Ready Player One is the $175 million embodiment of the adage about wishing to possess cake and consume it. Like a cruel parent with bipolar issues, the film spends two hours sparing no expense to tout its virtual-reality construct as something BuzzFeed might headline “You Guys! This Game Gives Me So Many Feels, I Can’t Even,” only to turn around and abruptly scold its audience for snapping at the cheese, let alone even sniffing it.

And that’s if you buy into the showroom model Ready Player One presents. If you don’t, which is my case, the experience is even worse: an empty vessel of sensory overload.

In the vast wasteland that is America 2045 (just you wait!), the populace has become what Pixar’s WALL-E prophesied in 2008: lazy asses. Instead of participating in real-world activities, people strap on goggles and hide behind chosen avatars to spend their days and nights roaming around in OASIS, an immersive, anything-goes environment of VR fantasyland games and high jinks. Drive the Batmobile or the Back to the Future DeLorean! Wage war against Freddy Krueger and the Iron Giant! It’s like Second Life with a thumbed nose at copyright law and intellectual property.

When OASIS’ dippy-hippie founder, Halliday (Bridge of Spies’ Mark Rylance, Oscar-winning porn star), passes away, he does not go gently into that good night. Rather, he makes his death and legacy a game, proactively bequeathing ownership of OASIS to one lucky player, Willy Wonka-style. Whomever can obtain the three keys hidden throughout his pixel-perfect world, wins.

Poverty-stricken teen orphan Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse) vies to grab that bounty. His most formidable challenger: the ruthless, bullying corporate CEO/control freak Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn, Knowing). The innocence of youth and plucky know-how vs. unchecked power and vast resources: We all know how this one will end — fictionally, of course.

The first key goes to the victor of an improbably speedy road race. Coming essentially right out of the movie’s gate, it kick-starts Ready Player One on a propulsive, well-boding note. Then the movie downshifts into narrative banality until the set piece for the second key — without question, the film’s most enjoyable sequence, as Wade and friends (including a love interest played by Ouija’s Olivia Cooke) enter The Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (Jack Nicholson not included).

From that point on, with roughly half an elongated running time still to come, Ready Player One is a punishing sit. The quest for the third and final key occupies all of Act 3, culminating in an all-out CGI war among indiscernible sides and blink-and-gone pop-culture cameos (Robocop! Chucky! And, um, that guy!) Maybe this Trivial Pursuit: The 1980’s style works on the page — I have not read Ernest Cline’s 2011 best-seller on which this blockbuster is based — but given how the battle is entirely artificial, the effect is pummeling to a point of numbness. Your mileage may vary, dependent on how much you enjoy watching others play video games.

Ironically, the USP of Ready Player One becomes utterly meaningless well before the picture’s end: the four-word phrase “directed by Steven Spielberg.” America’s longest-reigning household-name filmmaker helped define the decade to which this film pays homage, if not worships. In the 1980s, a movie stamped with Spielberg’s name felt like a Spielberg movie, from the ones he directed (E.T., the first two Indiana Jones adventures, one-fourth of Twilight Zone: The Movie) to the ones he did not (Gremlins, The Goonies, Poltergeist,* Young Sherlock Holmes); whatever his capacity, each production bore That Spielberg Touch.

No more. If Ready Player One has a heart, it does not beat. Arguably half-animated, the film could have been directed by anyone, since it sparks no wonder, appears to confuse nostalgia with drama, and wastes the gifts of its actors. It is a chunk of digital plastic — tomorrow’s ColecoVision, today! —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Any vampire film carrying the tagline “In space, the sun never rises” should be approached with considerable caution. After all, the sun doesn’t need to rise, because where but space does that flaming ball of gas sit? Dracula 3000 is that film, but other reasons exist that encourage avoidance, not the least of which is Casper Van Dien’s name leading the credits.

The Starship Troopers himbo stars as Abraham Van Helsing, captain of the spaceship Mother III. After his craft locates a ghost ship missing for years, he decides to investigate; you know how that’s gonna turn out. He and his crew members — stock roles filled by Tiny Lister (The Human Centipede III [Final Sequence]), Erika Eleniak (Tales from the Crypt Presents: Bordello of Blood) and Coolio (China Strike Force), who is saddled with the not-at-all-racist moniker of “187” — accidentally end up resurrecting Dracula (here called Count Orlock) from the ashes.

As played by Langley Kirkwood (Dredd), this Drac is one of the shoddiest-looking Dracs to grace the screen. He looks like an in-costume dad/ financial adviser beamed in from your local church’s “fall festival.” Spend five bucks at your local Halloween supply store, and you’re every bit his equal.

