Movie Nation

A teenage girl and her tween sister ride the bus, cross-state, towards the beach.

One’s an outgoing city kid, living in a foster home, looking forward a rare trip to the ocean. It’s her older sister’s bithday, and she’ll also take her older  to the place their Dad moved to.

The other just got out of juvie.  She’s met with her probation officer, tried to come up with some “goals” to tell him, and tracked down a lowlife gun dealer.

The pistol’s in her purse, because Angel (Dominique Fishback) bought a round trip ticket for her sister, a one-way ticket for herself. She’s going to shoot the father she saw beat her mother to death “right in front of me.”

Chatty, outgoing baby sister Abby (Tatum Marilyn Hall) doesn’t need to know that.

That’s the simpler-than-simple set up for “Night Comes On,”  a very fine debut feature from actress (“Ozark,” “The  Good Wife,” “The Mob Doctor”) turned director Jordana Spiro. It’s a lean, understated character study whose grit comes from its attention to detail.

Spiro follows Angel, played with poker-faced resignation by Fishback (“The Deuce” and the upcoming “The Hate U Give”), as she gets out of jail, collects her things and tries to take care of just one thing at a time.

Get my phone. Find a charger for my phone because the state lost my charger. Call Maya, the girlfriend I’m going to stay with. Call her again. And again.

Meet with Mark (Max Casella). Try to negotiate for a gun. He’s got some sort of sexual barter in mind.

Meet with my parole officer. That’s the first stand-out scene in this intimate step-by-step “starting over” (only not really) scenario. Angel cannot shake her prison toughness, her insolence, in just a day. The probation officer (James McDaniel)  isn’t having it.

“The world isn’t going to open up for you.”

It’s all Angel can do to maintain her sleepy-eyed resignation. She can’t make herself show “hope” for her future. Not to this man.

She can’t hide wholly hide her disappointment that Maya (Cymbal Byrd) has moved on to someone else. But she must have expected it. Sleeping in a stairwell? No prob. Just get me a public bathroom to wash up in.

It’s only when she checks in on bubbly sister Abby, warehoused in a big foster home with several other foster kids, that Angel softens. The kid has time to play. She’s smart. Yes, she’s on Ritalin and other meds, but she seems to be thriving.

Angel? She’s tried the authorities, prodded her probation officer and nobody will tell her where her father, released awaiting trial, lives.  Maybe Abby knows.

Spiro and Fishback unlock Angel’s long-dormant compassion with a screenplay that plays up her slow realization that whatever she does today, that little sister needs mothering. Abby has personality that Angel never acquired.

We’ve seen the older sister’s subdued dismay at what other kids her age are up to, living happy lives with friends, cheerleading and such. Angel was doing drugs and shoplifting, violently lashing out, paying the price for family violence that marked her and humiliated her. Abby knows none of that, making friends on the fly. But she doesn’t know how to be wary of the world, doesn’t know what do to with her hair, doesn’t know how to handle her first period — big sister stuff.

“Congratulations! You can pop a baby out!”

Angel doesn’t have the delicate touch.

Young Ms. Hall may be “a natural,” but her performance smacks of “child actor.” It isn’t just foster homes that have given Abby this polish. A couple of others in the cast also have a hint of “undiscovered regional theater actor” to their speech, their carriage and demeanor.

But Spiro has still gotten a striking, gritty and touching debut feature out of this cast, a movie that may lack much in the way of surprises but makes up for it with toughness, empathy and realism.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sexual content

Cast:Dominique Fishback, Tatum Marilyn Hall, Cymbal Byrd, Max Casella, James McDaniel, John Jelks

Credits:Directed by Jordana Spiro, script by Jordana Spiro, Angelica Nwandu . A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:26

The big question for me this weekend was and will be the word of mouth on Disney’s quiet, downbeat “kids” movie “Christopher Robin.”

Deadline.com and others had been projecting a brand healthy $29 million or so for this grownup riff on “Winnie the Pooh,” which makes up a midlife crisis for Christopher Robin Milne (they don’t use his last name), makes up a life he didn’t have, and a solution for that workaholism in the bear, burro, rabbit, teeny pig, kangaroo and owl of his childhood.

