Movie Nation

“Dave Made a Maze” is the most jaw-droppingly original movie of 2017, a delirious and deliberate act of DIY whimsy in the Terry Gilliam style.

It cannot possibly have been as cheap to make as it looks. The sets are literally made of cardboard. But genius often scoffs at the word “budget.”

Start with the simplest of concepts — this frustrated, directionless goof Dave (Nick Thune) has built a labyrinth out of old refrigerator boxes in the living room of his apartment. Girlfriend Annie (Meera Rohit Kumbhani) comes home and just rolls her eyes.

There he goes again. And yeah, he’s “lost” inside it.

But this thing “is bigger than it looks,” he insists. “Don’t come IN here! It’s DANGEROUS!” And no, you can’t tear it apart. I mean, he spent his whole weekend building it, its blind alleys, chimneys, tunnels and booby traps.

Oh yes — it’s booby-trapped.

“Call Gordon! Call Leonard! JUST Leonard!”

His pals are no help. Gordon ( Adam Busch of TV’s “Colony”) shows up with a documentary film crew, led by indie film icon and Hal Hartley muse James Urbaniak.

Leonard (Scott Krinsky)? He shows up with friends, Flemish tourists, the works.

They can’t lead Dave out. The maze shakes and smokes and every time they push against it, the sound of shattering glass and rending metal screeches from it.

“Don’t come in here” is ignored. Annie’s got her box cutter and she’s going in. And everybody and I mean EVERYbody else follows.

What they and we are treated to is a visual delight, dazzling cardboard rooms rendered from say, an electronic keyboard package, or walls of pasted-together playing cards.

And no, it’s not safe. It’s taken on a life of its own. There’s a monstrous Gilliam-style cardboard head straight out of “TRON,” predatory origami birds that attack and peck.

Slide into this room, and everybody is transformed into paper-bag puppets, cross into that one, death dealing axes or Vietnam War punji sticks await.

Hell, there’s even a Minotaur. And since the maze isn’t quite finished, there really is no way out.

“We’re going to die, and it’s all YOUR fault,” one and all scream at Dave.

Save for Harry (Urbaniak), the doc director who interviews everyone as they explore, manipulates performances (“More ‘childlike WONDER’ this time!”) and stays on task, even when people die.

The deaths are tiny little comic works of art — an arterial spray of red confetti, yarn and silly string.

Seriously, if this little indie pic’s production designer, Jeff White, isn’t nominated for an Oscar, the Art Director’s Guild doesn’t know genius when it sees it.

Actor-turned-director and co-writer Bill Watterson keeps the tone light and the surprises surprising, for the most part. The energy flags as the picture loses a little of its momentum in the middle acts. It’s only 80 minutes long, so even that doesn’t hurt it much.

The characters are dizzy, the film-making jokes (documentary fakery) zing and the stakes seem high even when we’re seeing characters ground up by cardboard gears, sliced by cardboard saws (“Paper cuts!”) in a cloud of paper-shredder plasma.

Urbaniak stands out in the cast — a droll voice of ’80s hipster nerd slumming among millennial slackers — though Busch, Thune and Stephanie Allynne all make funny impressions.

The whole merry affair walks a tightrope between ingenious and happy accident, skating along on a killer gimmick and the make-do/can-do DIY spirit of the production team.

Seriously, why bother making a sequel to “Labyrinth” now that “Dave Made a Maze?”

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, cartoon violence

Cast:  Nick Thune, Meera Rohit Kumbhani, James Urbaniak, Adam Busch, Stephanie Allynne

Credits:Directed by Bill Watterson, script by Steven Sears and Bill Watterson. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:21

“Annabelle: Creation” back-engineers the tale of the demonically possessed doll — the latest version of a demonically possessed doll — into an origin story that is a veritable grab-bag of terror.

