Six long years after organizing the underrated action film The Tournament, Scott Mann finally plants his ass in the director’s chair again to deliver another underrated action film in Heist. Although deprived of originality, it’s kinda great.

A loyal, longtime dealer at a riverboat casino, Vaughn (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, The Losers) is in quite a pickle: His little girl is in the hospital receiving treatment for a life-threatening ailment, but all that is about to stop because he can’t afford to pay. After going to his gruff boss, Pope (Robert De Niro, not far removed from his Sam “Ace” Rothstein character in Martin Scorsese’s Casino), to ask for a $300,000 loan that promptly is turned down, Vaughn does the only thing he feels he can do: Rob Pope’s place. Teaming with an opportunistic security guard (Dave Bautista, Guardians of the Galaxy), Vaughn uses his access code to gain entrance to the vault — and thereby $3 million of laundered dough. Help yourself.

As happens in heist films, the heist doesn’t go quite as planned, sending the crew scrambling with gunfire at their heels until they hop aboard and hijack a city bus full of innocent civilians. Thus, with an hour left, Heist becomes Speed, minus the mph gimmick. As the wheels on the bus go ’round and ’round, all through the town, Vaughn and company are chased by Pope’s right-hand man (a believably imposing Morris Chestnut, The Call) and the cops, including a sympathetic officer played stiffly by Haywire’s Gina Carano, a former MMA fighter.

One looks at the pace and polish of Heist and thinks, “Why not give Mann the next Fast and Furious sequel?” His action scenes are alive and cut in a way that keeps them easy to follow — a huge difference in today’s marketplace, as is a lead performance as solid as Morgan’s. The ending is as predictable as any, yet detonates a few surprises to get there — the most shocking being the charm and humor brought to the pic’s second half by Saved by the Bell vet Mark-Paul Gosselaar, of all people! It’s like the part was written for Ryan Reynolds, but they couldn’t afford him once De Niro boarded ship, so they “settled” for this former teen TV heartthrob. Against all expectations, he steals his scenes and is terrific. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Rule No. 1 of Zombie Fight Club? Do not talk about Zombie Fight Club. Not because it’s secret, but because the Taiwanese flick is not worth talking up.

This being a source for film criticism, however, we’ll break that rule to tell you why. One random day, in a Taipei tenement that makes the Cabrini-Green public housing project of Candyman look cozy, activity is abuzz from floor to floor: a businessman being held ransom, a Halloween party, a raid on a cartel operation, a courier making an inordinate amount of package deliveries for a single address.

One of the latter’s stops is the party-central apartment of sleazebag David (Derek Tsang, The Thieves) and his way-too-cute-for-him girlfriend, Jenny (Beach Spike’s Jessica Cambensy, here as pure eye candy, romping around in a white bra). David receives a bag of bath salts (not the Bath & Body Works kind) from his stateside cousin, and as luck would have it (shades of Bath Salt Zombies!), anyone who swallows the pill turns into a member of the undead, complete with a taste for human flesh; anyone bitten by the undead becomes a — hell, you know how this works by now.

The virus spreads through the building faster than the film is paced. No plot exists; director Joe Chien (2012’s even worse Zombie 108) is content with just stacking one zombie attack after another (like a corpulent gangsta getting his penis bitten off) atop one escape attempt after another (such as Jenny and an eventual law-enforcement hero played by Blackhat’s Andy On mowing down shuffling corpses by driving a BMW down a hallway).

The initial tone is such that Sam Raimi could knock something like this out of the park in his sleep, whereas after an exhausting hour of scene-Xeroxing, Chien realizes he has nowhere to go. So he just stops suddenly and bunts his timeline one year forward. At least doing so allows him to justify the film’s potentially litigious title, as the zompocalypse has turned the world into something Beyond Thunderdome, where survivors are forced to battle the undead in gladiatorial games.

Sounds like a different movie? It feels like one, too: one inferior to what we already were watching. In wanting to be everything without earning it, Zombie Fight Club emerges as nothing but a collection of awful clipping paths. As Asian low-budget trash goes, however, it reeks less than that Sushi Typhoon nonsense. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

In Florida, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas everywhere you go: Families are decorating their trees on the front lawn (huh?); Phyllis Diller is on the tube, shootin’ the shit with Merv; and Porky’s Revenge is playing at the local bijou. And then some Russians have to unload grenade launchers and machine guns into suburban homes and Mexican fiestas and ruin it for everybody. Call it an unprecedented act of terrorism — in fact, call it Invasion U.S.A.

Leading the charge is Mikhail Rostov (a reliably sniveling Richard Lynch, Bad Dreams), and he’d likely win his little war, if not for the CIA recruiting a bearded ex-agent — and Rostov’s longtime archenemy — back into all-American action: the Coors-drinking, alligator-rustling swamp rat Matt Hunter (Chuck Norris, The Delta Force). This Hunter dude is good, saving the stars and stripes with an assist from an ostensible sixth sense; wherever Rostov hatches an attack — even inside a crowded shopping mall — Hunter and his Ford 4×4 suddenly appear, as if he can predict the future … or just happens to be a block away gassing up the truck. Either way, this skill is rather convenient, given our infallible hero insists on being a one-man army.

