Movie Nation

This one a lot of high school and college kids who “like to party” have lived through — the horror.

That old movie critics’ maxim — “They rarely get better.” — kind of takes it on the chin with “Happy Death Day 2U,” the winded but game sequel to 2017’s “Happy Death Day.”

It starts badly. For five minutes or more we limp through a repetition of the same “Groundhog Day in Which You’re Murdered” routine — two rounds of it — featuring bland and charisma-starved Phil Vu as the tech nerd Ryan who busts in on college coed Tree (Jessica Rothe) and Carter (Israel Broussard), awakening her from her nightly “reset” after being murdered.

The horror of being stuck with Vu as our hero/protagonist almost sets in when the plot twists around into a science experiment with Tree–Theresa has been dumped in an alternate pathway in the Multiverse, an alternate college career with the same deadly day that ends with death.

Multiverses — God how I curse the day comic book writers and their Hollywood acolytes discovered those.

Even though Rothe provides “Death Day” with the same sort of lift she gave the original, the sequel has half the laughs and maybe one fifth the shocking death moments of “Happy Death Day.”

But it still has Rothe, of “La La Land,” over 30 and showing some miles, but giving her all to reprising her sorority girl Buffy the Mad Slasher Slayer trapped in “Edge of Tomorrow.” Her Tree knows the drill, knows that every detail she forgets, every would-be murderer she fails to guess, means she’ll have to duck, hide, run and fight her way through the trauma of being stalked and killed, one more time, by a nut with a knife.

In the alternate universe where she ends up, her snippy sorority rival Danielle (Rachel Matthews) is all about charity work, sweetness that is catnip to Carter. She’s auditioning for “The Miracle Worker,” and the best and brightest sorority pres has done her homework.

“Did you know Anne Frank was deaf AND blind?”

But what makes Tree think about fighting her way to success and remaining in this version of her alternate life is the third party at her birthday (and death day) lunch with her dad (Jason Bayle).

It’s her mom, her dead mom (Missy Yager) who is still around. And if you don’t think an experienced actress like Rothe can play the hell out of the shock and emotional release of having her mother (dead before the first film started) back, you aren’t giving the “Death Day” daughter her due.

Unfortunately, the slasher in the Bayfield U. mascot’s mask (The Bayfield Babies!) is still around, too. Veteran of this time loop or not, Tree is going to feel every fresh death she faces as she tries to settle into this “better version of my life.” And that gets old quickly.

Writer-director Christopher Landon is better at calling for cute camera angles and 360 degree pans and plotting — silly and farfetched as it is — than he is at jokes and zingers, which made the first film stand out.

Take away Rothe, and there is no movie.

Perhaps the clue is in the nerdy science boys trying to explain the temporal paradox to Tree in movie terms. They, at least, know where a big chunk of this movie came from — with only the jokes missing.

“Seriously, you’ve NEVER seen ‘Back to the Future?'”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, language, sexual material and thematic elements.

Cast: Jessica Rothe, Israel Broussard, Ruby Modine, Phi Vu, Suraj Sharma, Sarah Yarkin, Rachel Matthews.

Credits: Written and directed by Christopher Landon. A Universal/Blumhouse release.

Running time: 1:40

Kristen Bell’s still not letting it go?

Her ice princess isn’t getting her feet wet, if she can help it, in this briny blue action-packed (action only) trailer for “Frozen II,” opening Nov. 22.

Evan Rachel Wood and Sterling K. Brown are the “names” joining Kristen, Idina and Josh for this sequel.

Dazzling, or at least darned impressive.

Nicholas Hoult, who has a fun turn in “The Favourite,” has the title role here — a possible “serious actor” break-out moment for him in a picture that has  prestige and fangirl/fanboy appeal built into it, sort of in that “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women” way.

Here, we’re given a love story (Lily Collins co-stars) and a taste of the events that gave J.R.R.’s imagination room to roam, and a woman he’d love to impress by writing the blockbuster fantasy trilogy of all time.

“Tolkien” opens in limited release May 10.

Oh, that every dark comedy to come down the pike was as playful as “Woman at War.”

It plays around with expectations, setting us up and tripping us — time and again.

