More than one shark flick swam into theaters in 1975. Released a few months later than that other one was Sharks’ Treasure, the final film of the do-it-all director Cornel Wilde (The Naked Prey). Far from delivering an iron-hot cash-in, the aging auteur approached the oceanic adventure the only way he knew how: utter earnestness. So earnest is the film, Oscar Wilde — no relation — would look at it, nod his head and say, “Important.”

William Grefé’s Mako: The Jaws of Death, this is not.

Crusty skipper Jim Carnahan (Wilde) is approached by a young man (John Neilson, Terror at Red Wolf Inn) about chartering his boat to a spot where a Spanish galleon’s gold is rumored to be sunk in the sands of the Caribbean floor. After an initial and impulsive turndown, Carnahan agrees and takes out a dangerously large loan to fund the mission. Among the hired crew is a Black Irish diver (Yaphet Kotto, Across 110th Street).

As the title has it, the waters between the boat and the loot are shark-infested. And as the title doesn’t have it, sharks aren’t the dominant threat. That honor belongs to a dinghy full of escaped convicts who, led by the appropriately named Lobo (Cliff Osmond, Sweet Sugar), hop aboard to hold our heroes hostage. Still, if you don’t think the threats won’t overlap, you’re chum.

Featuring sharks and otherwise, the underwater footage is real and it’s spectacular — not a surprise when you consider the man-vs.-nature themes of Wilde’s No Blade of Grass and the aforementioned Naked Prey. While the fearsome finned fish clearly were the front-and-center selling point of Sharks’ Treasure, the movie would be compelling enough without it. With a character like Wilde on hand to scowl, bark and show off his sexagenarian physique — including a pre-Palance demo of one-handed push-ups, it would be hard not to. —Rod Lott

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Hutch Mansell leads an unremarkable existence. Married with two kids, his days are a blur of the mundane and the predictable. He works as an accountant for his father-in-law in a small manufacturing firm. The only suspense in his life comes on days he must hustle to get the trash curbside in time for the garbage truck. Hutch is a nobody.

At least that’s what he would have us believe. But the nobody at the heart of Nobody is portrayed by Bob Odenkirk, and as the actor has proved many times over in TV’s Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, he can be a damned compelling presence.

Hutch’s routine is forever uprooted one night when two masked intruders break into the Mansell home. Hutch arms himself with a golf club, but chooses not to escalate the situation, instead allowing the thieves to get away. That decision doesn’t sit well with his wife (Connie Nielsen, Wonder Woman 1984) and teenaged son (Gage Munroe), who interpret Hutch’s action as cowardice and treat him coldly afterward.

What his family doesn’t know, and we learn soon enough, is that Hutch has a secret past as an ex-military assassin. The home invasion awakens his old habits, however, particularly on a city bus when he sees a group of hoodlums threatening a young woman. In an inspired choreography of ultraviolence, Hutch pulverizes the baddies, including one who turns out to be the younger brother of Yulian Kuznetsov (Aleksey Serebryakov), a psychopathic killer in the Russian mafia.

Screenwriter Derek Kolstad and co-producer David Leitch, both of the John Wick franchise, infuse Nobody with brutally effective violence and a grim sense of humor. If the movie doesn’t quite match Wick-actioner standards, neither does it embarrass itself. Director Ilya Naishuller (Hardcore Henry) breaks no new ground, but helms with the cool efficiency of an acupuncturist who knows what pressure points will satisfy action-flick fans. It works, if perfunctorily, from the contrived plot devices (why exactly does the entire Russian mafia appear to be headquartered in the United States?) to a smattering of pop songs that provide ironic counterpoint to blood-spattered mayhem.

Best of all is Bob Odenkirk. The 58-year-old former sketch comedian turns out to be a credible tough guy. The film offers some other nifty casting choices, particularly Christopher Lloyd (Back to the Future’s Doc Brown) and rapper RZA (The Man with the Iron Fists) as Hutch’s father and brother, but Odenkirk’s rumpled charisma is what ultimately makes Nobody worth knowing. —Phil Bacharach

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Admits Jean-Claude Van Damme’s character several times within the opening minutes of Wake of Death, “I’m tired.” Dude, we’ve noticed.

Van Damme’s Ben Archer is former mob muscle gone legit, now a club bouncer, loving father and devoted husband. His wife, Cynthia (Lisa King, Love N’ Dancing), is a cop who, upon discovering a boat of Asian refugees at the harbor, bring a scared young girl home for the night, as if test-driving a puppy from the pound. Unfortunately, 14-year-old Kim (Valerie Tian, 2012’s 21 Jump Street) is no ordinary refugee; she’s on the run from her father, who unfortunately is Triad crime boss Sun Quan (Simon Yam), who unfortunately slit his wife’s throat post-coitally as Kim unfortunately watched.

“I’m going to get Kim back my way,” says Quan, and boy, does he try, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake — a wake of death, one might say — including Cynthia’s. As you’d expect, that leaves Archer in reluctant but devoted charge of Kim, protecting her from own father. It’s not unlike Boaz Yakin’s Safe, the 2012 movie in which Jason Statham also protects a young Chinese girl from the Triad while also taking revenge on the goons who murdered his spouse. The difference is Safe is far smarter and better made, but it’s not like Wake of Death didn’t have a chance.

