Fight or Flight (2025)

 

Fight or Flight (2025)

 

4/10

 Starring

Josh Hartnett

Charithra Chandran

Julian Kostov

Katee Sackhoff

 

Directed by James Madigan

 

I give the movie one thing, it knows how to throw mixed feelings around, which is good. I wasn’t particularly pleased with the way it started. It was vague, and there was some bravado-filled, annoying agent behavior at the beginning that almost made me walk. But I was curious to see the link with Josh Hartnett. Then, when I saw how he was presented, it didn’t help keep me glued, and I started wondering if I’d last more than twenty minutes into this movie.

The acting performances were mixed, some actors delivered, others didn’t but it didn’t take away from the movie’s overall idea or the tension it was building.

The plot is simple. There’s a character called The Ghost that the Americans are trying to catch. They track him to Bangkok, where he’s going to be on a plane. So, they activate an agent (Reyes, played by Hartnett) in Bangkok to get on the same flight and capture him.

The problem is, information about The Ghost is all over the internet, and other countries also have their own people on the same plane trying to do the same thing.

The movie’s tension comes from how all these characters, stuck on the same flight, plan to get the job done while also stopping each other. Another twist—which you could have guessed is, no one knows what The Ghost looks like.

As usual with action comedies, most have the same drawbacks like, the protagonist is unkillable because he knows martial arts. And not just any kind, he somehow has the exact skills needed to take down anyone who comes after him. Add luck to the mix, and he always seems to have just the right objects nearby to kill whoever comes for him, all within this confined plane. Things get worse when Reyes cover is blown and his picture is sent to everyone else on the plane, he too has to be captured, from here the movie dives into absurdity in the way it handles the situations on the plane.

The movie, of course, struggles with confinement, which is expected since all the action has to take place on the plane. But at the very least, they could have made the whole covert thing actually covert. From around minute thirty onward, bodies were dropping like flies. You’d think there would be panic with all the noise and fighting, but somehow, this movie found a way to make a plane feel massive and the dividers between classes so airtight that people on the same flight couldn’t hear a thing.

This isn’t one of those run-to-the-cinema movies. For what it’s worth, it’s an okay film, but you’re better off waiting to see if a streaming service picks it up. You might not enjoy being stuck in a theater for this one.

Love Hurts (2025)

 

Love Hurts (2025)

 

2/10

Starring

Ke Huy Quan

Ariana DeBose

Daniel Wu

Mustafa Shakir

 

Directed by Jonathan Eusebio

 

There was this feeling of being out of place when I saw Ke Huy Quan going through the motions of acting like a real estate agent. The performance wasn’t strong enough in this role to draw me in. Then came the moment he starts fighting martial arts, and suddenly, it felt alright. The movie was just ten minutes in, and I was captivated by the sudden shift from out-of-place real estate agent to secret martial arts fighter. We now see that he has a secret life, but sadly, that tone shift was the only exciting thing that happened in this movie.

Love Hurts has really good action scenes, but that’s it. There’s a lack of chemistry, and the dialogue between the cast doesn’t always flow as neatly as you’d expect.

This movie has bad comedy—the scenes where the jokes are meant to land aren’t funny. It’s not that the joke flew over your head; it’s just actually not funny at all. The writing is poor, and the first-time director—well, it’s obvious he’s just starting out because the movie’s tone jumps all over the place, thanks to the uneven pacing.

The thing that annoys me the most is the unrealistic way the characters behave around one another or how they react to situations, it’s just odd. You don’t step into a room, see a man you presumed dead on the floor, then pick up his notebook and start reading his poetry out loud like it’s a casual afternoon. You don’t even call the police—you call your boss, whose office you just found the dead body in. And guess what she does on that call? She tells him how amazing the poetry is (after briefly mentioning the dead guy) and then starts reading it to him over the phone. Where is the urgency? You just saw a presumed dead guy on the floor—where’s the call to the police? Where’s the panic?

The movie plot is about a retired hitman named Marvin (Ke Huy Quan), who is now hiding out as a realtor. But his past resurfaces when his brother hunts him down, sending an assassin to his office to ask about the whereabouts of a woman named Rose. Marvin knocks out the assassin in his office and runs home, only to be attacked by two more goons, also looking for Rose. When the movie actually starts, we see a woman defacing Marvin’s realtor signs all over town. It’s not hard to figure out that she’s the Rose everyone is looking for.

The first twenty minutes keep things vague, never making it clear whether Marvin actually knows where she is—but you can guess that he does. My biggest question is this: the movie tells us that Marvin was supposed to kill her but let her go instead, which is why everyone is after him for her whereabouts, because they know she is alive. How did they come to that conclusion, you may ask, well she stirred things up by sending letters to everyone when she was supposed to be in hiding.

Do you want to see this movie? I’d advise that you don’t.

Demon City (2025)

Demon City (2025)

2/10

Starring

Tôma Ikuta

Masahiro Higashide

Miou Tanaka

Directed by Seiji Tanaka

 

We may have to wait a long time before movie producers decide to stop rehashing the same old hitman-retiring plot.

There has to be a new way to get the protagonist angry enough to go after people for revenge. This is why I liked John Wick (Part 1—before the plot got convoluted with too many sequels). The whole revenge story was simple: You killed my dog, embarrassed me in my own house—now I’m coming after you.

But this movie didn’t bother coming up with a fresh reason for the protagonist (Sakata) to seek revenge. Instead, it stuck to the same old, predictable setup. He met a woman, started a family, and decided it was time to get out of the game. So, he did one last job and walked. But, of course, the people who hired him weren’t just going to let him go. So, they decided to kill him and his family, and in this plot frame him for killing his family, making it look like after the act, he tried to kill himself.

The acting in this movie is not spectacular and definitely not memorable. The silent, brooding protagonist trope is overplayed and, at times, just plain annoying. The first fifteen minutes are filled with horrible dialogue and weak performances. The movie was so predictable that I could guess what was going to happen within those first fifteen minutes.

One of the other issues with the movie is the unrealistic nature of the action scenes. For example, Sakata woke up from his vegetative state and—conveniently and briefly, I might add—was able to fight like he had the powers of the Hulk.

The plot picks up ten years after the incident with his family, where he was shot in the head. But luckily for us viewers, he didn’t die. Instead, he was in a vegetative state. His friend and former partner from his hitman days is now taking care of him. Sakata somehow manages to recover, and at this point, the movie takes a nosedive, challenging itself to deliver even worse acting, worse planning, worse writing, and worse fight choreography than what we had already endured.

So, Sakata is back, and he wants revenge on the people who killed his family. From here, the movie makes it ridiculously easy for him to track them down—it felt more like the writers were mocking us than putting in any real detective work.

All the usual betrayals and surprise survivals happen, and by the end, I felt like I had completely wasted my time and existence watching this. Here’s a movie you should not see for any reason at all. I can’t even think of a single strength worth mentioning.