“Cabin Pressure” (2003) is the cinematic equivalent of being stuck on the tarmac forever with a dying paperback and a screaming air vent. It’s not just dull; it’s aggressively, proudly dull—an unviewable mess that mistakes droning cockpit chatter and recycled stock footage for suspense. If turbulence were interesting, this movie would still find a way to taxi around it.

From the opening minutes, the film announces its priorities: beige sets, beige lighting, beige characters speaking in acronyms about systems we never see break in any satisfying way. Scenes repeat like safety demonstrations—pointless, bloodless, and performed by people who look like they’ve already mentally clocked out of the shift. The “action” is mostly cross-cutting between bored faces and a model plane that’s never given a convincing sense of scale, speed, or danger. You can practically hear the temp track begging to be replaced by something—anything—with a pulse.

The script is a wasteland of clichés and filler, the kind of movie where every problem is solved by the next line of dialogue rather than an actual set piece. No character has an arc; they have altitudes. Every attempt at ratcheting tension stalls into holding patterns: more radio chatter, more hollow commands, more reaction shots that mistake blinking for acting. Even the inevitable “hero moment” feels perfunctory, like someone looked at their watch and said, “Guess we should land this thing.”

For Stinker Madness seekers, there’s no campy payoff here—just the slow, oxygen-starved fade of a production that never gets off the ground. “So bad it’s good” requires swagger, accident, or at least a spectacular crash. “Cabin Pressure” offers none of that. It’s boredom at cruising altitude: a feature-length layover where the only emergency is keeping your eyes open.

If you ever needed a reminder that some remakes shouldn’t exist, 2025’s War of the Worlds delivers it in spades. This is not just a bad movie—it’s the kind of cinematic faceplant that makes you wonder how anyone signed off on it. The acting is flat-out terrible, with Ice Cube headlining in a role that feels less like a performance and more like someone wandered onto set after being told he was shooting a different movie. The whole thing reeks of miscasting, misdirection, and missed opportunities.

The real insult, though, is how aggressively this film relies on the “Idiot Plot”, a story that only moves forward because every single character makes the dumbest possible choice at every possible moment. Characters stand around waiting to get vaporized, make suicidal detours for no reason, and never once act like actual human beings dealing with an alien apocalypse. It’s not suspenseful, it’s not dramatic—it’s just aggravating to sit through.

Visually and tonally, the film is stuck in a post-COVID hangover haze. The world feels small, tired, and drained of life, not in a gritty, artistic way, but in a “we shot this at our desks because we couldn't go outside” kind of way. The whole thing becomes an unintentional time capsule of how much the pandemic gutted creativity and ambition. Watching it is like staring into the ghost of an industry still trying to find its footing—and tripping over itself at every step.

Ultimately, 2025’s War of the Worlds isn’t just a bad remake, it’s a sad reminder of what happens when you try to drag a classic into the present without talent, vision, or even basic competence. It’s noisy without being exciting, dumb without being fun, and joyless to the core. If the aliens really wanted to wipe us out, the fastest method would have been just screening this movie to humanity on loop.

Rutger Hauer and Gene Simmons squaring off sounds like the recipe for a wild cult classic, but Wanted: Dead or Alive (1987) ends up being more lukewarm than explosive. On paper, it’s a hybrid of gritty crime thriller and high-octane action flick, but the way those genres are handled here creates a constant tug-of-war. The crime elements are played too straight, dragging the pacing down, while the action beats aren’t stylish or kinetic enough to pull the film into popcorn territory. The end result sits uncomfortably in the middle—not pulpy enough for “so bad it’s good” status, but not sharp enough to be genuinely gripping.

The script is one of the biggest culprits. Dialogue is so flat and mundane that Hauer, who could carry almost anything with his screen presence, is forced to chew scenery just to keep viewers from nodding off. You can practically see him straining to inject some life into lines that might as well have been lifted from a TV procedural. Meanwhile, Simmons as the villain brings his usual menace, but the writing undercuts him—his terrorist mastermind never feels threatening so much as silly, especially when the movie leans on his boneheaded schemes.

That said, there are flashes of entertainment value if you squint hard enough. The movie indulges in one of the purest forms of “Idiot Plot” with the villain’s bizarre tactic of stuffing henchmen into barrels and honking a horn to unleash them like evil jack-in-the-boxes. It’s laughable, but at least it breaks up the monotony with something memorable. A few of the action sequences manage to land simply because Hauer sells the physicality, even if the staging is clunky.

In the end, though, Wanted: Dead or Alive is a middling watch. It doesn’t embarrass itself enough to be a riot, nor does it have the chops to rise above its B-movie roots. Instead, it drifts in no-man’s-land—a serviceable but unremarkable relic of the late ’80s action-crime craze. Hauer fans might find a few scraps of fun, but anyone else will likely forget it by the next morning.