Movie Nation

John Weld was a journalist, screenwriter, novelist and Ford dealership owner whose life is lightly skimmed over in “The Remarkable Life of John Weld,” a documentary based almost entirely on recreations of all the famous people he met, befriended, loved and cuckolded.

It’s a picaresque “Pilgrim’s Progress” of a biography that passes Weld off as a sort of writing equivalent of Forrest Gump or Woody Allen’s “Zelig.”

Weld was an Alabama boy who hied it to Hollywood at the peak of the silent film era, relying on his general fearlessness to tackle a job as a stunt man for the likes of Chaplin, Barrymore and cowboy star Tom Mix.

He was pals with Clark Gable, chased Walter Huston’s fiance and then became Huston’s lifelong friend and eventually came back as a screenwriter and novelist whose works Hollywood optioned. No films ever came from his writings there — not that made it to the Internet Movie Database, in any event.

A meeting at a party with gossip reporter Louella Parsons landed him a start in newspapering, learning the trade and writing in New York, chasing Lindbergh to Paris where he interviewed then-Governor Franklin Roosevelt and befriended the writer James Joyce. He eventually founded a small (rich) town newspaper in Laguna Beach.

The famed aviatrix Pancho Barnes was a drinking buddy. You might remember her as a “character” in “The Right Stuff.”

He wasn’t so much a colorful character and somebody who knew colorful characters. None of his books are touchstone titles — a Donner Party novel, “Don’t You Cry for Me” that was a 1940 best seller, and his “Memoirs of a Hollywood Stunt Man” captures the danger and DIY nature of early film stunt work.

He and his last wife filmed travelogues, but again, no record of them shows that they turned up in theaters or on TV.

And while the esteemed actor and go-to PBS narrator Peter Coyote narrates the recreations as Weld, reading from his memoirs, the experts interviewed here include a godson, a stunt coordinator, a couple of nieces, a film historian and Laguna Beach historian and an “Entertainment Life Coach.” Not exactly an assemblage that would past “American Masters” or “The American Experience” muster on PBS.

The relatives and fans interviewed here refer to Weld as “a man of honor,” even though he took up with other men’s wives and his Wikipedia entry leaves out half his marriages.

Director Gabe Torres samples a couple of Weld’s more difficult early Hollywood stunts — cliff diving, plunging in a raging river doubling for starlet Zasu Pitts — but neither of them deign to identify the movies.

And by the time we get to the resolution of the mystery that frames this life story — a ship sinking, with Weld and wife number four aboard it — in Yokohama Harbor in 1961 — the viewer can be excused for noting “Well, yes, this was a colorful enough life. But remarkable?”

The larger point here might be that this is an example of the sort of life lived when The Lost Generation was in Paris, when Hollywood was still new, when the world was smaller and people who made connections and got a foothold in publishing or New York newspapers or cinema could move relatively easily between those worlds.

As Coyote narrates Weld’s near-drowning “I wanted to take with me as many memories and images as I could conjure,” you can bet Weld wasn’t mentioning, in that memory, the bulk of his life — writing press releases for Boeing and Ford, owning a couple of small California Ford dealerships.

The viewer? It’s not just envy of a comfortable life well-lived that could make you blurt out, “Yes, and?”

MPAA Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Nic Tag, Claire Adams, Emily Kincaid, narrated by Peter Coyote

Credits: Directed by Gabe Torres, script by Rob Lihani.  A Multicom Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:16

Director Zhangke Jia gave us “Still Life” and “A Touch of Sin,” but earlier he expressed a fondness for gangster tales.

Nothing in this trailer — she meets him on the dance floor, he drops his gun, revealing his hidden life — surprises save for the setting. Quite striking.

Look for “Ash is Purest White” in limited release March 15.

There’s a “don’t overthink this” watchability to “Miss Bala,” the Hollywood remake of a lean-mean Mexican gangster movie about a beauty queen coerced into doing a drug lord’s murderous bidding.

Don’t give too much thought to the rapid transition the heroine makes from shocked and scared to death to confident enough to tamp down the fear and play both sides of the drug dealers/DEA front lines.

