Held every seven years in some unsuspecting town, The Tournament is a numbers game. For 24 hours, 30 of the world’s best assassins compete for a $10 million prize in a competition with only one rule: Kill or die. What more setup does an action-craving viewer need?

With tracking devices implanted in their tummies, contestants worthy of note include a parkouring Frenchman (Sebastien Foucan, who performed similar duties against 007 in 2006’s Casino Royale), a crazy-ass Texan (a miscast Ian Somerhalder, TV’s Lost), a Russian special forces member (Undisputed series badass Scott Adkins), a Triad vet (Kelly Hu, X-Men 2’s Lady Deathstrike) and the returning champion (Ving Rhames, Pulp Fiction). The latter is only in it to avenge the recent death of his wife by the trigger-happy hands of a fellow contestant — he just doesn’t know which one. Blah, details.

This particular do-or-die tourney takes place in Middlesbrough, a British town boasting more public surveillance cameras than anywhere on the globe — fortuitous for the assembled high-rollers hoping to make a mint off the blood of 29 hired guns. They are as unapologetic about their gambling as director Scott Mann (2015’s Heist) is about depicting irredeemably graphic acts of violence; let’s just say more than one human head explodes.

Accidentally caught in the crossfire of the shoot-’em-up (by events so unbelievable, explanation is futile) is a hooch-sloshing priest (Robert Carlyle, Trainspotting) and, one assumes, the audience surrogate. Yet you need not be inebriated to feel The Tournament’s juice kick in; Mann and company take care of providing the rush on their own. Virtually unseen, the film deserves better — not pantheon placement, but some sort of regard among fans of swiftly and slickly executed set pieces of undiluted action. Mann does that so well and so often, it seems as if the flick weren’t scripted so much as improvised, taking suggestions from audience members into what situations he should throw his players and their weapons: “In a slaughterhouse!” “At a strip club!” “On a moving bus! You know, the double-decker kind!” —Rod Lott

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Having already taken over the iconic role of Capt. Kirk in the rebooted Star Trek, Chris Pine guns for another A-list franchise in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. It’s a prequel that serves as an origin story for the badass CIA analyst embodied originally by Alec Baldwin in The Hunt for Red October, most famously by Harrison Ford in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, and forgettably by Ben Affleck in The Sum of All Fears. Fear not this belated fifth chapter.

Following the events of 9/11 — and thus messing with the series’ timeline, but get over it — Ryan trades studying economics for a stint in the Marines. Serving in Afghanistan, he endures a spinal injury in the process — an RPG-downed helicopter, to be precise — and while undergoing physical therapy is recruited by Thomas Harper (Kevin Costner, talking out one side of his mouth as if simultaneously storing nuts in his cheeks and packing sunflower seeds and Skoal in his bottom lip) to be a spy under the CIA’s employ. Ten years later, working undercover on Wall Street, Ryan notices something fishy in a Russian corporation’s books and is sent to Moscow to clean it up.

Using U.S./Russia pipeline talks as a MacGuffin, director Kenneth Branagh (Thor) casts himself as Viktor Cherevin, the cirrhotic head of the Russkie firm plotting America’s economic collapse … and only Jack Ryan can stop him! Well, with generous assistance from Ryan’s fiancée therapist (Keira Knightley, The Imitation Game) and Harper, in an elongated heist sequence that recalls the set pieces of Paramount’s tone-similar Mission: Impossible films. (Pine even adopts Tom Cruise’s famous palms-flat/fingers-out running stance.) Knightley’s convenient appearance in Moscow just in time for the operation is a contrivance, yes, but one that works.

Although the Cold War long has thawed, Shadow Recruit presses the “reheat” button to recall the ’80s-Reagan flavor of the previous installments, all based on Tom Clancy novels. Working from a script co-written by first-timer Adam Cozad and old pro David Koepp (Jurassic Park), Branagh all but dispenses with the Clancy touchstones of geopolitical rigamarole and overtly right-wing rah-rah hoohah that oftentimes crippled the pace of the predecessors, and focuses on action. In doing so — and in bathing the screen in gorgeous saturated colors during moments of inaction — he delivers a surprisingly engaging spy tale, fleet of foot. You can feel it dividing itself into traditional thirds, each clicking neatly into place. —Rod Lott

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Chris O’Donnell’s acting abilities have been in question ever since he transitioned from supporting parts to leading man, and his hot streak effectively ended — as did many — with 1995’s Batman & Robin. Five years later, the snowy mountain actioner Vertical Limit failed to reverse his career descent, but at least he emerged rosier than co-star Bill Paxton (Edge of Tomorrow), whose monosyllabic Texan routine already had worn thinner than his hair.

