Movie Nation

The brawls have to do most of the heavy lifting in your typical martial arts genre picture, even the ones in a scenic setting. That’s doubly true in “The Forbidden City,” a stumbling and generally indifferent kung fu thriller with comic touches set in The Enternal City — Rome.

“Rome” is limited to an out-of-place one night motorbike ride past the historical landmarks. And the tale of two sisters, raised to be martial artists in the “Only One Child Per Family” era China but separated by human trafficking in adulthood, misses as many plot points as it hits.

When they were little, Yun and Mei trained together with their dojo master daddy, with Yun forced into hiding every time a neighborhood spy dropped by to catch the family raising two daughters instead of the requisite one.

Adulthood sees tough-as-nails Mei (Yaxi Liu) pursue “always there for me” sister Yun (Haijin Ye) through the Chinese mob’s global human trafficking pipeline.

Imagine the dragon lady in charge’s surprise when she walks down a line of trafficked young women whom she assigns to “brothel,” “massage” work and the like, and that one furious immigrant who demands to know “Where is YUN?” and proceeds to kick the ass of everybody who fails to give her a quick answer.

Mei is focused and furious. If she has to bust up every Chinese mafia crew and Italian mobster in Rome, where Yun has ended up, she’s going to fetch that missing sister. Where most cities label their Chinese district “Chinatown,” in Rome they prefer “La città proibita,” aka “The Forbidden City.” Or so this Gabriele Mainetti movie asserts.

Mei is never scarier than when she yanks out her phone, barks a threat (in Chinese with English subtitles) into it and has it translated into Chinese-accented Italian (with English subtitles). Because most of the people she’s going to have to punch, kick, stab and slice (a CD broken in half makes a nasty weapon) are locals.

Annibale (Marco Giallini, flinty) is the neighborhood mafioso, 60something, with two bearded goons nicknamed “Chip n Dale” always by his side. He’s big on putting the squeeze on immigrants. He’s got an interest in Ristorante Alfredo. Alfredo’s son Marcello (Enrico Borello) is the star chef there. But the ever-philandering Alfredo (Luca Zingaretti) is where everybody is led to believe that the sex-trafficked sibling Yun wound up.

That puts Mei in conflict with hapless Marcello and on the warpath for Wang (Shanshin Chunyu), the new Chinese muscle in town, running his growing empire through Chinese restaurants, brothels and massage parlors.

As Mei makes mayhem, everybody keeps an eye out for “the Chinese girl,” who kidnaps Marcello at one point and sets out to rescue or avenge her sister, no matter who’s involved.

The cultures in collision plot mean that the Stefano Bises, director Mainetti and Davide Serino script is cluttered with filler. Subplots involving Marcello’s cheat-customers-on-their-bill mother (Sabrina Ferelli), Wang’s Sino-Italian hip hop star son (Roberto He) are side alleys that reach an instant dead-end.

Yun is transformed from a child trained to defend herself into a passive character in love or merely in the clutches of a much older man.

The “filler” stops the movie’s forward momentum every few minutes as we’re treated to chatty interludes meant to prolong how long it takes us to reason out the plot — which takes no time at all as long as you remember “reason” has little to do with it.

But stuntwoman (“Mulan”) turned star Liu is a formidable lead, selling much of the impossible Bugs Bunny physics of the fights as she and everybody else hopes that we don’t notice her quick recovery from gaping knife wounds and the like.

Borello can’t quite make the sale of sister-of-his-father’s-paramore-turned-love interest. But who could? The finale to “The Forbidden City” is the sort of reality only a trio of screenwriters could irrationally cook up, with nary an Italian Chef Academy alumnus in the lot.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Yaxi Liu, Enrico Borello, Marco Giallini, Shanshun Chunyu,
Sabrina Ferilli, Luca Zingaretti and Haijin Ye

Credits: Directed by Gabriele Mainetti, scripted by Stefano Bises, Gabriele Mainetti and Davide Serino. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:19

The ’70s are widely regarded as the cinema’s second gilded age, and with good reason.

As the audience shrank to date movie kids, action and genre addicts who thought drive-ins were the best way to watch a movie or discerning, sophisticated filmgoers, as the studios changed hands and new ownership abandoned old genres and formulas in search of something that might draw a crowd, a new generation of filmmakers announced itself with daring films, and later in the decade, the invention of the modern blockbuster.

But before “Jaws” and “Star Wars” changed everything, “Five Easy Pieces,” “The Godfather,” “Harold and Maude,” “Chinatown,” “The Conversation” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” were mulled over and debated by the major magazine critics of the era, and their readers. “All the President’s Men” was history illuminated and summed up just as it happened. And “Shampoo” and “Network” reminded us that comedy could be social commentary and satire.

