Movie Nation

It’s a summer AM in the middle of Pennsylvania Trump country, but Donnie is wearing his fur cap.

“It’s my work hat,” he explains, shrugging off the odd attire question.

His colleague in the garbage truck, Donna, is just grinding through another day. She hops back in the seat and Donnie just stares.

“You didn’t flip the lid down.”

That’s our second clue. A few minutes later, we see Donnie dig through a mountain of saved pens and magic markers — hundreds and hundreds of them. A character trait is underlined for us. Donnie’s “on the spectrum.” A little obsessive-compulsive, not quite picking up social signals, he’s one awkward conversation after another waiting to happen — squirrelly, maybe a little creepy.

Donnie is a most unusual character to serve as our tour guide to “A Dark Place.” British character actor Andrew Scott (“Spectre,””Pride” and TV’s Moriarty in “Sherlock”) utterly immerses himself in this “town weirdo” character who becomes obsessed with a little boy on his route who disappears, and then is found drowned in a local creek.

Director Simon Fellows (“Malice in Wonderland”), screenwriter Brendan Higgins and Scott have concocted an unsettling mashup of “Monk” meets “Gone Baby Gone” whodunit, a British production filmed in Georgia and awfully fond of showing all the “Trump” posters and yard signs in this corner of rural, Steelers-obsessed Pennsylvania.

Donnie’s back-story is layered, with no layer pointing towards him turning amateur sleuth when little Ryan Ziegler vanishes. Donnie drives a garbage truck because it’s the only work he can get, and his off-putting oddness makes you wonder if he should even be entrusted with that. He lives with his aged mother, collects sports memorabilia for his 11 year-old daughter (Christa Beth Campbell) who lives with her mother. The mom (Denise Gough) lets us see with just a glance how much she regrets every minute since a drunken one-night-stand with the town character.

Work partner Donna (Bronagh Waugh) shrugs off Donnie’s weirdness until he starts asking questions about the little boy who used to wave from the window of his parents’ house on Donnie’s route. She’s as shocked as we are at this turn.

What’s driving it? Did Donnie have something to do with the disappearance? He’s tactless enough to ask the grieving mom questions, and she’s not the first person whose social signals he misses. He hacks into his daughter’s Facebook and queries the missing boy’s foul-mouthed tweenage brother. The waitress at the diner (“Any strangers in here the past couple of days?”), the town’s lone detective (Griff Hurst), all get the Donnie third degree.

What the hell is up with him? The sheriff (Michael Rose) isn’t the only one wondering.

We scratch our heads, or maybe shake them at how implausible this garbage dump “Monk” is as a sleuth. But Donnie is used to poking through people’s trash. And he’s not an idiot. He just has problems with distractions, breaks in routine and questions left unanswered.

Scott makes a great tour guide, leading us down the rabbit hole of Donnie’s latest obsession. The plot includes confrontations and lines crossed that should land Donnie in jail, or dead. But something keeps those who might take drastic measures from pulling the trigger.

There’s always something or someone (Donna serves as a “Deus ex Donna” in this) who saves him.

Fellows immerses us in this world, focusing on the decay and despair in this corner of America where the “old mill” is long shuttered and the locals have been “left behind” by the rest of the country, underlining that with several images of Trump signs seemingly left over from the election.

Donnie, “A Dark Place” suggests, is that corner of America incarnate — off-putting, maybe creepy, uncertain in motive, but not someone we should discount, ignore or take for granted. He makes a most unusual big screen sleuth, and Scott’s unbalanced portrayal of him keeps us guessing what Donnie is thinking, what Donnie’s involvement in all this might be and most worryingly, what socially unacceptable, dangerous or extreme thing Donnie might do next.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, some of it committed on a child

Cast: Andrew Scott, Bronagh Waugh, Griff Furst, Michael Rose, Christa Beth Campbell and Denise Gough

Credits:Directed by Simon Fellows, script by Brendan Higgins. A Shout! Factory release.

Running time: 1:29

The tracking on Tim Burton’s live action remake of “Dumbo” has been all over the place. I have read numbers as low as the mid-20s and and high as $58 million for the “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory/Alice in Wonderland” director’s grim and depressing take on the little elephant with the big, big ears.

