josh hartnett

Verity (2026)

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A couple of months ago, when writing about The End of Oak Street, I mentioned that Anne Hathaway has a generational talent for delivering dialogue that is overwritten, overwrought, and trite. And she does! Alas, she seems to have finally met her match in Colleen Hoover. 

A young writer with the far-fetched name of Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) gets a call from her agent after an in-store reading that only a couple of people attend, letting her know about an opportunity that has arisen and advising her to appear for a meeting the following day. Walking to the appointment, Lowen narrowly misses being hit by a car, although an ill-fated bike messenger is not so lucky, and she ends up covered in his blood. A handsome bystander (Josh Hartnett) leads her away to get cleaned up and even gives her his shirt to replace her own ruined one. When she arrives to Hachette Publishing, Lowen learns that the man is Jeremy, husband to best-selling author Verity Crawford (Hathaway), and that Verity’s publisher is seeking someone to ghost write the last three books in Verity’s ongoing series, per some unexplained tragedy that has befallen the Crawford family. Initially resistant, Lowen eventually accepts the job, and the invitation to stay at Verity’s home and work from her office there. Upon arrival, she meets Verity and Jeremy’s young son Crew, as well as Anna (Irina Dvorovenko), who is now nurse to the completely catatonic Verity. But all may not be as it seems . . .

I had a lot of fun watching this, but make no mistake, it is a bad movie. I was hoping that all of its negative reviews would prove to be untrue, that there would be something really enjoyable and noteworthy here, but I’m sorry to say that this was simply not good. I’ve never read any of Hoover’s books in their entirety, but I’ve read enough samples (and been subjected to enough trailers of adaptations of her films) to realize that I should have known better than to think this cast and this director would be able to make a good film out of her source material. I’m no stranger to Dakota Johnson’s acting, and in fact, I’m a fan. I gave Madame Web a 5-star review and forced my fellow podcasters to watch it so I would have someone to talk to about it. I’m so charmed by her that I was tricked into enjoying The Materialists, for goodness’s sake. Josh Hartnett’s career resurgence has been a source of delight for me, and I was also excited to see him and Hathaway on screen; they’re both great performers who rarely let me down, even in mediocre flicks. Unfortunately, Johnson’s charm only shines through in rare moments, Hartnett is stiff and wooden at the best of times and has zero chemistry with Johnson, and Hathaway is mostly reduced to reciting passages from her own (read: Hoover’s) work, which has less literary merit than the “1 gallon / 1.78 liters per flush” sticker on the urinal at the megaplex where I witnessed Verity in all of its “glory.”

Verity bears more than a passing resemblance to Hitchcock’s Rebecca; a working-class woman who has recently lost her mother is given the opportunity to live in a gorgeous, remote home with a man who is rich, charming, and handsome, and the film’s primary conflict revolves around a drowning that may be more than it seems. There are other borrowings from Hitch’s filmography as well, most tellingly in the superimposition of images over one another as in The Wrong Man and Spellbound, which run the gamut from somewhat inspired (Lowen puffs on her vape reading Verity’s work while Verity smokes a cigarette as she composes it) to absurd (a scene wherein Lowen looks out over the house’s view is poorly composited to look like she’s reflected in the glass rather than doing so in camera, for reasons I cannot fathom). Unlike the first Mrs. de Winter, Verity is still alive, but only in the most technical sense, and thus she haunts the house in a much more literal way than Rebecca did Manderly, but the connections are there. You can imagine my disappointment when the apparent Mrs. Danvers stand-in, Anna, ultimately ends up having very little to do with the plot; she doesn’t even do enough to function as a red herring. Instead, the narrative hinges on Lowen’s discovery of a concealed manuscript entitled So Be It, an autobiography in which Verity confesses that she was jealous of the portion of Jeremy’s affection that her twin children took from her, and that she despised them for it even before they were born. In it, Verity paints herself as a monstrous sociopath devoid of all but one recognizable human emotion (unquenchable lust for Jeremy) and admits to taking several criminal actions. Lowen briefly asks Jeremy how he and Verity met, and when it matches the manuscript, she believes everything else found within it, which leads her down a path where she begins to suspect that Verity may be feigning her incapacitation.

