Movie Nation

There’s a high tone sheen to the new “Superfly,” a gloss of drug-trade affluence that we haven’t seen in a movie since “Scarface.”

Designer clothes, fur-trimmed pimpwear, mansions, supercars. exotic firearms and elaborate hairstyles highlight a remake that’s a shiny Director X (Julien Christian Lutz) Atlanta updating of what’s regarded as a Blaxploitation classic.

The Alex Tse (“Sucker Free City,” “Watchmen”) script crackles with quotable cinematic street slang — “Get those commas up” (raise more money), “You almost got GOT” (killed), Get that BASS out’you voice!”  and “I won’t go NOWHERE where the ‘J’s’ are silent!” (south of the border).

But that script wallows in “Scarface” homages and sequences to the point where when you see the beginning of the scene, you already know how it’s going to pay off. Characters blurt out exposition, trite situations are forced into the proceedings, simply due to script requirements.

If you’ve plunged into one party where overdressed drug dealers are flinging Dead Presidents into the air, you’ve plunged into them all.

And the title character. Trevor Jackson of TV’s “Grown-ish” and “American Crime,” may be pretty — and we’re not just talking about that styled-to-the-max hair. But he’s a bit young to be this top dog in drugs, and the actor’s not quite there in terms of nailing this amoral Robin Hood of Coke’s charisma.

He has the trappings of Cool Gangsta — a Lexus supercar, two women who live with him in a menage a trois (Lex Scott Davis, Andrea Londo) and the easy respect of all who deal with him. It’s just that Jackson can’t carry himself in a way that sells the swagger.

This is a world of dueling dealers all trying to stay under the radar of the corrupt local police. Youngblood Priest (Jackson) and his lieutenant Eddie (Jason Mitchell) have kept their records clean, despite years of lucrative apprenticeship to Scatter (Michael Kenneth Williams).

That’s probably because the Snow Patrol, a preening, showboating gang obsessed with white leather, white cars, white sneakers, white furs and white guns, is the designer dominant drug supplier to the ATL. Their Grille King overlord, Q (Big Bank Black) leaves Scatter, Priest & Co. alone.

Save for the punk footsoldier JuJu (Kaalan Walker). He’s a Snow Patrolman out to stir things up.

That turns Priest’s thoughts from making himself “Superfly,” and toward escape. All he needs, and say the Drug Deal Movie Cliche with me, “is one LAST JOB.”

Everybody jokes about Priest’s “pretty hair” as he travels among the city’s hip, high and mighty, or downlow and fur-covered.

Naturally, there’s a Mexican drug lord (Esai Morales really should start turning these down at this stage) that must be dealt with. And we’ve seen variations of those “dealt with” scenes in a dozen other, better movies.

It’s all pretty to look at, but the sheen comes at the expense of character development among the most interesting players in the cast. The mentor/pupil thing with Williams gets a flashback or two, the menage a trois gets an explicit shower and sex scene and the perfunctory blunders and betrayals — drive-bys, drawling cops (Jennifer Morrison of “How I Met Your Mother”) looking for their cut — and “surprise” twists we see coming a mile off aren’t remotely as dazzling as the set dressing.

No, the star isn’t reduced to that — set dressing. Jackson’s good in the action moments and there’s presence in other scenes.

It’s just that whatever points the script wants to score on murder-by-police, African American affluence of the “any means necessary” variety and the like are undercut by the shiny surface of all this. The grunge and edge are scrubbed off the city, and with them, the desperation that made this bad guy who made The Man play by His Rules so appealing, is lost. He had the hair long before he had the Benjamins.

This “Superfly” is all pompadour and clothes and cars. There’s nothing beneath the surface.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and language throughout, strong sexuality, nudity, and drug content

Cast: Trevor Jackson, Jason Mitchell, Lex Scott Davis, Andrea Londo, Michael Kenneth Williams, Kaalan Walker, Big Boi, Big Bank Black and Esai Morales

Credits:Directed by Director X, script by Alex Tse . A Sony Columbia release.

Running time: 1:50

All this “Conjuring/Annabelle universe” stuff. Warner Brothers getting deeper into that Lionsgate/Screen Gems/Summit/Blumhouse horror money is more what this is about.

