spent much of his career moving between historical drama and action filmmaking while frequently combining the two.
He made Bloody Sunday, one of the most powerful films ever made about political violence. He made United 93, which remains one of the most devastating and emotionally overwhelming movies about 9/11. He directed Tom Hanks in Captain Phillips, and then there are the Bourne movies, which proved just how remarkable he can be with pure action.
Greengrass loves handheld cameras, fast editing, bodies moving through crowded spaces and that feeling that you aren't watching the action from a safe distance, you are trapped right inside it. But what makes his best work so effective is that he doesn't simply stage chaos well. He gives you people to care about inside the chaos, so when the violence begins, it actually matters.
That combination is all over his new movie, The Uprising, a large-scale medieval action drama set during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Greengrass wrote, produced and directed the movie, which also has one of the stranger pre-production histories of any major film this year.
At one point, it was reportedly called The Hood, with Benedict Cumberbatch attached, and was much more overtly conceived as a Robin Hood origin story. That version disappeared.
Later, it became The Rage, with Matthew McConaughey (who had just worked with Greengrass on the terrific The Lost Bus) set to star. That version disappeared too.
Andrew Garfield eventually came aboard, and the movie evolved into something much more firmly rooted in the Peasants' Revolt, although somebody somewhere clearly remained desperate to keep Robin Hood attached to the marketing.
We'll get to that.
The movie takes place in England in 1381, after the Black Death has devastated the population. Richard II is only 14 years old, and the country is essentially being controlled by an older council surrounding him.
The government needs money, doesn't want to tax the Church or wealthy merchants, and comes up with the shocking solution politicians have somehow been discovering for centuries: squeeze the people who already have absolutely nothing.
Andrew Garfield plays a character known simply as the Ploughman, a farmer who survived the plague but lost his wife and two children. He isn't interested in becoming a revolutionary. He isn't looking to overthrow anybody. He wants to work his land, grieve his family and somehow continue living.
Then he arrives to pay his taxes and discovers that the demands have become impossible. He is even told that he must again pay death taxes on his wife and children because he cannot provide documentation proving that they died years earlier.
Then things get worse.
The tax collectors and soldiers are treating the peasants with extraordinary brutality, including a horrifying sequence involving young women being forcibly examined to determine whether they should be taxed as children or adults.
When the Ploughman finally intervenes and kills a soldier who tries to arrest him, that single act becomes the spark that ignites a much larger rebellion.
Garfield eventually joins forces with Wat Tyler, played by Cosmo Jarvis, and John Ball, played by Jamie Bell, a priest whose ideas about equality have already gotten him branded a heretic.
What begins as one desperate man's refusal to tolerate another humiliation gradually becomes an enormous movement of peasants marching toward London, convinced that their young king is fundamentally decent but has been manipulated by the corrupt men surrounding him.
One of the things Greengrass does particularly well is show how a movement can grow beyond the people who originally inspired it. There are moments of genuine idealism in this rebellion, but there is also rage, mob violence and chaos that the leaders cannot always control.
When the peasants eventually enter London, government officials are dragged into the streets and beheaded, their heads placed on stakes, and the uprising begins turning into something considerably more frightening and unpredictable. The Ploughman, Tyler and Ball want justice. What they eventually unleash isn't always justice.
The storytelling itself is not entirely smooth. The first third of The Uprising is surprisingly choppy, jumping between characters, locations and points of view in a way that sometimes feels like the movie has been heavily recut.
Richard's recurring nightmares about demons and mobs coming to kill him are intended to give us access to the frightened kid underneath the crown, but they don't really add much, especially because Richard becomes increasingly villainous as the movie moves forward.
There are moments early on when you can almost feel competing versions of the screenplay fighting with each other.
Fortunately, Greengrass has Andrew Garfield holding the center of the movie together, and Garfield is terrific.
There is tremendous sadness in the performance. The Ploughman isn't some swaggering medieval action hero. He is a grieving man who has already lost everything important to him and simply wants the opportunity to live.
Garfield gives him a sense of exhaustion, anger and decency that makes his transformation into a leader believable. You feel that he isn't fighting because he has some romantic dream of revolution. He is fighting because these people have finally been pushed beyond what any human being should be expected to endure.
The supporting cast is equally strong. Jamie Bell is excellent as John Ball, Cosmo Jarvis brings real physical presence to Wat Tyler, and Stephen Dillane, Tom Hollander and Jonny Lee Miller fill out the political world beautifully.
