Terminator Salvation, like the war in which its characters are caught, had many ways to go wrong. It is the fourth iteration of the action franchise, by itself a bad omen (see Jaws IV: The Revenge, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Live Free or Die Hard et al).

The 1984 original, The Terminator, and its 1991 sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, both became instant classics, not least because of their innovative director, James Cameron (who would later helm Titanic). Sequels to sequels cannot budget for innovation, however, so cheaper talent gets subbed in (e.g., Joe Johnston for Steven Spielberg in Jurassic Park III). McG, a man best known for obnoxious music videos and noxious Charlie’s Angels movies, directs Terminator Salvation.

Better men than McG have been crushed under the canonical weight of their franchises, done in by expectations or a desire to leave their mark. Joel Schumacher killed Batman & Robin after taking over from edgy A-lister Tim Burton (Batman, Batman Returns); Sylvester Stallone self-destructed Rocky IV. And the recently cancelled TV spinoff The Sarah Connor Chronicles exposes Warner Bros. as a negligent caretaker (unlike Sarah Connor herself).

The series also leaned heavily on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s beefcake bad-guy (Terminator), turned good-guy (Judgment Day), turned both (Rise of the Machines). Now that the Austrian is too old to play an ageless robot (or, as an American politician, has become one), Christian Bale provides the testosterone as resistance leader John Connor. This makes Bale the face of two concurrent blockbuster series, Terminator and Batman, as well as Michael Mann’s upcoming gangster flick Public Enemies, risking overexposure.

But Terminator Salvation doesn’t go wrong—it shows respect towards its predecessors without being sycophantic, it rejuvenates the series for a generation that considers the muscled Arnold a punchline, and it’s a good story to boot.

John Connor has become that which the earlier films tried to prevent: de facto leader of a de facto resistance (because most of humanity has been killed). The genocidal enemy is Skynet (a kind of evil, self-aware Internet), whose unstoppable land, air and sea machines are mopping up the last bands of survivors.

In the first film, a member of the resistance, Kyle Reese, is sent back in time (to 1984) to protect Sarah Connor, future mother of John. They fall in love and Kyle unwittingly becomes John’s father. In Salvation’s 2018, the adult John must now find and protect a teenaged Kyle, yet to be sent back in time, and who doesn’t know that John, his idol, is his son.

The subverted father-son dynamic forms the core of the film—as they both search for each other—around which many digital action sequences are built. Those sequences, and the film’s overall aesthetic, are heavily influenced by Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 dystopia Children of Men (in turn influenced by the 1960s French New Wave)—extended single-shot takes and a desaturation process called bleach bypass lend the footage a cinéma vérité feel (although the effect is tempered by all the killer robots).

So McG redeems himself. Christian Bale, juggling franchises, tries to become Harrison Ford. And for now, Terminator lives on.

But their future is not set.  Cue percussive bombast.

Once upon a time, in a Kingdom far, far away, across a mighty ocean, there lived a woman whom everyone called Jo.

One day, Jo was taking the train from Manchester to London when an idea—a big, glorious, billion-dollar, global franchise idea—popped into her head. It was the story of a orphaned boy wizard. Jo wrote the idea down, and when she got home, she kept writing. She wrote for the next five years, stopping only to move to Portugal, get married, and have a child. She named the girl Jessica, and the boy wizard Harry Potter.

To Jo’s surprise, children all over the world liked Harry Potter. So she wrote more books. Children even found their parents reading Harry Potter, too. Jo sold so many books, she became richer than the Queen of the Kingdom.

Far to the west, the nobles of another state heard about Harry Potter and Jo’s money. Being nobles, they wanted some of the money for themselves. So they flew Jo over and asked her if they could leverage her original properties across multiple platforms, finding synergies between their media conglomerate and transnational corporations for merchandising tie-ins, yada, yada, yada. J K Rowling said yes, and the nobles jumped with joy, giggled with greed and lived happily ever after.

The five Harry Potter movies (with three more to come) have amassed about US$5 billion, making it one of the most lucrative film franchises ever. That kind of cash inspires the sincerest form of flattery. Thus was adapted J R R Tolkien’s Middle Earth trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, which harvested another billion. And C S Lewis’s classic children’s series The Chronicles of Narnia, whose third installment is now about to begin filming. And Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. And now, Cornelia Funke’s Inkworld trilogy comes to the silver screen, starting with Inkheart.

