Movie Nation

You don’t have to rack your brain or squint at the screen to summon up Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” in the first-time feature filmmaker Claire Niederpruem’s modern day adaptation.

The bones are there, the four March sisters, making their way through life toward “happiness” in four distinct ways, coping with tragedy and the odd broken heart as they do.

It may be a colorless affair and being faith-based, adventurous liberties are not taken with the story or the characters. No sister comes out as gay, no loves-to-overdress-and dance neighbor boy named Laurie does either.

But it’s a serviceable “Little Women,” properly modern in the goals the March girls set for themselves, retro in ways that pay homage to the source material.

Sarah Davenport of “Body Snatch” and “The Hatred” is the Alannis Morisette look-alike/think-alike Jo, an outspoken believer in making her way without any man in her life, without marriage and children. From childhood, she has been determined to become a famous novelist and playwright, setting her sights foolishly high, composing and re-writing her “Wrinkle in Time/Lord of the Rings” fantasy in longhand, where you can let the words “seep into your skin.”

Meg (Melanie Stone of the “Mythica” movies, which virtually no one saw) is focused on family, marriage, and is willing to stray from the home-schooled path to “fit in” with her peers — drinking, dressing provocatively and making out with hormonal boys, until she realizes that’s not who she is.

Beth (Allie Jennings) is the would-be musician, too shy to do much outside of the family.

Amy (Elise Jones) is the youngest, the one who wants to hang out with the other girls’ dates, mainly Jo’s outings with her Platonic pal, rich neighbor Laurie (Lucas Grabeel), an effeminate swain who cuts a mean rug and wears a bedazzled bowtie or beret with the best of them.

Laurie has a “manny,” a boy nanny (Stuart Edge) whom Meg crushes on.

Marmee (Lea Thompson) is their indulgent but financially struggling (briefly touched on) mother, while Papa March (Bart Johnson) is off serving his country as an Army surgeon in the Middle East.

One clever idea from Niederpruem, who co-wrote the script, is having Jo’s struggles to get her sword-and-sorcery fantasy ready for publication (hanging with a hunky professor/adviser played by Brit Ian Bohen) interrupted by flashbacks about the March girls’ childhood.

THIS is the story that will become the book that makes her, as it made Alcott, famous — a herd of sisters growing up, making their own entertainment, staging plays, acting and video-taping their shows, getting along via addressing “grievances” as a group, each pursuing her own path.

Any girl who gripes “Can’t we just be a normal family?” isn’t recognizing the mental development such video-screen-free play encourages. Any home schooler who brings her kids to this expecting affirmation will enjoy that, and grimace at how poorly-socialized the girls turn out to be in their teens. Home schooling giveth, and maketh naive.

Meg finds herself being fed drinks by a boy, Jo never learns to listen to criticism or accept her shortcomings as anything other than problems of “the patriarchy,” Beth lives the life unlived and Amy is headed for boy trouble if  she isn’t careful.

Davenport is the stand-out in the cast, though Thompson makes a engaging Earth Mother and Grabeel’s Laurie, always “Almonzo” bland (to use a “Little House” analogy) character in the books an earlier films, almost has an edge.

Not that they were ever going to let give the role any bite, not in this crucifixes and odd moment of heavenly hope story.

“Little Women” nowadays is a bit of a stiff, as a few recent more period-correct adaptations have demonstrated. This light and frothy updating goes down easily and as often as not, and achieves “That’s not bad” and “That’s OK” at times.

Not a ringing endorsement, but as faith-based dramas go, this isn’t angry and isn’t an over-reach. Its virtues are the same as ever, even if its dramatic shortcomings only grow with time.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic elements and teen drinking

Cast: Lea Thompson, Sarah Davenport, Allie Jennings, Melanie Stone, Lucas Grabeel, Ian Bohen

Credits: Directed by Clare Niederpruem, script by, Clare Niederpruem, Kristi Shimek, based on the Louisa May Alcott novel. A Pinnacle Peak release.