The director of the simpler and superior “Lights Out” takes his best shot at making us quake, jump or recoil at demons, dolls, scarecrows and puppets. But while David F. Sandberg uses his silences well and doles out the early chills like a doctor worried we’ll get hooked on thrills, that grab bag is mostly stuffed with cliches. And if we’re talking back to the screen, as audiences often do at horror pictures, it’s because we’re two steps ahead of the plot and trying to hurry this lumbering beast along, or correct its lapses in logic or its anachronisms.

In the 1940s, a little girl named “Bee” is killed in a motoring accident. Her mother (Miranda Otto) grieves, and her taciturn doll-maker dad (Anthony LaPaglia) will never make another doll.

But years later, with his wife an invalid at their remote Southern California farmhouse, Dollmaker Sam invites the Catholic Church to set up a mini-orphanage in their home.

The half-dozen little girls under the care of Sister Charlotte (Stephanie Sigman) love having all this space. But there are a lot of shadows there, and a locked room with a spooky dollhouse and a closet holding an even spookier doll.

The teens are creeped-out, but the young polio victim Janice (Talitha Bateman) lets her curiosity get the better of her and her best bud, Linda (Lulu Wilson).  They’re the first to connect the doll dots.

An “I can’t stay here” followed by “We need to leave” falls on the nun’s deaf ears. She hasn’t noticed how naturally creepy those two little girls are to start with.

So naturally, all hell breaks loose.

Sandberg opens the picture with a couple of dazzling camera moves and disorienting crane shots, and then settles down on the penny plain effects that work in most horror pictures. Shadows that spread, taloned fingers that reach out of the dark, a well you shouldn’t look down and a beneath-the-stairs hiding place you shouldn’t hide in are all classic horror tropes.

As indeed is the idea of a demonic doll. From “Twilight Zone” to “Chucky” to “Treehouse of Terror,” we’ve been treated to all manner of manikin monsters. Usually they talk.

Producer James Wan commissioned screenwriter Gary Dauberman to fold this tale back into “The Conjuring” universe, the many spooky hoaxes of ghostbusters/book-hustlers Lorraine and Ed “Amityville” Warren. The result is a clockwork horror picture where the trains run on time and the attempted frights arrive in their turn. There’s just too little that’s novel and even less that’s scary.

If you can’t get more than just a taste of terror from throwing half a dozen orphans into a haunted house, maybe your “universe” isn’t expanding at all and your “Creation” has run its course.

MPAA Rating: R for horror violence and terror.

Cast:  Talitha Bateman, Lulu Wilson, Stephanie Sigman, Anthony LaPaglia, Miranda Otto

Credits:Directed by David F. Sandberg, script by  Gary Dauberman. A Warner Brothers/New Line release.

Running time: 1:48

It’s due in theaters in five weeks. It has a prestige director — Darren Aronofsky — and Oscar winners Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem, with Michelle Pfeiffer and Ed Harris.

And a VERY “Rosemary’s Baby” vibe. So they held back on giving us a trailer to preserve the surprise? That could pay off.

Sept. 15 we find out.

Pretty, perky perpetual girlfriend/best friend/second banana Lake Bell makes her second trip behind the feature film camera with a self-written comedy about marriage, “I Do…Until I Don’t.”

It lacks the goofy novelty of “In a World…,” which was set in the insular world of voice-over artists. And she’s still not figured out that comedy requires faster pacing. But she hews close to what she knows — a movie about a movie , a title with an ellipsis — and a winning cast makes the most of its limited possibilities.

A semi-famous British documentary maker, Vivian (Dolly Wells) wants to follow up her edgy cinema verite “Tween Jungle” with a project about the doomed state of marriage in the West. So she’s come to Vero Beach, Florida, to find specimen couples to make her point for her.

“Will you accept that marriage is dead?” She’s convinced “betrothed” means “impending death,” when the true definition — “contract” — would suffice to make her point.

Bell plays Alice, awkwardly married to Noah, and frustrated co-operator of his failing inherited window blinds store. Work isn’t the only place she’s frustrated. She and her husband have sexual peccadilloes that might explain some of their difficulty in conceiving.