Funke’s three fantasy novels—Inkheart, Inkspell and Inkdeath—and soon, their film counterparts, suffer from being in the right place at the wrong time. Which is to say, these perfectly enjoyable stories, originally written in German, have the bad luck to be turned into films at the tail end of a decade stuffed with adaptations of children’s fantasy literature. Inkheart, the film, while not boring, feels old before it’s begun.

Our protagonist is a young girl, Meggie (like Ofelia from Guillermo del Toro’s exquisite 2006 fantasy film Pan’s Labyrinth) who loves to read (like Ofelia and also Harry Potter) and has lost a parent (like Ofelia, Harry Potter and Frodo Baggins of The Lord of the Rings). An everyday object—a book—transports her to a fantastical new world (like Ofelia (an insect), Harry (a letter), Frodo (a ring) and the Pevensie children in The Chronicles of Narnia (a wardrobe)!). In the name of all that is tragic and magic, how many European-dwelling young bookworm orphans is too many?

The central conceit of Inkheart is the permeability of the printed page—losing yourself in a good book, in Funke’s world, can be a permanent displacement. But Inkheart’s imaginary world is not rendered imaginatively—both the CGI (computer-generated imagery) cloud that is the villainous Shadow and the wooden clunk that is Brendan Fraser feel like outtakes from The Mummy.

As Meggie’s aunt says, “I prefer a story that has the good sense to stay on the page, where it belongs.” The film’s producers should have taken that line of ink to heart.

Just as a priest feels during Carnival or a professor feels during Christmas, so a cinéphile feels during the summer—everyone else is enjoying themselves, and you’re the only one seeing the mindless rituals for what they are.

For summer is blockbuster season, when the six American majors (Sony, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Universal and Dreamworks SKG) release their tentpole pictures—the sinfully expensive, lavishly marketed mega-movies that determine the financial health of their parents. One Titanic (20th Century Fox/Paramount) or Spider-Man (Sony) or The Dark Knight (Warner Bros.) can single-handedly offset a year’s worth of box office flops.

Since a tentpole film is potential manna from heaven, the studios ram-pack it with every imaginable attraction—nudity, sexuality, violence, foul language, drugs—all the things on the rating labels, which are advertisements disguised as warnings (Don’t see this movie—it has SEX! GRAPHIC SEX!).

Of course, this sardine approach to filmmaking doesn’t exactly churn out masterpieces, so the studios spend more millions on publicity blitzes, to make sure we all see the movie at the same time, on its opening weekend, before we have a chance to tell our friends what a piece of crap it is. And we fall for it like faithful disciples, nattering excitedly about this movie or that, gushing about what we have to see and can’t afford to miss.

At its worst, this means execrable fluff like Hannah Montana: The Movie (Disney), in which a 16-year-old actress caught between childhood and Hollywood plays a 16-year-old actress caught between childhood and Hollywood, her innocence and privacy sacrificed at the altar of global commercialism. (Disney sells Montana-themed clothes, watches, bedding, luggage, shoes, makeup, spa kits, and toys. Last year Miley Cyrus, then 15, personally earned more than US$25,000,000. Yes, that’s the right number of zeroes.)

At its best, however, we get Angels & Demons (Sony), a thriller that lives up to its name and its ampersand, with compelling (though not complicated) dualities between science and theology, logic and faith, modernity and antiquity. And, yes, good and evil, though as the film reminds us in its crash course through Catholic history, deciding which is which is usually in the eye of the beheader.

Angels & Demons is the follow-up to The Da Vinci Code (2006), also directed by Ron Howard, adapted by Akiva Goldsman, scored by Hans Zimmer, and starring Tom Hanks. Both properties were originally novels by Dan Brown, who wrote Angels & Demons first, making it both a sequel and a prequel, depending on the medium. Because everyone, including the Pope, read The Da Vinci Code, Brown now rubs shoulders with Stephen King, John Grisham and the other rich, chosen few to escape the bargain bins at Barnes & Noble.

The Holy Grail for every popular fiction writer is to create a serialized character that captures the attention of the lonely secretary and the airport traveler—Jonathan Kellerman unravels stories of child psychologist Alex Delaware; Sue Grafton unfolds Kinsey Millhone alphabet mysteries; Elizabeth George investigates Inspector Lynley. These uniformly smart, capable protagonists are a dime a dozen, which is why you’ve either never heard of them, or have them stacked beside your bed.

