Movie Nation

Did you see the French film “Les Intouchables /The Intouchables” a few years back? No? No worries. Netflix will almost certainly reload it for streaming before this STX remake comes out.

Kevin Hart is a long-unemployed punk (probably not, but in the original film) haplessly applying for jobs, expecting rejection, practically inviting it, until he’s hired to be the driver/nurse/companion for a quadriplegic man (Bryan Cranston). Nicole Kidman plays his wife.

I’d say “The Upside” is the most ambitious film STX has produced and released, but I don’t think they’re Oscar campaigning this and it opens Jan. 11. One fears they’ve reduced it to a simple, broad Kevin Hart comedy. And the original was much more than that (My review is on this link).

So I guess we know now why Sony keeps rebooting and remaking “Spider-Man” movies.

They hadn’t a clue how to film “Venom,” the alien antithesis of “your friendly neighborhood” web slinger.

I mean, we all love Tom Hardy, but he can’t break through in this thinly-scripted, dully acted and badly directed Marvel comic brought to life.

There are casting issues — Riz Ahmed is a little too reasonable and not particularly scary as the science tycoon hell-bent on getting humanity a leg up in colonizing the stars. Michelle Williams may have four Oscar nominations, but she’ under-reacts to every overwhelming experience of extraterrestrial life and violence her character encounters, and can’t do much with the feeble punchlines four credited screenwriters cooked up.

Jenny Slate is wasted in a lab coat role.

But Hardy, not exactly known for his light touch, finally gets a handle on this alien “symbiote” who takes over his body and fights for control of his soul in his head, leading to oodles of the old ultra violence and lots of vengeance fantasies come true.

Because Eddie Brock, the TV reporter he plays, has a bone or three to pick with the world.

He gets fired from his TV gig for going off half-cocked with his big interview with space-faring billionaire bio-tech tycoon Carlton Drake (Ahmed, from “Rogue One”) and gets his fiance (Williams) fired by stealing a tip from her laptop.

They both kiss him goodbye with the same pithy sign off–“Have a nice life.”

So when this alien parasite takes over his body, turns him into a bull in a four-star-restaurant China shop (“HUNGRY!”), bickers with him over “Let’s tear off their heads and eat them” (people) and takes over every time he gets in a tussle, Eddie’s not as un-receptive as you might think.

“Apparently, I have a parasite” he deadpans.

Scott Haze plays the head minion at Drake’s lab, the one charged with bringing this alien thingy that has taken over Eddie back to the lab for more “human experiments.

“Bring me back my CREATURE!” Ahmed bellows, as Drake. And you kind of wish he’d gone more Elon Musk about it.

Slate is the ethically-conflicted scientist trying to expose Drake’s casual, callous inhumanity. Ron Cephas Jones of TV’s “This is Us” and last summer’s “Dog Days” is the underwhelming TV editor who gives Eddie the boot.

“Venom” is an “origin story” comic book movie, so there’s all this prologue about Drake’s spacecraft bringing specimens back to Earth and crashing in Malaysia as it does.

One symbiote makes its way to San Francisco the hard way — one stolen human host at a time.

The other gets out of the lab and gets hold of Eddie by the usual “no good deed goes unpunished” route.

You just know those two toothy, talkative monsters are going to tangle.

Truth be told, you know pretty much everything that’s coming, and the cast fails to act very surprised when these unsurprising, rote comic book story beats are revealed.

The picture finally achieves “tolerable” for a while in the middle acts, with Hardy all goofy and rubber-legged, yanked about by this beast within like a puppet, cracking wise as he negotiates with the invader about how to behave in human company.

The fights are the usual post-“Transformers” digital blur, mayhem that trashes cars, a motorcycle and the drones chasing that motorcycle through car-chase-capital San Francisco.

If you go, you must stay through the credits. Sony is expecting this thing to be another Marvel money-minting machine for them, a franchise and a new villain is thus introduced.