Reading a summary of the source novel indicates that there were some wise excisions and some baffling changes. In the novel, the Crawfords actually have two deceased children, while the film condenses these two characters down to a single dead daughter; that’s a smart choice to make this a cleaner narrative and makes the film less oriented toward a literary genre we might call “tragedy porn.” Other changes are less coherent. There’s a murder in both texts that the characters intend to make appear to be an accident, but the novel’s version will hold up to some scrutiny while the film’s will not (asphyxiation is unlikely to be confused for drowning by any medical examiner). I also get the feeling that Lowen’s mother’s passing is a more important plot element in the book, given that this would create more opportunities for her to connect Verity’s catatonia to her mother’s lingering illness in her mind, but I’m also not about to give the novel credit for cleverness in that regard, even without having read it. In this film, Lowen says that she “[doesn’t] read books you can buy at the airport,” which feels like a dig at Hoover’s own widespread, lowest common denominator of reader appeal, but we don’t get to hear or read enough of Lowen’s own work to see if she’s actually any more talented than Verity. Worse, the examples of Verity’s work that we get are virtually indistinguishable from Hoover excerpts I’ve seen. There’s a version of this story that might work, but not as written here.

Writers writing about writing is a cliché, but it’s also a forgivable one given that most academic compositional instruction directs students to “write what you know.” What’s unforgivable here, however, is that there’s a fundamental lack of curiosity about literature on display that hollows out a narrative that’s already basic and noncontemplative. We get very little idea of what drives Lowen’s own writing other than her pretentions about being better than airport novelists. She never talks about how her writing allowed her an outlet for her frustrations over having to care for her ailing mother or navigate the complexity of her emotions about said caretaking relationship. What little information we get about her, in her opening voiceover, indicates that she prefers living in a large city and the anonymity that provides over the nature of her small town, where everyone knows everyone else’s business, but this doesn’t hold up under any kind of scrutiny. How did she and her mother come to live in New York, then? Did she move to the city when she became an adult and then her mother moved in with her? We don’t get any clue about that, and at the end of the film she seems completely comfortable moving to a small town in North Carolina without even paying lip service to how her desires may have changed because of her time in the Crawford home. There’s a scene in which Lowen comes into the dining room while Jeremy is reading, and there’s a perfect opportunity for the two of them to have a conversation about the book, perhaps discussing its themes in a way that deepens one or both characters, but any chance that the narrative might comment on itself goes out of the window since we never even find out what book was in Jeremy’s hands. It’s a story in which the characters’ reading habits are irrelevant other than in the performance of being a reader. Verity wants you to know that it’s a story about literary people, but cares very little for what they might be ingesting or meditating on, what any given text might mean to them, or anything else that might give us an idea of their internal lives. I have no doubt that the source text was airport slop, and this film will end up being the same: suitable to put on a small screen on the back of an airplane seat to distract you for a couple of unchallenging hours between points A and B, and nothing more.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Fight or Flight (2025)

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Ironically, Fight or Flight seems to be flying under the radar. The new action comedy from first time feature director James Madigan is a lot of hyperactive, frenetic fun, even when some of the comedy thuds a bit. Some of that may fall on the writing duo of Brooks McLaren and D.J. Cotrona. McLaren’s only previous writing credit is for the 2018 direct-to-Netflix Theo James vehicle How it Ends, while this is Cotrona’s first credit in that category after several years as an actor, most notably as the lead in the From Dusk till Dawn TV series. Despite some weak jokes that fail to land (no pun intended), this is still a pretty fun ride (no pun intended). And hey, stars of both of the turn of the millennium Halloween sequels (Josh Hartnett from 1998’s H20 and Katee Sackhoff from 2002’s Resurrection) appear in a movie together, even if they never share the screen at the same time. That’s something, right? 

