Movie Nation

Two men try to keep themselves and their families alive during the Rwandan Genocide and a rich Nashville businessman reaches out to his rape-victim daughter in “Beautifully Broken,” a not-inspirational-enough real-life drama directed by music video veteran Eric Welch.’

You can guess what’s wrong with it from that plot summary. Flatly-scripted, unevenly acted and pointlessly patriarchal, it clumsily ties three three grossly-imbalanced stories together and basically loses its way every time it leaves Africa.

The tragedy of a teenage girl’s rape is somewhat muted, and suffers in scale when you’re comparing it to mass murder by machete in 1994 Rwanda.

Benjamin A. Onyango of “God’s Not Dead” is William Mwizerwa, a righteous, pious husband and father whose middle-class life (he’s a manager with a coffee exporter) is disrupted by the explosion of tribal violence that turned Hutu against Tutsi.

The radio reveals the call to arms, and thugs take to the streets in gangs piled into pickup trucks — “The cleansing has begun!”

William has no sooner said “We’ll be safe here” when he, his wife (regal Eva Ndachi) and little girl have to flee their home and make for the coffee company compound. They face execution in the streets until a timely, heaven-sent explosion spares their lives.

Tezan and Mugenzi (Sibulele Gcilitshana, Bonko Khoza) are a farm family with a toddler daughter when the fighting begins. Mugenzi is “not a soldier, not a fighter” his wife insists. But when neighbors are butchered at their front door, he joins the gang of murderers just to go along, and draw them away from his family.

Meanwhile, in Nashville, workaholic businessman Randy (TV veteran Scott William Winters) is keeping daughter Andrea (played by Emily Hahn as a teen) in riding lessons and on the cheerleading squad in their little corner of affluence.

The men’s lives cross in mysterious ways involving violence, refugee sponsorship, daughters-as-pen pals and faith. One saves another one’s life.

“The life you spared will not be wasted.”

And another is drawn into this world by a kid who is learning altruism at an early age.

“Helping those in need gives you back twice the love!”

The five-handed script goes to some pains to level the playing field of pain, suggesting that great hurt is an equalizer. “We are all equally broken” a mother counsels her child, and that makes us all merit redemption.

But I have to say the flatness of the Nashville scenes sucks the energy and heart right out of “Beautifully Broken.” Bland characters acting in mostly mundane moments of melodrama, relying on emotionally-lacking performances.

Heck, Eric Roberts was cast as the Nashville dad’s father, and given absolutely nothing to play. You get a name, you need to give him something value-added to do.

The African story has tragedy as well, and guilt and forgiveness. It’s a modern parable about great crimes and the greatness of spirit it takes to get over them and move on. Frankly, the acting in the Rwandan scenes is more compelling as well. The Nashville scenes are patronizing and tepid in comparison.

You cannot fault “Beautifully Broken’s” message. It rejects Christian conservative xenophobia and embraces immigrant outreach in the form of sponsoring the less fortunate, charity that is taught and reinforced at an early age. There’s even an “action step” at the end of the sermon that this film almost wants to be.

It’s the movie-making, the acting, that let it down. One lump in the throat moment with all these trials, all this tragedy and the path to uplift the story takes is hardly enough, considering the subjects engaged here.

Faith-based cinema has had its financial successes. But the brutal truth of the genre is that it rarely attracts charismatic, accomplished talent behind the camera or in front of it, people who can transcend the genre and lift it to the next level. Until that happens, you’ll get hackwork like this, a music video director content to preach to the choir, and a choir content to buy tickets to inferior work just because they agree with its proselytizing.

Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic content involving violence and disturbing images, and some drug material

Cast:Benjamin A. Onyango, Scott William Winters, Emily Hahn, Bonko Khoza, Sibulele Gcilitshana, Eva Ndachi

Credits:Directed by Eric Welch, script by Brad Allen, Chuck Howard, Martin Michael, Eric Welch. An ArtEffects  release.

Running time: 1:48

If you or your child ever shed a tear when yet another Roomba bit the dust, then “A.X.L.” may be the movie for you.

A misguided kiddie action pic that combines motocross and a fetching, tail-wagging, howling robotic military dog that chews on pieces of pipe instead of bones and can keep up with you no matter how fast you drive your motorbike thanks to JATO — Jet Assisted Take-Off, it has no laughs, no thrills and little that would distract, much less entertain a child.

Unless that child is inclined to go “Awww” at anything resembling a dog, even a digitally-created metal Skeletor like A.X.L. He’s a prototype whose name means “Attack, Expedition, Logistics,” “the War Dog of the Future” from Craine Industries and mad scientist Andric (Dominic Rains) and his whiny tech assistant Randall (Lou Taylor Pucci).