But there’s no franchise future with “Zombieland” director Ruben Fleischer in charge. He could not spice up or otherwise save this script, and the picture feels under-directed every time there are actors involved or climaxes that he stumbles past as if he didn’t notice them.

Even the last after-the-credits plug is a tin-eared head-scratcher, an “alternate universe” animated “Spider-Man ” TV show sample.

Silly Sony. The cartoons come BEFORE the big, dumb action picture that should have played like a cartoon, but didn’t.

MPAA Rating: PG-13, for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for language

Cast: Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Woody Harrelson, Jenny Slate, Michelle Lee, Riz Ahmed

Credits:Directed by Ruben Fleischer , script by Scott Rosenberg, Jeff Pinkner,  Kelly Marcel, Will Beal, based on the Marvel comic. A Marvel/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:52

If ever there was anybody who put out the “New Brando/James Dean” vibe upon his arrival in the movies it was Stephen Dorff. 

His unkempt swagger and commitment to roles combined to create a “cool” persona that lasted at least until Hollywood figured out he was never going to be A-list, and consigned him to villains, indie fare and other genres kinder to an aging out of it hipster.

“Don’t Go” is a supernatural thriller about a father who lost his daughter, but thinks he’s figured out where she “went” after death. It opens Oct. 26

Boy, do we love a mystery, a “puzzle picture.”

Feed us an “Inception” or “Lost” or “Stranger Things,” and it’s as if the Internet was invented with the sole purpose to crowd-sourcing a solution. Not everybody has to be into it, not everyone “gets” it, and that’s part of the appeal, what makes a “cult film” like “The Endless” so “culty.”

Filmmakers and co-stars Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have concocted a sci-fi/horror meditation on eternity, purgatory or any number of other “solutions” to this puzzle of a cult where escape, getting un-“stuck,” only seems like a possibility.

They play brothers named Aaron and Justin, young men struggling to get by in housecleaning jobs in L.A., lost and lonely with only each other for connection and company.

But Aaron remembers when they weren’t in this rut. Back before they escaped the Camp Arcadia cult, they had purpose, family, good health and stimulation. Now? A video tape from the camp’s still-resident sex symbol (Callie Hernandez) has him pining for the past.

Justin? He’s the one who “got us out,” the one who figures a mass suicide is coming, any day now.

“It’s a UFO Death Cult. It’s what they do!”

Aaron talks him into a return visit, and everybody there goes out of his or her way to welcome them. Sure, there was humiliating media coverage of their escape, and their descriptions of a “UFO Death Cult” hurt sales of the Camp/Farm’s one product (beer).

“Everything you did ranges from ‘I don’t care’ to ‘forgiven,’” asserts leader Hal (Tate Ellington).

The food is still good, the entertainment still homemade, the residents a blend of the seemingly sane and the definitely not. The artist Lizzy (Kira Powell) says she recently slipped away from a mental hospital. And the stuff she draws? Disturbing.

A day and a night of hanging with the Arcadians allow “the family” to remake its case to the brothers, who grew up there. There are flirtations, coercive debates and what seem like magic tricks.

Justin hangs on to his skepticism, but for no reason we can logically reason out, he lets Aaron talk him into prolonging their stay. A jog to “the border” of the camp (marked with gnarled, leprous looking posts) spooks him. A couple of the “magic tricks” and weird phenomena rattle him.

And a dive into the on-site lake convinces Justin there’s “something down there.”

Will he make a break for it? Can he drag Aaron out, again, or is his sibling too far gone this time? His brother thinks “I dragged him out of here for no reason” way back when.

Now, with the lousy, limited lives they’re leading in L.A., groupthink and belonging to something bigger than yourself seems like a better option.

And is Justin’s previous escape route even open?

The Family speaks of “the struggle,” which is what Aaron seems to want to get away from, the struggle just to get by, belong, meet somebody who shares his interests.

But Justin? He’s a hard-sell, a believer in Free Will. You’re not going to get to him by joking around.

“You mind if we get a little culty in here?”