And then “Heaven’s Gate” all but killed off risky and smart cinema. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” chiseled the popcorn blockbuster business model in stone, and it was all over.

But “Being There” ended a great cinema decade with a glorious, witty and wry flourish. It’s no surprise that it took years of effort and many potential stars turning it down before Jerzy Kosinski’s mirror-on-America novel could finally reach the screen. After Watergate, we were ready. As we prepared to put a dotty, myopic commie-hating movie star in the White House, we needed a movie that could explain how that might happen.

Peter Sellers, director Hal Ashby and Kosinski created a mythic satire of the attention span of a culture than embraces the new and the unknown as “fresh,” even when it isn’t fresh or profound or even smart, a timeless film that pokes at race, skewers clueless media, conservatism and the oligarchs who control it to rule over The Masses, a masterpiece that would come out just in time for The Reagan Era.

It’s all in the perception — the posturing and media gullibility in celebrating the surface gloss and polls of people who don’t pay a lot of attention to details but who find something or someone “new” to be “refreshing,” especially when the media spins inanities and ignorance into profundity.

With its illiterate, dim, confused and TV-obsessed “hero,” more than one wag has revived “Being There” in recent years as a predictor of The Trump Era. Cultures don’t degrade or revive themselves overnight. And great films have a timelessness that keeps them relevant through the ages.

Chance (Sellers) has grown up in the servants’ quarters of a posh city townhouse gone to seed, so we gather. He watches TV obsessively, changing the channel compulsively. He polishes “the old man’s” car — a 1938 Packard Eight whose whitewalls have long been flat — and tends his garden. Chance, the gardener, has been doing this and only this for all of his 50some years.

Then housekeeper Louise (Ruth Attaway, brilliantly tactless and furious), who has prepared his meals for most of his life, announces “The old man’s dead.” Chance says “I see” so inscrutably that we might confuse his confusion for solemnity and gravitas. Throughout the movie, everybody else does.

When Chance says “I understand,” he does nothing of the sort. When he notes “I’ve never been allowed out of the house,” or “I don’t read” or “I can’t sign” his name when a lawyer (the redoubtable David Clennon) shows up and questions Chance in classic legal CYA speak, he’s being literal. Not to worry, “I have no claim” Chance assures our litigation-shy lawyer. Chance is unsure of what the word means.

Eviction puts Chance on the street without even the most basic skills of survival. But his very expensive but dated tailored double-breasted suit, coat and hat speaks volumes. And “Being There” truly announces itself as one of the greatest films ever the minute Chance walks out that door and into a D.C. neighborhood that this mansion/townhouse has slowly gone to ruin within.

For eight minutes, this innocent abroad strolls the streets with their empty storefronts and litter. He stares past the urban decay to fuss over the state of the flora, asks Black female strangers he meets if they could make him his lunch and meets Black street punks who have a message for the “honky” to deliver to their rival, Raphael, with this entire odyssey set to the electronic jazz version of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” by Deodato.

No, this isn’t “2001.” It’s America in the late ’70s — as vivid a montage of struggling cities, the disadvantaged Black and Hispanic generations who prompted racist White Flight from those cities — and the power elite who cluelessly and heartlessly presided over it all.

“It’s for sure that it’s a white man’s world in America!” Louise fumes in the rundown boarding house where she and other Black domestic labor are fated to spend their retirement. Because she sees Chance on TV.

The simpleton who can’t discern reality from television, to the extent he uses his TV remote to try and change the channel from his unpleasant encounter with gang-bangers, stumbles into an accident, is rescued by the trophy wife (Shirley MacLaine) of aged, rich D.C. power broker Benjamin Rand (Melvyn Douglas). Chance the Gardener is confused for “Chauncey Gardiner,” with his every word misinterpreted and every coincidence that puts him in the orbit of Rand and the rest of the aged, white D.C. elite allowing one and all to mistake him for a behind-the-scenes shaker and mover, an inscrutable sage of the age with the ear of the powerful and their president (Jack Warden).

“Shortchanged by the Lord, and dumb as a jackass,” Louise preaches. “Look at him now!”

A $30 million second weekend, coming after a $45 million opening weekend and $58 million opening week, means Disney/Pixar’s “Hoppers” could flirt with the $100 million mark by midnight Sunday, and that it owns the box office all the way through the Oscars.

