Movie Nation

It’s unclear how much forethought M. Night Shyamalan gave to tying his “Unbreakable” anti-heroes to the multi-personality psychopath of “Split.” And asking him is pointless, because filmmakers lie.

But the upshot of “Glass” is that parking James McAvoy‘s “Horde” of characters benign and lethal, young and old, male, female or uncertain, into an “Unbreakable” sequel about men living under “the delusion” that they’re actual superheroes with actual superpower, just lets McAVoy vamp the picture away from everybody else.

Including the director.

Shyamalan abandons the direction his movie “might” have taken — a promising pursuit of the serial kidnapper/killer on the loose in Philly (McAvoy) by clairvoyant and super-strong vigilante in a poncho The Overseer (Bruce Willis) — for the story that comes after that.

“Glass” turns into a semi-serious dissection of comic book tropes, themes, story beats and traditions, and a seriously dull and sometimes silly psychoanalysis thriller set in an insecure insane asylum overseen by touchy-feely optimist Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson).

She’s the specialist in the “delusion” that some people apparently have, that they have special powers, that there have always been supernatural people like themselves. She wants to explain that away — logically.

“Comic books are not history,” she reminds one and all.

When the Horde of personalities that began life as Kevin (McAvoy) and the home security expert turned vigilante Dunn (Willis) are nabbed in mid-brawl, she has three subjects to study. Because the troublesome guy with the brittle bones called “First name ‘Mister, last name ‘Glass'”( Samuel L. Jackson) has long been in custody, and seems to be catatonic.

Raven Hill Mental Hospital has given over a wing to these three, and Dr. Staple has just a couple of days to make progress with the trio and her own reseach. No, we don’t know what’ll happen after that. But considering Glass wiped out everybody on a train save for Dunn 19 years ago (when “Unbreakable” came out) and Kevin/The Horde has been kidhapping and mutilating young women — save for Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) — it won’t be a slap on the wrist and “treatment.

One clever touch — the only thing that keeps Kevin/Hedwig/Patricia et al from turning into the monstrous mass of murderous muscle, able to climb walls and scamper across ceilings is a “hypnosis light.” It’s a strobe whose every flash disconnects whatever guise Kevin is in and prevents The Horde from slaughtering his way to freedom.

McAvoy gets to play an improv game, switching characters every time the strobe goes off — British or redneck, perpetually nine years old or perpetually their “queen bee,” Patricia.

Fans may check into this to see these characters revived, see the return of Dunn’s son (Spencer Treat Clark) or figure out how kidnap victim and sole survivor of a slaughter Casey could be so darned forgiving and sympathetic to at least one or two of Kevin’s less murderous characters.

But for too much of the two hours-plus running time of “Glass” is spent in grim and action-starved simplistic mind-games in the hospital, and a limp noodle of an anti-climax or two that pass for an ending.

The terror, tension, suspense and puzzle-solving of “Split” are abandoned for remedial movie back-engineering two stories into a third.

Willis and Jackson get by on presence and reputation, and Paulson — despite her delightful riffing on comic books and comic book fans who treat them as literature and holy texts — isn’t given enough to play.

Shyamalan compensates for dialogue and situation shortcomings by filming everybody in lots of full-screen close-ups. This is IMPORTANT, those say. Right. Paulson and Taylor-Joy get the best of these.

It all makes for a somber and self-serious (Shyamalan’s Achilles Heel) popcorn pic that is easy enough to sit through even as its pointlessness grows with every act, and its final act underlines and admits it.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence including some bloody images, thematic elements, and language.

Cast: James McAvoy, Sarah Paulson, Samuel L. Jackson, Anya Taylor-Joy and Bruce Willis

Credits: Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. A Universal release.

Running time: 2:09

This is the international trailer to Tom Holland’s latest turn as “Your friendly neighbhood Spider-Man.”

A villain returns, Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) arrives, with Zendaya, Marisa, Samuel L. Cobie and Favreau reprising their roles within “The Universe.” Director Jon Watts returns from the first Holland webslinger movie.

“Far from Home,” not to be confused with “Homecoming” or whatever, opens July 5 and will dominate the second half of the summer. Guaranteed.

“An Acceptable Risk” is “Scandal” with less sex and fewer fireworks. Almost no fireworks, to be honest.

