Movie Nation

It’s a bit maddening, but I guess that’s how a movie about abortion should be — shout at the screen infuriating.

“Invisible” is a patient, quiet drama about a pregnant teenager in a country where abortion is illegal, but the Internet is not — Argentina.

So when Ely (Mora Arenillas) has one backseat sexual fling too many with a veterinarian she works for, part time, she’s got a pal to stand by her in their high school restroom, reading her smart phone.

It’s all there, what medication you need “in countries where abortion is illegal,” what strategy to use to procure them, lies to tell, getting “a man to pick up the medication.” black market suggestions and warnings.

Because that’s what the world is like for a woman in patriarchy where the Catholic Church controls basic human rights usually protected by government.

Ely is 17, close-mouthed and a bit of a longer, just another bored high school kid with unruly hair and a nose ring. And now there’s a fetus to be considered.

Hers isn’t the happiest life. Her mother (Mara Bestelli) is housebound, overwhelmed by depression. The father of the fetus (Diego Cremonesi) isn’t exactly somebody she can talk to, either. His dad, the veterinarian who owns the practice, seems kind. But no.

When she first visits a government clinic, the unseen counselor/nurse gives her the bum’s rush, pushing the frightened girl into scheduling an ultrasound, OB-GYN visits…

“I’m not going to have it,” is an assertion this nurse is prepared for

“Think it over. Talk with your parents. The father… Abortion is illegal in Argentina.”

So?

“Your only choice is to put the child up for adoption,” she adds (in Spanish with English subtitles) before suggesting a psychologist.

Ely isn’t telling anyone about this — not her bother, who has become a burden, or Raul the veterinarian who got her pregnant. Like girls the world over, she turns to a peer.

I apologize for not naming the sympathetic actress who plays that sounding board/classmate, but director Pablo Giorgelli, who co-wrote the script, never has anyone address her by name and doesn’t even seem to have her in the credits. Every other actress listed seems entirely too old.

If you know who the redhead is to Ely’s left, or you’re the forgetful Pablo Giorgelli and know she is, feel free to comment below. I’ve been doing this for decades and never come across a lapse in a film’s credits this boneheaded, one I couldn’t get an answer to.

We follow Ely, poker-faced but forlorn, lost in her thoughts, struggling to make a decision she’s ill-equipped to handle.

Sad and maybe a little in shock, she tunes out her classes, but we never see her weep. Ely hides her dismay, if not her despair.

An adoption agency offers to pay her for the chance to place her offspring with a paying family. She tries to power through it, a little denial (clubbing, a bar pick up), a little unload on mom time.

And then the shouting at the screen starts.

Arenillas so underplays Ely that she’s hard to get a handle on, even if our instinct is to sympathize with her plight. She is “Invisible” and a movie about someone invisible is sure to test one’s patience.

Giorgelli shoots for something less conclusive, more vague. The larger object is here showing the Byzantine steps a single woman in a country where women’s rights are circumscribed in the most basic sense.

Because Ely has nobody giving her life advice that works, no one she can rely on to transcend sexism, religious propaganda and tell her what she needs to know before deciding yea or nay on this pregnancy.

Aside from that one friend, whom Giorgelli neglects to name on screen or in the credits.

MPAA Rating: unrated, explicit sex, nudity, adult content

Cast: Mora Arenillas, Diego Cremonesi, Mara Bestelli

Credits:Directed by Pablo Giorgelli, script by María Laura Gargarella, Pablo Giorgelli. A FilmFactory release.

Running time: 1:27

Just a little walk in the woods — Mother, son, Mom’s best friend. Summer, a like, a little peace and quiet. What could go wrong?

You don’t know much about “Desolation” in the movies, do you?

A grieving wife (Jaime Paige), her just-turned-teen son (Toby Nichols) and her best friend (Alyshia Ochse) figure a camping trip will help one and all cope with death.

Sam is 13, looking 11, and picks this moment to start his teenage rebellion.

