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CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 9-4-26

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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review four new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, September 4th, 2026.



By Any Means is a very puzzling movie.


It is also a pretty bad one, but not exactly in the ways I expected it to be bad.


This is a would-be historical crime thriller set in Mississippi in 1966, during one of the most volatile and horrifying periods of the Civil Rights Movement. It is very loosely based on the FBI investigation surrounding the murder of Vernon Dahmer, the NAACP leader whose home was firebombed by members of the Ku Klux Klan.


The film takes that real history and builds a fictional buddy-crime movie around it, teaming a young Black FBI agent with a notorious Mafia hitman and informant.


That sounds like the premise of something that could either be fascinating or absolutely disastrous. It lands much closer to disastrous.


Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays FBI Special Agent Wayne Strider, a completely fictional character loosely inspired by stories that mobster Gregory Scarpa may have worked alongside a Black federal agent.


There was never any identified agent matching the character in this movie, so screenwriter Sascha Penn essentially creates Strider from scratch and inserts him into this historical setting.


Scarpa, meanwhile, was very real. He was a Colombo crime-family capo, killer and longtime FBI informant, and here he is played by Mark Wahlberg under an astonishing amount of makeup involving a terrible wig, a gigantic fake nose and one of those exaggerated gangster accents that makes you wonder whether anybody on set ever said, “Maybe pull it back a little.”


Apparently not.


The basic setup has Strider and Scarpa reluctantly partnered to investigate racist violence and eventually the murder of Vernon Dahmer, played by Giancarlo Esposito. Strider believes in procedure, law and the institutional rules of the FBI. Scarpa believes in beating people senseless until they tell him what he wants to know.


You can probably guess where this is going.


The movie wants to be a serious historical drama, a crime procedural, a racial reckoning, a violent revenge thriller and an odd-couple character piece all at once. Unfortunately, Sascha Penn’s screenplay is so basic and heavy-handed that practically every character speaks in speeches, themes and platitudes instead of anything resembling normal human dialogue.


Nobody talks like this. People announce what they represent. They explain racism. They explain justice. They explain violence. They explain Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. And then, just in case you somehow missed what the title means, the movie eventually explains “by any means necessary” to you too.


Subtlety is not really part of the plan.


What is strange, though, is that the movie is not guilty of the most obvious version of the “white savior” problem I expected going into it. This kind of material has been mishandled many times before, with stories centered on Black struggle being filtered primarily through white protagonists. Mississippi Burning is probably the clearest comparison here.


Alan Parker’s 1988 film was about horrific violence against Black Americans in Mississippi, yet the story was framed through two white FBI agents played by Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe. That has always been one of the most troubling things about that movie.


By Any Means does something different, but in some ways even stranger.


Wayne Strider is technically the central character, and Abdul-Mateen gives him more complexity and humanity than practically anybody else in the film. But the movie’s dramatic arc is essentially about this Black FBI agent learning rebellion, anger and violent resistance from Mark Wahlberg’s white Italian gangster.


Think about that for a second.


Scarpa is the guy who keeps telling him that rules don’t matter. Scarpa is the guy who beats information out of people. Scarpa is the guy who keeps pushing Strider to understand that sometimes violence is the answer. He even tells Strider that he prefers Malcolm X to Martin Luther King Jr. And eventually Strider begins adopting Scarpa’s methods.


So instead of the conventional white savior narrative, the movie twists the trope into something even more bizarre: the white character teaches the Black character how to become radical.


That is an extraordinarily awkward idea for a movie about the Civil Rights Movement.


There are repeated scenes in which Scarpa walks into a room and beats somebody nearly to death while Strider stands nearby watching. Early in the film Scarpa casually kills a cop.


The movie actually opens with him beating an informant with a baseball bat, just to make absolutely certain you understand what kind of guy he is.


Scarpa’s answer to every problem is basically violence, more violence and then maybe another little burst of violence just in case. And Wahlberg plays all of this at about 175 percent. This is not a performance so much as a collection of gangster clichés strapped underneath a fake nose.


