I’ll be honest; I have no clue how American football works, nor do I understand the logistics of the Super Bowl. All I know is that there’s a lot of stopping and starting, every year we get an overblown pop show at half-time, and – more importantly – that half-time point comes with an influx of new movie teasers vying for the attention of the millions viewing. It’s time to size up the contenders in this year’s Super Bowl trailer brawl.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

A few short months from release and we’re only just getting our very first glimpse at Solo, the adored space-smuggler’s new stand-alone Star Wars tale. Marred by a director switch mid-shoot and rumoured on-set acting lessons for its main star, Disney seems to have pulled through the rocky production phase with something promising, at least on the thin surface a trailer reveals. Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian looks as good as that casting sounds, and Alden Ehenreich certainly looks the iconic part. Conversely, I can’t ignore that I’m still struggling to see the spark of magnetic brilliance that would justify this film’s existence; strip the Star Wars brand and there’s very little here that would set it apart from other mediocre space-adventure movies. A feeling pervades this trailer that, as a life-long Star Wars fan, a tease for the next film in the series should be inducing frenzied screams – not a mildly satisfied nod of the head.

Avengers: Infinity War

The daddy of all cinematic universes is gearing up to deliver its magnum-opus, 10 years’ worth of intertwining stories and characters coming together for an unprecedented detonation of comic-book wonder. Everyone and their mum is in it. Whereas the previous two Avengers movies were team-up films, Infinity War feels like an event. I can’t wait.

Red Sparrow

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

Skyscraper

Eurgh. The ‘Die Hard in a ___’ action sub-genre seems to have come full circle this year as we get Die Hard in a skyscraper…again… except it’s VERY tall this time… oh, and the hero has a prosthetic leg. Melodramatic and artificial-looking to an absurd degree, Skyscraper looks to be a level of un-self-aware awful that we rarely get to see nowadays. It seems it could be fun in its unchecked trashiness, but I feel only the most dedicated of Dwayne Johnson fans will be seeing this one.

Mission Impossible: Fallout

The trailer for Tom Cruise’s latest Mission Impossible outing, Fallout, seems a bit too preoccupied with vague, moody quotes in its first half; ‘Your mission, should you choose to accept it… did you ever choose not to?’ feels more guffaw-worthy than darkly atmospheric. Nevertheless, a bouncy Imagine Dragons tune soon kicks in and along with it an exhilarating montage of the 55-year-old seemingly immortal God flinging himself between buildings, crashing vehicles and performing his own helicopter aerobatics (because of course he did). Throw in a tease of franchise-newcomer Henry Cavill kicking some serious ass and we’ve got a pretty strong confirmation that Hollywood’s most commercially and critically reliable spy-series isn’t about to seize up – and neither is its star. We have a winner.

Elliot Gaynon

(Image courtesy of Empire)