Movie Nation

The gone-too-soon passing of the great Canadian funnywoman Catherine O’Hara last week had an added touch of pathos about that other great comedians could appreciate — the timing.

O’Hara went to that great Second City Alumi Reunion in the Sky on the day before the Westminster Dog Show’s annual pageant of all things “judged” about canines. Thinking about her over the weekend of “best in group/breed/show” events on the tube must have reminded many of the finest of her finest hours, “Best of Show.”

The dizzy matriarch of “Schitt’s Creek,” diva of Canada’s version of “Second City” and mom who makes guilt-ridden from leaving her kid “Home Alone” amusing was never funnier than she was in Christopher Guest’s improv also-rans in a string of films that began with “Waiting for Guffman” and ended with the uncelebrated “Mascots.” That partly-improvising ensemble comedy filmed without two of the company’s mainstays — O’Hara and her “Second City” partner in caricature, Eugene Levy — and failed accordingly.

The rep company’s “inside a dog show” comedy “Best in Show” (2000) is the funniest and most-loved of the lot. O’Hara — playing a Florida dog owner/”handler” with a torrid sexual past — was never funnier and was cringey as the comedy legend ever got. Her dolled-up, cleavaged-down Cookie Fleck has every man over 40 that she and her buck-toothed dork of a husband Geery (Levy) meet remembering how much of the Kama Sutra they tried out in days gone by, and the lecherous rubes are tactless enough to have those recollections in front of her hapless literal “two left feet” husband.

The Flexks compete their little Norwich Terrier all the way from Fern City, Fla. to The Mayflower Dog Show in Philly, an event set up, hosted and filmed like the long-running Westminster Dog Show in NYC.

Our mockumentary follows the flecks, a couple (Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock) whose neurotic Weimeraner has them in couples counseling, the gay couple (John Michael Higgins over-the-top bitchy/swishy, and Michael McKean) competing a Shih Tzu and the married-money golddigger (Jennifer Coolidge) who has tough broad Jane Lynch as her Standard Poodle’s handler.

A long shot? That would be a Pine Nut, N.C. good’ol boy (actor/director Guest) with showbiz aspirations and a bloodhound who is the biggest boo boo of them all.

They’re interviewed at home or in their shrink’s office, followed on the road trips to the event, captured primping their dogs and overheard at their bitchiest in the vain hope that at least some of them will be funnier than the clueless TV host for the event played by Fred Willard.

His character was inspired by dizzy ex-big leaguer turned baseball announcer, Joe Garagiola, inexplicably hired for YEARS of Westminster color commentaries,

“Now tell me,” the cocksure but clueless Buck Laughlin (Willard) asks, “Which one of these dogs would you want to have as your wide receiver on your football team?”

How do you screw up a “ticking clock thriller,” the surest among the sure-things in the action picture genre? You mess around with the “clock” too much, for starters.

In “96 Minutes,” set mostly aboard a couple of bullet trains in Taiwan, the timers on the bombs — you know, the cliched gadgets where all the suspense is in “Which wire do I cut?” — are decimal chonographs. They count down in 100 second increments.

Thus, every time a character says “How much time do we have?” and we can see “3649” on the LED display, another character blurts out “Just over an hour!”

But filmmakers Tzu-Hsuan Hung (director and co-writer), Yi-Fang Chen and Wan-Ju Yang don’t stop there. The clocks can be sped up or slowed down by our mad bomber’s design. If a train slows down (“Speed” style), the clocks speed up. If it speeds back up, the timer slows down, etc.

Whatever unspoken (in Mandarin or English) subtext the director of “The Scoundrels” and his co-writers were going for about physics, the nature of time, etc. (one character is a physics teacher) is unexplored and we sit and gape and wonder “How much longer does this trainwreck last?”

“96 Seconds” is about life and death dilemmas, self-sacrifice and choosing not to make a sacrifice and grief that takes the form of revenge. It opens with an event years past, pops into a “present” three years ago and skips forward to a current “present” when there are trains and bombs and flashback after flashback after flashback shows us characters “then” and now and a jumble of “personal” complications and motivations, enough to fill a season or two of your favorite soap opera.

At some point, my “not buying in” impulse curdled into “not buying any of this.”

