Movie Nation

Four academics, experts in their fields, have been summoned to a dingy, cedar-paneled basement office in a remote Chilean astronomic observatory.

Each was exceedingly flattered by the invitation, by a famous scientist legendary for his secrecy.

But when the door is locked behind them, they’re puzzled. And when the video screen on the wall flickers to life, their summoner (Daniel Epstein) tells them that he’s actually dead. He then recites a long list of numbers to them, which some are quick enough to write down.

They must figure out what those numbers mean to possibly stave off what their late science hero regards as they inevitable.

“You will all die at 10 o’clock tonight!”

Welcome to the “Tangent Room,” where only their brains can save Sandra (Lisa Bearpark), David (Håkan Julander), Kate (Vee Vimolmal) and Carol (Jennifer Lila).

Something only theorized about up until now is about to reveal itself. It could be catastrophic for all of them, or only the ones who can’t escape this room, or the entire planet. They just don’t know. But the numbers will tell them.

As Sandra, the token optimist in the quartet reminds them, “The right numbers can solve anything.”

“Tangent Room” is an “Escape Room” variation — basically “Six Actors in search of an author” or “Twilight Zone’s” sci-fi variation, “Five Characters in Search of an Exit.” Only with little in the line of dangerous thrills, and a Big Science Concept at its core — two, actually.

As the pragmatic David and nonplussed Carol argue for finding a way to short out the electro-shock lock that seals the door, the prickly on-the-spectrum Kate reminds the others that “Not all of us will leave this room,” and if she has to whack somebody, she will.

What the four try to reason out is part of “conformative cyclic cosmology,” an opening title told us.

First concept — that the universe, post-“Big Bang,” has reached “the end of expansion.” The explosion that blew everything into being and has been expanding and petering out ever since has petered out.

Second concept — It’s that whole “parallel universe(s) thing that classic “Star Trek” toyed with and “Spider-Man: Into the Multiverse” explored.

Writer-director Björn Engström’s movie leans more towards cerebral drama than edge-of-your-seat thriller. He’s more interested in the ideas these four are wrestling with than the actual wrestling. The four quarrel, apply reason built out of their areas of expertise and bicker some more.

Where things get interesting in terms of tension and actors portraying people (Lila and Vimolmal give the stand out performances) confronted with something so extraordinary as to be almost supernatural, is when characters literally flicker — in the room — jumping about in space AND time.

You’d freak out, too.

It’s a simple, inexpensive effect — digital video jumpcuts that move this character or another around the room in mid-conversation. And the ways the four figure out how to cope with that, to figure which “version” of their multi-verse selves they’re dealing with and why they have actually been summoned here and locked in this room are the best reasons to see “Tangent Room.”

It’s a fairly dry film, otherwise. But if it’s a great compliment to say any movie “makes you think,” hats off to Björn Engström for making a short, smart sci-fi picture that makes you wish you’d stayed in college a few years longer.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Lisa Bearpark, Daniel Epstein, Håkan Julander, Vee Vimolmal, Jennifer Lila.

Credits: Written and directed by Björn Engström. An Epic release.

Running time: 1:05

Netflix has responded to Steven Spielberg’s reported efforts to ensure that the Academy Awards, for over 90 years the showcase for honoring the best THEATRICAL motion pictures the world experiences in MOVIE THEATERS, makes Netflix play by the same rules as everybody else.

With nominated films such as “Mudbound,” “Beasts of No Nation” (produced elsewhere and purchased for release by Netflix) and Alfonso Cuaron’s Oscar-winning “Roma,”  reaching viewers under the Netflix banner, it’s the right time to have this conversation.

Steven Spielberg started it — when word got out that he was preparing to throw his weight around at the upcoming Academy (AMPAS) Board of Governors meeting to ensure that cash-rich streaming services whose product is almost entirely experienced on TVs and mobile devices don’t get to compete for Academy Awards.

Go for the Emmy, which is where you belong, is his argument.

He has gotten the expected pushback. It’s spread far and wide.

Which is fine, but there’s not a lot of discussion of this idea on its general merits.