He stomps around, growls, does the accent, insults people, beats people, threatens people and calls Strider “Jackie” throughout the movie because, naturally, he has to make a Jackie Robinson reference after meeting a Black FBI agent.


Everything about the character is underlined. Twice.


There are brief scenes involving Scarpa’s family that are just as clichéd. We establish that he cheats on his wife, because apparently the movie needs one more reason to show us what a jerk he is. Nothing interesting develops from it. It is just another detail dropped onto an already overloaded caricature.


The irony is that Abdul-Mateen’s completely fictional character is much more believable.


Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is a really good actor. He was excellent as Bobby Seale in The Trial of the Chicago 7, he made a strong impression in Candyman, played Morpheus in The Matrix Resurrections and has done the big comic-book thing as Black Manta in the Aquaman movies.


He has real presence, and he gives Strider an internal life that is almost entirely missing from the screenplay.


The best scenes in By Any Means are actually between Abdul-Mateen and Nicole Beharie, who plays Strider’s wife. Those scenes are quieter, more grounded and more human than almost anything else in the movie. They feel like scenes involving actual people instead of characters representing ideological positions. Which makes it even stranger that these are the characters the movie invented.


Giancarlo Esposito brings natural dignity to Vernon Dahmer, although he is not given nearly enough to do before becoming the victim whose murder pushes the investigation forward.


Ethan Embry turns up as one of the racist suspects, and Josh Lucas and David Strathairn play FBI authority figures in exactly the kind of roles you would expect Josh Lucas and David Strathairn to play. That is not really a criticism.


If you need somebody to walk into a room, look serious and immediately make a federal investigation seem more legitimate, hiring David Strathairn is a pretty good idea.


These actors give the movie some weight that the screenplay desperately needs. Esposito, Embry, Lucas and Strathairn are all reliable performers, and their presence creates the illusion that there might be something more substantial happening.


There usually isn’t.


The film keeps bouncing awkwardly between grim historical drama and ridiculously violent exploitation movie. One minute somebody is giving a heartfelt speech about race and justice, and a few minutes later Wahlberg is beating somebody bloody or killing someone in front of Strider.


Eventually Strider and Scarpa have their inevitable confrontation, and the two men literally get out of the car and beat the hell out of each other.


The scene immediately reminded me of Roddy Piper and Keith David fighting in John Carpenter’s They Live. The difference is that the fight in They Live is great.


Carpenter takes an absurdly long fistfight and makes it funny, painful, character-driven and weirdly believable. Piper and David establish more about the relationship between Nada and Frank during that fight than By Any Means manages to establish between its leads during the entire movie. Here it just feels like another reference to something better.


Eventually the title becomes the message, Strider decides that legal procedure is no longer enough, and the film pushes him toward the same brutal tactics Scarpa has been demonstrating throughout the story. He starts beating people, threatening people and accepting the idea that justice sometimes requires violence.


And the movie jams this transformation down your throat.


There is potentially a provocative movie hiding somewhere inside that idea. What happens when institutions designed to enforce justice are themselves compromised by racism? What happens when lawful methods repeatedly fail? When does resistance become justified?


Those are serious questions. By any Means doesn’t really explore them. It just has Mark Wahlberg beat somebody up and then essentially says, “See?”


Director Elegance Bratton approaches the material with complete seriousness, but the tone is all over the place. There are emotional scenes designed to pull at the heartstrings, procedural scenes, political speeches and bursts of brutal violence that feel like they belong in another movie entirely.


Terence Blanchard contributes a good score, and there are some solid technical elements throughout. There is also a strong title song over the closing credits. The movie looks respectable, it has a very good cast, and Abdul-Mateen and Beharie manage to find real moments inside an otherwise artificial screenplay.


But none of that fixes the central problem.


This is a movie about an extraordinarily important period in American history that reduces nearly everything to familiar movie clichés. It uses real racial violence as the backdrop for an invented odd-couple crime story, turns a real Mafia killer into a cartoon, and then somehow arrives at the idea that the Black protagonist needs a racist white gangster to teach him how to become angry enough to fight back.


