Tag: 2026

Infiltrate

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★★★
“Canadian bakin’.”

Thanks to Chris for finding this one. Albeit through a clip on a Chinese site under the name “Rescue From the Abyss”. This led to a significant diversion into movies about submarines, before eventually finding the correct, entirely submarine-free movie. No question, this is the hardest hitting film I’ve seen so far in 2026, though once you get past the action, things get more wobbly. Lily Chen (Ladouceur-Nguyen) is an operative for a shadowy government law enforcement group. She just learned about a potential promotion, though husband Jonathan is less enthusiastic and storms out. Before further discussion can occur, she gets a phone-call. The voice (Goad) informs her Jonathan is his hostage, and Lily needs to do exactly what he says.

His subsequent orders involve working her way through the criminal organization belonging to Marcel LaFleur (Moussi). Matters are complicated, as the voice eventually reveals that not everyone in Lily’s organization is as honest as she is. Can she trust even her boss, Director Bass (Berry)? There’s also backstory about a traumatic event in our heroine’s past, though this is largely irrelevant and can safely be ignored. Indeed, I’d say that overall, the scripting is the weakest link. The eventual explanation, while I can’t discuss it in detail due to spoilers, left me with a lot of questions. The supporting cast are a mixed bag too. LaFleur’s mismatched hair and beard colours irritated the hell out of me for some reason, as did his unexplained facial scars. 

But when he’s not doing pretentious things like painting in blood or debating Shakespeare… It takes a while to get to the expected Lily vs. Marcel battle. However, it is worth the wait, and is thoroughly convincing, despite the significant size disparity. It’s long, gruelling and brutal. I did have to laugh at the obvious stunt table, which stands out in LaFleur’s apartment like a sore thumb. The best fight might actually be earlier, when Lily has to take on a particularly psychosexual pair of henchmen. Though the opening scene sets bar for savagery quite high as well. Mark’s background in stunts is apparent, though I think I preferred his earlier feature, Control. While its script was imperfect, the flaws were less apparent. 

This Canadian production must be out of Quebec, given the significant sprinkling of French here. But, in another in the series of micro-aggressions the film commits, the font used for the subtitles is hard to read. I don’t recall the last time a film got the core element – here, the action – so right, yet appeared entirely dedicated to screwing things up around the edges. I could go on. The whiny nature of Jonathan, who doesn’t appear to realize it is no longer the Victorian era. Occasional forays by the director into shaky-cam. Despite that, there were still enough positives to keep me interested, and I look forward to seeing what both Mark and Ladouceur-Nguyen are able to deliver down the road. 

Dir: James Mark
Star: Orphée Ladouceur-Nguyen, Alain Moussi, Lisa Berry, Jonathan Goad

Pretty Lethal

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★★★
“Nutcrackers Sweet”

To be fair, this was actually announced back in February 2023. Though that was still after Ballerina had wrapped its original shoot. At the time, the title was Ballerina Overdrive, with the cast including Lena Headey, in the role subsequently played by Thurman. Now, it comes out feeling more than a bit as if it is trailing in the wake of Ballerina. Coming out on Amazon Prime rather than theatrically doesn’t help its prestige. While nobody is going to call this great, and it’ll be forgotten as quickly as most other streaming originals, it does at least deliver on the premise. These are actual ass-kicking ballerinas, and their artistic talents are an intrinsic component of their fighting styles.

A Los Angeles ballet troupe of five young dancers, including the working-class Zoe (Apatow) and her appropriately named nemesis, Princess (Condor), are on their way to Budapest for a performance. The bus from the airport breaks down, and they end up in the Teremok Inn, an establishment run by Devora Kasimer (Thurman). When the troupe’s instructor finds out Devora is not exactly just a boutique hotelier, and then spurns the advances of local mobster Pasha Marcovic (Sipos), it does not go well for her. The ballerinas are suddenly witnesses, and therefore very much surplus to requirements. That’s the plot, more or less. Oh, there are slight wrinkles. Devora turns out to be a former ballerina herself. But it’s mostly run, hide and fight.