No head shaking at the obvious “heat” the good looking but cold-blooded kingpin is supposed to generate with the kidnapped and traumatized American woman.

And let’s not wallow in the moral ambiguity of a picture that paints the callous corruption of drug dealers, Mexican police and the Drug Enforcement Administration agents as equal on almost all counts.

Because we have to believe that to buy into any of this heroine’s journey from naif to nasty enough to hold her own among monsters.

Catherine “Twilight” Hardwicke’s film, hewing closely to the somewhat sharper 2011 Spanish language  B-movie “La Bala,” shows us “the other Tijuana,” a border city with cool buildings, money, swank clubs and people who’d sponsor a beauty pageant. That’s before she delivers the Tijuana generations of drug-trade thrillers have planted in the mind — corrupt, lawless, violent with poor people trapped in the crossfire.

That’s the Tijuana Gloria (Gina Rodriguez) lived in as a girl, which she’s reluctant to return to as an adult. She’s a makeup artist who works in the fashion industry, and she’s come to town to help childhood pal Suzu (Cristina Rodlo) win the Miss Baja California Pageant.

Gloria herself isn’t to be confused with a pageant contestant, as other characters give her the “Ugly Betty” treatment. That’s “foreshadowing” for you.

When they don their disco togs and hit a club, all is swinging and fun until Gloria visits the bathroom. That’s where she sees the Estrellas (star) gang break in and gear up. They’re here to assassinate the police chief.

Their handsome leader (Ismael Cruz Cordova) gives her the chance to escape, but tracking down Suzu slows her down and they’re both trapped when the shooting starts.

Gloria gets out. Where’s Suzu? She tracks down a cop afterwards seeking answers. Mentioning “I saw the men who did this” to the cop turns out to be a mistake. She’s turned over to the gang, asked “Do you want to stay alive?” and given a choice — “Do this one thing for us” and Lino the leader will help her find Suzu.

That “one thing” turns out to be parking a car bomb in front of a DEA “safe house.” Which creates problems when Gloria escapes and runs to safety to the first American accent she hears (Matt Lauria). That leads to her second “unless you help us” threat.

Gloria is trapped, forced to be Lino’s “mule” and forced to be Agent Reich’s (!?) “mole.”

As Gloria, plucky Rodriguez of TV’s “Jane the Virgin” brings a nuanced and underplayed sense of a young woman barely keeping it all together faced with horrific life-and-death choices, one right after another. We get moments of quivering, moist-eyed terror and rage, but Rodriguez made the choice to go with “poker faced,” and sticks with it. She never lets Gloria make the leap to “compelling.”

That gets in the way of Lino’s real-or-feigned attraction for her. It’s not an appearance thing. She’s just not that interesting. Why add her to the gang’s harem of enslaved women? Only the threat against Suzu’s little brother, that they’ll “gut that boy like a chicken,” keeps Gloria on task with them.

The DEA’s threats, lawless, lawyerless and outside of their jurisdiction, are just ridiculous enough to work — in B-movie logic.

Hardwicke gives us a trio of competent if not stylish shootouts, teases us with hints of what COULD happen to Gloria at every turn and brings in a US supplier (Anthony Mackie) to add another tipping point to Gloria’s tightrope walk.

“Tell Lino there’s a ‘mole’ in his operation!”

Lino’s too busy explaining his “I’m just playing THEIR game” villainy, feeding Gloria Mexican barbecue and always getting interrupted just as it seems as if he’s about to make a movie on Miss Poker Face.

“Miss Bala” — the title translates to “bullet,” as in “La Bala settles EVERYthing” — may be slicker than the Mexican film it’s based on, and for all its alleged complexity, it’s the B-movie conventions (tempting villain, a suspicious top lieutenant to the mobster who doesn’t trust Gloria, etc.) that hold it together.

Hardwicke loses track of those building blocks of the Bs at her own, and her movie’s peril. And she does. Characters disappear for long stretches, plotlines are abandoned and the finale we all see coming feels like a pulled punch.

