Part 6 – The Dependable
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Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Failures
This is where the ranking crosses from 8 to 7, and the tier is held together by confidence instead of quality.
The American spends a hundred minutes being quiet and has about eleven minutes of action in it. Gravity strips survival down to a place with nothing to push against. Road House commits absolutely to the proposition that cooler is a distinct profession with its own circuit and famous names.
Commitment is rarer than competence, and it’s what separates the films here from the ones lower down, several of which are better made and less sure of themselves.
I like this tier. I like a film that knows exactly what it is and never blinks more than a smarter picture that keeps apologizing for itself, and most of these twenty qualify. Every one of them leaks somewhere and I’ll point at the leaks as I go. Still, I’d put any of them on after a long day and come away glad I did.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the sixth of nine parts.
Bryan Mills never doubts, Jack never speaks and Dalton never winks. Three ways to build a lead who doesn’t need an interior crisis, unpacked in the Protagonist Handbook.
1. Taken Trilogy (2008-2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of Taken Trilogy (2008-2014)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"One perfect film and two that demonstrate why it worked."
Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen wrote a ninety-three minute film with no fat anywhere in it, and Pierre Morel shot it for around twenty-five million dollars. It took more than two hundred and made a fifty-six-year-old character actor into an action star. Besson and Kamen wrote it in French first and the English draft came afterward.
The telephone speech is the reason everybody remembers it and the speech works because Bryan Mills is telling the truth. He’s not threatening. He’s describing his own professional capabilities to somebody who doesn’t yet know what he is, and Neeson plays it flat.
Neeson was fifty-six when it was shot and has said he expected it to go directly to video in most territories. Fox held the American release for close to a year after the European run, then put it out in January and watched it take more than two hundred million dollars.
The first film’s structure is the whole appeal. A clock starts in the opening act, the protagonist knows exactly what to do, and the picture never stops to let him grieve or doubt. Every scene is either movement or information. Neeson has said he took the part expecting the film to go straight to video.
The sequels are the problem. Taken 2 puts the family in Istanbul and asks the audience to accept the same premise twice, and Taken 3 abandons the abduction entirely for a murder frame-up with editing so aggressive that a fence climb takes fifteen cuts. Fox delayed the American release by almost a year after the European run.
The first film is a pleasure from the opening minute, and that flat phone call still unsettles me a little. The sequels are what irritate me.
Fox had a formula that worked because it was lean, then fattened it up twice and chopped the fights into confetti. Watch the 2008 picture and treat the other two as rumors.
2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"The Swedish original, and Noomi Rapace defined the part before Hollywood got it."
Niels Arden Oplev’s Swedish version came first and Noomi Rapace is the reason it’s remembered. She trained in kickboxing, took a motorcycle license and lost a considerable amount of weight, and the physical commitment shows in every scene. Larsson died in 2004 before any of the three novels were published. Stieg Larsson’s plot is a locked-room mystery on an island with a wealthy family, a disappeared girl and forty years of photographs, and the investigation half is conventional. What’s not conventional is that the actual protagonist is a state ward with a criminal record.
Lisbeth Salander works because the film refuses to soften her. She doesn’t explain herself, she doesn’t want to be understood, and the guardian sequence is filmed at length and without any of the relief a studio picture would supply. Rapace was thirty at the time and had worked almost entirely in Swedish television.
Michael Nyqvist’s Blomkvist is the better half of the pairing and gets very little credit. He’s a competent middle-aged journalist with no special abilities who does the unglamorous work, and the film needs an ordinary man to make Salander legible. The Swedish production was shot as a television serial and cut down for cinemas.
3. The American (2010) [full review]
► Read the full review of The American (2010)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.3/10
"Eleven minutes of action in a hundred-minute film, and it never apologizes for the rest."
Anton Corbijn was a photographer before he was a director and the film is shot like a series of stills. George Clooney plays a weapons maker hiding in an Abruzzo village, and the picture is almost entirely silent for long stretches. Corbijn had photographed Joy Division and U2 before moving into features.
It was marketed as a Clooney action thriller and audiences were angry. There are about four minutes of violence across a hundred and five, the rest is a man machining a rifle barrel and walking through stone streets, and the exit polls were brutal. Focus Features opened it wide on Labor Day weekend and it topped the box office.