A.X.L. has busted out of the desert Southwest lab where the $70 million killing machine was being developed. Why? Not getting enough walks and trips to the dog park, apparently.

That’s where motocross master Miles (Alex Neustaedter) stumbles across it…”him.” He’s just been conned by a conniving rich rival Sam (Alec MacNicoll) who urged him to “rip some gnarly whips” (get his bike airborn) before causing him to crash.

And the robot dog, hiding from search drones, finds him. The lad says the same thing boys always say to strange dogs in the movies.

“I’m not going to hurt you.” Thus, the motorized, macerator-mouthed mutt is “tamed” by the kid who electronically imprints on it. “HIM.”

The too-hot/midriff-baring girl his rival has under his thumb Sara (Becky G) becomes Miles’ partner-in-crime as he resolves to not give the machine back to its owners, as “He’s been abused.”

Thomas Jane shows up to collect a check as Miles’ dad, and Ted McGinley defies all logic by continuing to find work playing Sam’s rich jerk of a father.

We’re meant to get all gooey and fear for the “dog” as assorted cruel threats present themselves to it — “Him” — but good luck with that. “A.X.L.” the film and A,X.L. the War Dog is as cuddly as a Battle Bot, with and all the warmth of the Craftsman section of your neighborhood Sears.

MPAA Rating:PG for sci-fi action/peril, suggestive material, thematic elements and some language

Cast: Alex Neustaedter, Becky G, Thomas Jane, Dominic Rains, Lou Taylor Pucci

Credits: Written and directed by Oliver Daly. A Global Road release.

Running time: 1:40

Her momma could’ve warned her, about that deal with the Devil you make when you get yourself marked with that “sexual” label.

Granted, a “Suspira” remake (sort of) with Tilda Swinton and erotic modern dance is not “Fifty Shades Shakes It.” But that’s dull actress Dakota’s specialty these days.

Amazon Studios made this and unleashes this Dance of Death on Nov. 2. 

There’s nothing scarier than a little girl with the right glower.

Ellie has it.

Red hair tied in a bun, freckles, she’s imp-sized. But when we first see the “Prodigy,” it’s from behind. She’s in a straight jacket.

“Do not leave ANYTHING near the subject’s hands. Do NOT for any reason remove the subject’s restraints.”

As the colonel giving these instructions has a big ol’black eye, Dr. Fonda (Richard Neil) is inclined to listen.

She fixes him with those eyes, comments on Fonda’s “sweater vest” and “bargain bin” appearance, glares at the unseen observers on the other side of the one-way mirror, and smirks. “How quaint.”

Ellie (Savanah Liles) sizes Fonda up, deducts that he’s widowed or divorced, that no woman would let her man leave the house looking like a movie cliche of a distracted academic.

“That’s quite an evaluation, Eleanor.”

“Don’t call me Eleanor…Spare me your pandering.”

“Prodigy” is a “two hander,” basically a “bad seed” and a shrink (“Actually, I’m a psychologist.”), parked at a table in a darkish interrogation room, engaging in a battle of wits.

Ellie is a self-diagnosed “maladjusted pre-pubescent.” “Spoiled little psycho” say her keepers.

She is manipulative, hyper-observant and the fact that she calls her interrogator “Jimmy” suggests that she can hear through walls. Fonda? He didn’t even read her file. And it’s a thick one.

“I think I’m ready for anything at this point.”

If only the filmmakers had realized “This is just a two-hander.” The room full of guards, techs, doctors and officers on the other side of that mirror are a mere distraction. The tension, the drama is at that long table — Ellie and Fonda, the aloof, creepy kid and the kindly, elbow-patched therapist.

“Her walls are built high,” Fonda says. “It make take a while to pull them down.”

Don’t mention “love” to her. And don’t untie her hands to eat her banana and peanut butter sandwich.

“I’m going to hold up a card, and I want you to tell me…”

“I KNOW how it works.”

Dead dogs, gas chamber inhabitants, bloody car accident victims. Ellie’s not seeing happy fluffy clouds in the Rorschach Test.

“What possible reason could they have for strapping a nine year old to a chair like this?”

We wonder. So does “Jimmy.”

“Eleanor can do things…that we’ve never seen before.”

There’s nothing for it but for them to play chess. She doesn’t need to touch the pieces to move them. Apparently.

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.”

