Movie Nation

History’s most famous feuding redheads got at it again in “Mary Queen of Scots,” an engrossing, marvelously-acted account of the monarchical cousins that suggests their real enemy wasn’t each other — it was the grasping, pushy and ambitious men who surrounded each in her own court.

It’s more historical than “history,” and as the history itself is Byzantine in its complexity, stage director turned filmmaker Josie Rourke is hard-pressed to keep it all moving and not cast the viewer adrift in the process.

But stars Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie give performances of such textured subtlety, full of tenderness, vulnerability, fire and steel, that even when it drags “Mary” drags us along with it.

Newly-widowed Mary returns to her native Scotland having just buried her husband, King Francis of France. She was Queen of Scotland when she left, her homeland now ruled by regents. Now she’s back, speaking French without an accent and ready to stake her claim to her throne and assert her place in the English throne’s line of succession.

But she’s Catholic. Her half-brother Lord Moray (James McCardle), one of those ruling in her stead, is Protestant. And the firebrand Presbyterian John Knox (David Tennant, fierce) is openly contemptuous of Mary and her ambitions.

“Are we to abide a Papist and a WOMAN?”

There’s trouble in court at Holyrood Castle. And that’s nothing to the turmoil that’s roiling London, 400 miles to the South.

It’s 1561, and her cousin Elizabeth (Robbie) is just getting her footing, ruling a once-Catholic land which her father Henry VIII turned officially Protestant, navigating the treacherous shoals of English, Papal and global politics as an unmarried woman just making up her mind that she would not marry.

“I choose to be a man,” she tells her most trusted advisor, Sir William Cecil (Guy Pearce, all conspiratorial whispers). But Cecil and other members of her Privy Council (Ian Hart, Adrian Lester) are alarmed by Mary’s presence, with her having a legitimate claim to Elizabeth’s throne as well as her own.

The two queens? They act as if they can work this out without any mansplaining or man meddling. Elizabeth is most concerned with self-preservation and protecting the monarchy. Mary suggests. “Name us heir,” using the regal “we/us” of course.

And Elizabeth, whatever concerns swirl around her about a renewal of Catholic-Protestant hostilities and her own legitimacy (Daddy divorced Mommy by lopping off her head), is willing to hear Mary out.

Maybe she’ll fix the unmarried Mary up with her own Protestant suitor, the Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley (Joe Alwyn), the suggestion being that with a Protestant husband and consort (or even king), the dueling faiths will keep the peace.

Mary’s counter offer is “This is a matter of the heart, not the state.” And as she gets more worked up, she sets her sights on a marriage of her own choosing that will produce an heir.

“I will be the woman she is not!”

But this feud never descends into the cat-fight other films on the subject tend to turn it into. These are reasonable women, abiding by each other’s demands, with scheming menfolk behind them itchy to start a plot or pull the trigger.

A Stuart uncle (Brendan Coyle of “Downton Abbey) gets his handsome Catholic son, Lord Darnley (Jack Lowden) in front of Mary, and that’s all she wrote — and married.

Now the threat is real and the scheming — men trying to strong-arm each queen into action or usurp Mary’s power — reaches a peak.

As the film opens with Beheading Day in 1587, we know how this is going to play out.

I like the way “Queen of Scots” deviates from the usual manner of depicting Elizabeth I as victim of “two Marys,” sister “Bloody Mary” before she took the throne, “Mary Queen of Scots” after she ascended. Cate Blanchett’s “Elizabeth” movies repeat it. Elizabeth is almost helpless against the first Mary, cold-hearted and ruthless against the second — typically.

Robbie’s Elizabeth has a touch of the temperamental (the Elizabeth I cliche), but a broken sadness about her. No sex, please, Dudley. Can’t risk having an heir — legitimate or otherwise. Mary’s unbending resolve rattles her, and she blinks. Ravaged by “the pox,” she fears she’s lost another advantage over her rival — her looks.

Robbie is transformed in this performance, making Elizabeth lash out at her advisors and flinch at Mary’s every move — a strong woman hobbled by doubt. Her makeup, even before “the pox” is startling enough to make one question those “The screen’s next great beauty” labels of just a couple of years before. That took guts.

Ronan’s Mary is both feminine and in charge of her own destiny, lecturing her husband when invaders approach that “these swords are NOT just for show, you know.” And yet she is brought low, betrayed and undone, labeled “a whore and adulteress” by the power-drunk preacher Knox.

