Movie Nation

“Sicario” was a movie that needed no sequel. It set up a quest, twisted and turned — with shocking moments of violence — until that quest was at an end. Like too few action pictures these days, it gave us closure, a sense of completion. It dared to leave us wanting more. Lionsgate had a modest hit on its hands, and more importantly, a good movie, one that’s as rewatchable as it was surprising.

Then Sony got its hands on the property, more money was involved and here we have a sequel. As I said in my review, I loved “Sicario,” “Sicario: Day of the Soldado” I liked — much more conventional. And then the third act took even that away. Early reviews entailed a lot of underwear changing over “Soldado.” Then the better critics weighed in and poof, there goes the “masterpiece” silliness, right out the door.

Kudos to “Uncle Drew” director Charles Stone III. Check out the performances he got out of Kyrie Irving, Shaq, Reggie Miller and especially Chris Webber in this comedy. Pepsi did the proof of concept, that NBA stars of today, done up in old age makeup, old school track suits, surprising and skunking “young bloods” on the playground, is funny. Stone’s film took that to a (slightly) new level. He needed a better non-baller lead, and the script, despite the delights of seeing these “old men” dazzling on the court and surprise on the dance floor, has too few funny ideas to pay off. Mixed reviews for this one, too.

Neither of these two films should challenge “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,” which will plummet on its second weekend, or “Incredibles 2,” which is sure to hold audience another weekend. Box Office Mojo figures these two newcomers, both being established “brands,” will manage $17 or so. That’s selling the family-friendly farce “Drew” short. I’d be surprised if it didn’t clear $25.

“Leave No Trace,” the wilderness, off-the-grid vet (Ben Foster) raising his daughter in the woods drama, has earned great reviews but is going into limited release.

“Dark River,” a superb British “battle my personal demons when I return to the family farm” drama starring the formidable Ruth Wilson, is terrific and worth checking out if it’s showing in your neck of the woods.

“World” should manage another $50, 60 million this weekend, and anything below $50 will suggest buyer’s remorse and audience finally coming to its senses. If “Incredibles 2” does close to $50, it just might be close.

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor” should stick around the top ten one more week. Go see it while you have the chance.

I loved the borderlands hitman thriller “Sicario,” and I’m not alone. It has this  meandering but compact narrative, brutal violence meted out by brutish men, the queasy unease it gives you about government sanctioned mayhem and a devilish simplicity underlying all that surface complexity, the thing that drives it.

Revenge.

But while there is still intense pleasure in watching the understated machismo of Benicio Del Toro in the title role (“hitman”) and Josh Brolin as Matt Graver, the off-the-books black-ops guy the government calls in when they need things to “get dirty,” while that tag-team quest narrative is somewhat reprised, I never got got beyond “like” with “Sicario 2,” “Day of the Soldado (Soldier).” And when the thriller’s third act collapses in on itself , breaking its own unsentimental rules and reminding us that this is the studio that reboots “Spider-Man” every three years, whether we ask for it or not, “like” becomes a stretch.

The setting is our still-porous border, where suicide bombers are now sneaking in via Mexico via the cartels that used to make their money bringing us the drugs America craves.

The Islamic terrorists are that “Reicshstag fire” or 9/11 redux so many of us fear — an excuse for a civil liberties/rule of law-flouting government to “get tough” and “go dirty.” That’s what the Secretary of Defense (Matthew Modine) wants out of Garver, a no-holds-barred assault on the cartels that control human smuggling. Start a war between them, don’t leave our fingerprints on it.

The play? Kill a second-in-command here, kidnap a daughter of a kingpin there. That’s how our “Sicario,” Alejandro (Del Toro) comes back on the payroll

That daughter-kidnapping, of an insolent 14 year-old savage, the world-wise Isabel (Isabel Moner), is what goes wrong. That puts our Sicario in the position of protecting her from all comers.

Meanwhile, on the American side of the border, Miguel (Elijah Rodriguez) is a teenager going wrong in McAllen, Texas. He’s signed on with a cousin to become a mule, smuggling Latinos over the Rio Grande. The money, the machismo, the guns and tattoos are too much to pass up.

As in the original “Sicario,” these two threads will intertwine, and not in ways that follow Hollywood conventions.

Two great things from the first film are missing here; the sense of completion and closure, and the pathos brought by having Emily Blunt as a straight-arrow government agent caught up in illegal ops that she, and we, know are sure to lead to blowback. Nobody here is morally conflicted. Nobody here has to have the shenanigans going on hidden from her or explained to her.