The film dawdles in getting around to its Big Mystery and the suspense that entails. And the leads, while perfectly believable as siblings connected by blood, love and maybe a bit of the same skepticism, seriously under-react when extraordinary things start happening.

Most of the energy here when into cooking up the Mobius Strip plot and creating some H.P. Lovecraft-worthy effects — swarming, portentous crows, multiple moons in the heavens, a vast mostly-unseen beast just beyond visual comprehension.

Their very existence seems “stuck,” and all around the camp, lives are trapped in what looks like a skipping video disc or repeating, broken tape “loop.”

This last bit, the “twists,” have spawned an Internet cottage industry of “solutions” (some provided by the filmmmakers) and “possible theories” about the film’s meaning.

As a movie, it’s somewhat fascinating on that “fear of the unknown” level (a Lovecraft quote opens the movie) and somewhat less riveting as a thriller. The leads had a lot on their minds. Amping up each other’s fear factor in their performances to make them convincingly afraid-for-their-lives, gobsmacked by what appears to be the supernatural and “trapped by the unknown” appears to have been low on the list of priorities.

The mystery is more intriguing than the movie is alarming.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast:Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, Callie Hernandez

Credits:Directed by Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, script by Justin Benson. A Well Go release.

Running time: 1:51

Sony, the movie conglomerate releasing the latest Marvel picture (the “Spider-Man” universe is theirs for the exploiting), once did this crazy thing.

They showed “The Da Vinci Code” to critics all over the world at the same time — Cannes to Columbus, Manhattan to Miami.

It’s a way of avoiding critical groupthink, that shared “We all loved it” or “hated it” driven by Sundance snow, Austin’s beer and weed, Toronto’s chill or Cannes’ sun.

The shocking result of this “nobody sees it before anybody else” was almost universal agreement among reviewers that Dan Brown sucks and Ron Howard and Tom Hanks couldn’t overcome that.

“Venom” they showed Monday and Tuesday, and reviews are popping up. It’s more a slow-moving consensus — bad reviews mostly. 

That cherry-picked reviewers platforming pays off with SXSW films, fanboy product like “Bad Times at the El Royale,” and Toronto gave “A Star is Born” its ordination as an Oscar movie to beat.

I’m seeing for myself and withholding judgement, but that strategy isn’t rescuing “Venom,” which opens Friday.

Hoping for the best, love that Tom Hardy, but expectations have been lowered.

Even film fans who have never seen “The Searchers” know its quest — girls kidnapped by Indians on the Old West, a brutal-years-long pursuit of them and their captors by their uncle an the adopted nephew who draws into his obsession.

“Les Cowboys” is a modern French re-setting of that tale, borrowing its racial parable, its epic, tragic “hero’s quest” for a story of a French farm-country teen who runs off with her Muslim boyfriend, lost to a world utterly alien to her kin.

Her father Alain (François Damiens) never saw it coming. He’d bring the whole family along to their “Country Music Festival” in the foothills of the French Alps — every line-dancing, boot-scooting son and daughter of Gaul in hats, bandanas, blue jeans and bolo ties, driving Ford Mustangs, diving into Western lore and crafts and singing (in thick accents) “The Tennessee Waltz.”

His wife (Agathe Dronne) seems to enjoy the fellowship, his son, “The Kid” (Finnegan Oldfield) has absorbed this hobby as much as his dad.

Daughter Kelly (Iliana Zabeth)? She picked this 1994 fair as the spot for her to run off with Ahmed.

Ahmed? A friend from school? Who is he? What’s going on? A notebook filled with practice Arabic and extremist tracts turns up in her room, a letter from Charleville about “the life I’ve chosen” tells the tale.

“Maybe we should trust her,” his wife counsels (in French, with English subtitles). The girl is 16, and he’s not having it. He shares the views of many working class Frenchmen he meets — “You know how these savages treat women!”

Alain quickly tracks down the kid’s parents and is enraged at their lack of concern. Alain turns to the cops who give him the “wait three days” and “Let’s not get all steamed up.”