Lee Lee-Zen of “The Pig, the Snake and the Pigeon” plays the leader of a bomb squad glimpsed in the film’s opening scene in TV coverage of train wreck. No, Jie Li isn’t handling the aftermath of a bombing. The story isn’t being told in one long flashback. That earlier accident is a “clue.”

Jie Li is then in charge of a crime scene — a bomb that’s been planted in a cinema some time later. Luckily, he’s evacuated the theater and he has his best bomb-defuser A-Ren (Po-Hung Lin of “Suffocating Love”) on the case.

He’s got the bomb-survival suit, the portable X-ray and the wire-cutters necessary. As long as he’s not distracted by the wedding to Det. Huang (Vivian Sung of “Taipei Suicide Story”) he can’t quite make himself plan.

But defusing this bomb means — a sinister voice on the cell-phone declares — that another one in a crowded department store will go off. The bomb squad has to decide to set off the bomb they’re working on, or defuse it and trigger the other.

That awful dilemma, a snap decision with horrific consequences, frames the movie.

Because three years later, survivors of that earlier tragedy are on board trains leaving a memorial service when the same multi-bomb scenario presents itself.

Didn’t the bomber die in the first blast? Aren’t the bomb squad folks “heroes?”

A-Ren quit the bomb squad, is finally ready to plan that wedding and resolve to never go to this memorial service again. Jie Li is now a captain who has to talk A-Ren back into action. As the former bomb defuser’s mother and cop-fiancée are on board his train, he’s got real motivation.

“As long as you live, nothing else matters.”

A physics teacher played by Bo-Chieh Wang (of “Eye of the Storm”) in a troubled marriage injects himself into the plot. Is that his wife (Yao Titi) on the other train, not taking his calls?

And what does the phantom bomber mean when he threatens cops who “don’t want your secret exposed?”

The picture’s convoluted plot and fluid grasp of time contribute to the leaden pacing this supposed pulse-pounding thriller suffers from.

There’s gravitas in some of the performances, with overly-theatrical flourishes in others.

Sentimentality and grief is grafted onto murderous revenge as peripheral characters’ motivations are introduced, muddied up and then somehow “excused” in the confusion of bombs, ringing cell phones and a tsunami of supporting players acted panicked.

One has a hard time investing in this or that possible outcome because the script waters down each scenario and keeps shoving — via timers that SPEED UP or SLOW DOWN — the climax further and further into the future.

And as you might guess, the climax is almost preordained to be chased by an anti-climax that doesn’t so much rewind the ticking clock as make us wish they’d gone analog from the start.

Rating: TV-14, violence

Cast: Po-Hung Lin, Vivian Sung, Bo-Chieh Wang, Lee Lee-Zen and Yao Yiti

Credits: Directed by
Tzu-Hsuan Hung, scripted by Yi-Fang Chen, Wan-Ju Yang and
Tzu-Hsuan Hung A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:56

Long before he became “The Boy from Oz,” and just as he was considering growing his sideburns for the role that made him, Hugh Jackman co-starred in a featherweight rom-com from Oz that established his sweet and “sensistive” credentionals on the screen. Well, “sweet and sensitive” by Australian standards, anyway.

As the “Paperback Hero,” he’s a man’s man in a manly line of work and best buds with his cattle dog Lance. Jack Willis is a shirt-opened, shorts and boots bloke who drives a tractor trailer, one of those Aussie Outback “Road Trains” with plenty of trailers and not much chance of braking on a “banana.” That’s the dollar coin Down Under, Bruce.

But under Jack’s furry and fit bloke’s bloke exterior beats a sensitive(ish) heart, a fellow who scribbles ideas and pages for his “trashy” WWII era romance novel on roadhouse napkins.

He’s a Lucktown lad with an assigned parking place at the Boomerang and an ongoing, lifelong prank contest with the fetching crop duster pilot, Ruby (Claudia Carvan) who inherited her plane and the Boomerang from her late father.

Ruby’s got a plan — marry steady beau Hamish (Andrew S. Gilbert), the local veterinarian and settle into a comfortable conventional life.

Silly Hamish. Did he not see “Four Weddings and a Funeral?” Guys named “Hamish” almost never “get the girl.” And when they do, they can’t keep her. Some actor named Hugh just won’t let it happen.