But the big news this weekend is the $20 million that the Colleen Hoover romance novel adaptation “Reminders of Him” might hit. Mixed reviews aside, its engaging leads sell it and Maika Monroe and Tyriq Withers have their first certified smash outside of the horror genre. So good on them.

But any way you shake it, that doesn’t measure up to the opening of the abuse-and-its-blowback Hoover adapation “This Ends with Us,” which did a whopping $50 million on its opening weekend. It had Blake Lively as its star, which was a huge boost.

“Reminders” did decent Thursday and Friday business — just under $8 million. And depending on how Sat. shakes out, could clear $20 by midnight Sunday, with $18 million the floor of what it could manage.

“Undertone” is also an over-performer, a sinister and sonic (sound is EVERYthing) single-hander starring “Handmaid’s Tale” handmaid Nina Kiri, it’s on track to clear $10. For a wide but not huge release horror tale that isn’t a franchise installment, that’s impressive. The discerning horror fans are finding this A24 outing, as they should.

That should push the fading and weary “Scream 7” to fourth place, as it’s on course to clear $7.

“GOAT,” the other animated choice for parents with cartoon-craving-kids, will enjoy one last weekend in the top five with a $5 million weekend, according to Deadline.com.

“The Bride!” (dying a mercifully quick death — it may barely clear $20 million before vanishing) and “Wuthering Heights” (over $80 thus far, a Margot Robbie blockbuster) exit the top five.

That “EPIC” Elvis doc, playing in the provinces to a much older crowd, should exit the top ten, with either “I Can Only Imagine 2” ($17 million+) or “Send Help” ($63 million and counting) leaving with it.

I’ll update these figures as more data is shared on Sat. and Sunday.

A little old-fashioned movie star charisma and sex appeal spice up the latest from romance novelist Colleen Hoover, “Reminders of Him.”

An overwrought and only slightly less far fetched romantic melodrama than her edgier and abusive “This Ends with Us,” “Reminder” is the beneficiary of nicely nuanced turns by two attractive and engaging leads — horror icon Maika Monroe of “It Follows” and “Don’t Breathe,” and Tyriq Withers of “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and TV’s “The Game.”

They make a story of guilt and responsibility, starting over after a tragedy and overcoming legal, ethical and personal misjudgements and oh, intense sexual attraction and extreme affluence tolerable if not wholly palatable.

It’s the kind of romance that measures up to “This isn’t half bad” despite some eye-rolling or just too-obvious plot twists.

Monroe is Kenna, fresh out of prison and on her way back into Laramie when she has the cabbie stop by a roadside memorial. She yanks up the cross with Scotty Landry’s name on it. He’s the guy she writes “letters” to in her journals, letters she relates in voice-over narration.

“Dear Scotty, I know you hated memorials” and the like.

She’s got her pre-prison Daisy Dukes and cowgirl boots on as she rents an efficiency in the Paradise Apartments, a dump that used to be a motel. The owner arm-twists her into taking a kitten in the bargain. Kenna will have to get used to the special needs girl who goes by Princess Diana (Monika Myers) who’s in the habit of barging in wherever, looking in the fridge and taking whatever suits her fancy.

“We can’t hire folks with a record, hon,” is what Kenna hears from one and all as she job hunts. There’s no “starting over” without a job. A sympathetic grocery store assistant manager bails her out.

And the hunky ex-Denver Bronco tavern owner Ledger (Withers) will serve up day-old coffee if that’s all she’s drinking.

Kenna’s past, her big mistake, involved alcohol, a car accident and a tragedy none of those closest to it will ever get over. She’s come here to see her child.

“I just wanna meet the human being that Scotty and I made.”

His parents (Lauren Graham and Bradley Whitford) aren’t hearing that. And Ledger, once he figures out who she is, won’t allow her in their sight.

But as the hunk and the hottie gently collide and flashbacks flesh out their pasts with Scotty, big mistakes and whatnot, we see where this is going and have to decide just how plausible it all is.

Hoover’s edge — the book was adapted by Lauren Levine — comes from the R-rated language and sexuality of her entries in a genre that often has a faith-based or at least a Nicholas Sparks soft and squishy feel.

There’s no prison brutality, but we see Kenna advised by a wisened, butch inmate in the bluntest terms.

“They took your baby from you.” She has to decide, are “You gonna live in your sadness, or die in it?”

The narrative is littered with cute-bordering-on-cloying touches — Princess Diana’s running gag/nickname for Ledger — “Jerk” — jokes about hating music because all the songs are riven with heartbreak (Air Supply as a punchline).

Little Zoe Kosovic is the teeth-achingly-adorable five-year-old, improbably named Diem, at the heart of this tug of war. Ledger’s devoted to his best friend’s child. Can he forgive the woman who took Scotty from him?

