Passenger review – generic jumpscare horror offers bumpy journey to nowhere

A demonic entity attaches itself to travellers on the road in this competently directed but hopelessly indistinctive scare-free misfire As Obsession , a micro-budget horror made by a YouTuber , continues to overperform with critics and audiences, and as another twentysomething content creator prepares to break a potential record with the release of Backrooms , here comes a stodgy by-the-book Paramount horror that feels like someone’s embarrassing dad just gatecrashed a college party. While others might be trying to innovate, those involved with Paramount’s generic schedule-filler Passenger are perfectly content to keep things lazily trucking along as they always have. Even if it wasn’t stuck in an unfortunate gen Z genre sandwich, it would still be a struggle to see why anyone would want to hitch a ride with this one. Like February’s cursed misfire Psycho Killer , another junky on-the-road studio horror, Passenger plays like something that would have gone straight to unrated DVD back ...

Renegades review – veteran musclemen team up for ‘geri-action’ caper

Nick Moran and Lee ‘Six Million Dollar Man’ Majors are the star names in this UK thriller, but they are let down by inept action sequences and stilted banter

Cheap as undercooked chips, this British thriller about elderly ex-soldiers avenging a friend’s death belatedly cashes in on the 2010s trend for “geri-action” films, to borrow a term coined by Vulture’s Matt Patches. Though less slick, it resembles those American fisticuff- and gunfire-packed thrillers (the Red and Expendables franchises, for example) built around former big-name actors supplementing their pension schemes.

Directed by Daniel Zirilli, the film features Nick Moran (still best known for Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) as the low-profile protagonist, Burton, a former SAS man suffering from PTSD. He gets scooped up on the street by an old acquaintance, American veteran Carver (former Six Million Dollar Man Lee Majors), who has a beef with some gangsters in his London neighbourhood who are trafficking women, selling drugs and, given the age of everyone here, possibly dealing in black market ration cards.

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