Alice is a Vivian Prudeck fan, and she’s determined to get her art degree itch scratched by being in Vivian’s film. She signs them up and lies to Noah about the benefits in order to get him to go along with it. And that’s not the only lie she’s willing to play out.

Her hippy sister (Amber Heard) is in an open hippy marriage with Xander (Wyatt Cenac), and yes, they’re also invited into the documentary’s crucible.

Then there’s the grumpy older couple, semi-retired Harvey (Paul Reiser), who’s just bought a motorcycle, and realtor-at-her-wits-end-over-Harvey Cybil (Mary Steenburgen). She’s got a present for him.

“Is it anthrax?”

The complications here revolve around dishonesty and couples that aren’t in the same places — “open marriage”-wise, retirement-wise, whatever.

And the cute stuff is mostly about Alice trying to find ways to finance her participate-in-the-film dream by taking a job at the “Your Welcome” (sic) massage spa. Sassy Bon Bon (Chauntae Pink) has to explain “happy endings” to naive Alice — “Jerk that elbow to make that bank.”

There’s a funny exchange between Xander and this hippy (Chace Crawford) who hits on his wife, Fanny (Heard) right in front of him. The interloper, just taking advantage of that whole “open marriage” thing, is named Egon.

“Be gone, EGON.” None of this “Namaste” yoga speak for you, pal. “Na mas GO.”

The filmmaker comes off as a big-ol’ lonely phony.

The most crackling interplay is between the Oscar winning Steenburgen — who lets you feel the loathing — and Reiser, who still has the best timing of any comic alive.

The whole doesn’t add up to much more than an ellipsis — an ending foretold by the beginning, and not a lot of funny comic obstacles standing in its way.

But Bell has a beguiling, big-grin screen presence. And her ability to charm a cast into taking on her projects is admirable. Charming a script-doctor or two who could joke the films up would be a big help.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual material and language

Cast: Lake Bell, Ed Helms, Mary Steenburgen, Amber Heard, Paul Reiser, Wyatt Cenac, Dolly Wells.

Credits: Written and directed by Lake Bell . A Film Arcade release.

Running time: 1:43

In “Casablanca,” the arrogant German Major Strasser taunts the neutral American ex-patriate Rick how he’ll feel when German troops parade down the streets of this city or that one, and finishes his quiz with New York.

“Well there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade.”

Thus we come to “Bushwick,” a house-by-house urban combat thriller about an invasion of Brooklyn.

We’ve been so removed from any threat of enemy occupation for so long that typically such warfare fantasies involve the zombie apocalypse. Not here.

A young couple (Brittany Snow, Arturo Castro) get off the subway and suddenly notice how empty it is.

“Where did they go?”

Then a guy, on fire, tumbles down the platform stairs. They poke their heads out the entrance into mayhem — black helicopters, black-uniformed commandos engaged in a full-on shootout with the drive-by shooting locals.

It’s InfoWars’ wettest dream, a confusing “us” vs. an unknown “them,” with “us” not exactly coalescing into an organized opposition. The boyfriend is killed, the blonde “home from college” is nabbed by hood rats who challenge her right to be there with a “Think you’re BETTER than us?”

And then a “janitor” with what “Taken” taught us are “particular skills” rescues her, and the quest is on — a house by house, street by street effort to escape a war zone — Aleppo in the Boroughs, Mosul across the river from Manhattan.

“Take it one block at a time,” Janitor Stupe (Dave Bautista) mutters, and so they do.

Co-directors Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott, working from a Nick Damici/ Graham Reznick script, drag us through a school, apartments, laundromat and church caught up in a sudden conflagration. The randomness of warfare visited upon a civilian population stands out — five people dash across a street, three don’t make it, duck all the way through this block, forget to duck on the next one, you’re done. 

