katee sackhoff

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

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – The Long Halloween Pts. 1 & 2 (2021)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.

When I watched Matt Reeves’s The Batman a couple of years ago, one of the things that struck me about it was how much more I thought I would have enjoyed it as a standard crime movie without all the baggage of being attached to a huge intellectual property. Although that comes with making a film that’s all but guaranteed to make a profit (note: I started composing this review before the underwhelming opening of Folie à Deux), it’s also ultimately pretty limiting in how creative you can be before you start alienating that core audience by deviating “too much” from the source material. When it comes to The Long Halloween, I read the source material some fifteen years ago, but there were elements of the Robert Pattinson movie that seemed familiar, and now having had my memory refreshed by the animated adaptation of that comic, it’s clear that the live action movie took major plot inspiration from it. Strange that two such similar projects/products were in production at the same time and released within such proximity, with this week’s double feature having been released in 2021, followed closely by The Batman in 2022. Given that this was split into two roughly 85-minute halves, they add up to almost the same length (2 hours 56 minutes for the Reeves film, 2 hours 52 minutes for The Long Halloween) as well, which makes the comparison between the two almost a requirement. Since this is also a special double feature “issue,” I also did something a little special this week and watched this movie with a couple of friends, instead of late at night, alone and ashamed in the dark, so we’ll have some additional commentary tonight. 

A special note! This film is based on a highly regarded comic book from the 1990s, and which essentially continued the story from the 1987 miniseries Batman: Year One, which was previously adapted to an animated film. This film is not a sequel to that one. It is, however, placed in the “Tomorrowverse” series that began with Man of Tomorrow. This means that this one has that same thick-line art style as that film, which I mostly managed to get used to over the course of almost three hours, but every time Jim Gordon was on screen all I could think about was Rusty Venture. This is neither derogatory or a compliment, just an observation. 

Ok, it’s a little derogatory. 

It’s early in the career of the Batman (Jensen Ackles). Bruce Wayne is pressured by Gotham City mob boss Carmine Falcone (Titus Welliver) to help him launder his money, leading him to ally himself with new, seemingly incorruptible Gotham District Attorney Harvey Dent (Josh Duhamel) and Commissioner Jim Gordon (Billy Burke) – not as Wayne, of course, but as Batman. When he breaks into the Falcone penthouse to search for evidence, he encounters Catwoman (Naya Rivera), who is doing the same thing; they chase each other around doing parkour and other such foreplay. She leads him to a warehouse where cash is waiting to be laundered, and Batman, Gordon, and Dent agree to destroy it in order to strike a crippling blow to Falcone’s machine. Falcone’s waging a war on two fronts, as people close to him begin to drop like flies at the hands of a serial killer that the press nicknames “Holiday,” as each of the victims is slain on a holiday, beginning with Halloween. The killer’s m.o. is simple: a single gunshot, silenced by the nipple of a baby bottle. As the year of the titular “long Halloween” plays out, Arkham Asylum lives up to its reputation, as several of the old rogues gallery escape from their confinement there, including Scarecrow, Poison Ivy (Katee Sackhoff!), and, as you would expect, the Joker (Troy Baker). At the heart of it all, however, remains the question: who is Holiday? 

During the break between the first and second parts of this story, one of my viewing companions asked me how this one compared to the others that I have watched so far. I explained my tier system and said that, at least at that point, The Long Halloween was above average. I genuinely had no idea who the killer would turn out to be, I was engaged with the mystery, and I appreciated the film’s attempts to be more of a gangster movie than a comic book one, even if all of the goodwill it had in that arena required that it lift lines directly from The Godfather. And, hey, the last scene of that first one involved a man being shot overboard in Gotham Harbor and then getting atomized by a yacht’s giant subsurface turbines. You don’t see that every day! There are a few seemingly irrelevant scenes early in the film that featured Solomon Grundy, and I asked my not-well-versed-in-comics viewing companion if any of those scenes meant anything to her or if she even understood them, and she assured me that they did not. It’s rare to be able to get that kind of feedback from someone with neither much interest in these films in general or knowledge about all the things that get stuffed in here. This illustrated one of the issues that I have with these movies, which is that they aren’t really accessible to someone who isn’t already at least somewhat steeped in the fiction that this conglomerate has been producing for nearly a century. On the other hand, it’s not really clear who would be interested in these things other than those people. 

For what it’s worth, I appreciated that the film had a consistent theme of duality throughout. That’s patently obvious in the character of Two-Face, but one of the things that I liked here was that it was unclear from the outset whether Bruce and Selena know about the other’s nocturnal activities. My interpretation of the narrative is that neither one of them knows, but that Selena figures it out first and it takes Bruce a bit longer. When the two of them break up (as Selena and Bruce), Bruce says something along the lines of “We’re just two different people,” which I appreciated as a little bit of clever dialogue since both of them do, in fact, literally have two different personae. Where this is least interesting is in Bruce’s struggle between working in the darkness versus the light, and I have to be honest—I could not make myself care about this at this point. There was this podcast about a decade ago called The Worst Idea of All Time, wherein two NZ comedians watched the same (bad) movie every week for a year and did 52 episodes about it. I had friends who were fans, and at the time I thought I would be tough enough to do that with certain movies. Now, having seen Batman contend with his moral code for the umpteenth time, I can say that those men were brave. It’s beginning to feel purgatorial, frankly. 

