Movie Nation

The Chinese thriller “731” is a wildly ambitious attempt to get a heroic horror movie out of an infamous crime against humanity.

By turns macabre and moving, historical and fantastically, spectacularly over-the-top, it can’t be dismissed as simple anti-Japanese “propaganda” even if the clumsy structure underscores just how far writer-director Zhao Linshan (“Empress Wu,” “The Assassins”) — with the help of a dozen co-writers — overreaches.

The narrative jumbles and stumbles back and forth through the end game years of the Sino-Japanese War that had morphed into WWII. Zhao — with the help of a dozen co-writers — buries us under characters, and dips into the Japanese point of view via the Emperor’s most monstrous war criminal, Gen. Shiro Ishii, played here by Yasuyuki Hirata.

Yes, the script reminds us the U.S. granted Ishii immunity for help with its own post-war biological warfare experiments.

And Zhao’s film reaches a climax, then another and then grasps at postscript after postscript, suggesting a movie made by People’s Republican committee or a director who napped through a few important classes in film school.

Our protagonist is a Chinese “businessman” hustler (Wu Jiang) scrambling to make deals with all sides in the world war and the Chinese civil war that Japan interrupted by invading. He takes the name of a famous Chinese anti-fascist, which may be why the Japanese authorities nab him. Attempts to correct the “error” — “No no, I’m Wang Zhingyuan!” — can’t save him from arrest, being hooded and loaded onto a train to the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, occupied Manchuria.

Wang’s facility with languages and eagerness to appease his captors makes him “useful” enough to be made a trusty — translating Chinese and Russian into Japanese, and vice versa, for the many prisoners.

Being crafty and eager to save his own skin, he observes this white-tiled (with entirely too modern lighting and tech) “hospital” which thousands have been sent to. Despite the best Japanese efforts, he memorizes the rabbit warren of halls. He endures beatings from his captors and fellow prisoners, who regard him as a traitor. And he pays attention.

“The Emperor is benevolent,” Ishii’s tween twin daughters chirp over the public address system (the film is in Chinese and Japanese with English subtitles). “Food is precious. Once you’re cured you’ll be free.”

Wang is the first inmate in Unit 731 to figure out that “cured” and “free” are the most Orwellian lies in the fascists’ playbook.

We’re treated to an encyclopedia of “medical” human depravity as legions of hazmat-suited or white-coated “doctors” mistreat, torture and dissect “patients,” breeding rats and fleas for the Japanese Empire’s last throw of the dice, Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night.

Balloon bombs will float over America, dumping Bubonic plague-infected fleas on the country. As no one involved knows the war is fated to end with atomic bombs, they all proceed with this years-long monstrous plan and the human carnage their “experiments” create right to the bitter end.

There’s a worthy subject here and moments of pathos intrude on all the sadism — Wenjuan Feng plays a particularly barbaric female Japanese officer — and humanity (children are included in the experiments, and many of the guards are very young Japanese) and inhumanity we see.

But the film is needlessly hard to follow, pointlessly drawn-out and nakedly propagandistic when it deviates from histoty. The latter is somewhat excused, as Japan has been reluctant to accept the crimes against humanity its leaders, starting with the untried war criminal emperor, and their countrymen carried out amidst their wars of imperial aggression.

We see many European prisoners, but only the Russians get to speak. Japan was not at war with Russia. China’s using cinema to cozy up to their longtime Axis of Evil partners.

Yet it’s the “hard to follow” that’s less excusable.

At one point, a gathering of Japanese war criminals is framed like Da Vinci’s “Last Supper.” Why? Production design flourishes — the film looks anachronistically modern — include a scene in a vast, towering herb library storage silo that comes straight from “The Wizarding World” or “Brazil.”

Its myriad flaws and dramatic shortcomings mean I can’t recommend “731.” But the history is worth looking into, even it doesn’t render itself suitable to horror/history mashup this botched film attempts.