A movie this illogical shouldn’t get hung up on whether Gloria is turned on by the bad guy giving her the eye. And a genre pic this conventional shouldn’t shy away from those conventions, when they’re the time-proven elements that work.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of gun violence, sexual and drug content, thematic material, and language

Cast: Gina Rodriguez, Anthony Mackie, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Cristina Rodlo

Credits: Directed by Catherine Hardwicke, script by Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer. A Sony/Columbia Pictures release.

Running time: 1:44

The lifelong horrors of childhood abuse hide in plain sight in “Beneath the Leaves,” a more tricky-than-interesting thriller that might outsmart itself if it was any smarter to begin with.

It’s got kids who survive trauma and try to make something of their future, and kids who go on to repeat their trauma to a new generation. And what they’re all living with is memories of the worst things that can happen to children — torture, kidnapping, sexual abuse. So there’s something at stake here, at least.

A prologue shows us the worst of it, foster siblings growing up with a horrific stepfather who forces the nail-biting boy to endure brutal, bloody nail-trimming sessions, and a sad little girl who endures stepdad’s drunken attention after the boy has taken his punishment.

They escape their lot, but can they escape their fate?

Twenty years later, Whitley, a notorious child killer played by the cadaverous Doug Jones (he  wore the amphibian suit in “The Shape of Water”) escapes from prison with several other convicts. And he’s on his way back to the old gold mining town of Julian, California, to settle old scores.

The police captain (Paul Sorvino) puts his cops in the hunt. But despite the fact that several murderers were among those who got away, Detectives Shotwell (Mira Sorvino) and Larson (Kristoffer Polaha) are put on “domestic disturbance” duty.

Is it because they not-so-secretly sleep together? Is it because they both drink, Larson to excess? Nope. Larson was one of a handful of kids to escape Whitley’s clutches years before. He’s “too close to this case.”

As the escapees kill here and there, and are killed themselves, Shotwell and Larson get caught up in the action.

Whitley is still at large, but not being allowed to pursue him, they have time to hit the bars where Larson drinks til he drops and Shotwell picks her spot to share her past trauma — she’s ex-military — with her lover. Since nothing cools him down, she’s given a new partner — the squirrely bird lover Abrams (Aaron Farb), an obsessive with convenient knowledge of the area flora and fauna.

And then Whitley’s escaped prey from 20 years before start turning up dead, trapped, tortured and murdered.

There’s not much for the actors to play here, with the Oscar winning Sorvino having her weepy moment of remembrance and Poloha (“Atlas Shrugged”) tossing furniture around in drunken and sober tirades.

Farb makes his character comically quirky enough to underestimate. Abrams and Shotwell check out the register of a sleazy motel where one victim disappeared.

“Peter Piper?  That’s a pseudonym!”

“Ya think?”

The odd burst of violence doesn’t hide the sense that one and all are kind of sleepwalking through “Beneath the Leaves.” There’s a mystery to unravel, but no urgency in the actions of one and all. Only one of the fights has suspense and gets the viewer’s heart racing.

The novelty of pairing up the Oscar winner Mira Sorvino with her father, veteran character actor Paul Sorvino, wore off three collaborations ago.

Three screenwriters adapted a story by director Adam Marino (the Lou Ferrigno thriller “Ring Ring”), and they and he pay more attention to plot than dialogue or characters.

Some random scenes pay off. The opening, with children in  jeopardy, works better than anything that follows.

Some later scenes, with Polaha, Christopher Masterson of “Malcolm in the Middle” and Christopher Backus (married to Sorvino) giving us a hint of the living nightmare adult survivors of childhood abuse endure, pull the viewer in. Just a smidge.

Mostly though, “Beneath the Leaves” keeps us at arm’s length and the cast at half-speed, a disappointing combination when your aim was an intricate, raw-nerves thriller with visceral violence, surprises and characters we connect with enough to root for.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence and sexual situations — some involving children — and profanity

Cast: Doug Jones, Mira Sorvino, Kristoffer Polaha, Paul Sorvino, Aaron Farb, Christopher Backus, Christopher Masterson

Credits: Directed by Adam Marino, script by Naman Barsoom, Daniel Wallner and Mark Andrew Wilson. A Reel Fire/Eagle Films release.