I love the way Rourke uses each queen’s ladies in waiting as a gang, rousting the impertinent men out of court when privacy is called for, protecting their queen when they can, distraught outside the door to each woman’s bedchambers when they cannot.

Color-blind casting puts Asians and men of color in high positions in each queen’s retinue, and political correctness has Mary refusing to blame a gay minstrel for sleeping with her gay husband, because it is “your nature” and he didn’t betray that.

And there’s the much-discussed “meeting” scene between the two queens, which never happened. 

No one had the termity to tell stage-director Rourke that she wasn’t adapting Shakespeare and such liberties are jarring when you’re dealing with history and not fiction.

Those are minor quibbles, though. More historical accuracy might have been achieved in the flat, uncinematic lighting scheme of this digital production. Go back to Blanchett’s “Elizabeth,” 20 years ago, if you want to see vibrant colors and faces that don’t look washed-out by flat lighting. This looks…primitive.

There’s grit and gloom to the combat and marching into combat scenes. But even the gorgeous Scottish scenery, backdrops for romantic walks and horsebacks, lacks the majesty and visual pop that shooting on celluloid might have given it.

Surprised there’s not a “Technicolor” app for that. Yet.

But none of those failings undoes “Mary Queen of Scots,” because the director took her own film’s themes to heart. In the end, she leaves it in the most-capable hands of her two leading ladies and they do not disappoint. The stars outshine the production.

MPAA Rating: R, graphic violence, sex and nudity.

Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Margot Robbie, Guy Pearce, Adrian Pierce, Ian Hart, Gemma Chan

Credits: Directed by Josie Rourke, script by Beau Willimon, based on John Guy’s “Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart.” A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:10

On first and second blush, this film of history’s greatest “cat fight” would appear to have a contender or two in its cast.

Saoirse? Margot?

Stage director Josie Rourke, making her feature film directing debut, certainly knows a thing or two about working with actresses. That’s got to be a help when your stars are playing two of history’s greatest divas.

“Mary Queen of Scots” opens Dec. 7.

I’ve been seeing clips of this for months, but they’re calling this the first “official trailer” about the Brit family that longed for WWE glory in the good’ol US of A.

Florence Pugh plays the girl who comes from a rough (“It’s all fake, isn’t it?”) wrasslin’ family. Lena Headey plays her Mum.

Stephen Merchant wrote and directed it and has a supporting role. Nick Frost is the wrestling patriarch, and The Rock is…himself.

February? Did WWE pick up distribution for “Fighting With My Family?” 

Another “cute” hitman comedy, this one about a suicidal lad (Aneurin Barnard), despondent failed writer, all that, who tries and tries to off himself.

And fails at that, too. Well then, nothing for it but to hire Tom Wilkinson, “a professional assassin,” to do the deal.

Christopher Eccleston also stars.

There are a couple of funny lines in this dark trailer for what promises to be a dark scenario with jokey touches — “You’ve just signed your death warrant!” is a winner.

“Dead in a Week (Or Your Money Back)” is supposed to get a limited release Nov. 30.

But will it? I don’t see a US distributor lined up.

Dec. 16, Netflix premieres its recording of a “Springsteen on Broadway” performance — a storyteller, sans band, up close and personal.

Scripted? Of course. But it looks like the best way to get the poet without the bombast.

I watched the “I Am Paul Walker” retrospective documentary when it aired on Paramount Network last summer, and neglected to take notes and review it.

It felt incomplete.

But now the 90 minute version of this brisk film is coming out, with thirty minutes of “new” footage,” so I checked it out again in this longer cut.

It’s still warm and affectionate, a real appreciation of a guy his “Fast/Furious” franchise co-star Tyrese Gibson described as “the nicest dude on human feet…The guy every woman wanted to be with and every dude wanted to be like.”

But even at 90 minutes, “I Am Paul Walker” is seriously lacking in its collection of expert witnesses and in the pursuit of a more complete picture of the handsome blond screen icon who died on Nov. 30, 2013.

Filmmaker Adrian Buitenhuis got unlimited access to Walker’s large, adoring family. Well, most of it.

