Movie Nation

Mr May the Fourth Be With You” suggests the SlDC press corps should be reminding voters of re Nov. Fifth.

“Unfrosted” is “The Right Stuff” filtered through the “Bee Movie” and TV-honed shtick of Jerry Seinfeld. Seinfeld’s comic riff on “the breakfast wars” that Post and Kellogg’s fought in his youth is an amusing wallow in boomer nostalgia, a broad farce about the mostly-fictionalized battle to be the first to get a “shelf stable” (Yummm, extra PRESERVATIVES!) breakfast pastry to the market.

Maybe you have to be a baby boomer to get into a Pop Tarts lampoon. But as we watch a “Barbie” colored send-up of everything from the space program to JFK — the president and the Ollie Stone movie — with a tipsy Walter Cronkite (Kyle Dunnigan), cereal mascots and a fanciful Hugh Grant take on Tony-the-Tiger voice Thurl Ravenscroft as a Master Thespian, I laughed.

Hey, anything to keep Old Man Seinfeld from whining about “woke culture” or he and his cookbooks-for-fellow-goldiggers wife from financing “counter” protests against anti-genocide protests, right?

Yeah, Jerry has aged into Uncle Leo, looking for anti-Semites under every contrary opinion and laughs in the diabetic coma of 1960s breakfast cereals.

Where “Barbie” made a modern feminist statement out of a ’60s doll, “Unfrosted” wallows in the “Mad Men” ethos and tooth decaying breakfast offerings of the mid-century-modern past.

Director and co-writer Seinfeld stars as Bob Cabana, a Big Ideas Man at Kellogg’s, reveling in the company’s dominance of arch-rival Post at the 1963 Bowl & Spoon Awards, honoring Battle Creek, Michigan’s industry town industries.

But Bob doesn’t rest on his laurels or dream of a “sod” lawn as he drives that Car-that-Killed-Ernie-Kovacs to and from work. Post, and its crafty chairwoman Marijorie Post (Amy Schumer), are onto something new. He’s sure of it.

Bob soon figures out what it is, a stolen abandoned idea that he himself pushed, a “shelf-stable” fruit (ish) filled toaster pastry.

The race is on, with Bob begging Edsel Kellogg (Jim Gaffigan) to let him lure his old ideas-partner (Melissa McCarthy) back from NASA.

“Men on the moon? Hah!”

They assemble an all-star team of “Taste Pilots” — guys like a Schwinn (Jack McBrayer), a Carvel (Adrian Martinez), Chef Boy-ar-dee (Bobby Monaghan) and a “Never a member of ze Nazi Party” type German fop (Thomas Lennon, a strudel-accented hoot).

They bring in “Mad Men” to help sell it. Real “Mad Men.” You know, Hamm and Slattery.

But Bob’s got unruly mascots to contend with — quarrelsome Snap, Crackle and Pop, that pretentious Ravenscroft squeezing in “King Lear” rehearsals between appearances in the Tony-the-Tiger felt suit.

He’s getting pressure from “The Milk Syndicate,” with Christian Slater playing the muscle and Peter Dinklage stealing the movie as the ruthless dairy mafia don.

And there are these two precocious, dumpster-diving Post sugar-junkie moppets (Eleanor Sweeney and Bailey Sheetz, insufferably fun) who might be his ace in the hole at this pivotal moment in America’s breakfast wars. They’ve tasted “the hot fruit lightning that THE MAN doesn’t want you to have” that Post has cooked-up. So Bob knows what he’s up against.

Seinfeld recycles his best acting tricks from “Seinfeld. Every time a new ingredient is discussed — barking “PECTIN!” “Xantham Gum!” and “RIBOFLAVIN” like he’s seen his nemesis “NEWMAN” one more time.

The cameos pile up like the one-liners about “There’s always a surprise in the box” and “Vietnam? That looks like a good idea.” Bill Burr plays JFK, Cedric the Entertainer is the Bowl & Spoon Awards emcee, and “Seinfeld” regulars and many an unemployed “Saturday Night Live” alumnus shows up for a scene or two.