Truth be told, hanging the film on young Miss Liles would be a hard argument to make. She’s menacing, but not memorably so. She’s an ordinary looking kid whose line readings are venomous enough, but her gestures lack the coiled fury we’re meant to fear. The cat-and-mouse game lacks stakes if we (and Neil, playing Fonda) don’t fear what the monster/child is capable of.

Truth be told, there are entirely too many “mice.”

To be fair to the leads, the insipid “Dr. Fonda Explains it All For You” scenes in “the other room” suck the tension out of the film every seven minutes or so. “Punishment” for her actions (“zapping”), lame one-liners about the demonic child and what she “knows” about her captors don’t raise the stakes enough.

The effects are limited, the performances a tad muted and entirely external, even as each character is pushing the other’s buttons.

If they’d workshopped this, they might have figured out that “Prodigy” would make a perfectly suspenseful play. That being the case, leaving the “control room” inhabitants an unseen (but perhaps heard) menace, ratcheting up psychological suspense between doctor and patient in that room with far sharper, more pointed writing, cutting the constant “explaining” of it all, might have let this “Prodigy” reach its full potential.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Richard Neil, Savannah Liles, Jolene Andersen

Credits:Written and directed by Alex Haughey, Brian Vidal. A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:20

The major (and minor) Hollywood studios tend to dump movies onto the last two weekends in August, films that have limited box office prospects, damaged goods that their research tells them audiences won’t care to see, word of mouth won’t help and critical acclaim won’t save.

“Searching” appears to be the exception to this rule this late August, a cyber thriller/missing daughter story starring John Cho. Previewed in a few markets, good reviews, thus far. Screen Gems is “previewing” it tonight where I live AFTER the first paid showings of everything else.

“Happy Time Murders” was not previewed widely either. STX is trotting out releases, but is barely a studio at this point. Throwing stuff against the wall.

“Papillon?” It’s Bleecker Street. Even if it’s good they can’t market people into wanting to see it.

The mechanical dog movie, “A.X.L.”? Not previewed anywhere. Global Road is, I think, a Chinese-financed distributor. Mostly crap.

It’s no wonder the theater chains are financing their own productions, which they can promote the heck out of and hope, every now and then, one connects with viewers.

“Beautifully Broken” is making its way into Regal Cinemas this weekend, not previewed or reviewed, a faith-based drama of families in crisis, one of them caught in a bloody African civil war. Eric Roberts is the big name in the cast, so it didn’t cost much.

A cleverly calculated risk that perhaps pastors in the pulpit will push and make it a hit.

As Hollywood is doing them no favors dumping dogs into the Dog Days, I’ll put off seeing the pics Hollywood chose not to preview here and check this out instead.

The grey gathering gloom that hangs over “Super Dark Times” seeps into your bones.

It’s a ’90s teen thriller that has hints of “Stand By Me” and “River’s Edge” about it. And when it isn’t annoying the living hell out of you, it’s a grim, spare story with funereal reality and some pretty impressive performances.

The only problem with it is it entails spending 100 minutes with 16 year-old boys.

The morbid humor, boorish banter, trolling the school yearbook telling dirty lies or dirtier truths about the girls whose pictures they see therein, the warped values, creepy lack of a sense of proportion, the insane, inane admissions about why they watch their parents’ copy of “True Lies” late at night (Jamie Lee Curtis striptease), the ’90s fashion sense, impotent rage at bullies, not knowing what to do with your older brother’s pot stash now that he’s in the military, the tentative blunders in approaching that first real crush — it’s excruciating — to an ex-“Boy” any way.

And that’s before the precipitating incident and perverse, psychotic dreams and rising hysteria that this accident prompts.

Josh and Zach (Charlie Tahan and Owen Campbell) are best buds, hanging out too much in the days just before Christmas in their corner of upstate New York.

They meet up with the oafish Darryl (Max Talisman) and his friend Charlie (Sawyer Barth). As long as they avoid the subject of Allison (Elizabeth Cappucino), things should be cool, right? Josh worships her.

She’s just started to reciprocate his interest when it happens, and all of a sudden Josh has a secret to keep. They all do, except for the one who’s dead.

We see it coming far too soon, guess its outcome before it happens — the grim, shocked, panic-stricken death that comes from bleeding out.

The screaming — “WHAT DID YOU DO?”  — the wrenching gasps of denial, the stunned ” I need you to calm down” replies. “It was an ACCIDENT.”

A full minute doesn’t pass before the feeble attempt to cover this up begins.

“I think we should hide this, too.”

The victim’s bike?

“I’ll take care of that.”

