Movie Nation

For me, the money shot of “Skate Kitchen” is a little girl, clinging to her mom’s hand and spinning around in awe and adoration as a gang of load, assertive and a little unruly skateboarders swerve around them on a lower Manhattan sidewalk.

They’re young women and this child of three or four has a new goal in life — to be like them, confident, athletic and brash, to own the concrete all through what used to be Hell’s Kitchen.

Crystal Moselle has followed up her critically-acclaimed, unconventionally-raised-boys documentary “The Wolfpack” with a bracing, documentary-real coming-of-age drama about girls who shred in a boy’s world, a skateboarder who finds her tribe and hangs with these kids who can shred, grind and bail when they fail with the best of them.

They just happen to be female.

Camille (Rachelle Vinberg) lives with her divorced nurse mom (Elizabeth Rodriguez), done with high school and bored out of her skull on Long Island. Her sole adventure — treks to skateboarding parks and favorite hangs where she tries to drop in to the boys’ tricks without snaking their line.

She’s good enough to have a tiny taste of Instagram fame, but she’s an outsider, something underlined when she “credit-cards” on a fall. The injury (you’ll see) is painful, scary and bloody, and her mother gives her the “No more skating, PROMISE me” speech. Camille agrees. And then goes behind her back with elaborate schemes to sneak her board out of the house while she goes to “the library.”

What mom doesn’t know is that Camille has found other female skaters, their online photos and videos luring her to Manhattan like the Siren’s song. She’ll go to “the library,” the 42nd Street New York Public Library and environs, New York’s skateboarding Mecca.

And rough and tumble as they are, these girls — a floating group of five, seven or eight — welcome her in with a “What’s your name? You really shredded that!”

Kurt (Nina Moran) is the outspoken lesbian leader of the pack, who finds them room to skate in the crowded venues — “So many penises in the way!”

Janay (Ardelia “Dede” Lovelace) the friendliest one, with the best life situation — a nice house they can hang in, an indulgent, supportive dad who feeds them all on occasion and gives them a place to crash.

Camille has grown up without a lot of friends, so the girl talk is every bit as valuable to her as the skating camaraderie. They pass the joint and talk about boys, or not being into boys, debunk tampon myths and maybe the difference between heedless, reckless boy skaters and themselves.

“You can’t think. Us girls, we think too much.”

The gender rivalry in the hot spots to skate is borderline violent. Skateboarding is just like surfboarding, Moselle suggests — tribal, primal, turf-protecting. But there’s one boy, Devon (Jaden Smith), who seems to want to keep the peace. With his metallic-red hair and big camera, he stands out.

And he’s noticed Camille and sees a compelling video and photo subject in her mad skillz.

The problem? He has “history” with the girls. Trouble’s coming.

That’s the most conventional thing in Moselle’s narrative, a budding romance, a crush.

It’s a film that sounds improvised much of the time, with Moselle’s camera tracking the skaters down the streets, into construction zones where they’re not allowed, grinding and trying to match each other, trick for trick, scaring and insulting the non-skaters or worse, ex-skaters (adult, working in a straight job, off the board) they come across.

“Hey, can you do an ‘alley’?”

“No, bro, I’m a poser.”

Vinberg is a compelling screen presence and like the others,can skate well enough to manage a trick or three in a single take. Bespectacled Camille is pretty, has a lot of hair, but is just the sort of girl you could ignore in Vinberg’s performance. The other skaters, especially those played by Moran and Lovelace, are loud, out there, making themselves noticed, even when they crash or bail.

Smith has never been less affected on the screen, guarded, making you wonder about the bad blood he’s engendered and the rough crowd he skates with and who share his crowded, dumpy apartment.

Moselle’s second film to focus on a fringe-dwelling “pack” but first to be a narrative, fictional feature, has an intimacy that the novelty of a free-range family of raised-by-themselves boys did not. What the movies share is a non-judgmental point of view, no “don’t try this at home” moments, though the viewer can certainly infer that.