It’s a somber, chatty political thriller about a guilt-ridden ex-National Security Advisor, her stalker and the government security apparatus she left behind, which doesn’t want her to leave it behind.

Writer-director Joe Chappelle, who has TV’s “Fringe,” “Chicago Fire” and “The Wire” among his credits, has turned out a tepid “Who is about to do what to whom?” tale of the low-heat, meek-payoff variety. It unfolds TV-series slowly and the third act “thrills” don’t merit that label, creating a film that’s more frustrating than exciting, and a lot less sensible and logical than it makes itself out to be.

Tika Sumpter of “The Old Man and the Gun,””Southside With You” and the “Ride Along” comedies is Libby Lamm, former advisor to a vice president, out of office for four years and still somebody who draws protests and angry shouts when she’s recognized in public.

She’s estranged from her mother, on distant terms with her newspaper editor father (Clarke Peters) and lives without email or any kind of phone.

“How do you communicate with the world?”

“Slowly.”

A decision she helped justify, in a Colin Powell sense (for those who have recently seen “Vice”) haunts her. So naturally, she turns up at a Chicago college — protesters screaming “Peace starts HERE” in tow — to teach “Understanding Contemporary Warfare.”

But she has a stalker, a swarthy, solitary young student (Ben Tavassoli of “Overlord”) who shadows the new teacher, spends a lot of time photographing and researching her, and whose roommate speaks for us all when he complains, “It’s just the sneaking around that weirds me out a little bit.”

What’s he up to?

As Libby copes with faculty parties where drunken academics scream “What you did was UNCONSCIONABLE!” she spends many a flashback going over, in her head, what put her here, the debates, dogma and doctrine that she absorbed from her former boss, bellicose Vice President Burke.

Chappelle has a “Halloween” film, “The Curse of Michael Myers,” also in his credits. And the fact that he didn’t have Jamie Lee Curtis at his disposal there must explain why he hands this movie over to her.

Curtis, as Burke, devours the flashbacks, lending a little of that chased-by-a-monster pluck and fierceness to her Hillary-meets-Dick Cheney veep — an unquestioning idealogue who doesn’t flinch from Big Decisions with Big Blowback.

“The stars, they are aligning,” V.P. Burke lectures. And if they don’t align, Libby, MAKE them align, she adds.

“Doesn’t it bother you that the idea of ‘American Expectionalism’ is an anachronism?”

She preaches a “total and absolute response” that will teach “these primeval bastards” and indeed “send the whole WORLD a message.”

This is an iron lady with a very clear idea of what “An Acceptable Loss” means.

You can guess what she did, using “smartest person in the room” Libby to buttress her arguments. Curtis is the jolt “An Acceptable Loss” needs. But there is entirely too little of her in it.

Instead, we’re treated to the slow simmer of Libby’s rising paranoia — that she’s being watched, that somebody is getting into her rental house. Yes, she’s packing heat. But she’s changing the locks, getting a safe to store her valuables and fending off an ex-lover/agent (Jeff Hephner) who approaches her with his “You’re either with us or against us” message from the administration.

Meanwhile, we’re spending a lot of time with her stalker. He’s testing her security, photographing her house as he circles it, probing for weaknesses. Next thing you know, out come the rubber gloves — breaking and entering time.

“An Acceptable Loss” makes a covenant with the viewer — go along with us, reason this out and pick up the clues about what happened and what was averted, who was responsible and what role Libby played in it.

Track her stalker as he invades her life, fret about what the government wants from a woman who screams “I served faithfully. I did everything I was asked to do — EVERYthing!”

But a comically far-fetched turn of events robs the film of the chance to ratchet up what little suspense it manages, and deflates the movie entirely.

The Curtis scenes have a sort of lip-smacking equivocation about them, bringing to mind Hillary Clinton if she had all the Rumself/Cheney qualities (bluff, heartless and heedless of warnings) often attributed to her.

Sumpter is reduced to bystander in these scenes — cowed, passive. We want something more pro-active from her in the rest of the film, dealing with government threats, academic boors and Martin her stalker.

Chappelle doesn’t write that into her character, and Sumpter let him get away with it.

MPAA Rating: R, sex, profanity

Cast: Tika Sumpter, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ben Tavassoli

Credits: Written and directed by Joe Chappelle.  An IFC release.