Yes, most every joke churned out here has a “low hanging fruit” or “fruit food colored” air about it. But Gaffigan, Schumer, McCarthy, Grant and most everybody here has a chance to score. And so they do.

There’s also whimsy in the casting — Grant as a strike-leading mascot actor quoting Shakespeare, James Marsden as “bulging” fitness guru Jack Lalanne, Dan Levy as Andy Warhol?

That’s GOLD, Jerry! Or, you know, a honey-shaded high fructose food coloring version of it. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, “Uncle Leo.”

Rating: PG-13, profanity, innuendo, smoking

Cast: Jerry Seinfeld, Melissa McCarthy, Amy Schumer, Jim Gaffigan, Cedric the Entertainer, James Marsden, Jack McBrayer, Adrian Martinez and Hugh Grant

Credits: Directed by Jerry Seinfeld, scripted by Jerry Seinfeld, Spike Feresten and Andy Robin. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

It’s great that after all his years before the camera, Aussie actor Eric Bana is finally in a franchise that plays to his considerable strengths as an actor and a screen “presence.”

“Force of Nature” is a sequel to “The Dry,” a top knotch mystery thriller from a couple of years back set in the Outback. Bana reprises his role as Federal Detective Aaron Falk for a jungle Australia story of women lost in the rainforests of Giralang in this latest Jane Harper novel to be made into a movie.

As in “The Dry,” which took the character to his hometown during a drought to solve a crime, Falk has a past connection to this place — a childhood trauma. As in that film, there is a crime to unravel in classic mystery novel adaptation fashion, a few hoary tropes included.

And as in that film, we see Australia at its most tourist brochure-striking — scenic forests, clouds of bats, lovely waterfalls, and a “raging” river for somebody to fall in while trying to retrieve a map that will get her and her “Executive Adventures” retreat group out of the woods and out of a jam.

Falk and partner Carmen (Jacqueline McKenzie) show up after four women come out of the woods, wet, lost and in one case — spider-bitten. But one of their “team building exercise” participants did not get out.

Alice (Anna Torv), we learn, wasn’t popular. She was high up in the Bailey Tennants development (just guessing) firm, an ill-tempered bully. She might be romantically involved with the company founder (Richard Roxbourgh). Alice’s boss and wife of the founder Jill (Deborra Lee-Furness) might have known about it. Lauren (Robin McLeavy), the one backpacker with “bush skills,” has “history with Alice. And sisters Beth and Bree (Sisi Strong and Lucy Ansell) had their issues with her as well.

“Alice didn’t like me, and she never pretended to hide it.”

Even Falk wasn’t all that crazy about Alice. But he had to deal with her. She was his “inside source” at Bailey Tennants, which Falk and his partner were investigating for financial crimes. That’s why they’re there to “assist” with the search. Strange coincidence, their source being the only one to not make it out of the woods.

Falk knows this remote place, with its lovely Mirror Falls, is forbidding, where “one small mistake could change everything.” He knows it because of something that happened during his childhood.

So as he and Carmen question the women, and almost question Bailey himself, we see not just the flashbacks of that ill-fated hike for “problem employees,” and the melodramatic chain of events that put them all in peril, we glimpse young Aaron’s (Archie Thomson) experience there with his parents (Ash Ricardo and Jeremy Lindsay Taylor) decades before.

The script throws in a storm, a complication that’s treated as an afterthought. Another complication is that the woods were long ago the haunt of an infamous Aussie serial killer. The Robert Connolly film — he did Bana’s “The Dry” and “Blueback” — is a bit by-the-numbers in terms of those complications and the nature of the withheld details later revealed in the many interrogations.

“That’s why I wasn’t surprised when she lied to us,” lines like that, abound.

At one point, Falk gathers the women in the lobby lounge in front of a resort hotel fireplace for a group questioning to “Reveal what REALLY happened,” a gimmick straight out of Agatha Christie and all who would film her books or imitate them.

But through it all, Bana is a brooding, soulful presence, a man who takes this situation seriously, who is more interested in saving his source’s life than whatever information she can provide their investigation, someone who doesn’t let the local cops’ mission creep — Hey, we could wrap up more of this serial killer story with this “search!” — go unchallenged.