Rating: unrated, graphic, gruesome violence, nudity

Cast: Wu Jiang, Irene Wan, Zhiwen Wang, Qian Sun, Wenjuan Feng, Zun Wang and Yasuyuki Hirata

Credits: Directed by Zhao Linshan, scripted by Zhao Linshan and 12 “assistant writers.” A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:05

Of all the pictures one has come to expect “Black Dynamite” and B-and-C movie action star Michael Jai White to turn up in, a soapy, faith-friendly melodrama trotted out for Easter has to be the most “out there.”

“The Secret Between Us” is a static, turgid and low-stakes tale about lives disrupted by “secrets” plural, any and all of which have been potboiled to death on daytime soap operas going back decades.

White plays Jack Frazier, an Atlanta-based airline pilot with a daughter (Lisa Arrindell) finishing her medical residency who figures tonight’s the night longtime love (Denzell Dandridge) will propose, and an adoring wife (Lisa Arrindell) who’s arranged for all this to come about on husband Jack’s birthday.

But their dueling celebrations are interrupted by a knock at the door. A stranger stands before them. He (Tre Ryan) is 28 years old. And he’s the son flyboy Jack never knew he had. Apparently.

Nothing is quite worth taking at face value as writer-director Tamera Hill tosses secrets within secrets at us in a cascade of coincidences that range from “give me a break” to ludicrous. I mean, things get so bad that wife Lisa has to blurt out what she does for a living.

“What makes it worse is I’m a clincal psychologist!“

Things start off lax and flail away as health crises, hidden family history and lies within lies unravel and “God’s will be done” seems like everybody’s best response to it all. Including the editor.

The script is clunky and writer-director Hill, a few credits removed from “she’ll figure this out, eventually” status, serves up static scene after scene where nothing much happens save for a bit of empassioned conversation. There’s no pace as the editing leaves in footage before anybody should have called “Action” and scenes go on past the point where a “CUT!” was called for.

We don’t need to see that Torrance Frazier, the “son Jack never (sure) knew he had,” hired a “private investigator” to ID a man whose NAME AND PROFESSION HIS MAMA TOLD HIM BEFORE SHE DIED. The kid even has the man’s last name. Dude, Google much?

Dead weight like that abounds as characters that serve no dramatic purpose are introduced and a pause for a Stokley Williams concert — augmenting the silky, romantic R&B that laces the score (Keith Sweat was a producer) — delays new “secrets” that are kept when Torrance, who has health issues, meets a nurse (Destinee Monét) when a morning jog goes wrong.

“Fate is totally in control, I’m just here for a ride” is just a line of dialogue, not an editing strategy. This lump needed more shaping in the screenwriting/workshopping process, for starters. The final cut (IMDB suggests it was even longer at one time) is dawdling and lifeless.

White may be rock steady in the middle of all this. But with every new “secret” Jack springs on Lisa, all the way into the third act, each one to be brushed off without dramatic measure being taken of it, one can sense the eye-rolls that were merited, even if he was too polite to do that on set.

Rating: unrated, PG-ish

Cast: Michael Jai White, Lisa Arrindell, Dominique Wilson, Tre Ryan, Denzell Dandridge and Destinee Monét

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tamera Hill. A Hidden Gems Entertainment release in AMC theaters

Running time: 1:46

“Pretty Lethal” is another Pretty Young Things Imperiled of the “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” “Ready or Not” and so on genre.

Ho hum, right? There are only a couple of those in theaters at any given moment.

But it scores major style points for making the young women scrambling for their lives ballerinas, veritable terrors in tutus, incorporating dance into their desperate fights and box cutter knives in their toe-shoes.

The brawls have a certain brio, the villains are many and headed by a venomous Uma Thurman. And their peril is faced in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Europe’s newest dictatorship. So that’s something.

Dancing actress Maddie Ziegler of “West Side Story” and “My Old Ass” is the scruffy streetwise Bonnie Jones, “Bones” to the ballerinas in her class who like her.

“Rich bitch” mean girl Princess (Lana Condor of the “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” movies) isn’t one of those. But fundamentalist Grace (Avantika), deaf dancer Chloe (Millicent Simmons) and her sister Zoe (Iris Apatow) are on friendly terms with “the orphan.”