Movie watching is evolving, something the whole dustup brings to the fore. Theatrical attendance is generally flat to falling in North America, and yet people are still watching movies — Redbox and Netflix, Hulu, Crackle and too many other streaming services to name are proof of that.

But whatever the future of movies, I have been arguing all Oscar season that the minute the Academy gives Best Picture to “Roma,” the game is up for the Oscars. Giving Cuaron the Best Director prize for an indulgent, interesting but far from fascinating or well-acted bore, was bad enough. Hollywood has long shown a willingness to throw theatrical under the bus — home video, shrinking video release windows, etc — but this would underscore that tendency with a slap in the face that would hasten the demise of the magic of seeing a film as a shared experience, with other true believers.

Netflix is changing the rules, and throwing a LOT of money to elbow their way into the spot at the head of the table. They shoved a mediocre melodrama into the Oscar conversation with the muddy-lensed “Mudbound.” “Beasts of No Nation” was a natural Indie Spirit Award contender, had it been a real “theatrical movie.”

“Roma,” with staggering, laughable hype backing it and Cuaron fanatics (normally, I am one) pushing it to the front of awards season conversations, utterly upset the applecart.

If the nominations for “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” a lesser Coen Brothers effort, were all we were arguing over here, that’d be cause for alarm. Blank check financing from Netflix, the “Nobody else will make this” script gathering dust in a drawer, which this film and “Roma” have in common, and Netflix’s indulging Big Names and then spending Big Bucks to get them Oscar attention, is changing the rules.

These films wouldn’t have stood a chance in the theatrical marketplace, for a lot of reasons. Overlong and myopic and indulgent top that list. And really, not a lot of people are actually watching the movies — even though Netflix won’t provide streaming numbers — is backed up by the fact that the Academy turned its nose up at them.

Back when cinema was going digital, Spielberg famously came out to me and others declaring he’d cling to celluloid to the end, “even if I’m the last guy shooting on film.” So yes, the Wunderkind is showing his age with this high-handed move.

But Spielberg’s core argument, “They’re not REAL movies” has merit. These movies ARE a part of the cultural conversation, but they’re not part of the Hollywood traditional model, which includes Big Screen showings, movies experienced communally.

Another argument that Hollywood should take VERY seriously is “It is Netflix’s BUSINESS MODEL to KILL THEATRICAL and swallow Hollywood.”

They started out as another revenue stream for other studios, now they want to replace them. Letting them money muscle and bully their way to legitimizing this creation of a monopoly is a mistake.

But as I said, moviegoing is changing, and Oscar needs to adapt to that. The question remains, “How do you do that and not utterly blur the difference between cinema and Teevee?” Because the Emmys, whatever their value, aren’t remotely as prestigious as the Oscars in the EGOT realm.

I’m with Spielberg, mainly because I think this is a conversation that filmdom needs to have. It’s one thing when a documentary earns a token release in theaters to qualify for an Oscar. It’s quite another when a “studio” that turns out more product than most of the rest of Hollywood put together tries to Weinstein/bulldoze its way to prestige that its pictures — ALL of the ones I’ve mentioned looked and felt “small screen” to me, especially the flatly lit and shot, dull “Roma” (a critic friend who saw it in a cinema said he felt he was being “held hostage,” NOT a problem a home TV viewer would experience) — don’t deserve.

A caper comedy/heist hoot about the origins of “Stockholm Syndrome.”

Looks badass and funny, and as Noomi Rapace and Ethan Hawke co-star in “Stockholm,” we have our fingers crossed. We do.

It doesn’t appear to have a release date, but sometime this year, we figure out if this riff on history works.

We meet Steve at what might be his lowest — 60, alone, weeping and brooding. It’s a bottle-by-the-bed/pistol to the head moment.

Steve, played by J.K. Simmons, long ago discovered what the writer Mark Lawrence observed in his “Prince of Thorns” — that “memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you’ll find an edge to cut you.”

Stuck in a darkened home, with only an answering machine and his grimmest recollections for company, Steve is in the middle of what could be a terminal binge of booze and regrets, his outgoing answer message summing him up more than we realize.

“I’m not here.”