She makes optimistic films with one over-riding message. Don’t worry about kids. Even if they get “credit-carded” along the way, they’ll figure it out.

MPAA Rating: R for drug use and language throughout, strong sexual content, and some nudity, all involving teens

Cast: Rachelle Vinberg, Jaden Smith, Dede Lovelace, Nina Moran, Jules Lorenzo, Kabrina Adams, Ajani Russell

Credits:Directed by Crystal Moselle, script by Jen Silverman, Aslihan Unaldi. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:45

Truthfully, teaming up with Emily Blunt’s not a bad call.

And you can’t tell anything from a stars wandering a tiny sliver of the set in a “teaser” trailer.

But as we’ve reached the DDJSP — The Dwayne Johnson Saturation Point — you have to wonder how novel it will feel to see him in yet another high concept kid-friendly franchise. “Jungle Cruise” also features Edgar Ramirez, Paul Giamatti and the equally omnipresent Jesse Plemons and arrives in Oct. of 2019.

Just a little spring break camping trip, that’s what teen bros Sean, Donnie and Jeremy have in mind.

Sean (Daniel Doheny) has been away at school in Germany. Donnie (Luke Spencer Roberts) “might” have been telling the whole town he was in rehab. And Jeremy, aka “Virgin Megastore” (Eduardo Franco) a fake ID and a switchblade he just found, “in case any s— goes down in the woods!”

What can go wrong?

In “The Package,” pretty much everything. Some of it, OK yeah, funny.

You’ve probably heard this, once titled “Eggplant Emoji,” is a raunchy teen comedy that’s one long penis joke. Because what happens, AFTER Jeremy’s sister (Geraldine Viswanathan) and her pal, Donnie’s ex Sarah (Sadie Calvano) crash their “bro’s only” trip, Donnie loads them up with beer and then gets drunk.

And drink teens with switchblades have accidents. A penis is lopped off. It’s amazing the stuff that can happen to a penis, in transit through the woods, toted about by short-attention-span idiots.

Rattle snake bike, dumped on the ground, dropped off a cliff, hauled in a stolen boat, cleaned by taxidermist Redneck Reginald (Mike Elkund, mohawked hilarity), all AFTER the injured party has been serenaded with “Oops, I Did it Again” all the way to the Medivac chopper.

The screw-ups have twelve hours to rescue this member. As the nurse (Mary Holland) keeps reassuring our patient, “It’s not looking good.” Give him some more “living without a penis” literature and hope the four friends can scramble down the mountain, bargain with an oversexed punk 11 year-old, etc. and make to the OR on time.

Director Jake Szymanski (“Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates”), working from a hit or mess script by Kevin Burrows and Matt Mider, keeps the film on its feet and moving — for the most part, a must for comedy. 

Need to signal a Medivac chopper in the dark? There’s a funny way to shoot and cut the desperate act of tossing a propane cylinder into the campfire (It’s going to go BOOM.) and Szymanski knows how to do it. He maintains the cliffhanger suspense with ease.

More than a couple of the penis mishaps are laugh-out-loud funny (wait for “Redneck Reginald and his psychotic girlfriend played by Sugar Lyn Beard). The foul-mouthed kid (Chance Hurstfield) is pin-your-ears back hilarious.

The young cast is uneven but game, with Doheny amusingly hapless, Viswanathan plucky, Calvano as rude as any jerk teen boy as and Spencer, a redhead with an attempted-mustache, a sort of Next Gen Clark Duke — arrogant and clueless.

Oh, and it’s not giving too much away to reveal the victim. It’s Jeremy.

“If this doesn’t work out, I’m gonna be your sister, Becky.”

“You’ve already got the hair for it.”

“The Package” is funnier than any one joke/”dick” joke comedy has any right to be.

MPAA Rating: TV:MA

Cast: Daniel Doheny, Geraldine Viswanathan, Sadie Calvano, Eduardo Franco, Luke Spencer Roberts, Sugar Lynn Beard, Blake Anderson

Credits:Directed by Jake Szymanski, script by  Kevin Burrows, Matt Mider. A Red Hour/Netflix  release.