Brit Ms. Thorna (Lydia Leonard) has been prepping for a big Budapest ballet showcase that could launch their careers. But getting there by re-directed flight and clunky, ancient Eastern Bloc era bus proves daunting. They have to hoof it to a small town, where the Teremok Inn isn’t as inviting as one might hope.

Goons and thugs abound. Threats are everywhere. And when the son of the local mob boss (Tamás Szabó Sipos) kills their teacher on a whim, the five tiny dancers are witnesses, messiness that the ex-dancer/owner of the inn (Thurman) must tidy up.

The foreshadowing is plentiful and laid out right from an opening monologue. Ballerinas have to be tough to “turn pain into beauty.” They keep box cutters handy to break in their new slippers. And they’re in spectacular physical condition.

As the Hungarian minions come for them and the chips are down, Bones delivers screenwriter Kate Freund’s tagline for the movie.

“These guys are drunk and out of shape, and we’re prima f——g ballerinas.“

Pavlova, Fonteyn or Misty Copeland could not have put it better.

The novelty of dance choreography bent into fighting form makes the movie more fun than most recent iterations of this formula. Kudos to stunt choreographer Shahaub Roudbari and director Vicky Jewson for making all that play out.

Ziegler and Condor are well-matched leads.

But Thurman, aptly cast as a former ballerina with a chip on her shoulder, doesn’t exactly “bring it.”

And the script runs out of fresh ideas and novel ways to challenge the dueling dancers quickly, and soon trips over its own tropes.

I certainly enjoyed this more than “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come.” But I can’t say it’s any better.

Rating: R, bloody violence, the threat of rape, profanity

Cast: Maddie Ziegler, Lana Condor, Lydia Leonard, Avantika, Millicent Simmons, Iris Apatow, Tamás Szabó Sipos and Uma Thurman.

Credits: Directed by Vicky Jewson, scripted by Kate Freund. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:31

The seminal, genre-bending , world-conquering alt rock/rap/funk band The Red Hot Chili Peppers turn sentimental and surprisingly sweet in “The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother Hillel,” the new documentary about how they formed, their disparate infuences and the key pieces and players who defined their sound.

Ben Feldman’s film gets the earliest members of the band and pre-“Peppers” lineups to sit down and talk about the Israeli-born guitarist, Hillel Slovak, who befriended, inspired and brought singer/rapper/songwriter Anthony Kiedis into the fold and who convinced Flea (Michael Peter Balzary) to give up the trumpet and learn how to play the bass.

Slovak overdosed in 1988, just as the band was hitting its peak. But Kiedis, Flea, original drummer Jack Irons and producers George Clinton and Michael Beinhorn praise the funk/proto speed metal riffs and tempos Slovak introduced that replacement guitarist John Fusciantes, who idolized him, could only hope to replicate by “getting inside his head.”

Fans will know much of this story — the evolution from Slovak, Irons and Alain Johannes’ high school ’70s metal band Anthym to What Is This? and then The Red Hot Chili Peppers formation in 1982-83. But even they may be surprised at the details all involved reveal, at the readings from Slovak’s journals, which he kept from his teens until his death, and at the teary affection all involved still have for their first guitarist.

And the Peppers-friendly of the more casual variety can be dazzled by the explosive rise of what might be called the first post-radio rock supergroup, a band that pretty much changed the LA music scene and the future shape of alternative rock with their first single-song solo set, opening for their friend — rapper, designer, chef and LA influencer Gary Allen — in a small L.A. club.

“I knew I had heard the future,” Allen enthuses.

Kiedis has been the wild-eyed mascot of their high school outsider group, shirtless dancing at their gigs, dabbling in rap once they all heard Grandmaster Flash for the first time, playing around with poetry until that moment — at Allen’s suggestion — that he took the mike and became the most frenetic frontman of his era, maybe ever.