Paperbacks and motion pictures peddle the same diversions, so Dan Brown and Sony was a match made in, well, heaven. Angels & Demons, the film, once again follows Robert Langdon (Hanks), a Harvard professor of religious iconography, as he trips along a chain-reaction of Catholic clues embedded in action sequences.

The action academic has its origin in 1930s characters such as bronzed Amazonian scientist Doc Savage, and has its archetype in Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones, archaeologist and adventurer, whose movies were set in the 1930s. Robert Langdon has neither whip nor hat, only his wits and a decent haircut. At the behest of the Vatican, he is trying to locate both a small explosive that will obliterate the Holy See, and four missing Cardinals, the front-runners to become the next Pope.

What could have been a God-awful mess is intelligently paced by director Howard (A Beautiful Mind) and comfortably inhabited by Hanks. The required kinetics are motivated by Langdon’s urgent search. In one breathtaking sequence, he must escape, before he suffocates, from an electronically-operated, oxygen-regulated, bulletproof, air-tight chamber that has lost power—the Vatican Archives, home to sacred scientific texts like Galileo’s writings.

Take it from a blaspheming cinéphile—Angels & Demons is good, not evil. Just leave the reverence at the door.

Let’s start with the obvious and the obligatory: Star Trek, the new American movie, not to be confused with the 1966 television series Star Trek, or the four series it spawned, or the 1979 movie Star Trek, or any of its nine sequels, meekly goes where every blockbuster picture has gone before, and must go, and will continue to go.

Which means, in no particular order: young, attractive Caucasian lead actors (because it must sell in West Virginia); one token Black American supporting actor (because it must sell in West Harlem); loud noises, explosions and special effects (because it must sell to young men); unnecessary female nudity (ditto); fight scenes, sex scenes, chase scenes (ditto, ditto, ditto); catchphrases (because it must feel familiar); fancy camerawork and editing (because it must feel new); a foreign-sounding enemy (because Americans like to collect them); and the promise of a sequel (because Mercedes don’t buy themselves).

This blow-stuff-up, blow-up doll, shrink-wrapped form of entertainment short-circuits our synapses, and after a while we get used to the idea that we’re not supposed to think when we’re at the movies. This works very well for the major movie studios, run disproportionately by healthy, wealthy men from Los Angeles who understand, even though they’d never touch the stuff themselves, that ice cream will always sell because it feels good while you’re eating it. Never mind that it’s bad for us; we’ll eat it, anyway.

Hollywood makes the filmic equivalent of triple chocolate sundaes with sprinkles and syrup and two cherries on top—movies that are really, really bad for us, but feel so good while we’re watching that we keep coming back. As with ice cream, the damage is done a little bit at a time, so we can always justify one more indulgence.

Here’s the plot summary for Star Trek, if you need to know. James Kirk, from Iowa (ticket sales!), is a rebel whose father martyred himself in a battle (check!) against an evil race (double check!), the Romulans. (The bad guys in the original series, circa America’s Korean and Vietnamese invasions, looked Oriental; in this movie, unsurprisingly, they look vaguely Arabic.)  James gets talked into joining the Starfleet, where he flirts with a girl named Uhura, befriends a man named Leonard McCoy and outwits an alien named Spock. Either those names mean something to you, and you’ll get excited watching them spout ridiculous dialogue, or they don’t, and you won’t. And, yeah, James eventually fights the Romulans.

May now marks the beginning of the summer blockbuster season, which has crept earlier and earlier as studios fight to be first. Last week’s megamovie was Wolverine, or X-Men 4; this week is Star Trek 11, new and improvised; still to come are Transformers 2, Ice Age 3, Terminator 4, and Harry Potter 6. Oodles of ice cream.

It’s worth noting that there are filmmakers, with one foot inside and one foot outside the Hollywood dream factory, who try to make the audience engage their material and think about stuff. People like Quentin Tarantino (whose World War II flick, Inglourious Basterds [sic], opens in August), Woody Allen (Whatever Works, in June), Steven Soderbergh (The Informant, with Matt Damon, October), and Sam Mendes (Revolutionary Road, hopefully coming soon).

Go see their movies, and skip all the star-filled dreck.