Abbey and BFF Jen? They share wine, smoke a little weed after the boy goes to sleep, giggle through the tears and cry their way “up the mountain.”

The kid saw someone — “The Hiker,” across the lake earlier. Dark hoodie, beard, rose-colored glasses. Kevin Smith?

Nooo. Scarier.

And he’s watching them.

The women are spooked, the lad? “He looks like a wizard.”

“You know what, let’s go — leave this guy in the dust.”

Every time they see him, he’s a bit closer. Yelling, “How’s it going?” doesn’t defuse the tension. Jen wants to confront him. Abbey doesn’t. “Because he’s weird.”

They try to outrun him, duck him. And fail. Every so often, he disappears.

The kid wants to know if they’re scared and doesn’t believe their answers.

“Should I start a fire?”

“No, not tonight sweetie.”

Late night, they’re treated to tape-recorded ’50s ballad serenades. Weird and weirder.

It’s only when they become separated, facing their terrors in the dark alone, that we get glimpses of the villain’s knife, bottles of chemicals, his shades. Hell, it IS Kevin Smith! (Claude Duhamel, actually).

A 76 minute movie has to be efficient, and “Desolation” only feels that way on occasion. It takes 20 minutes to get up and going, lots of foreshadowing — the mother packed “bear spray,” the boy has his late father’s Swiss Army knife and a yen for carving sharp sticks.

The adults are fine, the kid (“Trumbo,” TV’s “Iron Fist” and “Underground”) is on-the-money, pouty and out of his depth, eager to lose “victim” and take on “aggressor” in this dilemma.

But there’s nothing surprising in this backwoods (upstate New York) variation on a torture porn theme. The stalker doesn’t speak, the prey doesn’t shut up. They’ll never lose this guy in the woods, these noisy chatterboxes.

Even the climax has a savage predictability to it — everyone but the characters on screen can see it coming.

Netflixable? Not so much.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Alyshia Ochse, Claude Duhamel, Toby Nichols, Jaimi Paige

Credits:Directed by Sam Patton, script by Matt Anderson, Michael Larson-Kangas. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:16

Cary Grant spent the last years of his box office stardom acting in ensemble pictures, top billed, but playing second banana to the likes of Tony Curtis, Sophia Loren and Audrey Hepburn.

When it was time to take a backseat to Jim Hutton (“Walk, Don’t Run”), Grant wasn’t stupid. He hung it up, “closed the door” as Garbo said — preserved his image for the future by not devaluing the brand with bit parts, old men who didn’t save the day or “get the girl.”

Bruce Willis is top-billed in “Reprisal,” even though he spends much of the film waiting for Frank Grillo, who plays his neighbor, to show up asking for his help. And much of the rest of the time he’s listening in, by phone, as neighbor Jacob (Grillo) chases down the bad guy who murdered people at the bank where he worked, traumatized him and made his employer and the F.B.I. wonder if he had something to do with what looked like “an inside job.”

In this, the “Death Wish” stage of the Willis career, entering his mid-60s and looking it, with more ill-conceived action pictures in the can and three more (another “Die Hard?”) in the planning, pre-production stages, you have to wonder how he’s missing the obvious.

He doesn’t have a third act in him. He stopped being funny 25 years ago, he’s never warmed to villainy, doesn’t have the grandpa/wise old man of the West, the War or The Business in his quiver.

Go ahead and prove me wrong, Bruno. But I’m looking at what you’ve done lately and what you have lined up, and I’m wondering why you’re putting yourself through it.

“Reprisal” is a dull, low-heat genre thriller presenting the formidable Grillo (Netflix “Wheelman”) as an Everyman Banker, struggling to make ends meet (Stop laughing.), trying to take care of the runway-ready wife half-his-age (Oliva Culpo) and diabetic daughter.

They’re living well, but struggling to maintain the standard of living. And Jacob? He’s showing up to work in the usual Frank Grillo stubble. Promotion material? Not hardly.

