The samurai code of Transporting has been ditched, the budget slashed, the product placement upped through the roof. And it’s the first of a threatened trilogy.

Even when the duo commandeer a luggage cart and trundle around these shiny corridors getting sozzled, we remain prisoners in their departure lounge of the damned.

The Matrix wants its green-and-black colour scheme back. Cape Fear wants its toxic male combat back. You may well want your money back.

Robert Zemeckis, who should be well above this, imprints a bit of personality on this nightmare exactly twice.

Director David Gordon Green fails to whip up even a fraction of the original 1973 chiller's menace in this sloppy, CGI-heavy farrago.

No Escape is a film you’d want to recoil from taking seriously, so it’s almost a relief that its bungled execution makes this actively impossible.

The pacing seems intentionally designed to break your spirits, with a climactic set-piece that rages on forever, despite being comprised of nothing but shouting and torpedos. It makes Crimson Tide looks like a masterclass in international relations.

We are encouraged to find these people stupidly brutal or comedic without being given the slightest idea as to why they might be that way.

Cuban Fury belongs to an older, unfunnier time. Please let’s not go back.

As trash pleasures go, Serenity’s too ploddingly stretched and lacking in plot curlicues to reach nirvana, but it’s capable of making a whole audience giggle at its wonderfully pretentious gracenotes.

Only Nyong’o and Winston Duke, whose avuncular mountain tribe chief M’Baku makes a welcome return, actually feel like human beings. Elsewhere it’s drainingly apparent we’re just watching the nth round of chess pieces being rearranged. Like Namor with his dinky ankle-wings, this franchise has become super-heroically adept at treading water.

The actual exorcism sequence, involving three well-meaning cult members and a chicken, is strangely uneventful – and if there’s one thing a movie exorcism should never, ever be, it’s that.

It’s a grinding disappointment all round, though at least now we know that what bears famously do in the woods can extend to their film work.

The end product is all but unfollowable, thanks either to a screenplay that was incoherent to begin with, or an edit so slicingly brutal that almost every trace of the plot’s connective tissue was chopped out.

Halloween is fast approaching and Netflix has very generously stitched together a chilling Frankenstein’s monster of a rom-com sure to keep audiences awake all night in a cold sweat.

Both the festival and filmmakers might have been better off waiting another week, until the screens were empty and delegates had all gone home, before unveiling this thing, perhaps to a slightly less derisory audience of seagulls.

Many good actors here are weirdly bad.

There’s almost nothing the film does well, but that doesn’t stop it donning a winner’s smirk while it copies every 1980s science fiction smash you’ve ever seen.

After a while, it’s as if Thomas’s self-loathing begins to rub off on the script, which keeps undercutting should-be-resonant moments with smirking references to other films.

Some of us saw a while ago that turning Avatar into a franchise would prove to be a creative cul-de-sac. Having reached the top of the street three years ago, Cameron spends all of Fire and Ash trying to turn his enormous articulated lorry around. The back-up beeper is beeping, the spinning yellow lights are spinning, and he’s just knocked over his third wheelie bin. I do hope he eventually gets out.

Incoming director Michael Dougherty (Krampus) is the one in this unenviable hot-seat, but he can’t competently handle a budget this huge when it’s being poured over an assignment this vague.

Pike’s preposterous accent is as close as the film ever comes to acknowledging its own premise’s inherent corniness.

If we’re reaching for something, anything nice to say here – and we absolutely are – Theron’s black trouser suit and trench coat is a strong look.

he film's indulgences are so heart-on-sleeve that it's hard to differentiate watching it from hearing someone pitch their very bad screenplay ideas with no attempt to read the room.

Some of the jokes here are so bad they may be legally actionabubble, even prosecutabubble, and will cause toes to curl on the feet of the hitherto unembarrassabubble. There are scenes now seared upon my memory through sheer force of murderous un-funniness which I fear may prove to be unscrubbabubble.

Unfolds with little dramatic momentum and negligible intrigue.

Rather than being any particular person’s bright idea for a girlboss fantasy revenge caper, this lousy romp was obviously hatched by an algorithm, and might just as well have been directed by AI.

A fantastically dreary and flatulent anti-war satire.