The title A Walk Among the Tombstones sounds like a horror movie or a Western or the last kind of film mass audiences want to see: a poetic art movie. And that, unfortunately, describes this mess. Director-writer Scott Frank stylizes a routine crime drama into an art statement, yet his means are asinine: Studied compositions, portentous characterizations, and lurid, grotesque violence, all to imitate a Liam Neeson ass-kicking thriller.

Hollywood lacked the pop instincts and sociological insight to make films like Taken and Taken 2 (produced by France’s pop adept Luc Besson). These films changed the career of the stolid Neeson by giving him a new big-screen identity, but the Taken series also grasped the new global terrorism ethos. Taken recognized the threat of ideological gangsters and brought home that fear and need for retaliation and self-defense.

But Scott Frank uses Neeson’s stalwart Man of the West figure insultingly, as the excuse for Hollywood‘s usual gross violence, dread, and social sentimentality. Neeson isn’t a father protecting his family here but an alcoholic ex-cop named Matt Scudder in glum pursuit of serial killers.

Frank is half-committed to the title’s implicit nihilism; he plays that Hollywood game of combing bleakness with corniness. Scudder sympathizes with the drug dealers whose family members are kidnapped and brutalized by a pair of gay psychopaths, and along the way, Irish-American Scudder befriends an at-risk black kid, TJ (Brian Astro Bradley), who wants to be a private detective–superhero like Scudder but also longs for a paternal role model. Unsavory and demeaning as all this is, it’s also insultingly calculating. Frank — who made his reputation as a screenwriter with the appalling ’90s comedy-thriller Get Shorty, which was praised for its Hollywood-insider snarky dialogue (“I’ve seen better film on teeth”) — gets arty here.

Fancifully turning Lawrence Block’s 1992 crime novel into a savvy contemporary concoction, Frank steals gimmicks from other bad movies: The gay killers evoke Michael Haneke’s ultra-meta Funny Games; their perversity and torture of female victims rips off The Silence of the Lambs (including a grisly Sophie’s Choice where one woman is forced to pick which of her breasts she can keep); and Scudder’s manhunt is nastily scored to an ironic ’60s hippie tune (“Atlantis,” by Donovan), just as David Fincher’s abominable serial-killer epic Zodiac disgraced Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man.” Fincher-heads might enjoy this garbage (while Donovan fans like me will resent it); truly savvy filmgoers should notice the distasteful condescension.

A Walk Among the Tombstones differs from other junk thrillers only by its hackneyed meticulousness. Frank pays closer attention to composition and editing than most directors, yet he lacks the feeling, the depth, that distinguished Denis Villeneuve’s superior thriller Prisoners, with its metaphysical qualities that also expressed post-9/11 homeland guilt and desperation. Frank is only about sensationalism. Having misused Neeson’s magnum-force chivalry (evoking Dirty Harry in a demeaning scene where Scudder instructs TJ on the safe use of a Beretta), Frank’s MVP is cinematographer Mihai Malaimare. Malaimare shot Francis Coppola’s comeback vehicles Youth Without Youth and Tetro, and he supplies beautifully subtle chiaroscuro here. Unfortunately, Malaimare’s good work is wasted, particularly during a stake-out montage set to a recital of Scudder’s 12-Step AA program as if redoing the baptism in The Godfather.

All this commercialized nihilism is arty but not artistic. By merely streamlining gruesome crime-thriller formula, Frank perpetuates a depressing mode of storytelling that destroys the ethical foundation of thrillers that once classically explored human error yet did not cheapen themselves with either a judgmental or a sympathetic response. Years after Get Shorty (and its predecessor Pulp Fiction and Silence of the Lambs and the Haneke and the Fincher, etc.), this is the kind of pig swill that forces one to lose faith in American standards. It creates miasma as entertainment. A Walk Among the Tombstones’ disrespect for life (and audiences) is utterly demoralizing. Its surface slickness is, essentially, cruel and arty, the kind of life-denying thing that could recruit members for ISIS.

***

The Maze Runner is a recruitment movie for illiterates: First of all, anyone who hasn’t read Borges or Lord of the Flies. Most of all, anyone, especially youth, already indoctrinated by video games and comic books. The nonsense plot concerns an exploitative corporation (stealing from the Resident Evil series) that uses teenagers as lab rats in a survivalist tournament/experiment (stealing from The Hunger Games) following an ecological catastrophe (just like Snowpiercer or other countless unoriginal blockbusters).

Instead of working out ideas about social order, animal instinct, and human intelligence, The Maze Runner substitutes dumbly contrived action. Its video-game/comic-book conceit foregrounds spectacle before logic. And the silly plot, in which Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) is sent among the community of teenage guinea pigs and disturbs their complaisance by opposing their made-up rules and trespassing the enormous maze that imprisons them, is poorly put together. Debut director Wes Ball’s incoherence is part of the film’s effect (he’s fond of half-blurred dialogue shots and jittery, unclear action scenes).

The Maze Runner is made for the millennial audience that doesn’t know to expect logic or coherence from a movie, just unreal spectacle and empty sensation.

This cinema-illiterate recruitment has been in effect since before the millennium began, starting with the incoherence of The Blair Witch Project on through the technological short cuts of computer-graphic imagery and video editing. The Maze Runner normalizes this disaster. It’s about geometry and scale in a cinematic era that ignores geometry and scale. Thomas and the other lost boys represent ahistorical kids who are clueless about their origins and the way the world works. They don’t know how they got to the glade they inhabit, have no concept of God, and during years of captivity are never even horny. (Ball doesn’t even provide a saltpeter explanation.)

Thomas’s adventure consists of running among rock and metal mazes — walls and towers, obstacles and vaults that shift like Rubik’s Cubes (stealing from Alien vs. Predator) and fighting off giant spiders (stealing from Starship Troopers). The lack of visual ingenuity and spatial clarity are a disgrace to Griffith, Eisenstein, Kuleshov, Keaton, Lang, Antonioni, Peckinpah, Boorman, Spielberg, Walter Hill, and Zack Snyder. That form and meaning no longer matter to Hollywood or to the film’s target audience makes The Maze Runner a tragedy. Add the corporation’s nihilistic logo WCKD (“Remember, wicked is good,” says Patricia Clarkson, a poor man’s version of Meryl Streep in The Giver) and you have another example of miasma entertainment — a blockbuster made with half-hearted cynicism.

— Armond White, a film critic, writes about movies for National Review Online and received the American Book Award’s Anti-Censorship prize. He is the author of The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World and the forthcoming What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about the Movies.