Then a ruthless robber strikes. We’ve seen him (Johnathan Schaech, who’s been hitting the gym) call in a bomb threat in the opening moments of “Reprisal.”

“There’s a bomb under the bridge, set to go off at 9 am. Which bridge is it?”

Then he plays dress-up, covered in tactical gear and mask, and storms into Cincinnati bank — shooting a guard, handing out note cards with instructions –“Open the safe,” is one, and if they hesitate, “Open the f—–g safe” is the second.

The robbery has a little juice to it, some of it shot with a GoPro gun-sight First Person Shooter POV, the robber firing off rounds and pounding on metal doors, desks, etc., to keep the hostages rattled.

Jacob is as rattled as they get. Then the FBI interrogators seem both sympathetic and suspicious. He’s put on unpaid leave.

“I should’ve DONE something” is his survivor’s guilt. But the Feds and maybe his employers think he might have had something to do with the planning, so that’s his other nightmare.

Lucky thing he’s got a retired cop (Willis) for a neighbor. They talk through Jacob’s memories of the robbery, fix on details and start their own “investigation.”

There’s a little PD slang — “BOLO” (Be on the Lookout/APB) — a little background to “motivate” the trigger-happy shooter/robber (We see him visit his Silver Star honored Marine Corps vet father, half-demented in a nursing home).

And there’s a cute montage, set to music, of Jacob and neighbor James obsessively reasoning out clues, looking for patterns in this guy’s robberies, as Schaech’s shooter diagrams a future heist, marking out doorways, walls, etc on a warehouse floor, putting targets where there would be human “obstacles.” He does a live-fire rehearsal of all the folks he might have to shoot, next time. As I said, “cute.”

Jacob’s sniffing around gets BadGuy attention, and not remembering he’s the murderous instigator of all this, BadGuy vows “an eye for an eye.”

There’s virtually nothing to distinguish “Reprisal” from a thousand other cop-vs-robber B pictures, except for the violence. Schaech stands out from the cast, a wound-up psychopath who won’t brook “disrespect” for his old man in the home, but manhandles and murders the rest of humanity as if by entitlement.

Grillo isn’t bad, but he gives us nothing much to hang onto here. We see his dilemma, but not his angst. As I said, Netflix “Wheelman.” Fiftysomething Frank gets it done in that one, even without a 26 year-old wife.

And Willis? Don’t be fooled by the action image above. He’s a bystander, here. and if he’s not careful, it’s these last five years of bad-and-worse movies, the “diva” gossip which won’t go away, which he’ll be remembered for, and not “Yippee ki yay” after all.

An Action Diva in Winter isn’t pretty.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and language

Cast: Bruce Willis, Frank Grillo, Olivia Culpo, Natali Yura, Johnathan Schaech

Credits:Directed by Brian A. Miller, script by Bryce Hammons. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:29

Last year this weekend, the last full weekend in August, represented an historic box office low with the top dozen titles drawing filmgoers at a rate not seen in decades.

It’s always one of the weakest moviegoing weekends of the year.

This year, “Crazy Rich Asians” is here to stanch the bleeding, heading towards a second weekend scarcely missing a beat from its opening frame. The upbeat family rom-com with an all-Asian cast and Chinese diaspora setting did $26 million and change last weekend, and is doing over $25 million in business this weekend, per Deadline.com. That’s a 4% falloff, at this point.

Perhaps every Hollywood exec should cancel that Labor Day vacation, or come back to work early (a safer bet) and push the whole studio system into beating the bushes looking for the next “Asians.” Yeah, that will produce sequels (Kevin Kwan wrote a trilogy of books, and is about to get J.K. Rowling rich, or close to it).

Deadline calls “Crazy Rich” the “Black Panther” for the Asian community. I still say it’s a “Big Fat Greek Wedding” for that corner of the audience, a picture with general interest amusement as well as cultural significance to its subject audience.