The gunsmithing sequences are the best material. Corbijn shoots the lathe work, the suppressor fitting and the test firing with the same patience a procedural gives to surveillance, and Jack is only legible as a person while he’s working. It was adapted from Martin Booth’s novel A Very Private Gentleman.
I’d push this one on people harder than anything else on the page, and I expect plenty of them to come back annoyed. Blame the marketing for that. Selling a patient, nearly silent film as a Clooney action picture was a cheap trick, and it poisoned the audience before the lights went down. The lathe scenes are my idea of suspense. The walks between them through those stone streets do test even my patience.
4. The Lincoln Lawyer (2011) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Lincoln Lawyer (2011)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"A defense attorney whose problem is that his client is guilty and he cannot say so."
Brad Furman adapted Michael Connelly and the film is the best legal thriller of its decade, largely because the plot is about a lawyer trapped by privilege instead of a courtroom performance. Mickey Haller knows his client is guilty and can’t say so. Connelly has written seven Mickey Haller novels and the character crosses into the Bosch books.
Matthew McConaughey took it during the period when his career was assumed to be over, and it’s the pivot. Haller is charming, compromised and good at the work, and the performance has none of the self-satisfaction the part invites. It was shot in Los Angeles for around forty million dollars.
The construction is what holds up. A previous client is serving a sentence for the same crime, the current client engineered the representation deliberately, and the trap closes because Haller did his job properly years earlier. A Netflix series followed in 2022 with Manuel Garcia-Rulfo in the part.
The supporting cast carries more than usual. William H. Macy’s investigator, Marisa Tomei’s prosecutor ex-wife, and Ryan Phillippe playing entitlement without a single moment of sympathy for the character. John Romano wrote the screenplay and kept most of Connelly’s courtroom structure. Frances Fisher and Michael Pena fill out the rest of the cast.
The Lincoln Lawyer builds a cage out of the protagonist’s own ethics and Juror #2 makes silence the reasonable option. Find the trap in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
5. Total Recall (2012) [full review]
► Read the full review of Total Recall (2012)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.2/10
"A different film from the 1990 version, and not a competing one."
Len Wiseman remade Verhoeven with a considerably larger budget, no Mars, no humor and none of the ambiguity that made the original worth arguing about. Colin Farrell is competent and the film has nothing for him to do. Wiseman had made two Underworld films and Live Free or Die Hard before this.
The production design is the one real achievement. A vertically stacked future city shot in permanent rain, with magnetic vehicles and a tunnel through the earth’s core, and Wiseman uses all of it for chases and nothing else. It cost around one hundred and twenty-five million dollars and barely recovered it.
This version removes the original’s central question entirely. Verhoeven leaves it open whether Quaid is dreaming, and the 2012 film answers early and moves on, converting a philosophical thriller into a pursuit picture with expensive sets. Kate Beckinsale’s role was expanded considerably from the original picture.
The city is the reason I keep an 8 on this.
I could stare at that stacked, rain-soaked skyline for a long time, and the chases through it are fun on their own terms. The script’s lack of nerve is the sore spot. Verhoeven trusted his audience with an open question, and Wiseman closed it early as if uncertainty were a defect to engineer out of the product.
6. Gravity (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of Gravity (2013)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"Survival in a place with nothing to push against."
Cuaron and Emmanuel Lubezki spent four and a half years building the technology to shoot it, including a light box with nearly two million LEDs, because the reflections on a helmet visor couldn’t be faked any other way. It won seven Academy Awards including Director and Cinematography.
The opening shot runs about thirteen minutes without a cut and establishes the geography, the characters and the disaster in one continuous move. Cuaron has said the film was storyboarded and previsualized entirely before a single actor was hired. Cuaron wrote it with his son Jonas across roughly two years.
Lubezki and Cuaron built a light box roughly nine feet on a side lined with nearly two million LEDs, so the reflections moving across a helmet visor came from actual light instead of from post-production. Nothing else available at the time could produce a believable lit face in vacuum.
Sandra Bullock carries roughly ninety minutes alone in a suit, much of it shot in a nine-foot cube with a robot arm moving the camera around her. Most of the performance is breathing and a face behind glass. Bullock was cast after Angelina Jolie and Natalie Portman both passed on the part.