What we’ve got here is your basic haunted convent, with scary ghost nuns. Taissa Farmiga and Demian Bichir are the big names in the cast. Sept. 7. 

Live action, with CGI elephant flying, a remake that relies on generations  of Disney kids growing up weeping to a genuine animated masterpiece.

Michael Keaton, Eva Green, Colin Farrell, Danny DeVito, Oscar winner Alan Arkin, all in the cast of “Dumbo.”

This teaser trailer pushes the right buttons, Burton. It does.

“Straight Into a Storm” is a tuneful, affable rockumentary about Providence, Rhode Island rockers Deer Tick, a band that celebrated its tenth anniversary with a rowdy New Year’s Eve show that mimicked many of the hundreds of concerts that preceded it.

Well, except for the balloons.

They’re a twangy guitar quintet (currently) who have, as their front man John J. McCauley III puts it backstage at that 2014 show, made the journey “from indie band to cult band.”

A more apt, less officially sanctioned label might be “best damned bar band around.” When your shows are known for drunken (and other forms of imbibing) revelry, and your fans greet you with “F— Deer Tick!,” and then sing along to “Let’s All Go to the Bar,” and when your sound is country-tinged rock-a-billy built for young white folks drinking, own it.

They wear their influences like tattoos, and in case you miss them, McCauley, bandmates Dennis and Christopher Dale Ryan and others will list them — John Prine, The Replacements, Hank Williams, Nirvana and certainly an uncredited Steve Earle, whose Appalachian drawl you can hear in a lot of their songs, not all of them sung by McCauley.

He comes off as the most unfiltered and the film focuses on him, as the founder of the group, a sleepy-eyed poet/folk rocker who came by “sleepy-eyed” honestly. The bottle is as omnipresent onstage as his guitar, and he brandishes LSD sugar cubes and jokes about his love of assorted hallucinogenics and how free-basing, etc. started to hurt the music.

Can it lead to baldness? Because he shows off his twice a day scalp treatment for that, too. As I said, “unfiltered.”

The film charts their rise, which is a lot easier to do with bands in this “video camera in every back pocket” era, shots of the grungy/snowy Providence they came up in, the bars they cut their teeth playing in, touring by van, breaking through at the Newport Folk Festival and hitting the liquor store before any recording session.

“Let’s go do a crappy album!”

The albums — “Negativity,” “War Elephant,” etc., made their name and their songs — “Twenty Miles,” “The Dreams in the Ditch” among them — gave birth to their cult.

It’s funny hearing their history and the wacky assorted bands various guys involved were in over the years — Haus, Androgynous Cowboys. Somehow “Deer Tick” stuck.

They’re still on good terms with members who bailed out along the way, and a lot of those guys (including the MC of their New Year’s Eve show) have the funniest anecdotes — being forced to harmonize to prove they’re a band to get out of a speeding ticket in Alabama, or McCauley getting a friend to walk him through his first LSD trip. The friend took him to Bed, Bath & Beyond.

“He thought we’d walk down the aisles and he’d make me name everything we saw as  belonging to ‘Bed,’ ‘Bath’ or, you know, ‘Beyond.'”

The drug material and humor is only funny when you get past McCauley’s self-confessed desire to join “that club,” the “27 Club,” famous musicians who died of drugs by 27. McCauley is now a father the film shows, happily married, a bit less inclined to get hammered, though not a boring teetotaller by any stretch.

Their fans, on tour, in their long engagements in and around Rhode Island, at Bonnaroo, SXSW, or at the Bowery Ballroom New Year’s Eve show in NYC, wouldn’t stand for it.

Films like this are generally for the faithful and are unchallenging at best,  onanistic and “inside baseball” at their worst. The stand outs in the genre have a news hook (“Shut Up and Sing,” about the Dixie Chicks) or other angle (“Buena Vista Social Club,” “Biggie & Tupac,” “I’ll Be Me,” “Dig,” “Anvil”).