Running time: 1:42

The earliest reviews have not been kind. This tying together of “Unbreakable” and “Split” into a trilogy, with McAvoy, Willis and the Laurence Olivier of his Age, Samuel L. (As in, “Anything for a buck, at this stage.”) here to do the heavy lifting.

My own valuation will be based not on the back-engineering it took to get these films to fit together, but on “Glass” as a stand-alone tale — with Willis leading the hunt for the escaped multi-personality psychopath played by McAvoy — and the performances.

“Glass” opens Friday.

The answer to that headline?

“Maybe.”

Alfonso Cuaron (above) is the best director favorite. And as “Best directors direct best pictures,” that makes “Roma” the best picture favorite.

But the Critics Choice Awards, handed out by the Broadcast Film Critics Association for decades now, have long been more concerned with “predicting the Oscars” than honoring the best work. It’s why they’ve broadened and broadened their categories (“Best Science Fiction/Horror Film, Best Action Film, Best Ensemble”) to the point that they toss this WIDE net over the Hollywood year, and then can say “SEE? We picked ‘Mission: Impossible: Fallout’ JUST LIKE the ACADEMY!”

They’ve taken on categories from the Golden Globes and SAG and found ways, this year, to honor “Roma” and “Fallout” and “A Quiet Place” that patronizing tripe “Crazy Rich Asians.”

It is to laugh.

But, for what it’s worth, they suggest “momentum” in several areas — not many of them encompassing “A Star is Born” or “Black Panther,” which have been all the rage on the interwebs this past week or so.

One sentiment I agree with that I am reading and hearing over and over again, “It’s WIDE OPEN this year.”

With Lady Gaga splitting best actress honors with Glenn Close, Close is almost certainly the Oscar favorite. The Academy is FAR larger in membership, and more diverse and younger than it has ever been. So Gaga has a shot. But Close, a screen legend, is now an even more likely Oscar winner — a Globe AND a Critics Choice Award, etc.

Christian Bale seems like a best actor lock for “Vice.” Mahershala Ali has best supporting actor in his tux pocket for “Green Book.”

Many pre-Oscar awards down the road, that’s how those look.

The brain trust that decided to campaign Olivia Colman as best actress and two Oscar winners — Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz — as competing supporting actresses in “The Favourite” are ensuring Colman has a shot at her award, but Stone and Weisz will split all the way down the line.

And that means Regina King, a fine actress who has been MUCH more interesting, varied and powerful in other films, is the supporting actress favorite for “If Beale Street Could Talk.”

The more disconcerting “Beale Street” robbery is that Spike Lee doesn’t seem to have a shot at an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for “BlackKklansman.” Barry Jenkins seems the likely winner. 

Guilds will shift some of the ground under the Globes/Critics Choice winners. I’d like to think a better animated film that “Spider-Verse,” such as Wes Anderson’s delightful “Isle of Dogs,” has a shot, for instance.

“Roma” is but — wait for it — a dull looking “glib facisimile” of the classic black and white foreign films which it pays homage to. Fine for Netflix, but…

And I’ve said several times and will repeat it here, the night Oscar gives all its love to a Netflix movie, the game is up. Especially a Netflix foreign language film with no viable acting nominees, flatly shot and meandering but critically-adored because most critics didn’t see it on a big screen (I did.)

When the quite fine and risk taking “First Man” can only count on a shot at “best score,” when Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed” has a shot at best original screenplay, and nothing else, when “Mary Poppins Returns” appears to have no shot at…anything…well.

Maybe the Globes and the Broadcast Critics got it Oscar “right,” and maybe they didn’t.

It’s not a backhanded compliment to say Zach McGowan of “Black Sails,” “The Walking Dead” and “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” is entirely too good-looking to play the boxer Chuck Wepner.

He doesn’t look like a mug, no hint of the beaten up and beaten down about him. There’s little that’s hulking about McGowan and his face hasn’t taken the punches Wepner’s did long before he became famous.

It’s a pity McGowan didn’t get a haircut and a hair-thinning, to at least make the effort to look like the working class inspiration for the “Rocky” movies in “The Brawler.” That’s kind of emblematic of McGowan’s take on boxing’s most famous loser, a guy who couldn’t win in the ring, and did his damnedest to lose out of it, too.

“The Brawler” is a poor excuse for a boxing picture and a middling screen biography, but it does manage a few saving graces.