That is not exactly the profound historical insight the filmmakers seem to think it is.

By Any Means could have been an intense examination of race, federal power, corruption and the horrifying reality of Mississippi during the Civil Rights era.


Instead, it is Mark Wahlberg in a bad wig and fake nose yelling at everybody.


Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is good. Nicole Beharie is good. There are several terrific character actors scattered throughout the movie, and some of the technical work is solid.


But the screenplay is awful, the message is heavy-handed, the clichés never stop and Wahlberg gives one of the most irritating performances of the year.


So no, I cannot recommend By Any Means.


By any means. - ⭐️1/2


Onslaught is one of the biggest disappointments of the year, and that is especially frustrating because it comes from Adam Wingard, a filmmaker whose work I have really loved at times and who has proven that he can make terrific genre movies on both a small and gigantic scale.


Wingard made You’re Next in 2011, which remains one of the smartest and most entertaining home-invasion horror movies of the past couple of decades. It was nasty, funny, clever, low-budget and beautifully aware of the genre traditions it was playing with.


He followed that with The Guest, which I didn’t care for nearly as much, and then made the terrible Blair Witch reboot, which we can all agree is best left buried in the woods somewhere.


But then he bounced back with Death Note, which I thought was terrific, and later proved that he could handle gigantic studio filmmaking with Godzilla vs. Kong and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.


So the idea of Wingard returning to something leaner, meaner and closer to the low-budget genre world of You’re Next sounded pretty exciting. Unfortunately, Onslaught is terrible.


This is a hollow, obnoxious mash-up of action movies, slashers, revenge thrillers and siege pictures, all tossed into a blender with almost no personality of its own. It is full of familiar characters, familiar kills, familiar setups and familiar visual references, and the most obvious influence hanging over the whole thing is John Carpenter.


And when I say “influence,” I’m being generous, because this movie REALLY wants you to know that Adam Wingard has seen John Carpenter movies.


The credits come up in a Carpenter-style font against a black screen. Matt Pusti’s electronic score immediately starts doing an imitation of Carpenter’s synthesizer work, especially Assault on Precinct 13.


The story itself is essentially a variation on that same siege-movie structure, with a group of people trapped in an isolated location while nearly unstoppable attackers close in. There are also echoes of Escape from New York, The Thing, They Live, Vampires, even Ghosts of Mars.


The problem is that copying the font and imitating the score does not mean you understand John Carpenter. Carpenter’s movies work because of discipline. His widescreen compositions matter. His editing matters. His pacing matters. His use of silence matters.


His music matters because it’s part of the architecture of the movie, not because synthesizers automatically make something cool.


And his heroes, whether they are Snake Plissken, Napoleon Wilson, R.J. MacReady, Jack Crow or John Nada, have a specificity and attitude that come from character rather than wardrobe. Onslaught copies all the surface details and misses everything underneath.


Adria Arjona plays Celeste, a former Army sniper living in an isolated desert trailer park populated largely by veterans. She is paranoid, withdrawn and still carrying the scars of her military past. At the beginning of the movie, she is out shooting pumpkins to make sure she still has her skills.


Her routine is interrupted when her ex-husband drops off their young daughter Daisy, forcing Celeste into a relationship the movie desperately wants us to care about but never really develops.


Nearby, a secret military facility is conducting experiments involving genetically engineered super-soldiers. The project is overseen by Hans Kammler, played by Dan Stevens with blond hair, contact lenses and an accent that announces immediately that subtlety has left the building.


Things go wrong, three massive experimental soldiers escape, climb into a vehicle and eventually make their way toward Celeste’s trailer park, where they proceed to slaughter everybody in sight.


The group is led by The Butcher, played by former MMA fighter Alex Pereira, and these characters are basically military-themed slasher villains. They are huge, silent, relentless killing machines who exist primarily to walk into scenes and murder people in increasingly violent ways.