Deadline.com is projecting something in the $57+ range, but pre-release tracking has been terrible — no web searches for the trailer and title these past two weeks, for starters. IMDb searches of the title in preparation for going? Pre-sales? Fuggedaboutit.

Read this Box Office Mojo analysis. They won’t come right out and say it, but tracking on “Dumbo” domestically is right about “Christopher Robin” (well under $30 million). Reviews have been downright downbeat for this dark and glum remake of a much-loved musical with a sad undertone. Burton kept the sad, made it the overtone and stripped the music and comedy out of it.

And what Burton does to the film’s version of Disneyland in the finale doesn’t take a shrink to analyze.

“Us” could conceivably beat “Dumbo” if the CGI “live action” mashup underwhelms. But I wonder if Mojo’s $40 million take for Jordan Peele’s sophomore venture into horror isn’t generous. When too many of the more overly sympathetic reviewers are saying “You need to see it two or three times to get it” (maybe, probably not) you know it’s not exactly clicking the way “Get Out” did. Cinema Tracking scores of B- from audiences suggest it’ll drop below $40 on its second weekend, even if the curious show up to see what all the fuss and confusion are about.

An anti-abortion drama “Unplanned” was shown to true believers (not critics) pre-release, and could make a few million. I will try and get to that tonight. And Matthew McConaughey’s “The Beach Bum” looks like a bomb.

Sometimes it takes a fresh set of eyes to see the harsh beauty in something that’s become commonplace, or at least over-familiar.

Documentaries such as “The Wild Inside” and “The Wild Horse Redemption,” and endless TV news magazine feature stories have frequently re-acquainted Americans with programs in the Western United States’ prison system program of rehabilitating hardened convicts by having them train wild mustangs.

But it took a French filmmaker and Belgian star to create a story that’s stark, intense and beautiful out of that.

“The Mustang” stars Matthias Schoenaerts, the rugged romantic of “Far from the Madding Crowd” and “The Danish Girl.” Here, shorn of most of his hair and his air of romance, he is Roman Coleman, a hard man doing hard time in Eli Penitentiary in Nevada.

When we meet him, and long after we’ve met him in Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s spare, minimalist tale, he comes off as a walking balled-up fist. The tension is in his eyes, the rage in every tattooed step, gesture and look.

Roman has impulse control issues and anger management issues. A no-nonsense counselor (Connie Britton) isn’t scared, even when he twitches and lunges at her word association quiz. We’re scared for her, though.

“I’m just trying to find out what is important to you,” she says, grasping for some sort of verbal response from this stoic thug.

“I’m not good with people,” he confesses, finally. Well scary guy convict, you just might be in luck.

That “outdoors” work crew he’s put on earns him a pitchfork. Somebody’s got to to shovel the manure, the old man in charge of the prison’s wild mustang rehab, growls. He’s played by Bruce Dern. Every word out of his grizzled mouth is a twinkling growl.

Roman is curious at the furious, buckskin-colored stallion pounding at the walls of the isolation shed he’s imprisoned in. Roman feels his pain. A man of violence himself, he knows what solitary confinement can do to you.

That curiosity will change his life. Boss Myles (Dern) says, “You’re in the program…if you can stay in there (the corral) more’n five seconds.”

Thus begins a long journey from violent mistrust and hostility to empathy. That’s what killers and other violent offenders learn, not so much from the prison’s group therapy counseling programs, but from looking an animal in their care in the eye and finding compassion and common ground.

We’ve seen the stallions rounded up off Federal lands, a culling of the herds that extend over the West, with those captured to be trained by convicts and auctioned off to pay for the program’s costs.

Roman has six weeks to go from punching the horse — an ugly, frantic scene full of rage and blows (the horse punches back) — to loving it, from rejecting counseling to embracing it, from keeping his pregnant daughter (Gideon Adlon) at a distance, to reaching out to her to mend the wounds that they share.

So much about “The Mustang” is conventional and predictable that the real marvel in Clermont-Tonnerre’s film is how much she is able to move us, even without much in the line of surprises.