“Force of Nature” is more solid and perfunctory than the even more exotic and atmospheric “The Dry.” But the players, the situations and the twists, which are pretty good, recommend it.

And Bana as Aaron Falk? Good on ya, mate. Hang on to this franchise as long as they’ll let you.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Eric Bana, Anna Torv, Lucy Ansell, Deborra Lee-Furness, Robin McLeavy, Sisi Strong, Jacqueline McKenzie and Richard Roxbourgh

Credits: Scripted and directed by Robert Connolly, based on a novel by Jane Harper. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:52

“There is nothing new new in the world except the history you do not know,” Harry Truman said at the beginning of one of the more infamous wars on free speech in these “free” United States.

That’s a big part of the value of “Storm Center,” a McCarthy Era drama starring Bette Davis, about an attempt to ban a book filled with “preposterous ideas” by people afraid of the idea of “ideas,” aka that generation’s crank fringe conservatives.

It’s a modest “it could happen here/it is happening here/it could happen again” drama about a beloved librarian taking a principled stand in the middle of “communist witch hunt” America.

Dated, quaint, well-acted and reasonably well-argued, it overcomes fairly pedestrian direction on its march towards a fine, seething flourish of a finish, much of it provided by She Who Seethes, the Oscar-winning icon Davis.

Mrs. Hull (Davis) is a bullwark against illiteracy and ignorance in her hometown of Kenport, a widow who devoted her life to founding a Free Public Library and who runs it with efficiency and an eye towards the future. The Baby Boom generation of new children tell her it’s time for a “children’s wing.” That’s what she figures the city council wants to meet her about when old friend Judge Ellerbe (Paul Kelly) calls.

But she might have gotten a clue about this “problem” book Ellerbe checked out that very morning — “The Communist Dream.”

When she meets with the “five foghorns from city hall, each trying to out-toot the other,” she finds one in particular (Brian Keith) more than happy to join the rest in a unanimous endorsement of her “children’s wing,” but determined to lead the lot in strong-arming her to remove that book.

Quid pro quo or no, Mrs. Hull agrees. But as she sits and ruminates with her assistant (Kim Hunter), she cannot get over the very idea of “getting rid of a book” over its “ideas.”

The lady’s got a gauntlet and it’s about to be tossed.

Sallie Brophy and Joe Mantell play parents — she’s “cultured,” plays Chopin at the piano, he’s a loving working class mug — whose little boy Freddie (Kevin Coughlin) has fallen under the reading spell. Like all the smart kids in town, he worships Mrs. Hull. Everybody knows the boarding house she lives in, and kids stop her on the street every morning on her way to work, selling raffle tickets for charity, asking about books, letting how know how beloved she is.

But with five “foghorns” fretting over electoral challenges from commie-fearing/blacklist happy voters, with much of the town gripped by the fear of communist infiltration and “grooming” and the nuclear threat that hangs over that, Mrs. Hull may find herself wearing a new label — “communist sympathesizer.”

The script, by director and Oscar-winning “From Here to Eternity” screenwriter Daniel Taradash and screenwriter Elick Moll (“The House on Telegraph Hill”), may be preachy at times. But the writers take pains to show a town divided, with the louder elements (conservatives) shouting down and intimidating everybody else, even those figures (Edward Platt) inclined to stand up for real American values.

This plays out, in microcosm, in little Freddie Slater’s house, where his piano playing mother goes toe to toe with her unread husband, who can’t understand why his son has “his head always buried in a book” when he should be playing baseball. Danged commie in the making. Dad’ll fix that.

You don’t have to know the movie or read the headline to this review to know Bette D. is saving up that “over my dead body” line for the third act.

The “quaint” label I slapped on the picture earlier comes in the Disney-esque Americana of the setting, a lily white Mayberry where the opening of a library wing calls for a “library anthem,” speeches and another confrontation.