Running time: 1:52

Whatever his accomplishments as a (mostly TV) producer, and his fanboy-adored “Cabin in the Woods,” Drew Goddard’s “Bad Times at the El Royale” plays like the work of a film school Tarantino.

Traveling at an old-man-with-a-walker gait, ponderously telling some parts of its sketch-of-a-story from multiple points of view, it’s an excruciating exercise in self-indulgence, packed with flashbacks and those big speeches/big scenes that draw names like Oscar winner Jeff Bridges, Dakota Johnson and Jon Hamm to its cast. Clever lines, pithy pop culture observations? Not so much.

It adds up to nothing more than two hours and 21 minutes of tedium, with the odd spasm of violence, back-story or musical interlude.

It’s a period piece set in 1969, obsessed with the music of 1962-64, a Theatre of the Absurd homage packing four disparate guests into a former “hidey hole” hotel (actually a motel) where the rich and infamous used to party.

The El Royale, outside of Tahoe, lost its gaming license a year before. But the last employee, the desk clerk/maid/cook (Lewis Pullman) tells its story as if it’s ancient history, this “bi-state” hostelry where guests can stay in either Nevada or California rooms — it pointlessly bestrides the state line.

Bridges plays a priest who shows up with a puzzled look on his face, Cynthia Eriva (“Step”) is a singer with a suspicious nature, and Jon Hamm is the guy with the patter, the luggage and vacuum cleaning sales paraphernalia piled in the lobby, looking for somebody to check them all in.

“Tahoe’s best kept secret” is a veritable ghost motel, and when the clerk blurts out, “This is NOT a place for a priest, Father,” he’s not just talking about the housekeeping, the Automat sandwich machines, the tender-less bar or the out of date jukebox.

A dialogue-free prologue shows us a robber (Nick Offerman) burying a bag in one of the rooms (all ground level, cars parked at the room –MOTEL). We can wonder about which of the first three guests knows about this for only so long when a “hippy” (Johnson) shows up in a Cougar, not standing for any nosy questions from ANY of them.

They all have secrets, revealed in flashbacks and resolved in violence. The motel/hotel does, too. The rooms were bugged, set up for blackmailing the celebrated, the political and the famous, should that be the owner’s priority.

Goddard breaks his picture into chapters taking their titles from the rooms each patron inhabits — “Room Five,” “Room One,” etc. Clever.

He introduces a hunky cult leader (Chris Hemsworth) and his “family,” letting us see how he rules that world, with sermons and staged “tussles” (brawls).

“Let’s have ourselves an ALLEGORY” Billy Lee (Hemsworth) bellows, prophetically.

Goddard even takes us to Vietnam.

And every so often, Darlene (Erivo) sings, rehearsing in her room, caught in an embarrassing flashback at a botched studio session, coping with a racist business and a racist world any way she can.

Scenes are dragged out in some inept facsimile of “suspense,” performances fail to touch or connect.

Allegory or not, little of this sticks together and none of it sticks to the memory. Don’t get too attached to anybody, don’t try to reason out who should survive, who should have the money, who to root for. Goddard doesn’t make his intentions clear.

Of course, there were people who plumbed deeper meaning out of that silly staged “experiment” “Cabin in the Woods,” and they’re wetting their Underoos over this, too.

Go to any film school in America. While the filmmakers might not be able to hire A-list talent (Bridges took a check for “R.I.P.D.,” Hamm has no big screen career and Johnson’s list of credits with heart and intellectual heft and no nudity is blank), you run into pastiches like this in every graduating class.

They all want to be Tarantino, but lack the wit to carry it off, or the nerve to go as far as he does. Goddard would be right at home among them.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, language, some drug content and brief nudity

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Jon Hamm, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson, Chris Hemsworth, Nick Offerman, Lewis Pullman

Credits: Written and directed by Drew Goddard. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:21

Shakespeare’s “The Scottish Play,” or “Scottish Tragedy,” has weathered samurai (“Throne of Blood”), mobster (“Men of Respect”) and Pennsylvania fast food feud (“Scotland, Pa.”) adaptations.