Native cunning has this one building an alibi for all this blood, that one remembering to forget that he knows the others. And there’s nothing like trying to talk to the girl you have a crush on when you’ve just begun a cover-up.

Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski’s script narrows the focus here to Zach, and Campbell (“The Miseducation of Cameron Post”) takes us into soul-sucking guilt and manic paranoia. His nightmares suggest a lifetime of therapy thanks to morbid, confused, hormonal sexuality is on its way, the waking nightmare that began with an accident is his rising terror at discovery and what might come from it.

Campbell makes us feel the deflating impact of telling that first alibi lie — to his “cool mom” mother (Amy Hargreaves). He quickens our pulses with his breathless sprints to “manage” the cover-up.

Director Kevin Phillips, making his feature filmmaking debut, makes the film a triumph of chilling, depressing tone. It’s a thriller, but it mimics the feel of a song from the era sampled on the soundtrack — “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand.”

We don’t see all of this coming, just enough to make us dread the next inevitable stage of this “Simple Plan.” The finale lacks much in the way of logic.

But “Super Dark Times” — boy, there’s a title that’s all truth-in-advertising.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Charlie Tahan, Elizabeth Cappucino, Owen  Campbell, Amy Hargreaves, Max Talisman. Sawyer Barth

Credits:Directed by Kevin Phillips, script by Ben Collins, Luke Piotrowski. An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:41

It’s the Everest of dramatic roles, an actor tackling King Lear once told me, and it stuck.

Old Men play Lear, and surround themselves with dazzling younger women.

So it is for this modern dress British dramatization of “King Lear.”

An Oscar winner in the title role, Oscar winners Emma Thompson and Jim Broadbent, along with Emily Watson and Florence Pugh and Jim Carter of “Downton,” all assembled for Richard Eyre’s film for Amazon Prime. Glad to see Hopkins get the chance to put his Lear on the screen, and I’ll be watching Prime Sept. 28 to see what could be a definitive take on a classic character.

Dylan Sprouse? He’s so sweet, “The Suite Life” blond and tanned and beautiful and all.

How could he be the Evil Student, psychotically-intense, given “bullying” his teacher to get better grades in “Dismissed?”

As Lucas Ward, he kid’s on the money, I have to say, creepy, coiled-too-tight, utterly amoral, the sort who’d write a paper defending the “perfection” of “The Final Solution” and believe it, who considers the treacherous Iago the “hero” of Shakespeare’s “Othello.”

Something’s a little off from the start, showing up mid-term, doing ALL the class assignments he’d missed at his previous school, flattering Mr. Butler, his teacher (Kent Osborne), strolling in and dominating the chess club at “small-minded” Morristown High.

Lucas is the sort of smart-kid/smooth talker who’d be any teacher’s dream, especially one whose students seem bored with his lectures on “Crime and Punishment.

Lucas speaks up in class, sharing brilliant insights like an automaton who memorized the forward to this book or that one. The sports jackets he wears to class, the precise way he uses language. He doesn’t write papers, he prepares dissertations.

But Lucas doesn’t react to class disruptions well, even from a jock twice his size. Something about the way he suggests he’ll “jab a pen in your windpipe” convinces the offender to shut up.

He doesn’t handle being “second seed” of the chess team well, and being second to the fellow who happens to be his lab partner in Chemistry class is just a little too convenient. Accidents happen, after all.

“You know, Beethoven composed some of his best work after he went deaf.”

And he isn’t keen on a B+ on his “Othello” paper.

“Iago is the most honest character in the entire play!”

As charming as he’s been, when the newly-enthused-to-be-teaching-thanks-to-this engaged kid Mr. Butler crosses him, the knives come out — just figuratively at first.

“Mr. Butler, where did you get your degree?”

“Dismissed” doesn’t play up the cat-and-mouse game of Lucas’s tactics against his offending teacher, to its detriment. We don’t wonder what Lucas is capable of. It’s as plain as the Hitlerian flop to his forelock.

Brian McCauley’s script shows this nightmare from the victim’s point of view, Mr. Butler’s application to work at a local college sabotaged, we see his growing irritation and then fear at what Lucas will pull next.

The screenplay shortchanges the characters outside the central conflict, narrowing the focus and turning in on itself with a laughably melodramatic third act.

What, tying the teacher’s wife to the railroad tracks never occurred to these guys?

And Osborne, a writer/producer and voice actor on cartoons like “Adventure Time” and “Phineas and Herb,” is more adequate as the baffled, over-matched foil, than compelling.

But Sprouse? He shows us something, here. It’s not a flawless performance, but it is creepily believable. Has Blumhouse called him in? Because they should.