Hartnett is Lucas Reyes, who’s drinking himself to death in exile in Bangkok. Stateside, Katherine Brunt (Sackhoff) is busy leading a shadowy quasi-government agency/surveillance network. Her subordinate, Hunter (White Lotus’s Julian Kostov), informs her of a failed unauthorized action that resulted in an explosion in Asia, and that it appears that the incident involved “The Ghost,” a “black hat hacker” and terrorist about which no agency has ever been able to get any information. An overzealous lackey manages to find nearby footage that has been edited to remove the Ghost, Dead Reckoning style, and they extrapolate that they are headed for the Bangkok airport, with the nearest action team too far away to get there in time. Reluctantly, Brunt calls on Reyes, promising to clear up his legal status and allow him to come home. All he has to do is get on the plane, discover the identity of the Ghost and safely take them into custody, and deliver them to the agency alive when the plane lands in San Francisco. Should be simple, except that once they’re airborne, Brunt learns that this whole thing is a trap for the Ghost; an all points bounty has been put out for them, meaning that the plane is full of potential assassins. 

That’s a concept that’s both high and a little broey, and it’s no surprise that when the jokes don’t work it’s because it leans into the latter rather than the former. After I had already groaned at the hyperactive stagey performance of the high-strung air steward Royce (Danny Ashok), what really thudded for me was one of the scenes that revealed more about the conspiracy. Brunt and Hunter take a walk outside of the agency’s headquarters as they discuss who knew what and when and whether or not one of them has any involvement in the leaking of the Ghost’s location, and there’s a lot of hay made (tediously) about how life is all about being top dog, full of machismo from both characters. When they end the discussion, they’ve reached a nearby waterfront, where a yoga class is being conducted by a long-haired hippie type; after they express their mutual disgust at this display, Brunt shakes her head and utters “Pussies.” It’s such a strange little cul-de-sac that exists for no reason other than to show Brunt and Hunter as adversaries vying for the position of alpha, with the oh-so-funny comical turn that it’s a woman calling people pussies. It’s these kinds of things that make this film feel weirdly out of touch in certain places, where ten percent edgelordiness seeps over and cheapens the whole thing. 

Of course, the film is kind of a throwback in other ways. The “X on a plane” format is probably best remembered for giving us Snakes on a Plane, but this is more reminiscent of nineties skybound thrillers like Con Air and Air Force One, with a little bit of Final Destination-esque plane depressurization thrown in for good measure (this is not a spoiler; it’s the first scene). It’s got the shady government agency staffed by former CIA and other operatives but which now operates under a banner that remains undisclosed until fairly late in the game, and the conspiratorial actions that they perpetrate have a distinctly pre-War on Terror feel — more Enemy of the State than The Bourne Identity, although when the film shifts into fight sequences it utilizes the shaky cam effects canonized in that series before becoming the default in virtually every action thriller today. There’s also the presence of an inexplicably powerful supercomputer that the Ghost has created and which represents a threat to certain intelligence infrastructure, and the fact that this asset may be the reason that the Ghost was herded onto an airplane with assassins in the first place. Maybe because I was already in that headspace, this element felt very 90s to me as well, as the writing felt intentionally designed to imitate that “computers can do anything” optimism/fearmongering of the era, from uploading a virus to an alien mothership in Independence Day to deleting your entire identity in The Net. More depressingly, the film acts as if exposing governments and corporations for their exploitation of third world labor and participation in human trafficking would somehow have a negative effect on those entities. The reality that we all inhabit here in 2025 is one where people are still in the highest offices of power despite damning evidence of their involvement with Jeffrey Epstein and people still upgrade their phones every time there’s a new status symbol with full knowledge that they come from sweatshops that “employ” children. It’s cute that the film thinks that the Ghost’s wikileak might have some impact on anything at all; I wish I still had that kind of optimism. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Trap (2024)