Everybody South of the Border is hopelessly corrupt, and the film offers just a glimpse of that sort of stink settling here in the country where we’re supposed to be about “rights” and “rules,” but where the looting and law-flouting is just now getting serious.

Only when things go sideways does the undersecretary in charge (Catherine Keener, great as always) show any sign of second-guessing, and that’s not over morals. She figures this could be cause (another cause) for “impeachment.”

The action beats are perfunctory and director Stefano Sollima never met a drone shot of a truck convoy, a wall of satellite videos from all angles or night vision shots from a chopper, that he didn’t like. SOMEbody read a little too much Tom Clancy, translated into Italian, for his own good. “Surgical strikes” only exist in action movies and Clancy novels.

All I’ll say about the film’s infamous third act is that the picture goes from engrossing to conventional in a flash, and then doubles down on the sort of bottom line “franchise” value that too many studios succumb to these days.

That’s the Marvel Universe we live in at the movies. No story is ever “over,” nothing ever feels complete and satisfying. Everything, even the movies you don’t have to stay all the way through the credits for, is scared to death to leave the viewer wanting “more.”

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, bloody images, and language

Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin, Catherine Keener, Isabela Moner, Elijah Rodriguez

Credits:Directed by Stefano Sollima, script by Taylor Sheridan. A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 2:02

Remember “Goosebumps?” Yeah, Jack Black’s all about the kid-friendly horror genre. Got to start them off somewhere.

This time, he’s paired up with Oscar winner Cate Blanchett for a film based on Eric Kripke’s novel, “The House With a Clock in its Walls.”

He’s weird Uncle Jonathan, Cate B. is his testy/scary/saucy neighbor. Yeah, witches and warlocks.’

Kyle MacLachlan is He Who Must Be Resisted.

It’s like Eli Roth made a period piece Harry Potter picture. Because Eli Roth is the director. 

You may recall Kripke created TV’s “Supernatural.” 

All good clean (pumpkin in the face) fun, right?

This one opens Sept. 21.

Good romantic comedies remain Hollywood’s most elusive unicorns, and maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe it’s a thesis put forth in “Playing It Cool,” a mediocre, gimmicky 2015 romantic comedy that featured a star-studded supporting cast, some cute characters, witty banter and adorable leads.

Maybe screenwriters are the last people to know a damned thing about “true love.”

Our hero and narrator (Chris Evans) admits as much. For all the “You can’t put love on paper” complaints of his writer pals, all the “Rom coms aren’t true. They’re what we wish were true,” advise from his agent (Anthony Mackie), you can’t be en emotionally stunted heel with a dead spot inside and write great romance.

I’m not necessarily buying that, but “Cool,” the first and so-far only feature of its director and one of two credits by its Chris Evans-connected writers (their sad-romance “Before We Go” came out at about the same time) makes its case and as we dissect what went wrong, it seems to make its point.

Romantic comedies demand that we’re shown a couple we want to see together, people we root for. And are there two more likable leads than Evans and Michelle Monaghan? Did you HEAR Evans sing in “The Losers?” Have you seen ANY Monaghan movie? Ever?

The genre has its conventions, which stretch to Shakespeare — obstacles, romantic competition, weddings and the “Act Three running through the airport” scene accompanied by bystanders giving the lovers “the slow clap” when they finally embrace.

OK, the airport bit doesn’t date from Shakespeare, but all the rest? Those are the rules our narrator must follow, as related by is writer-pal Scott (Topher Grace). So why can’t he get them into hi screenplay, “Splinter,” about two people with multiple personality disorder who fall in love?

“They have Ashley Tisdale from ‘High School Musical’ and Matthew Morrison from ‘Glee!’ It’s gonna be HUGE,” his agent says. “I can see the poster, now.”

But our hero just isn’t feeling it, and as never felt it. Even projecting himself into the romantic tales of the grandpa who raised him (an animated World War II romance and combat sequence) and his circle of writer-friends (Grace, Aubrey Plaza, Luke Wilson, Martin Starr) doesn’t help.

Until he starts seeing this woman he met at a charity dinner (Monaghan), who never told him her name but did let him see she had a boyfriend (Ioan Gruffudd) in these projection fantasies. Sometimes he’s the hero of a Korean soap opera they’re talking about, sometimes he’s his pal Mallory (Plaza), in a wig and dress, getting groped by her handsy date, but always he shares this moment, in his mind, with the stranger played by Monaghan.

That’s chief among the gimmicks of this gimmicky rom-com. The narrator sees himself in his “writer” guise — cynical, smoking and drinking in a black suit and Homberg hat. He wanders, black-and-white, through a world of lovers living out their romances in color all over Venice Beach.