She uses silence, limited Schoenaerts’ dialogue, letting us hear his furious breathing in the presence of that therapist/evaluator, which echoes the equine panting of the horse.

We’re treated to long takes of the training, with Roman getting trained even more by the horse, mainly by veteran convict-trainer Henry (Jason Mitchell of “Straight Outta Compton, adorable here), a joker and sometime drug dealer (horse drugs).

“If you’re to control your horse, first you’ve got to control yourself,” Henry counsels. “Respect his space” and “NEVER look him in the eye.”

Which of course, is EXACTLY what Roman does, something Clermont-Tonnerre captures in big, quiet close-ups.

This horse and that convict have to “get in sync,” old man Myles instructs. But we can see they’re already exactly alike — afraid, bitter, angry and prone to lashing out.

Schoenaerts gives a performance of steel-eyed stares and clenched teeth, clenched fists, clenched everything. The transformation we know if coming isn’t over-sold or obvious, but Schoenaerts makes it moving. As for the man’s violent bonafides, a prison fight we see coming a mile away is as shocking and real as his consequences for it are shocking and unreal (he’s not punished).

Any director would have approached this material emphasizing the “freedom” the vast, open skies from the valley to the far off mountains, the beauty of magnificent horse flesh and the Old West ethos — become somebody other somebodies, including animals, can rely on — that drives this program in prisons all over the West.

But it took a French actress (“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”) turned director to find the beauty, even in dusty thunderstorm, even in the terrified faces of the animals that the inmates have to calm and move to safety.

Clermont-Tonnerre never surprises with “The Mustang,” but in stripping the story to elemental visuals that tell a simple, touching story, she’s announced herself as a cinematic storyteller to watch.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some violence and drug content

Cast: Matthias Schoenaerts, Bruce Dern, Jason Mitchell, Connie Britton

Credits: Directed by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, script by Mona Eastvold, Brock Norman Brock and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre . A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:36

Michael Winterbottom maintains his rep as Britain’s most peripatetic filmmaker with “The Wedding Guest,” a somewhat conventional kidnapping thriller that leans on some fairly predictable twists to take it from Point A to Point K.

It’s another “road” picture, but this time it isn’t a Steve Coogan/Rob Brydon “Trip.”

It’s not an adaptation, as so many of his films are — re-settings of “Tristram Shandy” or “Brief Encounter” or the works of Thomas Hardy. But as always, the director of “Welcome to Sarejevo,” “The Trip to Spain,” “The Claim” and “A Mighty Heart” finds an arresting setting, and makes the most of it.

The novelty here, as it was with his “Trishna,” is that those twists and turns take his couple-on-the-run through much of wide expanse that is the Subcontinent — India and Pakistan.

Dev Patel (“Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”) stars as a guy who stuffs his luggage with passports and flies to Lahore, Pakistan. The driver he walks up to is holding a sign for “Jay,” so we’ll call him that.

We watch him hit the rent-a-car places, renting first a Toyota, then a Honda.

We see Jay weave his way through the bazaar, little shops that can serve as tiny factories, or hardware stores (“Duct tape?”) or gun shops.

No, he doesn’t want the shiniest pistol in the case. The matte black one will do. Two.

“Jay” doesn’t speak Punjabi, but he’s here for the wedding. He’s friends with the groom. Or was it the bride? He cases the joint, finds out where everybody is sleeping, chats up the night guard.

And in the dark of night, he stages his two cars, dons black mask and gear, sneaks in and kidnaps the bride. Duct tape and pull ties, stuff her into the trunk, change cars to throw any pursuers off the trail.

Winterbottom loses himself in the travelogue detail and the logistics of how such a heist could be pulled off by a lone gunman. Motives? They become clearer the moment Jay tears the duct tape off and cuts the pull ties binding her hands.

“You know who sent me?” Samira (Radhika Apte) nods. He’s there to give her a choice, or so he says. This arranged marriage? In or out?

She’s…OUT. The London-educated Samira is being rescued by the man she loves! OK, it’s a guy PAID by the man she loves.