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter’s Joseph Zito directs, but with Norris co-writing the screenplay with frequent collaborator James Bruner (two of the three Missing in Action pictures), one can’t help but wonder if some of the star’s personal politics creeped into the script. Or perhaps it’s mere coincidence that much is made of Hunter saving an entire congregation of good Christian honkies in church, whereas a boatful of dirty foreigners seeking refuge from Cuba becomes a ship of human Swiss cheese — kids included! Unsubtle touches like that and a hooker getting a coke straw kicked up her nose contribute to an all-around bad taste … and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Now a time capsule of Reagan-era America, Invasion U.S.A. knowingly ditches pesky things like “backstory” to hoist itself into that territory of unadulterated, over-the-top action cinema, all the while all but deifying its lead as the personification of patriotism with a mullet and a belt buckle. Compared to his peers/rivals (and eventual fellow Expendables) Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Norris was a second-rate brand of screen he-man, but No. 1 for those crazy Golan-Globus cousins. For their fondly remembered Cannon Films, this box-office Invasion is considered trash canon. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

An intended reboot of 2007’s Hitman, itself adapted from the eponymous video game, Hitman: Agent 47 trades Timothy Olyphant for Rupert Friend of TV’s Homeland to fill the title role of the assassin in the Italian wool suit. Bad move, 20th Century Fox — with a distracting pointy bump, he looks even stranger with a shaved head than Olyphant. Friend, despite his last name, has a fraction of the charisma as well. Not that much magnetism is called for when you’re playing a killing machine programmed to possess zero emotions, but enough to get viewers partially invested in the exploding spectacle would be nice.

The UPC-coded Agent 47 spends the film as a human variation on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s good-guy Terminator robot, terrifying a beautiful woman until she learns he’s actually around to protect her. She is Katia (Hannah Ware, Shame); she has ESP, which proves confounding for her own sanity; and she is searching for her orchid-loving, cancer-ridden father (Ciarán Hinds, TV’s Game of Thrones), for reasons that are fairly convoluted, even for a tale rather thin on story. More important than who our two leads are seeking is who is seeking them, with intent to kill: Zachary Quinto basically reprising his villainous Sylar character from TV’s Heroes, but with the added benefit of subdermal body armor to make him bulletproof. That enhancement hardly stops Agent 47 from trying to shoot him anyway.

You know your action film is in trouble when the aural appearance of the Wilhelm scream incites more passion in the viewer than any of the stunts. Same goes for when said viewer is more interested in finding out where a scene was shot (Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay) than what is happening in it. The plot doesn’t hold up to scrutiny of logic, but it’s not supposed to, as this is not that type of movie; this is the type of movie where an on-the-run character lives in a virtual hovel, with an entire wall covered by a map littered with newspaper clippings, photographs and thumbtacks to hold the string criss-crossing this way and that. Making his directorial debut, Polish filmmaker Aleksander Bach delivers Hitman: Agent 47 in the tidy facade of a magazine layout highlighting homes unattainable to members of your tax bracket, meaning it looks clean to the point of sterility, yet houses no soul. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

First things first regarding The Executioner Part II: There is no part 1. Well, there is — it’s just that as a 1970 spy film starring George Peppard, it has nothing to do with this would-be sequel. And if it did, the Peppard picture would call for swift disownment, and be completely justified in doing so. I wouldn’t want a child who has been entirely redubbed, either.

The title character is Mike (Antoine John Mottet, Arctic Warriors), an auto repairman who is plagued by flashbacks of his tour of duty in Vietnam: “I came back, but I’m not home. … Charlie must die!” Fellow vet and best bud Lt. Roger O’Malley (The Day Time Ended’s Christopher Mitchum, son of Robert) doesn’t share Mike’s problem, but is forced to confront it while investigating a string of vigilante murders across greater Los Angeles. As reported by batty “news dame” Celia Amherst (Lady Street Fighter herself, Renee Harmon, who gets away with an oft-incomprehensible accent because she serves as the writer and producer), some masked figure calling himself The Executioner shows up at the scenes of crimes to beat up the bad guys and shove a live, pin-pulled grenade down their pants or somewhere about their person. Kablooey. (Cue the cartoon explosion, each and every time.)

That said, I feel like none of these leads did much; O’Malley mostly sits in chairs. Not enough forward motion exists in this supposed main plot to justify referring to the rest as “subplots.” But what else to call them? The most prominent has O’Malley’s gap-toothed, cash-strapped high school daughter (Bianca Phillipi) jonesin’ so hard for “dope” that she follows her ever-giggling BFF (Marisi Courtwright) into part-time hustling. There’s also a street gang that seems straight out of Sharks and Jets territory, talk of a dreaded “Tattoo Man,” and a sex fiend with a bowl haircut and a habit of ripping open the blouse (sometimes the same one) of his lucky partner. Talk of The Executioner Part II isn’t complete without mentioning “Big Dan” (Dan Bradley, director of 2012’s Red Dawn remake), a villain forever dressed like a dinner-theater magician.

Squarely in the sludge section of his once-respectable career — he did Frankenstein’s Great Aunt Tillie the same year — The Green Berets’ Aldo Ray has a few scenes as O’Malley’s commissioner, but clearly shared no actual physical space with the other actors. That director James Bryan (Don’t Go in the Woods) doesn’t take great pains to conceal it is par for his misguided course. —Rod Lott

Get it at Vinegar Syndrome.