O’Donnell stars as a National Geographic photographer — no, really! — who must put away his fear of heights when his champion-climbing sister (Robin Tunney, Supernova) falls into an icy crevice with Paxton’s greasy, rich (redundant) scumbag villain. You really won’t believe the O’Donnell/Tunney pairing as brother-and-sister, because they totally play it like they’re firmly within week two of a couple’s “we’ve just begun fucking” phase.

Complete with the requisite spooky, local Native American hermit (played by a wackily miscast Scott Glenn of The Silence of the Lambs), members of the rescue team have the bright idea to strap nitroglycerin to their backs for the trek up the peak. Making up for such nonsense is GoldenEye girl Izabella Scorupco as the team’s all-important blonde hottie. I might have misspelled her name, but when you take a look at this frostbitten fox, vowels and consonants will be the furthest from your mind.

As directed by Martin Campbell (Green Lantern), the limited Limit does boast a couple of good, tense action sequences. However, like many other studio-spit-shined blockbusters, it grows excessive and doesn’t know when to quit. —Rod Lott

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In what has to be the orangest movie ever made, former NFL defensive end turned Radio Shack pitchman Howie Long has his first — and thankfully only — vehicle as an action hero. He’s Jesse Graves, one of an elite crack team of “smokejumpers,” those specially trained firefighters who parachute into raging blazes in forests and other wildlife sites.

He and Wynt (Scott Glenn, The Right Stuff) find themselves battling sniveling bad guy Shaye (Stone Cold’s William Forsythe, at first looking like Gregg Allman) while flames shoot up all around them. Jesse even finds time to romance a cute redhead (Suzy Amis, Titanic), who’s hauling around two screaming bird fetuses in her fanny pack. Together, they have even less chemistry than Long and Teri Hatcher did in those Radio Shack commercials.

As an action film, Firestorm is as mediocre as it is rote as it is orange. (At least it’s a great-looking orange, being directed by Dean Semler, Oscar-winning cinematographer of Dances with Wolves.) As an action hero, the amiable but insignificant Long is … well, not. In fact, every time he turns toward the camera, you expect to be pitched a cell phone. —Rod Lott

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After graduating from X-Men: First Class, director Matthew Vaughn returns to Kick-Ass territory — that is, adapting the gleefully profane work of comics’ enfant terrible Mark Millar — with Kingsman: The Secret Service. In theme and structure, it bears the buttoned-up look of TV’s The Avengers and the well-tailored derring-do of 007’s adventures … if John Steed and James Bond were keen on shooting puppies and penetrating anuses. (Caught off-guard? You had to be there.)

Looking like co-star Michael Caine in his Harry Palmer heyday, never-more-likable Colin Firth (2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) stands front and center as Harry Hart, a “knight” in the London-based spy organization Kingsman. Its gentleman operatives wear bulletproof suits and oxford shoes concealing poison-tipped blades, and they carry umbrellas that double as gun and shield. While on assignment in the Middle East in 1997, Hart makes a mistake that gets a colleague killed, so he vows to repay that debt to the dead man’s son.

Seventeen years later, that happens with the reformation of Eggsy Unwin (newcomer Taron Egerton), a hot-tempered juvenile delinquent whose street smarts Hart manipulates into secret-agent material, taking him from loser (his surname suggests as much: Unwin) to veritable princess magnet. Coinciding with the recruiting process is the nefarious rise of lisping tech entrepreneur Valentine Richmond (Samuel L. Jackson, Avengers: Age of Ultron), who with rapidity moves forward with his plan for world domination via mind control via SIM cards via free WiFi for life. (Looking at my most recent AT&T bill, I fully understand why the public would flock to such a strings-attached ruse.)

This being the start of an intended franchise, Vaughn spends much of the first hour laying the groundwork through the Kingsman org’s training sequences and unconventional tests of feats both physical and psychological. It’s not until hour two that the true plot kicks into gear. At 128 minutes, Kingsman is too long by a quarter, yet curiously, the movie is back-loaded with slam-bang. Until then, it cruises along on roguish charm without fully committing to tone; it failed to make much of an impression beyond my marveling at tailored clothing I can ill afford.

Not unexpectedly for viewers of Vaughn’s previous work — in particular, his 2004 debut, Layer Cake — the best scenes depend upon the jolt of pop music on the soundtrack; they even may have been built around the cuts. Although not necessarily for the right reasons, the showstopper is a church shootout in which nearly 100 God-fearing Kentuckians die graphically at Harry’s lightning-quick hands while Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” wails away. The intended effect is laughs — and they do come — but like that iconic Southern-rock tune, it just doesn’t know when to quit, thereby giving you time to recall real-life church massacres that aren’t funny at all. That somewhat sours one’s enjoyment of what essentially is a spoof of itself, but should we really be surprised? For all who have collaborated with Millar in his career thus far, restraint has not been among them. —Rod Lott

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