Movie Nation

The faithful know what’s coming.

Epic shootouts, sword-fighting set-pieces, the old “ultra violence,” ballets with bullets, Sam Peckinpah slo-mo for “the cool bits,” sacrifice, a little opera, a little jazz, tough guys acting tough to each other, tender to the womenfolk, always hoping for “A Better Tomorrow.”

And doves. White doves. A little Christian symbolism in the middle of the mayhem.

The great Hong Kong action director John Woo hasn’t seemed as active in recent years, turning out period epics intended for the Chinese market (“Red Cliff,” “The Crossing”). But at 71, he shows he’s still got those “Killer/Hard Boiled” gangster chops for Netflix with “ManHunt,” a Sino-Japanese thriller with a silly plot, vintage Woo fights and a lot of blood.

It’s a messy mixed-bag movie built around the “Lucy” plot (a secret superdrug that makes its users super-soldiers, psychotic killers whose pain threshold is through the roof). But it’s John Woo. We love John Woo. You can’t be an action film fan and not want to see it.

And on Netflix, you can start and stop and rewatch “the cool bits” over and over. Laugh when the heroes — a fugitive lawyer (Zhang Hanyu) and flinty cop (Masaharu Fukuyama) — are lashed together with handcuffs, chase each other and brawl over Jetskis (Or are they SeaDoos?) as they flea corrupt cops and biker assassin babes all over scenic Japan. 

Qui Du (Zhang) is a Chinese-based fixer/lawyer for Tenjin Pharmaceuticals who wakes up after a corporate party in dead with a dead woman. The cops are there in a flash, and as they do in bad movies, they tell Qui Du he’s about to die in a set up. Which gives him the chance to escape, the first of many.

Woo escalates these chase scenes from a sprint through crowded streets and subway tunnels, to a Mini Cooper, Jetskis (or SeaDoos) and so on. What, no planes?

Inspector Yamura (Fukuyama) is the brooding, tough-talking detective who on the very day Qui Du escapes, is breaking in a too-young/too-cute sidekick (Nanami Sakuraba), who smiles up to the point where some murderous punks take her hostage.

“You can’t go anywhere with that idiot,” Yamura growls to the villains. “It’s her first day. Give her a break!”

Yamura gets most of the best lines here, delivered in Japanese in a neo-Mijune growl.  He’s hurled into the hunt for Qui Du, tracks him down repeatedly and somehow lets him go. Repeatedly.

“There’s only one end for a fugitive! A DEAD end!”

Qui Du must evade capture so that he can figure out the real killer, get to the Tenjin boss (Jun Kunimura) and find out what’s going on. 

His deadliest and most persistent pursuers are straight out of a James Bond movie — sister assassins Rain and Dawn, played with pistol-packing verve by Ji-won Ha and Angeles Woo (Yes, she’s Woo’s daughter. Cinema nepotism knows no borders). 

Qui Du’s most fascinating encounter is with a group of Japanese hobos and the sage Sakaguchi (veteran Japanese martial arts movie star Yasuaki Kurata). Yes, there are still Japanese hobos.

The picture is all over the place, with many many actors, many plot threads and characters switching from Japanese to Chinese to hard-boiled English in a flash.

But John Woo knows pacing, knows how to keep a movie on its feet and hurtling forward, and damned if “ManHunt” doesn’t manage that, flaws and failings and all.

It’s not one of his best, not on a par with “A Better Tomorrow,” “The Killer” or his Hollywood debut, the Van Damme Cajun kill-off “Hard Target.” But hey, it’s John Woo. Even his failures are more interesting than this week’s Hollywood genre actioner directed by this or that no name film school alumnus.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence and lots of it, drug abuse, sexual situations

Cast:Hanyu Zhang, Masaharu Fukuyama, Ji-won Ha, Angeles Woo, Nanami Sakuraba, Ji-won Ha, Angeles Woo

Credits: Written and directed by John Woo, based on the Jukô Nishimura novel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:46

Steven Tyler is lead singer/front-man for America’s most enduring rock’n roll band, Aerosmith, a sometime talent judge for “American Idol” and a guy who knows opportunity when it knocks at his door.

Run-DMC covers “Walk this Way” in the late ’80s? Let’s try an Aerosmith comeback.

A whole new audience discovers or re-discovers him on TV? Let’s do a solo album in Nashville, one with a little twang to it. “We’re All Somebody from Somewhere” didn’t overwhelm “the critics.” But it hit number one on the sales charts, and that prompted the ultimate country homage from the “Demon of Screamin'” — a show at Nashville’s famed Ryman Auditorium, made legendary by its long association with the Grand Ole Opry.