That is exactly what Alain becomes, increasingly furious that his 16 year-old has run off with some “raghead,” and that no one is taking this disaster seriously.

He abandons his business and tracks any lead — the letter from Charleville, a child in a red bandana in a Gypsy camp in Sedan, a port city document forger, an Islamic terror-funding mullah in Antwerp — “Your daughter is not your daughter any more!” — by sea to Yemen, overland to Turkey.

And like any good Old West son, The Kid follows.

Days turn into months and years, but Alain won’t give up — “I’ll come home when I have my daughter!” How far will he, they, take it?

Director and co-writer Thomas Bidegain (he scripted “A Prophet”) gives us a tail of futility, of “saving” someone who does not want to be saved and the racism built into Alain’s fanatical pursuit.

As with “A Prophet,” Bidegain toys with the changing nature of France and its uneasy relationship with the Islamic world that its former colonies and immigration policies have brought into the country, if not assimilated. “Les Cowboys” (as it was titled in much of the world) shows us a subculture that has absorbed one alien culture (America’s Old West) and yet cannot relate to another, the strangely-dressed people of different faith, values and color who have settled in with them.

“The Searchers” was, in American terms, John Ford’s “Brown vs. Board of Education” Western, a film that metaphorically wrestled with America’s 1950s Civil Rights Movement in the form of a cowboys and Indians tale.

The period piece setting allows the film to chart a Western world that moved from racist co-existence along shared issues (oil, foiling left wing revolutions) to vengeful rage by 9/11 and attacks in Madrid, London and elsewhere. Alain’s generation won’t be able to make this right, even if he gets his daughter back. The Kid’s?

“Cowboys” (as it titled on Netflix) meanders and staggers somewhat in its final acts, where the son Georges takes over the hunt. John C. Reilly plays a sage, cynical and world-weary “Americain” who meets Georges in Pakistan, the post-9/11 focus of any search for “radicalized” Muslims of East or West.

The “trader” (as he describes himself) sees a kindred spirit and shared mission in The Kid, and declares “There’s no room for us back home. We take up too much space.”

It is up to Georges to meet that destiny or transcend it.

The marvel of Bidegain’s film (Noé Debre co-wrote it) is that it lets us hope for that, even as it plays into Western contempt, Western fears and Western rage about a culture we’ve been slow to understand.

MPAA Rating:R for a brief violent image and a scene of drug use

Cast: François Damiens, Finnegan Oldfield, Agathe Dronne, John C. Reilly

Credits:Directed by Thomas Bidegain, script by Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré. A Cohen Media Group release.

Running time: 1:44

If you’re into her movies, you probably have a fairly complete picture of who Parker Posey is, what she’s like.

A little flaky, a little flower-childhish — sexy, but more of a goofy flirt a romancer, high maintenance but not in a vain way.

And that’s how she comes off in her new memoir, “You’re on an Airplane.” You have to endure the random, stream-of-dopey-consciousness first chapter to get on her wavelength, but one there, you’re on that airplane with her.

She loses cell phones constantly, weeps a bit more readily than might be healthy and has been in therapy for decades. She was pals with Nora Ephron, chummed around with leading ladies on the many films where she got to play the girl who doesn’t get the guy.

She wears a succession of Gloria Swanson “Sunset Boulevard” hair coverings in the photos, with a few shots of her Deep South Louisiana/Mississippi childhood and early years scattered hither and yon.

She drops a recipe in, every so often, this “fireball” drink and that staple of the menu of her Nonnie (grandma).

She talks about her experiences on sets, memories of that seminal moment in the career of more than a few actors of her generation — Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused” — a painfully detailed look at her first Woody Allen experience (“Irrational Man”), a brief chapter on ALL her Christopher Guest films (what she’s most famous for) all but skipping over the indie-indier-indiest Hal Hartley years, which put her on the map.