MPAA Rating: TV-14

Cast:Dylan Sprouse, Rae Gray, Kent Osborne, Mitchell Edwards, Chris Bauer, Randall Park, Alycia Delmore

Credits:Directed by Benjamin Arfmann, script by Brian McCauley. A Making Horror release.

Running time: 1:27

The Angelina Jolie not-quite-Oscar-contender was not the “end” of the “Unbroken” POW story.

Sure, it’s been recast, new director, lower budget and narrower focus, but “Path to Redemption” follows Olympian Louis Zamperini (Samuel Hunt of “Chicago P.D.”) upon his return home, learning to forgive the barbaric Japanese soldiers who imprisoned and tortured him. It opens Sept. 14. 

Return we now to the world of Bianca del Rio, dispenser of drag queen justice, the “Hurricane Bianca” of Texas fame, out to “out” Mother Russia in “Hurricane Bianca: From Russia with Hate.”

It’s a rude, crude, cameo-happy sequel to “Hurricane Bianca,” with the same crazy eye makeup and the same stars as the first daft dirty dog of a gay rights goof.

Because SOMEbody not-named-Tina-Fey has got to keep Rachel Dratch employed.

The SNL alumna plays the Texas high school principal who tried to oust science teacher Mr. Martinez (Roy Haylock) thanks to his homosexuality and drag alter ego — Bianca del Rio. Hate-mongering Debby Ward did time in jail for her wars against Bianca, and dreamed of nothing but revenge.

Her post-prison plan? Once she’s turned off the prison matron (Wanda Sykes) who wanted to “initiate” her to prison sex? Trap Bianca del Rio some place where gays are imprisoned. Not Saudi Arabia, “where they throw them off the roof,” but Russia, which has its own Minister of Homosexual Propaganda (Dot Marie Jones).

“Russia, where vodka is born and elections are stolen!”

Of course, it’s not about the “plot,” it’s about taking drag comedies places John Waters never dreamed. It’s about “clown makeup” and big wigs and dirty, dirty jokes and one-liners, where “bitch” is used as punctuation, rejoinder and greeting.

“Girl, you KNOW I’ve got your back…cuz nobody wants your front!”

Mr. Martinez/Bianca moved to Texas because “Somebody has to teach these inbred twats that the world is older than…those pants.”

His conscience, Fire Island Stephen (D.J. ‘Shangela’ Pierce) thinks he’s wasting his life and Bianca’s stardom (“Famous, well GAY famous.”) amid the Lone Star Republicans.

“You make money, but you never make enough to leave. That’s called ‘Texas Hold’em.'”

Stephen dumps addicted and addled toy boy Rex (Doug Plaut) on Bianca/Martinez because he’s headed to Long Beach, which is “like Hollywood, but for lesbians and fat people.”

When Mr. Martinez gets a “You’ve won a trip to a Russian Science Fair” letter (from Ex-Principal Ward), Rex comes along for the fun, or whatever you’d call it when you visit a country where your sexuality and flamboyance can get you locked up.

Underground drag clubs, Russian paddy wagons, a drag show in a Russian prison that gives Rex “the ‘Folsom Prison Blues'”– all kind of comic non-starters, save for the odd R-rated zinger.

“Now FOCUS, or I will FIST you like a muppet!

“I did not pray to President Trump every morning to turn this country into a great big transgender toilet!

“I told you you’d be a good Mom, and not just because of your hips!”

“SAVE it, Martin Luther Queen!”

The most cinematic thing about “From Russia” is the YMC-Gay opening credits sequence, the zaniest cameo might be Janeane Garofalo, vamping a mad Russian scientist.

And the best performance? Well, Dratch is a natch when it comes to disguising herself in drag.  But Haylock, wearing Urkel glasses in his science teacher guise and the zaniest eye makeup this side of Bozo as Bianca, is as divine as Divine, a Rupaul for our times and a character deserving of a funnier film than this comedy set in a “Godforsaken country (not really, unless Russia has old Super 8 Motels for locations) that smells like burnt cat!”

“I didn’t know it’d be like this.”

“You’re from Texas. There’s a LOT you don’t know. ”

MPAA Rating: Unrated, drug humor, sexuality, crude sexual homor

Cast:Roy Haylock, Alyssa Edwards, Rachel Dratch, Molly Ryman, D.J. ‘Shangela’ Pierce, Katya Zamolodchikova (Brian McCook), Michael Musto, Sally Jessie Raphael

Credits:Directed by Matt Kugelman, script by Derek Hartley and Matt Kugelman. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:25,