So why not a “Curse of Macbeth” farce?

“Ghost Light” gets by on theater milieu and stage superstitions, with the odd biting line or funny turn from a cast that includes Cary Elwes, Carol Kane and Shannyn Sossaman, taking its not-that-good sweet time building up a head of steam.

But the third act, the actual staged disaster of particularly cursed production of “Macbeth” (“cur-sed,” as the Bard purists put it) delivers on much of the promise the premise lays out. Before that, call it a half-blood farce, a step slow with players half as antic as they need to be to pull it off.

A bus tour of Shakespeareans roll up to the weathered River Lodge in the Massachusetts Berkshires, “closed for the season” (fall), but with a new owner anxious to re-open the gem of an old barn converted into a theater.

The troupe is to do “The Scottish Play,” and the grizzled veterans of the tour (Carol Kane, Steve Tom and Roger Bart, as Henry the director) have to explain to the less experienced the “Curse” of saying “Macbeth” aloud, the remedies for relieving the curse should some careless or in this case, enraged enough to commit sabotage, utter the cursed Thane’s name.

Who could be that resentful? Maybe the veteran who toured Britain as First Witch, now reduced to third (Kane), the inept, hard-of-hearing soap star leading man (Elwes), his embittered wife and co-star Lady Macbeth (Sossaman), or the arrogant British understudy sleeping with Lady Macbeth on the sly and coveting the lead role (Tom Riley)?

Kane and Tom play the actors most-steeped in theater-lore — “Young man, you shouldn’t EVER whistle in the theater!” They even explain the tradition of the “Ghost light,” which is what you see on an empty stage between rehearsals and performances.

Bart (“The Producers”) and Scott Adsit (“30 Rock”), as stage manager Archie play along, and even demonstrate what is required to allay the curse once somebody invokes it. Funny.

Considering the on-again/off-again gay couple (Sheldon Best and Alex Protenko), the ingenue (Caroline Portu) cavorting with the props man, the Appalachian Trail backpacker (Danielle Campbell of TV’s “The Originals”) pressed into service as another witch, it’s a wonder anybody has time.

But sure enough, the word is spoken, the curse not-reversed and all heck breaks loose. Or should, is a more spritely production.

Thomas (Riley) and Liz (Sossaman) have ghostly, blood-stained visions, Juliet (Campbell) starts taking the “witch” thing a little too seriously, accidents happen and hallucinations spread far and wide.

The last to notice is probably Alex (Elwes), the soap star with hearing problems cast in the title role.

“Let me sit up and gather my thoughts.”

“That should be QUITE a harvest!”

As Liz/Lady Macbeth finds herself scrubbing and scrubbing to get that “dam-ned spot” of blood off her hands — “Look at my hands!” “They’re LOVELY hands…They don’t show your age at all!” — and invoking a taunt Lady Macbeth would have KILLED to have thought up — “Man up!” — we start to fear for the players and not just the potentially disastrous night of theater they’re about to mount.

Losing control when “the witches’ curse is unleashed” they find themselves forced to act out the murderous machinations Shakespeare cooked up 400+ years ago.

“You know how the play goes. We murder the king!”

Co-writer/director John Stimpson is hard-pressed to put enough that’s amusing up here to sustain the film’s meager forward momentum until that third act.

We should get a more “Noises Off” riff on the star who can’t recall the most famous phrases in Shakespeare — “Tomorrow and…LINE?” Dozens more moments like that were called for.

Theater fans will bask in the knowing glow of “theater types” and offstage ensemble shenanigans. If only there were more of them for everybody to giggle at and feel invited to the party.

Because curse or no curse, “Ghost Light” is never more than a “brief candle.” If not “a tale told by an idiot,” it still lacks the “sound and fury” to ever rise above what one suspects will be its final, deserving destination — Netflix.

Tomorrow and…Line?

Danielle Campbell hiker

a method taught to me by Lord Laurence Olivier’s stunt double..