And he could generously sample a whirlwind decade and a half of TV interviews and lots of home movies of the beautiful Mormon boy who became a child almost-star before growing into the surfer/racer/snowboarder/scuba diver adrenaline junky hunk he became.

But Vin Diesel isn’t here. Nor Jordana Brewster, Walker’s love interest in those “Furious” movies. Gibson is the film’s MVP, because he was genuinely close to Walker, who spoke up for him when the studio (Universal) wanted Gibson’s character written out of “the family” entirely. Nobody else from the film franchise, aside from first “Furious” director Rob Cohen, appears on camera.

Walker’s teenage love Rebecca, the mother of his daughter, is also felt in her absence.

By fixating on the immediate family and upbringing, Buitenhuis gets lots of detail of Walker’s “take it or leave it” attitude to a film career that seemed to come easily, his need to get away and stay “grounded.” But there’s so much more to mine that “I Am Paul Walker” feels like a TV quickie rather than a forensic bio-documentary that took time to make.

When Walker died, stories started popping up — about overhearing a soldier and his fiance not being able to afford an engagement ring at a jewelry store, watching them leave and paying for the ring himself, not seeking attention or “credit,” just doing a generous and very human thing.

I heard that one, and having interviewed Walker a few times, it sounded absolutely authentic. The guy was that down to Earth.

“I Am Paul Walker” has a firefighter friend who recalls a flight Walker paid for and joined, financing a ROWW (Reach Out Worldwide) trip to earthquake-ravaged Haiti to work with firefighters and first responders, again ducking credit and attention for stuff like that.

A water baby who took roles (“Into the Blue”) just for the chance to work in the ocean, he was a big backer of shark preservationist and researcher Michael Domeier, who also appears in the film.

And what his big family tearfully remembers about Walker is, while flattering, also revealing. He was a rough and ready dude who shrugged off the “pretty boy” label, on and off the set. He got into fights, even when he was a child actor, burned through money (his family had to help) and used words like “gnarly” and “bro” like they were his natural language.

Which they were.

His agent Matt Luber may be the most frank witness to testify here, a relationship fraught with fights over what he could and couldn’t talk Walker into doing.

“Superman?” Too cool to wear tights.

Presenter at the Golden Globes? “Can’t make it. Family.”

He wrestled Walker into “Running Scared,” which could have been a career-defining departure for Walker, already feeling trapped by the “Furious” commitments. Director Wayne Kramer remembers telling him, “You’re going to be McQueen in your 40s — get a few wrinkles, a little grit and age.”

Walker died at 40, a passenger in a friend’s high-end Porsche, a “widow-maker” of a sports car, just as it was for James Dean 60 years earlier.

Luber remembers Walker’s final film, the indie Dad-tries-to-save-his-newborn- baby-in-a-hurricane thriller “Hours,” as perhaps his finest and certainly the closest to Walker’s heart.

There are revelations here for his fans, such as his nickname (“The Vagrant”) for being a thrift-store shopping hippy surfer who liked fast cars and guns, for instance.

When he wanted to pay tribute to the military men in his family — grandad was a Pearl Harbor survivor (a diver), Dad earned a Purple Heart in Vietnam — there was nothing that could keep him out of Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers.”

“I’ll do it for free.”

And director Rob Cohen’s pivotal role in Walker’s rise, casting him in “The Skulls” (2000) before laying “The Fast and the Furious” (2001) at his feet, is covered.

But beloved cultural figures like Walker, taken too young, rarely get more than one screen documentary biography. Not everybody’s James Dean, an icon of his era, and even Heath Ledger has only seen one creditable documentary about his life.

That’s why it’s important to not let your one shot turn out incomplete. No doubt Buitenhuis approached the missing faces to try and talk them into making appearances in his film. They may have had reasons to avoid him and this subject.

But they almost certainly weren’t good reasons, and he should have done a better job of making them see that and talking them into lending their voices to this remembrance of the guy who had a hand in giving most of them the biggest breaks and biggest paydays of their careers.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Paul Walker, Tyrese Gibson, Rob Cohen, Matt Luber, Walker’s family

Credits: Directed by Adrian Buitenhuis. A Paramount Network release.

Running time: 1:30

Take a nice long drag on your imported or domestic brand cigarette.

Savor that last morsel of chocolate. And try not to make too much noise with the marvelously hand-crafted, shockingly cheap bracelets that grace discount stores and flea markets from Tuscon to Tampa.