The comedy here is that Jack’s kept his writing a secret. When he pitched “Bird in the Hand” to publishers, he used Ruby’s name. Now the bloody book’s been put into print and the publishing house wants to publicize its new star writer, a woman named Ruby who writes bluff and blustery prose in a genre known for its femine floral excesses.

Ruby’s got to “be” him. C’mon, help a mate out!

“How could you write anything romantic?”

Before she knows it, Ruby’s accepted a deal to get her wedding paid for. And on the long truck drive (with campouts) to Sydney, she’ll get a half-assed crash course on the first novel and her “inspiration” for it. But not being a lass of letters, one comparison every interviewer makes is sure to throw her.

“Daphne Du Maurier” was a Hitchcock favorite (“Rebecca,” “The Birds” ) queen of “middlebrow romances” back in the day.

“Is she from Sydney?” No, dear.

Jackman is downright boyish as Jack, with a higher voice and shorter sideburns and not exactly as rough and tumble as the part suggests he has to be. There’ll be no roadhouse brawls or trucker throwdowns here, mate.

A karaoke sing-along to Roy Orbison? That’s the ticket.

Karvan had already had roles in Gillian Armstrong and Philip Noyce films in Oz and was top billed here. She has Tomboy credibility and great chemistry with Jackman, and has enjoyed a long career in Aussie TV in the decades since.

Jeanie Drynan, who plays the brassy co-owner of the struggling local hotel and waitress at the Boomerang, was in early Australian break-out films “Don’s Party” and “Muriel’s Wedding.” Nobody else in “Paperback,” in front of or behind the camera, went to make a mark in Hollywood or even widely exported Australian cinema.

But Jackman made a mark big enough for them all — Wolverine superstardom, “Les Miserables,” rom-coms to “Song Sung Blue.” All he had to do was deepen his voice and grow hair anywhere and everywhere he could.

And to think the earliest big screen signs of his hunky charm came from a mushy road train trucker who writes romance novels.

Rating: PG-13, profanity, alcohol consumption, sexual situations

Cast: Claudia Karvan, Hugh Jackman, Angie Milliken, Andrew S. Gilbert and Jeanie Drynan

Credits: Scripted and directed by Antony J. Bowman. a release streaming on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:36

Preston Sturges may have had a decade of sparkling dialogue for films and such scripts as the holiday delight “Remember the Night” and “The Good Fairy” on his resume when he finally got to use “written and directed by” in his credits. But it would still be a mistake to label “The Great McGinty,” his directing debut, one of his very best.

“Sullivan’s Travels,” “Hail the Conquering Hero,” “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” and “Unfaithfully Yours” were to follow, after all.

But 1940’s “McGinty” had glimpses of the trademark Sturges cynicism with a faint touch of optimism, his populism and the crackling screwball comedy banter that would make him an icon of Golden Age Hollywood.

This time out, the dialogue was straight out of “Palookaville.”

“You got me all a’tremble. I bet you’re scared TO DEATH of yourself!”

He took the “romance” out of courtship to comic effect and dared to see optimism in the most cynical political operators.

Sturges cast a couple of Black actors in stereotypical subservient roles, but sees to it that they get their laughs from digging commentary at the white folks, something he’d expand on as his career progressed and Hollywood evolved.

And he built his film around not big name stars, but a trio of the great character actors of his day — Brian Donlevy, William Demarest and Akim Tamiroff. That pays off in most very scene and gives the picture a cute little kick in the finale.

The story here is a Roosevelt/Huey P. Long era political satire, about a down-on-his-luck mug who stumbles his way from voter fraud to “collecting” to graft to Big Time Graft, but who starts to grow a conscience about “helping folks” as he does.

You see veteran tough guy Donlevy (a “Beau Geste” Oscar nominee) in the corner of your eye in the opening scene, in which a tipsy American barfly (Louis Jean Heydt) staggers into a “Banana Republic” suicide attempt before the sultry saloon singer (Steffi Duna) enlists the bartender in helping her pull this failed bank clerk together.

You think you got it bad, the bartender (Donlevy) wants to know? “I used to be a governor.”