And you can’t do that show without cameras present. Aerosmith’s longtime filmmaker in residence Casey Tebo captured the show, interviewed Tyler’s fans among his rock peers and gives us a highly-sanitized “backstage” look at the-then 69 year-old rocker, taking such a “risk” with this venture that they call the show and the film “Out on a Limb.”

The concert itself is terrific. His stage-banter includes little half-confessional monologues — “Blame it on Joe Perry, blame it on my ex-wife.” — memories of meeting his guitar-player/co-band leader Perry, and a hilariously disingenuous account of his early life, “tiny town in New Hampshire” “country music” bonafides He’s about as country as a Kardashian.

Dad was a Juilliard-trained classical musician, and young Steven Victor Tallarico grew up in New York…city. He just MET Perry at a rock show in Sunapee, New Hampshire.

But aside from that balderdash, a faintly cornpone stage set and wearing jeans, he’s the same old Steven, same scarf-bedecked mike stand, same belting style, same long-hair and jewelry, a little less makeup.

And the show captured here is terrific,  three horn players added to his “Loving Mary Band” — female drummer, fiddler, bassist, and accordion/harmonic player, a couple of guys with guitars. It’s a Janis Joplin/Joe Cocker styled ’60s band, not quite rhythm and blues, not country either. They deliver an electric blues set, both the new songs, the Aerosmith tunes he includes, with the odd Janis Joplin cover mixed in.

The band can play, the ladies are all top-flight backup singers in addition to instrumentalists. Hearing Tyler and Co. cover “Piece of My Heart” or “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” is sometimes thrilling, and at the very least just plain fun.

It’s the backstage stuff that parks the film more in “for hardcore fans only” territory. Director Casey Tebo rounds up only the most adoring acolytes — including Slash and Tyler’s MANAGER (Rebecca Warfield) — as interview subjects. Tebo narrates the film with similar fawning accolades, and comes off seriously insufferable as he does. Calling yourself an “egomaniacal director” before somebody else does wasn’t a smart play.

Shooting those scenes, flattery from one and all, unexplained random snatches of Steven being Steven (never unguarded, even when driving his vintage Bentley) in locations that are never identified and shot in black and white, gives the picture visual variety, but no insights.

If you’ve ever seen another concert documentary, you get why this material is necessary. But I’m at a loss recalling a film that gave us less candid or entertaining behind-the-scenes views. Even Miley Cyrus’s concert films capture temper, conflict, “the stakes” behind this or that presentation, with more candor.

I had to check his credits to make sure Tebo wasn’t behind the similarly-sanitized Justin Bieber docs.

Even if one and all exaggerate the “what he had to lose” element, even if this music is “country” only in the modern arena rock country sense, “Out on a Limb” can be appreciated for taking a singer (slightly) out of his element.

And Tebo’s film gives us the sense that Tyler was living the dream most every rock singer of his generation shares, to front a Big Band, with horns and backup singers, paying homage to some old favorites, and vamping through others, and having a ball doing it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, squeaky clean

Cast: Steven Tyler, Slash, The Loving Mary Band, David Hodges, Rebecca Warfield, Adam DeLeo, Nathan Barlowe

Credits:Directed by Casey Tebo. An eOne/Momentum release.

Running time: 1:35

“Avengers: Infinity War” easily cleared the $500 million mark at the domestic box office Friday, and is heading for another weekend at the top of the charts by adding $55 million to its net. That’s a 48% drop from last weekend’s $115 or so, for those keeping score.

Which is the whole point of posting these figures, “keeping score at home.”

Deadline.com’s Thursday night/Friday projections, upon which that $55 million figure is based, are notoriously inexact, but generally within the ballpark. It could go into the 60s, or drop below $50 at this point, depending on Saturday’s take.

So that lowball/highball margin for error should be taken into account re: previews and matinees of “Breaking In,” which appears to be headed towards a Mother’s Day mayhem take of $13 million, and “Life of the Party,” which is undershooting its projected low $20s take with a $17 or $18 million weekend in sight.

Taking Mom out Sunday? That will be the key, how many people take their mother to “Tully” or “Breaking In” or “Life of the Party” on a day that usually sees a steep drop-off from Saturday’s numbers.

“A Quiet Place” is marching towards a $175 million take, hanging around the top of the charts for another week or tree ($200 seems too far off, but $185 maybe, all in?).