The downside of success was just as sudden, as the boozing/pothead pals all could now afford to dive into cocaine, heroin and anything else, with Slovak and Kiedis leading the way, and almost leading all of them astray.

The offstage Kiedis may be well past his exhibitionist/andrognyous gonzo sk8Rboi youth. But his adult frankness in discussing the band’s fractures and his own battles with addiction flesh out the doubts even an increasingly famous frontman battled.

Flea is almost shockingly accessible here, tearing up at this memory, that rift and his idol’s death. He and Kiedis were just “little punk a–holes” at L.A.’s Fairfax High, outcasts taken in by the tall, poodle-haired rocker Slovak was even then.

“He was cool,” Flea marvels. “Not ‘popular'” prom king “cool, just cool.”

And they all — including Irons and Johannes, who lost his band and record deal after Slovak finally made his Chili Peppers “side band” commitment permanent — come off as reflective, sober, compassionate and grateful to each other for the life-changing experience their stardom or near stardom gave them.

But “Our Brother Hillel,” speaking from beyond the grave, reading from his journals — his voice re-created via AI samples of scads of ’80s interviews — was already there. Drug-addict or not, he was the one whose signature sound and his love bonded this band of brothers and set the stage for the enduring fame that they’d achieve long after his passing.

Rating: R, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Anthony Kiedis, Flea, Jack Irons, Addie Brik, Gary Allen, Alain Johannes, John Fusciantes, Michael Beinhorn and George Clinton

Credits: Directed by Ben Feldman. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

If you’ve got time for just one Netflix movie on predator guardianships and the lawyers who prey on seniors with assets, and the nursing homes, health care workers and even judges in on the fix, I recommend “I Care a Lot.”

It’s got Rosamund Pike, theatrical feature production values and a mob connection that feeds the fantasy that sometimes, these bottom-feeders get exactly what’s coming to them.

But “The Bad Guardian” does a decent job of getting the blood boiling over unethical lawyers and “the system” that lets them come between families and their elders, all but ensuring neglectful elder care and draining their bank accounts in the process.

Just fighting back against the byzantine practices of probate court is “like asking for an invitation to a club they don’t want you in,” our heroine Leigh (Melissa Joan Hart) protests.

That’s the best line in this Lifetime Original Movie, a melodrama that piles up obstacles and raises the stakes — attempted murder, neglect and restraining orders and surgeries ordered out of spite — even if we hope that it’ll serve up some measure of justice by the finale.

Leigh and her housebuilding husband Luis (Luis Bordonada) have to leave a winter vacation in a mountain cabin with their two kids when “Dad won’t answer his phone.”

They dash home to their corner of suburban Tennessee only to find Dad’s house locked, his cell phone on the floor and a puddle of blood next to it. One missing person report later, he turns up — in the too-aptly-named “Shadyside Nursing Home.”

Subtle, Lifetime. And well played.

“How’d you wind up here?” is the next stage of Leigh’s nightmare. A self-righteous and condescending attorney (La La Anthony, magnificently vile) has gotten a chummy judge (Pat Dortch) to make her legal guardian of Leigh’s 80something dad (Eric Pierpoint).

Leigh’s a waitress in a diner. Her husband’s a skilled laborer. They have two kids. They don’t have money for a lawyer, and even their kids’ college fund is an asset in her dad’s hands.

Lawyer Timms has trouble feigning sympathy, but has her “family neglect” patter down cold. She’s in charge. And every person Leigh turns to seems subject to Timms’ money, position and coziness with the court — an ex-lawyer/victim (Teri Clark), a TV reporter (Eddie Yu), and even a sympathetic nurse (Mystie Smith).

It’s enough to chill older viewers and the family members of the elderly right to the marrow. And if you aren’t in either boat right, buy that life jacket now and tuck it away. A storm’s coming for you, too.

The movie’s melodramatic flourishes are obvious, and its narrative choppy (editing with commercial breaks built-in) and incomplete. Leigh’s plucky pursuit of justice is noble, but short on details.

We aren’t talking Erin Brockovich, here.