Running time: 1:34

When the actor Thomas Hulce was preparing to play the film role that defined him, “Amadeus,” he read about Mozart, but he truly studied the tennis star of the day, John McEnroe. Who better to model a precocious brat of a composer on than the player the world nicknamed “SuperBrat?”

“I’m a vulgar man,” Hulce’s Mozart admits in the film, “I assure you my music is not.”

The McEnroe analogy is almost too obvious.

When filmmaker Julien Faraut was plumbing the archives of French sport for a documentary about Gil de Kermadec, the government cinematographer charged with capturing close-up footage of every year’s French Open Tennis Championships in the ’70s and ’80s, he found reels of every great players of the era — Borg, Vilas, Connors and Lendl. And he found reel upon reel of John McEnroe.

Kermadec was putting together instructional films out of this footage, and was drawn to the fiery American with the most complete game ever seen, an artist and “perfectionist” who railed at those he perceived as less perfect (line judges, chair umpires), and at the courtside distractions. Chief among those distractions? Kermadec’s admittedly noisy Arriflex high speed (for slow-motion) camera and the filmmaker himself, sitting court side with a huge microphone, holding up “slate” cards behind McEnroe indicating date, reel, etc.

Faraut took that footage, filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s declaration that “Cinema lies, sport doesn’t” and the theories of French film critic Serge Daney — that tennis is inherently cinematic, with drama and players who, like filmmakers, control time — and created a mesmerizing, brilliant film about the movement, motivation and mentality of McEnroe at his peak.

“John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection” is quite simply the greatest tennis film ever made and one of the finest documentaries to honor any sport.

Actor Mathieu Amalric (“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”) narrates this exploration of one player’s game, letting us see up close and in slow motion “what the human eye cannot.” With Kermadec’s rare, unseen footage, we catch a perfectionist in his moment, a player who thrived with an “unpredictable” game that was “never about violence, but variety.” And we come to understand what so transfixed that cinematographer long ago, and something of the McEnroe mystique that lingers over the game even today.

A cinema camera, Faraut argues, creates a “form of truth” about sport, and in Kermadec isolating his camera, focusing in 3/4 view solely on McEnroe throughout a match, we see just “what is needed to win a point in a tennis match” — the speed, agility, snap-judgments, hand-eye coordination, sprints and slides, gasping stamina and mental acuity involved.

We get all that just from watching McEnroe, up close, candid, in his element and in his best year — at the 1984 French Open finals at Roland Garros Stadium.

Faraut plays around with documentary form in what is, in essence, a “found footage” film conjured out of another’s work. He uses vintage tennis instructional movies, live action and animated, an archived TV essay on McEnroe by tennis journalist Bud Collins, that clip from “Amadeus” and tight, fascinating dissections of McEnroe’s play and his endless arguments with officials and swipes at cameramen (including Kermadec himself).

The arguments are a revelation. McEnroe used them to “control time” in his matches, a piece of gamesmanship that still seems grossly unsportsmanlike and unfair, all these decades later.

But his gripes — the sometimes blown calls, the damned noisy cameras in the pristine mid-point silence at Roland Garros, and the disconcerting Frenchman with the huge boom mike sitting behind him? The brat had a point.

“Perhaps I’m 20 times better at seeing, 20 times better at hearing than you ever WILL be,” he berates one chair umpire.

You can write it off to nostalgia for the game when “the rackets were of wood and the men of iron,” but Kermadec’s footage underlines that point as well. Today’s game might have no room for a brittle McEnroe, who hated to practice and used doubles as his match-prep, who never cooperated posing for photos and could not always bend his pursuit of perfection to conditions on the court. Tennis today has no head case to match McEnroe, nobody with as perfect a drop shot or cunningly-disguised surprise lob, either. It’s all about big rackets and baseline power now.