“How do you know Dipesh?”

“Never met him.”

“How much are you getting PAID?”

But as they wait for Dipesh (Jim Sarbh) to make the rendezvous, there are…complications. There’s more travel. There’s more to this than “love.” Or less.

Or is there?

Winterbottom gets so caught-up in putting his mismatched duo in assorted cars, buses and trains, taking them across the border into India, up and down the Subcontinent, that he barely takes the time to let them develop chemistry.

We’re treated to endless scenes of Jay locking Samira in this or that 2 star or four star hotel room, trekking out to acquire another car, more passports, to make deals and wrangle with Dipesh.

Who is, as we say in the states, “wussing out.” Or hesitating. He offhandedly remarks about how Samira is always “looking for an angle,” and Apte — a relative newcomer to Western cinema (she was in “The Ashram”) — lets us see that in Samira’s eyes.

We think she’d be panic stricken, fearful or at least wary. She never lets that show. She’s mulling over each new wrinkle, seeing which way the chips fall.

There are abrupt shifts –shortcuts — in the plot which are treated cavalierly by the screenplay, callously by the characters.

It’s the nuts and bolts Winterbottom is worried about, getting the characters and the production on the road to the next location. Patel and Apte cannot make their characters anything more than good-looking cut-outs, puppets yanked back and forth by the plot, the travel demands and unseen writer-director.

The characters connect in ways more Western than Eastern (Indian thrillers and romances are still fairly chaste), but the action is pretty lukewarm by conventional thriller standards.

“The Wedding Guest” is no “Bourne” or “Run Lola Run,” or “The Getaway.” It’s just an ambling “antic” dash through the New India, forced to deal with Indian train and bus timetables (many rental car counter scenes) and the region’s sea of humanity, “where anyone (who looks Indian or Pakistani) could get lost.”

And if that’s the case, what’s the hurry?

MPAA Rating:R for language, some violence and brief nudity

Cast: Dev Patel, Radhika Apte, Jim Sarbh

Credits: Written and directed by Michael Winterbottom. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:37

It’s already opened in a few markets, but as we’re getting it in Orlando, Focus Features has set up a screening of it. “The Mustang” looks lovely, if pretty conventional.

Don’t wait for the phone to ring, “make your own work,” actors are told. Stage a play with a part for you in it, write yourself a star vehicle and find the financing to get it filmed.

Veteran character actress Madeleine Wade took that advice, scripting a low-budget horror tale for herself, the similarly oft-cast Augie Duke and others, a picture that required just a handful of sets, limited special effects and a generous budget for fake blood.

It’s pretty bad, as a script and as an acting showcase. But if you’re reading this review, you’ve found “Blood Craft” — maybe on VOD or wherever. And if you’re hellbent on watching it, here’s what “Blood Craft” is about.

Two long-separated sisters (Wade and Duke) reunite when their hateful, heckfire and brimstone preacher pop (Dave Sheridan) dies. The film opens with Minister Hall inveighing against “the un-righteous; fornicators, drunkards, effeminate, homosexuals.”

Sisters Grace (Wade) and Serena (Duke) remembers what he was REALLY like. He beat and molested them both, lied to each about what happened to the other, thus causing their separation for years.

“Where did you go?
“What do you mean? Where did YOU go?”

Their rage (tepidly acted out) drives them to seek a solution their mother (Dominique Swain, who began her career decades ago as Adrian Lyne’s “Lolita”) taught them. German mother Hilde kept a book of spells and taught the siblings how to cast them.

“Nothing is EVER gone for good!”

As dastardly Dad is buried “right out back,” Serena has a thought. “”We can bring him back! We can make him pay!”

They will bring him back from the dead to torture and punish him for who he was and what he did. They never thought of Twitter shaming the dead. Apparently.

“Blood Craft” is a simple-enough exploitation picture, which means it has cheap frights, gratuitous gore and random sex scenes to raise the kink factor.

As we’ve already seen that Grace is a sex worker (“private dancer”), and heard titillating (That’s the intention, anyway.) tales of the incestuous nature of their abuse, we know this isn’t just about revenge, digging up Dead ol’Dad and putting him in a pentangle they draw on the floor.