Running time: 1:30

In the larger scheme of things, the fact that a musical interrupted by tragedy came together for opening night isn’t the most important or telling story about the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

But if you watch one documentary about Parkland, Amy Schatz’s “Song of Parkland” might be the easiest to take.

The tragedy of Feb. 14, 2018, underscores every scene, every action.

The cell-phone videos recorded mid-evacuation, the TV news helicopter footage and montages of the news coverage of the massacre of 14 kids in a suburban high school isn’t pushed aside.

But the pluck and poise of the drama kids, more than a few of whom have become public spokespersons for a school that morphed into a national movement, is damned inspiring. The fierce, focused woman who is their teacher, coach and director, Melody Herzfeld — expects no less.

They were mid-rehearsal when Nikolas Cruz brought his AR-15 into school and opened fire. Herzeld, whom ALL her students call “Herzfeld,” didn’t let them dash into the hall on hearing the fire alarm go off.  One insists “that saved our lives.” She made them finish the number they were working on for their annual musical for little kids.

When the were in the middle of a school “CODE RED” became clear, she rounded up her charges — 65 students — and herded them into the secure “techie room” backstage.

“Text your parents…that you’re safe” she told them.

And when they heard the police break down the nearby doors to finally enter the school, she gave them another piece of “direction.” Cell-phones off, hands up.

“No dramatics. You’re not going to cry.”

And as cell phone video of their “rescue” plays out on the screen, she remembers what she told them as they were led to safety out on the school lawn.

“On the grass, I said ‘NOW we can cry.'”

As the news of the tragedy spread and the school became Ground Zero for #NeverAgain, the political movement that would take on the Russian-financed NRA and its Congressional backers, with a school surrounded by makeshift memorials made of posters, notes of support, flowers and stuffed animals from all over the country, shaking the shock was difficult, handling the turmoil and emotions more than most kids could handle.

“Our city is broken, and we don’t know when it’s gonna be fixed,” student Alex Wind says. But for kids like him, Herzfeld’s “Make your voice heard, tell your truth” edict was something they could cling to.

They poured their heartbreak and trauma into composing songs. And they went back to rehearsal.

“You always hear, ‘The show must go on,'” Wind remembers. “When we all came back to school, we knew what we needed to do.”

They’d get “Yo, Pirates!,” a musical adaptation of a children’s book, ready for opening night.

“We HAD to finish this to show ourselves and the community that we CAN do and keep moving on from something tragic that happened,” cast member Ashley Paseltiner says.

“We want to bring happiness to the school…to ‘shine a light,’ if you will,” Alex Atjanasiou declares, to gales of giggles from the rest of the cast at his cheeky drama nerd corniness.

If you wondered where those darned “Parkland Kids” got their confidence to speak up, debate foes and withstand the assaults of Fox News hosts and others, where their polish in organizing their thoughts, their courage to stand up and start a movement came from, “Song of Parkland” has your answers.

Schatz’s film doesn’t capture kids in weeping despair, but in the focus that comes with a renewed sense of purpose.

Drama kids, as anybody who ever was one can tell you, can be narcissistic and overly dramatic. But there’s little of that here. Schatz doesn’t let us confuse their efforts for any pursuit of the spotlight. They’re determined to put a different face on their school, and with that little musical, demonstrate resilience to their community.

Which they did, all the way to last year’s Tony Awards, when they stood on stage on national TV and sang “Seasons of Love” from “Rent.”

As I said, this isn’t the deepest or darkest or most complete look at Parkland you’ll ever see. But “Song of Parkland” is the most upbeat. Whatever hangs over them, whatever awful thing happened to them and their classmates, their plucky Keep Calm and Carry a Song is a sweet exclamation point to put on a year of tragedy, outrage, activism and action.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Credits: Directed by Amy Schatz. An HBO Film.

Running time: 29 minutes

Professional MMA fighter with biceps the size of Sequoias wakes up next to a dead woman, a “one night stand.”