Now they’re saying $24 million or so at Deadline, which historically underestimates the Saturday take of children’s films. So we’ll see.

When I saw it, the restless crowd of kids and parents I saw it with (some of whom applauded at the end) were of the “Mommy, can we go? I don’t like this” school.’

“The Spy Who Dumped Me” has a little star power — Mila Kunis has the “Bad Moms” franchise and Kate McKinnon is the viral break out star of “SNL,” the show’s MVP these past few years. But the comedy lacks a properly set up and played up villain.

Oh, and laughs. There just aren’t many. Kunis defers to Kate, and Kate is all over the place, flailing away for giggles. It’s earning numbers that reflect its reviews — $17-20 projected, maybe $12 million and change based on Thursday (sold out show I saw it with) and Friday’s turn out.

“The Darkest Minds” proves that the ongoing effort to find the next “Hunger Games” is growing more futile by the minute. Decent PYTs cast, meh villains, retread story, action beats, etc. It won’t recover costs — $6.4 million? Bombs away.

“Mission: Impossible — Fallout” will have earned in the ballpark of $125 million by midnight Sunday, the end of its second weekend of release. That’s another $34-35 million, and extends Tom Cruise’s box office clout another or three. His non MI films aren’t generally blockbusters, but he still opens a movie here and especially abroad, thanks to the career-injections Ethan Hunt gives him.

“Teen Titans” is about to topple out of the top ten. In its second weekend of release? Will Dinesh D’Souza’s “Death of a Nation” diatribe chase it out? “Forgettable cut-rate crap” always disappears in a flash.

Basically a Royal Caribbean ad masquerading as a romantic comedy, “Like Father” pairs up Kristen Bell and Kelsey Grammer as daughter and estranged father paired on what was supposed to be “her” honeymoon cruise to Jamaica.

“Eeew,” right? That’s what they say, too.

But that’s about as funny as this bland and not-quite-sad little floater manages for its 100 or so minutes.

Seth Rogen’s wife Lauren wrote and directed it, so it has Bell dropping the F-bomb like a drunk prom queen — vulgarity, the glue that makes the Rogen marriage stick.

But it’s as a drunk jilted bride that we meet Rachel, a busy marketing/branding whiz who barely manages to put her phone down before walking down the aisle for her Dream Wedding in Central Park.

Dropping that phone at the altar? That’s a deal breaker, in “Like Father” logic. Owen (Jon Foster), who must’ve been thinking about this a while as he didn’t even bother to shave before this swank, tuxedo’d ceremony, leaves Rachel at that altar.

After seemingly shrugging it off, nailing a pitch to clients at the office, she takes a moment to clear her desk and melt down, just a little.

Then her evening drinking binge is interrupted by Dear old Workaholic Dad, whom she hasn’t seen in 25 years.

“Twenty-SIX.”

His “You could use a drink” becomes an all-nighter, black-out-on-the-sidewalk affair, punctuated by him spiriting her to the town car and then cruise ship honeymoon suite she’d already paid for. Seemed like a great idea while they were plastered.

So these two, boozing and bickering and meeting all the “assigned” table mates on this binge boat, are here to avoid the endless intrusive “You crazy love-birds” questions followed by efforts to “help her” get over her embarrassment.

Seth Rogen shows up as a newly divorced, “rebound” Canadian who shows up 35 minutes in, a bit too late and entirely too little, as it turns out.

“Excursions,” on-board game show entertainment (almost funny), discos and karaoke and “family therapy” from the gay couple that share a table together build towards  abrupt changes in mood and tone predicated by plot necessity.

“You hate me and you probably should,” was Harry’s re-introduction to Rachel. So maybe a little daddy guilt over what he did wrong, maybe a little Rachel running around for a rebound, tantrums tossed, “Dad jokes,” none of it funny.

A Jamaican hike with a little ganja proffered is supposed to be cute (Guess who turns it down?).

We’re grasping at clues as the movie takes a stab at sentiment, Harry’s constant mention of his “business” partner Gabe, his utter comfort crawling into a bottle, even when it’s in a brown paper bag. There’s something we don’t know. Make us care, for Pete’s sake.

I had a notion that Netflix would be a great fit for Bell, whose big screen career has been miss and flop and “Frozen” and “Bad Moms.”