The film of that title is a sad and supposed-to-be-touching series of flashbacks brought forth by one answering machine message — tucked in between the “final notice” calls alerting him to the power and water that are about to be cut off.

It’s from his mother. “Karen died,” she says. “She never remarried…I’m sorry.”

From there, “I’m Not Here” takes us into two earlier timelines. Steve wanders the dimly lit rooms, rummaging for stashed bottles and mementos — a child’s bicycle here, an AA sobriety token there.

We see Steve as he (Sebastian Stan is younger-Steve) and pal Adam (David Wexler) drunkenly try out a two-headed stand-up act. It was the night Steve met Karen (Maika Monroe), almost giddy hook-up that led that “romantic” screen romance cliche — a slam against this wall, then that one, dishes and lamp-upending first sexual encounter that is Hollywood shorthand for “heat.”

Getting stuck in an elevator within minutes of their marriage?

“I hope this isn’t a sign.”

It is. Just because they were both tipsy way back when they met doesn’t mean that BOTH of them are trapped in “The Days of Wine and Roses.” Steve’s an alcoholic, and the desultory honeymoon sex proves the old maxim, “Nothing more whets the appetite, and dulls the performance.”

The other timeline for Steve’s flashbacks take him to his childhood, where Stevie (Iain Armitage of “Big Little Lies” and “Young Sheldon”) is closely-supervised by his classic early ’60s mom (Mandy Moore) who teaches him how to properly brush his teeth and the ways of the world as well.

“You’ve got to take better care of yourself, Stevie. You only get one life. Don’t waste it, like I did.”

Helluva thing to tell a kid.

His dipsomaniacal dad (Max Greenfield) dotes on him, plays with Stevie and fights with his mother over his drinking. There aren’t many sights sadder than a boy of eight pouring his dad’s drinks, and trying them for himself.

Stevie is destined for the trauma of divorce court, the boy stuck in the middle between warring adults. And that isn’t even the worst of it.

Co-writer/director Michelle Schumacher (Mrs. J.K. Simmons) lets us swoon at the romance of a young couple swirling around the room — the camera circling them in joy — to “I Melt With You,” and see the connection between Steve and Karen. But it’s the grim aftermath, the “Sunday morning coming down” with Steve waking up after passing out drunk in their son’s bed, that dominates “I’m Not Here.”

Steve, this script suggests, was pre-destined for misery. Children of divorce get divorced themselves, children of alcoholics…

A child pleading to a judge “I want my family back” tugs at the heart, but get used to heartbreak, kid. You’re pretty much bred for it.

The Oscar-winning Simmons broods well. He looks positively hollowed-out here, broken and wishing the liquor would ease his pain or kill him, that he could change at least one of the tragedies that mark his life.

Greenfield and Moore make a convincing, conventional doomed “Mad Men” era couple. Sebastian Stan — Bucky Barnes in the “Captain America” movies– ably gets across a younger Steve unable to shake off, even at that age, his past and his seeming pre-destiny.

Monroe (“It Follows”) has too little to play, her scenes and situations limited to cliches.

And that’s a shadow hanging over the whole film, its myopic main setting and its flashbacks covering familiar tropes of memory the way movies have always imagined them and alcoholism traveling the same arc it always does on screen. It’s a mopey, wallowing in the too-obvious point it never gets around to making.

“I’m Not Here” is never more than a short, morose melodrama whose chief shortcoming is that there’s not more that’s new, that there’s not more “here” here.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: J.K. Simmons, Sebastian Stan, Maika Monroe, Mandy Moore

Credits: Directed by Michelle Schumacher, script by Tony Cummings, Michelle Schumacher  A Gravitas release

Running time: 1:17

OK, this is starting to look like some seriously twisted goings on.

Love Harbour’s take on the character, and I have to say, it’s had to grow on me because I was quite amused by Ron Perlman’s hulking slow-burn version of “Hellboy.”

Funny funny red band trailer (Uncensored, unfiltered, so if you’re delicate, move along — move along).

Nice use of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” in the score. Apt.