Ever wondered what that first day or two working for Woody Allen is like, a director growing more tone deaf to the culture he purports to be documenting, infamous for firing actors on that first day or two because he’s hearing “his lines performed for the first time?” She re-lives doing 20 takes of a line reading for Allen, experiencing “the greatest living director’s frustration at my performance.”

He may be watching what you’re doing, but it is the headphones, where he listens to the nuances in his dialogue, that make or break you. He won’t let anybody wear blue jeans, even if the movie’s set at a college. He thinks “cool” and “grass” are “what the kids are saying these days.” You can hear it in every Blanche DuBois affectation in his scripts, and Posey confirms it.

“He said I was a terrific actress and a complicated woman but that he didn’t want to see any of that in his movie.”

There’s a touch of Kathy Griffin in her wounded pride, an endless progression of encounters with fellow celebrities and film world professionals, some of whom go to some trouble to pretend they don’t recall who she is.

“Remember? We worked together on…”

Her quick sketches of John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Michael Shannon and others — some of whom she worked with, others she just meets and shares that actor’s concerned question (“How are you doing?”) with — are spot-on.

She gives us a great taste for the ups and downs of this Gypsy lifestyle, the tight budget you live on, the uncertainty that comes with turning 40 (for an actress), being hot enough in indie film one minute to merit a Time Magazine appreciation/profile that she mentions and I remember, because the critic writing it just salivated over her, and many years later, relieved to finally get a steady job on the Netflix remake of “Lost in Space,” just when she was thinking teaching might be her only option.

At 50, she doesn’t exactly name names of the many men who have crossed her threshold (Ryan Adams, the one famous person she acknowledges was her beau). For all the sharing, she doesn’t talk about her Lyme disease.

But we get a few marvelous chapters mostly devoted to Gracie, her Bichon/Poodle/Maltese unjustly (she says) dissed on the late-not-lamented gossip site Gawker, whom a pet psychic once told her was “a seven year old English girl in a previous life.”

“When people say, ‘I’m not really a dog person,” all I hear is “I’m not really a person.'”

There’s a dose of what her level of success means financially — modest New York apartments, a truck given to her by her car dealer/larger than life dad, a small house “upstate,” which she paints and fixes up a little herself, breaking her wrist in the process, right before her first Woody Allen movie.

She shares the brittle “Blade” experience with her fellow SUNY-Purchase alumni Wesley Snipes (he was being squeezed out of his franchise, and she was a witness/participant), talks at teasing length about working for Louis C.K. on his show. “I’m a monster,” he kept telling her. So he was. Not that he pulled anything on a woman of her experience and profile.

“Please don’t repeat this. I’m only telling you because we’ll never see each other again,” she says, not naming names but revealing that some “actors are like snipers,” messing with your head on set, or at events, screwing up your closeups, etc.

In an earlier age, a funny/sexy raconteur like Posey would have been a “Tonight Show” or “Merv” or “Dick Cavett” regular, simply for her stories. Now that the Netflix series has given her a new lease on life, she’s hot enough (again) to warrant a memoir.

But now that’s she written one that left a lot out, maybe she will take a cue from Shirley MacLaine (they did that Mary Kaye Cosmetics TV movie together) and write another, name a few names and find even more laughs at her own, and other film people’s expense.

I’m a monster’

young thoroughbred  She asked if I needed anything from her. I wanted a lobotomy and a tapeworm.

Allen’s cluelessness about vernacular, his dislike for blue jeans, even on college student characters

Girlfriend is watching “Better Call Saul” and I think, “Wasn’t there a trailer slapped on the beginning of “Little Women” I meant to post? One that featured my man, my bud, the Great Character Actor Giancarlo Esposito (get him to tell you the story of how his mom brought him to meet Muhammad Ali), Amy Madigan and Ashanti, trapped on a subway car, singing their blues away.

“Stuck” opens in late Oct., limited release. And looks — DIFFERENT.

It takes a special kind of compassion to work in an animal shelter, a place which tests your ability to give your heart to anything or anyone.

Something about Mohamed made Linda hire him.