The Chinese-financed robot dog movie “A.X.L.” suggests that the Exotic East’s financiers need protection from Hollywood hustlers when it comes to picking material. The fact this is earning over $2 million is something of a miracle, a real “Dog of August.” Who talked
Global Road into this? Suckers.

Keeping with a theme, the other big Warner-distributed/Chinese financed hit of the month, “The Meg,” is maintaining audience and will clear $100 million Sunday –– another $11 million this weekend. This pic is a real triumph of marketing. It’s not as funny as its trailers, not that entertaining. But people are very slow to catch on when TV commercials stretch the truth.

Which brings us to August’s new nickname — “STX month.” A newish distributor whose biggest hit was “Bad Moms,” Chinese-backed Hollywood operation that produced “Edge of Seventeen” and “Adrift” and a lot of fare virtually nobody saw, now has “Mile 22,” a Mark Wahlberg bomb, and “The Happytime Murders,” a Melissa McCarthy bomb, in theaters at the same time.

“Happytime” cost $40, a lot when you consider its a dirty Muppet movie. It was projected to do $13-15 this weekend, and will barely clear $10. 

But STX has a deal with Jason Statham, and “The Meg” just boosted his stock again. So stay tuned.

Screen Gems has what might be another Asian-influenced winner on its hands with “Searching,” good reviews, a career kick for John Cho? But platforming the opening, 9 theaters in a couple of cities, is proving to be a bust with a $4,000 per screen average for the weekend. Keep it out of the way of “Crazy Rich” and even “Happytime” might pay off. Or maybe this was going to be an impossible sell — father searching for his daughter, discovering her online “life” — at this time of year.

Bleecker Street was right to abandon “Papillon” in late August. Not on a huge number of screens, this misfire could have cracked the top ten on the weakest weekend of the year, and won’t.

He’s got a face made for horror films, the voice, too. This Brit thriller (They ‘ave no possums in Jolly Olde, guvnah!) looks perverse.

“Possum” opens in the UK in time for Halloween. Alun Armstrong also stars.

The toughest action pic ever filmed in Cincinnati? VOD and limited theatrical next weekend.

Peter Hedges is that rare screenwriter and director whose movies are about character and emotion and family, old grievances and new hope, a sense of place.

He scripted “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” based on his novel, and wrote and directed “Pieces of April” and “Dan in Real Life,” and hasn’t had a big screen project since the resonant but unsuccessful, honestly-titled “The Odd Life of Timothy Green.”

Look at his emotionally-available movies and it’s easy to see how Oscar nominee Lucas Hedges is a chip off the old block.

And when your son is Lucas, fresh off the Oscar-nominated breakout turn in “Manchester by the Sea,” and “LadyBird” and everything he touches gets noticed, Dad can get his calls returned and land Julia Roberts, who is rumored to be behind the awards-season push of this prodigal son tale — “Ben is Back.”

The trailer doesn’t give away much, but pedigree speaks volumes, here. A good cry? Put money on it.

Look for “Ben is Back” Dec. 7. 

Perhaps one has been too hasty when one has declared “Is there anything worse than Imitation Tarantino, than Guy Ritchie Lite?”

Because when wild card and now Oscar-winner Sam Rockwell’s involved, and Simon Callow and a bevy of screwy British character actors, all wrapped up in a cascading catastrophe of carnage-covered capers titled “Blue Iguana,” all bets –as we are given to say –are off.

Producer turned writer/director Hadi Hajaig (“Cleanskin”) gives away the game by having a character, the chatterbox ex-con Paul (Ben Schwartz of “Parks and Recreation”) dream of making “MY indie film. Do you like LENS FLARE?”

Hajaig doesn’t give us much of that, but he takes a shot at filling the screen with “the cool parts” — slo-mo shootouts, blood spray played for laughs, one-liners, Brit-vs-American slang and mob mores.

“Shambolic” is the perfect word for it, even if he does have one of his dopes wonder, “What’s shambolic?”