Keith makes a fine villain. No mustache to curl, no sermons about communism, just insidious myopia and unprincipled opportunism, very representative of an era where Republicans rode McCarthyism into the White House, and then professed to be “shocked SHOCKED” when the demogogue came after Eisenhower’s beloved military.

If there’s a line from this solid, polished “programmer,” very representative of Hollywood’s modest budget efforts during TV’s first “golden age,” that rings through the ages, the co-writers give it to Davis, a sentiment worth remembering as a divided America re-divides over every new “issue” that confronts us.

“You can’t run a library or a town council to please everybody.”

A little less time fretting over what pleases the fearful, the hate-filled and the ignorant is always in order.

“Civil liberties” and “intellectual freedom” are always faced with the challenges of “censorship” and  demagoguery. If we’re lucky, a new Mrs. Hull shows up and shames us all into remembering what we’re supposed to stand for. And if we’re really lucky, she’ll be a Bette Davis, because nobody messes with Bette Davis and doesn’t get as good as she or he gets.

Rating: “approved,” TV-PG

Cast: Bette Davis, Brian Keith, Kim Hunter, Kevin Coughlin, Sallie Brophy, Joe Mantell and Edward Platt.

Credits: Directed by Daniel Taradash, scripted by Daniel Taradash and Elick Moll. A Columbia Pictures release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:23

May 8, Disney gets a little deeper into the Beatles business with Disney+ showing a newly-restored print of the making of their “Let It Be” LP.

Lovely film. Haven’t seen it in years. Bully for them for helping get this out there.

There’s a noble tradition in the acting profession, and the indie cinema. When the work isn’t there, you create something for yourself worth starring in. It’s how Billy Bob Thornton and others made their own “big break.”

There’s also a well-established route for actresses finally breaking through, getting themselves “taken seriously” by seriously dressing down for a part. Ask Charlize Theron what “Monster” did for her.

But both of these time-honored traditions are strained and stained in whatever the hell nobody’s-idea-of-struggling Nicola Peltz Beckham thought she was doing with “Lola.”

It’s a gritty and lowdown “showcase” in slumming, an attempt at a sort of Riley Keough re-invention for the well-heeled/married-well “Bates Motel” alumna. She wrote, directed and stars in this sordid and misshapen star vehicle about a small town Texas teen struggling to get her and her very young and feminine kid brother out of the hellhouse they’re being raised in.

Bonus points for casting indie icon Virginia Madsen as the monstrous mother who drinks, smokes and takes up with whatever rapist will have her as she ignores and berates stripper Lola and “home schools” a kid (Luke David Blumm) she will never understand.

It’s such a shame your Dad didn’t take you with him when he left!”

Everything else, from the nightly stripper make-up ritual to the “back room” where extra cash is collected for sex work — “Do you party, Angel?” — to the no-good high school boyfriend (Richie Merritt) she keeps around to keep her in drugs, to the Black best friend (Raven Goodwin) at the convenience store where they work and which Lola steals from, to an unplanned pregnancy is straight-up formula, the sort of down-market Southern Gothic downmarket Tennessee Williams wallow we saw in 174 indie films that preceded it.

“I’ve always thought I needed a reason to be good,” Lola narrates in the film’s opening. “But what does ‘being good’ even mean?”

Judging from Peltz Beckham’s writing her way through struggle and death and self-help group and strip club cliches, and donning all that makeup to act “cheap,” she never did figure that out.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse, sex and profanity

Cast: Nicolas Peltz Beckham, Raven Goodwin, Richie Merritt, Luke David Blumm and Virginia Madsen.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nicolas Peltz Beckham. A Vertical release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:23

“The Idea of You” is a swoony screen romance that skates on the edge of a lot of “almosts.”

A female wish fulfillment fantasy, it almost gets by on a little charm and a lot of acting effort by Oscar-winning leading lady Anne Hathaway.

It’s almost a romantic comedy, but the odd cute bits never really add up to much more than a chuckle or three.

And it almost lapses into romance-novel-adapted-into-Hallmark-movie territory, despite its A-picture budget, locations and wan pursuit of an R-rating that barely crosses the PG-13 line.