They were all brought to you by kids, children as young as four, harvesting the tobacco and getting poisoned by the vile weed and all the herbicides and chemicals it takes to grow it, hands bloodied by sharp metal edges they file down bracelets so your wrist won’t suffer, mining the minerals that make your smart phone so…practical.

With “Invisible Hands,” filmmaker Shraysi Tandon has made a damning expose, and a documentary piece of advocacy journalism. She lays out the problem — 200 million children the world over, including North America, losing part of their childhood, missing out on education, suffering injuries of developmental issues for the work they’re doing. Millions of them are victims of human trafficking. Others are merely trapped in cycles of poverty in the indentured servitude of palm oil harvesting, cocoa picking, cobalt mining or clothing and jewelry manufacturing.

India to Indonesia, China to Ghana, Mexico to New Mexico, underage labor is making Walmart your low price leader, allowing Nestle, Cadbury and every other chocolatier to “keep costs down,” protecting the bottom line of many a multinational corporation; Nike, Apple, Dow and Old Navy among them.

Tandon, who has worked on the American business documentary series “Bloomberg Game Changers,” interviews Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi and watches him and his fellow Indian activists rescue children from sweatshops all over India.

We see these hands-on activists savagely beaten by gangs of paid thugs, threatened with death by the baseball cap wearing “entrepreneurs” who run the child-staffed clothing and jewelry, their hands bloodied by labor with sharp metals and out of date hand-stamping machines, little boys of 8 or 9 weeping when asked about the work because they, too, fear for their lives.

“Even animals can roam freely,” Satyarthi declares. “These children cannot.”

“Their suffering is turned into our shoes, our clothes, our phones,” Harvard’s human trafficking expert Siddharth Kara adds.

And Tandon gets involved. She questions economists, academics and child welfare advocates, turns blunt with those in charge of child safety and anti-child labor enforcement officials and sets up a sting that shows just how cheap a child sold for work can be on the Horn of Africa.

The film shows the results of pressure that have forced companies such as Nike and Apple to at least make a show of acting more responsibly. The mining that drives the world’s cellular revolution is done by the very young in Congo and India, children enslaved and trapped in lives of drudgery and limited future all so that the rest of us can stand in line at the Apple store for the newest incarnation of the iPhone.

Tandon names names — showing montages of chocolatiers, irresponsible retailers like Walmart, which just don’t want to know (layers of companies have been built to insulate Big Brands from the stain of “Made with the Help of Enslaved Child Labor” labeling.

And she shows us the tobacco-stained hands of children wherever it is grown — including the US, which has antiquated child labor laws written in the 1930s with farm labor loopholes exploited not so much by small family farms, but by Big Agra and its client enablers.

If you grew up in the American South, in the “Heart of Tobaccoland,” as I did, you may not see the harm in that sort of work. Then Tandon shows us the chemicals that the leaves shove through the skin at rates far greater than any smoker would experience. You see the deadly chemicals and increasingly relaxed regulations — even in the US — that cause long term damage in children exposed to them at this age.

China’s vocational school “internship” scam (students marched off to do manual labor at the behest of factories that don’t want to pay) is exposed, the vast palm oil plantations of Indonesia are visited, where they don’t buy child-sized safety gear for the chemical application teams, “because that would be admitting that they use child labor.”

Children cannot negotiate for better working conditions or better salaries, cannot quit and have no control over what they’re being forced to do, many of Shraysi’s experts note. That makes them the easiest workforce to exploit.

And until the buying public takes up their cause, with our voices and our shopping choices, this is a cycle of poverty and exploitation that will not change.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast:Kailash Satyarthi, Ben Skinner, Mark Barenberg, Christian Frutiger, Siddharth Kara, Nicholas Kristof

Credits: Directed by Shraysi Tandon, screenplay by Shraysi Tandon and Chad Beck. A First Run Features release.

Running time: 1:14

An eight book series about a tweenage criminal mastermind, with fairies and dwarves and goblins and pixies and theft and death and bio bombs?

“Artemis Fowl” was always bound for the big screen. But with the production company accounts drowning in the red ink of scores of “Legend of the Guardians” and “City of Ember” and too many others to count, one learns to keep one’s hopes low.

Aug. 9, we’ll find out if this is a late summer dazzler.