The physics are wrong in specific places and the film knows it. Orbital mechanics don’t permit the transfers it needs, and Cuaron chose legibility over accuracy each time. The debris cascade itself is a real predicted phenomenon. Steven Price’s score replaces sound effects entirely during the vacuum sequences.
7. John Wick (2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of John Wick (2014)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Legible action, because the camera holds still and the shots run long."
Chad Stahelski and David Leitch were stunt coordinators who had doubled Keanu Reeves on The Matrix, and the film exists because they wanted to prove action could be shot wide and held. Nothing in it is cut to disguise a performer. It cost around twenty million dollars and took more than eighty-five.
The premise is famously minimal. A retired assassin’s dog is killed and the film spends the rest of its length on consequences, with no subplot, no romance and no second objective. Derek Kolstad’s script is about one hundred pages of escalation. Kolstad originally wrote the character as a man in his seventies.
The gun work is the detail specialists point at. Reeves trained for months in a close-quarters shooting discipline and the film shoots his reloads and transitions in frame, so the audience can see a magazine change happen instead of hearing it offscreen. Leitch went uncredited as co-director and later made Atomic Blonde and Bullet Train.
The world arrives entirely through props and procedure. Gold coins, a hotel with rules, a cleanup service that arrives with a van and a price list. Nobody stops to explain any of it and the film is stronger for refusing. Reeves has said he did roughly ninety percent of the fighting himself.
Few things on this page satisfy me like John Wick, because I can see every reload and every hit land.
Editors cut so much action cinema so fast I can’t tell who’s standing where, and this film is a standing rebuke to all of it. My reservation is the grief. The premise is famously minimal, and I’d have liked one more quiet scene with the loss before the escalation swallows everything.
8. The Foreigner (2017) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Foreigner (2017)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"Jackie Chan at sixty-three playing grief instead of agility."
Martin Campbell cast Jackie Chan against everything he’d done for forty years, as a London restaurant owner whose daughter dies in a bombing. There’s no comedy, no prop work and no charm anywhere in the performance. Stephen Leather’s novel The Chinaman was published in 1992 and the title was changed.
The film is really two pictures. Chan’s half is a grieving man conducting a one-man campaign in the Northern Irish countryside. Pierce Brosnan’s half is a former paramilitary turned government minister managing a political crisis, and Brosnan is excellent. Campbell had directed GoldenEye and Casino Royale, both Bond debuts.
Quan Ngoc Minh’s background is delivered in pieces and the film trusts the audience to assemble it. Special forces, Vietnam, two other daughters already lost, and Chan plays the role as exhaustion instead of rage. Chan produced it through his own company and took a heavy pay cut.
The action is deliberately unglamorous. He’s sixty-three in the film and it shows on purpose. He hides, he sets traps, he gets hurt badly and slowly, and Campbell never lets a sequence look easy. It was shot in London and across Northern Ireland over about three months.
9. Ghost in the Shell (2017) [full review]
► Read the full review of Ghost in the Shell (2017)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.3/10
"A visually accurate adaptation that reproduces the images and not the philosophy."
Rupert Sanders made a beautiful film with a hollow center. The visual design reproduces specific shots from the 1995 anime with enormous care, and an origin story has replaced the philosophical material that gave the original its weight. Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 anime runs eighty-three minutes and adapts Masamune Shirow.
The casting controversy overwhelmed everything else and the film’s own script made it worse by adding a plot explanation for why a Japanese character’s brain is in a white body. The defense and the problem became the same object. It cost around one hundred and ten million dollars and lost money for Paramount.
Scarlett Johansson is well cast for the physical performance. The Major moves wrong on purpose, the thermoptic camouflage sequences are the best in the film, and the geisha robot fight is staged with real precision. Sanders had previously made Snow White and the Huntsman.
The American characterizes a man entirely through lathe work and Ms. 45 does it with posture and a hemline. Learn what work replaces dialogue in the Showing and Telling Handbook.
10. Juror #2 (2024) [full review]
► Read the full review of Juror #2 (2024)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"Eastwood’s last film, and the premise is the best in the genre in decades."
Clint Eastwood was ninety-four and Warner Bros. gave the film a release in fewer than fifty theaters, a decision the industry argued about for months. It’s a plain moral thriller and one of his best late pictures. Jonathan Abrams wrote the screenplay and it sat on the Black List before production.
