“Disney’s so stupid,” Deadpool declares trollishly at the beginning of “Deadpool & Wolverine.” It’s the sort of jab — in this case, at the studio distributing the film we’re watching — that we’ve grown used to from this dude, a potty-mouthed exterminator in a face-obscuring suit vaguely reminiscent of Spider-Man. Not quite a hero, not quite anything else, Deadpool is an answer to the conflicted but upstanding superheroes of 21st-century Hollywood. He kills messily, he makes a lot of inappropriate jokes and, in an industry that practically decrees a profit-boosting PG-13 rating, his movies are always rated R.
Despite first appearing in Marvel comics, Deadpool (played by Ryan Reynolds), a.k.a. Wade Wilson, also used to stand slightly outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But in the six years since his last big-screen appearance in “Deadpool 2,” the Merc with the Mouth has been shoehorned into the M.C.U., along with the X-Men, for reasons involving Disney’s 2019 acquisition of 20th Century Fox. (Which was promptly renamed 20th Century Studios, and you can be sure Deadpool will joke about that too.)
Deadpool explains all this very quickly at the beginning of “Deadpool & Wolverine,” just to catch us up. He has a lot of expositional ground to cover, since he also has to clarify how this movie will avoid desecrating the memory of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), a.k.a. Logan, who was laid to rest in the excellent eponymous swan song from 2017. “We’re not,” Deadpool announces. Deal with it.
The first two Deadpool movies set out to skewer the conventions of superhero cinema, with “Deadpool” (2016) scrapping conventional opening credits for alternate text jabbing at tropes: “A British Villain,” “A Hot Chick,” “A Moody Teen,” “A C.G.I. Character” and also some words we can’t print here. Deadpool broke the fourth wall constantly, remarking to the audience about what was happening or about to happen, as well as the paltry budget of the film and the silliness of him, a minor and ridiculous character, being in a movie at all.
Based on the best-selling videogame, this all-star action-adventure follows a ragtag team of misfits on a mission to save a missing girl who holds the key to unimaginable power.
The film operates like Borderlands 101, focusing on Cate Blanchett's grumbly bounty hunter Lilith. Roth and co-writer Joe Crombie – replacing original co-writer Craig Mazin, whose name mysteriously vanished from the project in 2023 – interpret Gearbox's interplanetary world-building in disappointingly linear fashion. All the excitement of traversing Pandora's Skag-ridden territories and Psycho outposts is jettisoned, as Roth boxes his characters into a single mission: Lilith is hired by business titan and arms manufacturer Atlas (Edgar Ramírez) to find his daughter on Pandora – and that daughter ends up being the dainty demolitionist "Tiny" Tina (Ariana Greenblatt). But, in true Borderlands fashion, Lilith's objective isn't just about rescuing Tina from former mercenary Roland (Kevin Hart) and Psycho Krieg (Florian Munteanu). There's also an ancient Eridian vault, and Tina might be one of three required keys to opening it.
Roth’s movie blends together plot points that span the Borderlands timeline, but the experience is regrettably simplistic. It's only a matter of time before Lilith, Tina, Roland, Krieg, and everyone's favorite mouthy robot, Claptrap (Jack Black), form a vault-hunting squad. Between the adversarial Crimson Lance soldiers led by Commander Knoxx (Janina Gavankar) and massive Threshers that could swallow a hunter whole, their mission seems daunting. But any challenge they face breezes by with deflated stakes. Lilith lucks into a crucial artifact by opening a single drawer, while Roland avoids what should be certain Psycho-inflicted death off camera, neutering any sense of peril. It's like watching gameplay on God Mode with infinite lives, except these characters don't even take damage – so what's the point?
The internet is full of Borderlands fan fiction that’s more inspired than Roth's vanilla nostalgia fest. He directs action sequences like he’s posing action figures, instructing Blanchett to posture, hips-cocked, as if Lilith were Dystopian Marauder Barbie. The characters’ costumes are always pristine despite enduring battlefield wear and tear, explained away by a silly "electric shower" gadget that eliminates stains. The question "Wouldn't it be cool if?" seems to be the most thought anyone put into Borderlands, and the answer is frequently "No." Roth's production doesn’t genuinely invest in the universe Gearbox has built, so why should we care about this emaciated excuse for a sci-fi adventure? Sure you’ll ride Marcus’ (Benjamin Byron Davis) bus, spot Dahl ECHO HUDs, and gander at Pandoran locales like the acidic Caustic Caverns. But it’s all spoonfed, familiar, and as filling as a single rice cake.
