Movie Nation

Sony didn’t preview “The Emoji Movie” for critics. They knew it was crap, though how they failed to figure that out from the first, stupid, cynical pitch is a mystery.

I saw it at its first showing in Winter Park, Fl., with about a dozen folks — family filmgoers. And we collectively watched it in silence. Reviews for this dog have been uniformly dreadful. Yeah, MovieFone misquoted me on that there link.Here’s my actual review, which is funnier and maybe meaner.

But being animated, with some showings in 3D, and being for children — it’s the advertising campaign that matters. That should put $22 million into Sony Animation’s emptying coffers, according to Box Office Mojo.

Box Office Guru is saying $21. Awful, budget-busting bad. But not the humiliation this deserved.

“Atomic Blonde” is based on a comic book series, but there are no Men in Tights, just Charlize Theron in 1989 short skirts, undies and her altogethers as a spy taking beatings and delivering them in chaotic “The Wall is Falling” Berlin. Not bad for what it is.

But not being an established brand will crimp its box office upside. Maybe $19 million, besting “Girls Trip” in its second weekend. Maybe $20 million, says Box Office Mojo. 

That means that the historical thriller from the brand-name director will own yet another weekend at the summer box office. “Dunkirk” could flirt with $30 million, thought $28 seems a safer guess (both Mojo and Guru predict that).

I am guessing the upper teens guesses for “Girls Trip” are a bit low, as the comedy’s lowbrow appeal could extend past the female and African American-centered audience it drew opening weekend. It’s the “Girlfriend, you won’t BELIEVE what they did” watercooler comedy of the summer. I’m guessing $20 million or so, second weekend.

Almost a millennium has passed since Medieval manuscripts codified a “lusty wench,” and Aubrey Plaza has become that archetype personified.

Sleepy-eyed, foul-mouthed and carnality incarnate, whatever TV (“Legion,” “Parks & Rec”) has found for her to do, the movies (“Mike & Dave Need Wedding Dates”) have her perfectly pigeon-holed. And yeah, she could make that phrase sound dirty without even trying.

So it is no stretch at all to see Plaza as a profane, promiscuous Middle Ages nun in a film based on Boccaccio’s “Decameron.” The Italian, and his English contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer, could have had her in mind in composing their novelettes — dirty interludes in the first works history declares are modern fiction.

“The Little Hours” is a comically-bastardized adaptation of a couple of bawdy tales from “The Decameron,” and Plaza — as producer and the film’s anchor-tart, Sister Fernanda — holds this unholy romp together.

You don’t wish the nuns in this 14th century convent “a nice day” without hearing about it. Sister Fernanda leads a screeching, screaming and pummeling Greek chorus of cursing. Sister Ginerva (Kate Micucci) is in her thrall. Novitiate Alessandra (Allison Brie) is new, so she joins in to fit in.

They’re tough broads in a sweet spirited convent, presided over by kindly Father Tommasso (John C. Reilly) and a quite-tolerant Mother Superior (Molly Shannon). But their abuse chases off the convent gardener/handyman (“About a Boy” director Paul Weitz). And if the sisters are to have time to do the elaborate embroidery that the priest sells to support them, if they’re to have more than turnips to eat, they’ll need a replacement.

Fortunately, there’s a lusty manservant (Dave Franco) on the run from his murderous master (Nick Offerman) who needs a place to lay low. Father Tommasso gives Massetto shelter, tells him to feign being a deaf-mute, and hopes he’ll keep his mitts off the nuns.

Um hum.

Alessandra, waiting for her father (Paul Reiser) to arrange a marriage, despairs that “There’s no hope in the world!” to the hunk who can’t hear her, or protest when she drapes herself over him. And the other nuns, no matter which way they swing, long to taste that forbidden Franco fruit.

Lots of “Bless me Father, for I have had IMPURE thoughts” confessions ensue.

The characters are distinct, if broadly drawn, with Aubrey, Micucci, Reilly and Franco making the strongest impressions.

But writer-director Jeff Baena stages everything in first-year film school simplicity, and the verdant Italian settings have a “shot on a camcorder for Youtube” quality about them.

Truth be told, this plays like an extended comic sketch, which in all fairness is all many of the “Canterbury Tales” and their Italian “Decameron” cousins amount to.

And once you’ve heard Plaza launch into her colorful vocabulary with gusto once or twice, the shock of nuns cussing and fornicating in a period piece wears off.

Throw in witch rituals, nudity and a disapproving bishop (Fred Armisen) and you still can’t get over the notion that this was a clever way to finance a paid vacation in Italy to this tightly-interconnected crew. Franco and Brie are married, Weitz directed Reilly in “The Vampire’s Assistant,” Shannon and Reilly go back to “Year of the Dog,” Plaza and Offerman were “Parks & Rec” castmates, and so on.

But I was pleasantly surprised at how malleable the material was, how much of Boccaccio makes it past the anachronistic cursing and what not.

And simple plotting or not, there’s still something hilarious in that rooster loose in the henhouse scenario. See “The Beguiled” for proof of that. Here, at least, the laughs are intentional.