There is definitely some The Prowler in here, Joseph Zito’s 1981 military-themed slasher, along with about 40 years of other horror movies involving unstoppable killers.


Again, imitation is not inherently bad. Carpenter himself was influenced enormously by Howard Hawks. Every filmmaker steals. Every filmmaker borrows. The trick is doing something with it, and Wingard doesn’t.


Celeste is clearly designed as the Carpenter-style stoic antihero, but she feels like a collection of references rather than an actual person.


At one point an injury leaves her with one eye covered, and the Snake Plissken imagery becomes so blatant that you almost expect Kurt Russell to show up and issue a cease-and-desist order.


Putting a bandage over somebody’s eye does not turn them into Snake Plissken.


The trailer park residents aren’t much better. Eric Wareheim plays Kovacks, a drunken local cop, and he is so broad and obnoxious that every scene involving him feels like it belongs in another movie.


Reginald VelJohnson, who obviously knows his way around action movies thanks to Die Hard, plays Josiah, one of the residents who arms himself and helps Celeste fight back.


Michael Biehn shows up too, which is another giant flashing sign saying, “LOOK! EIGHTIES GENRE MOVIES!” Biehn has been doing this stuff forever (The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, Tombstone, Planet Terror) and he at least brings some battered genre credibility to the proceedings. He gets a couple of mildly funny line readings despite not having much to work with.


Rebecca Hall is completely wasted as Hanna Kammler, the wife of Stevens’ scientist. There is some vague kinky relationship between the two of them that feels like it might turn into something interesting, but it never does.


Hall has maybe two scenes and tries to make some odd choices around the edges of a terrible script, but there is absolutely nothing there for her to play. Rebecca Hall is one of the best actresses working, so why hire her if this is all you’re going to give her?


Both Hall and Stevens have worked with Wingard before, and there is also a connection here to The Guest, with the same basic world of military experimentation and covert programs. That might be interesting to people who love The Guest, but it doesn’t make Onslaught any better.


Eventually the movie turns into a full “survive the night” siege picture as Celeste and the remaining residents of the trailer park fight back against the three super-soldiers.


People are shot, stabbed, blown apart and mutilated, and there is a guy who gets killed on top of a barbecue grill, with his burning corpse becoming a running gag as the movie periodically returns to see how much more cooked he has become. That gives you some idea of the level of sophistication we’re dealing with.


There are plenty of kills here, and if all you want from a movie is loud violence and gore, you will certainly get some of that. But even the action is disappointingly generic. Wingard has staged terrific action before, and there is nothing here with the tension or invention of You’re Next.


The movie even opens with a countdown leading toward the escape of the experimental soldiers, which sounds like it might create suspense. Instead, it accomplishes almost nothing. We watch events unfolding at the facility, the numbers tick down, the experiment goes wrong and the soldiers escape.


There is no real payoff to the device. It’s just another stylistic flourish designed to make the movie feel cooler than it actually is.


That describes almost everything in Onslaught: cool font, cool synths, cool guns, cool military killers, cool eye patch, cool genre actors, cool Carpenter references. But there is no movie underneath any of it.


That is the difference between loving John Carpenter and understanding John Carpenter. Wingard clearly loves these movies. I don’t doubt that for a second.


But Onslaught feels like somebody doing an imitation of an imitation of a Xerox copy of a John Carpenter movie. It’s Rich Little doing John Carpenter through three generations of photocopies.


Paying tribute to Carpenter can be done successfully and cleverly, if you know what you are doing. Just look at Neil Marshall's glorious Doomsday, which beautifully apes Escape from New York. While Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, is a reasonably blatant knockoff of The Thing.


The difference between those films and Onslaught is that Marshall and Tarantino understand what makes Carpenter great, and add enough of their own voices to those movies to make them work brilliantly.


By the time you reach the end of Onslaught, all I wanted to do was go home and watch the real thing. Watch Assault on Precinct 13. Watch Escape from New York. Watch The Thing. Watch They Live. Hell, watch Ghosts of Mars. At least you’ll be watching John Carpenter.


