Mark Wahlberg’s Evan McCauley attends a job interview at a restaurant, where the slimy proprietor grills him about his past struggles with mental health before dismissing him rudely.
But “Infinite” is a movie about superheroes, which means that the stakes have to become, at minimum, planet-size.
And so Nora , one of the good gals, whisks Evan away to a mystical Wakanda-like destination, home to a Xavier Institute–like research center, where he undergoes a Batman–like training routine to save humanity from a Thanos-like villain’s Infinity Stone–like totem.
It’s as if Fuqua and his writers found the source code to the genre and 3-D printed it without any of the primal thrills that make such blockbusters watchable: intricate, ever-expanding world-building; giant objects whizzing into each other with satisfying booms; charismatic characters defying death with panache.
Who can blame Bathurst for being tired of reliving the same stuff over and over again? Yet while he wants to burn the world down, I’m still holding out hope for the movies.