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My best friend constantly teases me about how I rate and rank movies, and how sometimes I’ll describe what seems to her to be the worst movie she’s ever heard of, but which I’ll find something to praise about and then wind up giving it 3.5 stars. For weeks in advance of the premiere of Trap, while she predicted (accurately) that I’d give this one that rating, we speculated about what the major twist would be. I put my money on the premise being that Josh Hartnett’s character was actually kidnapping people because his daughter was some kind of vampire creature, which may simply have been because I saw the trailer for this in conjunction with the one for Abigail so many times that it incepted me a little. In reality, there’s no “big twist” in this one, with the portioned revelations coming not in the form of a huge rug pull but like actual ongoing narrative reveals. I know that what I’m describing is just “a movie” but when you’re talking about a director whose early career was so defined by his whiplash endings that, (A) if you remember Robot Chicken mocking him with the quote “What a twist!”, then congratulations, it’s time to schedule that colonoscopy—that episode aired in 2005—and (B) something this relatively straightforward seems like a novelty. 

Tweenage Riley (Ariel Donoghue) has been having a tough time at school lately, entering that period of adolescence where friend groups start to change and ostracization can be at its most emotionally damaging. She still got good grades this semester, so, as promised, her father Cooper (Josh Hartnett) is taking her to see her favorite pop star, Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan). Upon arrival, however, he starts to note that there’s a massive police presence at the arena where the concert is being held, and he discovers that the police learned that a serial killer known as “The Butcher” would be attendance that evening and have turned the entire place into a, well, Trap in order to put an end to his reign of terror. That’s bad news for Cooper, since The Butcher is him. Of course, if you saw the trailer, then you already know that, and you might even assume that this will be the film’s entire premise (I did), but this reveal comes very early in the film and the movie eventually spills out of the arena and into the streets, with quite a lot of plot left to go. I was delighted to see Alison Pill’s name in the credits, and flabbergasted to see the name “Hayley Mills” appear before my eyes. She’s in far less of the movie than one would want, as she plays the FBI profiler who has helped to create the titular trap; the film does play with this, however, as she frequently explains over the radio (one of which Cooper has pilfered) what the Butcher’s next most likely action will be while Cooper is doing it, forcing him to have to reverse and rethink his actions on the fly. Although her role is small, it’s omnipresent and pervasive, and that was fun. 

This feels like M. Night Shyamalan doing his version of a Hitchcock plot. We’ve got a dangerous man stuck in a situation that was devised specifically to entrap him and use his own psychology against him, using his quick thinking (and a lot of luck) to stay one step ahead of his pursuers. It’s as if Roger Thornhill from North by Northwest actually was George Kaplan, and Kaplan was a murderer. Like Norman Bates, Cooper is a man that we know is guilty, and for whom we can’t help but hope that his plan succeeds, because we’re with him every moment — trying to get away from the overly apologetic and invested mother of one of Riley’s friends-turned-mean-girls, watching nervously as other men are pulled out of the crowd for questioning, and being directly questioned by an officer after having learned the codeword taught to stadium staff, but not realizing that he would need to present additional documentation. All through it, Hartnett’s choice to play Cooper as ever-so-slightly off is incredibly effective; he seems superficially charming, and Josh Hartnett’s natural good looks go a long way to explaining why no one seems to notice that there’s something wrong. There’s a real juggling act going on in this performance, as Cooper’s mannerisms seem practiced and artificial every time that he has to interact with another person, like he’s spent a long time imitating human behavior but still hasn’t quite gotten it down, like he’s fluent in being normal, but it’s unmistakably accented. The only time he seems to be himself and not putting on the character of “Cooper” is when he’s alone and calculating his escape route, or when he’s with Riley, which does a lot of work humanizing him. 