‘The greatest thing you’ll ever learn/Is just to love and be loved in return.’  Those are the last lyrics of ‘Nature Boy’, a timeless song about human nature, made famous sixty years ago by the equally timeless Nat King Cole.  So simple to say—or for Nat, to sing—yet so difficult to do.  Forget government bonds and collateralized debt obligations—the largest investment you can make in life is to love someone.  And as the world’s stockbrokers now know all too well, without trust, your investment isn’t worth very much.

Trust is what makes relationships work, and doubt and suspicion are what kills them.  Writer/director Tony Gilroy knows this, as does anyone who’s ever loved and lost.  In his new movie, Duplicity, he takes the issue of trust to its logical extreme, turning his lovebirds into actual spies, engaged in real subterfuge, guessing and second-guessing, crossing and double-crossing, too scared to commit until they know the other person won’t hurt them.

This is the man who penned three Jason Bourne film adaptations and pulled double duty on the sly thriller Michael Clayton, which means: a) he knows a thing or two about movie spies; b) he likes writing for Hollywood’s leading men; and c) expect complications.  Duplicity gives us not Matt Damon, not George Clooney, but Clive Owen as star hunk, and Julia Roberts for him to chase.  Owen is Ray Koval, formerly of British intelligence, and Roberts is Claire Stenwick, formerly of American intelligence.  If the set-up and the names sound like something out of a Raymond Chandler novel, it’s because Gilroy is head-over-heels in love with the pictures Hollywood used to make sixty years ago (back when Nat was king).

Chandler’s most famous character, hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe, was played most famously by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946).  Bogart owns the screen, slouching around in tailored suits and cigarette smoke, and the camera lingers on his face as much as on his very young, soon-to-be very famous costar, Lauren Bacall.  Like Duplicity, the dialogue is honed and shorn to fine-edged perfection; the characters fall in love by trading barbs.

Duplicity is set in New York (along with Dubai, London, Miami and Rome), the world capital for the world’s capital, which is why our spies are there—they are working for warring conglomerates.  The second time we see Clive Owen, he is striding down a Manhattan sidewalk, and he fits the city like a comfortable leather shoe.  He brings to mind that other suave, cinematic Brit who made New York his onscreen own—Cary Grant.  Both men seem made for their bespoke gray suits, instead of the other way round.  They belong to us, larger-than-life, every man’s exemplar, every woman’s dream.

Even Claire Stenwick’s name is homage to a Golden Age star, Barbara Stanwyck.  She was one of the first femmes to be fatale, in movies like Double Indemnity (1944).  Julia Roberts doesn’t duplicate Stanwyck’s cocktail of sin and seduction, but she’s still a tall drink of water.  Like Lauren Bacall, Barbara Stanwyck, Grace Kelly, or any of the enduring, luminescent American actresses, Julia Roberts is irresistible, whether wrapped in bed sheets or strutting across an Italian courtyard.

Ultimately, Duplicity is a love story enthralled by love stories, a romance written by a hopeless romantic, who longs for a time when the movie never ended, when you couldn’t tell where the character stopped and the movie star began, where you could trick yourself into believing you were really watching Clive Owen and Julia Roberts fall in love.  Duplicitous?  Definitely.  But in the end, so worth it.  Just like, well, just like Nat used to sing—‘Then I could say, “Baby, baby, I love you”/Just like those guys in moving pictures all do.’

The Haunting in Connecticut is a letdown in two ways. The first and more expected of the two is that the film, marketed squarely in the horror genre, is not horrific at all. On the contrary, like a birthday party magician, we’ve seen all its tricks before, usually in older, better movies. We’ll get to those tricks later. Second, the plainness of the movie lowers the esteem of its young director, an Aussie named Peter Cornwell.

Long ago, Cornwell worked as a sound recordist for the Australian Broadcasting Commission. In his spare time, he created claymation shorts. Claymation is a portmanteau word for an animation technique whereby clay figurines are positioned, photographed, slightly repositioned, photographed, slightly repositioned, photographed again, on and on until the filmmaker collapses from exhaustion. Projecting the images in rapid sequence (24 frames per second) creates the illusion of fluid movement. Claymation films have a distinctive look—think Chicken Run or Wallace and Gromit. If you’ve ever seen a film reel, you know all movies are nothing more than a series of quick photographs, but with stop-motion, the frame-by-frame adjustments means there’s nothing quick about it.