Nobody has any information, although there is electricity and you’d think SOMEbody would have gotten a cell alert or picked up a newscast. This is the first big hole in the logic, here. Another is the film’s strained effort to hide the ID of the attackers. Hint, no, this isn’t “Red Dawn.” That happened last Nov. 8. 

The violence is visited upon the non-violent, Lucy (Snow), who must either adapt or die. The man of violence Stupe, has to demonstrate a little self-surgery (Ever seen a wound cauterized?) and great skill with a pistol.

And then there’s the New York that cafe owner Rick Blaine was talking about back in “Casablanca.” A diverse, armed and irritable population that has seen the movie or youtube video and knows how to make a Molotov cocktail, that has experienced the best way to hit and run with a foe is by drive-by, that knows its turf.

“Bushwick” doesn’t really work as a political parable, and doesn’t stand up to too much thinking over at all. It shortchanges characters and would have been far better served making more of a statement with folks who were actually local — “diversity” would be a bonus. ]

I mean, when the Hassid attack the attackers as if they’re defending their kibbutz, THAT’s your movie.

It could have been a polarized America take on “Attack the Block,” with over-matched locals — gang members or whoever — battling a well-equipped (no heavy weapons, though) drawling foe. It could have been darkly funny, in addition to violent.

But they needed Snow (“Pitch Perfect”) and Bautista (“Guardians of the Galaxy”) to get financing, and that limited everything the filmmakers wanted to do, from the situations and nature of the quest, to their muted satiric horizons.

As is it, “Bushwick” never rises above bush league, more a missed opportunity than a wickedly on-target winner.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Brittany Snow, Dave Bautista

Credits:Directed by Cary Murnion, Jonathan Milott , script by Nick Damici, Graham Reznick. An RLJ Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:34

The shooting of Michael Brown isn’t re-investigated and the trial of the police officer who shot the unarmed black teen eight times isn’t parsed in the new documentary “Whose Streets?”

Media coverage — some of it bordering on hysterical — is merely sampled, not probed in depth.

This compelling film is a streets-eye-view of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, which began with Brown’s body still lying in the background, in broad daylight, for hours as his community rose up to call attention to the shooting and the police culture that led to it.

Filmmakers Sabaah Folayan and Damon Harris interview many of those doing the protesting, but wisely rely most heavily on the citizen journalism of scores of folks from that corner of Ferguson (Canfield Green apartments).

Protesters, like the gay couple Brittany Ferrell and Alexis Templeton, protesters turned organizers Kayla Reed and Tef Poe, shout themselves hoarse.

“No peace? No JUSTICE!”

Ordinary citizens captured the tears of Brown’s mother, weeping and enraged as the police wait and wait and wait to remove the body. These uncensored cell camera videos document the growing frustration, the profane shouts and rising emotions of that summer and then fall and winter of 2014, when people took to the streets for peaceful marches and were met by massive, confrontational police presence, which hemmed in their marches.

Local Copwatch citizen videographer Dave Whitt tapes every police action — marchers peacefully walking, holding signs, while legions of cops cover them with the dots of red laser sights  from their rifles, dots dancing across heads and bodies of people as they pass.

Didn’t see that on TV, did you?

The riots and looting, seen from inside that insular world, and not from the selective “fire makes a pretty scary picture” editing of TV news, comes off quite differently in “Whose Streets?”

“A riot is the language of the unheard” is one of the film’s chapter headings.

The film captures a protest that grew into a movement, drawing supporters from all over the country as the marches, occupations (stopping traffic, pouring into a Walmart, speaking truth to unsympathetic white people’s faces) that demand attention as the local PD  and Missouri justice system attempt to whitewash the shooting and quash dissent.

This film won’t be aired on Fox News, but when you’re protesting on the streets and in public hearings and police are, to a one, wearing black wristbands with “Stand with Darren Wilson” (the police officer whose street encounter with Brown led him to pump eight bullets into him), ask yourself who the antagonists here really were?