Maybe it was his story. Back when he was named “Martin” Lundy, he was sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. It doesn’t matter what being locked up did to him, that his prison nick-name was “Cyclops,” because of what he did to another man’s sight. Mohamed, she realizes, “relates” to the animals imprisoned at Second Hope Animal Shelter.

Boyd Holbrook brings a quiet stoicism to Mohamed in “The Free World,” a tenderness to someone we’re sure is a very hard man. But Linda (Octavia Spencer, perfect) overhears him talking with the dogs, commiserating over “suffering” and the loss of freedom, knowing some of them are doomed. She knows she made the right decision, taking a chance on hiring a freed and exonerated man.

But in this part of Louisiana, it doesn’t pay to be “too” compassionate. Hard rural people who take out their frustrations on their pets are not unheard of.

“Ain’t no rules out here,” he complains.

“Things don’t get settled the way they do inside,” she counters. No matter how furious he gets, he has to maintain his passivity. He can’t show it.

Especially when the redneck who beat a dog nearly to death is a drawling, law-unto-himself cop (Stephen Louis Grush). Even though his wife (Elisabeth Moss) is bloodied and hysterical, that badge means there’s nothing that can be done.

Mohamed? He has to go outside to re-center himself every time a dog is “put down.” Because he knows “killed” when he sees it.

But Mohamed’s compassion and his own liberty are tested more severely when the woman shows up, after hours, bloodied, drunk and hysterical. He takes her to his spartan apartment, lets her sleep it off. And the moment she’s awake she pulls a knife on him, no memory of how she got there, paranoid about what this stranger’s connection to her husband and his brotherhood of police might be.

She holes up and he figures out how she got there. She killed her brute of a husband. Consequences be damned, he’s going to protect her from that, stonewall the “Innocent, my ass” boys and girls in blue who question him.

“An innocent man, he don’t do what you did in lock-up.”

Holbrook, villain of “Logan,” hero of “The Predator,” has shades of Tom Hardy’s quiet menace from “The Drop” in his performance. Big, burly and scary, he is prison-conditioned to not let authority goad him, his survival skills (he hides a fork when he spies somebody watching him too intently in the diner) intact and perfectly paranoid.

Moss makes Doris borderline unstable, almost punch-drunk in the way she reels from what life has given her and what she’s done to avenge her suffering.

Writer/director Jason Lew, who gave us “The Experiment,” one of a couple of films about the Stanford Prison Experiment, succeeds when he keeps the film centered on one paranoid location, a tiny world with police, including a drawling, belligerent Asian detective (Sung Kang) closing in on them.

Any mistake could be disastrous for them both, prison time for her crime and his.

The film founders when Lew sends the couple, platonic and respectful (he is a Muslim, remember), on the run. That dash rather spoils the picture’s paranoid compactness, and it goes on and on, melodrama added unto melodrama.

But the performances are riveting. And does wonders for his case as the most masculine leading man of his generation, suited for hard men of action and softer-centered roles as well. If you can’t respect a tough man with a soft spot for dogs, there’s no hope for you any way.

MPAA Rating: R for some violence and language

Cast: Boyd Holbrook, Octavia Spencer, Elisabeth Moss, Stephen Louis Grush

Credits: Written and directed by Jason Lew. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:40

The comment forums on IMDb and elsewhere about the movie “Loco Love” have the occasional complaint that this Spanglish romantic tragedy is “just like” this or that movie from South of the Border.

That might be true, kids. But it’s also a “West Side Story” without the music, and a “Romeo & Juliet” with the Mexican-American border racial divide subbing for the Montagues and Capulets.

It may give away its story too easily and be entirely too obvious low low budget, but it still scores some points in America’s “Border Wall” political debate.

Marisol (Melany Bennett, aka Cobie Smulers 2.0) is a beautiful teen from a loving family in the border country. She works at the mall, talks trash about boys with her Venezuelan pal Tete (Alexa Mansour) and fends off — half-heartedly — the advances of Ramón (Adan Rocha), who has the “macho” hot temper of many a Mexican-American stereotype.

