Cross Wars (2017)

(On TV, June 2020) Having seen and disliked both the first and the third films in the Cross series, watching the second entry Cross Wars was an exercise in consistency—it’s all amateur nonsense. There’s not much acting, only posturing. The dull cinematography leeches interest out of sequences that should have been interesting to watch, such as the junkyard firefight. It’s all built on a core of comic book clichés and assumptions, none of which translate particularly well to anything beyond fanboy fanfic. Numerous hallmarks of low-budget filmmaking keep sabotaging Cross Wars, perhaps most noticeably fast intercutting without continuity flow. (It’s one of those films where you suspect that actors in a single scene weren’t even in the same room when it was shot.) The ensemble cast severely works against the film—we don’t know these people, and yet the film arrogantly presumes that we care about them. Meanwhile, the story hops left and right in what I’m assuming is an attempt to give everyone an equally interesting part. The crass humour further highlights the rank incompetence of writer-director Patrick Durham. The only thing that’s impressive about Cross Wars (or the series itself) is how terrible it is—you can’t just accidentally make a movie this bad; you have to go out of your way to make it as terrible as it is. It’s not even so-bad-it’s-good: it’s just sad.