Hathaway plays Solène, a radiant and ever-so-stylish divorced mother of sixteen year-old Izzy (Ella Rubin). She’s a Silverlake, L.A. gallery owner we’re supposed to be convinced has prepped for a solo camping trip getaway (an almost comic eye-roller) while the kid enjoys a Coachella experience financed by her super-successful, cheated-and-remarried husband (Reid Scott, amusingly douchy).

Dad is just tuned-out of Izzy’s day-to-day life enough to have a arranged a pricey VIP “meet and greet” with the almost-grown-up boy band she used to love, August Moon. But Dad lets business get in the way of fathering one more time and Solène is roped into taking over as chaperone for Coachella.

That’s where she stumbles into the maturing but still “almost” grown-up lead singer of August Moon, Hayes Campbell, played by singing actor and “Purple Hearts,” “Cinderella” and “Bottoms” star Nicolas Galitzine.

He’s got the fashionable tattoos, a piercing or two and a t-shirt torn in all the stylish places. She’s dressed like a cool mom, but with a movie star’s trademark bangs, billion dollar smile and big anime eyes. She takes notice of him, but he is instantly smitten with her. And she notices he’s smitten.

When he tracks her down to Marchand Collective, as her tony gallery, is called, we get our first sense of his youth and the sheltered nature of a “career” that began at 14. He doesn’t know that pottery and ceramics are “thrown.” But while her daughter might think of August Moon as “so seventh grade,” a former band-crush, and Solène’s already met a fanatical August Moonie (mom-age groupie) or two, she can’t help but be a little swept away by his attention. And by the Big Romantic Gesture.

He buys out her gallery to decorate “my London flat.” He’s laid-back about the papparazzi and fan attention, literally laying back in her Subaru sport maternity vehicle’s seat to fool the stalkers as she drives him to see more art, and then her adorable arts and crafts bungalow.

Could she/would she fall for a much younger man, despite the “hypocrisy” of doing a version of what her husband did — take up with a much younger lover?

“The Big Sick” and “Hello, My Name is Doris” director Michael Showalter had the time and the budget to let this June/mid-March romance unfold at its leisure, with underfilmed Silverlake, Coachella and European vacation locations and a slow seduction that feels almost graceful in the hands of our leads.

The boy band stuff, on and off stage, is convincing if cliched, with the other members and their latest girlfriends/groupies (the movie suggests the latter) barely sketched in.

They brought in comic screenwriter Jennifer Westfeldt to goose the script, but even though her best writing credit (“Kissing Jessica Stein”) might have been the adorable, that was well over twenty years ago. She can’t sass-up a best seller that’s more about the adult decisions that such a “Notting Hill” affair, with cruelly-obsessed fans and a daughter sensitive to online hate, might entail.

But the beguiling, sophisticated Solène is still capable of being a little bewitched by Brit-boy Hayes’ boyish “It’s hard to trust people, innit?” The script patronizingly rationalizes her tumble by showing her 40th birthday party and the inept, “baggage” packed age-appropriate menfolk who might make a play for her, if they can just get over themselves, their “hurt” or whatever.

Watch the corrosive “Upside of Anger” if you want to see how that looks from a rationalizing older-man/very young woman romance from the male point of view.

It takes a lot of effort to achieve the “effortlessness” in Hathaway’s performance of a character seemingly tailor-made for her, but she rarely lets that effort show. She has always been grace-incarnate on the screen. There’s enough chemistry to make them believable as a somewhat ill-matched couple, but the efforts at sexual heat border on romance novel bodice-ripping.

This may do the trick for fans of the book. But for me, as sleek and slick as this all is, a “fantasy” set in romance novel affluence and the heady world of jet-setting celebrity, it never plays. The picture’s “patience” becomings trying after a while.

This you or “The Idea of You” love affair requires an elaborate but silly set-up, and once its up on its feet, it never abandons that dawdling, ruminating pace.

And the third act complications are both perfunctory and something any adult would see coming a mile away, in the story, or watching that story oh-so-slowly unfold on a screen.

