There’s a great interview with director Joseph Kahn in this quarter’s Cinema Scope in which he describes his film “Torque” as “a dumb movie for smart people”. The idea is that “Torque” indulges in idiocy self-consciously, offering up the staples of puerile filmmaking without sticking quotation marks on either side. And the implication is that those not savvy enough to recognize the film’s subtle winks will assume, incorrectly, that the exaggerated stupidity on display throughout was deployed purely in earnest, making it easy for mainstream audiences to laugh and easier for them to miss the point. It’s audience-pandering at its most mean-spirited: taking whatever trash the country wants and showing their grubby faces in it.

The unqualified master of making dumb movies for smart people, at least in the contemporary cinema, is Paul Verhoeven, whose run of American genre films from 1987 to 2000 repeatedly made high art of low culture. But what distinguishes Verhoeven from Kahn—and what makes a film like “Showgirls” such a singular achievement—is that its engagement with the social and cultural fabric of the lowbrow never presumed any kind of intellectual or moral superiority. “Showgirls”, in other words, isn’t mean-spirited about the apparent stupidity it relishes, making it not so much a movie explicitly for smart people as a movie for anybody.

Even Verhoeven’s angriest films—especially “Starship Troopers” and its less than optimistic sentiments about the American military-industrial complex—openly celebrate their own vulgarity and excess, and in the end these films are as enjoyable as exercises in genre filmmaking as they are as pointed critiques of the form. In practice this is a balancing act that proves surprisingly difficult to pull off. Kahn isn’t far off—his latest film, the zeitgeist baiting horror-comedy Detention, brushes close to greatness—but, oddly enough, it’s his intelligence as a filmmaker that causes his work to fall just short of the mark set by Verhoeven.

The three best “dumb” movies of the last decade were made by the same directorial duo: “Crank”, “Crank: High Voltage”, and “Gamer”, Neveldine/Taylor’s trio of (hyper-)modern classics. What distinguishes these films from the similarly frenetic and seemingly juvenile “Torque” and “Detention” is that they aren’t designed to be appreciated by those savvy enough to “get it”; on the contrary, smart audiences tend to be put off by these films when they begin to suspect there’s nothing much to get. With the “Crank” movies this problem is especially hard to navigate: the first film and its even more extreme sequel celebrate depravity so heedlessly that it’s hard to approach the material from a critical distance, making it next to impossible to assign their ugliness to some hidden satirical impulse.

It would be easier to dismiss “Crank” as stupid than to redeem it as a commentary on stupidity because, as with “Showgirls”, it resists the kind of shallow intellectualizing directed at films like “Torque”, where the “real” meaning is hidden just under the mindless surface. Kahn may think he’s making “dumb movies for stupid people”, but in a way he’s just making thinly veiled smart movies that pretend they’re dumb. Neveldine/Taylor couldn’t be bothered with that sort of posturing.

Which isn’t to say, mind you, that “Crank” or “Showgirls” aren’t smart. Neveldine/Taylor and Paul Verhoeven are smarter filmmakers, in their own way, than legions of more pretentious contemporaries making self-professed “meaningful” art—they just work, intelligently, within a culture that is itself founded on a kind of flagrant stupidity. “Crank” may not be a coded commentary on the vapidity of contemporary American culture, but it is a reflection of that culture, and what’s smart about it is how precise and well-attuned a reflection it both in content and form. There are plenty of films about media saturation and immorality and our desire for instant gratification, but the “Crank” films are actively designed as products of those qualities—reflecting and indulging in them to their logical extreme—and, in that (important) way, they are some of the most “modern” films available.

Neveldine/Taylor’s “Gamer”—which arrives on retrofitted 3D Bluray from Lionsgate this week—is a slightly different case, not only because it takes place in a far-away dystopian future rather than our time (“some years from this exact moment”, according to a jokey title card), but because, in a way, it was a much more ambitious project for the two to undertake. “Gamer” proceeds following a fairly shopworn template: Kable (Gerard Butler) is a criminal granted a chance to win his freedom from death row by playing in a live-action first-person shooter simulator called “Slayer”, an enormously popular videogame and spectator sport overseen and broadcast by a billionaire mogul named Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall). But while this setup is reminiscent of sci-fi features from “The Running Man” straight through to “The Hunger Games”, in practice it offers a conception of our future far removed from either of those cautionary-tale fictions—one that’s both grimer and more real.

The notion that gaming culture and surveillance culture might one day converge and pervade our lives and privacy isn’t exactly a challenging or subversive one, but “Gamer” isn’t interested in questioning the world faux-philosophically in the same way that, say, “The Matrix” might have been. “Gamer” has things to say that its directors might not; the film doesn’t intend to comment on anything, but the film itself is a comment. This is partly because its more radical ideas have to do with form: as with the “Crank” films, Neveldine/Taylor’s aesthetic approach is scattershot to the point of avant-garde, their cameras (operated by the directors themselves) less concerned with clarity and coverage than in piecing together extraordinary shots.

Much of the film—one of the first to be shot using the now industry-standard RED camera—is composed of cutaways and quick shots, tracking feet as they run across the ground or bodies as they fly through the air. Strapping themselves into harnesses and hurtling around set with the cast and their stuntmen, Neveldine/Taylor direct the film as though they were throwing together an action painting, their camera a brush flung out to shoot gunfire and arterial sprays of blood. The film reflects how our minds now work, browsing new ideas and styles like opening new tabs in the browser.

As has been noted elsewhere, Neveldine/Taylor share a love of low culture with guys like Michael Bay and the late Tony Scott, but the considerably lower budgets they’re granted for these projects result in a very different kind of cinematic maximalism. By virtue of their limitations—some self-imposed, some budgetary—the first three features of Neveldine/Taylor have a looseness, almost free jazz-like, that makes them far more capable of reflecting a truly contemporary style and sensibility. It’s hard to imagine “Gamer” made at twice the budget, because more money very often means more risk and, of course, more studio control; the freedom of form afforded them by working so cheaply and so quickly makes them practically guerilla filmmakers cobbling together blockbusters from spare parts.

Their style is closer to exploitation filmmaking, or perhaps even experimental filmmaking, than the traditional blockbuster practice of Bay and Scott, even if what’s being made in all cases is designed to be unabashedly accessible and mainstream. This isn't a case of dumb filmmaking directed at savvier audiences; it's a case of populist filmmaking reflecting a mass audience, crafted smartly but without smugness.