Figure on this being the last weekend for “Black Panther” in the top ten, “Ready Player One” is done and “Isle of Dogs” may hit $30 million domestically as it loses screens and fades away.

Olivia Munn. There. Does that sell tickets? No?

Shane Black directs her, Boyd Holbrook, Sterling K. Brown, Jake Busey and Edward James Olmos.

“The Predator” opens Sept. 14, just in time for awards season.

August is traditionally a studio dumping ground, movies not strong enough to stand with the Big Boys of Summer, movies will few prospects of garnering attention during “Awards Season,” which begins in fall.

But smart players of the box office game know that “August Sleeper” is a real thing, a movie that opens at the end of a blockbuster summer, usually a genre picture that touches a nerve.

Might “Searching” be that picture this summer? A father (John Cho) starts plowing through his 15 year-old daughter’s school, social media and general online profile after she disappears.

“I KNOW my daughter,” is the catchphrase of this trailer.

Genre pictures like this aren’t usually marketed to the parent-age audience, but the general paranoia about “What the kids are up to online” is a part of the zeitgeist.

Debra Messing co-stars in this Aug. 3 release, with unheralded Aneesh Aganty behind the camera. And whatever else you want to say about it, there’s enough creepiness there to cut a really good trailer out of.

“Infinity War” is going to own the vast majority of the movie-going audience for at least one more weekend.

Because, you know, “Deadpool 2” opens next week. And maybe, JUST MAYBE, filmgoers and even comic book movie fans are going to wonder why they were soiling themselves over two hours and twenty minutes of hype (more bathroom breaks, fanboys/fangirls) when the self-mocking ‘Pool shows them how its done.

“Infinity War,” like “Black Panther” before it, has made stupid money, and will continue to — $50-60 million this weekend is projected. 

Melissa McCarthy’s latest vehicle, a mom-returns-to-college-after-her-divorce “romp” shows up just in time for Mother’s Day. It’s more cute than rude and coarse, PG-13 instead of another variation of her R-rated “Bridesmaids” banter. And was directed by her husband, the steadily-employed but rarely funny Ben Falcone. The reviews, including mine, reflect the way his influence waters down the McCarthy brand. I hope it does well, because trying to give your husband a directing career isn’t an ignoble ambition. Unless he’s Tom Arnold.

Expect it to do “The Boss” or “Tammy” (which he also directed) money, over $20 million. Widely panned by critics, it has a few laughs, if you’re in that mood and fall into that very forgiving corner of the comedy audience.

“Tully” is its most significant Take Mom to a Mom Movie for Mother’s Day competition, which is to say, no competition at all.

“Breaking In” is from genre loving, African American-audience friendly money-making producer Will Packer (“Ride Along,” “Think Like a Man,” “No Good Deed”), another Heroine in Jeopardy/Home Invasion thriller, this one with a “You messed with the WRONG mother” Mother’s Day angle, starring Gabrielle Union.

It’s a half-hearted thriller played at half speed, and Union isn’t a box office star. But Packer, hiring director James “V for Vendetta” McTeigue and keeping his costs low, always makes money. Will it do the $18 million Box Office Mojo is projecting? Nah. I think even the $15 Box Office Guru is suggesting might be a stretch. $12? We’ll see. Packer pictures have a way of blowing up (in a small way) expectations. The man knows his audience.

A big hand for the strong and enduring marriage of comic phenom Melissa McCarthy and comic Ben Falcone. And it’s also impressive that McCarthy has made it a point to give her showbiz husband a leg up thanks to her success.

But trusting him to co-write her scripts, leveraging her box office appeal to get him behind the camera, directing “The Boss” and “Tammy?” You don’t see Kevin Hart, who needs to SAVE his marriage, doing that. Tom Hanks may support Rita Wilson’s late life lounge singer ambitions. He’s not entrusting his work to her. With good reason.

Because Falcone’s latest, “Life of the Party,” is death itself.

There’s nobody there to push her, nobody on set with the power and emotional remove to tell McCarthy that they need another take, they need funnier lines, or that her decision to go with halting, wait for the rim-shot line-readings do no make the unfunny script funny.

She plays a housewife, ditched by her husband (Matt Walsh, colorless here) on the day they drop their daughter (Molly Gordon) off for her senior year in college. Deanna, the mom, is lost until she decides to enroll at Decatur U. and finish the degree she gave up for marriage.

Lots and lots of scenes have McCarthy in her frosted-tips “Mom Perm,” sporting bedazzled alma mater-wear and trying to fit in with the hip kids half her age as she waddles to class.