He’s black. She’s white. No, it doesn’t look good. Not to the cops, not to his “alibi” girlfriend, not to the press.

Did I mention the woman was a reporter?

Major style points shout-out to “A Violent Man” for getting down and dirty in and out of the Octagon. It’s a fight picture with an aging but deserving fighter trying to make the most of his “big break,” a grizzled, loyal trainer and manager in his corner, a brute of an opponent, a slippery manager for that opponent and a nasty strip club scene — mandatory in such movies.

And it’s got a murder, post coital death by strangulation.

Director and co-writer Matthew Berkowitz has the makings of a solid vehicle for Thomas Q. Jones, the best running back ever to come out of Big Stone Gap, Va. But Berkowitz’s film has pacing problems exacerbated by rather clumsy handling of the film’s “whodunit” and thriller elements.

We can figure out what’s up the moment the crime is reported, even if the anti-heroic hero can’t even recall if he actually did it.

Ty (Jones) has taken up MMA later in life, and at 34 he’s still hoping to get something out of his magnificent build. A chance visit by Marco Rayne, the champ (UFC fighter and veteran big-screen heavy Chuck Liddell) and his manager (Bruce Davison) in search of a sparring partner has Ty and his trainer, the gym owner Pete (Isaach De Bankolé  of “Casino Royale,” “Night on Earth” and “Black Panther”) wondering where this could lead.

Maybe his girlfriend (Khalilah Joi) will get off his back about “our future” and his need to “get a REAL job.”

An impromptu bout gives them all their answer. Ty makes the Champ “tap out.” And it was caught on cell-phone video. Manager Ben Green (Davison, best known these days for his work in the “X-Men” movies) barely has time to put together a bribe and an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) before Ty can get the word out.

“I choked out the Champ!”

He takes the bribe and STILL meets with a reporter (Denise Richards) with a “thing” for fighters. She wants a demonstration of the choke hold. He’s not having it. Her promise to “keep your ass outta jail” has the ring of “famous last words.”

One position leads to another, and bingo — dead choking victim in bed, a guy who “choked out the Champ” is the only suspect.

“A Violent Man” stays interesting as the cagey, tricky trap-setting police investigation (Jon Sklaroff and Felisha Terrell play the cops) gets underway. We even follow the cops for a bit.

Then, they disappear. The urgency of the story flies out the window as the duplicitous Ty gets his dreamed-of title shot even as his world is supposedly crumbling around him. He’s got time to think of how he can make up with his girl, giving Pete his shot at managing a contender, all that. He should be afraid for his life.

The brawls, sex and interrogation scenes are well-handled. But if you don’t have the budget to stage a “title defense,” don’t show it. The fighting is passable, but the setting screams “We’re out of money.”

Jones had a role on the Marvel TV series “Luke Cage,” and has had bit parts in some movies. He’s got enough presence to graduate from “big threatening guy” roles and he shows us enough here to suggest he could go places.

Filmmaker Berkowitz? He might be worth watching, too. The dialogue works and the performances hold up. But with a background in editing, he’s still not showing us much command of story and pacing. Maybe next time, as this outing only achieves “close, but no title this time” status.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, explicit sex

Cast: Thomas Q. Jones, Chuck Liddell, Denise Richards, Bruce Davison

Credits: Directed by Matthew Berkowitz, script by Matthew Berkowitz and Justin Steele. A GVN release.

Running time: 1:47

That would be this one.

No, Mister Johnson, I am not a big fan of the Fast and Fatuous films.

But a promising, two-fisted buddy action comedy? I could see that. Especially with these three and Idris as the self-described “Bad Guy.”

There’s a half-joking cliche about a phrase directors over-use on the sets of big screen comedies.

“Again. But faster.”

Comedy is about timing, and speed and pacing are a big part of that. And no comedy about running, even if it’s about cross-country distance running and not sprints, can afford to be as slow-footed as “Varsity Punks.”

It’s about a jock who has relished being part of America’s Football Industrial Complex since childhood. Then, he’s injured in a high school prank and finds himself forced to abandon the safety of The Popular and the Pretty and take up with kids he’s teased since his tweens, discovering their humanity and his true worth in the process.