Faraut has made a great film about a sporting icon,  but one that also serves his original purpose, paying tribute to a cinematographer who “studied tennis the way other filmmakers study Emperor penguins in the Antarctic.” Which is to say, McEnroe isn’t the only one “In the Realm of Perfection” here. 

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: John McEnroe, Gil de Kermadec, narrated by Mathieu Amalric

Credits:Directed by Julien Faraut, . An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:35

The hype — a “Sharknado/Shark Week” marketing campaign and funnier-than-the-movie trailer led to a big Thursday and very big Friday for “The Meg.” 

Warner Brothers had tamped down expectations, and this China-centric, Chinese financed late summer groaner should have made its money overseas. As indeed it is.

But it’s making bank in North America as well, $40 million, Deadline.com is now projecting. That’s not quite double opening weekend guesses about its earnings.

And in China? $16 million on day one. 

Jason Statham, have a cigar!

“Mission: Impossible — Fallout” is in second, still expected to clear $150 by Sunday night ($19 million for the weekend), “Christopher Robin” is falling off 61% to $12.

“Slender Man” is now looking like a $10 million-sized “hit,” low for a horror opening, but considering it’s not a franchise, not bad.

That’s right around what “BlackKklansman” is earning on half as many screens.

An occupied British island, plucky locals “resisting” the Nazis with a fake “book club,” hiding livestock and a recipe for using the one vegetable they were allowed in creative, whimsical ways  — “The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Society” has “Whisky Galore!” written all over it.

But that’s not the movie Mike Newell (“Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Enchanted April”) got out of this British novel. It’s not his fault the tale turns, unexpectedly, towards “The Sorrow and the Pity” and winds up in melodrama-land.

Not totally his fault, in any event. A two hour movie wrung out of a 100 minute novel? Yeah, that’s on Mr. “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” (one of the better Potters, I thought).

“The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society” was born in desperation, at the spur of the moment. One of the British “Channel Islands,” Guernsey was invaded by the Germans right after France fell. It opens with staggering locals facing Nazi occupiers in the dark of night. No drunken declaration of “This is OUR island, not theirs,” can save them after curfew. But the whopper, “We have a book club,” does. “The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society” is born.

It’s a story the comic adventure novelist Juliet Ashton (Lily James of “Downton You-Know-What”) hears after the war, in a fan letter of sorts.

She and her publisher (Matthew Goode, perfect) are pondering the cash and notoriety her “Izzy Bickerstaff” books give her. Critical acclaim, gravitas and intellectual satisfaction? Not so much.

The war has left her dissatisfied and a little shell-shocked and shaky. Free-spending GIs are still in town, the nightclubs are swinging again — the ones not still in the ruins of the Blitz. “Don’t Waste Bread: Others Need It” is still stamped on every letter.

Maybe the guilt kicks in with that fan letter from a quirky book club, somebody who clung to an early book she wrote during long years of German occupation, when the mail, decent food and contact with the outside world was cut off.

The letter, from a farmer named Dawsey Adams (Michael Huisman), read in voice-over narration, is nostalgic (this is 1946), mysterious and just a little romantic. Juliet is intrigued. She must know the inspirations for this “club” of readers on a German-occupied island where life was put on hold for five years.

“Why did a roast pig have to be kept a secret? How could a pig cause you to form a literary society? And most important of all, ‘What is a potato peel pie?”

Juliet had a rather easy war of it, all things considered, even though everybody suffered loss. And now? She’s got a handsome American diplomat beau (Glen Powell) and the celebratory posh life is all around her. Guilty conscience?

Dawsey writes back, “The Germans took all our animals away. It was against the law to keep even one.” They were ordered to simply grow potatoes instead. “A proper meal was only had in memory, like the post, which they had suspended, the radio, which they had taken,  and the telegraph cables which they had cut.”

The pie? It was invented by the postmaster (Tom Courtenay) as a way of making something of the one thing the Huns let them keep — potato peels.