The plot is messy, but built on romance-novel tidiness — coincidences and twists that point towards “It’ll all work out.”

But director Vanessa Caswill (Netflix’s “Love at First Sight”) knows where the money is here. Monroe and Withers are showcased to beautiful effect and her stars reward her attentions with inviting performances.

Withers, a former Florida State football player, is Wheaties box-handsome and effortlessly credible as an NFL vet building a mansion in his home town and Monroe has a working class earthiness that serves the role well.

“Why are you so poor?” Princess Diana wonders. Monroe’s Kenna suggests the growing-up mistakes that limited the prettiest girl in school’s horizons.

The picture dawdles. Granny Graham (“Gilmore Girls”) rubs the sharpest edges off her still-grieving mother, Whitford seems out of place in this milieu and little touches like having an alcoholic partner (Nicholas Duvernay, Withers’ real brother) in the bar are just precious.

But the picture plays and Monroe and Withers make us invest in the characters and “This isn’t half bad” makes this a date movie that comes off, romance novel origins be damned.

Rating: PG-13, sexual content, drugs, partial nudity, profanity

Cast: Maika Monroe, Tyriq Withers, Zoe Kosvic, Bradley Whitford, Rudy Panko, Nicholas Duvernay, Monika Myers and Lauren Graham.

Credits: Directed by Vanessa Caswill, scripted by Lauren Levine, based on a novel by Colleen Hoover. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:50

The scary possibilities of a spooky story told and acted-out with simple sound recordings and timely sound effects are stretched to their limit in “Undertone,” a myopic and creepy thriller that messes with everything between your headphones.

Basically it’s a radio drama for the podcast era, a two-hander with only our heroine and her comatose bedridden mother seen on screen. It’s about two podcast storytellers who stumble into a variation of the watch it/hear it/say it and you’re haunted by it trope — “Candyman,” every “Bloody Mary,” “The Ring,” etc. — and wonder if what they’re experiencing is real and a threat to their lives.

After 40-plus years of reviewing movies, it’s very rare that I hit on one that raises the hair on the back of my neck any more. But something about the intimacy and isolation of our headponed heroine, Evy (“Handmaid’s Tale” alumna Nina Kiri) and sound’s power to play with your imagination got to me.

Then again, I think the scariest Stephen King adaptations I’ve ever experienced were adaptations aired in binaural (3D radio) productions on NPR back in the ’80s.

Evy is sitting through the last days of a death watch with her aged mother (Michèle Duquet), a devout Catholic who has stopped eating and slipped into a coma. Evy gets instructions from an unseen hospice nurse and knows the “death rattle” she’s supposed to listen for at the end — after all the bedclothes and diaper changing that leads up to that in the American Way of Death. She is moved to re-listen to the last voice mail she saved from her mother, with Mom promising to “pray for you.”

But once a week, Evy co-hosts “The Undertone,” a podcast of “real” and passed-down stories of “all things creepy.” She plays the “in house skeptic” Scully to her old friend Justin’s (Adam DiMarco) more credulous Mulder in this audio-only “X-Files” team.

As she logs in and headphones-up with the distant Justin, he pitches this anonymous emailed set of audio files as their next show. They’re home recordings by a couple named Jessa (Keana Lyn Bastidas), who is talking in her sleep, and her mate Mike (Jeff Yung) who records her to convince her this is happening.

The ten audio files grow more dread-filled the further Evy and Justin go along. And as they split the episode into a multi-part series, true-believer Justin gets a lot of “bad feeling about this” vibes as they mess with the sounds emanating from Jessa, the words they make out from her voice played backwards and how that fits into the backstories of nursery rhymes of the “Bloody Mary/Lond Bridge is Falling Down” era.

“All childrens song are about children dying,” is one thread they wander off on. Skeptic Evy hears “hoax” at every turn, and throws around an understanding of audio apophenia and the way the mind plays trick on what your ears — especially those isolated by high-end headphones — discern.

Is that really “Mike kill all” they’re hearing from Jessa’s late night mumblings played backwards?

The podcast may go down the rabbit hole of songs played backwards, the mythology behind such nursery rhymes as the bizarre results of hearing a couple’s “talking in your sleep” recordings take horrific turns. But Evy’s got real life problems, starting with her dying mother, extending to her less than wholly supportive unseen beau and the two possible outcomes of her peeing on a stick.

The soundscape may be the vivid selling point of writer-director Ian Tuason’s gimmicky debut feature. But Kiri does a swell job of selling the rising threat level and Evy’s growing sense of peril with it.