“Like Father” doesn’t quite rule that out, but she and Grammer and especially Rogen (who knows to keep his yap shut at home, I dare say) know this isn’t much.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, pot and alcohol abuse, adult situations, profanity

Cast: Kristen Bell, Kelsey Grammer, Seth Rogen

Credits: Scripted and directed by Laura Miller Rogen. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48

She should be, in this new twist on the “legend” that is based on the infamous “gave her father 40 whacks” with an axe case back in the 19th century.

The presence of Stewart takes this exactly where you’d expect. Sept. 14, we’ll count the whacks. 

“Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot” is a conventionally unconventional take on “recovery” movie motif — recovery from a paralyzing accident, recovery from the alcoholism that led to it.

Not everybody who finds himself confined to a wheelchair, a hopeless quadriplegic drunk, can become a celebrated cartoonist with a Swedish airline hostess for a girlfriend. But if John Callahan did it, well…

That’s glib and a bit mean, but it gets the only serious knock on this warm and engaging Gus Van Sant film out of the way up front. The isn’t the experience of the vast majority of “quads.” But Van Sant, like the amusingly self-aware Callahan, pokes fun at that and pinches until it hurts. Get beyond the surface Callahan, and glibness flees into the night.

Exceptional stories are the ones movies are made from, and Callahan, a dark and cynical Portland, Oregon (Van Sant Country) cartoonist who joked about his physical limitations, the Klan and sexuality in his Willamette Week and New Yorker cartoons, was nothing if not exceptional.

His life becomes the source for another startling transformation for Joaquin Phoenix, who shares the spotlight and the kudos with Jonah Hill and Jack Black, two stand-out supporting players in this uplifting Twelve Steps Taken in a Wheelchair comedy.

Callahan’s story is framed within a public acclamation, a speech Callahan is giving at the height of his fame. It is, we quickly discover, an over-rehearsed, oft-repeated recital of his orphaned childhood, the “Irish” “school teacher” mother who, by the way, “didn’t want me.” Callahan has been telling this story ever since he ended up in a wheelchair, as an explanation, a casting of blame, a crutch.

Because he needs one. There are a lot of stupid ways for a slacker — Portland or otherwise — to justify his never making anything of his life. Callahan was a once-promising artist who wound up painting houses, and a hopeless drink since his teens. The drinking calms him, or so he tells himself.

A bottle at his side, John is a charmer (so he thinks), a sarcastic wit, fun to talk to at parties. In his own mind, anyway.

So why does he end up sneaking off to the bathroom to spike his beer, instantly abandoned by the attractive woman he was talking up at the party? Why is he so willing to ditch that party for a round of bar-hopping and binge-drinking with a smarmy hale fellow, well-met he’s just met (Jack Black)?

That led to an accident, which put him through painful, soul-crushing rehab. Callahan  suffers, trapped in his own thoughts, losing his marbles, barely able to summon the dark wit it takes to place himself “somewhere between Decathlon champion and rigor mortis.”

But even that doesn’t change Callahan’s innate recklessness. Check out the way he hurtles hither and yon in his first electric wheelchair. Anywhere else, this genuine Portland character would have been run over or toppled and left to die in a ditch.

But in Portland he is tolerated, and once he re-learned to draw  — both hands on the pen — he is celebrated. He charms a Swedish nurse’s assistant who becomes a stewardess (Rooney Mara). And with all that, he repeats and rehearses his “My mother didn’t want me” speech until that day he figures he needs to tell it at an AA meeting.

It’s there, in the no-nonsense zone established by rich, gay, profane and bored-with-your-crap Meeting Leader Donnie (Jonah Hill, transformed), that Callahan begins to get a grip on who he is and how he got that way.

Beth Ditto plays Reba, a portly Southern transplant in their group who endures Callahan’s insults, and hits him with one that cuts him to the marrow.

“It’s always ‘Poor me, poor me,’ until it gets to be ‘POUR me another drink!”

Van Sant takes the Twelve Step program seriously, making sure to give it an irreverent Portlandia twist. Callahan’s group has a damaged vet, a gay and defiantly penis-centric poet and others — just like him — who always had an excuse to drink.

Hill, bearded, bare-chested, relaxed and funny, has a “big speech,” of course. But it’s the ease he fits into this slim 1970s gay hipster that marks this performance.

