Movie Nation

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.

Cute and cuddly as a Shaq Bear, and about as competitive as the past couple of NBA seasons have been, “Uncle Drew” is a kid-friendly b-ball fantasy, “Space Jam” without the space or the Looney Tunes.

It’s a feature-length comedy built around those Kyrie Irving-in-old-man-disguise Pepsi commercials from a while back, basically a film of him and a bunch of NBA retirees in old-age makeup, hustling “Young Bloods” at New York street ball.

But it hangs on the comic straight-man stylings of Lil Rel Howery, “coach” of this geezer hoops team.  And Lil Rel, ridiculed as “Hobbit” and “Tiny Tim” by one and all, is basically Kevin Hart lite (only plump), Cedric the Rarely Entertaining.

Howery plays Dax, a Footlocker salesman whose hoop dreams ended in middle school, a game-winning shot blocked by is lifelong nemesis (Nick Kroll). Now he’s gambled everything he has on  team he’s pulled together for the world famous $100,000 Rucker Playground outdoor tourney in New York, only to have Mookie, “the ghost of white boy past” show up and steal that from him, too.

Mookie even steals his gold-digging girl, Jess (Tiffany Haddish, of course).

Now, Dax’s last hope may involve listening to the geezers in the barbershop (J.B. Smoove and Mike Epps). He needs to track down the man of myth, the baller of legend, Uncle Drew (Irving). He had mad game back in the ’60s, but dissension broke up his crew back then. Can he and his 70something teammates still play?

Only a road  trip in Drew’s 1970s vintage Love Wagon (van) to reassemble that team will tell.

The Big Man (Shaquille O’Neal) is running a Deep South martial arts dojo and looks “like Wolverine’s granddad.”

“Pass the ball, Kobe.”

“That sucker punch is the only ‘free throw’ you ever made.”

Shooting guard “Lights” (Reggie Miller) is blind.

“Legally? Or actually?”

Boots (Nate Robinson) is catatonic and in a wheelchair, until the ball is passed his way. And Preacher (Chris Webber) is serving his flock in “Chocolate City” (D.C.) and about to dunk — literally — a baby he is christening when we meet him. His wife (Lisa Leslie of the WNBA) doesn’t approve and chases the van all up and down the Eastern seaboard to rein Preacher in.

We’re set up for a “Blue Brothers” style odyssey, with every player getting the chance to show what they can do, off the court, on the court and on the dance floor. The Old School dance-off is a hoot, but the many, many dead spots deflate that idea, and the endless short guy/old guy/trash talk-pep talks don’t compensate for wit or pace, all this stuff about  “playing the game the way it was meant to be played,” and the only shot you never miss is the one you never take, “mistake that defines your life” lessons.

Believe it or not, they lean hard on the same mantra “Tag” did — “You don’t stop playing because you get old. You get old because you stop playing.”

Erica Ash plays the doting granddaughter/Dax love interest, ESPN takes a co-starring role as this tale is set up by a “30 for 30” documentary and the network’s last “star” pops up, here and there.

And we all wait and wait and josh around with prostate jokes and heart-attacks until “the big game.” If it wasn’t for Webber, given the funniest part to play (over the top pastor) and playing it to the hilt, the dead spots and blase leading man would dull this to the point of distraction.

Howery is funniest in the outtakes over the closing credits, breaking up at what everybody else is doing.

But if nothing else, Irving & Co., with some sympathetic filming and editing, make a great case that basketball, not soccer, can be the world’s “beautiful game,” even if you can’t really play at this level past, oh, 38.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for suggestive material, language and brief nudity

Cast: Kyrie Irving, Lil Rel Howery, Shaquille O’Neal, Lisa Leslie, Chris Webber, Reggie Miller, Erica Ash, Nate Robinson, Tiffany Haddish, Nick Kroll

Credits:Directed by Charles Stone III, script by Jay Longino. A Summit release.

Running time: 1:43

Here’s a little homework, all the Pepsi commercials that feature a certain age-disguised NBA star owning lesser mortals on the playground b-ball courts of America.

Let’s keep expectations for this low, and hope for the best. When the most experienced jock “actor” on board is Shaq, that’s the safe way to approach “Uncle Drew.”

I mean, sooner rather than later, Tiffany Haddish is going to press that “OVER-exposed” button too hard, and it’ll be time’s up. Not yet, but you can see it coming.

The TV spots for Pepsi were a hoot, so fingers crossed.

John Travolta began his latest “comeback” with TV’s “American Crime Story,” playing the canny, dapper, eventually out-of-the-loop defense attorney Robert Shapiro in the O.J. Simpson trial. He was too tall for the part, but he brought pride, vanity and vulnerability to Shapiro and won kudos for doing it.

The best one can say for his newest attempt at returning to relevance, “Gotti,” which staggered onto the big screen this month after months of delays, distributors chickening out, etc., is that he should have stuck to TV. The script isn’t great, the production values New York seamy and there are a couple of supporting players who act well enough to belong here. But Travolta delivers what there is to deliver. The tone, direction and crack-addict editing all let him down.