Onslaught is only 92 minutes long, but it felt interminable. It is loud, empty, derivative, overplayed and filled with references to movies that constantly remind you how much better those movies are. Adam Wingard has made some terrific films, but this is not one of them.


In fact, I think this is the worst movie he has ever made. Yes, worse than Blair Witch.


He isn’t merely wearing his influences on his sleeve here. He doesn’t understand what’s written on the sleeve.


This is a terrible movie. - ⭐️


Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass is one of the most baffling animated disasters of the year, and I honestly don’t understand why this thing is being released in movie theaters.


That may sound like a strange place to begin, but it really is one of the first things I kept thinking about while watching it. We live in a time when good movies are dumped onto streaming services, terrific smaller films never get proper theatrical releases at all, and interesting animation is constantly treated like some kind of niche product.


Yet somehow this loud, ugly, generic, overstuffed piece of corporate product gets a big screen. Why?


The history of the movie at least explains some of the weirdness. This is technically a 2025 film, produced in China by China Film Co. along with Warner Bros. and Origin Animation, and it premiered at the Shanghai International Film Festival more than a year ago.


It was made primarily for Chinese audiences, features a largely Chinese voice cast in its original version, and much of its mythology, design and storytelling is rooted in Chinese culture.


None of that is the problem.


The problem is that sitting right in the middle of all of this are Tom and Jerry, two of the most iconic characters in the history of animation, and the movie has virtually no idea what makes them funny.


I LOVE Tom and Jerry.


I grew up with those cartoons. The classic Hanna-Barbera shorts are among the foundational pieces of American animation, and I especially love the Chuck Jones period.


Those Chuck Jones Tom and Jerry cartoons are insane. They’re inventive, surreal, violent, beautifully timed and frequently experimental in ways that would probably terrify anybody trying to get an animated short approved by a corporate committee today. And that's exactly what's missing from Forbidden Compass.


The original Tom and Jerry formula could not be simpler: cat versus mouse. Mouse versus cat. Usually in a house, a backyard, a kitchen or some other ordinary domestic setting. Sure, over the years they did Westerns and science fiction and all kinds of variations, but the basic appeal was always incredibly simple. Two characters. One conflict. Endless invention.


You don't need mythology. You don't need ancient prophecies. You don't need rebel factions. You don't need a cosmic magical artifact. You don't need an entire fantasy universe. You need Tom trying to catch Jerry.


Apparently nobody making this movie understood that.


The setup has Tom working as a security guard in a New York museum while Jerry is stealing things, which is at least vaguely in the spirit of the old cartoons.


A chase begins, they crash into the display containing the mysterious Forbidden Compass, and suddenly both of them are sucked through some magical vortex and transported to Gold City, an ancient fantasy world filled with Chinese mythology, warriors, deities, mutant rats and evil forces trying to control the compass.


At this point Tom and Jerry essentially become supporting characters in their own movie.

The story becomes this ridiculously complicated fantasy adventure involving the Phoenix Master, Mega Rat, Jade, Sonny, rival factions, magical creatures and various people trying to collect pieces of the compass.


Tom is mistaken for some kind of divine figure, Jerry becomes involved with the local rats, and eventually the two have to work together to stop the villains and return home. And I could not have cared less.


The movie is the first fully computer-animated Tom and Jerry feature, which sounds like something that could potentially be interesting. Instead, the animation is cheap, generic and unbelievably busy. It might look passable on a television, but blown up on a movie screen it looks pretty awful. Everything is overly polished, overly bright and constantly moving.


There is no texture to it. There is no personality. There is no visual identity. It looks like computer animation designed by committee. And the movie NEVER SHUTS UP.


It is sensory overload from beginning to end. Characters are yelling, music is blasting, things are flying through the air, the camera is moving, somebody is falling down, something is exploding, another subplot is beginning and then another character appears to explain another piece of mythology.


It's somehow boring and frenetic at exactly the same time, which is actually kind of impressive.


