A wave of recent high-profile releases suggests a troubling trend in mainstream filmmaking: a pervasive, self-satisfied smirk has replaced genuine wit. From sci-fi adventures to horror sequels, the spring slate is dominated by a strain of humor that feels less like organic comedy and more like a screenwriter’s strained attempt to prove their own cleverness.
Consider the new film Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice. Promoted as a genre-blending rollercoaster, its comedy relies on a few tired crutches. Characters display oddly specific, incongruous pop culture knowledge—debating Gilmore Girls in one breath—or, for contrast, exhibit baffling ignorance of common concepts. The third, and laziest, pillar of its humor is relentless, uncreative profanity, mistaking crudeness for irreverence. The entire exercise feels like a calculated effort to stand out, yet it ends up blending into a crowd of similarly smug contemporaries.
This tone is echoed in March’s Ready or Not 2: Here I Come Again, a sequel that leans heavily on archly written curses and ironic needle-drops, seemingly pausing for applause after each edgy line. The similarly premised They Will Kill You follows suit, punctuating its violent set-pieces with a barrage of hollow, expletive-laden quips. Even the more amiable sci-fi hit Project Hail Mary operates on a related principle, where the charm of its central alien friendship often feels engineered to showcase the filmmakers’ convention-flouting cleverness above all else.
This isn’t the winking, 90s-style irony of detachment. These films want audiences to invest emotionally in their heroes. Instead, it’s a posture of half-ironic attachment—a desire to have it both ways, to seem smart and subversive while still delivering conventional thrills. The lineage of this style is muddled. While some point to the quippy, studio-mandated banter of past superhero films, this current iteration feels more intentional, if not more skilled. It also carries an R-rated veneer that recalls 90s indie darlings, though without their daring or dialogue-driven tension.
A more direct influence may be the Deadpool franchise, which successfully welded ultra-violence to a meta, reference-heavy monologue. The damage of that film’s success, however, may be more structural than stylistic. It proved an R-rated action vehicle could double as a studio’s primary comedy outlet, eliminating the need to nurture pure comedic talent. The result is a generation of filmmakers—often brilliant at crafting action or horror—forced to graft on a prefabricated, “smarmy” comedic tone they are ill-equipped to write.
This explains why so many of these films aren’t actually funny. The humor in Project Hail Mary works marginally better precisely because its directors have a proven comedic background—a rarity in this field. For the others, the comedy feels like an afterthought, a value-add checkbox rather than a foundational element. They are less true genre hybrids and more like vehicles for an attitude: a screenwriter’s strained cleverness in search of a subject, or a development deal in search of a soul.
The audience’s desire to laugh within a spectacle is undeniable, and the action-comedy or horror-comedy can be a brilliant form. But the current vogue confuses a cynical, self-congratulatory tone for comic relief. It mistakes a knowing wink for a punchline, leaving behind not laughter, but the faint, irritating echo of a smirk.