Katherine Waterston plays Joan of Kent, the young king's mother, and Woody Norman is especially good as Richard II, capturing both the vulnerability of a frightened child and the terrifying arrogance of somebody raised to believe that God himself has placed him above everyone else.
Thomasin McKenzie, who is always good, plays Alyce, a peasant woman who becomes an important companion to the Ploughman during the rebellion. McKenzie brings exactly the right kind of grounded presence to the movie. Nothing about these people feels clean or romanticized. They are hungry, filthy, exhausted and terrified.
That physical reality is where The Uprising becomes a Paul Greengrass movie in the best possible way.
You feel the mud. You feel the blood. You feel the hunger and the cold and the fact that these people have probably been wearing the same filthy clothing for years. The production makes wonderful use of real locations, huge crowds, horses, weapons and practical stunt work, with special effects used to enhance rather than overwhelm everything.
The aerial shots of massive groups of peasants gathering outside London are spectacular, but Greengrass is equally effective when he gets down into the middle of the crowd where bodies are colliding, people are screaming and nobody really understands what is happening beyond the few feet directly in front of them.
There is an especially strong sequence in which the rebels gather to meet Richard as he approaches by boat. They believe this is finally the moment when their king will hear them. Instead, Richard remains separated from them, refusing to truly engage, and you can feel the tension building through the crowd until disappointment turns into fury.
The film gets even better once the betrayal begins.
Richard's council convinces him to tell the peasants that their demands will be honored, that they will receive their freedoms and that they should disperse peacefully. In reality, the king's armies are being summoned so the rebels can be slaughtered once they put down their weapons.
The Ploughman discovers the betrayal and races desperately back to warn everyone, leading to a remarkable stretch of action involving hand-to-hand combat, fights through buildings and a church, and finally a massive battle in an open field.
These sequences are brutal. Greengrass doesn't make medieval combat elegant. People don't gracefully swordfight for three minutes and then fall photogenically into the mud. They stab, punch, crawl, scream, bleed and desperately try not to die. The violence is ugly and exhausting, which is exactly what makes it effective.
And this is where the weaknesses in the screenplay matter considerably less because Greengrass is doing what Greengrass does extraordinarily well. He takes this enormous historical event and makes it immediate, intimate and frightening.
You understand what the peasants are fighting for because he has made their lives so tangible. You understand why they revolt because you have watched them be humiliated, starved and abused.
Then we get to Robin Hood.
For about 95 percent of The Uprising, this is not a Robin Hood movie. Nobody calls Garfield's character Robin Hood. There are no Merry Men. There is no Sheriff of Nottingham running around twirling his medieval mustache. Sherwood Forest isn't important to the story.
The movie is about the Peasants' Revolt, class oppression and a rebellion against a monarchy that has pushed ordinary people beyond the breaking point.
Then, in the final scene, the movie jumps ahead a year. Richard is traveling through Sherwood Forest when his party is ambushed by archers. Garfield's Ploughman emerges wearing green, now leading a band of outlaws, and suddenly the movie essentially says, "Oh, by the way...Robin Hood."
It's an interesting little final flourish. What I don't understand is the attempt to sell the entire movie around it. At one point the American marketing even flirted with the title The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood, which is incredibly misleading. Anybody going into this expecting a traditional Robin Hood origin movie is going to spend about two hours wondering where the hell Robin Hood is.
It's particularly strange because we already got a radically different Robin Hood movie this year with The Death of Robin Hood, starring Hugh Jackman, which I think is one of the best films of 2026.
That movie is also dark, muddy, violent and interested in stripping the legend away from the man underneath it. It asks what happens when the heroic story people tell about somebody becomes completely disconnected from the complicated, damaged human being who actually existed.
The Uprising approaches that mythology from the opposite direction, suggesting that the legend might have been born out of political rebellion. That's an intriguing idea, but it is really only there at the very end.
The movie doesn't need Robin Hood to work, and trying to sell it as a Robin Hood movie actually diminishes what is much more interesting about it.
Because The Uprising is really about desperate people deciding they've finally had enough.
It is flawed. The opening is uneven, the screenplay sometimes feels stitched together, and the perspective shifts don't always work.