The filmmakers occasionally attempt to recreate the physical comedy of the old cartoons, and those moments only remind you how much better the originals were. At one point Tom runs directly through the strings of a musical instrument, which slices his body into pieces before he snaps back together. That's exactly the sort of gag that could be hilarious in a Chuck Jones cartoon.


Here it just looks weird.


The elastic physicality of hand-drawn animation was part of the joke. Tom could be flattened like a pancake, chopped into sections, stretched thirty feet long or smashed into the shape of a frying pan, and somehow the animation made it feel graceful, funny and completely natural within that universe.


In this shiny 3D computer animation, it just looks like a rendering effect.


There's also a plot point involving a fake Forbidden Compass made out of a cookie. Yes. A cookie. That's the kind of writing we're dealing with here.


Then there's Mega Rat, and eventually an enormous ancient chicken that fires giant eggs out of its backside, because apparently somebody somewhere decided that was comedy.


There are weird digressions, endless action sequences and way too many characters, and then suddenly Jade, a female cat, gets a full-blown musical sequence staged in the style of Beijing Opera.


Now, again, Beijing Opera is not the problem.


The problem is that the sequence comes out of nowhere, stops the movie completely and feels like it wandered in from an entirely different film. Forbidden Compass is constantly doing this. It keeps piling new ideas on top of other ideas without ever developing a coherent tone.


Even Tom's characterization is inconsistent. Traditionally Tom and Jerry are essentially silent characters, communicating through expressions, screams, occasional words and perfectly timed physical comedy. Here the movie can't even maintain that basic quality consistently.


Everything that made these characters distinctive gets diluted. And this is where the movie goes from simply bad to depressing.


Tom and Jerry are not generic intellectual property. These characters have survived for more than 80 years because their comedy is elemental. You can show a great Tom and Jerry short almost anywhere in the world and people understand it.


There is no complicated mythology to translate. There is no giant exposition dump. There isn't some villain explaining how an enchanted compass controls the fate of an ancient kingdom.


A cat wants to catch a mouse. That's it. And from that incredibly simple setup, the greatest animators created masterpieces of timing, music, slapstick and visual imagination. Forbidden Compass takes that simplicity and replaces it with noise.


It takes two legendary characters and throws them into an anonymous fantasy adventure that could have featured almost anybody. Remove Tom and Jerry from this movie and replace them with two generic animated characters, and practically nothing changes.


That's a huge problem.


This feels less like somebody had a great idea for a Tom and Jerry movie and more like a business arrangement in which several companies from different parts of the world realized that recognizable characters might help sell an otherwise generic animated fantasy.

And you can feel that calculation in almost every frame.


There is no heart here. There is no affection for what made these characters special. There is no understanding of the rhythm, simplicity or visual elegance of the great cartoons. There is just corporate animation, mythology, noise, action and branding.


If you're a Tom and Jerry fan, stay away from this. You will only spend the movie remembering how much better the original cartoons were. If you're simply looking for an entertaining animated movie to take your kids to, there are countless better choices.


I love Tom and Jerry, and I was borderline offended by this thing.


Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass takes two of the funniest and most enduring characters in animation history and turns them into supporting players in a loud, cheap-looking, generic corporate fantasy movie.


Tom deserves better. Jerry deserves better.


And frankly, so does the giant chicken. - ⭐️


I should probably start by admitting that I am TERRIBLE with heights.


I mean, genuinely terrified of them. Put somebody on the side of a mountain, dangling from a cable, hanging off a skyscraper or standing on some little platform thousands of feet in the air, and I am already halfway where the filmmaker wants me emotionally.


A movie involving heights has an unfair advantage with me because even when I know exactly how the trick is being done, my stomach doesn’t care.


That certainly helped the original Fall, the surprisingly effective 2022 thriller about two women who climb an insanely tall communications tower and become trapped at the top.