Once we get past the boxing scenes — which are ineptly-staged, choreographed, photographed and edited — and stop rolling our eyes at the quick, superficial glances at Wepner’s out-of-the-ring life, and we learn to tune out the incessant voice-over narration (lazy filmmaking defined), we can limit our focus to a few good performances and some TV movie-level third act surprises that generally lift the picture out of the hole it digs itself into in its first hour.

Wepner was the unlikely bruiser, a 30something onetime Golden Gloves champ, an ex-Marine and “Great White Hope” who clawed his way into boxing’s top ten in the mid-70s despite taking several epic, bloody beatings along the way. In 1975, Mohammed Ali, almost as a joke but with an eye on the racial component of a fight that could make him even richer, picked Wepner as his next title challenger.

Wepner, like Rocky Balboa, the movie boxer inspired by him, didn’t win. But he hung tough, took his blows and delivered a few to the most popular heavyweight champion of his era.

“I never been knocked out. I’ve been cut. Never knocked out.”

Cue “Gonna fly now” if you want, because Sly Stallone (character actor Anthony Mangano, not bad) certainly did.

He’d done “collecting” for a mobster, and liquor deliveries. Wepner, “the toughest kid in Bayonne,” hung with a rough crowd — people who’d stuff guys, living or dead, into the trunks of cars or into the dryer at a local laundromat.

The Italian Stallion took the New Jersey Polish brawler unflatteringly nicknamed “The Bayonne Bleeder” and made him lovable, romantic, a mug with a soft side.

Wepner’s soft side was the women in his life. He was a married father of two who didn’t earn enough in the ring, “the only place in the world that made sense to me,” to train full-time.

“Why do you do it? You never win,” wife Phyllis (Taryn Manning of “Orange is the New Black,” a good choice) gripes after every loss.

But there’s love here, the nobility of struggle. It’s just that Chuck never listens to his trainer (Joe Pantoliano, perfect) who spends his entire time in his corner, trying to get him to learn defense. “Salute,” Braverman says, demonstrating. “Throw a punch, then bring the hand BACK” to protect your head — like a salute.

Wepner gets a fight with former champ and monstrous brawler Sonny Liston and bleeds all over the ring. One and all mutter in fear in revulsion at this.

“I hope his wife ain’t watchin’ this.”

Chuck, CHUCK! “How many fingers?”

“How many guesses do I get?”

He survived Liston and stuck around long enough to come into promoter Don King’s field of view, and Ali’s.

“The Brawler” gives us a passable Ali (Jerrod Paige, who also played Ali in a cameo in “American Gangster”), a rhyming, bantering charisma machine.

“You. Are. In. Trouble.”

We’re treated to a half-decent Howard Cosell (Jay Willick) and a dreadful Don King (He was more than just a wild haircut, folks.). The run-up to their fight gets more attention (a famous joint appearance on “The Mike Douglas Show”) than the fight itself, which is a blessing. As I said, the boxing stuff that veteran producer and director Ken Kushner stages here is almost laughably bad.

A stand-out moment, the famous “knock-down” in that fight. Wepner, crows to his trainer from a neutral corner as the count is administered to Ali, “Start the car, Al. We’re gonna be rich!”

The first hint of this “Stalloney Baloney” fellow turns up shortly thereafter. But “The Brawler quickly settles down to the rough and tumble “celebrity” life that followed for Wepner — rooting for “Rocky” at the Oscars, fighting wrestler Andre the Giant, brawling with a bear, cocaine and discos, screaming fights with the missus, who leaves, easy money that turns out to be not so easy and puts him in prison.

Through it all, McGowan’s Wepner keeps narrating — about his second wife (the luminous spitfire Amy Smart) “Linda. I swear she was sent from heaven.”

Time and again, people wonder if Wepner is “nervous” at this or that spotlight.

“You think I’m nervous? I get punched in the face for a living.”

That aptly sums up the man, who was probably never going to get a big-budget star vehicle movie about his life — a made for ESPN or Netflix drama, maybe.

But even a mug like Wepner deserved a more polished picture than this. Casting Burt Young may help your “The Real Rocky” bonafides, but there’s little else that suggests effort and expense that shows up on screen.

Granted, TV talk shows sets from the ’70s were notoriously cheesy, but the fake “Mike Douglas” one here looks like it was conceived and built by high schoolers who never consulted Youtube to see what the real thing looked like (a rights issue might partly explain that).