The voice-acting all is all around fine. And when the narrative pulls out all the stops — abandoning just a whiff of its isolated-Evy-against-evil structure — that hair on the back of the neck thing returns with a vengeance.

No, there’s not much to this thin plot and the monotonous visual limitations don’t deliver the claustrophobia you might expect to heighten the growing dread. But for horror that’s alarming in the most primal, aural and piloerection ways, “Undertone” hits enough right notes to recommend.

Rating: R, profanity

Cast: Nina Kiri and
Michèle Duquet, with the voices of Adam DiMarco, Jeff Yung and Keana Lyn Bastidas

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ian Tuason. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:33

The Grateful Dead may be dead, but Deadheadism lives on in the global “Let’s try Ayahuasca, ‘shrooms, (hallucinogenic) sage and toads” set — the “consciousness” pathfinders among us.

Well, the idle, entitled and easily bored among us, anyway.

“Wetiko” is a short, strange trip into the land of the Maya and the toads that you’re just supposed to lick, man. It’s about a young man of Mayan ancestry lured into delivering toads to an “Empire of Love” commune founded by a South African cult leader in the mountainous, cavernous back country of Mexico.

It’s “inspired by a true story,” but really, what is “truth?” In the cinema, that’s a slippery concept. In cults, it’s whatever Dear Leader says it is.

Aapo (Juan Daniel García Treviño) doesn’t wrestle with deep thoughts like that. He works in his mother’s pet store and patiently listens to her explain the restrictions on toad sales and toad “use” to the slim, sexy customer (Dalia Xiuhcoatl) who flashes a lot of cash in an effort to “rent” toads when buying some is out of the question.

Her local shamanka’s name is all Mom needs to hear to agree to the cash deal. But our customer uses her feminine wiles to talk Aapo into “delivering” the toads. He, like his mother, knows how to “milk” them? Right?

Next thing we know Aapo’s ripped-off some yankee tourist’s Honda 250 and screwdriver-started his way into the back country. He figures he’ll deliver the toads, making sure Yavetzi the shamanka is around to handle them, collect the cash and maybe ogle — and more — the female acolytes of the Empire of Love.

The bearded Afrikaans, English and Spanish speaking Zake (Neil Sandilands) is a dictionary of New Age doublespeak, psychobabble and gobbledegook. He talks up the “portals of remembrance” and “the interfade” to his “star being” acolytes — with some new paying customer “Tiktok shaman” influencers on board for a special “Moon” ceremony.

He doesn’t want to hear Aapo is “just the delivery boy, not the medicine man.” He wants the kid to milk the toads. And maybe “listen for the sound of our ancestors, calling us home.”

The Maya’s ancestors? Zake’s South African. Patronizing contempt for “native” people is in his DNA.

“They don’t know they’re special. That’s exactly what MAKES them special!”

Zake, his bait Luz (Xihcoatl), Ms. “perfect abs” muscle Sasha (Bárbara de Regil) and “climatologist turned influencer” Frankie (Jordan Barrett) and assorted Mayans named Maria or Felipe seem determined to pull this ceremony off. As Aapo is drugged, threatened, robbed and injured, we wonder about his role in this “ritual” and if he told Mom he wouldn’t be home for dinner.

Writer-director Kerry Mondragón maintains a sinister tone through much of “Wetiko,” and we fear for Aapo the moment he gets on that bike that he steals. These cultists have heat-vision goggles for chasing escapees through their caves and firearms along with a lot of airy-fairy sales pitches in their “free yourself” mantras.

Mondragón’s script strains to deliver anything particularly surprising — a bug in the ear calamity, the repeated suggestions of “We have no secrets here” and what might happen to one’s tongue if the wrong secret is exposed.

I liked the ironic needle-drop of The Tremeloes’ one-hit in the opening and finale. But the odd bit of distorted lens tripping or heat-vision chasing doesn’t pay off, and there’s no attempted visualization of the “whiteout” nature of toad toxin drug trips.

The logic of it all — Mayans repeatedly warn Aapo not to “stay for the ceremony — works. And Sandilands makes a decent enough archetypal cult king.

“It’s OK, Luz. I talk to God!“

But sinister as this often feels, the pedestrian direction, sloppy confusion of “frogs” and “toads” and the third act’s parade of perfunctory script beats bogs the film down. “Wetiko” never quite escapes the feel of genre pic that doesn’t quite come off.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, nudity, profanity

Cast: Juan Daniel García Treviño, Neil Sandilands, Dalia Xiuhcoatl, Jordan Barrett and
Bárbara de Regil

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kerry Mondragón. A Dekanalog release.