That movie had an almost beautifully stupid simplicity to it: two people, one pole, thousands of feet of empty air beneath them. It was suspenseful, technically impressive and anchored by two strong performances. It knew exactly what it was and didn’t need much more than that.


Now we have Fall 2: Deadpoint, which is not as good as the first movie because apparently somebody decided that what Fall really needed was drug smuggling, complicated backstories, hidden identities, family trauma, local mythology and a bunch of plot twists.


It didn’t.


Before getting into the movie itself, though, there is something amusing about its release. Fall 2 was not screened in advance for critics. No press screenings. No links. Nothing. It was basically hidden from us, which usually means somebody somewhere is nervous about what they have on their hands.


I always find this fascinating because I have already seen plenty of movies this year that were proudly screened for critics that are WAY worse than this. Studios will occasionally roll out some absolute catastrophe with confidence, but then they’ll hide a perfectly watchable little genre movie as though the press is going to storm the building with torches.


And before Fall 2 even begins, I got one of the biggest laughs of the entire movie from the production logos. Like practically every movie now, this thing has a parade of companies involved, so you sit through logo after logo before the story starts. Then suddenly the BUZZFEED logo appears.


BuzzFeed makes movies? Apparently they do.


The logo features an arrow going upward accompanied by what sounds remarkably like an old dial-up modem connecting to AOL circa 1998. So before anybody has climbed a mountain, fallen off anything or been threatened by drug smugglers, I’m sitting there thinking, “Why does this movie sound like I’m waiting for AOL to connect?”


That was entertaining.


Then the actual movie begins with a prologue involving two men crossing a dangerous mountain route in Thailand as part of a drug-smuggling operation. One guy has a gun, the weather is terrible, they are walking across old wooden planks attached to the side of a giant cliff, and eventually everything goes very badly.


This will become important later. Unfortunately.


The actual story centers on Jax Hunter, played by Harriet Slater, who is still grieving the death of her daredevil sister Shiloh. Jax is basically the opposite of her sister. She is nervous, cautious, deeply uncomfortable with heights and carrying all kinds of unresolved feelings about their relationship.


She reconnects with Luce, played by Arsema Thomas, one of Shiloh’s adventurous friends, who proposes a trip to Thailand as a kind of memorial. The idea is to climb Mount Kwan, navigate a notoriously dangerous route along the side of the mountain and eventually reach a giant stone figure known as the Deth Dragon.


According to local legend, if you reach the Deth Dragon, it will eat your fears. Okay.


Personally, if I climbed several thousand feet up a mountain and discovered that the thing waiting for me looked like Pazuzu from The Exorcist, I would assume my fears had made several excellent points and immediately start heading back down.


Because this thing looks like Pazuzu. Seriously.


If the final destination of your relaxing mountain excursion looks like the demon from The Exorcist, perhaps reconsider the itinerary.


Anyway, Jax agrees to make the climb, despite her terror of heights, because she sees it as a way to honor Shiloh and maybe work through some of the baggage she still carries about her sister. Jax and Luce arrive in Thailand and hire a guide named John, played by Tom Brittney, who takes them up the mountain through increasingly dangerous terrain.


They climb metal ladders bolted into rock faces. They walk across ancient wooden planks hanging off sheer cliffs. They navigate a section appropriately called the Devil’s Elbow. Bolts are rusted, boards are loose and the entire operation looks like something that would cause an OSHA inspector to simply burst into flames. Then there is a rockslide.


The trail is destroyed, the women become stranded thousands of feet above the ground, their guide disappears, and a backpack containing their radio ends up dangling about twenty feet away in a location they cannot reach without risking a several-thousand-foot drop.


This is where Fall 2: Deadpoint works. And when it works, it REALLY works.


The movie was directed by brothers Michael and Peter Spierig, and these guys know how to make genre movies. They made the wonderfully weird zombie film Undead, the very good vampire movie Daybreakers, the Ethan Hawke science-fiction thriller Predestination and the Helen Mirren horror movie Winchester. Even when their movies don’t completely work, they are solid craftsmen, and that skill is absolutely apparent here.