And if it gives you the creeping feeling that he’s some hack spending a lot of mummy’s money making himself a movie career, it’s still laugh-out-loud funny as often as not.

Eddie (Rockwell) and Paul (Schwartz) are ex-cons riding out parole in a New York chain restaurant/diner when in strolls England’s Plain Jane — aka Katherine, a British lawyer referred to them by a fellow hoodlum “English Tommy.”

She’s got a job for them In London. Travel arrangements, pay, parole? She’ll take care of it. Even though she’s frumpy, clumsy and seemingly out of her depth, the boys buy in.

Phoebe Fox (“Eye in the Sky”) plays Katherine with kind of posh-accent, dressed-down guile. She knows just which screws to turn because she’s not just a lawyer, she’s a barrister with an ear for illegality she can leverage in her favor.

She needs the Yanks to intercept this satchel that’s to be handed off in a natural history museum. They can be armed, but “no violence.” Naturally, with Paul a bit high-strung and Eddie plainly careless and/or rusty, much that can go wrong does.

That pursuit of the package leads to another heist, this one involving the “Blue Iguana” of the title. Katherine is mixed up with Mr  Big, with a name referencing an Orson Welles thriller (Peter Polycarpou), and he’s got Deacon (Peter Ferdinando of “Tommy’s Honour” and other films, hilarious here) as his “muscle.”

Deacon minds his mum’s pub, The Prince of Wales, loves double-crosses, his ’70s vintage mullet and denim jacket.

“They were me Dad’s.”

He hates Katherine and REALLY hates his mum. As she’s played as a braying, insulting, over-sexed harpy with a smoker’s laugh by Amanda Donahoe (a stitch), we can see where his “issues” come from.

“You stink of ketchup and…farts.”

The more complex the caper becomes, the more competent Eddie seems. Maybe he’s just trying to impress Katherine. Hard to tell. Lose the glasses, the shapeless sweaters, ’60s school teacher hair…anyway.

That rising list of plot complications is where Hajaig rather loses the plot. Fortunately, he’s got a lot of funny people on set riffing around some amusing twists.

Paul wonders just where one’s prostate is, and somehow takes a shine to Deacon’s mom, filling the pub with lies as he stakes her out.

“I work for NASA. It’s crazy, Stephen Hawking got me the job…Name’s Teddy Roosevelt.”

Eddie takes an interest in Cockney slang — “‘Throw a pint down my Gregory.’ What’s that mean?” Gregory Peck, and what rhymes with Peck? “Preh-ey good, innit?”

The shootouts in enclosed spaces create an awful mess, and a chance for Paul to try out his tampon-as-bullet-hole-plug theory.

And so on.

As the Americans, with the erudite and fey English Tommy (“We know what we are, but not what we would be.”) stake out the pub, they enlist Tommy’s thespian uncle (Callow, amusing) and his “old gang” — old actors who take notes in the bar and plummily recite the profane clues they overhear in Royal Shakespeare Company English.

Like lesser Ritchie and most Tarantino, there’s a lot of “just go with it” to “Blue Iguana.” There are built-in ’80s pop conceits that reward the viewer on the same wavelenth, “Private Idaho” era B-52s and the like.

Rockwell does this sort of ditzy cool as well as anybody, and as shocking as the violence is, it’s as funny and not as horrific as the stuff we saw him win the Oscar for in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”

“Blue Iguana” could fall on either side of the sliding “whatever” scale, probably more Netflixable than something to run out and see. But Rockwell, Schwartz, Fox, Ferdinando and Callow make it engaging in between its darkly-funny bursts of slow-motion violence — be their characters expertly menacing, or just mean and inept.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Sam Rockwell, Phoebe Fox, Ben Schwartz, Peter Ferdinando, Amanda Donahoe, Al Weaver, Simon Callow,  Peter Polycarpou
Credits: Written and directed by  Hadi Hajaig. A — release.

Running time: 1:40

Two strangers dressed in black arrive by train at a small Hungarian town.