There are a lot of cartoons in cinemas this weekend — “Lego Movie: The Second Part,” “Into the Spider-Verse.”

And let’s be brutally blunt, “How to Train Your Dragon 3” isn’t all that. Once audiences started seeing it, those comically endorsement-happy reviews were going to induce head-scratching. I said as much, and damned if that hasn’t turned out to be the case.

“Joyless” is not a great word-of-mouth recommendation.

Second weekend numbers show “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World,” falling off the box office cliff. The $30-35 million second weekend projections of many are over 30% off, unless Saturday (traditionally the big take-the-kids-to-the-cartoon day) turns it around.

Bearing that in mind, Deadline.com may be off in projecting “A Madea Family Funeral” winning the weekend with a $25 million+ take, with “Dragon 3” fading in a plummeting fashion to $23 and change. Deadline is notorious for under-counting Saturday animation box office takes. But if this holds, that’s a 60% drop from “Dragon’s” opening weekend.

I saw “Madea” with a paying late afternoon matinee crowd in rural NC. Half-full house at 4:30? That’s telling. As Tyler Perry is giving the character her curtain call here (he’s not playing Madea again, he insists), longtime fans (older, female) are checking out her final bows.

“Greta,” the other new wide release, doesn’t have any branding or supernaturalism to make it appeal to today’s horror audiences — just a screen legend, Isabelle Huppert, abusing a beloved starlet (Chloe Grace Moretz) via stalking, kidnapping, etc. It’s not bad, but a $5 million+ is all she wrote for this Neil Jordan thriller.

“Alita: Battle Angel” will have to break even with its overseas take — down to $6 million this weekend.

“Green Book” is getting a decent Oscar bounce. No word yet on how re-issues of “Spider-Verse” and “Favourite” and “A Star is Born” are faring.

I guess it was too much to hope that Tyler Perry would send the old broad off in style.

He’s losing the dress, the fake chest, the wigs and the wildly uneven makeup and bidding everybody’s favorite auntie adieu with “A Madea Family Funeral.” 

Decades of playing the character on stage, and screen — you can’t blame him for running out of gags, out of ideas and phoning it in. You CAN blame him for letting us SEE him phone it in.

He flings a funnier new Perry-in-heavy-makeup character at “Funeral,” a brother to his stand-bys, the preachy, threatening, Jesus mis-quoting, language-mangling Force of Nature Madea, and out-of-you-know-whats-to-give pothead/dirty-old man brother Joe.

Heathrow has no legs and an electrolarynx for his missing voice box. No, he didn’t lose that much of himself in ‘Nam. Blame “the diabetes” and cigarettes. It’s a funny effect and a great gag, making even limp lines the character growls

The film surrounding this unholy trio, their nephew Brian (Perry, out of drag) and Madea’s crusty running mates Hattie (Patrice Lovely) and Aunt Bam (Cassie Davis) is another Perry melodrama folded into Atlanta African American affluence.

It’s about a family of beautiful people — many of whom cheat. Madea and crew show up for an anniversary celebration just as the news that patriarch Anthony has died in the S & M clutches of a voluptuous and faithless family friend (Quin Barker).

Actually, they don’t “know” this. Only cheating Renee (Barker), cheating son Anthony (Courtney Burrell) and his brother’s fiance Gia (Aeriél Miranda) KNOW. They were having an assignation in the hotel room next door to Anthony’s bondage-games demise.

But the sharp-nosed Joe and Heathrow know. And Madea and her girls catch up. It’s all they can do to keep a lid on it when the widow, Vianne (Jen Harper) starts asking questions.Two

“Hotel?” Madea evades. “These ho’s don’t TELL.”

That soap opera stops the movie every time it moves front and center. Fortunately, Madea is put in charge of the hasty funeral.

“Two days? Black people do NOT bury people in two days!”

Perry’s pictures have always had outtakes which show his version of the “best joke on the set wins” tradition. The problem is, he’s not surrounded by funny people competing for the best line. It’s just him. And he’s run out of one-liners.

I doubt Davis and Lovely, the two hammy supporting actresses, come up with their own jokes. And everybody else Perry casts is a comic stiff. The melodrama is played straight — or straight-ish. Beautiful, buff shirtless black men and perfectly coiffed and made-up women who are the victims of these no good/no count yard dog males.