Yes, the U.S. Justice Department got involved, and pressure was applied. This scruffy, street-wise and blunt documentary effortlessly shows — with just images and captured police behavior — that was wholly justified. No George Stephanopoulos interiew with the policeman and his “Who, ME racist?” declarations, no talking heads on chat shows are here to spin it.

Here was a police force and City Hall preying on a big chunk of its community, and the bubbling outrage of decades of that is what “Whose Streets?” cell phone camera participants grab, at the moment it explodes.

The scruffiness is intentional and the film has that conventional search for heroes and heroines — who to follow, single-out and build the movie around. But “Whose Streets?” also lets us see how citizens journey from outrage to action, from passivity to protest to influencing public policy, just by standing up and saying “Enough!”

MPAA Rating: R (violence, profanity)

Cast: Brittany Ferrell , Tef Poe, Tory Russell, Alexis Templeton, Kayla Reed, Dave Whitt

Credits:Directed by Sabaah Folayan and Damon Harris . A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:30

The filmmaking is more pedestrian, the visuals a bit too heavy on travel and meetings and phone wrangling.

And the shock and optimism of the Oscar winning “An Inconvenient Truth” is more muted in “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.” It’s never self-congratulatory, rarely “I told you so,” although if anybody on Planet Earth is entitled to owning that phrase it’s Al Gore.

“Truth to Power” revisits Gore’s life project, educating the world of the increasingly obvious perils of climate change. It follows him from Washington to Paris, Miami to the Philippines, and lays out the Sisyphean task of convincing the developing world to shoulder part of the challenge and the developed world to stop listening to the paid propaganda of Big Fossil Fuel and its compliant right-wing mouthpieces.

The numbers, statistics and charts are more damning than ever. Just last week, another weather “anomaly” in Miami caused that “once in a century” flooding that the film shows Gore witnessing two years ago. “Hottest day ever recorded” pops up in the news around the globe. In India, the asphalt streets are melting into a scalding quicksand for days at a time. Beijing’s mayor has labeled his city “unlivable” thanks to the polluted air and rising temperatures.

Filmmakers Bonni Cohen (“The Rape of Europa”) and Jon Shenk visit imploding glaciers in Greenland and a typhoon-sacked city in the Philippines. We and Gore witness the smog-clogged skies of India and China and hear out the developing world’s jingoistic pushback against curbing its carbon emissions.

And there is Gore, talking, training others to spread the message, showing his ever-evolving power point presentation and patiently dealing with setbacks big and small.

The biggest? America electing Donald Trump, a climate denier untroubled by facts, truth or insurance rates which will start to bite his properties — should he bother to pay his bill.

The movie meanders somewhat, giving screen time to a failed worldwide climate wake-up call telecast from Paris that had to be abandoned during the citywide terrorist attacks of 2015.

Do we really need to revisit the 2000 presidential election to know how far backward America and the world were pushed, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling?

The film feels also less personal, although Gore comes off as better-informed on the subject than ever, more committed to the task at hand, and when need be — folksy and self-effacing in the face of abuse from the dumbest and most politically cynical voices in America.

When Gore preaches that “despair can be paralyzing,” we get it. When he wades through record flooding in Miami Beach, he can make a crack like “I just wonder how the governor (climate change denier Rick Scott) sloshes through this and doesn’t notice.” sting.

The warnings are dire, and before great progress can be made “on the climate crisis,” we have to fix “the democracy crisis.” He visits the New York Attorney General suing Big Oil to find out how they’re financing misinformation campaigns. This subject was politicized long ago, and it wasn’t politicized by Al Gore.

But he is selling, above all else, optimism. He talks the most with mayors, and those folks — from Miami Beach to Georgetown, Texas — get it. Georgetown is the largest city in America to move to renewable energy.

It’s mayor crows that “It’s the reddest town” in a Red State, but the energy cost savings and moral high ground the city can claim trump even Trump among Trump voters.

A seriously backward town I used to live in, Kodiak, Alaska, used to be powered by a diesel generator plant. Now it’s lauded for running 100% on renewable energy. If it can happen in Kodiak, it might even happen in Florida.