It toys with conventions and worn comic tropes — identical twins, mistaken identity, running gags.

And Benedikt Erlingsson’s Icelandic caper comedy has fun with music, installing an offbeat trio (tuba, drums and accordion or piano or organ) who score the movie, live on set, standing behind our “Woman at War” as her odyssey is by turns serious, possibly tragic or — more often — just plain strange and whimsical.

When Halla finds out her adoption of a Ukrainian orphan might come through, a Ukrainian trio — in native garb — shows up, her very own Greek Chorus, an ironic commentary on Halla’s newly-complicated plight, singing in Ukrainian.

In “Woman at War,” Halla (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir) is quintessentially “quixotic.” But unlike Don Quixote, famed tilter at windmills, this 50ish chorus director is tilting at power line pylons. Halla is an Icelander at war with the government’s high-handed plans to bring more work to the nation’s polluting smelting industry — “Chinese money” and all. Her way of fighting it? Take down the power lines that keep the metals and ores melting.

We meet Halla in full warrior princess mode. She’s hiked out across the lava fields that form Iceland’s terrain, brought her bow and arrows and has shot a cable across the power lines, shorting out the works.

When the black helicopter pops up to track her down, she’s resourceful enough to get away, but only as far as the nearest farm.

“If you want to help me, it has to be now.”

Her pitch, that this, her fifth act of sabotage, does not make her a criminal, that “I’m trying to stop crimes against us,” is unnecessary. The farmer (Jóhann Sigurðarson) figures they’re cousins, not a far-fetched guess on the tiny rock on the edge of the Arctic Ocean.

Halla has just made her first getaway, a skin-of-her-teeth escape back to her solitary life of bike-commuting to work, leading a chorale, maintaining contact with her government “mole” who updates her on the whole smelting conspiracy and covering her tracks as she single-handedly throws a spanner into the works.

Her latest sabotage has netted a suspect, a convenient Spanish tourist (Juan Camillo Roman Estrada) who becomes a running gag, always in the wrong place at precisely the wrong time. The cops jail him and let him go, but not without a jaunty “Welcome to Iceland!” — one of the few times anybody here speaks English.

Co-writer/director Erlingsson (He did “Of Horses and Men.”) loses himself in Halla’s cunning and resourcefulness. She’s not just handy with a bow and arrow. She knows she’s risking electrocution, messing with high tension lines. She’s got her rubber gloves.

And she’s careful in other ways, too — right on the edge of paranoid. Seriously, how easy would it be to catch an eco-terrorist on a remote island with only 350,000 people on it — especially an island with the omnipresent CCTV “security cameras” popping up in every corner of Reykjavik?

Erlingsson has her raise an eyebrow at questions Halla’s asked about the getaway car she parked on the street. The questioner is blond, wearing black, his eyes hidden behind Ray Bans. It’s only a moment or two later than she and we see he’s pushing a stroller. NOT a cop.

She wants to get her message out to the public, and when cutting up newspapers to create a lengthy “ransom note” styled “manifesto” proves impractical — she needs a typewriter, untraceable, preferably. Check out the way Halla procures it and then distributes her “message.”

Through it all, Geirharðsdóttir gives Halla this inscrutable poker face — until, that is, she gets the news that her long-ago filed-for adoption (a Ukrainian war orphan) has come through. She lets us see the shock, and later the delight that this news — in the middle of all the drama she’s filled her life with — gives her.

The deadpan whimsy spills out of many scenes in this “War” film. Halla’s farmer “cousin” lives alone with his sheep dog. He’s named the dog “Woman.” As in “Woman, STAY.” “Woman! BARK!” “SHUT UP Woman!”

But I can’t say enough about the way Davíð Þór Jónsson’s music and musicians are incorporated into “Woman at War,” setting the picture’s tone, having fun with scoring the film and providing visual/musical commentary to Halla’s adventures.

It’s not just that the simple rhythms — a snare drum march in some scenes, a folkish accordion or oomphs from a tuba in others — that tickle. We see the percussionist impatiently clicking his sticks together behind Halla as she reasons through her next plot and watch the ensemble perform as she sprints by, running from drones or police helicopters.