But as promising set-ups are misplayed or abandoned, as the comic leads search and search for their funny bones, with the script offering no help, these “Punks” seem gassed long before the finish line comes into sight.

Monte Valley is a typical American high school where life is all about football. The “misfits” who’re into sports? They wear their hair too long, sport a few too many tattoos and run cross country, “XC” as it’s called.

A prologue has shown us that A.J. (Cody Esquivel ) has been jerky jock since his tweens, picking on future XC runner Rosie (Andy Bueono) even then. But the handsome QB of the Monte Valley Vikings has never wavered in commitment to his athletic career.

He avoids risks off the field, until that fateful mid-season party where he’s reluctantly sent on a beer run. Peer pressure results in a “tense” grab and dash that gets him two cases, and a busted hand.

His foul-mouthed football-crazed coach (Orien Richman, the funniest guy in the movie) blows up and blows A.J. off. You’d expect no less from a guy who chews on his young charges with “Just because you can Google ‘concussion,’ you think you’re a DOCTOR now?”

A.J. needs to stay in shape, needs an outlet. So he jogs over to the “misfits” running cross country. Laid-back Coach Menlo, played by Efren Ramirez (Pedro of “Napoleon Dynamite”) lets the “jock” in, shrugging off his arrogance that he’s automatically in the starting seven on the XC team. His new teammates?

“He’s not one of us! He doesn’t DESERVE to run with us.”

“Varsity Punks” never loses track of the kids, but it does tend to lean on Ramirez to juice up the comedy quotient. And he just can’t get up to speed.

Coach Menlo gets so little respect from the football-crazed school that he loses his office space to the junior varsity — “Let me bend over, like the rest of the administration, and give you guys everything you want.”

Ramirez cannot make that line funny.

Reacting to the other coaches (veteran character actor Noel Gugliemi of “A Boy Called Sailboat”) bragging about their teaching gigs “Online MASTERS, boy!” just contrasts Ramirez from the snappier wits cast around him.

Writer-director Anthony Solorzano even gives Menlo a couple of secrets — he was a star cross country runner at Monte Valley as a high schooler, but today he’s got a gambling problem, a weakness for the ponies. You sense Solorzano realized the mistake in casting in the editing, as in one unexplained scene, the cash from a “fundraiser” for the team we haven’t noticed is then gambled away — with no follow up scene showing consequences for Coach Menlo.

Solorzano leaves money on the table, time and again, in the finished film. Lines are wasted in a scene where A.J. is warned that a tea they’re competing with “Runs dirty” — elbows, trips, etc. Solorzano doesn’t do the obvious with this — a footballer now running XC is NOT a guy you want to try elbowing in mid-race. Solorzano does NOTHING with that piece of painstakingly included dialogue.

And after putting “Punks” in the title, a little shaving creaming cars is all the “punkish” behavior we’re treated to. The little scamps!

Here’s what does work. Rosie’s short childhood make him an easily goaded older teen. He’s provoked into joining a backyard fight club bout.

“He’s not really a BOUNCER, right?

“Naah, that’s just his GANG name…But don’t worry. He left the gang when he was 12.”

The rejected-by-the-popular-kids journey A.J. makes — dumped by his dishy girlfriend  (“Cross Country, who DOES that?”), shamed by his punk teammate Ryan (J.J. Martinez) — may be a non-starter.

But the whiskey-soaked rural California parties, where the boys flirt and the girls twerk and Jesus (it’s a Halloween costume) is the bartender at the tub, taking every bottle “contributed” to the event to make “Jungle Punch,” have the ring of the real and are at least potentially funny.

Coach Menlo’s flirtation with the “hot math teacher” who runs marathons (Raquael Torres, lightly amusing)? Not so much.

The subject matter and El Monte, California locations conjure up unfortunate comparisons to the Kevin Costner-coaches Latino runners dramedy “McFarland, USA,” a far superior movie even if it did have the “Anglo Saving the Latinos” subtext to fight against.