But once the revolt takes hold, the movie becomes powerful, violent and tremendously involving. The battle sequences are terrific, the period detail is tactile and convincing, Andrew Garfield gives the entire movie an emotional center, and Greengrass once again proves that very few filmmakers are better at placing an audience right in the middle of historical chaos.
Forget the Robin Hood marketing. Forget the green hood until the movie decides it's time for one.
As a brutal, passionate story about tyranny, poverty, rebellion and people fighting for the right simply to live their lives, The Uprising works.
And as another example of Paul Greengrass's extraordinary ability to combine history, emotion and kinetic filmmaking, it works even better.
I'm recommending it. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
There is not one frame of Runner that feels original. Not one.
This is one of the most derivative action movies I have seen in a very long time. It is recycled, reheated, regurgitated and assembled almost entirely out of pieces from other movies. Watching Runner is like watching a rerun of a reboot of a remake of a sequel to an action movie you already saw 30 years ago.
And somehow even the MUSIC is copied.
There are several recognizable songs used throughout the film, but none of them are the original recordings. They are all cover versions. So you will hear a song you know and immediately think, “Wait a minute, who the hell is singing this?”
That actually became one of the more entertaining things about the movie. Trying to identify the cheap cover versions. And eventually it occurred to me that this is the perfect metaphor for Runner itself. This entire movie is basically a K-Tel cover version of an action movie.
Remember those old K-Tel records where you would get “25 Super Hits!” and then discover none of them were actually performed by the people who made them famous? That’s Runner. It has all the recognizable components, all the familiar beats and all the sounds you remember, but somehow everything is just slightly cheaper, flatter and less convincing.
The setup could not possibly be more familiar. Alan Ritchson plays Hank Malone, a massive former Navy SEAL and recovering alcoholic now working as an independent driver-for-hire in Australia. Hank is divorced, grieving the loss of his child and carrying enough generic action-hero trauma to qualify for some kind of bulk discount.
He is hired to pick up Ben Bishop, played by Owen Wilson, an organ courier who has flown in carrying a human liver. This is not just any liver. This is a VERY IMPORTANT LIVER.
The liver has to reach a hospital on the Gold Coast in less than three hours or a critically ill young girl will die. It also happens to have an extremely rare blood type, making it worth millions on the black market.
So naturally there are criminals who want it. And naturally the criminals are heavily armed. And naturally Hank is the only guy standing between them and the liver. Thus begins the chase.
Hank is the large, silent, damaged tough guy who doesn’t want trouble, he just wants to eat his sandwich. Ben is the fast-talking smartass who won’t stop making jokes. The two men don’t particularly like each other at first, but since they have to transport precious cargo while being chased by bad guys, you can pretty much start writing the rest of the movie yourself.
This is Midnight Run. It is The Transporter. It is Premium Rush. It is Collateral. It is every mismatched-buddy action movie you have ever seen, except now there is a human liver sitting in a cooler between them.
There is even a scene where Hank has to borrow a car from his ex-wife that reminded me directly of Midnight Run. That sort of thing happens throughout the movie. You don’t watch a scene and wonder what is going to happen next. You watch it and try to remember which better movie it came from.
Ritchson is certainly built for this kind of thing. He is enormous. I mean, the man looks like somebody inflated an action figure. He is physically imposing, completely believable throwing people through walls, smashing guys into furniture, firing weapons, driving cars through things and generally creating enormous amounts of property damage.
I recently saw him in Motor City, which was such a strange movie that it was difficult to judge him as an actor because he barely spoke. The whole thing played like an extended music video, with action choreographed to songs and almost no dialogue.
I don’t watch Reacher, so Runner was really my first opportunity to watch Ritchson carry a conventional dramatic role. And he is not very convincing. The physical stuff works. The emotional stuff does not.
Hank is supposed to be a recovering alcoholic dealing with grief, divorce, guilt and the death of his child. That is potentially heavy material, but the screenplay treats all of it like a box that needs to be checked before the next car chase.
There is even an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting early in the film that is one of the least convincing portrayals of an AA meeting I have ever seen.
As somebody familiar with recovery, I found the entire subplot not only inaccurate but borderline offensive. Alcoholism is not really treated as part of this character’s life. It is treated as a screenplay accessory. It is there so Hank can stare sadly at something, talk vaguely about redemption and then go beat six people unconscious.
That’s not character development. That’s decorating an action hero.
Owen Wilson has the opposite problem.
I generally like Owen Wilson. He can be wonderfully funny, charming and relaxed, and when he has good material there is something naturally likable about him. He is unbelievably annoying in this movie.