Boring characters boringly-played.

The big, multi-bedroom house and hotel settings, with all these cheaters, offer the promise of a “door slamming farce,” people stumbling into and out of rooms and the mistaken identities/intentions that follow. As comedy-savvy as Perry is, that’s beyond his dramaturgy.

His most promising homily is a scene in which young, professional Brian is schooled on the origins of “#BlackLivesMatter” when Madea instigates a traffic stop as he’s hauling them all to the party. Brian figures its a teachable moment on how Black people’s “compliance” would prevent all these police meltdowns and shootings.

Nope. Madea knows better. And Joe. Brian will, soon. But there aren’t enough gags there to pull the scene off, and like every other sequence in recent TP movies, it goes way beyond its comic payoff. His movies lack comic timing and pacing.

They’re slow, Joe.

His desperation to find a cheap laugh in many scenes has Joe doing something Classic Madea would never stand for — dropping the N-word for a giggle.

And there are continuity errors (including a doozy in the final act), blown lines and other signs Perry has moved on from big, brassy “Angry Black Woman” Madea.

I guess he’s letting us know we should move on, too.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for crude sexual content, language, and drug references throughout

Cast: Tyler Perry, Cassi Davis, Patrice Lovely, Courtney Burrell, Aeriél Miranda, Kj Smith

Credits: Written and directed by Tyler Perry. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:44

“Iran” and “comedy” don’t often see themselves in the same sentence, but “3 Faces” is the latest entry in that rarest of cinema sub-genres.

Jafar Panahi, who made “Tehran Taxi” and the darkly funny/socially-biting “Offsides,” finds wry laughs amid the clashing cultures of rural, Azerbaijani Iran and the potentially offensive “liberation” of a life in cinema. It’s filled with wry laughs, comical rural “types” and over-the-top, fame-craving desperation worthy of an over-the-top slapback.

The “3 Faces” of the title are three generations of Iranian actresses — a modern day star, an aspiring starlet with a chance to attend a Tehran conservatory and a screen legend from before the Islamic Revolution, lying low, living alone in a backwater where everybody knows who she was and can shake their heads at what her talent and fame earned her.

A young woman (Marziyeh Rezaei) sends a cell-phone video from her tiny village in Northern Iran. She is desperate, pleading with a movie star to save her. “I’ve loved cinema since I was little,” she declares (in Persian, with English subtitles). She’s won the chance to attend a film school/acting conservatory in Tehran, but her family is determined that she go through with their plans first (An arranged marriage?). THEN school.

“They betrayed me,” she wails. the jumpy, tense XCU cell-phone video ends with young Marziyeh hanging herself and the phone tumbling to the ground.

The actress she sends this to, the famed Behnaz Jafari, is distraught. She exits the set of her latest film, flaming red dye job and all, and gets her director — Jafar Panihi (See what they’re doing here?) — to drive her north to see what happened.

“If she’s dead, how could she send this?”

But the “film” is real enough to make them wonder if the kid hung herself. It’s just that the star is cynical enough to wonder if her director, who has pitched a suicide story to her as a project, is just messing with her.

If he is, this is quite the elaborate hoax. They’re way beyond paved roads, asking for directions to the village of Saran from locals who crack, “Your Turkish isn’t very good,” (in Turkish, with English subtitles).

Behnaz and Jafar “investigate” and try to reason out what might have happened, parsing every encounter. A wedding party on the mountain-girdling dirt path they’re driving means either that the girl didn’t kill herself, or they’re not close to Saran.

That whatever repressive steps the Islamic State to limit women’s rights never took hold in Iran is obvious from Behnaz’s doing most of the questioning — polite, discrete, “Did something just happen here?” She doesn’t want to give away that she’s fishing for a suicide.

They suspect “a cover-up,” just another one of those things the Islamic State doesn’t want the Iranian people to know is going on all around them. Ambitious, passionate, talented girls exist. And must be STOPPED.