Make an animated Christmas tale for kids and the world will beat a path to your door.

But for every “Christmas Carol,” every “Arthur Christmas” or “Polar Express,” there are a hundred also-rans. Even starring Mickey Mouse in “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” is no guarantee your movie won’t end up in the bargain bin, condemned to fill a little-watched seasonal queue on Netflix.

“Elliot: The Littlest Reindeer” gives us the crisp, clean lines of CGI animation, dazzling production design enhanced by sweeping, swooping tracking shots through a dazzling digital North Pole, and a voice cast that includes Martin Short, Samantha Bee, Josh Hutcherson and John Cleese.

What it doesn’t have is much of a story, or much that’s funny for that voice cast to say or do. Writer-director Jennifer Westcott word processed another “Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer” variation, without the warmth, wit or a classic children’s song to recommend it.

What she cooked up was a dull, oddly anti-reindeer riff on not letting birth or circumstance keep you from your dreams. “Elliot” has the usual snobby reindeer games business, a reindeer meat subplot and reindeer meat gags built into its “We’ve got to SAVE Christmas” agenda.

“I like reindeer. Good and GAMEY. I mean, good at GAMES!”

And that’s the funny stuff.

There’s a problem on the North Pole. The veteran reindeer immortalized by Clement C. Moore’s famous poem — Dasher, Blitzen, Comet, Cupid etc. — are retiring to the suburbs, defecting to Russia, joining ashrams to “find myself” or quitting to open “Blitzen’s Juice Bar” in the Florida Keys.

Santa has to round up new recruits. And that could be good news to Whittick’s Witty Bitty Farm and failing  Petting Zoo in snowy North Dakota.

They have reindeer, a holiday favorite of the local kids, and their fastest and strongest are prime candidates for the Reindeer Games — a survival of the fittest elimination competition at Santa’s Workshop. DJ (voiced by Christopher Jacot) is sure he’s about to meet his destiny.

But the movie isn’t about him. It’s about the pony — “Miniature HORSE!” — Elliot (Josh Hutcherson), who trains and trains with his pal Hazel the goat (Samantha Bee) for that day when he’ll crack the reindeer sleigh-pulling monopoly.

Hazel repeats the bromides   of Coach (Darren Frost), who owns the failing farm and trains the reindeer (not Elliot) with  “Success trains, failure complains.” “If it’s important, you’ll find a way. If not, you’ll find an excuse.”

Elliot believes “Big dreamers dream BIG,” and won’t let go of that dream, no matter what the Braveheart-painted Shetland pony Clyde (Jeff Dunham) says. “That’s what ye get for tryin’ to be something you’re not,” he growls in a dark Scots burr.

Elliot and Hazel stow away when Coach takes DJ north for the three day competition and fake their way in with phony antlers and an assumed name (Glitzen). Elliot gets his shot.

But Santa’s got a reporter (Morena Baccarin) nosing around and a bit of a coverup underway. No, there won’t be a repeat of “what happened last year. We have nooo problems with the reindeer…Everything is UNDER control.”

The head elf (Martin Short) is trying to keep a lid on things and keep the “jerk” reindeer in line — “Save your whining for the sports psychologist!” But about “last year…” And about those mechanical sleighs being stockpiled.

The sight gags include the Witty Bitty Farm’s annual “running of the goats,” and other attempts at humor involve cheating Russians (sneaking extra “magic cookies” to enable their reindeer to fly long) and elf-expletives.

“Oh, sugar cookie!”

“Oh for the love of Keebler!”

Bee’s goat gets into the magic cookies, and gets caught eating a can.

“Goats eating cans is a VICIOUS stereotype!”

At least she has something to play. Hiring Monty Python’s Cleese and wasting him like this is borderline criminal.

None of it is any funnier than a greased North Pole climbing contest, which is also tossed in here.

The main villain is Ms. Lutzinka (Martin Short again), a vamping Eastern European who covets the Witty Bitty farm — and its livestock. She gets the funniest line, which I’ll repeat as there are no other candidates.

“I like reindeer. Good and GAMEY. I mean, good at GAMES!”

Lump “Littlest Reindeer” in with “The Star” and every other released and forgotten animated half-hearted holiday hit that never was.

It’s pretty enough, with enough incidents and “action” to hold the attention of those too young to get Global Warming and reindeer (and goat, horse and llama) meat dehydration gags. And pretty much charmless to any viewer over six.

