David Ayer

Although many commentators will no doubt immediately compare the new WW II epic "Fury" to Quentin Tarantino's brilliant "Inglourious Basterds," largely because both films star Brad Pitt as a heavily-scarred, drawling Army man leading his men in a quest to kill as many Nazis as possible, it is actually closer in tone to a straightforward and un-ironic guys-on-a-mission tale along the lines of " The Dirty Dozen " or "Where Eagles Dare," with a heavy dollop of gruesome bloodletting depicting the true horrors of armed conflict that have been de rigueur for the war movie genre in the wake of " Saving Private Ryan ."

In the most obvious ways, “Fury” reaches back to the rousing, band-of-brothers tradition of ‘60s and ‘70s war movies like “The Big Red One” or “The Dirty Dozen,” but it also reflects, more than a little, the post-Vietnam shadow that fell across later films like “Platoon” and “Full Metal Jacket.”

Based on a DC comic from 1959, this “Suicide Squad” is in effect a superhero remake of the great Robert Aldrich classic 1967 World War II film “The Dirty Dozen.”

It’s also, intentionally I think, a nod to Samuel Fuller’s war-movie milestone The Big Red One, which similarly placed an anachronistic equine amidst the red-misted fog of war.

Much of Fury hangs on Pitt, and he carries the load dutifully, though Wardaddy’s dicy blend of blood-lusting avenger and reflective soul never fully marry, which is true of much of Ayer’s vision; it never quite registers the true organic essence of men in war the way “alternative” WW II gems like The Big Red One and Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron do.

(This movie also looks like it smells really bad.) Adopting the rambling, anecdotal structure of Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One, Fury works best when it’s a shapeless chronicle of surreal, day-to-day horrors.

…a John Wick, but ordered from Wish…

Much like the storybook mayhem of the first John Wick, A Working Man isn’t afraid to make its spectacles of slaughter visually enchanting.

…another round of Statham escapism in the vein of John Wick and Nobody?

Marvel is doing its best to alter its cinematic course by continuing its own "Suicide Squad"-esque entry with "Thunderbolts*."

There have already been comparisons to the Suicide Squad movies (including one in-movie quote)…

In other words, Marvel’s version of DC Comics’ “Suicide Squad.”

In fact, the premise recalls the superior Lebanon (2009), which took place entirely inside the claustrophobic confines of a tank.

There was more clammy tension in two minutes of Lebanon, the gripping 2009 film set entirely inside an Israeli tank, than there is in the whole of Fury.

Fury doesn’t come close to the achievement of those edifying cinematic ordeals, let alone to Samuel Maoz’s harrowing Israeli film Lebanon , which summoned a claustrophobic psychopathy by setting virtually all its action inside an Israeli tank.

Patterned after Agatha Christie's classic "And Then There Were None," Sabotage follows an elite DEA special ops team led by Arnold who start getting picked off one by one after their $10 million in stolen drug cartel money goes missing.

(Or, to be more accurate, it originated as Ten Little Niggers, the 1939 Agatha Christie whodunit whose title was quickly changed to And Then There Were None.)

Once it gets into And Then There Were None territory, the movie stalls.

But once the film continues past its first day and expands into a more tempered gangster epic akin to The Godfather, it begins to lose some of its luster as it proceeds to move both too fast and too slow.

Trying to channel his inner Francis Ford Coppola, circa ‘70s-era The Godfather (he can’t because he doesn’t have the talent, self-awareness, or insight), Ayer basically tries to turn David into a Michael Corleone stand-in, conflicted by the choices he’s made and even more conflicted when choices force him to make one compromise after another, eroding whatever soul he has left when we first meet him in The Tax Collector’s early scenes.

It’s an interesting idea, and it certainly has some real-life precedent; Serpico (which is referenced during some dialog in this movie) is just one example.

Whatever the case, Aquaman falls into an uncomfortable try-hard dead zone that leaves it in better shape than, say, Batman v. Superman or Suicide Squad , but just shy of the gleefully anarchic predecessors whose ranks it could have joined, like Jupiter Ascending or Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets .

Sure, the critically panned but financially successful Suicide Squad was part of this interconnection, but it wasn’t until the almost universally admired Wonder Woman film in 2017 that people began to think that maybe DC had it figured out.

Dutch (Chidi Ajufo), who sits on an ersatz Game of Thrones chair made out of motorcycle muffler pipes…