Black revisits his “life of the party,” hep-cat Falstaff persona as Dexter, the party animal there for Callahan’s last night on two legs. But when he returns, and you might even know which “step” Dexter will make his next appearance in, Black gives us embarrassed, guilty, resigned to his fate and joyful at being forgiven with just his eyes. For my money, that’s the best scene in the movie.

Phoenix? He’s always done vulnerable well, but his Callahan (who died in 2010) is the most self-assured we’ve ever seen him, righteous in his reasons to drink, steeled against the criticism his outrageous politically incorrect cartoons earned him in 1980s Portland.

And the fact that’s really him flying through traffic, down crowded sidewalks, in that teetering motorized chair is a stunt and sight gag worthy of the silent film masters.

The star-crossed nature of Callahan’s life is one thing that gave me pause, that first “knock” I mentioned above. And Van Sant’s decision to include a female therapist’s blunt suggestion that Callahan proposition a nurse as sexual therapy (who then accepts it) is “World According to Garp” creepy and tone-deaf in #MeToo America.

But Van Sant never fails to get a laugh out of Callahan’s cynical out-of-left-field cartoons, which he has animated in squiggle-vision at various points in the narrative. “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot” takes its title from one of those, an Old West posse finding a wheelchair in the desert, their quarry having abandoned it.

And Van Sant, a legendarily sensitive filmmaker, never fails to see the difficulties in Callahan’s journey, the spirit it takes to overcome them or the fact that they were all difficulties of the man’s own creation. That lifts this “uplifting” story above the twelve steps that are its natural starting point and into the realm of something more challenging than the genre conventions it otherwise adheres to.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, sexual content, some nudity and alcohol abuse

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill, Rooney Mara, Jack Black

Credits: Written and directed by Gus Van San , based on the John Callahan memoir. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:54

Barry Jenkins, writer-director of “Moonlight,” spent the capital that Oscar winner game him on doing something folks in Hollywood just don’t do.

He tackled a James Baldwin novel, bringing one of the great American Writers to the big screen. The much-honored documentary about Baldwin last year has pushed him back into the limelight, and this late career novel should make for a timely and timeless film about the African American experience in modern America.

This trailer is all about tone, romance in the face of hopelessness and the comforting mothering of Regina Hall, captured in full, expressive close-up.

“If Beale Street Could Talk” looks like a contender, and opens Nov. 30.

I’ve stumbled past the trailers for this a few times over the weeks, but I was finally forced to sit through it in previews before “Spy Who Dumped Me” last night.

You know, in between all the Tiffany Haddish upcoming attractions.

I’d avoided posting a trailer to “Robin Hood” because this “Kingsman” kid, Taron Egerton,  does nothing for me.

And love love LOVE Jamie Foxx, but period pieces are not where his gifts lie. Yeah, “Django” sucked. I’m saying that. Or reminding you of that.

And really, do we need ANOTHER “Robin Hood” (Nov. 21)? I think not.

I do like the idea of making him a highborn dude turned into a lowdown thief. But the rest of this, meh.

Every movie month of the year is its own particular brand of battleground, but August is, like January, a special case. It’s where movies that couldn’t compete against an “Incredibles 2,” “Mission: Impossible” “Girls’ Trip” or “Avengers LCXVI” traditionally are trotted out.

Genre pics, generally, comedies with less at risk, dramas and more sensitive fare that might not be “awards season” worthy, but could make some money in contrast to the big action, big laughs, big budget popcorn fare that dominates the multiplex from late April to Labor Day shows up in August.

Yes, “Signs” opened in August and blew up, and “Guardians.” They were exceptions to the rule and defied lower expectations. “The Constant Gardener” is the one Oscar winner in recent memory that stood out from the crowd and made its “prestige picture” mark long before awards were handed out.

Thus, Disney’s “Christopher Robin,” which had a healthy budget (nobody seems to know what that is, I’d guess in the $80-100 million range), the director of “World War Z” and Ewan McGregor and the Disney brand and the Winnie the Pooh name recognition going for it.