But even simpler “Here’s who we are, check us out” pieces can be a fun introduction to the music and the people who make it, like similar films about Metallica, Jay Z, Flogging Molly or Pearl Jam I’ve reviewed over the decades.

And “Straight Into a Storm” manages that, I think. It did for me. Wonder if I can make that October Tampa date, or maybe…Dublin?

MPAA Rating: unrated, drug abuse, alcohol, omnipresent cigarettes, profanity

Cast: John McCauley III, Dennis Ryan, Christopher Dale Ryan, Ian O’Neil,

Credits:Directed by William Miller. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:41

In “Incredibles 2,” the villain is named “The Screenslaver,” a monster straight out of the American Id, as relevant as each day’s latest panic-stricken headlines.

Screenslaver has identified our weakness  — “screens,” that we “don’t talk. You watch talk shows. You don’t play games, you watch game shows.”

And another Achilles heel —  “People will trade quality for ease every time.”

People have “less trust in Congress” to do the right thing  “than monkey’s throwing darts.”

When Elastigirl, Mrs. Incredible, figures all this out, she announces “We’re under ATTACK.” And in the cartoon America, at least, people hear her.

“Incredibles 2” is a superhero action comedy that’s about something, and when’s the last time the moneychangers at Marvel could make that claim? Writer-director Brad Bird has loaded a noisy, long and daffy farce with the most potent Pixar political message since “Wall-E.”

“Screens” are a threat to our freedom.

The much-called-for and long-awaited sequel to “The Incredibles” took 14 years to reach the silver screen, and the animation is even more dazzling, the action beats every bit as thrilling and fun (if repetitive) as the first one.

Is it a major departure or vast improvement over the original? Not really.

But Bird, after dabbling in “Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol” and the eye-opening flop “Tomorrowland” has returned to the medium where he is undisputed master. He visualized a Year of the Woman period piece that’s still about family, but with a heavy dose of female empowerment and those messages about the screens that are threatening our way of life.

“Supers” have been banned from using those superhero powers for 15 years, now. That’s left the Parrs, Bob (Craig T. Nelson), Helen (Holly Hunter), Violet (Sarah Vowell) and Dash (Huck Milner) pretty much homeless.

Until this wiley PR genius (Bob Odenkirk) and his tech-whiz sister (Catherine Keener) pitch them a way to get back into legality and into the public’s good graces. Maybe the ham-fisted Bob, Mr. Incredible, can maintain a low profile. They’ll throw Elastigirl, less of a bull-in-a-china-shop and more a heroine to young girls, into the crime fighting fray as the public face for super-powered do-gooders.

Unemployed Bob has to stay home, help Dash with his “New Math” homework (remember, this is set in the late ’50s/early ’60s), keep the peace with the rebellious Violet and control the suddenly super-powered toddler Jack-Jack.

Elastigirl? She’s ready to mix it up, make her case, “impose (my) will on the status quo.”

Big chase set-pieces involve an Elasticycle, a hover-train and a hydrofoil motor yacht. Fights involve all sorts of superheroes with superpowers.

And Bob gets to Be Incredi-Dad, overwhelmed by the kids’ issues, but helped by saucy designer/advisor Edna (voiced by Bird).

Jack-Jack’s smorgasbord of un-controlled super powers — laser eyes, dimension leaping and the like — get the biggest laughs, especially when he throws down with a racoon. Bird’s Edna, still a spot-on spin on a high tech Anna Wintour, remains hysterical.

The family stuff tends to slow the picture down, and like his counter-parts in Marvel movies, Bird has a hard time giving every character enough to say and do. Anachronisms creep into this alternate future/past a lot more often than they did in the first film. The visuals, including an alarming brawl within a video screenscape and battles with the burrowing “Underminer” (John Ratzenberger, of course), ice effects from FroZone (Samuel L. Jackson), are a big leap beyond what was possible 14 years ago.

Listen for Isabella Rosellini as an embattled ambassador and Barry Bostwick of  “Spin City,” still playing a mayor, and chuckle at Hunter’s Elastigirl complaint about being rebranded via costume — “I’m not all dark and angsty!”

And take to heart that Big Idea, the subtext that characters chew on in philosophically adult ways in scene after scene. Bird and the Incredibles are talking to us.

