Movie Nation

As interesting as he inevitably is, there’s something forlorn about British character actor Toby Jones, a sense that he’s carrying on through the hopelessness of whatever dead-end life he’s portraying this time.

Short, balding, Jones gives every role the weight of the world, the sense that he’s doing his best to beat back the bitterness.

He works a lot — sci-fi and drama, British TV — and plays a lot of scientists, officious officials (“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy”), assistants, gossips (Truman Capote in “Infamous”) and downtrodden fixers. Sometimes, they aren’t quite so downcast (Hollywood agent Swifty Lazar in “Frost/Nixon.”).

At least when he’s a villain, or a villain’s henchman (“Captain America: The Winter Soldier”), he gets to break out a demonic smile.

The rare occasion when he becomes a leading man puts his disappointment or efforts to avoid it front and center. Check out the melancholy myopia of the ever-so-twee TV series “detectorists,” for instance.

In “Kaleidoscope” he’s Carl, a little man in a little flat in a huge, impersonal complex living a lonely life, with only his mother’s guilt-loaded answering machine message for company. He faces that blinking “You’ve got messages” light with utter dread.

When he finally gets a woman (Sinead Matthews) up to his place for Sea Breezes (vodka, cranberry juice, grapefruit juice), he’s on his heels from the start.

“Where’s all your stuff?”

He doesn’t have much.

“Let’s look at your profile. Where’s your computer?”

“I use one at the library.”

And when the aggressively fun-seeking Abby asks if “I’m your sort,” because men tend to date their mothers (her theory), it’s nosebleed time. His.

He dashes to the bathroom, she rummages through his place. Not to rob him, but to figure him out — a prison library book here, an old-fashioned kaleidoscope there.

“You don’t drink. You don’t smoke. You don’t dance. Maybe you’d rather read a book.”

What’s her angle? Maybe she’s just drunk. His? He’s got secrets, layers of secrets.

Carl’s mood turns on a ten pence piece.

“Why are you here?”

“You look like a pushover.”

When he wakes up after blacking out, Abby is dead. What’s he done?

That sets off the ex-con’s frantic effort to clean up after the crime, curling up in a ball to see if the luggage he has on hand will hold a short woman’s body. Bits and pieces of the night, his psychological past, and that damned answering machine message interrupt the sound of…sawing.

Jones’s brother Rupert wrote and directed “Kaleidoscope,” a psychological thriller with touches of the Edgar Allen Poe story “The Cask of Amontillado” that Toby Jones filmed years ago. And maybe a hint of “Psycho.”

Because when Mummy (Anne Reid) shows up, she has an awful lot of access to his life and information about what might have just happened. He wants nothing to do with her, and her every word and action seems to implicate him and complicate the crime he apparently has committed.

She cooks, “It’s liver, your favorite,” and he’s not having it.

“You have no idea what I like.”

Mumsy, from the Isle of Wight, is all “bygones,” and unflappable in the face of Carl’s naked hatred.

“Is there no way to start again, after all this time?”

“But I haven’t had any time. All my time’s been taken away.”

Interrogations, phony alibis, a brute of a husband, an overly curious police dog — and afterwards, the third degree in velvet gloves from the hated on woman on the sofa.

There’s a built-in inevitability about “Kaleidoscope” that puts the burden on performances for this to come off, and they almost salvage a generally bland, mostly unsurprising thriller.

Reid’s toxic smile and Matthews’ working class wantonness work. But in a role no-doubt written for him, Jones downloads his entire arsenal — hurt, shyness, pain, guilt and rage — onto the screen. This is a performance that smacks of desperation and denial, a paranoid loner making it up as he goes along.

He’s better than the film, more interesting as a character than as a character watching justice close in on him.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, disturbing themes

Cast: Toby Jones, Anne Reid, Sinead Matthews, Deborah Findlay

Credits: Written and directed by Rupert Jones. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:39

Eye popping action, and a celebration of “Mom.” June 15.

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.