It would have stood out, but it most certainly would have gotten lost in the summer shuffle in May, June or July

Disney knew something else about it, which is why they had a late night Thursday embargo on reviews. It’s not very good, a stumbling, “dispiriting” effort build upon a dubious effect (furry toy animals who talk their way into the real world of Post-War Britain) that is a let down. 

But opening it on a weak weekend in August, with bad reviews suppressed, they might get $29 million out of it. 

That won’t surpass the second weekend of “Mission: Impossible — Fallout,” but it would go a long ways toward covering the costly effects that drive the Pooh picture, even if the too-furry, beady-eyed (literally) bear is a bit of a bother as entertainment.

Then there’s “The Spy Who Dumped Me,” a formulaic two-star comedy that’s a distaff variation on the Buddy Picture. It’s seriously lame and would have bombed on any other weekend. With Kate McKinnon and Mila Kunis as draws, it could hit $15 million.

I caught it at a packed house at my Favorite Regal Cinema Thursday night — packed. But the biggest laughs came from the front row, where people were apparently must have been reading funny texts on their phones. Something like that.

The theater was so quiet and the movie so dull that my mind wandered off into considering the Curious Case of Kate McKinnon. She is brilliant on “Saturday Night Live,” great timing, almost underplaying some roles (Hilary C.) and over-the-top in many others (Notorious RBG).

But on the big screen, she always goes Big. Too Big. Trying Too Hard Big. Desperately POUNDING for laughs. Her compact supporting performance — a bit part really — in “Masterminds” was the only Kate turn that I thought worked, small, underplayed, daft and a quite specific.

In starring roles, she’s all over the place, trying something different, day to day, scene to scene. She is disastrously bad in “The Spy Who Dumped Me,” straining to add laughs to a leaden Mila Kunis turn (she, too, is always funnier in support).

Think of all the players who were great at sketch comedy on the small screen — Dana Carvey, Gilda Radner, even Joe Piscopo. They could never dial it down and make their personas work on the big screen, or they had too many personas to choose from and couldn’t settle on an image they wanted to build characters out of.

McKinnon is starting to look like that’s where she’s going to land. Watch Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy’s big screen debuts. They instinctively grasped dialing down their small screen, play to the back row “live audience” impulses and went for understated droll or cool.

Some of it is a matter of timing. Will Ferrell was the last of the “Broad Character/High Concept” comedy stars to come out of that cast. McKinnon might have thrived a dozen years earlier.

McKinnon will continue to get the Kristen Wiig-sized offers. She ought to be looking for Bill Hader ones, films that don’t force her to tote the comic load, to be as broad. Hader never made a “Stefan” movie, Wiig hasn’t turned “The Target Lady” into a film.

McKinnon goes way-out wacky every time out.

Hell, if Jason Sudeikis could figure this out, McKinnon should be able to as well.

Look at the Rotten Tomatoes (in particular) reviews of “The Spy Who Dumped Me.” The endorsements of this dog — widely panned overall — are overwhelmingly male, as indeed the entire tomatometer is. With the recent “research” that claimed male critics are giving a harder time to female centered projects, and movies with female directors, I was looking for some confirmation of that in the reviews of this one 

Most of the endorsements were from guys. It’s called “working the refs.” Make a claim of bias, those accused bend over backwards when the next test case comes up that they fear might be measured. Conservative media critics in the conservative media have played that game for decades. The majority of female critics dumped on “Dumped,” recognizing the film for what it is — poorly-scripted, a poor pairing of stars, a misuse of McKinnon’s talents. The majority of male critics did, too. Save for a few weak-kneed Major Media Outlet folks afraid for their jobs over “sexism” labels.

Everybody was in utter agreement over “The Darkest Minds.” This appears to be based on fiction that predates the cut-and-paste piffle of YA books and movies such as “Maze Runner” and “Divergent,” built to be movie franchises in imitation of “The Hunger Games.”

That’s doesn’t keep it from being one of those awful orphans like “The Seeker,” “The Host,” etc., formulaic crap for an audience that hasn’t experienced a decade of these movies and thus doesn’t realize how bored it should be.

The marvelous “Eighth Grade” goes into wider release today, too. Find it. See it.

A leaden, violent and tone-deaf script and two surprisingly unfunny stars — one trying WAY too hard and the other not trying at all — bury “The Spy Who Dumped Me.” 