Visually, Borderlands is one of the ugliest studio releases you'll see this year. Even in IMAX, Pandora's dusty digital backdrops resemble pixelated vomit. There's an early scene where bunny-eared Tina tosses explosive stuffed animals at Lilith from above, and the green-screening of Greenblatt atop her junkyard perch doesn't even attempt to believably plug Tina into place. Later, when Atlas confronts our unlikely heroes, it's like Roth shot them against an LED wall showing a low-res YouTube feed. The games’ cel-shaded, pleasingly pop-arty aesthetic is one of their most attractive features, so why would you drown the movie’s opening sequence in dimly lit murk? At least the wardrobe department nailed the ensembles’ outfits, which burst with signature colors – but even those look like trash against the washed-out, eyesore landscapes inserted during post-production.
Outside of Greenblatt – playing an explosives addict clearly modeled after Harley Quinn – no one on screen appears to be enjoying themselves. Especially Blanchett: She's the correct choice for Lilith, but plays the gunslinging mercenary with eye-rolling ambivalence that translates into a dry, disinterested performance. Kevin Hart plays Kevin Hart in a beret, portions of Florian Munteanu's nonsense dialogue are inaudible, and Roth can't even coax a consistently funny Claptrap out of Jack Black. Gina Gershon's Mad Moxxi lacks seductive burlesque charm, while Jamie Lee Curtis' neurotic Dr. Patricia Tannis exists merely to rattle off exposition. The complaint here isn’t one of Hollywood stars failing to properly emulate their in-game counterparts – it’s more that Roth wastes their talents, treating a cast of heavy hitters like personality-free eye candy for the fandom.
In all honesty, Borderlands feels incomplete. Roth's storytelling rushes forward with a conspicuous briskness, as if crucial building blocks were missing from the plot. (Maybe those two weeks of reshoots under fill-in director Tim Miller shaved Roth's vision down to what we see here?) Why else would Krom (Olivier Richters) deserve a portrait in the end credits when he's barely a last-minute cameo in the movie? Something's not adding up. Gearbox's games are dense, expansive, and brimming with the freedom to get buck wild, whereas Roth's interpretation is like a preschooler's Guardians of the Galaxy coloring book. Verdict
Borderlands is an abysmal waste of a beloved franchise that takes a kooky band of murderous misfits and drains the life out of their first adventure together. Eli Roth is no James Gunn, and this film has none of the lovable lunatics, awe-striking sci-fi visuals, and out-of-this-world storytelling of Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy. The hyper-stylized flair of the Borderlands games is replicated only on the most superficial level, and with a PG-13 rating, all the limb-severing gore, dirty-minded humor, and uniquely deranged themes are replaced by recycled blandness geared toward mass marketability. It's the worst-case-scenario Borderlands movie that goes against everything Borderlands stands for as a series – a miserable failure.
Rex, a Florida party girl, turns out to be the only hope for the NASA space program after a fluke puts her in training with other candidates who may have better resumés, but don't have her smarts, heart, and moxie.
There’s a well-tested, and mostly well-liked, formula being recycled in Amazon’s lightweight Fourth of July comedy Space Cadet. It’s the mildly rousing story of an underestimated blonde excelling in a more serious field, something Goldie Hawn aced in Private Benjamin and Protocol before Melanie Griffith took over with Working Girl and Born Yesterday, followed by Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde (the less said about Jessica Simpson’s two under-the-radar attempts, the better). It’s an easy, against-all-odds rise for us to get behind and a career-defining every-scene showcase for an actor who may have also found herself unfairly undervalued by the industry.
The Imaginary review – charming anime about made-up best friends from former Ghibli protege
There’s something for both actor and character to prove, and when it’s done right, we should be able to taste the same hunger, cheering for an inevitable victory. But in the writer-director Liz W Garcia’s blandly cobbled together attempt, one will have trouble tasting much of anything. It’s another cheap and poorly made category-filler, the kind that makes you want to reconsider how many streaming subscriptions you’re paying for, a grim, plasticky reminder of what so many films look and feel like now.