The premise is airtight. A juror on a murder trial realizes during testimony that he almost certainly caused the death himself in a hit and run he believed was a deer. He’s in recovery, his wife is pregnant, and confessing destroys everything. Warner Bros. gave it a limited release and moved it to streaming within weeks.
Warner Bros. opened it in fewer than fifty theaters with almost no campaign. The trade press treated it as a studio abandoning a film by its most decorated living director. It moved to streaming within a few weeks and found the audience there that it had been denied in cinemas.
Nicholas Hoult plays it without any of the pleading a lesser film would supply. Justin is an ordinary man doing arithmetic about his own life, and the film is honest that the arithmetic favors silence. It was shot in Savannah, Georgia over roughly two months.
Toni Collette’s prosecutor gets the film’s real arc. She’s running for office on the conviction, she starts to doubt it, and the last shot is her arriving at a door with no scene after it. Eastwood ends on the knock. Eastwood has directed more than forty features since Play Misty for Me in 1971.
The way Warner Bros. handled this still makes me angry.
A ninety-four-year-old director hands them a plain, adult moral thriller, and they bury it in fewer than fifty theaters as if it were an embarrassment. This is exactly the sort of film people complain nobody makes anymore. My only reservation is Hoult’s restraint. It’s the right call, and there were still stretches where I wanted to see it crack.
11. Futureworld (1976) [full review]
► Read the full review of Futureworld (1976)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.7/10
"The Westworld sequel nobody remembers, and it takes the premise somewhere the original did not."
Richard Heffron made the sequel to Westworld without Michael Crichton and the difference is visible in every reel. The park has reopened, two journalists are invited to investigate, and the film has a good idea buried in a slow picture. American International Pictures made it for around three million dollars.
The replacement plot is the good idea. Delos is duplicating influential visitors and substituting the copies, so the resort is a machine for replacing world leaders. That’s a better premise than the original had and the film can’t pace it. Crichton had no involvement and MGM sold the sequel rights outright.
Yul Brynner returns for a dream sequence that’s nothing to do with the plot and exists because the studio wanted him on the poster. It’s the most memorable thing in the film and it’s entirely disconnected from everything around it. Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner play the two journalists.
12. The Eagle Has Landed (1976) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Eagle Has Landed (1976)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.8/10
"A German operation to kidnap Churchill, and the Germans are the protagonists."
John Sturges directed his last film from Jack Higgins’s novel about a German plan to abduct Churchill from a Norfolk village, and the picture’s central decision is to make the German paratroopers the protagonists and treat them as professionals. Sturges had made The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven in the previous decade.
Michael Caine plays Steiner as an officer under punishment for trying to save a woman from a deportation train. That gives the film its moral footing without turning anybody into a hero. He’s doing a job he considers pointless. Higgins published the novel in 1975 and it sold in the tens of millions.
Donald Sutherland’s IRA agent is the weakest element and the accent has been mocked for fifty years. The character exists to supply local knowledge and a romance the film doesn’t need, and every scene he’s in slows the operation down. Robert Duvall plays Radl and Robert Shaw doesn’t appear despite persistent claims.
The village sequences are the best part. A German unit disguised as Polish paratroopers holding a church congregation while a child drowns in a mill race, and the cover breaks because a soldier does the decent thing in front of witnesses. It was shot largely in Cornwall standing in for the Norfolk coast.
I like this one for the village and for Caine, and I’d happily lose every minute of Sutherland. That accent distracts me whenever he opens his mouth, and the romance is dead weight on a mission I want to watch. When it sticks to the operation and the drowning child, it’s a sturdy, decent war thriller that treats its professionals with respect.
13. The Dogs of War (1980) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Dogs of War (1980)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.3/10
"A mercenary film far more interested in procurement than in combat."
John Irvin adapted Frederick Forsyth and Christopher Walken plays a mercenary hired to overthrow an African government for a mining concession. The film’s interest is almost entirely procedural and that’s its strength. Forsyth published the novel in 1974 after reporting from Biafra during the civil war.