“Go Tigers, right? “Mondays, huh?” “There’s always that one, right?”

There’s a little midwestern mom in this Georgia mom and her hot-dishes, her smocks and clip-on earrings, dropping into daughter Maggie’s sorority.

“I brought snacks!”

Scene after scene starts off stale and isn’t rescued by riffing. The supportive sorority girls (Gillian Jacobs, Debbie Ryan, Adria Arjona) may counsel “Party through it…We need to get you jack-hammer blasted,” to cope with divorce. Deanna may acquire college kid nicknames — Dee Dee, Dee-Roc. She may find an unlikely college friend-with-benefits (Luke Benward). 

And a frat house may throw an ’80s Night party, allowing the ladies to doll up like “Dallas.” Dee Dee gets her ’80s dance moves on, a low highlight of the picture.

None of it plays that funny. Even comic MVP Maya Rudolph, playing the foul-mouthed hard-drinking BFF, struggles to deliver a giggle. Chris Parnell is introduced as Deanna’s college classmate, now her archaeology professor, and given nothing to play.

It’s all harmless enough, but charmless as well. Wrapping messages about women supporting each other (and not stealing each other’s husbands or being mean girls in college) fall flat without more comic pop surrounding them.

If McCarthy’s still getting pitched scripts from studios all over Hollywood, she’d be wise to give up the co-written ones with her husband. Falcone’s not at full-tilt Tom Arnold here. But Melissa is heading towards a serious “MRS. Norman Maine” reckoning if her not-funny other half keeps misusing her talent in crap like “Life of the Party.”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual material, drug content and partying

Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Maya Rudolph, Gillian Jacobs, Molly Gordon, Matt Walsh, Julie Bowen, Stephen Root, Chris Parnell and Luke Benward

Credits:Directed by Ben Falcone, script by Ben Falcone and Melissa McCarthy. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:45

So what do we know about the “Deadpool” sequel?

No, not the “Introductions,” the “new kids” in “X-Force” stuff. Change your diapers, nerds. Yeah, Josh Brolin’s yet ANOTHER Marvel villain.

And yes, Zazie Beetz is, oh, “Domino,” and is on “Atlanta” and in the indie film “Sollers Point” coming out the same week as “Pool 2.”

No, what we REALLY know is how much hilarity Fox/Marvel and the ol’Pool are hurling at us via marketing stunts, “feuds” with Hugh Jackman.

And gag TV commercials. Like this. Oh, Canada.

And this one.

So you have to wonder, “Damn. Are they giving away more laughs than are in the movie?”

Let’s hope not.

“Deadpool 2” comes out May 18.

It’s not the most original conceit. Round up scientists from different disciplines, have one specialist introduce his or her speciality to somebody from a wholly unrelated field, and see what happens.

But The Motherboard, the science corner of Vice.com, takes this roundtable discussion idea into the field and the far corners of the Earth for “The Most Unknown,” a documentary film/global game of tag with experts in the brain, measuring time, cognition in monkeys, particle physics and cave microbes relay racing their way from Italy to Puerto Rico, Hawaii to Sussex.

As microbiologist Jennifer Macalady from Penn State suggests, “Humans get smarter, the more things they experience.” So she leaves Fransissi Cave in Italy and “probably the most beautiful slime I’ve ever seen” to the deep underground particle research lab of Davide D’Angelo in Milan, observing “a physicist in his natural habitat.”

And D’Angelo meets, on camera, psychologist Axel Cleeremans in Belgium, and gets wired up for Cleeremans’ studies of consciousness.

Cleeremans is the REAL fish out of water when he goes camping with Montana astrobiologist Luke McKay, helping take DNA samples from the mud of boiling hot springs in the American West. And so on.

From methane vents in the deepest corner of the Pacific to Macaque Monkeys on Caya Santiago off Puerto Rico and the measurement research of Jun Ye and his colleagues in Boulder, Colorado, home to the world’s most accurate atomic clock, which they’re striving to make even more accurate, “The Most Unknown” mashes up scientists from widely divergent fields for intellectual, scientific, social and even comic effect.

Make a “Ghostbusters” reference, a “Pina Colada Song” joke or “Pokemon Go” aside, chances are the other scientist knows what you’re talking about, even if she or he doesn’t know what the Western term “ride shotgun” means.

They talk of how no one genius making a breakthrough alters human knowledge, but of scientific scholarship, building on tradition, earlier proofs, a wall of What We Know built one brick at a time.