This is all adequately entertaining nonsense. Disbelief obviously needs to be suspended as you watch 90-pound girls beat up men twice their size. At least there is some effort put in to making them, in the main, use their agility and flexibility, rather brute force. There’s some cool stuff with razor blades, embedded into ballet slippers or taped to fingertips, which works well. Though the sequence I enjoyed most was the one where they went full corps de ballet on Pasha’s men. It’s impossible to take seriously, yet is done with so much inventive energy I was left with a big, goofy grin on my face. Shame there wasn’t more. It’s certainly lighter in tone – and likely more entertaining – than director Jewson’s previous GWG entry, Close, with Noomi Rapace.

I actually grew to like the characters more over the course of proceedings. Admittedly, this is because my initial reaction was… not good. Obvious trope followed obvious trope. But by the end, I had even warmed to the obnoxious Princess. She gets a great moment, confronting one of the henchmen, and going on a rant which begins by complaining about the wifi, drifts through reality TV, and ends up in a sad psychic story. Finally, an amusing anecdote. While we were watching this, Chris pipes up, “You know who’d be good as Devora if they remade this? Uma Thurman.” While I certainly couldn’t argue with her there, I did have to break the news, gently, that it already was Uma Thurman.

Dir: Vicky Jewson
Star: Iris Apatow, Lana Condor, Uma Thurman, Tamás Szabó Sipos

The Bluff

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★★★
“Back from Davy Jones’s locker.”

Are women pirates in vogue again? It’s safe to say that the startling failure of Cutthroat Island holed that subgenre of action heroine movies below the water. That was over thirty years ago now, and this may well be the first time Hollywood has returned to it since. [I found an indie film about Irish pirate Grainne Uaile which wrapped shooting in February 2014, and still hasn’t received a release] Though even here, there isn’t much high seas action here. Outside of the opening scene, where Captain Connor (Urban) boards a ship run by Captain Bodden (Córdova) and finds gold stamped with Connor’s hallmark, this takes place almost entirely on land, specifically the island of Cayman Brac.

Connor heads there, that being where Bodden’s ship came from, in search of the rest of the gold. This was taken from him years previously by then piratical associate Bloody Mary (Chopra Jonas) , who stabbed Connor in the chest and left him for dead. She is now Mrs. Ercell Bodden, having abandoned the nautical life, and started a family. The arrival of her ex-lover upends her domestic bliss, and forces her back into the violent way of life. It’s all kinda like The Long Kiss Goodnight, without the amnesia thing. She has to protect her crippled son Isaac and rather flighty sister-in-law Lizzie (Oakley-Green), while figuring out how to rescue her husband from Connor’s clutches.

The two leads are probably the best things about thus. Chopra Jonas has been ramping up her action chops since her co-starring role in Citadel – also an Amazon product – and does a good job throughout. Urban makes for a great villain, despite being solidly into his mid-fifties. He still commands a fine screen presence, almost thirty years after playing Julius Caesar on Xena. However, the other elements aren’t quite as impressive – or, at least, not consistently so. Flowers doesn’t have a lot of directorial experience, especially in the action genre, and sometimes that shows. There are some good sequences, such as where Ercell fends off buccaneers in her own home. But others, such as a battle in a cave complex, come over as dark and muddled.

The same lack of consistency hampers the rest of the film. For every cool moment – such as the discovery that there are caimans on Cayman Brac – there are elements that don’t work, like Ercell’s relationship with Lizzie. Another issue is that since the days of Cutthroat Island, the genre has been redefined by the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Any pirate movie will inevitably be compared to it, and any hero(ine) to Jack Sparrow. It’s an awkward situation, and it feels as if The Bluff is torn between pandering to this, and being its own thing. Whatever Cutthroat‘s issues – and they were numerous – that wasn’t one. But if this can prove the viability of female pirates again, it’ll have been worth the effort. 

Dir: Frank E. Flowers
Star: Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Karl Urban, Safia Oakley-Green, Ismael Cruz Córdova