When Halla faces a decision, she makes eye contact with this or that performer before she — and they — decide what course she is taking, by virtue of the music that the performer scores it with.

When you see the source producing music in a scene in a movie, that’s called “diegetic sound.” Several movies have played around with this, but “Woman at War” has the best diegetic placement of music and musicians in a story since “There’s Something About Mary.” It’s just delightful.

Erlingsson takes a fairly cut-and-dried caper comedy and tosses twist after twist into it, letting “Woman at War” surprise us just as often as it repeats a running gag (the poor, cursing bicycle-camping Spaniard).

And as predictable as this might have been and sometimes is, Erlingsson and his stoic, poker-faced star save the best twists for the finale, letting this genial lope across the lava flows finish with a flourish and leave you with a big grin.

MPAA Rating: unrated, locker room nudity

Cast: Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir, Jóhann Sigurðarson, Juan Camillo Roman Estrada, Jörundur Ragnarsson

Credits: Directed by Benedikt Erlingsson, script by  Ólafur Egilsson, Benedikt Erlingsson. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:40

It’s a little sci-fi, and a lot “Love Actually.”

Danny Boyle directed and Richard Curtis scripted this musical romantic fable.

Lily James, Ed Sheeran, Kate McKinnon and others are among the “names” that surround star Himesh Patel, who plays a struggling musician who could, you know, cash in. If, you know, nobody remembers The Beatles or holds those copyrights.

Just saying. Maybe our hero can afford to get his teeth fixed when, you know, he becomes the star that they were — in equally sudden and overwhelming fashion.
“Well, it’s not Cold Play…”

Stay all the way through it — two teases to the trailer are followed by the trailer proper.

“Yesterday” opens Sept. 13.

This “Woman at War” has the potential for whimsy, I must say.

A quixotic figure who is tilting, like the Don Quixote who inspired “Quixotic,” not at windmills but at power lines.

Reminds me of this TV movie for the last millennium — “Ohms.” Remember that one?

“Woman at War” opens March 1.

The first thought — and perish that thought, if you can — that popped into my head was “impressive, in a ‘Prince of Persia’ way.”

But the source material here is a can’t-miss Disney musical, a cartoon classic given a live action remake.

Will Smith and a cast of mainly lesser-knowns here in the West bring “Aladdin” to the screen on May 24.

The trailers aren’t selling me, I have to say. This could go either way. But we’ll see.

Rebel Wilson’s niche in the cinema is an enviable one.

She’s the quintessential “funnier best friend” the ultimate icing on the ensemble comedy (or musical) cake. The Aussie has made a career out of sharing the screen in “Pitch Perfect” or “How to Be Single” or “Bachelorette” — packing a lot of comic value into her moments and stealing virtually every scene she turns up in.

But being a leading lady isn’t about showing up on set and riffing your way to the funniest take, doing that for a few days or weeks, and moving on. It involves a lot more heavy lifting, a lot more range and in the case of “Isn’t it Romantic,” providing all the laughs when the supporting players aren’t in the Rebel Wilson league.

And if this rom-com that’s a send up of romantic comedy conventions and cliches and doesn’t definitively show she’s not up to the demands, it underlines how even Rebel Wilson can’t save a script this joke-starved or direction this uninspired.

Still, we could see why this was pitched, financed and filmed with every trailer for it. The idea, a rom-com that sends up rom-coms, is a winner.

Wilson plays a woman who was always taught that romantic comedies are fables, that as her mother (Jennifer Saunders) put it, “there is no happy ending” for women “like us.”

As in not svelte, beautiful with perfect hair and makeup from the moment they wake up like the star of virtually every romantic comedy ever.

Adulthood reinforced that. Natalie might be a Manhattan architect, but the plump pushover from Oz is treated like the office doormat, even by underlings. Only her adoring colleague Josh (Adam Devine, still not funny) and assistant Whitney (Betty Gilpin of “GLOW”) support her.

And Whitney’s a bit of a dope, endlessly watching rom-coms like “The Wedding Singer” on her work PC. Natalie cannot set her straight often enough.

“All these movies are terrible lies set to pop songs!”