The story of Dan McGinty’s rise and fall is told in flashback, a burly, blustery hustler on the bum until he’s solicited to “vote” by a political fixer (Demarest). Two bucks if you go vote for Mayor Tillingast.

Greedy McGinty wants to know how many times he can get away with that unregistered voter scheme.

“Whaddaya think this is, Hicks Corners? Some people is too lazy to vote, that’s all. They don’t like this kind of weather. Some of ’em is sick in bed and can’t vote. Fixer Skeeter (Demarest) pauses a beat.

“Maybe a couple of ’em croaked recently…” 

McGinty pulls the scam at 37 polling stations, which is how he meets the Big Boss (Tamiroff), who pulls all the strings in this town and who lapses into his native Russian at the first sign of aggravation.

A Russian fixing elections? Go on.

McGinty becomes a mob collector then a mob alderman. And when the jig is up on that corrupt administration, he becomes the “unknown” alternative “reform” candidate. He can be the mob mayor if he just runs out and gets himself married.

The Rachel McAdams/Dylan O’Brien “Castaway” with a whiff of “Misery”“Send Help” is opening to decent reviews and audience exit-scores (Unlike critics, audiences pick a movie that they expect they’ll like) and a $20 million opening weekend.

That’s good enough to best the indie video game turned feature thriller “Iron Lung,” which is doing really well among gamers despite having a no-name cast, including the director, and little more than word of mouth promoting it. It hit $18 million, depending on the snowy day turnout in the Southeast and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, out in the Pedophile Protector Belt of rural America, “Melania” is doing big bucks. The pervy Brett Ratner-directed documentary about sex-worker/ illegal immigrant First “Lady” from the former Soviet Empire is on track to earn $7 million frompeople whose internet search histories you wouldn’t want to stumble through. Audience exit scores are reverse IQ tests in this case, as this one is earning savage reviews from the better educated. At least it gets “them” out of the house,because heaven knows what goes on there, right?

“Zootopia 2” is in fourth, adding another $5.8 million to its $408 million and counting tally.

Jason Statham has made bank in previous Januaries with J-Stath-styled action/avenging. “Shelter,” distributed by tiny outfit Black Bear cracked the top five with a $5.5 million opening. .

“Avatar: Fire and Ash” is is around $5.5 as well and seems to have FINALLY exited the top five. But Monday we’ll know if Black Bear was fudging their estimates (They say “Shelter” earned $5.505).

The tumbling Chris Pratt bomb “Mercy” ($4.73), Sydney Sweeney’s blockbuster “The Housemaid” ($3.5, over $120 million since release), the Oscar contender “Marty Supreme” ($2.913 closing in on $100 million) and the bombing “28 Years Later: Bone Temple” ($1.6) finish off the top ten, unless a lot of people realize they need to see “Hamnet” ($1.5) by midnight Sunday.

A nearly forgotten piece of World War II lore is brought back to life in the Chinese epic “Dongji Rescue.”

It’s about the Oct. 1942 sinking of a Japanese transport loaded with British POWs from the capture of Hong Kong, which the Japanese used as an excuse to try and execute their entire “cargo,”

Leave it to the Chinese to remind the world what barbarous bastards the Japanese were during WWII.

But “slow” is the byword in this heroic epic by veteran Chinese TV director Zhenxiang Fei and Guan Hu (“The 800”).

Slow is the submarine (the U.S.S. Grouper) that stalks the unmarked Lisbon Maru, slow enough for free diving Chinese fishermen swimmers to catch up to it to check out the torpedo-firing.

Slowly the Lisbon Maru sinks below the waves with over 1800 British POWs locked in the holds and doomed to die.

And slow is the reaction of the Dongji Island villagers to this horror, who take a lot of time and plenty of extra murderous outrages from the Japanese occupiers before they decide to attempt a rescue via their junk-rigged (sailing) fishing boats.

That doesn’t prevent this formulaic thriller from being moving in its big moments of shared humanity and supreme sacrifice.

The fishermen brothers, marked by their neighbors as having “pirate blood,” live on the other side of the island from the village where a small Japanese garrison runs the show. Both dive and swim like very fast fish, but Ah Bi (Yilong Zhu) is the younger, reckless fisherman. He’s the free diver who spies the U.S. submarine, hears the explosion and fishes a survivor flushed out when the Lisbon Maru is punctured.