Nigel gay

You want it to be convincing, right?

A little more butch would be good

Everyone believes that.

Everyone KNOWS that!

married Lady Macbeth fooling around with the understudy

The “ghost light” is another of those theater traditions,

old farts explaining theater traditions to the newbies

You how the play goes. We murder the king.

burning on an empty stage

an older leading man without talent or a clue

tiny but very cute little converted barn theater

some lamenting their lot

resentful British understudy

Bart, producer?

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Cary Elwes, Danielle Campbell, Shannyn Sossamon, Carol Kane, Roger Bart, Tom Riley

Credits:Directed by John Stimpson, script by John Stimpson, Geoffrey Taylor . An H9 release.

Running time: 1:42

All these years in show business, born into a showbiz family, with an Academy Award and a long career of his own, and Cuba Gooding, Jr. doesn’t know when to “drop the mike?”

Gooding makes his directing debut with “Bayou Caviar,” a slow moving thriller as complex as Great Granny’s Jambalaya recipe. And in spite of that pacing, some stereotypical casting and a need to contort and drag out the finale, it makes for messy movie-watching fun.

Gooding’s always had an athlete’s build with a recent turn as O.J. under his belt showing he’s a convincing ex-jock as well. As Rodney Jones, he’s a retired prize-fighter with a guilty conscience and a world that has shrunk to training anybody who comes along to the New Orleans gym where he got his start, with a side gig as a bouncer at at popular night club.

We get a taste of his compromised morality when he pays a deathbed visit to his former trainer (Wayne Dehart), whom he wronged. But it’s The Big Easy, kids. Everybody’s corrupt, everyone has a side hustle and who is anybody to judge anybody else?

Rodney’s side-hustle is what gets him into trouble. The mouthy, coked-up club owner (Sam Thakur, amusingly loathsome) pays “the champ” to escort to a meeting with his unhappy silent partner.

Partner is Russian, so you see problem, right? Yuri, given a whimsical “movie Russian” accent by Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss, shoots the big mouth right in front of Rodney. But, no worries, he’s a BOXING fan.

“First think a smart person should think about ees ‘How you DISPOSE of a newly dead body?'”

Yuri has a gator farm. Use your imagination.

Rodney is now beholden to Yuri, and his first “job” is getting dirt on the son-in-law of his aged accountant “counsel” (Ken Lerner). Both Shlomo and the son-in-law Isaac he is grooming to take over the dirty work are Orthodox Jews, genuflecting before their big paycheck, Yuri. They’re afraid of him, yet utterly corrupt and given to saying “Oy” and “We’ve been blessed” a tad too much for comfort. They have no scruples.

“Ours is not the first family to do Russian business. We have a good life!”

“Getting dirt” means Rodney has to lean on his lesbian photographer friend and gym client Nic (Famke Janssen). Her photo sessions can be seductions if she’s into her female subjects, but that on-the-make vibe has cost her clients. So she does porn on the side, and Rodney has in mind a sexually compromising blackmail video of Isaac (Gregg Bello) which will give Yuri leverage with him.

Conveniently, Isaac has renters behind on their payments, and an under-age daughter (Lia Marie Johnson) who has Isaac’s attention. All Rodney has to do is talk up this kid who keeps trying to get in the door of the club where he bounces, hear her Kardashian level ambitions (“Youtube reality show…jewelry line”) and give her his “The only ones who become famous are willing to do whatever it take” pitch.

Complicated enough? Everybody has an agenda and Gooding keeps five separate balls in the air with confidence. Having so many points of view means he shortchanges pretty much everybody, but the many second act complications are smartly plotted and only occasionally overly-reliant on coincidence.

“Bayou Caviar” — let’s not spoil what the title refers to — begins with a lovely montage of training and shadow boxing boxers, shots framed by shadows — has self-assured performances and manages to surprise here and there along the way.