Cornwell spent years, yes, years painstakingly crafting his 15-minute film Ward 13, about a patient trying to escape an evil hospital. It was worth it. Ward 13 is funny, smartly written, expertly paced, riffs on and subverts cinematic conventions, smashes genres together, and holds your attention from start to exhilarating finish. In short, the short is amazing.

Flash-forward to today, after Cornwell rode his wave of success across the Pacific to Los Angeles, to his American live-action feature debut, The Haunting in Connecticut. The film is about a teenager, riddled with cancer, whose family relocates to a house close to his treatment clinic. The house was formerly a mortuary and the home of a powerful séance. It’s easy to see why Cornwell took on the project—the premise plays into his sensibilities.

Cornwell borrows his scare tactics from the classics, which worked well in Ward 13, a pseudo-horror film never meant to scare anyone, but falls dead in Haunting. The film’s ghosts are first glimpsed in mirrors—a favourite of Orson Welles. Then they are glimpsed in flashes of light—see The Exorcist (1973). Other touches include a beauty taking a shower, a flock of birds, doors slamming shut and approaching footsteps—all covered by Alfred Hitchcock, father of pop horror, in Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963), and Rear Window (1954).

But there is a third grievance, beyond the mediocrity and the director, though related to them. Ask yourself this. Where is Connecticut? Could you find it on a map? Is it a city or a state? Don’t feel too stupid. You’re not supposed to know. Why should any of us be expected to know that Connecticut is a coastline New England state below New York in northeastern America? This is the preposterous state of affairs in which we find ourselves, being force-fed useless arcana about the United States because our media diet is so narrow.

America does not make higher-quality movies than anywhere else—French, German and Italian films, for instance, are just as well-acted and well-directed. America does not make more profitable movies than anywhere else—many of its big studios are in debt. America does not even make more movies than anywhere else—that honour goes to India. Yet where are all the Brazilian, Nigerian and Indian movies? Exhibited nowhere, distributed by no one in Jamaica. We are stuck, for the time being, with The Haunting in Connecticut.

Is it fair to unload years of accumulated frustration on a single film? Is it fair to expect a movie designed to be profitable to also be profound? Is it fair to criticize a product for being itself?

In New in Town, Renée Zellweger is a high-powered Miami executive whose higher-powered corporate heads assign her to downsize a food factory in rural Minnesota. There, she has to battle snow, small-town values and Harry Connick, Jr., the local union representative. The usual misadventures follow like so many bland protein bars off the assembly line—she wears stilettos to the plant, she drives into a snowdrift, she falls in love. Personal desire and professional ambition dovetail. Transnational financial imperatives and the livelihoods of the workforce converge. City and country meld. Alan Ladd rides off into the sunset. Okay, everything except the last bit.

New in Town has all the ingredients of a romantic comedy, but director Jonas Elmer hews too strictly to the recipe printed on the box office. Is it fair to unload years of accumulated frustration on a single film? Yes. The creative talent behind the film, including writers Ken Rance and C. Jay Cox (Sweet Home Alabama), failed to get creative, to bend the formula without breaking it.

That is what all great genre films do—they redefine the genre. The old remarriage romantic comedies of the 1940s, like His Girl Friday, had mile-a-minute repartee; New in Town has a thong joke (“No, I said wear something you can get dirty.”). When Harry Met Sally (1989) had a pair of instantly likeable leads in Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan; when Harry meets Renée in New in Town, there’s no spark, just a pair of Hollywood veterans, one looking old and tired, the other unnaturally young.

And where Ms Zellweger puts her Botox on display, there’s money to be made. Is it fair to expect a movie designed to be profitable to also be profound? Yes. Michael Clayton (2007) and Little Miss Sunshine (2006) were both highly formulaic, highly successful genre films—a thriller with an easy enemy, the corporate world, and a family dramedy with a road trip. But their characters and themes, so carefully crafted, lodged in our minds, in the space reserved for unsolvable problems and uncomfortable truths. New in Town can’t bear the thought of disappointing its audience; everything works out for everybody, no matter how improbable the odds and unlikely the choice. Disappointing, no?

Enough, you say. It is what it is—expensively-produced, cheaply consumed, disposable entertainment. Is it fair to criticize a product for being itself? No. It is not fair to fault New in Town for being a romantic comedy; it is only fair to fault it for a being a schmaltzy, sloppy, slapdash one. If only the writer/director of Michael Clayton, Tony Gilroy, tried his hand at a romantic comedy, with witty repartee, and likeable leads, like Clive Owen and Julia Roberts.