187 is the first among the crew to get bitten, and if you can imagine the rapper fitted with red contact lenses and a pair of fangs, you may have a hint of the kind of unintentional comedy that results. And if you do not, this kind: “Do you know how many times I’ve thought about ejaculating on your bazongas?” a vampiric 187 asks Aurora, before proceeding to talk about “stroking my anaconda.” More people are bitten, while others are staked, and yet you’ll be the only one reeling in pain.

Do not insult the comparative genius of Wes Craven Presents Dracula 2000 by mistaking this as a 2000 sequel. Dracula 3000 looks as if director Darrell James Roodt (Dangerous Ground) shot it in the lower level of a South Africa franchise location of Jiffy Lube. Considering he managed to find a way to include a scene of Coolio taking bong hits, but failed to get Eleniak to strip out of a sailor suit while emerging from a giant cake, Roodt deserves as much scorn as you can muster.

Just when I thought I’d finally found a genre movie with a muscular African-American man who doesn’t exclaim, “Now that’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout!,” Lister pops up in an end-credits stinger to utter those very words directly to the camera, then punctuates them with a slap to Eleniak’s ass. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Remember the late-’90s resurgence of that quintessentially ’70s genre known as the disaster film? Although short-lived, audience enthusiasm for it was so strong that in the summer of 1998, two space-rock epics — Deep Impact and Armageddon — competed for cash and both became major hits. But in 1979, Meteor had the space-rock scenario all to itself, yet flopped massively. Not only did its failure signal the death knell of the disaster craze, but also of indie distributor AIP, in way over its otherwise budget-mindful head by deviating from the low-risk/high-rewards model it had perfected for decades. It’s not like AIP hadn’t promoted it; for months, you’d couldn’t glimpse the back cover of a Marvel comic book without being exposed to an ad.

Helmed by The Poseidon Adventure’s Ronald Neame, Meteor opens with a look at Orpheus, an asteroid some 20 miles in diameter. But that’s not the object that gets scientists in a collective tizzy. Now, when a passing comet smashes Orpheus into several pieces, sending a 5-mile chunk hurtling toward Earth, that they worry about — and not without merit, because its touchdown would trigger another ice age. With only a six-day head start on its ETA, what’s a National Aeronautics and Space Administration to do?

They call in Paul Bradley (Sean Connery, Never Say Never Again), engineer of the U.S. Hercules missile defense system floating in space. Because each of its nuclear rockets packs a one-megaton punch, NASA enlists Paul’s help in realigning Herc to point toward rocks, not Russia. NASA needs Russia to do the same with their missiles, so those Commies come onsite, too — well, two of them: Dr. Dubov (Brian Keith, Death Before Dishonor) and his interpreter, Tatania (Natalie Wood, The Great Race), the latter pulling double duty as Paul’s instant romantic interest. In the face of global cataclysm, America’s real enemy is one of our own: a disbelieving Air Force general (Martin Landau, Ed Wood) who functions as a monkey wrench to the multinational plans; he is to this movie what real-life Sen. Jim Inhofe is to climate change: a buffoon.

Some 40 minutes in, penetration occurs! Not of Tatania by Paul, but our planet’s atmosphere by Orpheus fragments. Disregarding the aged effects, these sequences mark Meteor’s high points, and Neame ensures they avoid repetition by having them play out differently from one another. It’s as if he helmed several types of destructo-flicks within one end-all-be-all package. For example:
• Europe gets an avalanche, complete with sexy skier Sybil Danning (The Concorde … Airport ’79) and footage recycled from the previous year’s Avalanche;
• Asia takes a tidal wave;
• and America has to settle for an earthquake (and the takedown of the World Trade Center, but let’s not go there), leading to a set piece inside a flooding subway car.

Connery is so surly throughout, it’s difficult to know for certain where his performance begins and ends. Did he bark lines “Why don’t ya stick a broom up my ass?” with gusto because the script called for it or because he was disinterested in masking his contempt for the material? At least he exudes more passion than the oddly wooden Wood, who is miscast as a Russian despite being born from Russian parents! While Meteor is not the outright bore its reputation suggests, it’s also not the spectacle we’d expect. Let’s just say Irwin Allen could have Irwin Allen’d the shit out of this material, and call it a draw. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Seeing green (with envy) at the massive success Marvel Studios has had with its shared cinematic universe, Universal Pictures announced that audiences can look forward to seeing its classic movie monsters intersect across a “Dark Universe” of reboots, starting not with 2014’s Dracula Untold, which would have been logical (and, at $70 million, relatively cheap), but this summer’s creaky, extra-pricey, been-there-done-that The Mummy. It smacks of a high concept on a low boil.

Well, you gotta start somewhere.