The best half is the preparation. Reconnaissance under a false identity, arms purchased through a Spanish broker, a ship chartered, end-user certificates forged, and the film treats all of it as the logistics problem it is. Gary DeVore and George Malko wrote the screenplay. The assault itself is short and ugly. That’s correct. Forsyth’s point was never the battle. The coup takes minutes, the mercenaries win easily, and the film’s last decision is Shannon installing a leader the employers didn’t want. Tom Berenger and Colin Blakely appear alongside Walken in the mercenary team.
Gravity spends thirteen unbroken minutes on the undamaged version before anything breaks. Learn what establishing length buys you in the Pacing Handbook.
14. Ms. 45 (1981) [full review]
► Read the full review of Ms. 45 (1981)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"A disreputable form used for something instead of just operated in."
Abel Ferrara made it for around sixty thousand dollars with Zoe Lund, who was seventeen and had never acted. She plays a mute garment worker in Manhattan who’s attacked twice in one day and begins killing men. Lund also wrote the screenplay for Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant a decade later.
The film has almost no dialogue from its protagonist by design, and Lund holds the film together with physical performance. Thana’s transformation is tracked through clothing and posture, from hunched invisibility to deliberate display. It was shot in about three weeks on New York streets without permits.
The Halloween party is the final sequence and Ferrara shoots it as a nightmare. Thana in a nun’s habit with a pistol at a costume party, and the film’s one real surprise is who stops her and why. The film was refused certification in several countries on release.
15. Nighthawks (1981) [full review]
► Read the full review of Nighthawks (1981)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"A tight procedural, ninety-nine minutes, with one extraordinary performance in it."
Bruce Malmuth took over the production and the film was intended as a French Connection sequel before rewrites. Sylvester Stallone and Billy Dee Williams are decoy cops in New York hunting a European terrorist played by Rutger Hauer. Stallone made it between Rocky II and Rocky III.
Hauer is the reason to watch it. Wulfgar is charming, professional and entirely without ideology, and this was his first American film. He’s better than the picture around him in every scene. Hauer had been working in Dutch cinema with Paul Verhoeven before this.
The subway sequences are shot in real stations at night and the tram hostage climax over the East River is well staged. The film’s energy comes from location work instead of from its script, and the script has visible seams from the rewrites. Gary Nelson shot some sequences before Malmuth replaced him.
Hauer is the whole reason I’d recommend this, and it’s a little sad how much better he is than the film built around him. Stallone is fine. The rewrites are the problem, and I can feel the seams whenever the plot has to turn a corner. Those night subway sequences are worth the evening by themselves.
17. Cobra (1986) [full review]
► Read the full review of Cobra (1986)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.7/10
"Stallone’s response to losing Beverly Hills Cop, and it is eighty-seven minutes long."
Stallone rewrote Paula Gosling’s novel into an eighty-seven minute film after leaving Beverly Hills Cop over creative differences, and the picture is what happens when a star has complete control and no editor willing to argue. Gosling’s novel was published as Fair Game and filmed again under that title in 1995.
The opening supermarket siege is legitimately good filmmaking. Cosgrove Cobretti arrives, talks to a hostage taker, and the sequence has more tension than anything in the remaining eighty minutes. George P. Cosmatos directed and had made Rambo: First Blood Part II the year before. Andrew Robinson plays the detective who spends the film objecting to his methods.
The antagonists are a cult with axes who meet in a warehouse and clash blades overhead in unison, and the film never explains their beliefs, their numbers or their objective. They’re an aesthetic and the film is content with that. Brigitte Nielsen was married to Stallone during production.
It was cut from a reported two hours to eighty-seven minutes for a rating and the damage is everywhere. Characters disappear, motivations are missing, and the last act becomes a chase through a foundry with no setup at all. It took around one hundred and sixty million dollars worldwide despite the reviews.
Cobra is a mess and I enjoy it anyway.
That supermarket opening is real filmmaking and I’d happily watch it on its own. The rest makes me want to find whoever cut two hours down to eighty-seven minutes and ask what the hell they thought they were doing. Axe cultists with no beliefs are silly, but I prefer silly and confident to a careful film with nothing on its mind.
John Wick hands over an entire criminal economy through coins, house rules and a cleanup van with a price list. Study the method in the World Builder’s Handbook.
18. The Abyss (1989) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Abyss (1989)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"A technical achievement made under conditions that nearly broke the production."