The irony of ironies here is that this quick and cold and stunningly cluttered comedy is Exhibit A in ways a rom-com can’t work. The film has so much going on that we don’t connect the lovers and never have a chance to root for them.

Their “meet cute” in the first act is promising, with her overhearing him diss the other women at their charity dinner.

“If I have to hear one more ‘4’ talk about her vegan pet, my sperm are going to start eating each other.”

After that? Bupkis. Pretty much.

Evans rounded up a legion of former and future co-stars (Mackie, Gruffudd) and actors like Patrick Warburton and Philip Baker Hall (as is grandfather) show up for a couple of scenes, make an impression and exit.

There are several scenes with his “family” of writers — at a shooting range, on the beach, in a bowling alley. The banter is overfamiliar men saying what women are like, and vice versa, save for riffs about writers with sexually suggestive names — “Shakespeare, Longfellow. ee cummings. Balzac. Atwood. Koontz. Longfellow.”

A cute analogy or three — “Love is like a leak in a boat. It starts slowly, and if you don’t stop it, you drown.” “You know what this suit’s made out of? Boyfriend material!”

But the rest is just cliches that aren’t really turned on their heads, tropes that play like the high five instead of a kiss at “the right moment,” which means he gets to “hear it echo to the end of eternity.”

Because our hero, like our screenwriters, can’t manage sweet. But writing a rom-com that is “Not funny, not romantic, love how it really is” isn’t quite within their reach, either.

MPAA Rating: R for language and sexual content

Cast: Chris Evans, Michelle Monaghan, Anthony Mackie, Topher Grace, Aubrey Plaza, Luke Wilson, Ioan Gruffudd, Patrick Warburton, Philip Baker Ball

Credits:Directed by Justin Reardon, script by Chris Shafer and Paul Vicknair. A  Vertical/Voltage release.

Running time: 1:34

In the glorious early days of Jackie Chan’s career, the only films you saw him in were Hong Kong imports, not really intended for the Western marketplace. But the cognoscenti got their Chan on in these dubbed B-movies, memorable only for the martial arts tumber/clown’s dazzling stunts.

“Bleeding Steel” is a throwback to those days, slick but cheesy, dubbed, filmed and set in Australia but really for the enormous Chinese film market. And Chan fans will find it memorable for one sequence which shows the 64 year-old can still make a fight funny.

He plays a UN detective who lost his daughter (to leukemia) while he was on the job, battling to save a Western scientist (Kim Gyngell) who has “defected” with this secret tech to create “bio-roids,” nuclear-powered super-soldiers, impervious to bullets and what not. 

Yes, that’s where the world is headed, not nuclear-powered super soldiers, but scientists defecting from the regressive West to the ascendant East.

Years later, Det. Lin Dong has “retired” to Sydney, Australia, where he keeps an eye on this cute teen, Nancy (Na-Na OuYang) who has uncanny fighting skills, but is seeing a witch to treat her nightmares.

There’s a best-selling novelist (Damien Garvey) whose latest book, “Bleeding Steel,” borrows its tech from the super-secret scientist’s files, and that’s gotten the interest in the SuperVillain Ande (Callan Mulvey) and his Avengers spaceship borne minions, mainly The Woman in Black (Cape, leather suit, hair), played by Tess Haubrich.

And we also meet also a goofy young hacker (Show Lo) stalking Nancy, helping her where he can. He gets her into the show of a mentalist/magician who might explain those dreams to her. But that’s where the villains have their first shot at getting to her.

And as that show and ensuing brawl takes place in the iconic Sydney Opera House, that’s Lin Dong’s moment to spring into action and Jackie Chan’s chance to shine.

As his first throw-down is a generic shootout with futuristic guns and explosions, and his second, and first actual martial arts fight, is performed in a mask — “Who do you think you are, Spider-Man?” — and thus the work of a stunt double, it’s gratifying to see him turn back the clock, flinging every trick in the magician’s bag — cards, fire pans, a white rabbit — at Andre’s henchmen and henchwoman.

No, it’s not up there with his epic ladder fight in “First Strike,” his playful scramble up a sailboat mast, listing the little boat so that he nimbly drop on a hovercraft in “Rumble in the Bronx.” But it’s a reminder that the violence used to be more slapstick — this is not quite as bloody as “The Foreigner” — and that in his younger days, he took his falls, broke his bones for his art.

Hey, he’s 64 and he’s not Uncle Drew.

If he’s at the Sydney Opera House, you know he’s going to have to climb that shaped-like-sails roof for a fight, and find a way to tumble off it. That’s a tepid imitation of the other times he’s done this sort of this thing.