It’s still a messy, film, with throw-away ideas introduced — Rodney “put his hands” on his ex, Nic is irate at the sexual harassment climate of “Trump’s America” because she doesn’t know where to draw the line, etc. — and forgotten.

And Gooding, who co-wrote this, doesn’t know where to draw the line either. He piles resolution after resolution into the finale, when leaving most of these questions unanswered after this or that character “gets what’s coming to them” would have made for a far better film.

Sometimes, not knowing what’s in this this “Bayou Caviar” they’re serving you is for the best.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Cuba Gooding Jr., Famke Janssen, Richard Dreyfuss , Gregg Bello, Katharine McPhee, Lia Marie Johnson

Credits:Directed by Cuba Gooding Jr., script by  Eitan Gorlin, Cuba Gooding Jr.. A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:51

Gemma Jones, Richard Madden and Bryce Dallas Howard also star in “Rocketman.”

The “Kingsman” star does his own singing, wears the high heels and oversized glasses. May 19 is when this “inspired by the true fantasy” comes out.

The trailers have been dark and twisted, the cast impressive as all get out.

And if they’re previewing “Bad Times at the El Royale” two weeks in advance, they have to think they’ve got a winner on their hands, right?

Bridges and Dakota Johnson, Hamm and Hemsworth…It opens Oct. 12.

Just my luck, a Viking movie to review and fresh out of Spam. Bloody Vikings.

And while I’ll watch most anything with Vikings in it, “Viking Destiny” gives that brand loyalty a pretty severe test. A flagon of mead could help, even if Python’s Spam theory proves insupportable.

It’s a cut-rate “Excalibur” with the Norse God Odin and trickster Loki dueling for the consciences of assorted Vikings, who were not known to have consciences.

A Viking King (Andrew Whipp) is summoned to battle as his queen struggles with childbirth. “Go,” do the battle thing, save the Kingdom of Volsung.

But, as Odin (the great Terrence Stamp) narrates, it is “a curse for a child to be born with an absent father.” The Queen (Victoria Broom) dies in childbirth, and the king, even though he’s victorious, grieves and gives up his daughter, an unacceptable heir, to his treacherous half-brother (Timo Nieminen).

“Half Prince” Bard is “planting a seed that will take 20 years and one to bear fruit,” Odin intones. Odin tends to do that.

Odin shows up, now and then, to advise the girl who grows up to be Helle (Anna Demetriou), a fiery redhead trained in the martial arts, just like Merida, the princess of “Brave.”

But fair is fair, so Loki (Murray McArthur), his eyes and forehead covered in black, hisses evil ideas into Half Prince Bard’s ear.

Sure enough, Helle turns 21 and the treachery begins. Lured into a cave to kill the Kraken (“It’s not real,” she says, citing the scientific method), surviving assassination attempts, fleeing across the seas in (mostly digital) long ships.

She stumbles into Paul Freeman (“Raiders of the Lost Ark”) who leads a “Traveler” tribe of vegetarian hippies.

“Would you care to join us for turnips? Do not worry. We will not be eating the turnips.”

A drinking joke? This MUST be Ireland.

Odin sidles up and offers pep talks and the odd profundity.

“Rain does not fall on one roof alone…No matter how dark the forest, there is always a path through it.”

That Odin.

If this reads as if I’m not taking “Viking Destiny” seriously, it’s because I’m not.

Screen newcomer Demetriou is a striking presence in metallic red hair and leather, and she and her stunt team (not always obvious) handle fight choreography, including epic brawls with twin giants (Martyn Ford), well enoughl.

The Northern Irish locations are as lovely as they were when “Excalibur” and assorted other Viking and Dark Ages tales (“The Last Kingdom”) were filmed there.

The movie needed more out of its Loki, and as nasty as as Timo Nieminen makes Bard (murdering sex partners in mid-coitus), he’s a tad bland, too.

Stamp gives Odin an aged twinkle.

And writer-director David L.G. Hughes (“Hard Boiled Sweets”) may not be at home in the genre, but the dialogue has a chuckle or two.