It’s called Duplicity, and it arrives new in town in a few weeks.

Susan Murphy has been hit with a big problem. After surviving a radioactive meteor strike, she finds herself fifty feet tall, captured by the military, living in a metal prison with bugs for friends, and tasked with defeating a killer robot. Fortunately, she’s a big-picture kind of gal. Her real problem comes when her fiance, an ambitious TV weatherman, tells her he doesn’t want to live under her enormous shadow.

The audience is meant to side with Susan (voiced by Reese Witherspoon), but the studio behind Monsters vs Aliens probably feels great empathy for the self-involved reporter, Derek (Paul Rudd). After a decade spent making a dozen computer-animated films, Dreamworks Animation should be pretty tired of playing catch-up to the industry giant, Pixar.

Pixar is the Holy Reel—a film studio that consistently enjoys both critical and commercial success. The movie executives love the returns; the children love the characters; the critics love the sophistication. Critics are part of Dreamworks’ problem—every time they spit out a movie, we can’t resist the comparison.

But the studio invites the scrutiny by trying too hard to make Great Animated Movies that instantly enter the contemporary canon, like Pixar’s Toy Story (1995). Sometimes serendipitous timing or settings highlight their shortcomings, pitting their Antz against Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, or their forgettable Shark Tale against Pixar’s near-perfect Finding Nemo. And their most innovative film to date, 2001’s fractured fairy tale Shrek, has been spoilt by soggy sequels (with another, Shrek Goes Fourth, coming next year).

Monsters vs Aliens feels like more of the same—Pixar already did big, hairy creatures in Monsters, Inc. and provided the definitive animated action film with The Incredibles. Susan Murphy, or Ginormica, as she becomes known, is no Elastigirl. Admittedly, positive female protagonists are rare, and it is exciting to watch her sort out her life while saving it. But it is hard to embrace Susan for two reasons.

The first is her size, or more accurately, her proportions. Society is quite fond of supervising children, railing against the corrupting influence of everything from Movado to marijuana. But we apparently have no problem telling our little girls they should look like an anorexic 15-year-old all their lives. Susan is simultaneously sexualized and childlike—a combination that should cause nightmares for parents with girls.

The second is the fault of directors Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon. Like boys in a sandbox, they are too anxious to destroy the city they had built (in this case, San Francisco, California), forgetting that we need to care about Susan along the way. Monsters vs Aliens is the first animated film made natively in 3-D (though we in Jamaica won’t get to see it) and the technology distracts the filmmakers. So we get mesmerizing shots of the Golden Gate Bridge collapsing into the sea, but they wash over us without much of an impact.

It’s tempting to think that Dreamworks will get it right next time. But with sequels to Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar and a Shrek spinoff in the pipeline, you’re better advised to wait a few months for the next gift from the benevolent gods of Pixar—Up, about an old man, a young boy, and a lot of balloons.

Eight years ago, The Fast and the Furious cobbled together Japanese automotive imports, the subculture of urban street racing, and two young, relatively unknown male leads into a surprise summer hit. In one weekend, the film recouped its budget and lifted Vin Diesel into stardom. Since then, two sequels have been made, with different bazaars, different cars, different stars—and different results at the box office. In Hollywood, making bad movies comes with the territory; making bad money does not.

Which explains the new, fourth installment in the franchise, Fast and Furious, which returns Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker) to their original Los Angeles haunt, recapturing and even surpasssing the original film in danger and drama.

This is not to say that Fast and Furious lacks ludicrous moments (though, thankfully, this time it does lack Ludacris)—the opening sequence, set in a tropically-generic version of the Dominican Republic, includes fishtailing pickups and a CGI (computer-generated) escape from an enflamed runaway gas tanker. Nor does it avoid cheesy, forgettable and offensive dialogue— like multiple tired parallels between the curves of women and vehicles.

In fact, while the sex is modern (read: gratuitous girl-on-girl action), the film’s sexual politics are depressingly retrograde. Reveling in the misogyny of its cartoonishly muscular protagonists, Fast and Furious quickly establishes firm breasts and fan belts to be man’s playthings; the camera actually segments female bodies into their constituent parts for voyeuristic consumption. As a society, we want—almost demand—moralistic uplift from our leaders, but individually we are only too happy to sit in darkened rooms and stare at dancing derrieres. Jamaican women are denigrated enough without their husbands expecting to live out celluloid fantasies.