As for McGowan, if you can’t bear to cut your hair between TV seasons, if you’re too busy to train with a boxer for several weeks or more to make yourself pass for one in the ring, there’s nothing keeping you from just saying “No.”  Which might have been the smarter move here.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, drug and alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Zach McGowan, Taryn Manning, Amy Smart, Joe Pantoliano, Burt Young

Credits:  script by Robert DiBella and Ken Kushner. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:35

The high-higher-highest hopes engendered by titling your comedy “I Hate Kids” are pretty much dashed by this sentimental romp that never romps.

Joke by groaning joke, scene by clunky, unfunny scene, it’s a DOA farce that wastes another vampy turn by that vamp incarnate, Tituss Burgess of “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.”

He plays a radio psychic who stammers through his blunders — “Your wife LOVES that dog!” — and bulldozes past even the simplest blown “reading.”

“I’ve got GREAT news for you, Charles.”

“It’s Chaz!”

But “three months later,” as a title tells us, The Amazing Fabular’s most far-flung seed bears fruit. Meet Nick Pearson (Tom Everett Scott), popular author of “I Hate Kids,” a best-seller among unhappy parents AND the happily child-free.

Perhaps the biggest blunder of the Frank Dietz,/Todd Traina screenplay is not SAMPLING the book or making ANY effort at having Nick explain his “hate” stance.

He’s just a successful “tongue in cheek” writer whose jokes often land with a clunk, especially at his wedding rehearsal dinner. Nick’s a veteran ladies’ man who has finally found Ms. Right, who also happens to be Ms. “I hate kids, too!”

Sydney (Rachel Boston of “Witches of East End”) has just parroted back to Nick, in front of friends and family, “those three precious words, ‘I hate kids,'” when a 13 year-old boy (Julian Feder) interrupts the festivities with “I’m your SON.”

That’s a great prank to play on a New York Times best-selling author getting Porsche-rich off “I Hate Kids.” Or so everybody thinks.

But the kid won’t let it go. He got the “news” about who his father was from Fabular on the radio. And in his best, stammering Anton Yelchin impersonation, Mason interrupts the bum’s rush Nick is giving him to blurt out “I, I need you to find my mom!”

With The Amazing Fabular (and a DNA test) to “prove” paternity, Nick finds himself lying to his intended, running off with the boy Mason and Fabular and Fabular’s psychic-channel chihuahua Mr. Sparkles (“A service rat?” Nick asks.) in search of which among the many of women Nick slept with 14 years ago could have given up their child.

“Three Christines, two Jennifers, two Barbaras, four Pattys…”

Let’s take Fabular’s 62 Impala SS convertible and head up the California coast. Let’s hope for the best.

“Think she’ll remember you?”

“They never forget.”

We’ve barely established the future Nick is endangering, the thin justification for buying into the kid’s story and taking on his quest (blackmail via “scandal” is suggested, meh). Nick’s “wit” has barely produced a smirk, much less a giggle. But sure, let’s take this beater of a comedy on the road and see if the “mother” candidates can save it.

And let the insults fly.

“You have such a way with words,” Fabular purrs. “You really should be writing cards for Hallmark!”

“If YOU’RE such a good psychic, why can’t you SEE who Mason’s MOTHER is?”

Nick did NOT leave a lot of happy, amicable breakups in his wake. One woman punches him, and while it’s fortunate she’s not the karate instructor Schyler (Beth Riesgraf), she’s not the manikin collecting nut Janice (Arden Myrin, amusingly over-the-top) either. The manikin collector collects flame throwers (Shades of “The Blues Brothers”) too.

This isn’t going to be easy.

 

Dropping in on the millionairess Christine (Oscar winner Marisa Tomei) isn’t a good idea.

“I didn’t recognize you, Nick. You didn’t AGE well.”

Meanwhile, fiance Sydney is letting her pregnant and suspicious sister (Rhea Seehorn) convince her Nick is up to no good, in between labor pains.

Director John Asher (“A Boy Called Po”) can’t wring laughs out of the gimmes (a too-on-the-nose childbirth scene), much less the mostly sad parade of exes that Nick barges in on and quizzes. Scott, of “That Thing You Do,” cannot make Nick engaging or amusing. The “kid” isn’t funny in the least.

