Give me the stupidest movie you have

I've already professed my love for honest-to-god trash movies, but over Labor Day weekend I was lucky enough to be seated for one of the most shamelessly stupid movie trailers I've seen in a long time. And I couldn't be happier about it.

We've been hearing for some time now that the movies are back. And of course they're back, and of course they've never really left, but a summer buoyed by Spider-Man: Brand New Day, The Odyssey, Toy Story 5 and a bevy of others have resulted in a cumulative box office of nearly $5 billion, which is (as you may have guessed) a record. So it just stands to reason that the time is ripe for big, stupid action movies. The stupider the better.

Recently, these big stupid actioners have mostly landed on streaming services. Basically every streaming app you can think of has a big stupid paint-by-numbers explosions flick dropping at a rate of a minimum of one per month, but you've never heard of them and you're never going to watch them, unless you get hit by the autoplay algo when your latest rewatch of Bosch gets to the last episode.

And that's why it warms my heart to see that Angel Films, the weirdo maybe-Mormon, maybe-Christian production house that brought us such hits as Sound of Freedom and the Andy Serkis-directed Animal Farm that absolutely zero people enjoyed, has taken what is allegedly a Blacklist script and have tapped the director of the fourth Expendables to give us ... this:

That's Alan "Reacher" Ritchson and Owen "Wow" Wilson in a keep-the-human-organ-safe-so-a-little-girl-won't-die buddy blow-'em-up. And yeah, there's a bird.

This is a movie that presents as so paint by numbers that you absolutely know every single beat of it just from watching this trailer. It completely rules. The shots of the Sick Little Girl! The Tortured Backstory of the Reluctant Badass! The Nebbishy Corporate Stooge who Learns How to Feel Alive through the transformative power of Killing Some Guys.

As I mentioned, this is apparently a Blacklist script, so I don't know what it may have looked like before it became Stupid Action Movie 101, but if the Blacklist is now championing a cliche pile, I would like to direct them to my screenplays so that I may find some of this "money" that people are using to "make movies" and "put them in theaters." (Strangely, Wikipedia and lots of outlets are referencing Academy Award-winning documentary The Cove in reference to this movie, but the two screenwriters of The Runner merely acted as two of the many assistant editors on that film. That's a bigger stretch than those posters that are like FROM A PRODUCER OF STAR WARS.)

I'm looking forward to watching Alan Ritchson toss ready-to-explode-at-a-moment's-notice oxygen tanks at cars and watching Owen Wilson catch a payday to be the comic relief here. And I'm looking forward to seeing what happens to the bird.