Cameron shot most of it in an unfinished nuclear reactor containment vessel in South Carolina holding seven million gallons of water, and the production is among the most punishing in Hollywood history. Ed Harris has said he won’t discuss it. The shoot ran for months and several crew members left before it finished.
The underwater work is genuine. The cast trained for scuba certification, the sets were built at depth, and the fluid breathing sequence used a real rat in a real oxygenated liquid, and several countries cut it from the release print. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Michael Biehn play opposite Harris.
The containment vessel held around seven million gallons and the crew worked submerged for shifts long enough that several of them developed serious problems. Ed Harris has said in interviews that he won’t discuss the production, and Mastrantonio walked off the set at least once.
The water tentacle was the first computer-generated character to interact with a live action environment, built by ILM over months, and the technology developed for it went directly into Terminator 2 two years later. It won the Academy Award for Visual Effects in 1990. Dennis Muren supervised the effects work for Industrial Light and Magic.
The theatrical cut removes the entire third act argument. The special edition restores the global tidal wave sequence and the nuclear disarmament ending, and the film goes from a rescue picture to the argument Cameron wrote. Cameron wrote the original story as a teenager after a school biology lecture.
19. Road House (1989) [full review]
► Read the full review of Road House (1989)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"Commits absolutely to a preposterous idea and never once acknowledges it."
Rowdy Herrington made a film in which a philosophy graduate is the most famous bouncer in America, performs tai chi shirtless by a lake, and eventually tears a man’s throat out. It’s completely sincere and that’s why it survives. Joel Silver produced it and Sam Elliott plays Dalton’s mentor Wade Garrett.
Patrick Swayze plays Dalton entirely straight. He’s soft-spoken, he stitches his own wounds without anesthetic, he’s a philosophy degree from NYU, and Swayze never once signals to the audience that any of this is ridiculous. Jeff Healey appears as the bar’s blues guitarist and performs throughout.
Ben Gazzara’s Brad Wesley is a small-town extortionist who owns everything and drives a monster truck through a car dealership out of spite. The performance is enormous and entirely committed. Swayze made it immediately after Dirty Dancing and before Ghost. Kevin Tighe plays the bar owner who hires Dalton in the opening act.
The fights are shot clearly and the stunt work is real.
Swayze did most of his own, including the throat sequence, and the film’s reputation as camp obscures how competently the action is staged. A remake with Jake Gyllenhaal arrived in 2024. Herrington had made Jack’s Back the previous year and little of note afterward.
Road House delights me, and there’s nothing ironic about it.
Swayze plays a bouncer with a philosophy degree completely straight and I believe every word. Few actors could have sold that. My reservation is that the film goes thin anywhere Dalton isn’t standing, and Gazzara’s monster truck spite only covers so much of it. The camp label sells the fight staging short. Those fights are clean enough to teach from.
20. Dexter – “Dexter” (2006) [full review]
► Read the full review of Dexter – “Dexter” (2006)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.3/10
"A pilot that has to make an audience spend time with a serial killer."
James Manos Jr. adapted Jeff Lindsay’s novel and the pilot establishes a serial killer working as a blood spatter analyst for Miami police, with a code taught to him by his adoptive father that restricts him to other killers. Lindsay’s Darkly Dreaming Dexter was published in 2004.
Michael C. Hall plays the performance of normality as the character’s real work. Dexter practices his expressions, keeps doughnuts in the office for social credit, and narrates his own emptiness in a voice designed for an audience that doesn’t exist. Showtime ran eight seasons and a widely disliked finale in 2013.
The Harry flashbacks are the pilot’s structural spine and they arrive at the right intervals. A father recognizing what his son is, choosing to direct it instead of reporting it, and the episode never asks whether that was defensible. Julie Benz, Jennifer Carpenter and James Remar are in the pilot cast.
The Ice Truck Killer arrives at the end of the episode as somebody who’s communicating directly with Dexter. That’s the hook. A bloodless body, a taunt he recognizes, and the pilot ends on him being flattered instead of threatened. A revival called New Blood followed in 2021 and a prequel after that.
Hall is the draw, and the practiced expressions and the office doughnuts are the details that made me like the character. What keeps the pilot at a 7 for me is that it flatters its killer as much as the Ice Truck Killer does. It likes Dexter a great deal and wants me to like him too, and I’d have trusted it more if it were a little colder about him.