Ben exists almost entirely to make wisecracks during dangerous situations. Gunshots are flying, cars are exploding, people are trying to murder them, and Owen Wilson is there to make another joke, and none of the jokes land. The mismatched-buddy chemistry never develops because the screenplay confuses “one guy is serious and the other guy talks a lot” with character interaction.
Meanwhile, waiting at the hospital is Kate, played by Leila George, the mother of the young girl who desperately needs the transplant. The movie keeps cutting back to the hospital to remind us about the ticking clock, which is apparently necessary because the giant cooler full of endangered human liver isn’t enough.
Eventually that subplot becomes increasingly ridiculous when we learn that somebody inside the hospital is secretly working with the criminals. Because apparently the movie thought a liver, a cartel, a three-hour deadline, a recovering alcoholic Navy SEAL and approximately 900 gunmen were not enough plot.
The main villain is Damián Zaldívar, played by Rodrigo Santoro, and he is another generic action-movie bad guy who kills people constantly just to remind us that he is bad. At one point he kills a man in a car and throws him out. Then he kills somebody else. Then somebody else.
He is basically a murder machine until the climax arrives, at which point he suddenly hesitates long enough for the movie to have the giant final fight it obviously needs.
Convenient.
Director Scott Waugh has made Act of Valor, Need for Speed and Expend4bles, so gigantic, stupid, cliché-ridden action movies are clearly his neighborhood. And Runner may be the most generic version yet.
There are car chases, gunfights, explosions, fistfights, people smashing through glass. There are people being hit with objects. There are cars flipping over. And practically every one of these sequences looks like something borrowed from another filmmaker.
Waugh repeatedly attempts these elaborate long takes where the camera moves toward a speeding car, passes into the vehicle, swings around the characters and then comes back outside while the chase continues.
The obvious inspiration is Alfonso Cuarón’s extraordinary work in Children of Men, especially the famous car sequences where the camera seems to float impossibly around the passengers while chaos unfolds outside.
The difference is that Alfonso Cuarón knows what he is doing. Those sequences in Children of Men are breathtaking because the technique disappears into the storytelling.
Here you can practically see the CGI seams. You can feel where the digital camera move begins. You can feel where the edit is hidden. You can feel where the actors are replaced by effects. Instead of being immersed in the chase, you start thinking about how the shot was assembled. It looks like a video game.
The movie also repeatedly uses that familiar Michael Bay shot where the camera starts low and dramatically circles the hero while something explodes in the background.
You know the shot. Bay has been using it since roughly the invention of fire.
Waugh uses it several times here, presumably because if you spin the camera fast enough around Alan Ritchson while something blows up, maybe we won’t notice that we’ve already seen this movie. Well, we notice.
The action itself is surprisingly violent for a PG-13 movie. I actually assumed while watching it that Runner was rated R.
The final section takes place largely inside the hospital and includes gunfire, axes, bloody fights, syringes being jammed into people and enough general destruction that you begin wondering whether anybody is still available to perform the transplant.
And yet, somehow, after this enormous violent battle tears through the hospital, everything basically resets within minutes. The hallways apparently clean themselves. Doctors get back to work. Everybody resumes normal hospital operations as though there hadn’t just been a small war fought near the nurses’ station.
I understand that a movie like this requires suspension of disbelief. I am perfectly capable of enjoying gigantic stupid action movies. Arnold Schwarzenegger could kill 80 people in a jungle and I was fine with it. Sylvester Stallone could hang from a mountain with one hand and I would happily go along.
But even stupid action movies need internal logic, personality and rhythm. They need something. Runner has noise.
Angel Studios is involved here, and as with many of their releases there is a faint faith-and-redemption element running underneath the story. Hank is searching for forgiveness, trying to rebuild himself and attempting to find some sort of moral purpose. That could have worked.
Instead, because the alcoholism and grief are treated so superficially, the redemption material feels just as manufactured as everything else. Nothing in this movie has weight. Not the grief. Not the friendship. Not the jokes. Not the danger. Not even the liver.
And that is impressive because the entire plot is literally about how much the liver weighs emotionally and financially.
The biggest problem is that Runner never gives you one moment that feels genuinely its own. Every scene triggers another movie in your head. Midnight Run. Collateral. The Transporter. Premium Rush. Children of Men. Michael Bay. Jason Statham movies. Eighties action movies. Nineties buddy movies.