One stand-out “fun fact” from the movie was Jun Ye’s explanation of how, if the clock is accurate enough and is measurably impacted by even the slightest changes in the mass around or underneath it, you could predict earthquakes with it, even the Big One headed for Yellowstone sometime down the road.

Whatever the intent of Ian Cheney’s film, at its best it humanizes a class of people being demonized in America’s virulent outbreak of Know-Nothingism. These are smart, funny and charming worker bees with limits to their knowledge, just like the rest of us.

Where they differ might be in their grasp of all we don’t know, what constitutes “The Most Unknown” in their area of science. The fact that they admit what they don’t know and grin at every “Eureka” moment of understanding they gain from this until-now stranger who is expert in something they know little about is reason enough for “The Most Unknown” to exist. And that’s why this class of open-minded thinkers should be celebrated, emulated and above all else, funded.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Jennifer Macalady, Jun Ye, Axel Cleeremans, Rachel L. Smith, Luke McKay, Victoria Orphans, Anil Seth, Davide D’Angelo, Laurie Santos

Credits:Directed by Ian Cheney. A Motherboard/Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:32

The thing about “ticking clock” thrillers, movies with a hard, fast and deadly deadline, is that somebody on board has to be able to tell time. Preferably the director.

That was Job One for James McTeigue (“V for Vendetta,” and nothing remotely as good since) on the set of “Breaking In,” this weekend’s “Woman in peril from home invaders” B-movie. Keep the picture moving, keep the cast on task, amped up and on the edge of panic, maintain that sense of urgency.

Because the guys busting into Gabrielle Union’s dead-dad’s “country house” have only 90s minutes, as they’ve cut the power, before the alarm company calls the cops.

You know the firm. You’ve seen their ads on TV. “Last Alert: You’re already Dead by the Time we Show Up.”

But never mind that. If there’s one thing that Hollywood thrillers and the legions of actors who march through them teach us, it’s that faking shock and breath-gulping panic isn’t easy. And hiding boredom, for some actors, is damned near impossible.

Union, of “Think Like a Man, Too” and “Good Deeds” and “The Birth of a Nation,” is Shaun, a mom who drags her two kids (Ajiona Alexus and Seth Carr) with her to the remote Wisconsin estate that her dad owned. As we’ve seen him run down in the film’s smartly scored, shot and edited opening moments, we know he’s dead. And we know this was no accident, as the “hit and run” didn’t involve any running.

The house is a fortress of stone and brick and bullet proof glass and microchips — quite the security system. But minutes after their arrival, the kids are nabbed by house breakers, and Shaun is forced to master this house, and outfight, outsmart and out trash-talk the gang and its leader, Billy Burke (“Twilight”).

And even though that clock is ticking, even though the power that the bad guys “cut” is somehow on (as is the security system), even AFTER Shaun pulls the circuit breakers and dunks them in a sink, gang boss Eddie (Burke) never breaks a sweat, never for one second lets us think he’s manic, and passing on his hurry to his equally bored team (Mark Furze, Richard Cabral, Levi Meaden).

Burke just mutters “Veerrrrrry impressive” for “a woman alone, trapped by strangers,” and “Moms don’t run, not when their babies are trapped in the nest.” If the man wasn’t bored by “Twilight,” why does he have so much trouble punching the clock here?

And his performance is contagious. Check out the little boy in his most terrified moments. How he doesn’t yawn is a miracle for the ages.

Union, who joins Halle Berry and others who have tackled this “You have no idea what I’m capable of” mom gets down and dirty when her kids are “Taken” genre, gives a little of herself. But she only goes half-Halle in this. The commitment isn’t really there as Shaun half-hearted shouts “I’ll get you out, I love you” to her children.

To her credit, she doesn’t listen when one bad guy, armed with a crowbar, shouts “STOP right there!”

Bad screenwriters (Ryan Engle), do you never learn? NOBODY stops right there.

“Breaking In” far too quickly devolves into unintentional laughs provided by the henchmen, complete with long stretches of near silence, affording the smart alecks in the audience the chance to half-shout, “She’s gonna ELECTROCUTE him,” or “There’s ONE IN THE CHAMBER” and “Shoot SHOOT” at the screen.

The dears. They, at least, have a sense of urgency the folks onscreen forgot. They, at least, can tell time as the minutes tick by in this clock-stopping ticking clock thriller.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, menace, bloody images, sexual references, and brief strong language

Cast: Gabrielle Union, Billy Burke, Ajiona Alexus, Richard Cabral, Levi Meaden, Christa Miller

Credits:Directed by James McTeigue, script by Ryan Engle. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:28