Hart, like most former child actors, developed her chops and range on TV shows (“Clarissa Explains it All,” “Sabrina the Teenage Witch”) so undemanding and assembly-line quick that bad habits became ingrained and hitting Big Notes in drama was wrung right out of her repetoire.

While Ashley Gable’s script and Claudia Myers’ brisk but spark-free direction of it may get us worked up over the outrage of it all, some of it almost as far fetched as having a guardian “kidnap” a mobster’s mom by mistake, the picture lacks a knock out punch. The abrupt payoff never amounts to more than an unsatisfying cheat.

That’s “Lifetime Ever After” for you.

So go watch “I Care a Lot” instead. Seriously.

Rating: TV-14, violence

Cast: Melissa Joan Hart, La La Anthony, Luis Bordonada, Eric Pierpoint, Eddie Yu, Teri Clark and Pat Dortch.

Credits: Directed by Claudia Myers, scripted by Ashley Gable. A Lifetime Original Movie on Netflix.

Running time: 1:27

The nihilist in an existentialist world of Albert Camus‘ novella “The Stranger” comes to sublime, understated life in the latest film of François Ozon.

The director of “Potiche,” “Eight Women,” “Everything Went Fine” and “When Fall is Coming” turns out to be the perfect choice to grapple with a novel that only Luchino Visconti dared film before him, and he did it in the much more daring and cerebral cinematic era, the 1960s.

Ozon grapples with the story’s novelistic longueurs, its meditative pondering of life, guilt and moral responsibility or irresponsibility in a mesmerising period piece that underscores the timelessness of Life’s Big Questions.

Benjamin Voisin of the French kidnapping comedy “Freestyle” becomes the beautiful blank slate that is Camus’ Meursault. He is a young Frenchman in colonial Algiers so passive that he barely engages with his world, barely notices the unrest among the colonized Arabs, barely acknowledges the love of the vivacious Marie (Rebecca Marder) and can’t be bothered to mourn when his mother dies in the Catholic nursing home where he left her.

It’s no wonder we meet him in prison. The huge cell is filled with natives, so the thin, fair-skinned Frenchman stands out. What did you do, his Islamic cellmates want to know?

“I killed an Arab.”

If Meursault was the least bit wary, guarded or unsure of his life’s meaninglessness, he would have kept that to himself.

Flashbacks tell us how that killing happened, and much that led up to it. He’s an unambitious office worker in a French trading company who only needs “two days” to see to his mother’s affairs. All he has to do ride a bus to the nursing home in the Algerian countryside, meet with the director and the man who built her cedar coffin, and wait for the funeral service.

He sheds no tears. When his mother’s nursing home fiancé trips and falls because of how shattered he is by her deauth, Meursault offers no assistance. When the priest offers a benediction, Meursault is the last to stand — reluctantly.

Everybody there notices this callous emotional detachment. Meursault does not care.

His return to Algiers has him take the afternoon to go swimming in “the baths” off a stone pier. He expresses no delight that the lovely Marie is there and that they swim together. It’s only when he suggests they go to a movie that she realizes his mother just died.

Meursault is a man of few words (in French with English subtitles). “I don’t know.” “You never know.” “There’s no point.” He must have been a fun interrogation for the gendarmes.

Meursault doesn’t intervene in his elderly neighbor’s frequent beatings of his aged dog, is impassive when his pimp neighbor (Pierre Lottin) talks about beating a young woman and isn’t the one to call the cops when Raymond does it again. He is perfectly passive when Marie starts talking about marriage and expresses no interest when the boss suggests a promotion.

“I don’t believe a ‘life change’ is possible,” he shrugs. “One life is as good as another.”

But the crime he’s accused of can’t be passively dismissed, rationalized or even admitted to. “There’s no point” has become his mantra and his dogma. Let’s see how that holds up in court.

Voisin is the very embodiment of the “taciturn” and “reserved” anti hero. He’s so unemotional and emotionally unavailable that we question Marie’s devotion to him. Looks aren’t everything, dear.