The mere fact that these two unmarrieds are touring a waterless backwater like this is a tad subversive. And that’s the starting point for Panihi’s exploration of empowerment, repression and this local girl they start to hear about as they close in on her village.

“She didn’t know when to keep her mouth shut.” And yet, she persisted.

It takes a while to pick up on the droll vibe Panihi was aiming for, here. We meet an old woman test-driving her freshly-dug grave, many locals they meet have a story of Shahrazade, a film star under the Shah, now in exile, a near-recluse on the edge of this very village.

The older star, first of the “3 Faces,” craved independence and artistic outlet and free expression and, it is implied, had a corrupting influence on young Marziyeh.

“She has brought DISHONOR to the family!” the most disapproving relative bellows at one and all. Some might agree, but most think he’s being a little extreme.

The biggest laugh here I won’t give away, save to mention that it involves a LOT of slapping. But there’s a general culture-clash whimsy about “3 Faces” that matches the funniest moments in “Offsides,” Panahi’s 2006 comedy about soccer mad women trying to sneak into the male-only world of Tehran’s soccer stadium.

A nation of religious philosophers resides all around these two film folks — “The world is unjust. It knew Noah as well as Solomon!”

Behnaz earns reactions from “Didn’t I just see you on TV?” to “We are honored by your presence!” culminating with, “Now that you’re here, how’s that TV series end?”

“Same as always,” she sighs. “Tears and mourning.”

Panihi, a pioneer of the Middle Eastern New Wave cinema? He’s mistaken for a bureaucrat, come to hear grievances about the water, the intermittent power outages, the roads.

“Didn’t you come here to help us?”

Actually, by creating another comedy for those “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,” by making another film about the plight of women in backward theocracies, by finding fun in the “Green Acres” quaintness of rural Iran, that’s exactly what Panihi is doing.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with suicide, threats of violence

Cast: Behnaz Jafari, Jafar Panahi, Marziyeh Rezaei

Credits:Directed by Jafar Panahi, script by Jafar Panahi, Nader Saeivar . A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:40

“How to Train Your Dragon 3” will still sit atop the top of the box office heap on this its second weekend. The only curiosity about that fact is how much audience will the kiddie cartoon lose on its second weekend? Box Office Mojo figures it’ll clear $32, which would be a healthy if not robust 40-42% fall off. So we’ll see.’

It will have  more animated competition as Sony brings back the Oscar winning “Into the Spider-verse” to see if there’s an Oscar bounce in the blurry holiday season blockbuster.

That, and a “Lego Movie” sequel and the partially animated “Alita: Battle Angel,” means animation fans young and old will have a choice or two this weekend.

“The Favourite,” with an Oscar win for Olivia Colman, killing off Glenn Close’s best shot at the big prize — maybe her last shot — will add hundreds of screens and return to a multi-plex near you.

Lady Gaga’s “Shallow” Oscar win and engaging performance with Bradley Cooper at the Oscars means that “A Star is Born” is returning to theaters, another blockbuster looking for extra cash in what has been a seriously downbeat box office 2019. There’s new footage here, more Gaga, Warners says. Fans take note.

And Best Picture winner “Green Book” will remain in the Top Ten for another week or two, until “Captain Marvel” devours all NEXT weekend, anyway.

Newcomers? Tyler Perry is taking off the dress and wig and makeup and body padding after “A Madea Family Funeral.” It could exit with $22 million, as his franchise may be out of ideas, but has a lot of residual good will. A couple of funny films in that series, a lot of “Hire a JOKE writer ya cheapskate!” releases that Perry could not be talked into workshopping until they were worthy of release.

Maybe get Jordan Peele could take a look, offer a little feedback? He did wonders for that spoiled ingrate Spike Lee.

That’s one thing a more diverse Hollywood could rectify. With Peele and others gaining clout, a critical mass of decision makers who aren’t shy about telling a talented filmmaker who can’t get out of her or his own way “Sport, this needs WORK” should be entering the picture.  Do white execs shy away from engaging or engaging with Spike Lee when his script is a little off?  I’ve long thought Lee needed that kind of pushback, and I see evidence that he got it making “BlackKklansman.” Perry could use it, too. An African American producer with clout could work wonders on the raw material Perry puts out there, and tell Spike Lee “You can do better” without fear of getting called the name Spike likes to throw around a bit too cavalierly.

