Free Fire

For all its star power, this chamber piece fires all blanks except in its attempt to desensitize to gun violence. An attempt at a comedic crime caper completely misses the target as an arsenal of talented actors fill a Room with less personality than Brie alone has in the past.  

Hardcore Henry

Excessive cutting, terrible acting, and lack of finesse make Hard-to-watch Henry an ultimately failed experiment.  Still this stream of stuff includes a few interesting ideas, most of which are not Sharlto Copley. Clever concept and ambitious acrobatics, though not overly satisfying, might just produce a superior army of cinematic clones.

Chappie

Robot 9 addresses sentiment rather than intellect of AI.  Copley goes to the Serkis while Ripley overcomes her fear of machines and struggles to keep Hugh’s hair from killing Slumdev.  Antwoord raises die question of whether casting actors would have been more effective.  Only artificially intelligent, but not too crappie.

The A-Team

More like C+Team, but still grades about the Expendables’ D-. Qui-Gon joins a hung-over Cooper and an MMA fighter to help take down a Bond-esque District 9. Biel and Wilson tag along and it becomes terribly ridiculous at points, but only out of respect for the utterly inane source material.

District 9

Clever retelling of apartheid that incorporates every video game weapon ever conceived. Bonus points for originality of story and for impressively goopy body explosions. Negative points for silly transformation plot aspect and arbitrary use of documentary footage. One of only seventeen films in 2009 to use the Avatar/Transformers/Terminator Salvation robot.