Ah Dang (Lei Wu) is the older pragmatist. He’s got dreams of escaping to Shanghai with his fellow outcast girlfriend Ah Hua (Ni Ni). He’s the one to try to shove the injured British survivor (William Franklyn-Miller) under the waves.

“Why borrow trouble,” after all, says Ah Dang (in Chinese with English subtitles)?

The younger sibling won’t hear of it.

We know that Ah Dang will come around to Ah Bi’s humanity and righteousness about the shipload of doomed men that they learn about. It takes a LOT of movie for that to happen.

We know that the “chief” (Haoyu Yang) appointed by the Japanese will have to shake off his appeasing nature, that Ah Hua will have to take a stand. The army deserter/school teacher (Minhao Chen) isn’t just here for drunken comic relief. He has a reckoning with his past coming. And we figure out that Old Wu (Dahong Ni), the protected village sage who once led resistance to the Japanese three years ago when they occupied the island will have to gird himself for one last fight.

“The longer you kneel, the harder it is to rise up again.”

Every obvious thing the script sets us up to expect takes forever to happen.

The middle acts are seasoned with confrontations with the murderous and thin Japanese lieutenant and his trigger-happy garrison, Imperial navy decisions to murder all the Brits rather than transport them to Japan and each of the two “pirate” brothers taking matters and the fight into his own hands in his own way.

Some of the swimming stunts are borderline superhuman, and the sailing and fighting sequences make for delicious spectacle.

It never pays too much to ponder the reasons the Chinese military and its film production companies (check out the Communist Party agitprop logos of the various studios involved) want this particular story to be told. “Heroic” idolizing of Chinese fishermen’s when they being used as pawns for attempted island grabs in the Philippines Sea? Wedge issue “We were FRIENDS to the British back when” used against the Japanese?

American clumsiness in sinking a shipload of Allied POWs played up?

But when this lumbering but intimate combat saga winds its way to a grand, predictable finale, the propaganda and slack pacing aren’t deal breakers. When the chips are down, it isn’t the fact that “They helped us fight the Japanese” that matters. It’s the first law of the sea — when others are in distress, you come to their aid that is the story’s moral compass.

“It doesn’t matter what they look like…A life saved is still a life.”

Rating: unrated, graphic and bloody violence

Cast: Yilong Zhu, Lei Wu, Ni Ni, William Franklyn-Miller, Haoyu Yang, Minghao Chen and Dahong Ni.

Credits: Directed by Zhenxiang Fei and Guan Hu, scripted by Shu Chen, Runnian Dong, Ji Zhang, A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:13

Horror icon Sam Raimi takes his shot at a “Cast Away” tale in the “Admirable Crichton,” “Swept Away” vein with“Send Help,” an over-the-top romp in the Raimi “Drag Me to Hell” style.

It’s about class and sexism, survivalism and revenge showcased in extreme close-ups that punch jokes right in the nose, violence that will pin your ears back and a dressed-down Rachel McAdams flipping the script on the movie that made her — “Mean Girls.”

And even though it gives away one twist/gag too easily and tends to pummel us in the finale, I have no notes. This is a damned funny riff on “Survivor” and the very idea that the dainty McAdams might have a little “Misery” era Kath Bates in her.

McAdams plays the uncool “victim” here — dowdy, 40ish Linda Liddel, the “workhorse” at Preston Strategic Solutions. But being a little older than the rest of the staff, she doesn’t fit in socially. She dresses down, right down to her “practical” comfortable shoes. She feels the need to suggest “googling” her “go to” song in bar-karaoke. “One Way or Another” by Blondie might as well be “Bringing in the Sheaves” to the bros and Gen Zs that fill out the staff there, the ones who don’t INVITE her to karaoke night.

Not that these Tau Kappa Dipsticks give two damns what the bespectabled numbers “savant” who does all the digital heavy lifting there thinks or says.

Linda’s on-the-spectrum awkward. So that vice presidency promotion that the now-late-founder of the firm promised her before his death is out the door when his frat-bro-promoting son (Dylan O’Brien) takes over.

