Every few months, Hollywood drops a new action thriller that promises to reinvent the genre.
And every few months, the internet collectively discovers that the trailer showed literally every good part.
This time, the movie in question has a grizzled lead actor, a one-word title, and a plot that involves a briefcase, a betrayal, and at least three scenes of someone walking away from an explosion without flinching.
The reviews are in, and they're the kind of mixed that makes studio executives sweat through their expensive shirts.
Critics say it's "propulsive" and "relentlessly tense," which is code for "we couldn't figure out how to describe the plot because there isn't one." Audiences are split between people who just wanted to watch stuff blow up and people who made the mistake of expecting a third act that makes sense.
Reddit has already done its thing, which is to say it has assembled a 4,000-comment thread titled something like "Am I the only one who thinks the ending was insultingly stupid?" Spoiler: no, you are not the only one.
There are always thousands of you, and you all found each other within six hours of the premiere.
The biggest complaint isn't the plot holes, though.
Apparently, in 2024, we still haven't figured out that audiences would like to see the fistfights they paid eighteen dollars to watch.
One top comment put it perfectly: "I didn't pay to watch a blender have a panic attack for two hours." That comment now has more upvotes than the movie has ticket sales in several states.
Then there's the inevitable discourse about whether the movie is "woke" or "anti-woke," which is exhausting because the movie is about a guy trying to stop a bomb.
Somehow, both sides have found a way to be offended by a film whose most complex thematic statement is "explosions are loud." The studio, for its part, is already teasing a sequel.
The first one made just enough money overseas to justify another round of the same thing, but with a bigger budget and even less coherent editing.
The director has promised that this time, they'll "go deeper into the character's psyche." Translation: they'll add a dead wife and a scene where he stares at a lake.
What's genuinely funny is that the movie will probably be a hit anyway.
Not because it's good, but because it's the only thing playing that isn't a superhero movie or a horror film about a haunted Airbnb.
People want to eat popcorn and watch a car flip over.
It's just not art, and pretending otherwise is how we ended up with twelve Fast and Furious movies.
In the end, the action thriller isn't dying.
It's just gotten lazy, and we keep rewarding it.
The genre will keep churning out the same movie with a different title until we stop buying tickets.
But we won't, because sometimes you just want to turn your brain off for two hours and watch a man in a leather jacket outrun a helicopter.
Final Thoughts
Either way, someone on the internet is already mad about it, and they're typing in all caps.