Seriously, if you didn’t live through this “Teflon Don” era in New York crime and crime headlines, keeping track of the flaccid, choppy and anecdotal flow of the story is nigh on impossible.

You might remember “The Chin,” and “The Bull” and “Gaspipe” and all the Gambinos, Rosellis, Bilottis, DiCiccos, Ruggieros, Castellanos, Cassos and Boriellos involved in one of the noisiest and bloodiests eras in “La Cosa Nostra” history. But chances are, you don’t, no matter how many headlines you read or how many vowels are in your last name.

Kevin Connolly, who finished “Entourage” with the thought, “I want to direct,” finds this feature way beyond his grasp, creating a muddled movie that cannot find the balance between lionizing Gotti as a “Robin Hood,” a man of honor and fierce family devotion, recognizing that whatever New Yorkers chose to see in him, and the brutally simple fact that he was a murderous, overdressed psychopath, a well-dressed mug and a thug.

The first mistake is right before the opening credits, having Travolta, in character and defiant, address the camera directly — “This life ends one of two ways, dead or in prison. I did both!”

The second mistake is those credits, a montage of the real John Gotti’s many headlines, court appearances and smiling TV “perp walks” during his years running the Gambino Crime Family, and facing the justice system for doing it. Travolta looks a bit like him, but this cheapskate blunder takes you right out of the movie.

It’s a tale told in a disorganized, illogical narrated flashback, where the aged inmate Gotti tries one last time to impart “the life,” its code and “manhood” to his son (Spencer Rocco Lofranco, not really living up to his “big break).

John Jr. is thinking of copping a plea. So the dying Don tells him how he became a “made man,”about men he killed, women he threatened. He became “an earner,” the highest praise for the “soldiers” of the pyramid scheme that is mob management. He figured things out.

“Never do anyone a small injury,” he counsels. Don’t trust anything you hear from “New York’s Finest.” The cops? They “serve two masters,” and sometimes, that second master is a rival mob. And lastly, “I don’t trust any man who never did time.”

Stacy Keach deftly plays Gambino family underboss Neil Dellacroce, the mobster who knew his place, let the family pass to weaker, less deserving leadership than him and didn’t create a fuss.

“The boss is the boss is the boss,” he says. “That’s La Cosa Nostra (“Our Thing”).”

Gotti wasn’t hearing it. In the tradition of a thousand mob movies before this one, younger John angles his way to power, and when the closing circle of prosecution and exposure forces his hand, he takes action — bloodily and ruthlessly.

Connolly and the screenwriters get lost in red-letter dates, this “hit,” that “meeting,” and the Great Ceremonies (a wedding, a “made man” takes his oath) of “the life.”

And they wallow in the coarse, crude and ugly vernacular of these creeps, the murderous threats that pepper “loving” conversations with the wife (Kelly Preston, Mrs. Travolta), the endless F-bombs, the colorful “Lemme AX you this” and “I made youse a tuna sandwich for the road!”

The man loved his wife, loved his kids, loved to gamble and never forgot an offense. He was “Twenty-four hours, seven days a week STREET,” and proud of it. Worth celebrating? Meh.

It’s a movie of impressionist sketches of Gotti, always dressed in Travolta’s permanent scowl. That’s how this vexing picture works best, as little impressions here and there, the fixed image (from police surveillance footage, immortalized in scores of movies and “The Sopranos”) of a bunch of paunchy, homely middle-aged tough guys, standing around some dumpy storefront, restaurant or “social club” entrance, smoking and making veiled threats, the endless back-stabbing, the liberal application of angry Italian, like it’s a code nobody else knows.

“Gotti” doesn’t really have a point, but there is the suggestion that if he was lionized locally, it wasn’t for the occasional “lemme take care of that” favors — a boxing gym’s rent “fixed” here, neighborhood fireworks sponsored in defiance of police there. The NYPD and local prosecutors, a lot of Italians among them as well (including Rudolph William Louis Giuliani) were in their post-“Serpico” funk, infamous for corruption, doing the mob’s bidding and not worthy of unearned respect. No wonder people mobbed Gotti’s trials and tried to riot and free him when he was finally convicted. He came off as “a stand-up guy,” by comparison.

It’s a bad movie, but it has hints of the simplest failing of a lot of movies made by folks who come from long-form TV. It’s episodic to a fault, with no episodes fleshed out and developed, characters played by actors at least as interesting as Chris Mulkey (as underboss Frank DeCicco) and not the generic goombahs rounded up here.

If they’d sold this to cable — and this film sets the World Record for credited producers, at least ONE of whom should know somebody in TV and made the suggestion — it might have worked, another “American Crime Story,” with a lot fewer F-bombs.

It’s just a mess as is, and the only thing we can be sure it will accomplish is killing off MoviePass, a foolish heavy investor in it, and giving Kevin Connolly’s directing career the old Italian Rope Trick. As in, “Fuggedaboutit.”

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and pervasive language

Cast: John Travolta, Kelly Preston, Stacy Keach, Spencer Rocco Lofranco

Credits:Directed by Kevin Connolly, script by  Lem Dobbs (screenplay), Leo Rossi. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:44