Shot in South Africa, the cheap actioner has four credited writers and went through three directors, the first being Hong Kong great Ringo Lam, reuniting with Yam after Full Contact and with Van Damme after three films, including Maximum Risk. Lam walked after a couple of weeks, so who knows which scenes are his; my guess is the film’s best: a motorcycle chase through a shopping mall, including up the escalators and jumping from level to level. A sequence as bravura as that rises above Wake’s other set pieces, which are so poorly staged and edited that the viewer is never given the chance to invest oneself. Since Philippe Martinez (The Chaos Experiment) holds the directorial credit and also produced, we can pin the failure on him.

Van Damme himself is fine. Ironically, the further time removes him from his box-office heyday, the better an actor he becomes. Every now and again, one of his DVD premieres pops with some acclaim — like 2008’s JCVD and 2012’s Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning — but not enough to fuel a career comeback. Wake of Death isn’t one of those standouts, lumbering with so many slow-motion shots and needless scenes — like watching Yam practicing tai chi for a hot minute — that the running time keeps calling attention to its own padding. —Rod Lott

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While the Rocky films are typically considered to be the Rolls Royce of boxing pictures, the Penitentiary flicks have always been more of a twice-used Ford Festiva: Sure, it might have plenty of scuffs and dents all over, but it gets great gas mileage and the insurance is cheap, too. I like both, but I’d rather drive to 7-Eleven in a Festiva.

This comparison reaches an apex with the first sequel, Penitentiary II. We find Martel “Too Sweet” Gordone (Leon Isaac Kennedy) fresh out of the hud and making love to all the sweet ladies who have missed him, including a very special one he meets at a roller-skating park. Unfortunately, she’s killed by a gang, leaving Too Sweet to fight a rival in the penitentiary he was so desperate to leave. Helping him along the way is a bearded elderly man who loves the ladies and Mr. T, who loves the ladies two at a time while dressed as a genie in gold lamé.

Everywhere he goes, people cheer loudly for Too Sweet, including Rudy Ray Moore in a cameo on a fire escape. Here, Moore plays, of course, a “born rat soup-eating, insecure muthafucker.” I wouldn’t want it any other way. Unfortunately, Too Sweet’s family is kidnapped and Ernie Hudson — clad in a tight white T-shirt and rainbow clown wig — beats him up backstage while his family is kidnapped. Luckily, they escape with the help of their adorable son unplugging the television and with them back by his side, Too Sweet finds his will to fight and, of course, win.

Additionally, as Too Sweet wins the match, Mr. T kills Hudson in the dressing room, so … win-win?

As the credits roll, everyone — including the little-person prisoner (Tony Cox) scoring poon under the ring — cheer wildly at the camera as the credits roll. Of course, some of them will be back for Penitentiary III, released by the Cannon Group in 1987 and, sadly, is nowhere to be found on home video, no matter how hard I look.

Director Jamaa Fanaka was a bit of a cinematic odd-duck — has anyone here seen Soul Vengeance and its magic-lasso penis? — who sadly passed away in 2012, only a few films under his (probably) welterweight belt. Still, with those movies mostly like Penitentiary II, I consider it a great movie in absolutely stellar filmography, a purely dependable Festiva of film. —Louis Fowler

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Among the events crammed into the needlessly distended Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen is a fun moment in which Charlie Hunnam’s drug-trade enforcer runs afoul of — and trades blows with — a group of street thugs. Russian Raid feels like an extension of that scene into nearly two hours of its own, turning a standout bit into mere status quo. Do you want to settle for that? Nyet.

This Russian actioner’s story is somewhat less thin than its setting’s doors, which look to be made of packing material: Former military sniper Nikita (Ivan Kotik, Chinese Zodiac) takes a freelancing assignment to rob a missile factory of its riches. Reluctantly assisting him on this nighttime heist is a rowdy, ragtag pack of tracksuited hooligans with authority issues. While they target a massive safe — and even attempt its penetration via medieval battle ax — Nikita has personal reasons for retribution as well.

Justifying the assumed titular nod to Gareth Evans’ The Raid, but hardly as vertical, reaching the well-fortified bounty requires moving from room to room and level to level through the factory. Wearing a blue-striped tank top that registers as ridiculous to this side of the world, Nikita and his hired charges go to hand-to-hand combat in one skirmish after another.

While I have no doubt of the guys’ real-life fighting abilities, the choreography isn’t as supportive; in fact, it’s pretty clunky. In his first feature, writer/director/producer Denis Kryuchkov not only errs by hitting “play” on a distractingly obnoxious soundtrack when shit hits the fan, but speeds up the footage to a telling degree. Worse, he gives the camera a slight bump to punctuate the points he wants viewers to react to with a sympathetic “Oof!”

It’s so obvious, it’s Pavlovian. The overall effect is punishing, as the sequences near-instantly wear out their welcome, with a respite of flat humor or preening villainy before returning to more of the same song, different room. In a fight film, the fights are everything. And sometimes, as in Russian Raid, nothing. —Rod Lott

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