It’s August 1945 and this little corner of Hungary seems all but untouched by the World War that is just now winding up in the Pacific. Aside from the sparsity of motorized vehicles and the presence of bullying, loutish Russian occupiers and the bursts of pro-Soviet propaganda on the radio, the locals would seem to have few complaints.

They’re plump, almost prosperous, especially István, the town clerk, landowner and drug store operator. His son Arpi is about to marry the farmgirl Rozsi, and he’s finishing the day’s arrangements.

But something about these two strangers rattles István and almost everybody around him. Who are they, what’s their business here and what’s with those outfits?

“Jews have arrived!”

The cinema has never seen the likes of “1945,” a Hungarian Holocaust Western, a “High Noon” testing a complacent, complicit town, pricking the guilty consciences of most of the people.

Because their prosperity put blood on their hands, and any Jews who “return” or just show up with packing cases for luggage are a potential threat — unwanted business competition, legal action, reclaiming property taken from them or just plain revenge could be on their minds.

No wonder the station master (István Znamenák) tells the wagoneer hauling the old man and his son’s cases to “take your time” (in Hungarian, with English subtitles) getting them to town. The officious railwayman has to dash in by bicycle to alert the village.

No wonder István, played to small-town fat-cat perfection by Péter Rudolf, has a drink at every stop he makes after he gets the news. No wonder he’s sweating, blustering and chain-smoking his little cigars. He bullies his depressed, drug-dependent wife (Eszter Nagy-Kálózy) and his panic-stricken flunky (Jozsef Szarvas), “Bandi.”

“We have to give it back,” Bandi drunkenly declares, “ALL back.”

Nobody else thinks that way. The folks they took their houses, businesses and money from all those years before made their lives better by their absence, so the burning of evidence — promissory notes, etc. — commences in earnest. Venomous mistrust and hostility are the orders of the day.

Co-writer/director Ferenc Török (“Isztambul”) teases out the suspense here, folding in layers of melodrama on top of the tension. The would-be bride (Tünde Szalontay) never got over the handsome farmer (Tamás Szabó Kimmel) who went off to war and came back an ardent socialist. Her would-be groom (Bence Tasnádi) isn’t half the man Jancsi is.

The Russians are not shy about throwing around their weight in an occupied Axis country. Any moment we expect a beating, robbery or rape, or just a summary arrest.

And nobody, not the priest, the spouses of the various guilt-ridden men or the local constable, is able to keep his or her darkest feelings about Jews buried for long.

“You just can’t get rid of them.”

The spare, black and white cinematography won’t take anybody back to the golden age of monochromatic films. But the compositions are simple and succinct and the score — the rattling of coins in a pocket punctuating scene after scene, like spurs clattering down a dusty street — underlines the Western vibe Török was going for here.

Few subjects have dominated film to the extent history’s worst genocide has, resulting in the “Holocaust film” becoming a cultural punchline, a way of backhanding Jewish Hollywood with its obsession with the 20th century’s darkest hour.

But “1945” takes a familiar subject and well-worn theme — collective guilt — and finds a new way to bring us into that story, to connect us to that crime and its aftermath. Here’s a clever, sideways take on the grimmest of human horrors, a clever parable that delivers the same heavy message, but with mordant wit and originality.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse, smoking

Cast: Péter Rudolf, Bence Tasnádi, Tünde Szalontay, Tamas Sabo Kimmel

Credits:Directed by Ferenc Török, script by Gábor T. Szántó, Ferenc Török. A Menemsha Films release.

Running time: 1:31

How do you film a movie about the infamous jungle prison colony of French Guiana in Serbia and Malta, which have no jungle?

Badly and cheaply, it turns out.

“Papillon” was a best selling if largely discredited autobiography of French criminal and escaped convict Henri Charrière, one of the publishing sensations of the ’70s.

A tale of endurance, survival and inhuman cruelty, I must have read it 25 times in my high school years. It became a sturdy Franklin J. Schaffner epic starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman and every character actor Hollywood had on hand back in 1973.