That’s not this movie’s fault, however, and I would praise it for having a mystery that I found pretty compelling, and when all of the pieces fell into place, the resolution scratched that same part of my brain that gets pleasure from Murder She Wrote and Columbo. The clues really were there all along, and although I got to the solution before the characters did, it was only by a matter of minutes. That having been said, my viewing companions were not as entertained or engaged by it as I was. Their notes, collectively, identified that the mystery was not that interesting, that Batman seemed kind of dumb, and that the art style makes Jim Gordon look too much like Dr. Venture (oh, wait, that last one is me again). Neutral comments included that “the art style was easy to get used to,” and that it was derivative, but that this could be because it inspired some storytelling elements that are now commonplace or otherwise old hat. We were all in agreement that the film did not, perhaps, need to be this long. The film does not do itself any favors by featuring panels from the comic in its opening credits sequence—artwork which is moody, shadowed, and full of rich character detail—which makes the film’s animation look plain and dulled in comparison. If you want to experience this story, that’s the preferable option. This one makes a case for its existence and makes for a fairly interesting watch, though. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Don’t Knock Twice (2017)

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I’m not sure it’s always necessary for a horror film to justify the surface pleasures of its scares & thrills by linking them to a dramatic metaphor. However, it can be frustrating when one comes close to achieving that dynamic without fully following through. The recent British ghost story Don’t Knock Twice enters into the modern tradition of horror flicks with clear metaphors specifically centering on the anxieties of motherhood: The Babadook, Goodnight Mommy, most of XX, We Need to Talk About Kevin, etc. The frustrating thing is that it nearly succeeds in joining those incredible ranks with an entirely​ new angle on motherhood terror its peers had not yet represented, but falls just short of hitting that target. Ultimately, its demonic scares & familial drama hang separately in the spooky air, never joining forces to drive home its significance as an individual work. That kind if strength in metaphor is not entirely necessary for a modern horror film to feel worthwhile, but without it Don’t Knock Twice struggles to feel substantial in any memorable way.

The always welcome Katee Sackhoff (Oculus, Battlestar Galactica) stars as an American sculptor and recovering drug addict who struggles to reconnect with her teenage daughter (Sing Street‘s Lucy “Riddle of the Model” Boynton) who she gave up for adoption in the British foster system. The daughter is reluctant for obvious reasons to welcome her mother, now essentially a stranger, back into her life, but finds herself in dire need of shelter from a supernatural threat. She & a fellow teen disturb a small, haunted shack near an interstate overpass where a witch’s ghost was rumored to live, knocking on the door twice (hence the title) after being told there would be urban legend-style consequences. The legend turns out to be exactly true and the teen girl finds herself haunted by a demonic witch that follows her from home to home to avenge the transgression. The monster itself (an aged, lanky, inhuman variation on the little girl from The Ring) and the film’s flashy over the top camera work make for plenty of effectively creepy moments: the witch climbing out of a kitchen sink, s ghost slitting its own throat, an Unfriended-style murder witnessed on Skype. The question of what the monster represents and how its terror communicates with the ex-addict mother’s suddenly possessive love for her estranged daughter, however, is much less effective.

There’s a distinct, nightmarish terror in this film’s teen victim being told that her parent, who has hurt her before, is now completely rehabilitated & worthy of trusting forgiveness. The vulnerability of welcoming that parent back into her life and not having her reservations for that forgiveness being taken seriously is not unlike being haunted by a literal ghost from the past that no one but she believes exists. If the demonic witch ghost that causes havoc in the film is supposed to somehow represent the mother’s past as an addict, however, Don’t Knock Twice doesn’t do much to help the metaphor along. A couple major plot twists that bring in murder mystery dynamics outside that central mother-daughter relationship suggest a mixed metaphor where the ghost also represents some kind of abusive evil in the foster system or, more likely yet, represents nothing specific at all. It’s not at all fair to burden Don’t Knock Twice with the expectation of a strong metaphor to support the presence of its demon witch antagonist, but the film comes too close to saying something freshly insightful about parental anxiety & the cycles of addiction not often depicted in horror cinema for the frustration in the shortcomings of its metaphorical potential to be ignored. When that aspect of its story doesn’t land, there’s not much left of its familial drama to hold onto and the film ultimately plays like a more visually striking version of mainstream horror titles like Lights Out & The Darkness. There’s nothing especially wrong with that distinction, but Don’t Knock Twice comes very close to being much greater than that limited ambition suggests.

-Brandon Ledet