“You want out of the hole,” one character counsels, “first you gotta put down the shovel.”

MPAA Rating: PG for action sequences and some brief mild language

Cast: The voices of Holly Hunter, Craig T. Nelson, Catherine Keener, Samuel L. Jackson, Bob Odenkirk

Credits: Written and directed by Brad Bird . A Disney/Pixar release.

Running time: 1:58

I’ve made my fondness for Ruth Wilson (TV’s “The Affair”) and the omnipresent Domhnall Gleeson all too clear all too often in this space.

Now, they’re paired up in a period piece set “between the wars,” with Charlotte Rampling and Will Poulter (“The Revenant”), a movie that had me at “There’s something EVIL in this place,” and the stiff-upper-lip “Nonsense” in reply.

Based on a Sarah Waters novel.

It’s an Aug. 31 release, which suggests low expectations (limited release, too) and yet, the same window where “The Constant Gardener” opened — the cusp of Awards Season.

There’s emotional satisfaction in hating. It helps one cope with the Curse of Relative Deprivation. “Why am I here while this rich, no-talent so-and-so is out living a better version of my life?” You know. That.

And Max, the hero of “Catching Feelings,” is a great hater. Max, played by writer-director Kagiso Lediga, is a fiction writing professor in the New South Africa.

That’s the hook of this lightweight delight, a Johannesburg of integration, black oligarchs joining the white ones running the show and young, hip, funny, accomplished and racially diverse circles of friends hitting the clubs, the bars and poetry readings — and coming on to each other, as they do.

And Max hates it, if rather good-naturedly.

He’s got a more successful musician brother, who has to pick up the check for a birthday outing Max was planning on paying for. He’s a “Rolling Stone” artist to watch.

“That’s got to be LOCAL ‘Rolling Stone,’ right?”

He has a best pal academic (Akim Omotoso) he can have flip discussions about “cultural appropriation” of the N-word (but NEVER “the K-word” — “kaffir”), and of the hot coeds all around them with. But going to hear a famous South African novelist (Andrew Buckland) lecture just unleashes more bemused dismissal.

Max, a blocked writer with one novel under his belt, says he’s tired of “that bleeding heart white liberal view of the ‘plight of Africa,'” a view coming from an ex-pat who chose to flee Africa for Australia. Jealous? Sure. Until the guy compliments him on his book, “Lost Among the Roses.”

And he’s got a smart, witty wife Sam (Pearl Thusi), a journalist pretty enough to keep him from the frank temptations of fangirl students. Maybe. He doesn’t hate her.

But that hip newly-gentrified corner of town where they love to eat out?

“I just hate the fact that a few years ago white people were too scared to come out here, and now they’re here over-charging us for steaks and beer. It’s just not right!”

Yes, he “racializes everything.” He’s got a Volvo and a house in the gated suburbs because, well, he’s a classist, too. He’s not that keen on working class black people, either.

It takes a day of drinking and bickering with the old white novelist, and another day of touring the land by Rolls Royce or bicycle, from brothels to front porch beers in the townships, to get Max to “relax” and maybe see how homeland he thought he knew.

That’s one way of looking at the drinking, carousing and flirting with the cute coed
(Zandile Tisani) who is always coming on to him.

Lediga has a hipster’s ease on camera and in Max, he’s created a “losing my hipness” character of vulnerability and abrasive charm. He makes a funny drunk pontificator, not quite out of his depth, but unguarded enough to not see the trap he’s falling into.

The plot, which takes a few too many predictable turns, isn’t as interesting as the characters and the rich milieu Lediga puts them. Buckland gets across a wonderfully entitled Great Writer swagger, and Lediga and Thursi have a sexy, brittle chemistry that runs with her sex appeal and his almost-jealous fear of that sex appeal.

“Catching Feelings” ambles along — No hurry? No worries. — and feels too slight to justify its running time, no matter how flip and funny the dialogue sometimes is.

Slice-of-life moments — chats in the market, bar chats about “the state of marriage” with threesome-pitching strangers, a life insurance sales pitch that devolves into a fight, tempted by the fruit of another, sex in an elevator, hangovers — all the fodder of scores of romantic comedies before this one.