The guy’s rich, young and entitled, with just enough biz school “management” track study under his belt to suffer Linda’s attention if only to “handle” her. The sharp-dressed slacker (Xavier Samuel) frat brother who steals credit for Linda’s work gets to promotion.

But they need her along when they close a big deal in Thailand. A lot of extra work is her consolation prize. She’s been humiliated to her face by this sexist creep, showing off for his model-fiance (Edyll Ismail). One last insult? The bros all watch a pirated copy of Linda’s goofy audition tape for “Survivor” on the private jet they’re all taking to Bangkok.

Payback is a bitch, and it starts the second the jet loses power and starts to go down. In short order, Linda the “Survivor” fanatic and her injured, no real skills in life Gen Z boss are stranded on an island in the Gulf of Thailand.

She proceeds to “Survivor” the s–t out of this dilemma, relishing every survival skill she learned for a show she never got on but gets to try out now. And everything she can do that he can’t is just more leverage in this class/status reversal.

The script by Damien Shannon and Mark Swift does a blunt-instrument chiseling in of Linda’s character — over-sharing to colleagues who could not care less, confessing her dreams to her pet cockatiel, lacking the spine, the wardrobe or the makeover to “make it” in the culture where she works, and not having a clue about that.

Raimi plays with the camera — exTREME closeups of senior partner Dennis Haysbert’s nose as he sniffs an errant dab of tuna salad from Linda’s uncleaned lip, funny/scary jolts of Linda having nightmares over how far she can take this status-reversal thing she’s playing with her hapless “boss,” a stunning drone shot -pull back from Linda on the beach, tipping its hat to “Castaway” and then throwing the latest tech in Robert Zemeckis’ and Tom Hanks’ faces.

But it is McAdams and O’Brien (“Maze Runner,” “Saturday Night” and TV’s “Teen Wolf” alumus) who make the sale here. They give their characters edges and strained efforts to hide those edges, if only for a little while. The way O’Brien’s Bradley oversells “Love the backpack. You make that TODAY?” to Linda’s latest latticework palm fronds creation, how McAdams hits just the right newly-hinted-at menace when she intones “We’re not in the office any more, Bradley,” grounds the characters in an amusing reality.

The film’s gender politics and Gen Z slaps aren’t going to earn universe endorsements. But Raimi’s delivered a laugh-out-loud variation on a well-worn theme. And those of us lucky enough to remember his body of work and age with him (look for the vintage Delta 88 wagon, kids, and Sam’s daughter in the office scenes) can appreciate the novel horrific touches he can bring even to the pedestrian of genre films even if some people are more the butt of the joke that in on it.

Rating: R, gory violence, profanity

Cast: Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Edyll Ismail, Xavier Samuel and Dennis Haysbert.

Credits: Directed by Sam Raimi, scripted by Damien Shannon and Mark Swift. A 20th Century Studios release.

Running time: 1:53

The quips clip by and corpses pile up (off camera) as “two guys who look like they eat steroid pancackes for breakfast” team up for the action comedy “The Wrecking Crew.”

Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa tear through Hawaii as estranged half-brothers who will crash, kick, crack and cut down anyone who gets in their way of getting to whichever villain or villains killed their dad.

Director Angel Manuel Soto (“Blue Beetle”) takes a few too many cues from “Old Boy” for this not to be a blood bath. He and his “crew” expect us not to notice the boatloads of pedestrian and motoring innocent bystanders who drop like flies all around the periphery of this jovial mayhem.

Momoa and a tanner-than-usual Bautista have decent chemistry and “Deadpool” alumnus Morena Baccarin all but steals the show as one’s ex-girlfriend who finally gets to land zingers of the Ryan Reynolds variety.

Bald cherub “Spiderman” sidekick Jacob Batalon is here as a paid punching bag and accomplice.

“Who’s Uncle Fester?“

“It’s ALOPECIA man!”

Yes, there are some dumb laughs. But the timing of this kind of “due process” ignoring “rogue cop” piling up victims who are in his sights, or just civilians in the way. could not be worse.

Momoa’s a veteran, rules-bending Oklahoma Reservation cop named Jonny summoned home when his low-rent private eye father is killed in a Honolulu hit and run. Bautista is James, a Navy SEAL trainer who brings the toughness to a new generation of the toughest of the tough.

