My wife insists, with characteristic respect, that it’s because I’m a “miserable, grumpy old git”, but I rudely respond by saying she’s too easily amused (Sally married me, after all, which confirms her hilarious lack of discernment).
“Thrillers” deliver me no such frisson, and most other film genres leave me slumped on the couch (I long ago gave up cinemas and enforced proximity to strangers in the dark), loudly pointing out the banal plot signposts and thereby – big plus! – emptying the room.
Action films, while I used to love them, are now my disappointment of choice. Is it still a condition of greenlighting your project that it must include a bomb with a handy digital countdown that moves slower than the film? And a cheeky young renegade who can crack the most sophisticated password in three goes, when to get into my laptop they’d need to know a mate’s schoolyard nickname and my dead grandmother’s phone number.
Can rogue spy agencies really use satellites to track people across foreign cities in real time and dispatch teams of killers to intercept them without applying for a visa? And if it were as easy as it looks for evil billionaires to eliminate anyone in their way, there wouldn’t be a politician left standing (yes, I know, we can only dream). Not boasting, but I could once, thanks to my youthful military training in a distant land, strip and swiftly reassemble an L7 “Gimpy” general purpose machine gun. This is not a talent I’ve had to call upon lately, which is lucky as I now barely remember which end the hurty bits come out of.
No such problem, however, for the pitiful Hollywood dad, teased at work and mocked by his family – until someone (as usual) gets kidnapped, because it turns out that 20 years ago he was a deep-cover, highly trained assassin, and all he has to do to reactivate his surprisingly non-perishable skills is to narrow his eyes and set his jaw.
US government-sanctioned black ops are popular stepping stones to a career as a middle-aged schoolteacher or real-estate agent: go through their unremarkable suburban homes pressing walls and furniture and before you know it a secret panel will slide open to reveal the stash of international passports that never go out of date, bundles of foreign banknotes, guns in neatly indented cases and enough knives to arouse a jaded ninja.
Still, at least the scriptwriters are making a sad stab at creativity, unlike the cynical regurgitators of sequels and, worse, remakes. No, Colin Farrell, Total Recall is Arnie’s film; and to the rest of you, we didn’t need another Point Break, Robocop, Wicker Man, Oldboy or Jackal. As for Sylvester Stallone in his rubbish version of Get Carter, Michael Caine would have made short work of him.
I could go on, but I’ve run out of space before savouring the bitter aftertaste of modern novels. Look out for the blockbuster sequel, Whinge II: The Reckoning, coming to a newspaper near you next month.
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It was four boxes, not one; the ASMR was dire; and completion took more than four hours: a shambolic unboxing.
It’s not uncommon, I suspect, but my entertainment threshold seems to be rising as quickly and scarily as my age, with no obvious way of lowering either. My interest in the few sports I like to watch remains moderate but steady, as the players these days are fitter and more skilful, but in the creative field no one seems to be getting any better. Current projections have me dying of boredom in mid-November 2029, unable to endure any more badly written, predictable and cliche-polluted films, TV series or books.