He writes of their “club” and Juliet takes the bait. She must venture to 1946 Guernsey, forsake her American beau and find this flinty Mrs. Maugery (testy-grim Penelope Wilton, another “Downton” alumna), this Isla (Katherine Parkinson), who distilled homemade gin.

On picturesque Guernsey, isle of rocky cliffs, seaside forests, small farms, cozy cottages, bicycles and horse-drawn carts, she sees a cute story for the London Times. But the book “society?” They’re adorable on first meeting. And less cooperative on the second.

It’s not all nostalgia, grins and giggles. The war is still a recent horror to these quaint locals. Rifts, feuds and bitterness, with memories of evacuated children, missing locals “transported” off by the Germans and hardship stick with them.

Any film fan knows where this is going, but the source novel takes pains to trip up expectations as Juliet digs into the “real story,” finds the “real” objections to her telling it and gets sidetracked from the future that seemed to lay itself before her as she embarked on this journey.

James is a winsome presence, with able support from Huisman, Powell, Goode, Courtenay, Parkinson and Wilton.

But the story veers into pure melodrama, a tale of missing persons, grudges, babies whose real fathers we aren’t sure about and a quite young novelist trying to “investigate” and find the true story — from the club members, or from her unsentimental on-island landlady (Bronagh Gallagher of “The Commitments”).

As we know how this is going to pan out, it’s a puzzlement how Newell wrings 30 unnecessary minutes out of the journey. Guernsey is a great setting, James a properly plucky English heroine and her potential suitors nicely contrasted.

The most intriguing thing here is the “collaborationist” angle, something usually only seen in stories of Occupied France.

But that’s not enough to make “The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society” warrant its long title, its drawn-out ending or patience-testing, flaccid running time.

MPAA Rating: TV-14

Cast: Lily James, Glen Powell, Matthew Goode, Jessica Brown Findlay, Tom Courtenay, Penelope Wilton

Credits:Directed by Mike Newell, script by Don Roos, Kevin Hood and Thomas Bezucha, based on the novel by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. A Studio Canal/Netflix release.

Running time: 2:04

Hogwarts it ain’t. Kind of a giddy trailer, eh wot?

The triumph of “Crazy Rich Asians” is the spectrum of its characters, a broad representation of the global Chinese diaspora.

Granted, these are the Asian “one percent” we’re talking about here, but you have old money nobility, sage elders, gauche goofballs and party animal vulgarians. Pettiness and kindness, enduring marriages and infidelity, class snobbery and academic achievement are represented.

There are cliches and stereotypes, but the film’s broad collection of “types” transcends that.

That’s why you see the words “representation” and “inclusion” in most reviews of this Jon M. Chu (“Jem and the Holograms”) film of Kevin Kwan’s novel, the first of a trilogy.

The movie? Well, you’ve seen the trailer, right? It is exactly as sold, as aspirational and acquisitive as “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” as surprising as a McDonald’s menu.

They’re utterly Westernized Chinese — British or American educated, speaking American, Australian and British accented English — insanely rich families with ties to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Shanghai, all around the Pacific Rim.

Their clothes are the latest fashions from Milan, Paris and (for the tacky) Vegas, their music consists of Chinese covers of jazz and pop standards and Madonna classics. “Material Girl?” You guessed it.

And the story they’re stuck in? A weary “she’s not good enough for my crazy-rich son” tale of class consciousness, with an all-Chinese cast of characters. It has hints of the high-tone gloss of Tyler Perry’s melodramas among Atlanta’s African American elite and the outsider-looking-in cultural divide of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” (OK, “Greek Wedding 2,” as in less funny).

Constance Wu stars as Rachel Chu, an economics professor at NYU. She’s dating this hunk, Nick Young (Henry Golding) and he’s invited her to his cousin’s wedding back in Singapore. He’s to be the best man, he tells her.

What he hasn’t told her is that they’re flying first class in one of those trans-Pacific luxury airliners, that his family’s “comfortable,” “which is exactly what somebody super-rich would say!”

OK, so a professor at an elite American university in New York has dated a guy for a year and never “googled” a notoriously “eligible” heir to Singapore’s richest developers. Riiiight.