Rating: R, sex scenes that are closer to PG-13, profanity

Cast: Anne Hathaway, Nicolas Galitzine, Reid Scott and Ella Rubin

Credits: Directed by Michael Showalter, scripted by Michael Showalter and Jennifer Westfeldt, based on the novel by Robinne Lee. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:55

“Down the Rabbit Hole” is probably the strangest feature film on Netflix at the moment, a twisted parable of an indulged, myopic childhood based on the acclaimed debut novella of Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos.

“Fiesta en la Madriguera,” as it was titled in Mexico, is about growing up in a “palace,” the spoiled and sheltered only son of a Mexican drug lord. The novella earned comparisons to “Alice in Wonderland” and “Room,” and the Pacino/DePalma “Scarface,”when it was published, to which I’d add such “the child doesn’t really SEE what’s really going on” tales as “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.”

Miguel Valverde Uribe is Tochtli, a tween we meet on his birthday, where party “guests” are all hired hands of his father, whom the child addresses by his name — Yolcaut. Dad (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) indulges his boy’s every whim, keeping a zoo for the boy’s entertainment, a room of the mansion turned into a giant terrarium for displaying stuffed critters and the kid’s vast collection of hats. .

The child is sheltered from the outside world, tutored by the failed writer Mazatzin (Raúl Briones), who turns the kid into a curious child and an avid reader. Tochtli, who is bald (“to prevent head lice”), is nicknamed “Bonehead” by everyone in the household save for the teacher. Mazatzin feeds the boy’s every new obsession, the latest being Louis XVI of France. He gives him a crown. Samurai Japan will come later.

The boy is used to a father who makes his every wish come true. Dad provided all the hired help with big wads of cash to buy an endangered woodpecker and other exotic gifts for that birthday party.

“Life is like the lottery, hijo,” Yolcaut teaches. “At least for us, we got a lot of lucky numbers.”

When the kid gets it in his head that he must add pygmy hippos to his collection of critters, there’s nothing for it but to safari to Africa and “acquire” a couple.

But there are limits to what omnipotent Yolcaut, who goes through women friends (Debi Mazar, Teresa Ruiz among them) and cash like there’s no tomorrow, can do. As the boy watches the way his brutish dad treats a compliant governor, his desire for the boy to learn but his disdain for “pansies,” Tochtli starts to form opinions even if he’s slow to ask hard questions about all the cash, the dead-of-night goings-on and the way the household frets over crime news on TV and the like.

Swiping a pistol from his father’s gun cache may be an innocent act, or just dangerously imitative of his role model. But the kid may be taking lessons outside of his father’s limited, cruel and Darwinian views.

“The world is full of pansies, men, women and children!” Yolcaut bellows. “But we are macho and can take advantage!”

The players are good across the board, with Garcia-Rulfo managing to convey a nurturing presence in an impatient, ignorant and violent man.

Director Manolo Caro is a workhorse of Mexican TV and cinema, getting jobs from Netflix and others and telling stories efficiently, with just a hint of style.

I wouldn’t call this pointed parable about wealth, corruption, innocence and The American Get Out of Jail Free card that could come with a lot of money any sort of great leap forward in terms of technique. But it’s immersive and biting and fun to parse for its deeper meaning, even if it most certainly isn’t for every taste.

Rating: TV-MA, lots of violence, profanity

Cast: Manuel Garcia Rulfo, Teresa Ruiz, Miguel Valverde Uribe, Raul Briones and Debi Mazar

Credits: Directed by Manolo Caro, scripted by, based on a novel by Juan Pablo Villalobos. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

Rating: TV-MA, lots of violence, profanity

Cast: Manuel Garcia Rulfo, Teresa Ruiz, Miguel Valverde Uribe, Raul Briones and Debi Mazar

Credits: Directed by Manolo Caro, scripted by, based on a novel by Juan Pablo Villalobos. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

“Checkmate” is an Argentine action that is una pelicula caseosa.

Cheesy? It’s a picture that wouldn’t last past its opening credits without a never-ending parade of cliches, tired genre tropes and banal, over-familiar plot elements.