“Of course we don’t eat our horses. What kind of monsters do you take us for? We will eat your women.”

“Shouldn’t you be off raping and pillaging?”

“There is no greater mirror than a true friend!”

“Sleep is the cousin of death.”

“Goodbye my brother. Onwards, to Valhalla!”

In the end, “Viking” finds its destiny to be kind of a half-finished, half-financed and half-hearted Viking saga, with only the arrival of the Irish vegetarian hippies led by Indiana Jones’ nemesis, Belloq, to delight us.

Not robust and realistic, not silly enough to include Spam, it finds its own Valhalla to be more like Perdition — a mediocre middle ground it’s stuck in for all eternity.

MPAA Rating: R for bloody violence, and some sexuality/nudity

Cast: Anna Demetriou, Andrew Whipp, Terence Stamp, Paul Freeman, Will Mellor, Martyn Ford, Victoria Broom,

Credits: Written and directed David L.G. Hughes. A Saban release.

Running time: 1:31

Epic shootouts in the movies make you clench up, reflexively duck. They’re visceral and heart-pounding, which is why they’re an integral part of many a best-selling video game.

It’s that famous Churchill quote about being shot at and missed — “There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result.”

There’s a doozy or two in “Hold the Dark,” and by “doozy” I mean comically melodramatic in defiance of reason, common sense and any police procedure you ever heard of.

It gives this unfortunately uneven Alaskan thriller by the director of the bloody-minded “Green Room” (based on a William Giraldi novel) a “Wind River Botched” feel,  or would if hadn’t wandered off the reservation half an hour earlier.

But it starts so soberly, creating such a bleak, drained-of-emotion mood that makes its lurch into horror movie conventions and blunder into a bloodbath all the more disappointing.

Jeffrey Wright plays Core, a tough-minded wolf behavior expert summoned to the mid-winter wilderness, a town where wolves are taking children. The woman who writes to him read his book. She’s a military wife, Medora Slone (Riley Keough) who wants closure before her husband (Alexander Skarsgård) returns from a tour in the Middle East.

“Come help me, and kill him,” she writes. “I know you feel sympathy for these animals. Please don’t.”

Core is no ivory tower academic. He may be unused to the cold, but he knows his quarry and is willing to pull the trigger if he finds the pack that did this.

Core stays with Mrs Slone, whose grief has gutted her, turned her speech into something metronomic — mechanical. She seems off. An there’s this mask on the mantel, the silliest piece of foreshadowing this side of “Friday the 13th” movies.

Because the wolves? They’re bystanders, metaphors here.

There are father-son flashbacks, and the setting shifts to Afghanistan, where Vern Slone is seen as a murderously efficient machine gunner, coping with news of his son by searching for death.

Core struggles to understand what he’s stumbled into, tries to filter what the white locals and suspicious natives (Julian Black Antelope is scary, tough and cagey Cheeon) and James Badge Dale is the state police officer who suddenly realizes he needs “everyone” in his department in this small town, thanks to the shocking burst of violence that signals the film’s shift from the real world to the surreal.

The point of view drifts, the “hero” we follow drifts and the carnage piles up as director Jeremy Saulnier and his screenwriter/collaborator Macon Blair try to wrestle a savage beasts/savage humans allegory into shape.

Wright is one of the great character actors working these days, and losing track of him and his character hurts the film.

It’s an almost pitiless thriller, as unforgiving as the wilderness that it is set in, another reason the “Wind River” comparison is apt.  But every time it strays from the realm of the realistic, “Hold the Dark” stumbles.

And about that big shootout. It’s hard to believe Alaska’s cops somehow missed out on the Militarization of Policing in America, even if it’s not hard to imagine police being outgunned in the land where spree killings were common many winters before Columbine.