Eventually the references pile up until the movie disappears completely underneath them.
There is nothing wrong with being influenced by other movies. Every filmmaker is. But influence is supposed to be a starting point. Here it is the finished product.
Runner is loud, obnoxious, predictable and exhausting. Alan Ritchson can certainly handle the physical side of action filmmaking, but the dramatic material exposes his limitations.
Owen Wilson is saddled with awful jokes and gives one of his most irritating performances. Scott Waugh throws every action cliché he knows onto the screen and hopes volume will compensate for originality. It doesn’t.
By the time the movie ended, I could not wait to get out of the theater.
Although I did want to stick around long enough to find out who performed all those terrible cover songs.
Because that, more than anything else, perfectly sums up Runner. It is a cheap cover version of something you already liked better. - ⭐️1/2
There are bad movies. There are terrible movies. There are movies that are nearly unwatchable, movies I wouldn't recommend to my worst enemy, and then there is The Fix, a new action thriller starring Zachary Levi with Liam Neeson in a supporting role.
The Fix is so comprehensively awful, so misguided in almost every conceivable way, that I spent much of the movie genuinely astonished by what I was watching. The writing is terrible. The direction is terrible. The action is generic. The dialogue is ridiculous. The performances range from dull to completely insane. Nearly every creative decision seems to be the wrong one.
And I laughed my ass off.
This is one of the worst movies of the year, possibly one of the worst movies I've seen in a very long time, but I cannot pretend I wasn't entertained by its spectacular ineptitude. The Fix is that rare straight-faced disaster that achieves the old "so bad it's good" cliché almost perfectly.
It is deadly serious from beginning to end, which only makes it funnier. Nobody involved appears to have the slightest idea that they are making comedy, and yet this is legitimately one of the funniest movies I've seen all year.
We're talking Mystery Science Theater 3000 territory here.
The movie was originally called Hotel Tehran, which at least gives you some idea what you're getting into, and it eventually became The Fix. It's being sold partly around Liam Neeson, but anybody expecting another Neeson action vehicle is going to be very confused.
Neeson is actually playing the aging mentor to the main character, Tucker, a former CIA operative played by Zachary Levi, and the entire thing begins during the chaotic American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
The opening is supposed to establish the trauma that will haunt Tucker for the rest of the movie. His special operations team is attempting to extract an Afghan ally from Kabul when everything goes horribly wrong.
The compound is compromised, Taliban fighters swarm the location, people are killed, and Tucker ultimately makes a brutal decision involving the man they're supposed to rescue. It is intended to be grim, horrifying and morally complicated.
Instead, within minutes, the movie begins producing dialogue that sounds like it was generated by somebody who has watched every bad military thriller made during the last 40 years and decided to use all of them at once.
The movie actually opens with a Bible quotation, because of course it does, and immediately announces that it takes itself VERY seriously.
Then Liam Neeson arrives as Larry, the veteran CIA mentor, and starts delivering lines that made me wonder whether he thought he was still playing Frank Drebin. Somebody asks what another character is doing and Neeson dramatically growls, "His job!!"
When questioned about where he's going, he fires back, "I don't answer to you, Colonel. Take it up with Congress!!" At another point, somebody asks where he's headed and he bellows, "To hell!!"
These are not jokes.
That is the important thing to remember throughout The Fix. None of this is supposed to be funny.
Larry is also suffering from increasingly severe headaches, and during one sequence he's sitting in a vehicle after a disastrous mission, overwhelmed by pain, rambling about Saigon and then slowly reciting the national anthem.
Liam Neeson plays this with the kind of volcanic dramatic intensity normally reserved for somebody discovering that his entire family has been kidnapped, and I was sitting there trying desperately not to laugh.
We eventually jump ahead to the present, where Tucker has become exactly the character you knew he would become from the moment the movie started. He is disgraced. He is lonely. He has family problems. He rides a motorcycle. He lives by himself. He fillets fish. He stares into the distance while generic rock music plays on the soundtrack.
If you asked an AI program in 1998 to create "BROKEN TOUGH GUY ACTION HERO," it would probably produce this exact montage.
Meanwhile Larry is now suffering from serious cognitive decline, and buried memories from his intelligence career begin spilling out. Among them is the revelation that approximately $25 million was hidden in Tehran decades earlier.