Voisin’s placid performance captures something as modern now as it was when the novel was published in 1942. The world’s a mess, awful people are everywhere, guilt and culpability seem inescapeable.

Some will say “It’s better to light a single candle than sit and curse the darkness.” Others won’t even bother with the cursing. “What difference can I make?” Religion, morality, national identity, career, thinking about “the future” with someone, choosing life or questioning “life must go on,” everything is on the table for Meursault.

“No man is an island” is a thesis Camus and Meursault figure is worth putting to the test.

It’s a near miracle that anyone could get a movie out of this. But Ozon, like Visconti before him, has. It’s not for the sentimental, the conventional or the faithful. But “The Stranger,” in book or its latest cinematic form, is for the intellectually curious and questioning. Just don’t go expecting it to provide many answers.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, nudity, smoking

Cast: Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder, Pierre Lottin, Denis Lavant,
Abderrahmane Dehkani and Hajar Bouzaouit

Credits: Directed by François Ozon, scripted by François Ozon and Philippe Piazzo, based on the novel by Albert Camus. A Music Box release.

Running time: 2:02

The season’s biggest hit adds another $50 million, and Zazie Beetz can’t beat the horror audience out of its stupor, as the last weekend of March spring breaks to an end.

“Project Hail Mary” is doing robust business, and even a 35% falloff from last weekend (Deadline.com is guessing 30%) isn’t bad news for a two and a half hour feel-good sci-fi showcase for Ryan Gosling and a sentient FX rock crab.

MGM’s got a big hit on its hands, even if it isn’t drawing the massive repeat business of films that become phenomena.

I have been questioning where the horror audience went for the entire post COVID box office era, because aside from the odd exceptional film with the heaviest hype (the Oscar winning “Sinners” and “Weapons”) this traditionally younger crowd just isn’t turning up numbers.

Used to be, most any horror film with a little cachet — SXSW or ComicCon buzz — could open in a pre-Trumpflation upper $teens, with a franchises able to count on upper $20s. That’s no longer happening. “Final Destination” and “Scream” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer” reboots can count on a turnout at least the lower end of the range of previous hits. But even they aren’t drawing the raw numbers (tickets are more expensive) that they used to.

It could be that the demographics have shifted, the past audience aged out of going. Higher prices and a crippled economy and Netflix and Shudder may play a role.

And one reason that “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come” with Samara Weaving only managed $9 million last weekend and “They Will Kill You” with Zazie Beetz will be lucky to clear $6 ($5.5) million is that they seem like the same movie, or similar enough to each other and scads of other variations on a young woman battles evil to the bloody death tale.

“They Will Kill You” also features Oscar winner Patricia Arquette, Heather Graham and Hogwarts alumnus Tom Felton and — forget-the-fanboy/RT hype — is collecting even weaker reviews than “Ready or Not 2.” It managed only $1 million in ticket sales Thursday night and Friday didn’t take up enough slack to help it move beyond third place

The new witchy horror tale “Forbidden Fruit” from IFC should clear $2 million, maybe $3, and land somewhere in the second five. Seventh place?

“Hoppers” is heading towards a $11 or low $teens weekend in second place, with “Dhurandhar: The Revenge” ($4.5) and “Reminders of Him” +$4.6 )likely taking fourth and fifth or fifth and fourth, shoving “Ready or Not 2″ ($4, in sixth place) briskly out of the top five.

“Scream 7” is in eighth ($2-3).

“GOAT” is winding down at $2 in ninth place.

“Undertone” is stocking around, as $1.6 million should keep it in the top ten.

And the two new titles should finally push “Wuthering Heights: out of the top ten as it winds down its run in the mid $80s.

I’ll pass on more data as Sunday’s BO figures roll in.

The American cinema of the ’70s is justly celebrated for daring and intellectually challenging film, cynical cinema that pointed the camera at urban and rural decay.

The skepticism of the “Hud” and “Midnight Cowboy” 1960s curdled into grim portraits of a nation in decline just past the cusp of its greatest triumphs.