Honorable Mentions: Thrillers Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Each belongs in this tier or above and each is on the list.
Sicario (2015)
Villeneuve and Deakins put an FBI agent inside an operation nobody will explain to her, and the border crossing sequence is fifteen minutes of traffic. Benicio del Toro gets the last act and the film hands it to him completely.
The Drop (2014)
Dennis Lehane adapted his own story and Tom Hardy plays a Brooklyn bartender the film spends its length letting you misread. James Gandolfini gives his last performance and the reveal is delivered in one flat sentence.
A Most Wanted Man (2014)
Anton Corbijn adapted le Carre and Philip Seymour Hoffman gives his last lead performance as a German intelligence officer running an asset. The final shot is a man screaming in a car park and it’s devastating.
The Guilty (2018)
Gustav Moller shot a Danish thriller entirely inside an emergency dispatch room, with a police officer working one call. Everything the audience knows arrives through a headset and most of it turns out to be wrong.
Shallow Grave (1994)
Danny Boyle made his first film about three Edinburgh flatmates finding a suitcase of money and a dead tenant. Christopher Eccleston takes the attic and the film watches the arrangement rot from there.
Bound (1996)
The Wachowskis made a tight neo-noir for four and a half million dollars with a plan that goes wrong in stages, and the money never leaves one apartment building. Joe Pantoliano is extraordinary in it.
Compulsion (1959)
Richard Fleischer fictionalized the Leopold and Loeb case and gave Orson Welles a closing argument that runs close to fifteen minutes. The film is about two young men who believed intelligence exempted them.
Sleuth (1972)
Mankiewicz filmed Anthony Shaffer’s play with Olivier and Caine and nobody else in the cast at all. The credits list performers who don’t exist, itself part of the trick the film is running.
The Ghost Writer (2010)
Polanski adapted Robert Harris and put a ghostwriter on an island working on a former prime minister’s memoir, with the previous writer dead. The final shot is a manuscript scattering across a road.
Nocturnal Animals (2016)
Tom Ford runs two stories at once, a woman reading her ex-husband’s novel and the novel itself, and the fiction is an accusation. Michael Shannon and Aaron Taylor-Johnson carry the interior half.
Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021)
Sion Sono put Nicolas Cage in an explosive leather suit in a samurai western and the result is unclassifiable. It belongs on a list somewhere and nobody has worked out which one yet.
Under the Silver Lake (2018)
David Robert Mitchell made a Los Angeles conspiracy film about a man finding patterns in everything, and it’s deliberately unclear whether any of them are real. It divides people permanently.
Dishonorable Mentions: Thrillers That Failed
Also unreviewed here. Each had a premise worth the budget and lost it somewhere between the pitch and the edit.
Homefront (2013)
Stallone wrote it and Statham stars as a former agent in a small town, with James Franco as a methamphetamine cook. A coincidence the film doesn’t bother to justify triggers every escalation.
Broken City (2013)
Mark Wahlberg and Russell Crowe in a municipal corruption thriller whose entire plot rests on a photograph anybody could have produced. The mayor’s scheme collapses the moment it’s described aloud.
Stolen (2012)
Nicolas Cage has fifty-two hours to find his kidnapped daughter in a locked taxi trunk, and the film reuses its own premise from Gone in 60 Seconds without the energy or the cars.
The Tourist (2010)
Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie in Venice with a twist that makes the preceding ninety minutes a performance staged for nobody. It was nominated for comedy awards by mistake and the confusion is understandable.
Mindhunters (2004)
Renny Harlin trapped FBI profiler trainees on an island being killed in sequence, and the film reveals the killer through a monologue that contradicts several scenes the audience watched earlier.
Knight and Day (2010)
Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz in a film that keeps drugging its protagonist to skip sequences it didn’t want to stage. The device is used four times and the audience misses every set piece.
What Do You Think?
This page runs from an 8 down to a 7, so Road House and Cobra are on the same list as Gravity and Juror #2. I’m comfortable with that. A film that commits and misses costs far less than a polished one that hedges every choice, and the smooth, forgettable thrillers that play it safe are the ones I resent. Road House earns it on total sincerity. Tell me whether Cobra does.
Continue the Series
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Failures