It begins with the “retired” agent (Adrián Suar, of “I Married a Dumbass”) laying low in the outskirts of Tigre, trapping an intruder in the snare he has set in the woods surrounding his home. It’s his 16 year-old niece (Fiorella Indelicato) who has shown up to find out “what you and Dad did for a living.”

They’ve barely re-established their relationship, with Juana showing off her mad chess-playing skills, when a team of assassins storm the house in a hail of gunfire.

They shoot and shoot and shoot, and then are killed and killed and killed. Inexplicably, the last assassin tries to kidnap Agent Duque. All that bloodshed and intent-to-kill, and somebody NEEDS Duque for a “job?”

That’s what we figure out when Juana is nabbed as our intrepid undercover man is calling up his old “team” for help. Some fey villain (Mike Amigorena) who calls himself “Rey” (king), wears too much makeup and keeps capes around as part of his vast wardrobe needs Duque, nicknamed “Dwarf,” to grab something out of a top security lab.

Duque calls in logistics man Malcosido (Benjamín Amadeo) whose way of coping with his bruxism is talking people to death, the observant Israeli Jew Iair (Tsahi Halevi) who must find a way to answer the phone, get on a plane and work his computer expertise without actually working on Shabbat, Mexican bomb expert and pilot Molo (nepo baby José Eduardo Derbez) and mistress of disguises Sofia (Maggie Civantos), whose testiness tells us that she and Duque used to be an item.

They must “Mission: Impossible” their way into this lab, retrieve something and/or someone, and swap that for Juana.

The exploding cars are impressive enough, with or without digitally-added flames. The super secure “lab” settings pass muster.

But every attempt at sending up movies like “Mission: Impossible” falls flat. A few jokes about Israeli Spanish accents and the ways Malcosido (which translates as “bad at sewing”) can be mispronouned might play in the home country. But the light bickering goes nowhere and the plot twists are so over-used there’s nothing left in them.

Not exciting, not funny, not quite sexy and pretty violent, considering the tone they seemed to be going for, “Checkmate” can’t even manage a draw.

Rating: TV-14, violence, profanity

Cast: Adrián Suar, Maggie Civantos, José Eduardo Derbez, Tsahi Halevi, Fiorella Indelicato, Charo López, Benjamín Amadeo and Mike Amigorena

Credits: Directed by Jorge Nisco, scripted by Leandro Calderone, Luis Bernardez, Matías Dinardo, Andrés Restrepo. An MGM release on Amazo.n Prime.

Running time: 1:44

It might be based on a weathered, folksy and cheesy TV series of the ’80s, but every minute of the big screen version of “The Fall Guy” reminds us it’s a MOVIE movie, a spectacle.

Break out the popcorn.

An action comedy about the movies, it’s a noisy, cutesie and violent love letter to the unheralded art of the stunt performers, the “Fall Guys” and Gals who take the tumbles, race and roll the cars and let themselves be set on fire if the script demands it.

And dammit, a lot of the time it does. They work hard for the money. Not that anybody knows their names.

“I don’t know why I’m talking so much,” our hero, Colt Severs, narrates. “I’m not the hero of this story.”

Ryan Gosling is this version of high-mileage stunt double Colt Severs — played by Lee Majors on TV — with Emily Blunt as the camera operator turned director of photography promoted (after the prologue) to director, Jody Moreno.

The players are charming, with Gosling fast becoming North America’s sweetheart, and that counts for a lot.

The laughs are here, the crowd-pleasing stunts and “fan service” touches — an homage to the TV series, a very smart stunt dog who only understands French, elaborate “fool the villains with cleverly conceived stunt craft” and movie magic bits.

But it isn’t exactly the out-of-body experience summer popcorn pic we’ve been hoping for. The relationship is tentative, wounded, and a little cartoonish, the plot more complicated and frustratingly convoluted than it needs to be.

The stunt man and the camera operator are having an on-set “fling” on a production in that prologue, which ends with Colt having a near-fatal on-set accident.

Over a year after his fall, Colt is summoned back to work by the big shot Brit producer (Hannah Waddingham of “Ted Lasso”) to double his delusional former star-partner Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, not remotely as funny as one would expect). Jody is making her directing debut on “Metal Storm,” a silly sci-fi blockbuster “and she asked for you” personally, or so Colt — cooling his heels as a car parking valet — is told.