Then again, nobody has ever been able to tell Woody Allen anything, and it’s not like he wasn’t surrounded by an army of just-as-Jewish producers capable of giving him feedback that would have canceled half the movies he’s made in the past 15 years. So maybe not.

The other “old broad” at the cinema this weekend is Isabelle Huppert, who gives Chloe Grace Moretz all she can handle as “Greta.” Huppert, a star since the ’70s, hopefully regaled young Ms. Moretz with tales of life on the set of “Heaven’s Gate.”

“Greta” could scare up about $5 million at the box office.

One-time “Starship Trooper” Casper Van Dien gets off easy in “Chokehold,” a bloody, bone-snapping B-movie set in the world of off-the-books “no rules” mixed martial arts brawling in Arkansas.

Van Dien’s character is killed off in the first act. Top billed, and home before anybody misses him. Nice work, if you can get it.

He’s here just long enough to show us he’s got some moves before his character’s estranged daughter — fighter and screen newcomer Melissa Croden — takes over, takes the hits and carries the movie for the remaining 70 minutes.

That movie, a vengeance tale about a daughter trying to prove herself in her sport, confront the MMA mobster (Ilona McCrea) who murdered her dad and collect some fight purses as she does, is a lump on the mat — inert, from its inane plot and colorless dialogue to the slo-mo fights which demonstrate the concept of “stage punch” to those who’ve never been able to pick up on them in better fight movies. Where, you know, the fact that you’re not ACTUALLY hitting somebody is masked.

Croden is Zoe, a brawler who envisions a future for herself in her father’s sport, but in Vegas, where the MMA action actually is.

The cleverest piece of filmmaking co-writer/director Brian Skiba manages is the parallel construction that shows us Zoe getting knocked out in Vegas as Dad, Javier (Van Dien) fights and fights and is finally done in by a firearm way east in Arkansas.

Zoe settles in at Dad’s old gym, links up with Dad’s favorite female trainer (Corinne Van Ryck de Groot) and grits her teeth through cops who seem disinterested in finding Dad’s killer.

“Your father was in a dangerous business, one that likes to keep its secrets ‘secret,'” is all the unkempt detective (Diego Diablo del Mar, most colorful stage name ever) offers.

Zoe, trained by Renee (Van Ryck de Groot), dives into the fight scene, promoted by Jones (Lochlyn Munro), works her way through assorted female brutes, the sort who offer no quarter, and won’t take it, either.

“Give up! GIVE UP! Before I break your arm!”

They never listen.

Eventually, Zoe must face Tatiana. That’s the only way to get to boss Natalia (McRea), a sadistic she-devil whose Russian overlords are putting the financial screws to her even as she’s kicking sparring partners through tables and walls — just for kicks.

A clumsy device — Dad’s “training videos,” video letters to Zoe — is introduced but mercifully abandoned.

Aside from the Russian intrigues and an opportunistic Scot (Gianni Capaldi), there’s nothing to this story outside of the bloodier-than-bloody bouts. No love interest, no real benefit to the addition of Uncle Ray (Kip Pardue) to Zoe’s fighting life.

With nothing but fights to recommend it, they’d better be good, right?

They aren’t. The choreography is elaborate, but gives itself away, lower level pro wrestling style. They’re not fights, they’re half-speed dances with big sweeping kicks and punches ducked in close-up. So that we can see, you know, how fake it all is.

They turn “Chokehold” from the B-movie Van Dien signed on for to a D-movie by its closing credits, a clumsily plotted and directed thriller that’s a primer on how stage punches work, how fake it all can look when we’re supposed to believe the pugilists are actually landing blows.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Casper Van Dien, Melissa Croden, Ilona McCrea, Corinne Van Ryck de Groot, Lochlyn Munro and Kip Pardue

Credits: Directed by Brian Skiba, script by Brian Skiba, Craig Michael Hall An Ammo release.

Credits: 1:37