Phil de Semlyen

This visually epic, but monotonous collaboration between James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez is less than the sum of its slick parts.

What’s missing is a bit of heart to make you care, or at least, a sense of knowing how to wrap it up quickly enough, and smartly enough, for it not to matter if you don’t. An amped-up Friday night audience might have fun with Bullet Train once, but it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to ride it again.

It’s hard to know if this clunky comedy is part of Mel Gibson’s redemption arc or some strange new form of karmic retribution.

If you’ve ever wondered what the boredom threshold is for watching a musician tuning a hurdy-gurdy, you’ll find the answer here.

Despite the best efforts of its committed young cast, and especially a game (if suspiciously old-looking) Nicholas Hoult as Tolkien in his late teens and early twenties, it’s a plodding and polite portrayal that holds few surprises.

The franchise squeaks past with a so-so sequel that barely improves on what came before. Our only hope is that at some point they'll have to hibernate.

Few of the laughs land, either.

The overall effect is glassy and inert, with Rooney Mara’s Mary an oddly elusive presence in the film that carries her name.

It’s a long movie and when its star isn’t on screen and cracking wise, the boundary-pushing shocks and endless self-references wear thin. Still, if you’re the Deadpool fanatic who recently had Reynolds’s name tattooed on his arse, you definitely won’t be grumbling.

It’s not that you can’t see what Von Trier is getting at, it’s just you wish he’d get there quicker and without all the desecrated bodies. For most of its hefty runtime, The House That Jack Built is just a slog.

Hunt is a film stuck entirely in fifth, racing from one sudden shootout to another at the expense of the labyrinthine plot.

In the mood for two hours of relentless fights, gory kills, clichéd McGuffins and unmemorable characters, all served up in a weightless CG environment? Mortal Kombat II punches a hole in all those boxes.

It’s to the 1993 original what The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was to Raiders.

It all feels so rote and old-school, especially during such an exciting era for the genre (thanks to Jennifer Kent, Ari Aster, Jordan Peele, Rose Glass and co). Never mind the fact its once-sturdy beats have been spoofed, homaged and riffed a thousand times. In the era of Netflix’s Fear Street and The Haunting of Hill House, big-screen horror surely has to work harder than this.

Clearly surge pricing also applies to jokes, because it’s mostly about as funny as a traffic jam.