John Huston’s film of Leonard Gardner’s 1969 novel “Fat City” is a classic of this seedy cinema of the underclasses, a compelling drama of “the fight game” that grappled with bitterness and a generation facing the disappointment of the dashed American Dream.

It’s a boxing picture that isn’t about the boxing, save as a metaphor for the violence of lives at the bottom with little prayer of escaping their fate. Hardboiled and booze-fueled, it was a career-maker for Stacy Keach, an Oscar-nominated revel for Susan Tyrell and a great stepping stone for Lloyd Bridges’ younger son, Jeff Bridges, long and lean and hungry in his “Last Picture Show” years, here playing a lanky kid proclaimed as a “natural” by people we realize are grasping at the same straws that he is and kidding themselves as they do.

We meet Tully (Keach) as he staggers out of bed, takes a sip from a bottle in the Stockdale, California flophouse hotel room’s nightstand, and saunters into the street. Maybe today’s the day he’ll get back in shape. So he visits the nearly empty YMCA. That’s where he meets “the kid” mastering the punching bag.

Ernie Munger (Bridges) is muscular but lean. He agrees to “spar a little” with grizzled Tully, a fighter he recognizes but who hasn’t fought for a year and a half.

“I think you got it, kid.”

That’s enough to send 18 year-old/no-prospects Ernie to meet with Tully’s old trainer, Ruben (Nicholas Colasanto, a decade before “Cheers”). Ruben repeats Tully’s compliments. They’re all impressed by the length of the kid’s arms, his “reach,” and figure Ernie could “make a lotta money, if he’s handled right.”

Keach’s Tully is the focus in a narrative that introduces our two protagonists to each other and separates them for much of the picture before a bitter-with-barely-a-hint-of-sweet reunion. Huston, who took boxing seriously for a stretch of his youth, knew this world and brings a romantic fatalism and grit to his only film set in that milieu.

Tully cadges drinks and closes the bars down, talking with the deluded chatterbox Oma (Tyrell) and her man Earl (Curtis Cokes). There’s a tolerance and affection between them that suggests maybe our hooker/pimp guess about their relationship is wrong. When Earl goes to jail, Tully takes up with her, another obstacle to him ever putting the gloves on again. Then again, maybe he’ll swallow his pride and bitterness and reunite with Ruben.

Ernie’s got a girlfriend (Candy Clark) who clings to her first lover, not because she thinks he’s her ticket out, but because that’s the only life she can see ahead of her. Ernie’s earliest bouts don’t have him convinced that boxing is their salvation, but with a baby on the way, he marries her and their fates are sealed.

“Refuge” is a frankly stupid and formulaic “whodunit” wrapped in torture, retribution and guilt from all the dirty secrets men keep.

Four friends since high school head off to a hunting/fishing cabin in the woods, rounded-up and driven there by Sam (Adam Sinclair).

We’ve heard Sam’s voice, frantically calling 911 years before when his 10 year old daughter was abducted. We saw him acquire a revolver. And you know what Chekhov said about guns in the first act.

Sam is certain one of his old chums was involved in his Sophie’s disappearance. And he’s got drugs to knock them out while drinking, duct tape to tie them down and an incriminating piece of evidence that somehow escaped the cops and which Sam apparently didn’t bring to their attention.

One of the men in this cabin knows more than he’s been willing to admit.

Could it be stoner, ex-con and perpetual screw-up Jay (Christopher Dietrick)? Could it be his short tempered teacher/older brother Mike (Adam Dorsey) ?

Or maybe the successful Barry (Donald Paul), the one with the sketchiest sexual past?

Through a long afternoon, evening and next day, Sam will drug and torture these three, rooting through their shared pasts, character traits, foibles and alibis to get to the truth.

“What IS this? Something out of a f—–g ‘Law & Order’ episode?”

No, the dialogue isn’t anything to quote or highlight on the resume of our Icelandic writer-director, Anton Sigurdsson. Not that his earlier credits — “Full Pockets,” “Graves & Bones” — are anything to brag about, either.