“We call forth the power of air! We call forth the power of Earth! We call forth the power of water! We call forth the power of fire!”

No, there might be money hidden on the property, and the creepy kid they knew long ago, Tyler has grown up to be the county clerk (Michael Welch) who wants that money.

A couple of sequences stand out in this tedious, icky thriller.

Sheridan makes us understand how the preacher could have talked his flock out of enough money to create a scandal. He works up a fine spittle in the pulpit, smacks his head with his Bible and pleads, “Donate your conscience, save your soul!”

Grace’s troubled childhood put her at the mercy of the sex trade, as an adult — donning bustiers in a booth, dealing with pervy clients on the other side of the window, creeps with their “unreasonable” requests.

“Take your belt and CHOKE yourself!”

The kink here feels shoehorned in (ahem), nakedly pandering to the audience Wade and her director and co-writer James Cullen Bressack figure they want.

Sister on sister action? Preacher Dad “really liked it when I kissed you softly…like this.”

Wade and her cohorts took that “Make your own work” advice to heart and got their film made. Nothing’s more empowering to an actor than that.

But “Blood Craft” isn’t much to proud of, aside from that. Ineptly written, often poorly-acted and directed with little style or sense of how you build suspense, terror or even revulsion, it’s a make-work project the horror cinema could have done without.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence (bloody torture), sex, profanity

Cast: Madeleine Wade, Augie Duke, Michael Welch, Dominique Swain

Credits:Directed by James Cullen Bressack, script by Madeleine Wade and James Cullen Bressack . A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:35

A beloved Australian tale about a boy, his pelican and preserving and respecting nature earns a sympathetic new telling in “Storm Boy,” which could be called a remake, a reboot and a sequel all at once.

Colin Thiele’s novel was most famously filmed in 1976, but has turned up in animated form as well. The new film is structured as a long flashback, a story remembered by the old man who lived it, its lessons worth passing on to a new generation.

It’s not a thrill-a-minute piece of children’s entertainment, but winning performances by young Finn Little, by Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush as the adult “boy,” and by Trevor Jamieson and Morgana Davies, lift it.

As do the birds. It was jarring seeing “Storm Boy” on the morning after sitting through Disney’s live-action (CGI assisted) “Dumbo” remake. As we watch Finn Little and Jai Courtney (playing his father, and playing him well) interact with naked, featherless chicks and adult white pelicans, the difference between what digital critters don’t give you and the surprise and delight real ones do is a pleasant shock to the system.

The actors seem as tickled by these birds as we’re meant to be.

When you’re making a movie about children and animals, “Fly Away Home” is your template, not “Jurassic World.” “Dumbo” director Tim Burton learned that the hard way.

Rush plays a retired tycoon who has been summoned home to help his son see to a transfer of traditional farm (natural) land into hands that will develop it. Son Malcolm (Erik Thomson) has upset his teen daughter (Morgana Davies) with this decision. She’s gone into “I HATE him” mode over the whole cynical “ruin the waterways and destroy their original homelands” debacle.

It’s up to grandpa to smooth troubled waters. A storm and a taste of candy from his childhood put him in mind of a flashback. So let Maddie be late for school and the board meeting can wait. Let’s take a walk on the beach and remember “the beach I grew up on.”

It was called “Ninety Mile Beach” outside of Adelaide. That’s where young Mike (Finn Little) and his father, whom the locals nicknamed “Hideaway Tom” (Courtney) moved.

There was a tragedy that turned Dad into a hermit-like waterman, home-schooling his son, raising him on fish and whatever else he could scrounge up. So Mike grew up “cut off from the world. Then one day, the world came to me.”

It’s the 1950s, and Mike’s life is wading in the shallows and wandering among the placid flocks of white pelicans. But there’s a tug of war over this remote piece of land, a local battle between hunters and those who want to declare the place “a sanctuary…” his father tells Mike. “Who cares about a bunch of birds?”