“Bleeding Steel” has Nancy fighting off Aussie racists (“You’re a credit to us Chinese!”) and the most exhausted “Do not disappointment me again!” and “I’m going to enjoy killing you!”  bad guy threats.

There are ways to film around a movie you know will be dubbed, and director Leo Zhang employs these — keep the conversation scenes moving so we don’t notice what their lips are doing — reasonably well.

But even by no-plot/all-action standards of Chan’s early pictures, “Bleeding Steel” feels a bit bled out. Impressive sets, cool minion combat suits (leather with lights), fun settings, but a film that has to content itself with gunfights, blood, explosions and a plot that makes little sense, no matter how many characters stop the movie to explain it.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and some language

Cast: JAckie Chan, Callan Mulvey, Tess Haubrich, Show Yo, Na-Na OuYang

Credits:Directed by Leo Zhang, script by Siwei Cui, Erica Xia-Hou, Leo Zhang. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:47

Super cool character actress Judy Greer (“The Descendants”) steps behind the camera for this school murder mystery comedy starring Jennifer Garner, Common, Keanu Reeves, John Cho and newly minted Oscar winner Allison Janney, Katie Holmes and Rob riggle among others.

They’re dumping it in late August. Monumental let-down, at least in terms of release date. Could be funny.

It’s a common failing of films adapted from beloved books. The fervent desire to be “faithful” to the work leads to fear that you’ll leave something important out.

The resulting film feels truncated, abridged. Time simply runs out.

That’s the feeling one gets from “Suite Francaise,” an all-star World War II in occupied France film based on a novel Irène Némirovsky wrote early the war, hid away and never published during her lifetime. She was Jewish and died in a concentration camp.

Do you have the gall to trim it for time, edit it down? Neither did the folks filming it. That, and the film’s suppressed, underplayed romance hamper what could have been an awards contender back in 2015, rendering it chillier than it might have been.

Michelle Williams is our heroine, Lucille, though she hardly feels that way. She married into money and comfort, even though the invasion of France in 1940 means her husband is away, fighting. Living with her imperious, greedy mother-in-law (Kristin Scott Thomas, perfect) is the cost of this security.

France falls, and suddenly Madame Angellier‘s trips to various properties, squeezing rent out of tenant farmers, seems trivial. But with new masters come a new angle to the status quo. Some will do well, some will have food and fuel to hoard and some will starve.

And old scores will be settled by denunciation, anonymous letters to the German authorities who occupy the little town of Bussy.

As Lucille’s earthy, farm wife neighbor Madeleine (Ruth Wilson, dazzling as always) says, “You want to know what people are truly made of, start a war.”

An officer is billeted in the Angellier’s chateau. Lt. Bruno von Falk is handsome, and in a town with no able-bodied young men left, this sudden influx of blond Aryans who like the wash up, shirtless, at the town fountain or group skinny dip in the nearby ponds, are a temptation.

As we know Margot Robbie (in curls) plays one of the overripe farmgirls, we can guess one woman who will be tempted. As Matthias Schoenaerts plays Lt. von Falk, we know Lucille will be another.

The boorish, plundering Huns (Tom Schilling plays another Lieutenant, more standard-issue sadist) leave the townspeople afraid and appalled. Bruno, who asks for access to the family piano because it turns out he’s a composer, is very quick to distance himself from his compatriots.

“I have nothing in common with these people.”

The story has many melodramatic intrigues, the ways the town judges Lucille for sleeping with the enemy, the ways she manipulates that relationship to be of service to her fellow townspeople. Sam Riley, for instance, plays Madeleine’s defiant, crippled farmer husband, a communist who rubs the Nazis and the upper class folk in town the wrong way and is sure to need protection, over and over again. That material works as well as it usually does in a convincing WWII drama.

But the central romance earns short shrift, with all these characters to service and all those story lines to get in.

It doesn’t help that Williams’ Lucille doesn’t give herself over to the passion and never quite sells us this “relationship.” Schoenaerts broods over just what he might be putting on the line, but Williams is so cool that we don’t buy into the risks taken.

This disconnect is most obvious in Williams’ scenes with Wilson, of TV’s “The Affair” and such other films as “Dark River.” Williams narrates and ruminates, Wilson will break your damned heart in just a single scene.

And you sure as shooting would know if Wilson was playing a woman headstrong enough to rebel against the mother-in-law, and against her neighbors and countrymen because of the fatal attraction of a brutally handsome but tender man.

