Ceylan is generally pretty good at presenting unlikeable protagonists who are subtly petty and selfish and yet still rather engrossing, able to carry an indulgently long movie. That said I think he got knocked off balance here. The lead is fairly entertaining in the first 45 min or so, but becomes too unbearably nasty by the film's conclusion. There isn't much to learn from in his behavior, he's just patronizing and snotty, a self-important academic who looks down upon the…

A stunning subversion of the original source material ala Starship Troopers, Eli Roth takes the faux-cathartic, objectionable murder reveries of the Bronson original and pares away the tough guy grime. The results are pretty horrifying and perhaps even better than my star rating suggests (though there's some dicey plotting here) - fuckhead dad as wanna be superhero, the forgotten white man attempting to assert himself on the world through clumsy, arbitrary violence.

In this sense its an apt continuation of…