The new “Papillon” was directed by the Dane Michael Noer (“R”), who is no Franklin J. Schaffner (“Patton”) it turns out. And it stars Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek, who know they’re no McQueen and Hoffman and should have avoided this pointless, note-for-note, almost scene-for-scene photocopy of the original film.

Hunnam has the title role, and in the film’s unneeded opening scenes, we see him in the life that put him in the French prison system. He was a safe cracker, with a hooker-girlfriend (Eve Hewson), framed for a murder he did not commit.

The original script left some mystery about Charriere, who had a butterfly tattoo on his chest (“Papillon” in French), who was a criminal and pretty much a pathological liar. But no, let’s strip that mystery away from him.

Malek of TV’s “Mr. Robot” and the upcoming “Bohemian Rhapsody” Freddie Mercury bio-pic, is Louis Degas, a forger who got rich selling fake government bonds, which made him enemies far and wide.

You remember the set-up, the shrimp who lived well and avoided jail needs protection from the hardened criminal Papillon, and they stick together, more or less, through decades of imprisonment, murderous assaults and escape attempts, winding up on Devil’s Island, the most notorious of the prisons of French Guiana, a remote, shark-surrounded rock from which there was no escape.

Well, not according to Charrière.

The book’s shock value, its vivid depiction of the violence and the novel way inmates had of storing their valuables (a tube, called “a plan,” shoved up your rectum, because “A man had to have a plan.”) has been updated in the new film.

And to be absolutely fair, the rocky isles off the northern coast of Latin America can be desert-dry, like Malta. Curacao, which I’ve visited, is not far removed from from Cayenne (Devil’s Island) in geography and climate, and is arid and rocky.

But that’s about all one can say for this malnourished remake, a real Bleecker Street debacle.

The supporting cast, aside from Tommy Flanagan as a grizzled fellow inmate, is seriously cut-rate, folks who wouldn’t mind a Serbian/Maltese vacation. Yorick van Wageningen, for instance, plays the callous warden. Funny in “The Way,” a not-quite-horrific heavy in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” he doesn’t eviscerate hope with his wooden, half-hearted threats.

“Keeping you is no benefit, destroying you is no loss.”

Hunnam is game enough, a tough guy from TV’s “Sons of Anarchy” who has made plenty of regrettable big screen choices (“Pacific Rim” was a woebegone hit, “King Arthur” and pretty much every thing else deservedly a bomb). He isn’t the most charismatic screen presence, however — blandly pretty, inexpressive.

Malek is a dull big screen presence in this, none of the twitchy nervousness Hoffman brought to this part makes it into his interpretation, none of the guile or hard life-and-death calculations cross his bespectacled eyes when he says “I have trouble seeing hope in hopelessness.”

For all the period detail, characters are a little too healthy and well-scrubbed to be convincing and the actual look of the film is video-flat and dull — ugly. Cinematographer Hagen Bogdanski did “The Young Victoria” and “The Physician,” but here — there’s no contrast to the lighting, no menace in the darkness. It’s a real “throw up your hands and collect a check” job, as if he saw the production design and gave up.

My over-riding gripe with this is that they relied so heavily on the original film’s script by Dalton Trumbo and Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and didn’t really dig into the books (“Banco” was Charrière’s further tales of Papillon memoir).

And by “they” I mean screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski, who when he rewrote the Icelandic hit “Contraband” for Mark Wahlberg, at least got a decent thriller out of it. This is the laziest cut and paste job imaginable. Why even take the credit?

MPAA Rating: R for violence including bloody images, language, nudity, and some sexual material

Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Rami Malek, Eve Hewson, Tommy Flanagan, Yorik van Wageningen

Credits:Directed by Michael Noer, script by Aaron Guzikowski, based on the Dalton Trumbo/Lorenzo Semple Jr. 1973 film script and the book by Henri Charrière. A Bleecker St. release.

Running time: 2:13