A great day in her familia is when Cousin Genaro (Joel Saak) makes it back across the border from the family’s native Sonora, Mexico.

Then comes that fateful day at the amusement park. Grinning Gavin (Evan Deverian) spies Marisol and Tete and follows them around. Giggling and toothy grins are exchanged, then a “What do YOU want?”

“I was hoping to get a kiss.”

Marisol knows her Shakespeare, so she complies. They move from macking to lip-smacking in the snack bar in a flash.

Of course, he’s ditched the blonde bigot (Natasha Esca) cheerleader who was his date to make this happen. And she had to give Ramón the slip. The furtive romance hasn’t even begun when her crew and his jocks/cheerleaders gang tangle over imagined affronts.

Gavin’s sister (Naian González Norvid) is the instigator, but “Spic” and “Beaner” are a ready insult for any of her white compadres. “Gringo pendajo” rolls off the tongue of Marisol’s family and friends, even her foul-mouthed baby brother.

As the affair takes hold, each must wear the label “traitor” and deal with disapproving relatives and close friends.

Race tops the list of both groups’ arguments, but the playing field isn’t level in the movie or in this debate. Marisol may correct a Hispanic teacher about “Who was here first,” and the injustices foisted on Mexican Americans. But racism and racial resentment fuel the fury of the Anglos.

Gavin’s dad (Christopher Warner) blames the failure of his contracting business on “illegals” and “Cheap labor.”

“They’re like the Taliban!”

“They’re just people trying to get by, Dad. Just like us.”

His mother (Stefanie Sherk) works for a Wall-backing GOP Congressman, and fills her public statements with racial dog-whistle trigger words, immigrants as “a cancer on our society,” “an entire way of life being threatened,” bringing “gangs” to threaten “safety” and “terrorism” into the argument.

Embittered dad is inspired by TV ads recruiting for “The Clayton Brothers Brigade,” a migrant-hunting militia.

That leads to one of the few lighter moments in Loco Love,” as Gavin’s racist football teammate pal Luke (Jordan Wilson) jabs the old man after seeing the commercial.

“You’d make a good Border Patrol Agent, Mr. Hayes.”

“You mocking me boy?”

“No sir. But I would like to point out you have an uncomfortable amount of guns in your home, sir.”

Earl is so far down his race-blaming rabbit hole that he doesn’t hear himself yelling “No WAY, Jose!” when his kid shows up in a Cesar Chavez t-shirt Marisol lent him.

The dialogue is generally bland, though the insults have a seriously racist sting — “Gavin’s too busy eatin’ burritos, now. He’s over you.” “Because he’s white I don’t know who I am?”

There’s heat in the performances, even if this isn’t anybody’s idea of a charismatic “name” cast.

The picture’s cheapness also pokes through in the many scenes shot in the early AM light (no crowds), the malnourished fake “fair” or amusement park they try to pull off, and at a party where all you hear is the thundering of feet on the dance floor (music low enough for dialogue, no money to fix that in post-production).

“Loco Love,” in English and Spanish and “Spanglish” with English subtitles, makes no secret where its sympathies lie. Nobody articulates the argument that “Just wanting to be here isn’t qualification enough for being allowed here.” Everybody’s too invested, too quick to play the race card to say or think that.

Borrowing from The Bard makes it predictable, but fans of this classic story are always intrigued to see how screenwriters tackle an update, who gets to play the hotheads, who gets hurt or killed.

Only the young and the passionate could possibly figure true love is worth all this hassle, pain, suffering and name calling. Bennett and Deverian make us believe that, even if we know they’re bound for “woe.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, sexuality, violence

Cast: Melany Bennett, Evan Deverian, Jordan Wilson, Adan Rocha, Joel Saak, Alexa Mansour

Credits:Directed by José Luis Gutiérrez Arias, Fernando Sariñana, script by  Diego Gutiérrez. A Corazón release.

Running time: 1:42