Natalie’s just proven how “invisible” she is to men like their “He’s CW hot!” new client (Liam Hemsworth) when she takes a blow to the head during an NYC subway mugging on the way home. As she wakes up in hospital, something isn’t right. The doctor’s a contender to be the new “McDreamy.”And the decor…

“This isn’t an emergency room! This is a Williams SONOMA!”

She’s dressed in “Pretty Woman” (post-makeover) wear, sent out into the street, where seagulls fly in heart-shaped flocks and “New York doesn’t smell like s–t any more!”

Much bleeped profanity later, Natalie figures it out.

“I”m trapped in a f—–g PG-13 romantic comedy!”

She rages at her cliched interior monologues, is slack-jawed at the over-the-top interest Mr. “CW hot” shows in her (He writes his phone number on a rose. Don’t try this at home.) and sort of loses it at all the insipid pop that underscores every “Thousand Miles” step she takes on these fantasy-New York streets, into her now luxurious apartment and its over-stocked walk-in closet and makeup vanity.

Her testy neighbor (Brandon Scott Jones) has been turned into “an offensive version of a gay guy,” offensive and funny. Before she knows it,”I think we’re being dragged into some dumb ‘makeover montage.'”

And on and on it goes. First we identify the exhausted cliches of romantic comedies — gay BFF, every woman is a cutthroat rival (Priyanka Chopra takes after Adam Devine’s Josh), every New York streetside shop sells cupcakes, flowers or wedding gowns and when the right song pops up — random strangers all work with the same choreographer. Then we try to make something amusing out of sending up those cliches. And fail.

A “My Best Friend’s Wedding” gag repeated in too many rom-coms to number almost works — “karaoke night.” But just when you think “That’s it. ‘Pitch Perfect’ Rebel just needs a few more production numbers,” the movie provides them. They don’t help.

Hemsworth turns out to be the less funny sibling to brother Chris, although, truth be told, nobody here gets much of a break from the trio of screenwriters.

Waiting around for that first giggle is like sitting through a teetotalers’ Irish wake — death itself. And Wilson, letting the strain show the way a hundred other funny folks expected to “save” a flimsy comedy built around them have before her, has never seemed more out of her depth.

Here, she’s a Rebel without a laugh.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language, some sexual material, and a brief drug reference

Cast: Rebel Wilson, Liam Hemsworth, Adam Devine, Priyanka Chopra, Betty Gilpin and Jennifer Sanders

Credits: Directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson script by Erin Cardillo, Dana Fox and Katie Silberman. A Warners/New Line release.

Running time: 1:28

There are worse sins than “trying too hard” in a romantic comedy.

With twee (precious) characters, a twee setting — the world of antiques and vintage dealers in small town Arkansas — and twee subject matter, as in getting to know your late alcoholic daddy by living in his house and taking a job at the antiques mall where he worked — “Antiquities” tries too hard on too many levels.

It’s so tart and sweet it makes your teeth hurt. But it’s cute enough to more or less come off, in a featherweight sort of way.

Walt Prior, played by Andrew J. West of TV’s “Once Upon a Time,” has come “home” to the small town where his late daddy lived, loved, worked and died. Walt’s not making a big deal out of it, but he’s in town to “live in his old house, work in his old job, go through his old things and know the people that he knew.”

So, issues? Maybe.

It’s a place with a jovial surface to it, everybody naturally assuming that the son from the big city (Little Rock) will move back here and take up Dad’s old booth at the antiques mall. Walt surprises us and possibly himself when he rejects that booth idea, but he takes on a job at that mall — which as in small towns all over America, is a long-closed department store in a half-dead downtown.

Cue the colorful cast of eccentrics that populate the place. If you’ve ever spent any time in such emporiums, you’ve seen the “types.”

There’s the bullying, oversharing unreconstructed Confederate Blundale (Roger Scott) entirely too into his Civil War dioramas.

“My Daddy…he used to WHUP me…he’d put his foot about RIGHT there on my neck and HIT me with a shovel. He was a good man.”

Dolores Jr. (Michaela Watkins) dresses in vintage accessories and drawls through her planned surgeries — nose, or a boob job first? Whatchathink, hon?

Old Coach McGee (Ryk St. Vincent) sells sports training cards and will bend your ear about the athletic exploits of anybody he played with or coached.