It’s not the only scene in the movie that hobbles it, but it does put an exclamation point on a tale that gets so much right — setting, atmosphere, tone and casting — before it goes so wrong.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA (graphic violence, nudity)

Cast: Jeffrey Wright, Riley Keough, Alexander Skarsgård, James Badge Dale, Julian Black Antelope

Credits:Directed by Jeremy Saulnier , script by  Macon Blair , based on the  ook. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:05

Here’s a knotty little thriller about a “psychic medium” with an eye for the main chance, if not the gift he’d need to take advantage of it. Because if you’re supposed to be able in touch with the spirit world, the one thing you should be able to figure out is when the hustle is up.

Richard Sommer of TV’s “Mad Men” has the title role of “A Crooked Somebody.” He plays Michael, a colorless wannabe with a book out and a gig working the paid seminar circuit, still giving “readings” to small groups when “by this point, John Edward was on TV every night of the week.”

He makes his gripe to his booker and “plant” in these audiences, Chelsea (Joanne Froggatt of “Downton Abbey), a woman he has history with, who now resists his advances.

Michael sees his work as harmless, giving comfort to the bereaved like an AA group leader or a preacher of the laying-on-of-the-hands variety.

His preacher father (Ed Harris) and mother (Amy Madigan, of course) wish he’d find work with more “honor” in it, with Dad seeing his special “gifts of persuasion” — you’ve got to be a fast talker and a faster-thinker to pull this off — as something he should turn towards sales.

But Michael’s birthday party magician years gave him a taste for applause, and the fact that he’s willing to give away his books on occasion, make him feel he’s “helping.”

“Your son loved animals, didn’t he?” he reassures grieving parents. “There’s no more pain, there’s only joy.”

All that changes when he casts the name “Jim” out into an Arizona audience. One guy who won’t own up to knowing a Jim (Clifton Collins Jr.) seems shaken.

And he’s the fellow who clubs Michael in the parking lot and takes him hostage. Dead “Jim” “showed you what happened.” And that means Michael must die. Michael’s protestations that he’s faking it don’t cut it with Nathan.

“You don’t just stop being psychic, I know the real deal when I see it.”

It takes quick thinking to get that knife away from his throat, and even quicker thinking for Michael to figure out a way to turn this situation  — Nathan committed an infamous murder years ago — to his advantage.

Michael has to improvise, wing it, make it up as he goes. “Jim is FURIOUS with you,” gets the killer’s attention. And a road trip at knife-point gives Michael ideas for how he can “solve” this case and get that “Crossing Over” level of success he’s dreamed of.

Sommer plays Michael straight, so there’s no hint of the lovable con artist about this grifter. He’s an “Ace in the Hole” cynic, a “Leap of Faith” hustler not above risking his neck and his manager’s to work this situation to his advantage.

“There are still moves to make here,” he says, repeatedly plotting his course as he goes along.

Collins, an old hand at playing a gullible murderer (“Capote” was his breakthrough film), carries murderous naivete around like baggage. Sommer gives Michael a paper-thin bravado born of desperation.

Director Trevor White is more known as a producer (“Wind River” and “Ingrid Goes West”), and he’s not bad at maintaining suspense in producer/screenwriter Andrew Zilch of Youtube’s “Good Mythical Morning” somewhat predictable script.

One thing good producers have an eye for is casting. The right actors can save directors and make passable scripts something extra. Even when we know where it’s going, really good actors make that stroll down the primrose path an entertaining one.

MPAA Rating: R for language and brief violence

Cast: Richard Sommer, Clifton Collins, Ed Harris, Amy Madigan

Credits:Directed by Trevor White, script by Andrew Zilch. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:42

Reliably hilarious together, master improvisers, the Kings of One-Upping Each Other, do Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly have another buddy farce hit in them?

Hell, the world’s been WAITING for a Ralph Fiennes version of Professor Moriarty. And in a farce?

Kelly Macdonald, Hugh Laurie and Rebecca Hall are bystanders to the silliness, not a bad sign.

Seems a bit late for the lads to be getting around to re-teaming, but Reilly always delivers fair value and Ferrell has had an amazing run in buddy pictures. Amazing.

Nov. 9, “Holmes & Watson” are on the case.