The scenes on the mountain are terrific.


The Spierigs give you a genuine sense of geography, which is enormously important in this kind of movie. You understand where the characters are, where they need to go and exactly how far they will fall if something goes wrong. The editing is tight, the visual effects are convincing and the camera constantly emphasizes just how much empty space is underneath these people.


There are sequences involving loose planks, dangling ropes, collapsing bridges and rusty bolts slowly pulling themselves out of the side of the mountain that are genuinely nerve-racking.


You know somebody is going to slip. You know something is going to break. You know the board they just stepped onto is probably going to fall apart. It doesn’t matter. You still tense up.


There is one extended bridge sequence that reminded me very much of the opening of Cliffhanger, and that is obviously not a bad comparison for a movie like this. The Spierigs understand how to milk every wobbling board and every horrifying downward camera angle for maximum effect.


The problem is everything the screenplay keeps adding around that.


There are endless flashbacks involving Jax and Shiloh, including memories of jumping from an airplane together and Jax feeling overshadowed by her adventurous sister. We repeatedly get reminders that Jax never felt respected, that she was always frightened, that Shiloh was the fearless one and that now Jax has to confront those fears herself.


We get it. The movie doesn’t trust us to get it, so it keeps explaining it.


Then there are secrets involving Luce that complicate the relationship between the women, and the drug-smuggling subplot from the opening keeps wandering back into the story.


Eventually, during the last portion of the movie, the criminal element becomes directly involved in what is happening on the mountain, and some of the twists involving John are simply ridiculous.


None of this is necessary.


The original Fall worked because it understood that being trapped thousands of feet in the air is enough of a problem. You don’t need drug traffickers. Gravity is already the villain.


Fortunately, Harriet Slater is terrific, and she saves a lot of this material.


Slater, who has appeared in Tarot and Outlander, gives Jax enough vulnerability early on that when the character finally has to take control of the situation, the transformation actually works.


During the last half hour, when Luce is injured and Jax has to stop being the frightened passenger and become the person who saves everybody, Slater really comes alive.


She is physically convincing, emotionally committed and extremely likable. You believe that she is terrified while also understanding that she has reached the point where fear no longer matters because she has somebody else to save.


That gives the later action sequences something the screenplay frequently lacks: emotion.

Jax has to climb, swing from cables, cross unstable structures and make decisions that would send me directly into unconsciousness. Because Slater sells the fear so well, you root for her when she finally forces herself forward.


That is why I can mildly recommend Fall 2: Deadpoint despite all the nonsense surrounding it.


This is not an original movie. We have seen versions of this in Cliffhanger, Vertical Limit, A Lonely Place to Die, The Ledge and plenty of other mountain-climbing thrillers. The obstacles are familiar. The character arc is familiar. The revelations are familiar.


Even some of the situations are predictable enough that when somebody steps onto a questionable-looking board, you basically start saying goodbye to the board. But the craftsmanship matters.


The Spierig brothers know how to build suspense, and when the movie stays focused on people hanging thousands of feet above the ground with very limited options, it is extremely effective.


The movie creates that awful pit in your stomach that a good heights thriller should create, and there were several scenes where I was absolutely reacting physically to what was happening.


So yes, the drug-smuggling subplot is stupid. The secrets surrounding Luce are unnecessary. The flashbacks are clichéd. Some of the final twists are ridiculous, and the movie keeps trying to complicate a premise that desperately wants to remain simple.


But the mountain sequences work, Harriet Slater is excellent, and Peter and Michael Spierig know how to put a camera in exactly the right place to make somebody like me want to crawl under the seat.


That’s enough.


Fall 2: Deadpoint is nowhere near as good as the original Fall, but it is a well-crafted, occasionally very suspenseful piece of silliness with a terrific lead performance. I’m giving it a mild recommendation.


And if somebody tells you that the reward for climbing 4,000 feet up the side of a mountain is meeting a giant stone creature that looks exactly like Pazuzu from The Exorcist, stay at the hotel. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️




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