The South Africanness gives it flavor and the players give it spark. “Catching Feelings” is a South African film without the ugly history, without the pious treatment of that history. This is South Africa without guilt (much) but with drinks and banter and a casual sexual tension that almost never fails to tickle.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, frank depictions of sexuality, and cartoon depictions of same

Cast: Kagiso Lediga, Pearl Thursi, Andrew Buckland, Precious Makgaretsa

Credits: Written and directed by Kagiso Lediga. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:56

Life would be tough enough for Mallory, a pale freckled redhead in boarding school in Bangkok.

She crossed the Russian Mean Girl at school, the sort who cracks her knuckles after bloodying Mallory’s nose, hits her with “Hey, Snitch, I swear to God I will KILL you” in her best adolescent Bond Villain voice, and is the Queen of Victimhood when she gets clocked in the way she so richly deserves.

Unfortunately, Mallory (Kelly Ann McCart) used a weapon. And that’s how she ends up “Locked Up.”

Guardian Uncle Tommy (Jared Cohn, also the writer/director) isn’t all that sympathetic.

“Congratulations,” he says between pills and belts of the local booze. That’s Mallory’s next misstep, an overdose.

“Locked Up” is a little “Locked Up Abroad,” a little less “Orange is the New Black” with a hint of “Brokedown Palace.” If only this was “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason,” just a lock up, a song and let’s move on. Nope.

It’s a laughably bad teen-in-stir thriller set at swank, shiny Lattsan Correctional, an American coping with the pristine, orderly two years of Thai Law (corrupt), Thai mores (LOL!) and the cliques that are in reality “gangs” in this “reform school/prison.”

Head mistress Tuptim (Shades of “The King & I”) may try to “keep things informal,” to help “troubled young ladies.” But we know what’s coming. That’s why we tune in to “Bad Girls in Prison” pictures.

“Mmmmmm, fresh MEAT!”

The shiny admissions area and grounds are just a front. The prison is every Asian druggy dungeon we’ve ever seen in the movies. Spray painting “Hell” on the entrance just seems redundant.

The guards let every Euro-trash and Amazonian Asian in there do what they will. Miss “Gingerland” is in over her head.

“You look like a crier,” her cellmate (Kat Grey) taunts. “Are you?”

The sweating, the stripping, the hazing, the threats, the baggy prison fatigues, the rats.

“You will learn to think they’re cute!”

It’s a prison built for “sex, fighting and gambling,” not for rehabilitation, where silence is guaranteed by death threats, mean that the bullied redhead must adapt, toughen up or die. Whatever the officials are having her sign away, whatever the future holds, this is an adapt or die situation.

The decision to have everybody communicate in English is both inaccurate and painful to listen to — labored, unnatural inflections sounded out by non-English speakers.

It’s a film of mopey, tentative acting (especially Cohn), arch villains and “types” — the “inmates” must have emptied out modeling school during the casting call.

And worst of all, they make us wait for the “catfight.”

“You can only hide behind Kat so long. And then you’re MINE!”

From the strip-down scene to the first loving slow-mo of shower time, this is straight-up old school exploitation. Nudity abounds. Rape. Inmate-on-inmate sex. More showers. This is as demeaning as movies get for young actresses.

The sinister warden (Maythavee Weiss) lets her monstrous side show, in the most labored English this side of Melania. 

“Bring them to the CAGE! Fight now. I say FIGHT!”

Train, toughen up, get your head right. Strip on command.

The fights? No wonder they made us wait. Meh.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, nudity, explicit sex, profanity, substance abuse

Cast: Kelly Ann McCart, Kat Grey, Jared Cohn, Katrina Ingkarat

Credits: Written and directed by Jared Cohn. Aan Asylum release.

Running time: 1:25

It’s hard to know what to make of “Path of Blood.”

The documentary begins with Islamic fanatics and narration underscoring efforts to create, or recreate “a global Muslim empire,” of making war on “the Crusaders.”

That would be us.