Running time: 1:31

The many unattractive faces and personality traits of deeply flawed humanity cross the screen in “The Ugly,” a Korean murder mystery and human nature parable from the filmmaker of the zombie thrillers “Train to Busan,” “Seoul Station” and “Peninsula.”

It isn’t the undead who are hideous in this one. It’s petty people lacking self-awareness and — to bend Hannah Arendt’s most infamous phrase — “the banality of cruelty” that writer-director Sang-ho Yeon holds a mirror up to.

Yeong-gyu (Hae-hyo Kwan) has been a fixture in his Seoul neighborhood for decades. He’s a blind artisan who gives the lie to the “misconception” that “the blind” have no idea of what consistutes “beauty.”

Yeong-gyu carves lovely, tiny embossing stamps with a person or business’s name on them, using just his fingers to spell out and shape the Korean language characters. He and his small shop have been the subject of feature stories and TV profiles over the years. We meet him as another perky, persistent TV producer (Ji-hyeon Han) is questioning him and the sighted, 40ish son (Jeong-min Park) who has taken over the business.

But the lightly inspiring feature story the TV gang has in mind takes a turn when son Dong-hwan gets a call from the police. They’ve found his mother’s body. Dad always told him that mom “ran away” from them. Now bones, buried on a nearby hillside, reveal her fate forty years ago. Or some of it.

The ugliness starts at the funeral, where Dong-hwan and producer Kim are abruptly subjected to surviving members of his mother’s family. They are rude and blunt about the “inheritance” he won’t be getting. His mother “stole jewelry” when she fled the family, they say. As a cruel kicker, they mention that no there are no photographs of the late Yeong-hee and for good reason. .

“She was ugly,” the most callous aunt to attend declares, in Korean with English subtitles.

The family who hated her and the blind husband who may have lied about why and how Mom “left” are the first two suspects in what becomes the new focus of the TV crew’s documentary — “Who killed Yeong-hee?” The dazed and grieving Dong-hwan is dragged along as he’s too polite to demand one and all back the hell off while he mourns and absorbs all he learns.

They meet former co-workers and Mom’s old boss, with producer Park smiling and questioning one and all and secretly recording the interviewees. Dong-hwan would never have found these people without the resources of the TV journalists. But he’s haplessly caught up in this sketchy “secret” taping, forced to pass himself off as a disinterested “writer” on the show while one tactless creep after another trashes his mother, her appearance and who had a reason to kill her.

Lengthy flashbacks take us back to the ’70s sweatshop where Mom worked, taunted by colleagues with the nickname “Dung Ogre” and ill-used by one and all. Only one person who “knew her when” seems the least bit remorseful about how she was treated and her final fate.

You don’t need a wine buzz to “appreciate” “The Napa Boys,” a vulgar, lowbrow and clumsily unfunny send of up “Sideways” and lots of pop culture of similar vintage. But it probably helps.

There have been good reviews of this double-shot of diarrhea. Not many sober ones. Me? I could not be more disappointed if it had been about anarchic 40ish auto parts clerks on a bender in Motor City.

The novelty of it is its exercise in world-building, creating a sequel to a movie that neither needs nor could withstand one. We’re dropped in, mid-fame, on the careers of the (way-too-old) sons of the characters Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church played for Alexander Payne back in 2004. The “Juniors” have become famous comic book creators and wine lovers, with podcasts obsessively devoted to their hijinks and a hint of mystery about whether their “graphic novel” adventures are fiction or “We LIVE the story” real.

Long in the tooth Miles Jr. (Armin Weitzman) is still mourning his late wife and unnamed (No room on the tombstone?) “little girl.” Jack Jr. (Nick Corirossi) has his Toyota FJ wrapped as a “Wine Wagon” for, we assume, tours of wine country. And he’s grabbing Miles Jr. “to get you laid” up Solvang way.

The first big “joke” of the movie — after that tombstone side-splitter — is the vanity plate on that Toyota — “IH8MRLT.” If you bust a gut over that, have I got a film festival “midnight movie” for you.

Sarah Ramos plays The Napa Boys’ “biggest fan,” an “investigative podcaster” who’s decided to follow them as they reunite with their other mates and recruit “Stiffler’s Brother” (Jamar Malachi Neighbors) to join their ranks for a quest supposedly plotted by the unseen, all-knowing and mystical “Sommelier,” whose emerald set tastevin will be their guide.

Their “grapes before gals” ethos may go out the window with Puck around. Not sure how that ever played into “get you laid,” in either “Sideways” or this abortive stepchild.