One really noteworthy thing here is that this empathy we naturally have for our primary viewpoint character takes a strange turn at about the midpoint, when Lady Raven becomes aware that Cooper is The Butcher and thinks quickly and cleverly in order to stick with him in a way that he can’t prevent without revealing himself. She briefly becomes the heroine of the story, as she manages to get Cooper’s phone away from him and use it to get more information about where his latest victim is being held and then going on Instagram live to ask her massive group of fans to help her find and save the man. The trailers would lead you to believe that the pop superstar arena show is just set dressing, or a means to justify having all of the action take place in a stadium for the novelty of the location, but Lady Raven actually ends up being central to the plot and even emanates a bit of Final Girl energy. Surprisingly, I also found Raven’s music, which Saleka Shyamalan composed and performed herself, to be a lot of fun. Not every one of the tracks that she performs hits the same, but there were a few legitimate bops in there; not since Josie and the Pussycats or Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping have I enjoyed a movie’s representation of in-universe popular music as much as this, and both of those were comedies. If this movie was a backdoor into springboarding a larger music career for her, I’d say she has a decent chance, and it got me out of the house and into a place where I witnessed shirtless Josh Hartnett (he’s still got it, in case you were wondering) get tased by Hayley Mills (she does too), larger than life. 

There are, of course, some issues. The fact that all of Cooper/The Butcher’s victims are talked about in glowing terms about what great parents/teachers/children/community members they were got a bit of an eyeroll out of me; I don’t need the victims of a serial murderer to be paragons of heteronormative virtue in order to think that their deaths are tragic. If anything, heaping that much praise on them early in the film made me think that the big Shyamalan Twist™ was going to be that Cooper was some kind of vigilante picking off people whose apparent moral perfection belied their true, evil natures. Further, nitpickers will find a lot to complain about here, as there are a number of instances in which Cooper eludes the law’s grasp through pure luck rather than through any ingenuity. This starts first when he manages to find himself in the good graces of an arena employee (Jonathan Langdon) mostly because of his handling of a situation in which Riley and another girl have conflict over the last tour shirt in their shared size, which feels like a reach. Later, however, Cooper dons an apron to pose as staff while attempting to escape to the roof and is stopped by security, who ask him to present a card in conjunction with the codeword, and he just so happens to have grabbed an apron in which the real employee left their wallet, “I’m not The Butcher” card and all. It’s a narrative necessity, but you already know how the people who treat the enjoyment of the cinematic art as some kind of argument to win are going to beat this talking point to death whenever the social media algorithm figures out how to spin Trap discourse into your timeline. I hate to side with them at all, but by the time that Riley gets pulled on-stage to dance with Lady Raven, I had to concede that there were some “conveniences” that might have been spackled over with just one more draft of the script. The fact that Cooper has OCD and that this is something that is only barely hinted at (when he folds his napkin very precisely when he and Riley grab food at the concert) before it becomes a major part of his profile, which ends up seeming a little underbaked, but otherwise, the planting and payoff is effective. 

This is a pretty good time. Nepotism aside, Saleka Shyamalan is a welcome screen presence with musical talent that makes this one work in a way that it absolutely wouldn’t if the concert that the characters were attending felt as artificial as they often do in movies and TV. (There’s actually a cute moment in the early part of the film wherein Riley is singing along to Lady Raven in the car and missing many of the notes, then says to her father that she might want to be a singer one day, and he politely goes along with this dream, which is very funny in the context of said singer being the director’s daughter.) Hartnett is always a welcome addition to any cast, and although seeing the heartthrob of The Faculty and Halloween H20 playing the father of a middle schooler aged me like I had just stepped onto the beach that makes you old, he was great here. I honestly didn’t really realize that Hayley Mills was alive, but seeing her here made me realize how much I’ve missed her, and I hope that this emergence from retirement is long lived and that I get to see her again soon (she also really classes up the joint). It may not be worth running out to the theater to see, but this is one I’d recommend checking out for a nice, low stakes movie night when it comes to home video. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond