Movie Nation

Fiercely feral, dis-orientingly trippy and (for some folks at least) sure to inspire flashbacks, Gaspar Noé’s “Climax” is horror that hits you where you live.

It’s a waking nightmare, an erotic fantasy that twists into the sum of all paranoias. And even if I can’t say I’d care to ever see it again, there’s no denying its riveting/eyes-averting bloody-minded brilliance.

This is “Suspiria” without the cryptic supernatural nonsense, “Black Swan” without ballet, a tale of “the dance” that takes the stereotype that dancers — uninhibited hedonists and born sensualists — “live for the dance” and adds drugs to take away whatever inhibitions they might have left.

Noé, in the best Poe, Agatha Christie or “Friday the 13th” tradition, fills a remote school full of young, lithe and talented danseurs, showcases them as they celebrate the end of rehearsals with flexibility and skills most of us cannot imagine and then introduces LSD to their popping and locking, twisting and contorting bacchanal.

Sure, that’ll be fun. Until somebody gets hurt — everal somebodies. Until somebody grows paranoid — pretty much everybody.

Noé introduces us to the players “A Chorus Line” style — video “interviews” before casting, glimpsed on a TV set parked conspicuously between books on schizophrenia and a VHS copy of “Suspiria.” This happened in 1996 we’re told, and we meet Shirley and Cyborg, Rocco and Omar, revealing “my darkest fear,” and their utterly fanatical devotion to dance.

“It’s all I have,” says Lou (Souheila Yacoub). “I can’t be anywhere else,” adds Riley (Lakdhar Dridi).

Black and white, Gallic and Middle Eastern, gay, straight and all points in between, they’re primed for their “chance in a million” with choreographer/dancer/”boss lady” Selva, played by Sofia Boutellava for  of “Kingsman,” “Hotel Artemis” and the titular monster of “The Mummy.”

The party they throw to celebrate the end of three snowy days of rehearsal is a fluid, supercharged dance-off with dancers strutting their moves, showing off all manner of sexy dance wear — pausing only long enough to flatter the hell out of each other’s skills (in English, and French with English subtitles), flirt as they arrange their latest hook-up and partake in the evening’s libation.

“I made some sangria.”

It takes a while for what’s in the sangria to peak, a bit longer for Selva to hiss “What have you DONE?”

Chatterbox Emmanuelle (Claude-Emmanuelle Gajan-Maull) made the sangria. But she drank it, too. And she’s got her little boy with her for the weekend. Would she do that?

Omar (Adrien Sissoko) may have grown up in Muslim household, and still doesn’t drink. But joining a dance company isn’t exactly a Fundamentalist move and LSD seems way out of character.

Somebody else is pregnant, others are bitter over failed relationships, David (Romain Guillermic) may be “a ticket to an STD” after cutting a wide swath through the company, sexually. Might he have done it?

Doesn’t matter. Logic doesn’t apply when everybody shrieking accusations, screaming at this or that person accused, pounding and kicking them or tossing them out into the snow.

Noé (“Enter the Void”) parks his camera overhead, flips the image upside down, hurls light and darkness, dancers’ bodies and dancers’ blood at us as we watch a lot of healthy, perhaps not that well-adjusted young people dance until they go off their rockers.

But not before the longest music credits in screen history. He positioned those credits, and the film’s finale, in a final disorienting flip designed to look like a video editing “glitch.” They come at the beginning of “Climax.”

It’s unnerving at times, assaulting at others. “Disorienting” is the idea, and even if many of the tricks are simple and the plot unfolds along a generally predictable track, “Climax” achieves that goal. And how.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing content involving a combination of drug use, violent behavior and strong sexuality, and for language and some graphic nudity

Cast: Sofia Boutella, Romain Guillermic, Souheila Yacoub, Taylor Kastle, Giselle Palmer, Thea Carla Schott and Claude-Emmanuelle Gajan-Maull

Credits: Written and directed by Gaspar Noé. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:33

Yes, “Aladdin” knows parkour.

And no, Will Smith is not Middle Eastern in any way, shape or form.

Funny? Yes he is. Not Robin Williams funny, but flip and the timing is there.

The leads are as bland as ever, animated or live action. Mena Massoud and Naomi Scott are the co-stars, because really, this is all about the genie.

If I was Disney, I wouldn’t be flinging “A Whole New World” away in the the first trailer. Already sick of it, it’s over-exposed in that “Let It Go” way. Why not keep it out of earshot until the movie opens?

May 24, we’ll see how this lush, action-packed Guy Ritchie version works out.

If we learned nothing else from “Suspiria” — either version — or “The Red Shoes” or “Black Swan” — we had to absorb this.

Dancers are obsessive hedonists, living only for…the dance.

Gaspar Noé’s French horror tale “Climax” parks such people in “a remote schoolhouse” to rehearse.

What could go wrong?

A former colleague from his days as a Goldman Sachs investment banker is chatting with Stephen K. Bannon near the end of the new documentary about him, “The Brink.”

“People who don’t know you,” he says, will find Bannon “disarming.”

Bannon can be funny, flippant. He’s given to moments of self-deprecation about his weight, his politics and views. He doesn’t seem to lose his cool, unlike his former employer, Donald Trump. We don’t even hear him swear.

That’s the Bannon at the beginning and middle of “The Brink.” He cracks jokes during public appearances, calls his audience “deplorables,” even though most of the crowds he’s seen speaking to in Alison Klayman’s film — post 20016 election — are the very “elites” he railed against, well-heeled “country club Republicans.”

But stick with “The Brink,” our Goldman Sachs man seems to suggest. We’ll see something more.

As Klayman tracks Bannon through the whirlwind of 2017-2018, basically kicking off after Bannon was forced out of the White House when the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va. blew up and Bannon’s “own it” attitude towards white nationalism became a perceived Trump weakness, to his whirlwind media tour afterwards, his triumphant holding of audiences in Europe, “organizing” or at least meeting with the far right “nationalist” parties of Britain, France, Italy, Sweden and Belgium, we get a peek at the man behind the self-described “gross-looking Jabba the Hutt drunk.”

How much attention was Bannon getting in 2017? Royal Family/Meghan Markle coverage. His every stop, supporting Judge Roy Moore’s Senate campaign in Alabama, his meetings with the chief cheerleader for Brexit and other far right party operators, covered by major media outlets in the U.S. and abroad.

Hell, there were even two documentaries being shot about him, almost at the same time. So hats off to Klayman for getting “The Brink” into theaters before “American Dharma,” by Oscar winning documentarian Errol Morris, reaches the viewing public.

Bannon was magnanimous, quoting Lincoln at a time when that first Republican president was at his lowest ebb and the Republic was “on the brink,” as a coping mechanism when things start to turn against him.

But by the time November of 2018 rolls around and Bannon sees the storm coming, estranged from Trump or not, frantically rallying the faithful for embattled candidates we’ve seen him meeting with to get his endorsement in the film’s first act, we get the cursing, defensive micro-manager.

Yes, there’s a documentary crew following him around, so when he’s bluntly cut to pieces on “Good Morning, Britain” — Bannon will only grin and say, “She’s tough. Tough.”

What “she” said? “If you’re a ‘fine person,’ you wouldn’t march alongside a neo-Nazi.”

He doesn’t show any temper when his own words are thrown back at him, a Guardian reporter who has done his homework contradicting his use of “dog whistle” phrases, setting up enemies as (Jewish) “globalists” and the like.

Trump taught him a lesson, Bannon says, which one can imagine the credit-stealing Trump passing off as his own, even thought P.T. Barnum coined the phrase a century ago. “There’s no such thing as bad media.”

We meet him in a cringe-worthy moment, expressing admiration for the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, which he’d visited in his previous life making a film. He’s in awe of “the German perfection” of this machine for “mass murder,” and what can only be described as frank admiration for the “people who totally detached themselves from any moral horror of it.”

“Humans can actually do this. Not devils. Humans that are just humans.”

You can see why Bannon spends so much of “The Brink” defending himself from charges of anti-Semitism, even as he works with Jewish Republicans running for Congress. The “racism” tag seems a harder sell as he cozies up to a Bannon Republican Senate candidate who happens to be black, or partners with the London chief of the Breitbart far right media site which was Bannon’s entry into Trump world.

Perhaps the film’s great moment of disconnect is when that Londoner, Brit-accented Raheem Kassam, sneers out the car window to Bannon in London — “Look around you. It is lit’rally ALL Arab stores.”

Bannon spends “lit’rally” the entire film denying that his “economic nationalism” is just old fashioned nationalism/fascism rebranded.

He makes sense when he talks about why 2016 happened, admitting that “hate” is a strong motivator when talking about the boogeymen he helped Trump identify to his “deplorables” — Clinton, and especially the Jewish philanthropist George Soros.

But Klayman, to her credit, doesn’t just observe and let him spout his worldview and “reality” of “alternate facts”. He ridicules Democrats for their black/brown/yellow/LGBT “identity politics,” and she suggests “the Deplorables” are his “identity politics” crutch.

“And your point is?”

The film glosses over Bannon’s suggestion, in Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury,” that Trump’s arms-length-but-colluding involvement in the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russians was “treasonous.” We see Bannon meeting with old chum and Trump insider PRESENT at that meeting, mercenary firm Blackwater founder Erik Prince, as if nothing at all happened.

We hear him go out of his way to mention the “vibe” one gets from “a church, a mosque, a temple” and how that contrasts with the poisonous atmosphere of the White House he was just kicked out of.

We hear him pound his “not a racist, a populist” message time and again, even when he’s meeting with Big Money at the Republican Society Patriot Dinner crowd at that bastion of the Unreconstructed Confederate South, The Citadel. Then he poses for selfies with a couple of fans, bull-necked white South Carolina cops.

He never explains his assault on the European Union, and there’s no overt Russian connection made to Bannon in the film. Even the European reporters, who give him a harder time than the American ones (with the occasional exception) fail to highlight what’s really behind his efforts to “weaken Europe.”

Whatever else the Harvard man might be, he’s no idiot. His candidate reached his “people” because “the elites are content with ‘managing’ our decline,” with NAFTA, the EU, trade deals and Wall Street absorb and merge mania.

Perhaps its going to take two documentaries to plumb the depths of Bannon’s persona, what drives this frump who rails against elites even as he’s serving their purposes so well. Klayman’s has an incomplete yet polished feel to it. There’s too much we don’t find out.

But Morris is going to be hard pressed to come up with a better illustration of what a dangerous figure the subject he shares with Klayman is than Klayman’s eviscerating montage of Bannon making George Soros his favorite whipping boy, eager crowds asking “Why hasn’t George Soros been arrested?” and the mailing of bombs to Soros and others, and the massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

It may be all just a game to him, some late life rationalization that his “dedicated” core of unswayable Breitbart Media “deplorables” has made him matter. Getting the angry, the resentful and the armed and unhinged worked up will be his real legacy. Whatever the future of his “nationalist” wave holds, he’s already getting people killed.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Stephen K. Bannon

Credits:Directed by  Alison Klayman. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:31

This documentary makes its way to theaters at the end of March.

So I gave up a seemingly perfect Saturday last weekend to catch a late-scheduled preview screening of “Wonder Park,” a new animated kids’ film opening Friday, with Nickelodeon supposedly building a TV series out of it this fall.

It was an exceptionally untimely screening, in the middle of the day — 1130 am. Kids’ films previewed on Saturdays are usually at 10 or 1030. Anything later and you run into Unruly Audience Syndrome.

In any event, that’s a time that kills AM activities and severely cuts into PM ones.

Reviews of this latest Paramount Animation offering are embargoed until 9am Eastern Thursday. So, not a lot of time for an online audience for reviews, pro or con, to develop.

But as I type away here, I see no “directed by” credits in my notes. There’s no credited director on Rottentomatoes or IMDb for that matter.

Was it, like much episodic television (“director” credits or not), “produced” rather than directed?

I have a message in to Paramount, and a Google search turns up the name of a veteran TV writer/producer and show runner, without attribution. So we will get to the bottom of this. I hope. (Updated, “No directing credit” on “Wonder Park,” per Paramount).

Is Alan Smithee making cartoons, now?

I can’t remember ever reviewing a movie — and I’m a long time in the saddle, kids — with NOBODY credited as director. Did David Feiss, whose name turned up in random Google searches as “director” of “Wonder Park” have his name removed? Did he finish the movie, which changed titles, release dates, etc.?

Original director Dylan Brown was canned back when the title was “Amusement Park” over a year ago. Sexual harassment. Perhaps they should have retitled it #NotYouToo.

Sorry, I don’t usually go into the whole rigamarole of weekend screenings of kids movies, but had I known it had no director, I would have probably gone to a spring training baseball game. I want my Saturday back. But at least you know, now.

Anyway, my review of “Wonder Park” (embargo is over) is here.

“Division 19” is science fiction more to be appreciated than enjoyed.

It’s a reasonably smart, somewhat timely riff on Current Conditions rendered in a dry, slow action satire, a picture lacking a charismatic lead or much in the line of entertainment value.

In 2039, the online faces of the Resistance are mocking us for eating and staring at our cell phones, “stuffing your faces while the world burns.” The hectoring hoodie-wearing spokesman declares that “We’re gonna bring down your house and watch it burn.”

Twenty years in the future, “Anonymity is a crime,” and being “off the grid” and “unregistered” means you could officially disappear — and not just in the digital sense.

Hovering drone gunships keep watch over the cities, CCTV cameras are pretty much every where and small drones can track and trace anybody Central Control chooses to watch.

The Nanny State has taken on Nazi State totalitarianism. A drone barks through  its speaker, “Smoking is not permitted in the street…you have ten seconds” to put out your smoke and move along.

But the power here isn’t so much in elected or anointed authority. It’s in corporations, especially Panopticon Interactive. They have created the most addictive streaming reality TV of the day, tracking a prison inmate 24/7, like an incarcerated “Truman Show.”

And their public face, Nielsen (Alison Doody of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”) is dreaming bigger. In a nation where the incarceration rate long exceeded the crime rate, corporations have control of the prisons and have found fresh ways to monetize them.

That’s why Nielsen has turned Hardin Jones (Jamie Draven) into a star. He’s the unwilling, unwitting, brawling spokesmodel for product placement in prison togs. He has no idea he’s being watched.

“He’s had more drugs pumped into him than Central America,” Nielsen crows. “Crime’s down. Consumerism’s up. What’s not to like?”

Her bigger idea? “New Town,” a planned community where convicts interact with one another and the general public, watched (on your streaming device) as they “earn their way back into society.” Or don’t. By committing crimes, acts of violence on their neighbors? Maybe.

“People died building the pyramids,” she sniffs. “The price of progress!”

The Resistance, calling itself “Division 19,” has figured out how to live “off grid.” They remove the chips that allow Central Control to track you down. They change their appearance, and holing up in Greater Detroit (still mostly ruins in 2039), they can hide until their next hack, on the Federal Reserve, on Panopticon’s live-streaming Hardin’s life.

That’s when they can blurt out their manifesto and make demands. Hardin’s brother Nash (Will Rothhaar) is in their ranks, Barca (Toby Hemingway) is their spokesman.

When Barca makes demands, it’s enough to make you nod your head and then head over to Wikipedia. He hides his face in a stocking cap, points his finger and says Division 19 wants a far-reaching anti-corruption trial, reaching back several administrations to pinpoint where America went wrong. And they want a re-introduction of the Glass Steagall Act that protected the economy and the public from the greed, carelessness and depradations of bankers and Wall Street investment firms, up until it was eroded and removed prior to the Great Recession of 2008.

That’s on the money political commentary, writer-director S.A. Halewood. And you parked it right in in the middle of an exceptionally low-budget indie film.

Division 19 helps Hardin escape. The COO of Centrol Control, the would-be “president” of us all, is Premier Lyndon (Linus Roache, terrific). He’s as cynical as the latest polls allow, determined that Hardin be caught and order be restored. But Panopticon sees better ratings, more product-tie-ins and more viewer involvement (“Seen this man? Turn him in for CREDITS.”) in chasing him on his dash through the underground to the Underground.

The pursuits are reasonably well-handled, montages of aerial footage, black and white drone interior clips, fights and chases. There’s blood, and that action picture stand-by, self-surgery.

Lyndon has been sentenced to be served by a class of hipster tech nerds and trend “influencer” trackers, who appreciate the “sophisticated hive mind”  pitch of Division 19’s subversives — they include tax reforms in addition to their push against Big Banking and Wall Street.

When the youngsters start to lecture him on the predictable path this liberty and taxation insurrection is taking, he notes that what they’re talking about “The Laffer Curve.”

“How’d you KNOW that?” the childish hipsters want to know.

“Because when I was your age, YOU were being BORN.”

There are a lot of dystopian ideas crammed into this tiny movie — human organ sales, the ways privatized prisons are incentivized to both get everybody incarcerated and misuse the inmates.

“Convicts are for fighting!”

Poor neighborhoods reflect the globalization of poverty imposed by a winner-take-all economy. Detroit’s roughest corner? Favela Town.

Hardin learns the hard way that getting off the grid while you’re on the run in a cashless economy is a great way to starve. He applied for Food Stamps/

“Can you fight?” the social worker wants to know. Food Stamps are “not for you. That’s for real people. Ex-cons are for entertainment.”

The idea here is that zonked-out Hardin takes up the cause as the drugs wear off as he’s on the run. Might he become “The brain dead Messiah” he needs to be?

Well…

Casting and coherence are two serious shortcomings of “Division 19.” Other names were attached to this project at one time, and the importance of charismatic leads is sharply underlined here. Only Roache,  a veteran character actor with “Priest,” “The Wings of the Dove” and “Hart’s War” as resume highlights, brings anything like the spark this picture needs to come off. Another character player, Clarke Peters (of “The Wire” and “Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri”) so dazzles in a single scene or two that you wish they’d built the entire movie around these two.

But no. The leads, whatever their ability to handle fight choreography, are bland in the extreme, uninteresting to the point where the picture wilts at their mere appearance.

The Panopticon boast about their “adopt a convict” streaming show, “Drama’s never been so real,” was never going to be the tagline for “Division 19.” The plot is top heavy with ideas, and the only three witty lines in the thing I’ve quoted above.

But as great scripts attract great talent, you can see the conundrum the financial backers and the writer-director found themselves in — a script, cast and movie trapped in the second division.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sex

Cast:Will Rothhaar, Jamie Draven, Alison Doody, Linus Roache, Lotte Verbeek, Clarke Peters

Credits: Written and directed by S.A. Halewood. An Uncork’d release.

Running time: 1:33

It’s a sixth grade “Superbad” rolling out just as the little darlings are back in school. Which they’ll have to sneak out of to sneak INTO an R-rated — dirty, drug content etc — comedy.

Totally appropriate that Seth Rogen introduces this Aug. 16 release’s red band trailer for “Good Boys.”

Put your headphones on, as this is NSFW and not something you want to be listening to in a public library, for instance.

They disembarked their trains — some of them, the foreigners — well-heeled, serenaded by a string quartet, assured their luggage would arrive later — “Everything will be safe.”

German officers in their crisp, grey uniforms, smiled beneath the red swastika banners and only deigned to hide their contempt once the train and its better off passengers arrived.

Jewish clerks, luggage handlers and translators hustled everyone to and fro as a public address system crackled out “Welcome to Sobibor, your new home!” announcements, a place where they would “work diligently and live in dignity.

Of course, the kapos — the clerks doing the lying for the Germans — knew the truth. So did any local and most Poles sent to Sobibor. Nobody here gets out alive.

Just enough people knew the truth and lived long enough to do something about it to ensure Sobibor’s place in Holocaust history, the death camp that gave birth to the largest uprising by Jewish concentration camp detainees of World War II.

Actor and director Konstantin Khabenskiy of the “Night Watch” movies brings us a Russian-backed film of that uprising and mass escape, conventional in its telling but still delivering a visceral, heart-pounding finish.

Khabenskiy also headlines “Sobibor,” starring as Alexander “Sasha” Pechersky, a Soviet soldier transferred there after a failed escape attempt in Minsk. He arrives in Poland with little more than contempt for his fellow inmates, praying “cowards” awaiting death “like livestock led to slaughter.”

But don’t be so hasty, survivor Leo (Dainius Kazlauskas) cautions. “We’re trying to survive to get our revenge,” he says (in subtitled Russian. The Polish, Hebrew and German in the film is also subtitled). They have been organizing. They just lost their leader, a veteran of the Dutch Navy. They might follow a soldier like him. If he can prove he’s Jewish.

“We need a Moses!”

Striking new arrival Selma (Mariya Kozhevnikova) is warned to “take whatever work you can get” by camp veteran Chaim (Fabian Kociecki), which she does.

Others — scores of them — we see herded nude into a “shower,” an officious guard totaling their number on a ledger, locking the door and turning on a valve that opens up the exhaust gas from a huge engine that Sobibor used to murder 250,000 people or more.

Young apprentice jeweler Shlomo (Ivan Zlobin) reassures his little sister and family that he’ll be all right, but that they’ll be safer together. He doesn’t know.

We also meet the jeweler Jakob (Joshua Rubin), assured “We are immortal” by a fellow jeweler on arrival, relieved that means he has “work” and can look after his wife, horrified when he comes across his dead wife’s wedding band among the loot the Nazis have taken from prisoners before directing them to “the showers.”

Perhaps Khabenskiy and his trio of screenwriters didn’t need to treat us to a “Holocaust 101” refresher course. We’ve seen nude women packed into a room, gassed to death. We know about the gruesome architecture of mass murder, the ghoulish practice of pulling gold fillings from the dead bodies, the officious and contagious efficiency and sadism of ordinary Germans (passed on to collaborators in many countries they occupied).

But as the world lurches towards new versions of fascist totalitarianism, with bigotry and anti-Semitism blinking into the cold light of day, a little reminder of what human beings are capable of doing to each other is always a good thing.

The Nazis are the usual cadre of psychopaths, drunks, bullies and martinets. Christopher Lambert plays the haunted, deranged camp commandant, Karl Frenzel. Wolfgang Cerny, Mindaugas Papinigis, Maximilian Dirr and Philippe Reinhardt, playing his subordinates, have the sicker and showier roles. Lambert’s German is dubbed, here.

Khabenskiy loses himself in characters like Sasha’s would-be love interest (Felice Jankell), the adorable kid (Kacper Olszewski) whose eager-to-please/desperate-to-survive obsequiousness will come in handy later, and traffics too readily in the tropes of Holocaust movies. The orgy of violence staged by the guards and officers (who knew the camp was slated to be closed ahead of the advancing Russians) is so excessive only Caligula could appreciate it.

But his “Night Watch/Day Watch” years with director Timur Bekmambetov taught him to make the most of the night scenes, giving the extermination camp a haunting beauty and menace — guard towers and the occasional fence post sitting in pools of light.

He expertly sets up the planning scenes, capturing the impromptu haste with which those plans had to be implemented and the leap each conspirator had to make, from resigned victim to cold-blooded killer, for this to come off.

And he stages the revolt, its chaos rendered more sensible by judicious use of slow-motion, with fury and brio.

There was a fine TV movie, “Escape from Sobibor,” on this subject in the ’80s, and all this “Sobibor” (opening March 29) has on that Alan Arkin and Rutger Hauer film is the graphic violence, heightened sense of horror and odd moment of poetry Khabenskiy brings to the story.

Still, it’s a sturdy enough story that it can withstand a little dilly-dallying, and the visceral finale is as heart-pounding as we need this story — when the lambs rose up against their slaughterers — to be.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity

Cast: Konstantin Khabenskiy, Christopher Lambert, Mariya Kozhevnikov, Michalina Olszanska, Maximillian Dirr

Credits:Directed by Konstantin Khabenskiy, script by Anna Chernakova, Michael Edelstein and Ilya Vasiliev. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:50

Here’s another gritty, pitiless Western carved out of archetypes and that favorite horse opera trope — the good man who eschews violence forced to take up a gun by armed thugs invading paradise.

Countless Westerns have been built on that framework, from “Firecreek” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” to “The Outlaw Josey Wales.”

What sets “Never Grow Old” apart is its intimacy, canny casting and novel setting. It’s not every day that Ireland, with its lowering grey skies and wintry pallor, fill in for 1849 Oregon, which is where the remote “California Trail” town of Garlow is supposed to be.