And then we meet the footsoldiers in this jihad/Holy War. They’re interviewed by their comrades for the online obituary/recruitment videos posted by Al qaeda.

They’re giggling and laughing, and a little confused.

“I don’t understand the question,” Brother Ali complains. Stop using such “big words,” he suggests.

Training videos include jihadists competing in human wheel-barrow races, their baggy pants falling down. “Delete that,” one boy, barely in his teens, laughs.

Coming back to camp in a driving rain, they’re singing and laughing hysterically.

“This is MARTYRDOM,” one bellows as the torrent threatens to wash their tents, bedrolls, what have you, away.

Thoughts of Albert Brooks’ “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World” pop up. Are they, is this movie, having us on? Is this a mockumentary?

Glance back over the credits. Mark Boal, journalist turned screenwriter of “The Hurt Locker,” “Zero Dark Thirty” is a producer. Director Jonathan Hacker is a British documentarian specializing in spy documentaries and a film about “Britain’s First Suicide Bombers.”

No. This isn’t a joke. And as the young, the faithful, the fanatical and plainly gullible clean and brandish their AK47s, we get the gallows humor. They’re as serious as young men advising, “KEEP the bandana! Your hair looks AMAZING!” can be.

But Hacker’s film, basically video underscoring the book, “Path of Blood: The Story of Al Qaeda’s War on the House of Saud” (Saudi Arabia’s rulers) he co-wrote with Thomas Small, then suggests more troubling motives.

Jihadists declare “Join the religion of god or be killed” and “I bring you SLAUGHTER,” as “Voice of Jihad” online videos document “missions” to attack “infidels,” “Crusaders,” “Hindu dogs” and “foreign scum.” It’s all footage from the early to mid-2000s — dated, historical at this stage. Why revisit it now?

And the subtext? Saudi Arabia bore the brunt of the fight with this terrorist organization, suffered most of the attacks and did the most to destroy it. Saudis and the House of Saud are “victims” of this fanaticism, running the in-country man-hunts, tracking down and killing off cells of Al Qaeda — usually AFTER another deadly attack, often playing catch-up to the Bin Laden organization.

In simply presenting this mass of captured jihadist video, mixed with official Saudi security forces raid footage, firefight video and odd snippets of Al Aribiya (Saudi owned-state TV) coverage of the conflict, is Hacker cashing Saudi checks for a little House of Saud image polishing?

We see victims of the violence, foreign workers, children killed in bombings. Propagandists refer to this as “The Bloody Shirt” persuasion — wave the victims in our faces to prompt some reaction.

There are bloodied, bullet-riddled corpses of Al Qaeda fighters, and almost comically gruesome scenes of the jihadists elaborate Saudi funerals.

An outsider might well ask, why is this oppressive, religion-controlling state allowing these mass murderers, with their “72 Virgins” vanity plates on their truck bombs, to even BE buried? Wouldn’t the best Islamic deterrent to recruitment and martyrdom be to deny them that superstitious comfort, and let the Islamic world see their corpses dumped in the sea?

There’s nothing in the narration, and there are no expert witnesses interviewed on camera to provide context to all this. No, the world doesn’t need another Complete History of Modern Radical Islam, its offshoots and inspirations. But we don’t hear the word “Wahhabism” once. This 18th century fundamentalist sect is widely considered to be the wellspring of current jihadist thought. And the House of Saud has spent billions embracing it, twisting it to its purposes and coddling it as long as the terrorism it spread was abroad.

There is no mention of 9/11, and while that “behind the scenes” footage is better known — bin Laden’s cruel, insulting laughs at the gullible, “martyred brothers” he paid to train and send to America sticks in the mind — that allows “Path of Blood” to conveniently leave out that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi.

“Blood” narrows its focus to Saudi and foreign victims and Saudi fights — mostly from 2003-2005 — against the beast the House of Saud financed and created, Americans tortured and (off camera) beheaded, Brits and Americans in “soft target” businesses in Saudi Arabia murdered in their offices (on camera).

It makes for a chilling portrait of fanaticism at work, even if it is more historical than anything worthy of “let’s feel that fear again” topicality. Even if we suspect its designed to gin up more support for our Islamic ally in the Middle East.