MPAA Rating: PG for some suggestive and rude humor

Cast: The voices of  Josh Hutcherson, John Cleese, Samantha Bee, Martin Short, Jeff Dunham, Morena Baccarin

Credits: Written and directed by Jennifer Westcott . A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:29

You know those thrillers where the bad guys talks a lot? Too much? Like, constantly?

Hate those. And that’s what “Blood Brother” is.

That’s Jack Kesy’s character, the psychopathic ex-con Jake, in a nutshell — once a “blood brother” to his fellow teen hoodlum Sonny (Trey Songz), now an ex-con, just freed from prison all set up to live on the take from an armored car robbery he and his mates stumbled into as teens.

He’s got cash. He’s done his time, and really, 15 years for committing his first murder, as a teen? He got off easy.

But Jake is back to take out the guys in his teen gang, a man with “demons” determined that his “blood brother” Sonny go “through hell” just as he has. And while he’s at it, he’s going to talk. And talk. And amble. And saunter. Because this IS New Orleans, after all.

“You’re LOSING me, Jake!”

Yes, you are.

What might have been a lean little crime-spree thriller of the “This time’s it’s PERSONAL” variety is talked and (slowly) walked to death.

I rather liked writer-turned-director John Pogue’s “The Quiet Ones.” That must have been due to Oren Moverman’s script. Or maybe it was the Triumph TR6 that played into the period piece’s plot that stuck with me (used to own one).

In any event, that wasn’t a movie that had much in the line of pace to recommend it, and while Pogue’s writing credits (“U.S. Marshals,” the “Rollerball” remake) moved along, “Blood Brother” does not.

Too many pauses for delivering a pithy observation.

“Thought I had friends I could rely on,” Jakes growls.

“On these streets, all you’ve got is the guy next to you. And if they guy next to you wants to take you straight to Hell, you just ask, ‘When do we leave?'” the hero, Sonny, narrates.

It’s so slow of foot that when Sonny, who has to cover up his involvement in that long-ago heist from his partner (Joy Lofton), he doesn’t ask for minutes or hours head-start. He wants a day, “tomorrow morning.” Because nobody, not even the cops in The Big Easy, feels much in the line of urgency.

Jake gets out of prison, goes home to his racist family and insults Sonny (who has shown up to drive him home) in ways that maybe Sonny ought to see this coming. He’s paid Jake back, he figures.

“Payback’s just getting started!”

The old gang gathers to split the cash. Everything seems hunky dory, despite the fact that Jake was the only one to do hard time. But Sonny lets Jake get in just close enough — to him, his ex-wife (Tanee McCall) and the ex-wife’s sister Darcy (China Anne McClain) — to drop the hammer on him.

Let the killing spree begin. Let Jake steal Sonny’s vintage Buick Skylark (Again with the classic cars?). But let Jake take a break from the throat slashing and shooting to play a game of pickup basketball. Just to impress Darcy, you understand.

“You don’t know me,” she flirts.

“That could change,” he promises, shrugging off the “little mistake” that put him in the joint.

With all this yacking between gritty New Orleans locations (hints of an accent pop out, here and there), the odd solid line emerges.

To Sonny’s partner — “You L, G B or T?”

To Sonny, sorely tested by Jake’s mayhem — “You in Hell yet?”

To Sonny again, when what looks like the final showdown is going down “in the club.”

“You didn’t come up in this butcher shop like a dumb little lamb chop, didya?”

Songz, seen in “Baggage Claim” and “Preacher’s Kid,” is still more of a singer than an actor. Solid presence, but Fetty Wap, who has a cameo as a gang leader, suggests more menace.

Ex-child star McClain fails to get across any sense of the terror that is supposed to hit her character when she realizes letting an ex-con flirt with you has dire consequences.

But Kesy is scary and a bit crazy-eyed, wearing his tats and a grill and carrying himself like a rough customer fresh out of stir.

It’s a pity he has to talk so much.

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

Cast: Trey Songz, Jack Kesy, China Anne McClain, Chelle Ramos, Tanee McCall, Ron Killings, Fetty Wap

Credits: Directed by John Pogue, script by Michael Finch, Karl Gajdusek Charles Murray. A Lionsgate/WWE release.

Running time: 1:26