Tucker sees this as the opportunity that can solve everybody's problems, so he decides to reunite his old team and sneak back into hostile territory for an unauthorized heist. The movie then becomes a completely different bad movie.
What begins as a grim military trauma drama turns into a generic espionage thriller, which then becomes a heist movie, which later becomes a rescue mission, which eventually turns into a geopolitical conspiracy involving double-crosses, secret assets and increasingly ludicrous revelations.
It feels less like one screenplay than four unfinished screenplays stapled together.
Tucker recruits the usual group of action-movie specialists, none of whom feels like an actual person. There is the smart-ass guy, the tough guy, the damaged guy, the guy who doesn't trust anybody and the various women who exist mostly to explain things, become endangered or motivate men.
You could shuffle half these characters into another direct-to-video action movie and nobody would notice.
My favorite production detail happens during the recruitment scenes. Tucker meets people in bars where they are drinking from bottles labeled simply "BEER." Later, when the movie apparently wants us to know that they have moved upscale, the bottles say "CRAFT BEER."
I am not exaggerating this.
Not Budweiser. Not some fake brand created by the prop department. Just BEER. Then CRAFT BEER. That is the level of filmmaking we're dealing with here.
There is also a negotiation sequence involving an apple. Somebody shoots an apple as a threatening demonstration of what will happen if they betray Tucker, and the whole thing is staged with such ridiculous seriousness that the generic villain somehow ends up appearing intimidated by fruit.
Every scene contains something like this. A bad line. A strange reaction shot. A horribly timed explosion. A ludicrously generic prop. An action beat that seems edited three seconds too early. The Fix is almost generous in the number of ways it finds to embarrass itself.
The big Tehran operation eventually involves simultaneous missions: one part of the team trying to break into a heavily guarded location where the supposed money is hidden, while another group attempts to rescue women and get them out of the city.
Director Guy Moshe crosscuts frantically between the two operations, but none of it generates much suspense because the action is so derivative. We've seen every version of this before, frequently done better on episodes of television.
The strange thing is that the production reportedly involved people with actual intelligence and special-forces backgrounds, which apparently proves that technical advisers cannot save a terrible screenplay.
And then there is Zachary Levi.
Levi is catastrophically miscast as Tucker, and his performance is the movie's greatest source of unintentional comedy. This is a character who is supposed to be haunted, battle-scarred, emotionally destroyed and lethally competent.
Levi approaches all of that by growing a beard, narrowing his eyes and staring at everybody as though he is trying to telepathically convince us that he is dangerous.
He isn't.
I liked Levi years ago on Chuck. He had an appealing light comic quality, and that show knew exactly how to use him. Shazam! also understood that there is something inherently boyish about his screen presence.
But The Fix asks him to become this grizzled, hardened CIA badass, and he simply does not have the weight for it. Every glare looks rehearsed. Every tough-guy pause seems calculated. Every anguished expression feels like somebody standing just off-camera whispering, "More intensity, Zachary. MORE."
Even the beard seems to be overacting.
There are actors who can enter a room and immediately convince you that they have seen terrible things. Levi enters a room in The Fix and looks like he's auditioning for a cologne commercial called PTSD.
That would be funny enough, but the movie also gives him some of the worst dialogue imaginable and expects him to deliver every syllable as though Shakespeare himself just handed him the pages. The combination becomes irresistible.
This is not merely a bad performance. It is a fascinatingly bad performance, the kind where every choice somehow compounds the previous wrong choice.
Liam Neeson isn't exactly escaping unharmed either. Neeson has done enough tough-guy action movies at this point that he can practically perform them in his sleep, but here he is handed this strange mixture of mentor clichés, dementia material, patriotic speeches and later revelations that become increasingly absurd.
He plays everything with total commitment, which under normal circumstances would be admirable, but here it becomes another source of comedy.
And then the movie reaches its big final twist.
I am not going to give away the specifics because people deserve the experience of discovering this particular piece of insanity for themselves. I will only say that after 140 minutes of Afghanistan trauma, CIA intrigue, dementia, Tehran, secret money, terrorist negotiations, double-crosses, explosions, motorcycle brooding, generic rock songs and bottles labeled CRAFT BEER, The Fix somehow brings Lyme disease into the equation.
Yes. Lyme disease.
At the precise moment when I thought this movie had exhausted every possible way of becoming more ridiculous, it found another one.
