Wanted (Timur Bekmambetov, 2008). Colossally stupid. Based on a six-issue comic book series written by Mark Millar, the film revolves around a secret society of assassins with a knack for bending the laws of physics to their favor, most notably by sending bullets on curved trajectories with a flick of their wrist while firing a gun, as if they were bowling balls hurled down a well-oiled lane. If the filmmakers are going to disregard the basic principles of science so freely and frivolously, I suppose it’s silly to expect them to care a whit for things like logic and narrative storytelling basics. Bekmambetov has a directing style that weaves back and forth between merely antic and explosively incomprehensible, treating the audience with something that feels like contempt, a sensation that the closing line viciously confirms.

Miracle at St. Anna (Spike Lee, 2008). Lee’s corrective for the dearth of black faces in various World War II films over the years, St. Anna is well-intentioned and dramatically languid. If anything, Lee proves that stodgy, cliched, by-the-numbers war pictures transcend race. Scene to scene, Lee demonstrates that he is as skilled as anyone and building the frame, constructing the image. None of it adds up. The film has no drive whatsoever. At least the wartime material is better than the more modern framing sequences, which boasts an embarrassingly over-emoted cameo by John Turturro and poor Joseph Gordon-Levitt straining to find something natural within gimcrack newspaperman dialogue that sounds like something Damon Runyon might have written as an act of drunken self-mockery.

21 (Robert Luketic, 2008). For awhile, it’s a reasonable diversion. The film is based on the book Bringing Down the House, about a group of MIT students who utilize their preternatural mathematics skills in a scheme to win big at Vegas casinos by counting cards at the blackjack tables. I’m assuming it’s based fairly loosely on that (purportedly) non-fiction tome since there’s a lot of stuff in here that feels like Hollywood screenwriting filler, from the schlumpy betrayed friends serving as the barometer of the heroes descent from decent guy to hard-hearted cad to the pasted-on romance. When it’s setting up the mechanics of the group’s strategy, it has a nice energy, bolstered by the fierce crackle of smart people figuring out something complicated. When it has to concentrate on the plot and the poorly drawn interpersonal drama, it’s a barely bearable trudge.

Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946). Not the movie that made Rita Hayworth a star, but probably the one that sealed her place in the classic Hollywood firmament, if only for the moment when she does that shit with her hair. The film follows a small-time hood, played by Glenn Ford, who is recruited to help run a casino of questionable legality in Argentina. Mattes are complicated when his boss brings home his new bride, who, in a painful coincidence, happens to be the hood’s smoldering ex. The earliest scenes feature some sharp noirish dialogue, but that keeps slipping away as more and more melodrama crowds in. Hayworth is the reason to watch this film, of course. Before the plot necessitates her wallowing in the sort of lovelorn anguish that was the province of name actresses during the era, she has a real dazzle and forthright allure. She brims with sensuality and an alluring tanginess that arises when a character knows they’re just a shade or two smarter than everyone else onscreen.

Hamlet 2 (Andrew Fleming, 2008). This is exactly the sort of drab, needy comedy that’s come to represent the Sundance Film Festival as much as (or, sadly, more than) the sterling, insightful, surprising indies that made it the most influential fest in the U.S. It has the decent hook, the aggressively quirky characters, and the strained whimsy that have been markers of Sundance hits for at least ten years. (While we’re on the subject of snippy Sundance laments, what are they doing opening their slate to the likes of Andrew Fleming, who had entirely off-putting major studio film in theaters around six months before and a backlog of equally repellant fare to his name.) Steve Coogan plays a self-deluded high school drama teacher who tries to save his program from deep budget cuts by mounting a controversial production of an original sequel to Shakespeare’s signature tragedy that includes show tunes, a time machine and a central role for Jesus Christ. Once it gets to the production itself, the film is fitfully amusing. Before that, it flounders with tone-deaf farcical nonsense led by Coogan’s overplaying in the lead role.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)