They bicker and brawl and have their psychological issues bandied about by James’ child psychologist wife (Roimata Fox). And they figure out no, it wasn’t an “accident,” no matter what the aged Honolulu police detective (Stephen Root, in rare form) says.

The Japanese mob, the Yakuza, are involved. There’s this casino developer (Claes Bang, settling into the “New Jeroen Krabbé generic second-choice Euro villain role) who seems sketchy.

Hawaian culture is sampled, and the script is peppered with more Hawaianisms and slang than a dozen Kona Beer commercials. Maori character actor and “Star Wars” alumnus Temuera Morrison even plays the governor.

But damn this beast is violent and stupidly predictable. You can’t have a car chase getaway from the yakuza without “Ninjas on motorbikes!” Don’t bring in a helicopter on that CGI-assisted chase if there isn’t a tunnel that’ll come into play.

The “talking villain cliche” is on its way!

And you can’t set out for a final confronation without visiting a Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Statham et al styled private armory of firearms of every persuasion. Action heroes are “hoarders” in cheesy action comedies.

Soto takes a couple of shots at reprising the famous Park Chan-wook “mowing through foes on a narrow hallway” scene from “Old Boy,” the last one even including a claw hammer to complete the homage.

This overlong but rarely slow picture almost gets by on Momoa’s playfulness bouncing off Bautista — “You got old.” “You got FAT.” — and a light tone that almost wholly belies the arm-yanked-off/head-sliced/woman-tossed-out-a-window gore we’re treated to.

There’s no gore like glib gore, right? And there’s no body count when nobody bothers to count, which Soto, screenwriter Jonathan Topper and their cast take pains NOT to do.

Rating: R, graphic violence in big doses, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Jason Momoa, Dave Bautista, Morena Baccarin, Jacob Batalon, Frankie Adams, Stephen Root, Temuera Morrison and Claes Bang.

Credits: Directed by Angel Manuel Soto, scripted by Jonathan Tropper. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.

Runnging time: 2:04

“Conspiracy of Fear” is another “future is the past” slice of sci-fi noir, a shiny but emotionally empty thriller that lacks the suspense, intrigue and pretty much anytbing else to recommend it.

But it’s another B movie featuring Malcolm McDowell as a seemingly urbane villain, so there’s that.

An exposition-packed voice-over narration by a private eye tells us that a decade has passed since World War III, which climaxed with electro-magnetic pulse blasts that fried everything electronic. The world is analog again, with newspapers, landlines, cathode ray tubes, celluloid photography and vintage Chevy Novas making a comeback.

Capitalism? It collapsed into one great big monopoly, with The Company running everything that got the world back to work.

But a virus came roaring in after the conflict, one with symptoms similar to rabies. Big pharma concocted Suppresco, a “little white pill” that allows “purists” to live without catching it and the infected to suppress symptoms.

Reporter/poker player Alice, expressionlessly played by writer-director Kayla Tabish, is being watched because of what she’s been told about Suppresco’s latest iteration. There’s a kid on the run she’s trying to protect.

That private detective (Nick Lima Heaney) has been hired to find the girl on the lam by the knife-wielding heavy Vega (Steven Baeur). Will Gumshoe Avery switch sides because “She’s just a kid” or the reporter’s easy on the eyes?

Is that a grimace we detect every time the esteemed Brit character actor McDowell mispronounces (intentionally, “in character” we hope) the name of Halley’s Comet, which is due to return in 2061, which barely figures in the movie’s plot?

A high stakes “Company Money” game of Texas Hold’em opens the film, with our intrepid reporter looking more deer-in-headlights than poker faced. Tony bars, clubs and a party fill the middle acts. And double crosses abound in the finale.

But the whole never amounts to much more than antiques-adorned/production-designed-to-death tedium.

Rating: TV-14, violence

Cast: Malcolm McDowell, Kayla Tabish, Nick Lima Heaney, Steven Bauer and Edoardo Costa.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kayla Tabish. A Vision Films release on Youtube, Tubi, Amazon etc.

Running time: 1:25

On October 20 of 1944, with World War II at its peak and hurtling towards its conclusion, the “zipper,” the iconic New York Times electronic headlines billboard on Times Square, briefly displayed the two tops stories among “all the news that’s fit to print.”