There’s a lot to be said for “telling our own stories,” but “Punks” doesn’t even have that going for it. A mostly Latino cast and the writer-director gives the picture little flavor of the people or the place.

Making it “again, but faster” isn’t an option. But it might have helped. For a movie about running, this one never gets out of the blocks.

MPAA Rating: unrated, boxing violence, sexual situations, alcohol abuse and profanity — all involving teens.

Cast: Efren Ramirez, Andy Bueno, Cody Esquivel, Stphanie Almaraz, Raquael Torres, Noel Gugliemi

Credits: Written and directed by Anthony Solorzano. A Top 7 Productions release.

Running time: 1:40

The difference between “The Lego Movie” and “The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part” is the distance between “love” and “like.”

Because although it has a delightful DIY feel, more of “This is how kids with imagination PLAY with Legos,” to its framework — a Lego-crazed boy is forced by his parents to share the toys and play with his little sister — the story slapped together under that banner runs out of gas and good gags long before the blocks snap together to spell “The End.”

We see the smudges and finger-prints on the Lego Duplo (aimed at the littlest kids) blocks, which are weird, illogical creations from that a toddler or pre-schooler might gurgle up.

The best lines are voiced by such a tyke, a villain threatened with her big brother’s characters snapping together laser cannons to take her down.

“I EAT lazubs!”

Still, there’s a lot for (allegedly) adult fans to giggle at, as the kid (Jadon Sand) has gotten over his “Everything is Awesome” phase and moved into pre-fanboy “Everything’s NOT Awesome” and turned “darker, broodier, Bale-iest.”

His Lego “Bricksburg” has morphed into “Apocalypse Burg,” complete with ruins and the half-melted Statue of Liberty from “Planet of the Apes.”

It’s “a heckish place to live” for everybody but orange-vested construction worker Emmet (Chris Pratt), who keeps a song in his heart and a Lego picket-fenced house ready for two-fisted heroine WildStyle, aka Lucy (Elizabeth Banks).

But there’s a new threat, Queen Watevra Wa’Nabi and her empowered aide, General Mayhem (Stephanie Beatriz), a new threat to “The World” as the kids playing with these toys see it.

Batman (Will Arnett) may be “off having a separate, stand-alone adventure” for much of the movie “and Marvel not taking our calls.” When he comes back he may have to MARRY the Queen if he can’t fend off General Mayhem’s assaults.

“EAT it and weep!  Keep eating and weeping!”

Emmet? He’s too naive and wimpy to be much help, prompting WildStyle and new arrival Rex Dangervest to try butching Emmet up before the Final Confrontation.

I loved the way we see Lego piece ID numbers floating around the parts used as the heroes assemble assorted Mad Max-style getaway vehicles, the cute Bruce Willis and Ruth Bader Ginsburg cameos and Will Arnett’s peerless way with a funny line.

“I carry my tortured past in my chiseled gluts.”

Haddish sings and has the occasional one-liner that lands.

“I’m just not INTO Gotham City guys!”

The world-ending calamity that this quest contrived by feuding siblings is meant to avoid? “OurMom-egeddon.”

The teachable moment message — Everything ISN’T awesome, but learn to persist (and it is implied, ‘Resist’) — is…fine.

The quest itself is a tad dull and repetitive, the one-liners dry up and the several new tunes fail to delight.

And as much as I’d love to say this one sticks in my head the way it’s musical show-stopper, “This Song’s Gonna Get Stuck Inside Your Head” is supposed to, it just doesn’t.

MPAA Rating: PG for some rude humor

Cast: Maya Rudolph, Will Ferrell and the voices of Elizabeth Banks, Chris Pratt, Will Arnett and Tiffany Haddish.

Credits: Directed by Mike Mitchell, script by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller.  A Warner Animation release.

Running time: 1:45

She’s always been more than a supernaturally (or made in a computer — “Tron”) pretty face.

Here’s Olivia Wilde all foaming at the mouth fierce, an abused woman avenging other abused women?

“A Vigilante” gets a limited theatrical release and VOD on Direct TV on Feb. 28.