The world Nick inhabits is insular enough that he’s been noticed, dining out with Rachel, by the diaspora’s speed-of-light social gossip network. Nick’s mother (an imperious, regal Michelle Yeoh) knows he’s bringing this “nobody” home to meet her before Nick can break the news.

Rachel? She has no idea what she’s in for.

“His parents can’t NOT like me, right?” she asks her widowed mom.

The fangs are out and the judgmental gossips span the generations as Singapore’s Chinese rich prep to take on this “golddigger.”

At least Rachel can catch up with her college pal, Peik Lin, played by the always-more-amusing-than-she-was-in-“Ocean’s 8” B-girl, Awkwafina. Meeting her and her new money/tacky “Donald Trump’s bathroom” decor-obsessed family is when “Asians” finally finds some laughs.

Because Peik Lin (Is “Pigpen” her Americanized nickname?) is sassy, slangy, all “banana” jokes — “Yellow on the outside, WHITE on the inside.”

And comic Ken Jeong plays her dad, over-the-top, pretending to only speak Pidgin English, force-feeding his plump family (and their guest) at dinner.

“Eat up! There’s a lot of children starving in America!”

They’re the life of this somewhat leisurely stroll through Asian affluence. They explain this world to Rachel, the rigid hierarchy, the supercars, the absurdly pricey fashions, with Peik Lin putting Rachel through the obligatory “makeover” scenes (“Pretty Woman”), the Young family’s “rainbow-striped” cousin (Nico Santos, a campy stitch) advising her about handling Nick’s Dragon Lady/Tiger Mom and virtually nobody coming right out and saying “She’s not good enough for him,” but a whole series of cliques coming to that very conclusion.

A secondary story, about Nick’s married-below-her-station fashion icon sister (Gemma Chan) has her spending millions on earrings and hiding them from her ex-military “entrepreneur” husband, who is bothered by the money. In the “Crazy Rich” value system projected here, he of course is in the wrong.

The only “crazy” stuff here consists of bachelorrette party shopping sprees — “Nobody likes free stuff more than rich people” — and a bachelor blast that is as excessive as the “Gangnam Style” groomsman (Jimmy O. Yang, funny) who throws it.

But there’s more product placement than laughs. Kwan’s novel presents a too-conventional-to-be-interesting story, one with very limited comic horizons. Netflix Ang Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet,” about a dutiful Chinese son who hides his homosexuality behind a fake “wife” he brings home to Taiwan. I’m not saying that’s the way this should have played out, but “Crazy” could use some edge, some real culture-shaking/culture clash conflict.

The world depicted, and the entire enterprise, despite some warm moments in the third act, is smug and self-satisfied in an off-putting way.

It begins with a get-even moment Nick’s mom had years ago at an exclusive London hotel, which in a racist harrumph refuses to honor her reservation. In 1995? Racism is real and the Brits invented most of the world’s racial slurs, but that grates and feels a decade or two off.

And the “only our kind” snobbery of the rich for the less accomplished Chinese doesn’t completely gloss over the monoculture we’re seeing, a reminder that sociologists place the Chinese (and Japanese) as among the world’s most racially exclusive (“racist”) cultures.

The leads are pleasantly bland, but Yeoh never lets Eleanor, Nick’s mom, descend into cartoon villainy. And the giggles provided by the supporting players help.

But “Crazy Rich Asians” puts its emphasis on “Crazy Rich,” and “Asians,” when a little more “Crazy” would get us through its glitzy two hours with less tedium and more wit.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some suggestive content and language

Cast: Constance Wu, Michelle Yeoh, Henry Golding, Awkwafina, Ken Jeong, Gemma Chan, Chris Pang

Credits:Directed by Jon M Chu, script by Peter Chiarelli, Adele Lim, based on the Kevin Kwan novel. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:00

The giant prehistoric shark thriller “The Meg” opens to indifferent reviews, and middling box office expectations.