“MacArthur lands at Leyte Ethel Barrymore’s Temperature Lower.”

A general who promised “I shall return” had returned. But just as importantly to its readers, “the First Lady of the American Theatre,” “Queen of the Royal Family of Broadway,” was recovering from her bout of pneumonia.

That revealing moment is one of the grander take-aways in Kathleen Spaltro’s new biography of the grande dame of American acting, descended from generations of acting Drews and daughter of an actor who married into that clan and changed his name to Maurice Barrymore because he didn’t want to bring shame to his “real” family name.

Ethel Barrymore was a theatrical pop star in her youth, idolized and adored as a winsome beauty as an ingenue and flirty gamine of stage comedies by critics and audiences alike. As aspiring concert pianist in her youth who trained for and announced her intention to become an operatic prima donna in the midst of her earliest theatrical fame, Barrymore was the uncomfortable “queen” of a profession that was chosen by her footlights footsoldiers family of troupers.

As Spaltro’s academic biography details, Barrymore got stage fright the moment she became a “star.” It lasted until her dying days.

The “queen” title conferred on her in middle age was a further burden. Celebrity confined her early on, limited her ambition and the title “queen” was used as a cudgel by generations of critics who heard or heard of the plummy locutions and enunciations of her forebears in her mannerisms and speech and called her acting “old fashioned” in ways that never troubled her stage-turned-screen-actor siblings, John Barrymore and Lionel Barrymore.

Ethel had an early triumph in Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” a risk which critics and audiences punished the prototype “Ethel Barrymore Girl” actress for taking. Barrymore was forever frustrated that she only got a few chances to play Shakespeare — Juliet when she was too old for the role, “Merchant of Venice” and snippets of other plays for radio. The “cult of Ethel” dogged her for most of her career and limited her choices rather than broadening them.

But as Spaltro notes, Barrymore endured, “hating” the movies even as she dabbled in the silents, then found her own post-theatrical career with Oscar winning and Oscar nominated turns as she became matronly and her fame, her reputation and her imperious hauteur could be showcased to fine effect.

“Shy Empress of the Footlights” is very much an “academic biography,” with some 70 pages of notes, index and appendices stretching it to a still-thin 277 pages. The biography proper has whole pages filled with quotations from scores of reviews from publications long defunct and writers often without a byline — ardent admirers at first, comparing her to earlier legends like Eleneora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt in cascades of archaic purple prose.

That contributes to the book’s stodgy, arm’s length feel. Barrymore was very private woman who didn’t dish about an abusive marriage, famous “engagements” and courtships and her alcoholism in her evasive memoirs.

Spaltro never lets the reader forget the challenge of “knowing” someone whose greatest fame came from the ephemeral experience — for actress and audience — of the theater. “Legend” and “lore” about her and those like her will have to do.

There is more analysis of the film work — a disastrous “Rasputin” bio-pic for MGM, a lesser Hitchcock, the Oscar-winning “None but the Lonely Heart” opposite Cary Grant, the racially-charged but muzzled “Pinky” for Elia Kazan, a noir and “Portrait of Jennie” for David O. Selznick.

Barrymore gave lots of interviews early in her career, and turned more press shy later, which might explain Spaltro’s repetition of any anecdote or quip that plays like a Barrymore creed or secret to a happy life. A quip is quoted, then quoted again and then again in blocks of copy rarely broken into paragraphs. That comes off as sloppy editing or “padding” a thin manuscript.

The chronology of the life and career of “First Lady of the American Theatre” is jumbled up so much that one loses track of which “Jack” (John Barrymore or “Uncle Jack” Drew — the writer is talking about. Names are dropped by the bushel basketful and unless you know your Woollcotts and Dorothy Parkers from your “Thomas Hishak,” you’ll wear out Wikipedia trying to supplement all the author left out which her editors did not attempt to clarify.

Spaltro indulges herself in long sidebars about stage and screen depictions of disability in Barrymore’s day, and ever so daintily refers to Barrymore’s struggles with the bottle as “misuse of alcohol” and “alcohol misuse.” That’s not just dainty, it’s precious.