This strictly-according to formula espionage thriller is so laugh-starved it makes you wonder how this can’t-miss formula ever worked in the first place.

Double and triple crosses? Check. Motorcycle assassins who chase the heroines through the street of whatever European city they’re in (Vienna)? Check.

Exotic talky torture? Of course. Climax in “The Big Gala” or “The Circus?” Let’s do BOTH at once!

And the violence! My stars, the bloodshed!

But none of it clicks because the stars never do. Kate McKinnon mugs so much it’s as if she’s playing to a “Saturday Night Live” audience on a film set, where extras and crew are ordered not to laugh to spoil the take. And nobody told her.

Co-star Mila Kunis phones this one in, which adds to McKinnon’s desperate hamming, riffing, groping for laughs that the script doesn’t give her and she cannot improvise.

Kunis plays Audrey, freshly-dumped via text by her swarthy, stubbly boyfriend (Justin Thereoux).

BFF Morgan (McKinnon) tries to cheer her up at her birthday party, but the occasion just makes Audrey mope for the party, a year ago, when she met Drew.

Even Morgan’s “Let’s burn his s—” suggestion of a bonfire for what he left in the apartment fails to, um, ignite.

But we’ve seen Drew in action in the prologue, a secret agent man fending off back guys and snapping their necks when the need arises. Of course Audrey doesn’t know.

And she’s just vulnerable enough to follow the handsome Brit (Sam Heughan) out of the organic market where she works, only to be stuffed into a van. Sebastian and his Harvard Man sidekick (Hasan Minhaj) want whatever Drew left for her. 

No idea what they’re talking about, but when Drew suddenly appears, she understands. Kind of. Just as She Drew is murdered, right in front of her eyes.

His dying words send her and Morgan off to Europe, to Vienna, Prague and Paris, trying to make the connection Drew warned her to make, delivering the plot device (MacGuffin) he’s entrusted to the woman he dumped.

Action follows, a well-filmed chase that all but ends the moment they figure out they cannot drive a stick shift, would-be actress Morgan (The live in LA.) dons a disguise and utterly inappropriate accent, with a model/gymnast/assassin (Ivanna Sakhno) racing across Europe in an inconspicuous chrome Ferrari to kill them, and an irate MI-6 chief, “a real Judi Dench, IN THE FLESH” (Gillian Anderson) chewing them out and earning Morgan’s undying devotion.

The two moments you feel were “directed” here are that opening, an espionage in fall bit filmed in shades of blue, grey and white, and in a funny-deadly trapeze brawl.

=ut the jokes feel added on, as if nothing the director/co-writer (Susanna Fogel, mostly TV credits) prepped in advance was good enough to keep.

Morgan grabs an Amadeus hat in a train station and marvels, “They REALLY play up that Mozart was from here…and play DOWN that Hitler was here, too.”

Morgan’s constant affirmation of Audrey is a non-starter of a running gag, with “He literally works in intelligence, and you were more intelligent!” and the like not selling the joke.

It’s too soon to call the code on McKinnon’s big screen career, but considering her best roles were bit parts in middling fare like “Office Christmas Party” and “Masterminds,” that she’s overreached for laughs in “Ghostbusters” and this one, you have to wonder if the “SNL” MVP isn’t destined for a Dana Carvey sort of big screen career — stunted.

McKinnon has never been good in a movie. Kunis has never been worse.

Kunis seems to shrug off toting half the load here, deferring to McKinnon. No, dear, they didn’t just pay you to wear the designer gown and drop F-bombs. Her “reaction” to seeing her ex-boyfriend’s death, and the aftermath, is just wrong — even in a comedy.

The only time they’re both invested in the film is in manic patter torture scene, and that comes over an hour after the first significant on-screen death (there are several), long past the moment when this movie flatlines.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, language throughout, some crude sexual material and graphic nudity

Cast: Mila Kunis, Kate McKinnon, Justin Theroux, Sam Heughan, Hasan Minhaj, Gillian Anderson, Jane Curtin, Paul Reiser

Credits:Directed by Susanna Fogel, script by Susanna Fogel, David Iserson. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:56

Disney has a responsibility to Winnie the Pooh that extends beyond licensing agreements and mere commerce.

