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

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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

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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

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In the spirit of the Transporter films, I’ll cut right to the chase: The onomatopoeic Ed Skrein (The Sweeney) is an odd choice to anchor this rebooted franchise, sans Jason Statham. He looks like Mad Max: Fury Road’s Nicholas Hoult, but more elfin and with impeccable dress. In my rough estimation, Skrein has maybe 18% to 23% of Statham’s charisma. Amazingly, that range of points is enough to keep The Transporter Refueled running on the plus side of watchability.

Fifteen years after being forced into prostitution in the French Riviera (could be worse!), the fetching Anna (Loan Chabanol, Third Person) finally hatches her long-gestating plan of revenge against Russkie superpimp Kasarov (Radivoje Bukvic, A Good Die to Die Hard). It entails a few fellow hookers, matching disguises, a bank robbery and — hired as the no-questions-asked getaway driver — special-ops vet turned professional transporter Frank Martin (Skrein). Oh, and for added stakes, the kidnapping of Frank’s newly retired tomcat pop (Ray Stevenson, Punisher: War Zone). Souped up with built-in gadgetry like rotating license plates, the Audi that Frank drives skirts 007 territory; it’s the Tonto to his Lone Ranger.

With the franchise co-creator Luc Besson aboard as a writer and producer, The Transporter Refueled feels very much like an extension of the previous films — far more than the rather meh cable-TV series does. While not as good as the 2002 original or 2005’s Transporter 2, this fourth film leaves 2008’s autopiloted Transporter 3 in the dust. It has to help that director Camille Delamarre is a protégé of Besson, having helmed 2014’s Brick Mansions (itself an English-language remake of 2004’s Besson-penned/produced parkour-packed District B13).

Statham’s loss excepted, this Refueled reboot ticks all the boxes it’s expected to: fast cars, hot women, Eurotrash villains, thrilling stunts and no brain. Fulfilling that last requirement is a third-act, physics-defying howler involving a Jet Ski and a car window. You’ll know it when you see it, because you’ll laugh aloud and replay it. —Rod Lott

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For legal reasons so tangled and tortured, they could make a book out of the copyright fight (and did, with Robert Sellers’ The Battle for Bond, recommended), Never Say Never Again is not considered part of the 007 canon, despite marking the return of Sean Connery to his iconic role after a 12-year absence.

Last seen doing Vegas in Diamonds Are Forever, James Bond is no longer the glistening gem that Britain’s MI6 requires of its secret agents, so he is shuttered off to a health club to adhere to a strict regimen of calories, chiropractic and colonics. I’d say this is the first sign that something about this adventure is a bit “off,” but it’s actually the third; first is the franchise’s signature gun-barrel POV sequence being MIA, while the second is Lani Hall’s rightly forgotten theme song, thoroughly unmemorable except for the cloying presence of cowbell.

Back in shape enough, Bond is thrown into a new mission as SPECTRE — headed by pussy-petting Blofeld (Max von Sydow, Flash Gordon) — hatches a scheme to steal two thermonuclear warheads from the U.S. Air Force, which it achieves by getting a USAF captain (Gavan O’Herlihy, Superman III) hooked on smack and then replacing his right eye with a replica of the American president’s. The plan is so crazy, it just … might … work …

In cahoots with Blofeld are the exotic and explosive Fatima Blush (Barbara Carrera, Condorman), who at one point wears what looks like an ensemble of Hefty bags and the see-through plastic tarp you put down before painting, and Largo (Klaus Maria Brandauer, Oscar nominee for Out of Africa), who is as slimy as he his wealthy. His girlfriend, Domino (Kim Basinger, in only her third film), is the sister of the USAF patsy, but really she’s around so Bond can have a fourth woman to fuck within two hours’ time.

Irvin Kershner’s follow-up to directing The Empire Strikes Back, this “unofficial” Bond entry is — again with the pesky laws! — technically a remake of 1965’s Thunderball, but doesn’t quite feel like it until the underwater sequences come into play. Then, shark excepted, Never Say Never Again becomes every bit of a plodding slog as that official fourth 007 film. Because this is the ’80s, Kershner’s take includes a scene built entirely on a video-game challenge between Bond and Largo, as well as a rather uncomfortable bit that more or less sees Domino being butt-molested for laughs, as our suave spy poses as a masseur. For pure action of a nonsexual nature, only the gadgetry-enhanced motorcycle chase wrings the kind of thrills we expect from 007 set pieces.

As if to acknowledge to the audience that Never Say Never Again is an overstuffed and undercooked turkey, Connery closes his reign in Her Majesty’s secret service by breaking the fourth wall to wink directly at us. Its meaning is unmistakable: “You’ve been had, but I made some serious bank.” At the time, nobody did Bond better, but never had Connery done it so flaccidly. —Rod Lott

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