And Burgess, better when he’s working for Tina Fey and her antic stable of “Kimmy Schmidt” zinger-writers, cannot carry “I Hate Kids” with what this script gives him.

The sentimental stuff half-works, but “Kids” never works up any silly sense of “Hate.” Without that conviction, the characters don’t make sense, the scenes don’t set up a debate that sets off sparks and “I Hate Kids” plays like “Actually, I’m not all that keen on kids.”

And that truth-in-advertising title isn’t funny, either.

 

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some suggestive material and language

Cast: Tom Everett Scott, Tituss Burgess, Rachel Boston, Julian Feder, Rhea Seehorn, Adren Myrin and Marisa Tomei

Credits: Directed by John Asher, script by Frank Dietz, Todd Traina  A Freestyle release

Running time: 1:29

The tweenage characters in “The Kid Who Would be King” freely acknowledge that they’re living through an endless story, “The Hero With a Thousand Faces,” they’d say — if they were reading Joseph Campbell at 12.”

“We’re Han and Chewy, Frodo and Samwise!” the nerdy sidekick, gamely played by Dean Chaumoo, offers.

The Harry Potter, “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings” comparisons — made by the characters here — abound.

What writer-director Joe Cornish, of “Attack the Block” and “Adventures of Tintin” and “Ant-Man,” has cooked up is a story built on the same “Young hero’s quest” framework, one of the great stories of that narrative tradition — the story of King Arthur and the Sword in the Stone.

He’s leaning, not on J.K. Rowling or J.R.R. Tolkien’s best-sellers or George Lucas’s equally famous saga, but on the “brand” that preceded them all.

Check out the street where our young fatherless hero Alex (Louis Ashbourne Serkis, whose father is Andy Serkis) lives with him mum (Denise Gough). “Malory Court” is named for Sir Thomas Malory, author of “Le Morte d’Arthur,” the most famous account of the Age of Arthur.

Cornish relies on Western audiences’ memory of chivalry, swords in stones, ladies in lakes, “the Once and Future King” and Round Tables to deliver a dose of good clean fun — with violence and jokes and a social relevence so obvious even a child could see it.

In a time “When hearts are hollow and the land is lost and leaderless,” when snippets of newscasts play up the violence and division fomenting world wide, a boy with the courage to stand up to bullies, pure of heart and noble of purpose, is bound to run across an ancient sword, cemented and rebarred into a foundation piling on a demolition site.

Well, a British boy is bound to, anyway. That’s what “The Once and Future King” portends — that the sword and the Lady in the Lake will find a new leader when Britain desperately needs one. And none of these inbred Germans masquerading as Windsors will have any say in it.

Alex is always sticking up for best bud Bedders (Chaumoo), who is constantly getting picked on by Dungate School class creeps Kaye (Rhihanna Dorris) and Lance (Tom Taylor).

“Don’t be a hero,” the towering Lance sneers, “It’s not worth it.”

But Alex, who covets the “Knights of the Round Table” book his absent Dad left him, cannot help himself.

Which is why the sword choses him. Or so he’s told by the gawky, hand-waving/spell casting new nerd in school, “Mertin (Angue Imrie).” He’s chosen a name that will deflect any connection to his real identity.

Mertin is really Merlin, a wizard as old as time (or as Patrick Stewart, who classes up the show). He shows up in a stolen Led Zeppelin ’75 Tour t-shirt and utterly upends Alex’s world.

“The penumbra between light and dark” is threatened, Merlin intones. And Alex and Bedders have to put things to right.

As the sword has made its choice, Alex must take it up and commission an order of knights and keep the evil Morgana (Rebecca Ferguson) from ascending from the underworld where she’s been imprisoned and enslaving humanity.

The minx.

I used the word “clean” in describing “Would be King” because Cornish has conjured up an Arthurian vision that is free from the clutter of the Hobbit and Harry Potter pictures. Even though there are some cool effects and monsters (fragile flaming wraith-horsemen) to battle, there’s none of this standing around and gawking at this or that “Fantastic Beast.”

Cornish relies on the viewer knowing the bare bones of the story he is riffing on and takes off from there.

And he uses that’s story deep messages, about chivalry and loyalty, the lure of adventure and necessity of compromise and coalition building, to teach his young audience (and those kids’ parents) about how to mend a “divided world.”