They roll up on gay vintner “Boy” Mitch (Mike Mitchell) as he’s stomping grapes in a grape barrel, with one and all sampling his raw grape juice with Dr. Scholl’s undertones and pronouncing it grand.

Mitch’s Winery is to compete in The Great Grape Festival’s wine-judging competition, which Jack Jr.’s sudden bout of intestinal distress sabotages via a drawn-out, butt-naked bowel movement over the submitted competition barrel. And that low point in the movie might win the Boys’ vintner nemesis, the racist/homophobic (but effeminaate) Squirm (Paul Rust) of Squirm Vineyards another blue ribbon.

What one hesitates long and hard before labeling “story beats” follow “Sideways” about as much as they mimic “The Lord of the Rings.” “Random” is the rule of the day as the picture could not set out to get more things wrong and be a bigger bungle.

Makeout music for the two waitresses Jack and Miles Juniors pick up (Vanessa Chester and Chloe Cherry) involves putting on an LP by The Chipmunks. Riffs on :American Pie,” “Fergully: The Last Rainforest” and the oeuvre of Kevin Smith, who makes an AARP-ready cameo in the third act with his other half, Jason Mewes, play like blind men groping for a laugh in the dark.

The acting isn’t up to carrying off jokes that FanDuel wouldn’t give odds of ever coming off and ranges from amateurish to adequate. Ray Wise, is that you?

The picture is artlessly shot and edited as well, with Corirrosi and Weitzman scripting and Corirossi directing. Scene after scene, starting with the opening “Ah, Napa Valley in the vine-barren browns of winter” shot, begins with dead space — pointless, paceless footage — and is cut well after the shot or the scene’s payoff.

Perhaps that, like the very basic blunders about wine and the protocols of wine-judging, was intentional. Smith goes all “Ratatouille,” daring anybody to criticize the movie because “We’re all just trying,” or CYA platititudes to that effect. He looks a little embarrassed. With cause.

Because somebody had family or whatever connections to get this flailing, winded lower-than-low comedy out of film festival midnight showings, where it belonged, and into distribution. More’s the pity.

Rating: unrated, sexual and scatalogical humor, profanity

Cast: Armin Weitzman, Nick Corirossi, Sarah Ramos, Jamar Malachi Neighbors, Chloe Cherry, Mike Mitchell, Vanessa Chester, David Wain, Raul Rust and Ray Wise, with Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith.

Credits: Directed by Nick Corirossi, scripted by Nick
Corirossi and Armin Weitzman. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:32

Generations have been introduced to the no-named stranger who is quick to kill or maim and even quicker with a quip through the Clint Eastwood Sergio Leone Western “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), the Bruce Willis/Walter Hill Depression Era Western “Last Man Standing” of 1996 or other variations on that theme.

But even the “original” version of “Let’s you and them fight” is a Western with samurai, and no sagebrush. “Yojimbo.” one of Kurosawa’s greatest collaborations with his muse, Toshirô Mifune, has brothels and sake breweries instead of saloons, silkworm farming instead of cattle ranching and swordfighting instead of shootouts.

Theres a body count, and laughs to go along with it — wisecracks to a coffin builder/undertaker, geishas and bungling bosses and their hapless minions. The musical score has jaunty Western touches in the orchestration and arrangment.

And as it’s set @ 1860, a pistol is introduced and the undoing of the samurai era and code are foretold as the tale is tied to the “end of an era” movies Hollywood has put on horseback since the beginning of cinema.

Action comedies have been around since Keystone Studios unleashed mayhem and its famed Keystone Cops on the (silent) moviegoing public. But the genre didn’t really find its template until Hitchcock’s 1959 classic, “North by Northwest.”

Kurosawa raised the stakes, the violence and the body count and established many of the tropes of these films with his tale of a Rōnin who wanders into a divided town and figures out how to manipulate the combatants for bloody fun and profit.

Our rogue warrior (Mifune) wanders into the (black and white) wilderness frame and decides where to go next by tossing a stick in the air at a crossroads. That’s how he winds up in a frightened town where a brothel owner, Seibe (Seizaburô Kawazu) is at war with a former lieutenant, Ushitora (Kyû Sazanka).

The men have armed goons to carry out their fight for control. Everybody else has to live with the consequences of this mayhem and ongoing murderous threat.

That’s what our stranger learns from the “old man” tavern keeper (Eijirô Tôno) who is resigned to struggle on here, and to serve as the deliverer of much of the narrative’s exposition. He’s the one who eventually coaxes a name out of our swordighter– Sanjuro.