The acting isn’t good enough to steal attention from from the dialogue, broadly-drawn characters or the simpler-than-simplistic plot. Painting yourself into a corner with a four-character tale can be disastrous when you further reduce who might truly be to blame, and when you give your most thinly-developed character, Mr. “I have never felt more sane in my entire life” Sam, the torturer, to the least interesting actor in the lot.

There’s some novelty to the editing, little of it good.

The opening credits SLOWLY roll underneath an opening montage about the crime and the media aftermath of it. Right from the beginning, exposition and back-story are being presented with a screen covered with eight credited producers rolling past, distracting us from taking it all in.

Frankly, things don’t improve after that.

Rating: R, graphic violence, profanity, sexual subject matter

Cast: Christopher Dietrick, Adam Dorsey, Donald Paul and Adam Sinclair

Credits: Scripted ad directed by Anton Sigurdsson. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:26

“Watching Mr. Pearson” is an indie outing with “Sunset Boulevard” as its original mailing address.

A drama about an aged actor lost in his old roles, with two caregivers indulging his “harmless” dementia and acting out his old scripts with him, it lacks anything in the way of wit and much that would make it dramatic.

It begins with a seriously unconvincing black and white film-within-film and leans on that device for flashbacks-that-don’t-look-like ’40s and ’50s cinema as it quickly stalls out. It’s essentially a screenplay pitch that needed workshopping that would polish dialogue, raise the stakes, flesh out characters and sharpen agendas and motivations.

Robert Pearson (Hugo Armstrong) is an old man in the hands of caregivers at his seaside mansion. But back in the day, if you needed a hardboiled private eye, a hero fighting oceanic “evil” in “The Beast from Below” or a flinty Western gunslinger, he was your man. Sam Bullington plays Avery the gumshoe and Robert in the other guises of his youth.

Miguel (Luis Rizo) has the night shift “Watching Mr. Pearson.” Polish immigrant Caroline (Dominika Zawada), anxious about her Green Card renewal, keeps him company during the day. She’s the one who sees the old props around the house and the old screenplays lying about and starts indulging Robert as he dementedly drifts off into a role from his past.

“I’ve got alarm bells for broads like her,” he once said on the silver screen. “And they were ringing like a Christmas hymn.”

Today, he’s still a diva.

“Are you just gonna STAND there? It’s YOUR line!” “Can you see me?” Yes. “That means you’re in my SIGHT line!”

Miguel has his doubts about this indulgence of Caroline’s. But it turns out he’s an aspiring screenwriter, and there’s a couple of years of film schools in all these scripts for “Ranger on the Bluff,” “The Captives,” “Avery” and “Truer Odds.”

Pearson drifts in an out of reality, fretting over finances (Zainab Jah plays his financial advisor) — “They want to cut me apart and sell me piece by piece.” Much of the time, no one can tell if he’s expressing real feelings or just parroting old dialogue.

“My life is over when I SAY it is!”

Armstrong — who has bit part screen credits going back to about 2000 — is meant to be the anchor here, a colorful curmudgeon of the old school. That’s a tough assignment as the film rarely gives us the human being underneath the scripted creation. The other performances range from adequate to eye-rolling in the movie clip flashbacks.

There’s no hint that this suburban LA story was filmed in Connecticut, but the editing doesn’t build suspense or sustain pace. The production values are decent enough. But an opening scene of a PI back in the black and white cinema heyday includes a student film level blunder — a highway speed limit sign is reversed as our anti-hero drives past it.

As we wrestle with the lack of pathos, the point of it all and how this story sets up that low-stakes resolution, the most hopeful words of encouragement for all this work — all those graphics of fake-movie posters, renting that mansion and a quarter million dollar+ collectible Porsche convertible — is “better luck next time.”

Rating: unrated, some violence

Cast: Dominika Zawada, Hugo Armstong, Zainab Jah, Sam Bullington and Luis Rizo.

Credits: Directed by Dillon Bentlage, scripted by Dillon Bentlage and Simon Kienitz Kincade. A KT Pictures /Hedy Films release.

Running time: 1:24