And for screenwriter-turned-director Alex Kurtzman, “somewhere” is more or less 1999’s The Mummy, whose flashback prologue this film apes, but gender-flips, making the bandaged bandit a woman (Sofia Boutella, Kingsman: The Secret Service) with double the necessary retinas, hieroglyphs for facial tattoos and a wicked kiss of death. She and her curse are awakened — or rather, unleashed — when asshole adventurer Nick Morton (Tom Cruise, Jack Reacher) dares muck with Ahmanet’s tomb, accidentally discovered buried beneath the Persian desert. Lucky for Nick, doing so saves his life when he perishes in a plane crash, only to reanimate himself while nude in a body bag on the morgue slab.

Don’t ask questions; the movie makes only a minimal effort at grasping coherence. It does what little it can get away with just enough to set up the bulk of the pic, which is Nick and his fetching one-night-stand of a foil (Annabelle Wallis, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword) literally running from Ahmanet, her zombie posse and an array of spiders, rats and exploding glass. Midway through, they meet Dr. Jekyll (Russell Crowe, The Nice Guys), for no other reason than to introduce a character for future Dark Universe installments; Jekyll is this franchise’s Nick Fury, but with zero employee-engagement skills.

While not quite the total train wreck so many have expected for months, this Mummy is no better than the worst among the Brendan Fraser-led trilogy or its Dwayne Johnson spin-off, The Scorpion King. Those pics’ feel-good, Indiana Jones-inspired flair has been jettisoned for an approach that leans in toward horror without fully committing. Whatever usual care Cruise takes to pick his projects was asleep at the E-meter the day he signed on the dotted line for this flat phantasmagoria; among supernatural elements, he clearly is out of his comfort zone, and it shows in a performance sapped of charm. Not being able to rely on him as an anchor, the film falters (even when the effects impress), most glaringly with an ending that is so laughably wretched, it does the cringing for you. Haste indeed made waste. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

It does not take much for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 to generate instant goodwill among viewers — just the earworm that is Electric Light Orchestra’s “Mr. Blue Sky,” the 1977 pop confection to which tiny tree creature Baby Groot so adorably grooves, oblivious to what unfolds behind him: his teammates’ all-hands-on-deck battle with a giant space monster. (Geez, Louise, how I wish I held stock in Baby Groot merch.) This opening bit is but one way in which returning writer/director James Gunn wrings maximum mileage from Vol. 2’s existence as a sequel to the 2014 surprise smash-hit original: It leaps right into the fray. No re-introducing the characters, no sequences of having to get the band back together — waste not, want not. It’s bigger, better and much, much funnier.

This time around, the wisecracking, Walkman-worshipping Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord (Chris Pratt, 2016’s The Magnificent Seven) learns a little more — okay, a lot more — about his past on Earth. In fact, he finally comes face-to-face with the father he never knew, Ego, played by the always-welcome Kurt Russell (The Hateful Eight). Family — whether real, surrogate, dysfunctional or otherwise — is the thread sewn through all the storylines, especially with green-skinned Gamora (Zoe Saldana, Star Trek Beyond) experiencing sibling rivalry taken to the extreme, as her sister, Nebula (Karen Gillan, The Circle), tries to kill her. Or with Yondu (Michael Rooker, The Belko Experiment), the finned-headed baddie of the first adventure, flipping sides due to fatherly affection for Quill. Or with Baby Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel, xXx: Return of Xander Cage) serving as the needy infant to every other Guardian, upper- and lowercase. More examples exist.

In shortcutting the setup, Gunn frees more time to let Gamora and her fellow Guardians have more to do than in the first film, and benefiting most is Drax (Dave Bautista, Spectre), the superhuman muscleman with no social filter. His scenes with Ego’s antennae-bearing assistant, the telepathic Mantis (Pom Klementieff, 2013’s Oldboy remake), make for some laugh-out-loud moments. The downside to the wider canvas? An expanded running time of 136 minutes that can’t help but fall victim to third-act bloat — a problem not limited to this film or even all Marvel Studios product, but effects-driven Hollywood blockbusters in general.

At least the enormous success of Guardians of the Galaxy (which I found fine, but hardly the Greatest Thing Ever so many others did) allowed Gunn to rubber-stamp Vol. 2 with his distinctive brand of subversive humor — in permanent red ink, no less. Those who have followed the Troma undergrad‘s filmmaking efforts from the start will recognize more of his touch, and less of Marvel corporate’s. (Watch in particular for the scene where Rocket Raccoon, voiced by The Hangover trilogy’s Bradley Cooper, asks for a piece of tape.) In fact, if you watch Gunn’s two superhero parodies prior to him getting in bed with Marvel, 2000’s The Specials and 2010’s Super, you’ll notice he unknowingly had been auditioning for this gig all along. The major differences are that he can cast Sylvester Stallone instead of Josh Duhamel, and that millions now appreciate him instead of hundreds. Gunn and his Guardians deserve it, for this and future volumes. —Rod Lott