Not the beer-swilling jerks who wander in and shoot up the place from time to time, that’s for sure. After one such massacre, Mike finds three orphaned chicks. The aboriginal man Fingerbone (Trevor Jamieson of “Rabbit-Proof Fence”) figures they’re goners. And that there’ll be a storm. Soon.

“When a pelican is killed, there’ll always be a storm.” As he and the boy debate caring for the chicks, he delivers a shorthand history lesson about this land.

“No white fellas. For thousands of years, just black fellas.”

After a bit of pre-integration wariness between Dad and Fingerbone, the men pitch in to help save the pelicans.

There’s a warmth to these DIY, making it up as they go scenes — Dad donating a scarf to keep them warm, Mike, whom Fingerbone gives the Aboriginal name “Storm Boy,” improvising a fish guts food processor with an outboard motor.

Yeah, that’s funny.

And there’s a single line that has more heart in it than the entire screenplay of “Dumbo” manages, a little boy’s whispered “please don’t die” to a living thing (three of them) he has in his care.

Australians reviewing this seem to have a little of that “doesn’t measure up to the original film” thing going, and as I have been beating up on “Dumbo” this AM, I feel their pain.

But as someone who hasn’t seen the 1976 “Storm Boy,” I can endorse this movie’s occasional flash of emotion, the clever if slightly sterile way the past and present (Rush’s character revisiting his tweenage self) are blended and the Big Action Payoff, which is both far-fetched and analog tactile.

There are real birds in these scenes, and the movie, slight as it is, is richer for it.

For old men remembering the magic of childhood and filmmakers caught up in the cinema’s digital revolution, that right there is the lesson in “Storm Boy.”

“Sometimes you forget the best thing you ever learned.”

MPAA Rating: PG for some thematic elements, mild peril and brief language

Cast: Finn Little, Jai Courtney, Geoffrey Rush, Morgana Davies, Trevor Jamieson

Credits:Directed by Shawn Seet, script by Justin Monjo, based on the Colin Thiele. A Good Deeds release.

Running time: 1:38

Gloom and doom hang over Tim Burton’s live-action (ish) remake of “Dumbo,” a classic in the Disney cartoon canon.

You knew from the source material and the trailers to this remake that he was going for a sweet, sentimental fable, tinged with sadness.

But hiring the screenwriter of “Arlington Road” and “The Ring” should have been a bigger give-away. Burton has blown up Disney’s ode to magic, misfits finding their gift and a mother’s love into a shiny but bloated, glum affair that feels “BIG EVENT” in scope, and depressingly heartless in execution.

The soaring, Disney-esque non-verbal choir oooing, ahhing and tra-la-la-ing over much of the score is the only nostalgia to it. Every other scene — of mistreated animals, parents separated from their offspring, an ancient industry in its death throes and the physical cost of war, just underscores how the “good ol’days” were nothing of the sort.

I expected Burton to make me cry. I didn’t expect him to utterly bum me out.

“Dumbo” opens in 1919, with a circus about to leave its Sarasota winter quarters for its annual tour by (digital) train. A threadbare showman, Maximilian Medici (Danny DeVito) presides, his vastly-reduced “family” of performers who are forced to handle many off-stage jobs, thanks to years of layoffs and “The Spanish Influenza.”

A father, Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell), formerly a star horse trainer/stunt rider, returns from World War I to his motherless children (Nico Parker, Finley Robbins). He lost an arm in France, the horses were sold after his wife died (the flu). And little Milly has dreams of being the next Marie Curie, or a veterinarian, not “a show-off” in the circus.

Max gives one-armed Holt the job of tending to the elephants, and shows off Mrs. Jumbo, his most prized recent purchase. She’s not performing. She’s pregnant.

And no sooner has she given birth than her baby becomes an attraction, “freak show” ears be darned.

Much of the movie is about Dumbo — as jeering, pelting audiences name him — being separated from his mother and trying to get back to her. Max sells her off.

But the kids figure out the big-eared babe has an odd reaction to feathers. He can fly. And they promise Dumbo that if he performs this feat in public, he’ll earn enough money for the circus to buy mom back.