The smothered affair and the abrupt nature of the climax don’t so much ruin “Suite Francaise” as make it far less than it could have been. It’s a sturdy period piece that should have set off sparks, instead.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Michelle Williams, Matthias Schoenaerts, Kristin Scott Thomas, Margot Robbie, Tom Schilling

Credits:Directed by Saul Dibb, script by Saul Dibb and Matt Charman, based on the Irène Némirovsky novel. A Weinstein Co. release.

Running time: 1:47

Sometimes, even your most attentive parenting isn’t enough. “Beautiful Boy” is based on David Sheff’s memoir about “losing” his son to addiction, and trying to find him and get him back. As the memoir was co-written by that son, the story isn’t so much about the suspense of what will happen to the kid (Timothee Chalamet of “Call Me By Your Name”) as what the parents (Steve Carell and Maura Tierney) and kid put each other through on this nightmarish journey. Amy Ryan also This one’s due out in October.

“Wild Oats” begins with a funeral.

“So brave…”He’s in a better place.” “This is the nicest pot-luck wake I’ve ever been to.” “I’m sorry for your loss. And I just LOVE your house.”

Eva (Shirley MacLaine) is burying her husband, Maddie (Jessica Lange) is the one falling to pieces.

Not about Frank, her friend’s dead husband, but her own lesser half who is having an affair at the office.

“Who brings a secretary to the funeral?”

Demi Moore’s the hysterical daughter — “You have NO one, now! Where are you going to live? Without DADDY?” What she means is, “When can we see the house?”

Hysterical tears, insults, peals of laughter and…no, that life insurance policy of Frank’s won’t last long. And a lady can’t dine out on “You were the best teacher I’ve ever had,” even in this small town.

As Maddie’s husband (Colin Walker) just “packed up his clothes and moved in with Clarissa’s 25 year old ass,” we’re presented with two retiring “best friends for 40 years” (Oscar winners) with a lot of grief and time on their hands, time to get into mischief.

Well, not so much time. And maybe the life insurance company made…a mistake?

“Wild Oats” is a bittersweet better-to-burn-the-candle-late-than-never comedy waddling around on the flimsiest, corniest bones. Director Andy Tennant (“Hitch,” “Sweet Home Alabama”) likes comedy’s low-hanging fruit. And he’s not shy about taking forever to get is movies started. Even short ones like “Oats.”

The ladies take off to the Canary Islands, with an aged insurance investigator (Howard Hesseman) who will be the fall guy for the “mistake” if he doesn’t catch them before they have too much fun, on their tails.

Along the way, a doddering, forgetful old charmer or con artist or nut (“He’s demented, honey.”) played by Billy Connolly shows up. And the “adventure” begins.

Gambling, torrid “Have you ever seen the movie ‘The Graduate?'” hook-ups, “let yourself go” all while the long arms of Big Insurance reach out to spoil all the fun. That’s the set up.

But Tennant can’t wait to get at that, move past it and get on to the far less funny and less promising “twists” that follow.

Lange does the high-mileage bipolar vamp thing well, lurching from admiring herself in the mirror to weeping at her lot. MacLaine plays the pedantic teacher here, correcting grammar, geography and history, when the need arises.

Hesseman manages befuddled “villain” with ease.

But the laughs in this insomnia cure come in the first act, almost all of them at the funeral. Once the machinations of a tedious, trite and formulaic script take hold, the novelty of hearing lionized actresses curse (demurely) wears off, so do the charms of “Wild Oats.”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content

Cast: Shirley MacLaine, Jessica Lange, Billy Connolly, Howard Hesseman, Demi Moore

Credits:Directed by Andy Tennant, script by Claudia Meyers, Gary Kanew. A Weinstein Co.  release.

Running time: 1:25

She manages one of those “sports” bars whose real selling point is what the too-willing-to-be-objectified waitresses wear. And being a woman of optimism, faith and a sense of sisterhood, that’s not easy.

Regina Hall stars in “Support the Girls,” a comedy about looking beyond the bums and tight, tied-and-the waist low-cut T-shirts and doing the psychological math the employees do. And it’s about one long, bad day as the poorly-paid manager walking the tightrope between accepting certain strip club norms being shoved into a “mainstream” restaurant, trying to look out for somebody’s daughter, girlfriend or wife as the occasional (more than occasional) creep crosses the line in such an establishment.

Good to see Regina Hall in this Mother Superior role, riding herd on Brooklyn Decker, Haley Lu Richardson and assorted other “Coyote Ugly” candidates. With James Le Gross and comic Lea DeLaria along for the ride. August 24 at a theater near you.