The thing is also two hours and 20 minutes long, which is completely insane. Nobody needs 140 minutes of this material. But there is a perverse upside to the running time because it gives the filmmakers more opportunities to make astonishingly bad decisions.
You can fit an impressive amount of bad dialogue, terrible acting, confused politics, generic action and cheap-looking production design into 140 minutes, and The Fix is determined to prove it.
I want to be clear about something: this is not a recommendation in the normal sense. The Fix is a terrible movie. The script is a disaster. The action sequences are mediocre. The politics are muddled. The characters are clichés. The women are badly written.
Liam Neeson is stranded inside material that sometimes makes him seem like he's doing parody, and Zachary Levi gives one of the funniest unintentionally terrible tough-guy performances I can remember.
But if you love bad movies (real bad movies, the kind where a group of people can sit together and slowly realize they are experiencing something special)The Fix may eventually have a life.
Years from now, I can absolutely imagine people discovering this thing at midnight screenings and screaming the dialogue back at the screen. I can imagine drinking games built around Tucker staring intensely into the distance. I can imagine audiences cheering when the CRAFT BEER appears.
The Fix is one of the worst movies of 2026, and I enjoyed almost every hilariously incompetent minute of it.
Not because it's good.
Because it's magnificently, astonishingly, almost heroically bad. - Zero Stars (⭐️⭐️⭐️ if you want to laugh and mock it)
South Korean filmmaker Na Hong-jin does not make small movies. He doesn’t really make short movies, either. His previous films (The Chaser, The Yellow Sea and The Wailing) are all intense, violent, genre-bending pieces that take their sweet time getting where they’re going.
I particularly liked The Wailing, his terrific 2016 horror film, and Na clearly loves pushing things as far as he possibly can: the violence, the tension, the action, the running time, everything.
With Hope, his first feature in ten years, he pushes all of those things so far that eventually I wanted somebody to push me toward the exit.
This is a gigantic, nearly three-hour South Korean science-fiction/action/horror/monster movie that contains some genuinely spectacular filmmaking, several terrific action sequences, enormous amounts of destruction, some wonderfully nasty violence and a handful of stunning long takes.
Unfortunately, it also contains cardboard characters, awkward comedy, surprisingly lousy visual effects when it matters most, a derivative final act, an interminable climax and an ending that essentially says, “Come back for the sequel.”
After nearly three hours. No, thank you.
The film takes place in Hope Harbor, an isolated rural coastal community near the DMZ, where police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) and rookie cop Sung-ae (Hoyeon) become involved in the investigation of a brutally mutilated bull.
The initial assumption is that some kind of wild animal (possibly a tiger) is responsible, but before anybody can figure out exactly what happened, massive wildfires erupt in the surrounding mountains, communications are cut off, and Hope Harbor becomes completely isolated.
Meanwhile, Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) and a group of local hunters head into the mountains looking for the creature. They eventually discover something considerably more significant than a rogue tiger: a crashed alien spacecraft. Whatever has been wandering around Hope Harbor isn't from around there. Not even close.
Na initially keeps the creature largely hidden, and once it finally attacks the village, Hope essentially turns into one enormous action sequence. A giant humanoid alien creature tears through buildings, destroys vehicles and kills townspeople while Bum-seok races frantically through the streets, trying to understand what the hell is happening and occasionally trying to stop it.
There are shotguns, grenades, rocket launchers, explosions, car crashes, bodies flying everywhere and an astonishing amount of property damage. And some of this stuff is GREAT.
Na absolutely knows how to direct action. There are long, complicated tracking shots in which the camera moves through passageways, races down roads, follows speeding vehicles and stays with characters as complete chaos erupts around them. The geography of the action remains clear even when everything onscreen is exploding.
He understands editing, movement and escalation, and he isn't afraid of making the violence blunt, bloody and painful. The sequences involving the hunters in the woods are particularly effective, as these guys realize they aren't hunting anything, they're being hunted.
The movie becomes a brutal combination of Predator and Aliens, with creatures stomping through the forest, throwing grown men around like toys, smashing bodies against trees and absorbing ridiculous amounts of gunfire.
But here's the problem: EVERYTHING GOES ON TOO LONG.
Not a little too long. Not “maybe trim five minutes out of this sequence” too long. Hope is at least 45 minutes too long, and almost every major action sequence eventually reaches the point where you think, “Okay, that was really impressive,” followed ten minutes later by, “Wait, we're still doing this?”