Michael Keaton plays a New York impresario who wants Dumbo for his new theme park. Eva Green is Collette, his seemingly callous aerialist who shows a softer side when she has to work with the baby elephant.

Alan Arkin has several pointless (one laugh among them) scenes as a banker backing Dreamland, only if its new star attraction, a flying elephant, pays off.

The performances lack anything like the pluck, wit and spark they’d need to stand out and lift this. Some of that can be parked at the feet of having to act with digital animals. DeVito tries too hard for laughs, and even a dumb gimmick (having Michael Buffer, the WWE’s “Let get ready to RUMBLE” announcer, introduce Dumbo’s act) falls utterly flat.

The script’s idea of a running gag is Medici’s “rules,” which consist of only “Rule Number One: Keep the cages LOCKED.” “Rule Number One: Always have a BIG FINISH!”

This version of the story is overrun with villains, people not doing right by the animals, the kids or the basics of kindness. But none of them interesting enough to be worth hissing at.

The big “ooh” and “ahh” flying moments have a hint of magic, and the touching mother-baby stuff almost yanks a tear.

But those scenes are robbed of any payoff by the surrounding scenes, which offer no contrast — Burtonesque gloom becomes a pall that hangs over the entire enterprise.

There are half a dozen songs in the sixty-eight minute original 1941 animated film — and quite a few laughs, some of which came from the racist stereotypes playing the crows, which were never going to remain in a 2019 Disney remake. But when you strip away that, and almost all of the songs, save for the sweet, sad lullaby “Baby Mine,” and don’t replace them with anything the least bit light or funny, what are you left with?

Burton’s “Dumbo” is dark, digital and only weakly humorous. Kids may laugh at the digital Capuchin monkey who gets in Medici’s hair (and in his desk drawers, etc.) and coo at the baby elephant with the oversized ears. But the movie surrounding that is relentlessly sad, a picture that plays up the cruelty in this imaginary but sometimes too-real world.

And what the man who owes his career to Disney does to “Dreamland,” the theme park setting for the film’s final act, should have given the folks who write his checks pause.

Burton’s place within cinema culture is built on his ability to make the sad and morbid palatable, to play up the darkness in fables (“Edward Scissorhands,””The Corpse Bride”) and the gloom in what we used to call “comic” books. His “Batman” movies set the tone for the genre that has taken over the entire industry.

But in spite of that, the whimsy of “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure,” “Edward Scissorhands,””The Corpse Bride” and even his daft “Dark Shadows” and downbeat “Alice in Wonderland” still made this seem like a movie Disney could trust in his hands.

He remade it twice as long, with half the heart.

MPAA Rating: PG for peril/action, some thematic elements, and brief mild language

Cast: Colin Farrell, Danny DeVito, Nico Parker, Michael Keaton, Eva Green, Alan Arkin, Roshan Seth, Joseph Gatt

Credits:Directed by, script by Ehren Kruger , based on the Helen Aberson/Harold Pearl novel. A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 1:52

There’s almost certainly market research backing up Nickelodeon/Universal’s decision to put “Dora the Explorer” in high school, strip the “boots” off “Boots” — her digital monkey pal, and generally “Tomb Raider” the daylights out of this adorable pre-tween character, her singing map and handy talking backpack and annoying fox-villain “Swiper.”

Eva Longoria and Michael Peña are good choices for the parents. Benicio Del Toro is Swiper in this version. Not a fox, which is fine.

Isabel Moner of “Instant Family” is plucky, but 18 — ready for teen magazines, a record deal (if she doesn’t have one already) and unwanted tabloid attention (at least in today’s culture).

This trailer grates in its wrong-headedness. She’s too old, the whole set-up is too grown up. There’s no childish magic, childish innocence or childish childishness to this Aug. 2 release.

The one nod in that direction is casting Eugenio Derbez, who sets a different tone (overly dramatic adult in a child’s “action” adventure) and I think, the right one.

Younger Dora, younger kids around her, take teen/tween pinup appeal out of your decision making and maybe you can do right by an admittedly infantile TV show, but one which little kids just loved.

Yeah, looking forward to this one. Tim Burton’s hit or miss recent track record be darned.