That’s where Patrick Tate (Emile Hirsch) scrapes out a living. He’s an Irish immigrant, the local undertaker and town carpenter, struggling to feed his French wife (Déborah François, fierce) and two kids, with one more on the way.

Business hasn’t been good since the fire and brimstone Preacher Pike (Danny Webb) and his “temperance league” shut down the saloon and emptied out the whorehouse.

He may declare this “a holy town…a true Christian town” from the pulpit, but the money that was coming in through that saloon and brothel is missed. And without armed, drunken men getting into fights over women, cards or manners, Patrick’s hard-pressed to make ends meet.

“This isn’t the same town that we stopped in,” he gripes.

He’s a sensitive soul raising sweet children, all of them mourning the death of their plow horse, Patrick because it means “we go hungry.”

That’s when his “luck” changes. Armed brutes show up, looking for a missing member of their gang. They are the quintessential “men with guns,” ruthless bullies who get their way over the weak. Dutch Albert (John Cusack) wants to know where Billy Crabtree lives. And mere directions won’t do. He demands Patrick’s use as a guide, in the middle of a rainy night.

“Son, don’t make me ask you again.”

Events quickly unfold that demonstrate how serious these men are, and how helpless the town is, useless sheriff (Tim Ahern) and all. A saloon not serving alcohol? A “hotel” with no cook or available prostitutes? Dutch Albert, the brutish mute Dum Dum (Sam Louwyck) and “Italian, I think” Sicily (Camille Pistone) set about remaking the town in their own image — violent, above the law, drunk and corrupt.

And as they do, Patrick’s business booms. Burials aren’t free, you know. Whatever his wife thinks of his blood money and guilt by association with Dutch Albert, Patrick reluctantly goes along with it, corrupted by the corruption and murder he tolerates and profits from.

Cusack’s Dutch Albert is his most charismatic role in years, yet another black hat perpetually pulled down over his dark puffy eyes.

He’s smooth, if not exactly subtle at sewing the separation the once-Catholic Patrick feels towards his preacher and fellow townsfolk — “They don’t like the Irish much, do they?” He coos over Patrick’s “honest man’s work” hands, nicknames him “Saint Patrick” even as he drags him into Hell, or at least underground (a cave) to help him cover up his not-quite-finished murders.

“He’s here to bury you, Bill. No need to thank me. I know you’d do the same for me.”

Hirsch does well by Patrick’s story arc, a man who realizes he’s trapped in a morality tale, a parable about greed and “every man for himself” libertarianism, who endures the insults and indignities for a few pieces of silver, until the hoodlums go too far — repeatedly — and finally settle on his family as their next prey.

A favorite gripe of “The Golden Age of the Western” was how most of what Hollywood churned out during this era of the iconic American film genre looked the same.

Settings often used the same studio-owned ranches near Los Angeles, or productions would decamp for wilderness and National Parks land which shared the same waterless dust and sagebrush terrain — striking, but leaving the viewer thinking “Who could farm/raise cattle or do anything with nothing but sand and tumbleweeds to rely on?”

“Never Grow Old” — a terrible title, by the way — resembles “The Claim” in how striking and unusual its setting is. It’s disorienting, if not unheard of, seeing Westerners mostly clad in black under grey skies, contending with mud instead of dust.

Irish writer-director Ivan Kavanagh uses that arresting setting and his stars well, staging some of the violence off camera but never letting us forget the consequences of it by having Patrick pluck the bodies from the scenes of crimes — which he is helping cover up — and then prepare the torn and bloodied corpses for their entombment in wooden boxes he hammers out.

Kavanagh’s second coup was in giving this too-familiar tale just the right star power, with the criminally under-used Hirsch shining as our anti-hero and Cusack, settling into the playing-the-heavy part of his career with as much wit as he can muster.

We’re long removed from the Western’s gilded age. But grimy, bloody lower-budget fare like “Hostiles,””The Kid” and “Never Grow Old” remind us that there’s value in remembering the genre and what it says about our country’s history of violence, even if we have to shoot the film in Ireland to make it look new and fresh.

MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, language, some sexual content and brief drug use

Cast: Emile Hirsch, John Cusack, Déborah François, Danny Webb.

Credits:Written and directed by Ivan Kavanagh. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:40