But beyond all that, beyond the silly lines and soft-core pornography, Fast and Furious succeeds. It succeeds by doing what Hollywood does best—sticking to a formula. Only it’s not Formula One. Fast and Furious is a Western in disguise—a souped-up, hyperkinetic Western, but a good Western nevertheless.

Vin Diesel’s Toretto rides into town, alone, after a long absence, with a score to settle and an unwavering determination to settle it. His past keeps chasing him (in the form of federal agents), forcing him to live life on the run, and extracting the ultimate price—losing someone he loved. Despite his experience, he is an outsider. The only tools at his disposal are his own skills and attributes—his physicality, his hands, his rough charm—and his trusted horsepower. Shane (1953), The Searchers (1956), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)—there is no shortage of desert-backed films that share the same story kernel.

Unconvinced? Consider three more bits of evidence. During one chase, Toretto leaps from one car to another driving alongside him, in a new take on the old chestnut of switching horses. To pick up the trail of the man he seeks, Toretto studies a crash site. He bends down to the asphalt and rubs some residue between his fingers. Like any Western hero who knows his dirt, the residue points him in the right direction. And finally, the film contains an epic chase across the American-Mexican border desert, with Toretto and O’Connor (and even their names now seem to fit in the genre) pursued by a dozen or so men, riding in formation.

John Wayne might be spinning in his California grave, but only because Fast and Furious blew past it with a nitrous-oxide injection of speed, seduction and solid adventure.

There’s not much to say about 12 Rounds, which claims to be an action thriller but never gets around to producing any thrills, except for ending after only 108 minutes. John Cena, of American professional wrestling, stars as a beat cop who arrests a criminal mastermind by chance, and must save his girlfriend when the same terrorist kidnaps her a year later. The film was produced by WWE Studios, the movie arm of major wrestling outfit World Wrestling Entertainment, so the title, apart from referencing a plot point, is a clever way to rope in Cena’s longtime followers.

It’s hard to imagine anyone other than those followers enjoying 12 Rounds, which is as ordinary as a multimillion-dollar movie can get. In 1896, Frenchman Louis Lumiére set up his camera beside a railroad track. The resulting shot, of the arrival of a train, was so startling that some viewers screamed or moved away from the screen as they watched. Today’s moviegoing public is pumped so full of high-octane footage that we yawn as a fireball rips through an apartment building or as a luxury car does somersaults on the highway. Flying under an overpass becomes passé; driving on the sidewalk becomes pedestrian. Movie studios compensate with bigger explosions and more elaborate chases, seeking to shock us even as they jade us.

Thus we have films like 12 Rounds, which zooms from one action sequence to the next but leaves the plot behind. Cena and Aidan Gillen (HBO’s The Wire) have little to do except play good-cop/bad-guy; there’s no characterization to help texture their line readings. Without a compelling story or compelling leads, the promotional materials fall back on credentials—‘From the director of Die Hard 2 and the producer of Speed’. To be fair, 12 Rounds does borrow from both films—there is a cop running around trying to save his woman from the hands of a terrorist, and there is a bomb on a bus.

To be really fair, the film copies elements from every action blockbuster of the last twenty-five years, from Commando to The Fast and the Furious. But we shouldn’t fault it for failing to live up to its obligations any more than we should fault ourselves for neglecting ours. John Cena is only the latest in a century-strong battalion of Aryan supermen projected onto screens around the world. The United States has a narrow definition of hero, and it looks like Charlton Heston and Sylvestor Stallone and John Cena. It always has, and for the foreseeable future it will.

So be it. It is up to us to recognize that America maintains her power most directly, and with the greatest accuracy, not with smart bombs, but with dull hits like 12 Rounds. Because of her relentless propaganda, half our countrymen and women want to emigrate to Florida; they will be the ones enduring the midday sun tomorrow outside the American embassy in Liguanea. Standing in the sun, dreaming about a place only the movies can hallucinate—the land of the freeze-frame and the home of bravado.

Here’s a suggestion for the next action film you should see: Arrival of a Train by Louis Lumiére. It’s an oldie but a goodie.

12 Rounds
Directed by Renny Harlin.
With John Cena and Aidan Gillen.
108 minutes. Action.