The Netflix-led rise of romantic and female-led comedies has been a superficial win, given how they’d been largely absent from the big screen in recent years, a large audience barely catered to. But too many of them have been made without much care, lazily thrown together unlike the glossier films that they’re modeled on. Space Cadet is as garishly lit and shoddily green-screened as the worst of them, which is distractingly bad enough in itself but something that could perhaps be tempered by other elements. The current Netflix hit A Family Affair, with Nicole Kidman romancing Zac Efron, looks far uglier than it should, but there’s enough charm from the performers and the script to make it just about work. Here the visuals are as rough as everything else, saving graces nowhere to be found.
The star Emma Roberts has been somewhere similar before, in 2007’s Wild Child, in which an English boarding school tamed her Californian excess. Here the journey to self-discovery takes her, as the improbably nicknamed Rex, from Florida, where she has turned bartending into a lifestyle, drinking and partying hard with her best friend, Nadine (Hacks’ Poppy Liu), to Nasa, where she hopes to live out her dream of going to space. Rex had been accepted to Georgia Tech years ago but dropped out when her mother got sick. After Nadine spruces up her application to become an astronaut with some embellishments, she finds herself in her element but out of her depth.
The film exists in the kind of frothy far-away fantasy land where audience questions are not only discouraged but ridiculed. It’s not supposed to be taken seriously, defenders would say – fine – but even in such heightened territory, there has to be some sense of structure and Garcia’s script just isn’t smart or slick enough to have us suspend disbelief entirely. No one would check to see if she had really won a Pulitzer? References would be obtained long after she was hired? A one-time Georgia Tech applicant would attend her first day in skimpy party gear? The problem is that Rex’s ascent is not only absurd but crucially uninvolving - we simply don’t care if she makes it to space or not – and Roberts, comfortable and competent in this territory if not entirely convincing, is unable to lift her character out of network sitcom cliche.
The uplift of a woman triumphing in a male-dominated Stem world isn’t enough to get us through a mess of grindingly unfunny dialogue, too-broad performances and an utter, movie-killing lack of charm. Films like Space Cadet should feel graceful and light, going down easy like the many sweet cocktails we see Rex prepare, but this one is hopelessly muddled, a bitter first sip that proceeds to curdle.
A spin-off of a Chinese variety show of the same name, it involves a number of characters getting involved in a series of misadventures during a visit to Macau.
Directo: Li Jiqiang
Stars: Lun AiRowan AtkinsonPierre Bourdaud
Top Funny Comedian: The Movie Infidelity, infertility, inclusivity- when was the last time that a film, err, a comedy film handled all these themes well? It’s always a tricky territory when making a comedy film. The easiest route to evoke laughs has forever been vulgar, double entendre jokes. And body shaming, which certain television shows believe to be the holy grail of appearing to be hilarious. Also read: Khel Khel Mein screening leaves fans roaring with laughter; early reviews call Akshay Kumar-starrer a ‘blockbuster’So I had my set of apprehensions when I went in for Khel Khel Mein, led by Akshay Kumar, who has done it all in his career. Just earlier this year, he hit it out of the park with an intense acting performance in Sarfira, a biopic which brought out a version of Kumar we haven’t seen before.I was fully expecting him to belt out his physical comedy routine which we have seen him do in umpteen films before. But Khel Khel Mein isn’t that, and I heaved a big sigh of relief as the end credits rolled.
Events span a single night, with seven friends partying as they attend a wedding. It’s desi adaptation of the 2016 Italian film Perfetti Sconosciut, but you know what? It doesn’t really matter, because the story is a breeze. Remakes have forever held a bad rep for killing originality. Why can’t we just judge a film for what it is?
Rishabh, played by Akshay Kumar, is a plastic surgeon trying to save his second marriage with Vartika (played by Vaani Kapoor), an author looking for a plot point for her next book. Their friends Samar (Aditya Seal), his wife, the rich Naina (Pragya Jaiswal), Harpreet and Harpreet (Ammy Virk and Taapsee Pannu) and Kabir (Fardeen Khan) all agree to let their phones be public properties for that one night, come what may. It’s a delicious plot, and I was relieved when the film begins with Rishabh throwing the conventional comedy tropes out of the window. He’s smooth, charming, or as Taapsee’s friend puts it on a call ‘George Clooney’.
While we- as always- won’t give away spoilers, here’s a shoutout to director and writer Mudassar Aziz for keeping the proceedings very light, and yet, exploring themes actually quite maturely.