Wherever A.A. Milne’s books still stand within the kid lit universe, Disney gave Pooh a voice, and the childish, gently daft and very English tone of its many cartoons fixed Pooh in the minds of generations.

So moving Pooh into the “real” world, the “adult” world, by making him a tactile, real walking-talking, honey-craving bear proves to be tricky in “Christopher Robin,” a mopey, downbeat “rediscover my inner child” ode to the grown up boy who inspired the Pooh stories.

It’s a fantasy that has nothing at all to do with the real Christopher Robin Milne. 

Still, you can’t make a Pooh movie without at least a hint of the Sherman Brothers’ “Winnie the Pooh” song, without him sounding like the late Sterling Holloway, who voiced him in the earliest cartoons.

But no longer drawn, “real,” with an inexpressive plush face and entirely too much faux fur? Well, as the bear might put it, “Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.”

Ewan McGregor is the harried, workaholic Christopher Robin, ignoring wife (Hayley Atwell) and little girl Madeleine (Bronte Carmichael) as he struggles to find “efficiencies” at Winslow Fine Luggage, an upscale firm finding it hard to serve the well-to-do in austere, post-War Great Britain.

When he neglects to join the family for a weekend at the Sussex farm where he grew up, the bear stirs. A gloomy fog has descended over The Hundred Acre Wood.

“If only Eeyore were here to enjoy it.”

Pooh frets over where the Old Gang might be. So he sets out to find Christopher Robin, stumbling upon him in a London park.

The businessman, with his attache filled with “very important things” (papers), figures he has at long last snapped.

“Stress,” he says, on imagining that he sees and hears his childhood toy-pal talk.

“Not ‘Stress,’ Pooh,” insists the bear, who recognizes him even in his “wrinkly” middle age.

They return to the Hundred Acres and fall into their old roles without so much as a second thought — Pooh sighing, puzzled at  anything beyond honey, naps, friends and adventure, Christopher Robin explaining the world — “There’s more to life than balloons and honey!” — fixing Pooh’s problems, tracking down Eeyore, Piglet, Owl and Rabbit, Kanga and baby Roo.

Madeline Robin (Bronte Carmichael) and her father Christopher’s longtime friends Tigger, Piglet and Winnie the Pooh go on an adventure in Disney’s CHRISTOPHER ROBIN.

But is it “Always a sunny day when Christopher Robin comes to play?”

Sadly, no. Director Marc Forster is over a decade removed from “Finding Neverland,” and whatever the “World War Z” filmmaker might have brought to a production that relies on CG toys in a photo-real world, the light touch was not one of them.

It’s a quietly dispiriting film, keeping the viewer on tenterhooks, watching a grey and exhausted domestic melodrama play out while groping for some recognizable Pooh tune, Pooh mischief or Eeyore complaint to grab hold of.

“Looks like a disaster,” the sad old plush donkey says, surveying Rabbit’s crashed home. “Why wasn’t I invited?”

McGregor gamely tries to fit in here, but there’s little whimsy in the character or his performance of him.

Jim Cummings has made a career out of sounding like Pooh’s Holloway and original Tigger voice Paul Winchell. Brad Garrett of “Everybody Loves Raymond” and “Finding Nemo” is an apt voice for Eeyore, Toby Jones a good choice for Owl and Peter Capaldi a daring one for Rabbit.

But the laughs, what precious few there are, and the obvious but Pooh-appropriate theme (Make time to play.) are strictly of the lowest low-hanging fruit variety — Pooh making a mess with honey, Pooh unable to fathom the mysteries of a compass.

The adult stuff won’t do much for adults or children, and the childish moments don’t add up to a kid-movie’s worth.

I can’t find it in me to hate on the little big screen bear. But the whole affair feels like a desperate, big-budget response to last year’s far superior and non-Disney “Goodbye, Christopher Robin.”

Protect the brand and all, you know. One can’t help but wish they’d honored that brand by simply saying, “Nicely done” to the earlier film, and left it at that.

MPAA Rating: PG for some action

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Hayley Atwell, Bronte Carmichael

Credits:Directed by Marc Forster, script by Alex Ross Perry, Tom McCarthy and Allison Schroeder, based on the A.A.Milne/Ernest Shepard characters . A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 1:44