Jimmy Lee (Graham Gordy, who co-wrote this and is quite funny in it) is flamboyant and just closeted enough to effeminately talk up the sex appeal of any woman entering the store, like he’s fooling anyone. Or selling to anybody who visits his elaborately detailed recreation of a childhood Christmas in his home growing up. That’s his booth.

“Women like that can’t have nice things. Did you see her shoes?”

Stocky Delaney (Michael Gladis ) insists that he’s on the same training regimen as his brother, a Navy SEAL. Delaney downs those little energy drinks you find at service stations and lies like a sealskin rug.

Presiding over everyone in Sticky Vicky’s Antiques Mall is manager and antiques trader Dewey (Troy Hogan of TV’s “Queen Sugar,” an absolute stitch here). He went to high school with Blundale, and ended up marrying the crank’s mother. But back in the day, he assures Walt,  he was “gettin’ more Tang than Buzz Aldrin.”

Everybody over-shares. Everyone is a trapped in their past. Everyone is presents equal degrees of difficulty when it comes to extracting yourself from a conversation with them.

You’d have to include Ellie (Ashley Greene of TV’s “Rogue” and “Pan Am” and a lot of iindie movies) in that group. Because even though she’s a world traveler and pretty enough to have never been told “no” by a guy, she’s there selling pottery in Sticky Vicky’s, sizing up and pulling the new guy’s leg.

“Delaney’s parents? First COUSINS…When I was little, I didn’t think fat people could feel things.”

Even though culture-shocked Walt “can’t tell the difference between a nice girl being flirty and a flirty girl being nice,” he takes her bait and takes his shot.

Even though he’s only been in Vicky’s mere minutes, Dewey gives him the “You’ve got that look…the look of management,” pitch. He should take over all this and let Dewey and his elderly wife Vicky retire to a life of second-hand RV travel.

“Antiquities” has the feel of a tale that’s been researched. Having dated Southern women deep into collecting and even joined them in estate sales and auctions, in “picking,” restoring and re-selling this stuff, I recognized every “type” here in an instant.

The “malls” inevitably have more clients running booths than customers, with those booth folks enjoying having each other to talk to about their specialties, their “picking” and their obsessions. There’s competition, gossip and a whole lot of reluctance to unload their most precious treasures.

And I’d swear I’ve overheard this very line (courtesy of Dolores Jr.) at an Oak Hill, Florida flea market.

“I’ve taken so much ginko I think I can hear what my neighbors are thinking.”

The hangup that all these people in the movie share is their big smiles and surface enthusiasm for the past, for their DOA business and for keeping up appearances, is all just goofy glossing over for their pain.

That’s a bit of a reach, and “Antiquities” has no business shooting for “deep” for even one second. Sentimental? Sure. The filmmakers pull that off.

It’s the goofy gloss that director and co-writer Daniel Campbell and Gordy absolutely nail — Delaney sucking on helium because it “makes me feel better when I’m depressed,” the native cunning of a small town pole dancer who knows how to take a tip when it’s not being give, the entertainment value of a small town Japanese cook-at-your-table steakhouse. He’s clumsy, and there’s a bit of the insult comic in him (David An).

“Hey stringbean, show over here. I killing myself for you.”

Mary Steenburgen has a two scene cameo as the local shrink Walt consults with, someone who keeps a chatty parrot to help her narcissistic patients hear their self-absorbed words hurled back at them in mockery.

But the standouts in the cast are Gordy, Scott, Watkins and especially Hogan, who makes every singeing admission, every stinging insult sing.

“The only toes you need to worry ’bout steppin’ on are under this desk — covered in athlete’s foot.”

Greene has a lot more to play than West, but truthfully, the leads seem like bemused anchors for the funnier characters to bounce off of. That’s sitcom writing.

With CBS exploring the revival of “Northern Exposure,” I could totally see “Antiquities” as an hour-long character comedy. “Trying too hard” doesn’t seem like a shortcoming in that format.

MPAA Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Ashley Greene, Andrew J. West, Michaela Watkins, Michael Gladis and Mary Steenburgen

Credits: Directed by Daniel Campbell, script by Graham Gordy, Daniel Campbell . An Orchard release

Running time: 1:33