Who are the first recruits Alex rounds up for his quest? The school bullies. He is not the only one with a quest, a character arc. The little thugs have to find something nobler in their souls before they can become true knights.

What gets a laugh from any and all of them every time the phrase is used? “The Sword in the Stone.”

Merlin, in either his young Angus Imrie form or wizened, befuddled Patrick Stewart guise, is a goofy delight, sneezing in a cloud of feathers every time he transforms into his spirit animal (an owl), showing up as Old Man Patrick Stewart for the sake of credibility and gravitas, every now and then.

It’s all very English, from its grey skies and cute/posh accents (shared by a diverse cast) to the sort or wordplay the script trots out.

Merlin, in human form, laments his ability to get around in owl form in modern Brittainia.

“Are there NO unglazed windows or unblocked chimneys in this GOD forsaken country!”

The Uther Pendragon and Arthur story, the original “Sword in the Stone” tale, is told in animated form over the opening credits — a nice touch.

The kids are mostly just OK, not the charismatic, dazzling future stars Warner Brothers rounded up for the Harry Potter movies. Ferguson, of the last “Mission: Impossible” movie, makes an adequate villain, not a shake-in-your-boots terror/seductress that Morgana can be.

See the young Helen Mirren’s turn in John Boorman’s timeless “Excalibur” to see what a real fury looks and sounds like.

The few effects are sharp and crackling, though the action beats seem to play out at half-speed and are spread too far apart. Cornish makes the Lady in the Lake sticking her chain-mailed hand out of the water more the object of comedy (lakes, bathtubs) than awe-inspiring or thrilling.

And the movie, clocking in at over two hours, could use a few more thrills, heart-touching moments or those welling-with-pride “There will always be an England” touchstones. You know, like “Excalibur,” which had plenty of those, all scored with Wagnerian overtures or Orff’s “Carmina Burana.”

But “Kid Who Would Be King” is still an engagingly topical and smart fantasy film for kids, “good clean fun” that benefits more from “clean” than the creators of Hogwarts and Mordor or The Empire would ever guess.

MPAA Rating: PG for fantasy action violence, scary images, thematic elements including some bullying, and language |

Cast: Louis Ashbourne Serkis, Rebecca Ferguson, Patrick Stewart, Rhianna Dorris, Denise Gough, Dean Chaumoo

Credits: Written and directed by Joe Cornish. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:05

A decent Thursday and big Friday were enough to give STX its first-ever weekend win at the box office.

The studio best known for the “Bad Moms” movies, and “Second Act” and “Molly’s Game” (their lone “upmarket” title, before this) and “The Happytime Murders” bought “The Upside” from the smoldering remains of The Weinstein Co.

And it earned $19.590 million. Not bad for a Kevin Hart vehicle opening in the middle of a Kevin Hart homophobia storm.

That comfortably slipped it past the fourth weekend of Warners’ “Aquaman,” which managed another $17.

“A Dog’s Way Home,” from the guy who wrote “A Dog’s Purpose” and “A Dog’s Journey,” garnered $11 million+ in ticket sales.

Keanu Reeves’ name wasn’t enough to get “Replicas,” a shiny but dim-witted sci-fi thriller, into the black. It didn’t even crack the top ten.

There’s not a lot of dishonor in that, as “If Beale Street Could Talk” opened wider and still couldn’t find an audience, “Green Book” added 176 screens and didn’t get a Golden Globes bounce and “Bohemian Rhapsody” didn’t quite catch “A Star is Born” at the domestic box office off its own Golden Globes bounce. Still $5 million behind Bradley Cooper’s Oscar favorite.

“On the Basis of Sex,” an under-rated under-buzzed Awards Bait contender, opened wide and managed over $6 million.

“Free Solo” added a lot of screens pre-Oscar nominations, and is doing OK in the second 20, as are “The Favourite” and “Mary Queen of Scots.”

“Into the Spider-Verse” added $9 million this weekend as well.

Dev Patel, Armie Hammer, Jason Issacs, Nazanin Boniadi,
Anupam Kher and Natasha Liu Bordizzo star in this Mar.22 release, a nail-biting thriller built around the terrorist takeover of the Taj Mahal Hotel in November of 2008, part of a series of Pakistani backed assaults on Mumbai.

Of course, it’s a Bleecker St. release, so few will see it.