Crooked mayor to sake brewer, everybody’s entangled in this fight, even those who refuse to take sides. Only the cooper/woodworker/coffin maker (Atsushi Watanabe) sees profit in all this conflict.

One and all can tell from our Rōnin‘s confident and belligerent stride that he’s “tough.” So it takes no time at all for one and then both of the factions to try and hire him as a “bodyguard,” aka “yōjinbō.” But a smart samurai sees all the angles, and not just the ones he knows from swordfighting. There’s more money to be made by convincing one and then the other boss that he’ll sign on to their gang.

Brawls, killings and kidnappings ensue, threats and hostages are exchanged, schemes are hatched and who will get the better of whom is very much in doubt.

One gangster has a violent, hulking monobrowed goof of a son (Daisuke Katô). One gang has a “giant” (the Lurch-sized Tsunagorô Rashômon). And only one gang can up the ante when a sadistic son (Tatsuya Nakadai) shows up, a preening punk with a pistol — a revolver he’s quick to set off to end any fight or argument.

In this maelstrom, who will live, who will die and who will double cross whom are the burning questions this much-copied plot will answer. We hope.

The two old men bickering on a bench could be there in “2030, 1984, 506” or whenever, an opening title of “Strangers in the Park” tells us.

This tale is “timeless” is the message. This movie is an “I’m Not Rappaport” writer-director Juan José Campanella is a lot slower to admit.

It’s always been a talky two-hander, a very static and melodramatic “filmed play,” in this case, with the filming taking place in a Buenos Aires park.

But a lot of the comedy — old men lying, puffing up their past or having no tolerance for those who lie, the old “I’m not Rappaport” comedy sketch at its center — translates well enough. And veteran stars Luis Brandoni and Eduardo Blanco are spot-on as the two leads, elderly “strangers” who meet and bicker and recall their pasts as they do.

Antonio (Blanco) has the tremors of a very old man, one content to sit on his favorite bench, take in the air, the sunshine and the solitude as he reads his paper.

Abel — Or is it Mobutu, Leon or some other name he trots out? — won’t have that. He (Brandoni) is a colorful character with lots of indentities and “careers,” stories about Rwandan liberation, his legal work, psychiactric expertise and recruitment — in his dotage — to be a secret agent.

“‘He’s an old man,'” Abel says his recruiter marveled. “‘No one will notice him.'”

Antonio, an 80something still maintaining the ancient boiler at his apartment building, is over it when we meet these two. He’s not listening to this pathological “liar” any more.

They’re not lies, they’re “alerations,” the not-quite-mysterious “stranger” Abel shrugs. “Sometimes the truth doesn’t fit me.”

Abel lies on the fly, passing himself off as a lawyer, a police official, a shrink and a mobster as their day and evening of chat progresses.

He is, we think, a Jewish leftist of the Old School — labor and civil rights protests, “an old Polack” who moved to Argentina and agitated against the injustices and political and civil rights crimes of the past half century there.. Abel isn’t having shrunken Antonio’s timid state, nor his rosy reminiscences about the past.

“Nostalgia kills more old people than heart attacks,” he intones, in Spanish with English subtitles.

Over the course of their long day together, Abel will pass himself off as an expert in this or that, intervene in Antonio’s impending forced-retirement and eviction, lie to his concerned daughter (Verónica Pelaccini0 and enlist Antonio in a scheme to save a young damsel (Manuela Menéndez) in the park.

“All pretty girls have a glow about them,” he swoons. “Now all I see is the glow.”

“I don’t KNOW this man,” Antonio insists to any who will listen.

Brandoni — recently seen in “The Weasel’s Tale” but whose career the started in the ’60s — has the more colorful character to play, and he oozes charm as the aged hustler and teller of tall tales. I was more impressed with Blanco (“Son of the Bride,” “20,000 Besos”) grappling with the affectations of the extremely-aged, and never losing the tremors, the squint or outrage.

“Rappaport” was always just witty enough to get by, although I’ve yet to see a stage production or film version of it (Ossie Davis and Walter Matthau were in the ’96 movie) that didn’t drag drag drag. Campanella’s film is 20 minutes shorter than that one, and still never quite shuffles up to speed.

But it’s fun to realize this most big city American of plays still hits its notes in Argentine Spanish, in an Argentine park, with English subtitles — even if the characters are little more than “types,” even if the indignities and infirmities of old age vastly limit the shtick that’s possible.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, smoking, profanity

Cast: Luis Brandoni and Eduardo Blanco, with
Manuela Menéndez and Verónica Pelaccini

Credits: Scripted and directed by Juan José Campanella. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55