But once in Australia and on set, he finds Jody didn’t “ask for” him. And star Ryder has disappeared. Colt is motion-captured so that Tom’s face can be “faked” over his in the stunts in the finished film. He must hurl himself back into the danger, double the fight scenes, dealing with Jody’s brittle, vengeful off-camera directions and back-story motivational speeches, delivered by BULLHORN and getting personal enough to make everybody on set who hears this squirm.

And after shooting, he’s got to go and find the real “Space Cowboy” star and get him back on set. Stumbling across a corpse in a tub sets our plot in motion, as Colt is in over his head, but always ready with a fist, a piece of furniture or a firearm as bad guys set out to silence him and the movie production is threatened with being shut-down if the missing star’s absence is ever discovered.

Colt has to juggle all this on and off-set danger and get across his real feelings for Jody while taking the blows with little more than a pained smile and a thumb’s-up after every near death experience.

It’s the “fall guy’s” way. “

“The Fall Guy” has big stunts and big explosions and a couple of good gimmicks — a cell phone conversation which deconstructs the efficacy of filming two actors in ’60s-style “split screen” scenes, this conversation itself handled in split screen, for instance. People talk in movie quotes from “Rocky,” “The Last of the Mohicans” and (Universal intellectual property) “The Fast and the Furious,” to comic effect.

A couple of the filmmakers’ aesthetic choices stand out.

One is using the KISS disco anthem “I Was Made for Loving You Baby” as a kitschy recurring gag, treated with more romantic sensitivity in some scenes than the band ever gave it. And then there are the stunts themselves, epic in a few cases, and as often as not, it’s too obvious Ryan Gosling is not “doing his own stunts.”

That underscores the message and agenda of the movie, that stuntmen and stunt women, from Yakima Canutt to Zoe Bell, rarely get their due. And “deep fake” tech allows productions to paste movie star faces on stunt bodies, should they so desire. But after the third or fourth time in which even a casual viewer might say “That’s not Ryan G.,” its real effect is to take the viewer out of a movie, at least momentarily.

And considering the uncertain pacing and sort of lurching-along narrative, that’s not good thing.

Stuntman turned “Deadpool 2” and “Hobbs & Shaw” director David Leitch is at home making the stunts pay-off. But the dead patches and uncertain pauses for the love story are evident from the start and really become a liability in the later acts. As stunt man movies go, it’s a lot better than the Burt Reynolds laugher “Hooper,” but not in the same class as “The Stunt Man.”

Sequences can be both awe-inspiring and slow-footed, and character rationales seem more popcorn pic perfunctory than anything Ms. Blunt would sign off on as convincing and reasonable. I didn’t buy the romance. I’ve never seen her act more tentative on camera. She’s trying to play “in charge,” ambitious and broken-hearted. We get it. But Leitch & Co. do her no favors when they drown out her pained karaoke cover of “Against the Odds” with the Phil Collins version. Perhaps they were the “tentative” ones.

Yes, the leading lady has some agency, Taylor-Johnson gets a few scenes to get across what he’s trying to do with the character, Winston Duke (as the stunt coordinator on “Metal Storm”) and Stephanie Hsu (as a can-do, badass production assistant) make impressions.

And the wonderful Australian actress Teresa Palmer (“Warm Bodies”) is here, but her stunt double has more moments than her.

The picture is thus a mixed bag, rather like “Hobbs & Shaw” and “Deadpool 2,” and Leitch’s “Bullet Train” — violent, funny, but leaning on Gosling’s twinkling charisma and inside-the-movies jokes and pratfalls to come off, which it does just often enough to recommend.

Rating: PG-13, violence, drugs, profanity

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Teresa Palmer, Winston Duke, Stephanie Hsu and Hannah Waddingham.

Credits: Directed by David Leitch, scripted by Drew Pearce, based on the Glen Larson TV series starring Lee Majors. A Universal release.

Running time: 2:06