Because “Path of Blood” is just as chilling as pay-for-play Saudi image polishing, selectively editing that history in a “Hey, look, OUR PRINCES were victims, too” effort.

MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody, explicit scenes of death and dismemberment

Cast: Narrated by Samuel West

Credits:Directed by Jonathan Hacker. A Paladin release.

Running time: 1:29

What do the stars of the “Universal Soldier” film series have in common with “Brokeback Mountain” cowboys?

Jean-Claude Van Damme, the onetime “Muscles from Brussels,” and Dolph Lundgren, the “Siberian (Stockholm, actually) Express,” just can’t quit each other.

They reunite yet again for “Black Water,” an oddly over-plotted and implausible action pic starring a couple of wizened action stars who peaked in the ’90s.

The intervening years have seen not just Z-movies, but something resembling “comebacks” for these two — “JVCD” and reality TV for Van Damme,  “Expendables” and “Sharknado” outings for Lundgren.

Like their contemporaries, Sly, Arnold, Bruce and Mel, they’re beating back Father Time, or trying to. Their head-busting’s been replaced by gunfighting.  The scripts they’re forced to shoot? As awful as ever.

Van Damme plays Scott Wheeler, a spy or agent of some sort who wakes in a featureless prison cell. He shouts into the void, “Where the Hell AM I?”

A voice, a fellow “inmate,” we come to understand, replies that “officially, it doesn’t exist…Neither do you.”

That would be Marco (Lundgren), a man of certain skills with “a terminal case of ‘I know too much,” similarly “disappeared” into the void.

Wheeler, at the urging of Marco, thinks back to the “last thing” he remembers. Flashbacks take us to New Orleans, an assignment of some sort gone wrong, the dishy contact (Courtney B. Turk) half his age who Bond Babed her way into his bed right before everything went wrong.

Now, mysterious competing government agencies, repped by Ferris (Patrick Kilpatrick) and Rhodes (Al Sapienza) are competing to see who gets to torture our hard target.

“Guys like him have an infinite threshold for pain,” Ferris growls, upping the ante. “You want a man to tell the truth? Put a needle in his eye.”

That’s kind of twisted, if you know JCVD’s history. He was successfully sued in the ’90s for half-blinding a stunt man in a fight scene gone wrong in “Cyborg.” Penance?

Somehow, Wheeler’s got to get the drop on his captors and start the long process of a prison break — one complicated by the film’s title. No “Black Water” isn’t a play on a former U.S. government contractor, but the conditions of their imprisonment.

Much of the movie, our two heroes are separated — one, making new allies, killing old enemies, working his way through this “facility” until, of course, he gets back tto the long-absent Marco.

Because of that whole “can’t quit you” thing.

Part of Van Damme’s appeal has always been the mismatch of seeing someone his height fight a world of villains and evil minions, always much larger. A little of the fun of pairing him with Lundgren once was that height mismatch, a sight gag that many a comic duo have exploited. Nothing is made of that here.

There is a Van Damme offspring in the supporting cast. See if you can spot him.

The most interesting scenes in “Black Water” are those first moments of mystery, harking back to Pirandello or that classic “Twilight Zone” episode, “Five Characters in Search of an Exit.” The mystery is far more interesting than its solution. The actors, with their gruff history — more history than real chemistry — less interesting than their confused characters.

Letting Wheeler and Marco reason out their plight, with less specific flashbacks not ALL focusing on Van Damme’s Wheeler, would have heightened the mystery, still leaving time for the two or three memorable one-liners, and time for shooting butts and taking names.

What all involved, including cinematographer-turned-director Pasha Patriki, settle for is easier, dumber and far less interesting, a movie that lives down to its vague, murky title with endless shootouts through sets that don’t remotely resemble what this prison is supposed to be.

As for the performances, Van Damme and Lundgren may not be able to quit allowing producers to pair them up. But they should. Movies like this and their work in them isn’t doing either of them any favors.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and language

Cast: Jean Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Jasmine Waltz, Patrick Kilpatrick, Al Sapienza

Credits: Directed by Pasha Patriki, script by Chad Law. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:44