The first hour is basically one extended action sequence involving the destruction of Hope Harbor. Then we move into the woods for more action. Then the movie slows down while authorities and medical personnel deal with the wounded.
Then we're back to the aliens. Then we're back to more destruction. And then comes an enormous climactic chase involving cars, guns, an alien creature and, because apparently we haven't thrown enough stuff into this movie yet, a guy on horseback.
It's an impressive sequence. The stunt work is good. The effects are effective. The combination of the horse, the speeding vehicles, the creature and people hanging out of cars firing weapons is technically complicated and sometimes thrilling.
AND IT NEVER ENDS.
I swear there were moments when I thought I had somehow entered a time warp. The horse is running. The car is speeding. The monster is chasing them. Somebody fires a gun. Somebody tries to get from the horse to the car.
More driving. More shooting. More running. More monster. At some point I started wondering if the horse had signed a three-picture deal.
This would matter less if Na had given us interesting people to care about between all the explosions, but the characters are astonishingly thin.
Bum-seok should be the emotional center of the movie, yet he's basically a collection of reactions. Sung-ae is more fun, and Hoyeon brings some energy to the rookie cop, but none of the relationships are developed enough to give the carnage any real emotional weight.
There are attempts at humor throughout, usually involving the townspeople bickering or reacting to the complete insanity surrounding them. A few jokes work, especially during the scenes involving the wounded villagers, but much of the comedy feels forced and disconnected from the mayhem.
The movie eventually reveals that the creature attacking Hope Harbor isn't simply destroying the town randomly. It's looking for its offspring, and the actions of one of the villagers have inadvertently turned this isolated little community into ground zero for an interstellar catastrophe.
That's actually a pretty good idea. There is something darkly funny (and potentially tragic) about ordinary people accidentally triggering a cosmic incident because they have absolutely no understanding of what they've encountered. Na could have built an entire movie around that idea.
Instead, by the time Hope fully explains what is happening, we're so deep into the running time that the revelation feels less like an escalation and more like somebody starting another movie before this one has finished.
And then Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander and Taylor Russell show up. Sort of.
They play alien characters rendered through CGI, and this is where the visual effects (which had been pretty effective during much of the creature action) suddenly become terrible.
Once you can clearly recognize these famous actors inside the digital alien faces, Hope begins looking like some bizarre combination of Avatar and Alita: Battle Angel.
That's not a compliment.
The movie had already reminded me at various points of Alien, Predator, Jaws, Jordan Peele's Nope and even Na's own The Wailing. That's not necessarily fatal; every genre movie has influences. But once the Fassbender/Vikander alien material arrives, the film stops feeling like an interesting variation on familiar ideas and starts feeling derivative.
Worse, these characters arrive absurdly late. Suddenly we're watching recognizable Hollywood actors speaking an alien language with subtitles, and the movie expects us to become emotionally invested in people we essentially just met.
Fassbender and Vikander are terrific actors, but putting famous faces inside CGI creatures doesn't automatically create characterization. By this point, we've been sitting there for approximately two and a half hours.
You can't introduce what feels like an entirely new subplot after two and a half hours and expect me to say, “Oh, terrific! MORE PLOT!”
Especially when Hope doesn't really end.
Na has apparently conceived this as the beginning of a larger story, but instead of leaving me desperate to see what happens next, the ending made me wonder why this movie couldn't have bothered to finish what it started.
That is particularly frustrating because there is real filmmaking talent all over Hope. Na Hong-jin is not some hack throwing digital monsters at the screen. There are sequences here that are beautifully designed and executed.
The camera work can be extraordinary. The action has weight. The violence hurts. The explosions feel enormous. The best tracking shots are genuinely exhilarating. But technical bravado isn't enough to sustain a 160-minute movie.
Eventually I need characters. I need relationships. I need something emotionally compelling underneath all the carnage. And if you're going to keep me in a theater for nearly three hours, I definitely need an ending.
Hope gives me some terrific action, some cool monsters, a few laughs, plenty of blood and explosions, and about 45 minutes of movie I desperately wanted someone to remove.
Whatever works here is ultimately overwhelmed by the bloated running time, underwritten characters, increasingly derivative science-fiction elements, disappointing CGI and an awkward sequel setup that arrives ridiculously late.
I cannot recommend Hope. In fact, I'm pretty sure the screening I attended is still playing.
I think the horse is still running. - ⭐️⭐️
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