When Volvo announces it is abandoning gasoline engines, and Toyota and Mazda announce plans for a shared North American electric car plant, when solar and wind power take root and take over the power grids of countries from Denmark and Portugal to Chile, there is cause for hope and little chance of giant steps backward.

“Sequel” doesn’t have the novelty of its Oscar-winning predecessor. But it still has its Nobel Peace Prize-winning star, fighting the good fight, riding a tide of changing awareness toward that ever-nearer tipping point, where this issue is no longer debated, even by the most cynically-corrupt and their unthinking lemmings.

MPAA Rating:

Cast: Al Gore, Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel, George W. Bush, Donald J. Trump

Credits:Directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, script by . A — release.

Running time:

Years of hype, speculation, studio changes, director/screenwriter, and many many cast changes and FINALLY Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower” books have reached the big screen.

And the film may…MAY…take the top spot on its opening weekend. After taking a critical pounding, after Sony hid it from view until the last second, spending $60 million on a potential franchise pic in which they combined a few of King’s books and…after a solid if underwhelming Thursday night opening and decent Friday — $18 million.

Going from J.J. Abrams and Daniel Craig and/or Tom Hardy to Ron Howard and others to an untested director, many screenwriters and Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey, it plays as played — as in played-out. They lost their nerve, kept costs down and burned through material and ended up with an exhausted, half-hearted bust.

“Dunkirk” is looking at a $17-18 million third weekend, and will clear the $130 million mark by midnight Sunday.

“Detroit” and “Kidnap” are the other two wide releases opening this weekend, and Halle Berry’s nervy if illogical they-stole-my-little-boy thriller looks to pull in close to $10 million, edging “Atomic Blonde,” which will finish in the $8 million or so range. “Detroit” earned wonderful, Oscar-contender reviews, as befits a harrowing true-story riot and its aftermath picture from the people who made “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty.” It was always going to be a hard sell, and $8 million or so seems its opening weekend ceiling, based on Thursday night/Friday ticket sales.

“Girls Trip” is in that cluster of films selling about $10-11 million in tickets, and will have $100 million in range, if not in sight, by midnight Sunday ($83-85 total).

“The Emoji Movie” has no fresh kiddie/family film competition (“Despicable Me 3” is nearing $240 million) until NEXT weekend, and its still taking a dive — another $10 million putting it close to $50 ($47) by Sunday night.

“Wonder Woman,” Baby Driver” and “War for the Planet of the Apes” are losing screens and pretty much spent, falling out of the top ten this weekend after lucrative runs. “Valerian” may beat one of those three out of the top ten, thanks to it being a big time bust.

It can’t have helped that Stephen King fans and fantasy-horror fangirls and boys spent years breathlessly anticipating a film version of his “Dark Tower” series of novels.

Sure, he’s a proven brand and these books — about alternate worlds where “The Gunslinger” does battle with the forces of darkness, keeping demons at bay and preserving the titular “tower” from toppling, loosing them on other dimensions, including “Keystone Earth” — were particularly popular.

But going through potential directors J.J. Abrams and then Ron Howard, and a cast-list that might have included Daniel Craig, Tom Hardy, Aaron Paul, Oscar winners Christian Bale and Javier Bardem was sure to disappoint.

Truth be told, you do wonder how a type-to-hype machine like StephenKingWorks manages to maintain anticipation for a filmed version of this or that. There’s a remake of “It” is due in theaters in weeks, “Cujo” and “Children of the Corn” rebooted, new TV versions of “The Mist,” and “Mr. Mercedes” replacing the gone-and-not-soon-enough “Haven” and “Under the Dome” — all saddled with King’s dreadful big screen track record .

Is there anything that this guy has churned out that HASN’T been a movie or TV series? “The Shining,” “1408,” “Carrie,” “Misery,” “Dolores Claiborne,” “Shawshank Redemption” and “Stand By Me” stand out among the scores upon scores of King adaptations. The rest were never more than boilerplate, a good gimmick lost in pages and pages of formula, making for mediocre movies, at best.