A $23 million opening for a reported $150 million film won’t please the accountants, but the Chinese investment, co-stars and setting suggest that’s where the box office expectations lie.

Reviews aren’t helping. With popcorn pics, they don’t dampen fan enthusiasm for a picture people are dying to see, but in this case — a 45 at Metacritic and a whopping 50 at the broader sample (less exclusive, greener reviewers allowed in) Rottentomatoes won’t convince an indifferent audience to change its mind.

That will make for a neck and neck race at the box office with “Mission: Impossible–Fallout,” one of the best MI movies and something of a late summer phenomenon. It heads into the weekend closing in on $150, and should end it around $170-175 million 17 days after release.

The best reviewed new film of the weekend is “BlackKklansman,” a return to funny, politically/socially relevant form for Spike Lee (with a producing assist from Jordan Peele). It could catch fire, but nobody sees any evidence of that at this point. An $11 million weekend is projected. It’s good enough to make money on into September, if audiences find it.

“Slender Man” isn’t awful, just an attempt to substitute style for scares in a horror film that doesn’t come off. It’ll still flirt with $10 million this weekend, according to Box Office Mojo. 

Will Disney’s “Christopher Robin” overperform an expected 50% drop at the box office on its second weekend and manage over $13 million? Doubtful.

A pre-fabricated urban legend comes to the big screen in “Slender Man,” essentially a random mash-up of horror film tropes and effects that doesn’t amount to much that’s frightening.

Director Sylvain White, of “Stomp the Yard” and a lot of episodic TV in the many years since, hurls fish-eye lenses, hand-held shaky cameras, tracking zooms (in homage to Spike Lee), all sorts of in-camera effects to simulate how crazy teenage girls go after they’ve summoned Slender Man.

The monster, an Internet creation of the child-snatching variety, is a faceless version of Lurch, the butler for The Addams Family — wraith-thin, faceless, inexplicably wearing a white shirt and tie.

He’s the ghost of a Reservoir Dog or one of the Men in Black? In any event, he’s better in fleeting glimpses than in close-up.

The movie mimics what’s allegedly been dominating teen and tween slumber parties the past decade, girls hearing or reading about the legend, finding online help in “summoning” the demon, and (in the movie at least) suffering the consequences.

“Guys, we SO have to do this.”

Four BFFs (Joey King, Julia Goldani Telles, Jaz Sinclair, Annalise Basso) , essentially egged on by a quartet of boys who say this is what they’re trying this weekend, watch the online video (Shades of “The Ring”), hear the bells toll and start having nightmares.

“What did you see?”

What did YOU see?”

The thing is, you SEE the Slender Man — often glimpsed in the background, in foggy woods, glimpsed in “Bigfoot” style online videos — and he’s got you.

“Some are haunted, some go mad and some he takes.”

A week later, one of their number disappears on a school trip.

You can guess the order the girls will have their Slender moment of truth by the stereotypical casting here  — brunette, brownette, African American and redhead.

The kids frantically do online “homework” to figure out how to retrieve the missing friend, and that just gets them in deeper. Warn a boyfriend or younger sister “Do NOT watch the video,” and they do what teenagers do.

It’s not laughably off, and give White credit for the picture’s fairly eerie tone and look — darkened streets, foggy forests of spindly pines, shadows and more shadows. It’s just not worth more than the occasional hair-raising instant.

But here’s something that “Slender Man” gets right — casting Joey King of “The Conjuring,” Netflix’s “The Kissing Booth” and “White House Down” as Wren, the punk/Goth girl in the quartet. King sells the pants-wetting terror of facing supernatural doom better than anybody else in this movie, or most of the horror movies since A Quiet Place.”

If everybody else had faked being scared as perfectly as Ms. King, maybe we’d be scared, too.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for disturbing images, sequences of terror, thematic elements and language including some crude sexual references

Cast: Joey King, Julia Goldani Telles, Jaz Sinclair, Annalise Basso

Credits:Directed by Sylvain White, script by David Birke . A Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:33