Are people’s memories really that short? Ah, but critics remember. And if you’ve been in the business long enough to resent the weeks of your life wasted while suffering through “Christine” or “Pet Sematary,” “The Running Man” “The Lawnmower Man,” and “Children of the Corn,” you know better than to get your hopes up.

Which is a VERY long way to get around to what a bust “The Dark Tower” turns out to be. A thriller with tepid thrills, a horror movie with bland frights, a generic fantasy quest story in which we mope along with joyless, heartless characters in an out-of-date celebration of Old West gunplay, this never should have left pre-production.

Tom Taylor is Jake, the New York teen whose vivid nightmares convince him there’s an alternate, ruined world where a Gunslinger pursues the murderous sorcerer, The Man in Black. Everybody else thinks the kid is crazy.

But he’s sketched these dreams, and they’re his guide to a portal in that world. And that’s where he stumbles into a desert and where he meets The Gunslinger of his dreams.

“This is cool. It’s all REAL.”

Idris Elba is Roland, the Gunslinger, who lives by the Gunslinger’s Creed.

“I do not aim with my hand; He who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I aim with my eye.

“I do not shoot with my hand; He who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I shoot with my mind.”

And so on.

Matthew McConaughey, his face polished to some sort of ageless sheen, is the Man in Black, who steals the dreams of “special” children like Jake, who long ago killed The Gunslinger’s dad (Dennis Haysbert) and whose minions (Jackie Earle Haley heads the New York Minion Local) pursue both.

Which is odd, because The Gunslinger is looking for the Man in Black, too. Only they never seem to connect.

Third, fourth or fifth choice director Nikolaj Arcel (he scripted the Swedish “Girl in the Dragon Tattoo”) tries to make something of the script-by-committee, but ho-hum effects and all the many compromises made getting a potential franchise off the ground weigh on the film.

It’s 96 minutes long, feels truncated and just drags.

King fans may find some thrills in seeing things they only imagined on the page realized on the big screen, or in the many Easter Eggs (“Christine” turns up, as do other tidbits of Kinglore).

Whatever literary merits there were to the book, this comes off as claptrap — rushed, cut, pasted together nonsense with a too-passive/too-dull child “hero,” a leading man content to let cool (not really) gunplay do the heavy lifting and a villain here to collect a check and deliver action-movie-villain dialogue so generic it gives genre a bad name.

“Ah. Impressive!”

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic material including sequences of gun violence and action.

Cast: Idris Elba, Tom Taylor, Matthew McConaughey, Katheryn Winnick, Jackie Earle Haley, Dennis Haysbert

Credits:Directed by Nikolaj Arcel , script by Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, Anders Thomas Jensen, Nikolaj Arcel, based on the Stephen King novels.  A Sony Columbia release.

Running time: 1:36

No, Steven Soderbergh’s “retirement” didn’t last any longer than Cher’s — or Tina Turner’s. Or Kiss’s.

But we’ve missed him, and this modest-budget/big-name cast comic thriller could be a nice desert for a summer overloaded with junk food sequels and heavy meals (“Detroit,” for instance). It opens in a couple of weeks, and coupled with the news that its star, Daniel Craig, will return as James Bond, it makes you wonder.

An old Hollywood maxim is that you announce your next project before THIS one bombs or hits. “The Elizabeth Berkley (“Showgirls”) Rule.” So what is Craig saying about this movie in climbing back into the Bond tux?

What were MGM/Sony/DeLaurentis saying about possible other Bonds in pursuing him for another outing?

Idris Elba’s box office upside may crater after “The Dark Tower.” (It’s smelled like a dog for months, now. )

Craig might miss those Bond paydays more than he thought. And if most of what he’s going to be offered is action pictures, why not keep his quote and marketability and profile high by reprising 007?

“Logan Lucky” opens Aug. 18.