MPAA Rating: R for graphic nudity, sexual content and language

Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Allison Brie, Kate Micucci, Dave Franco, John C. Reilly, Molly Shannon, Nick Offerman.

Credits: Written and directed by Jeff Baena, based on “The Decameron” by Giovanni Boccaccio. A Gunpowder & Sky release.

An animation braintrust put in the overtime, brainstorming brilliant bon mots, thinking outside the box and in dreaming up visuals to illustrate The Secret World of Cell Phones for “The Emoji Movie.”

Nah, not really. They just took “Wreck-It Ralph” and rolled its video gamescape over into cell phone apps, stickers, games and emojis.

But that cluster of screenwriters found barely a single laugh in this wayward tale of a “Meh” face emoji in search of reprogramming. Not a one.

Anna Faris voices an in-phone hacker named “Jailbreak,” and she gets to blurt out “Sweet MOTHERboard!”

The poop emoji (Patrick STEWART?!) gets picked on.

“You’re soft, Poop!”

“Not TOO soft, I hope.”

And Maya Rudolph, voicing the ever-gargling/always-flossing/compulsive tooth-brushing Smiley Face emoji, gets to do a couple of spit-takes.

But that’s all there is to this comatose cartoon for kids, aka “T.J. Miller’s ticket to oblivion.”

Yeah, T.J. Miller quit a good TV gig because now he’s a LEADING MAN. In, uh…this. But never mind.

Gene the “Meh” emoji screws up his Source’s (a teenage boy) text flirtation with a cute girl in school. And that’s enough to get him erased, if the evil supervisor Smiley Face and her delete-bots have their way.

His “Meh” parents (Steven Wright and Jennifer Coolidge with nothing funny to say) can’t help him. “I’m so nervous I could SHRUG.”

Only the no-longer-a-favorite High Five emoji (James Corden, giving it his all) can sneak Gene out, into the phone’s nether regions and perhaps on into The Cloud.

So let’s dash through “Let’s Dance” and “Candy Crush,” fend off the abuse of Internet trolls (Jeffrey Ross voices one — perfect), the distractions of Youtube and the come-ons of SPAM, and find a way to get Gene his “Meh” back, or something resembling cell phone world Free Will before the balky phone is erased.

Must be a Samsung.

It’s not funny, and the fanciful world of Textopolis and environs here is not remotely as inventive as the one cooked up for “Inside/Out,” “Monsters, Inc.” or “Wreck-it Ralph.”

The script’s strained overview of web memes — hashtags,  kitten videos and “Bye, Felicia” — isn’t worth the 86 minutes the movie sucks out of your cell plan, your battery or your life.

MPAA Rating: PG (poop jokes)
Cast: The voices of T.J. Miller, Anna Faris, James Corden, Maya Rudolph, Steven Wright, Jennifer Coolidge

Credits: Directed by Tony Leondis, script by Tony Leondis, Eric Siegel and Mike White.  A Sony Pictures Animation release.

Running time: 1:26

Fresh insights are rare and dramatic moments rarer in Barbet Schroeder’s meditation on Germans forgiving themselves for the Holocaust, “Amnesia.”

It’s an apologia with any hint of edge rubbed off, a soft and squishy drama that has so little to come to terms with it leaves one slack-jawed that it fails at even its most modest ambitions.

The great Marthe Keller is Martha, who has lived much of her life in the cosseted, just-enough-cash solitude of Ibiza, Spanish sister island to Majorca and Minorca.

She’s an old woman when we first see her, in 2000, walking the cliffs and staring out at the sea. She is somewhat younger in the film’s long flashback, where our story takes place.

In 1990, vacationers were just discovering Ibiza and the Berlin Wall has just fallen. But don’t broach that subject with her. She lives without electricity, cooks, gardens and takes her dinghy out for rowing exercise in the Mediterranean.

Then young Jo (Max Riemelt of “The Wave”), a musician and DJ struggling to mix his way into fame and fortune, moves in next door. He tinkers with natural sounds to add to his digital dance mixes, and his only goal at the moment is to break into the island’s hot new club, Amnesia, and impress his girlfriend (Marie Leuenberger).But meeting his neighbor changes his focus. Martha is fascinating, an old-timer on the island, plainly a woman of breeding and education. But she’s carrying around a mysterious life-list, things she will not do.

“Please, no German,” she says when they meet after he’s burned his hand. He wants to thank her for the help. A bottle of wine?

“No Riesling.”

Can he drive her to town in his VW convertible?

Not on your life. Can you imagine, she blurts out, the idea that Hitler has been “forgiven by all those drivers?”

Martha is German, lived the war years in Switzerland and resolutely refuses to forgive and forget her native land’s crimes against humanity. The movie tracks her “education” of Jo, and the ways he and his family (Bruno Ganz is the granddad) suggest to her that it’s time to let go, move on.

“Should I have forced myself to forget it?” she demands. She has a point. But so has everyone else. And getting around to hearing everyone’s point of view takes forever.

At least “forever” here is filled with lovely shots of the Ibiza countryside and coast, little reveries in the market, at the stove (paella, etc.), at the cello which Martha gave up long-ago, and in Jo’s “studio.” Yes, Schroeder (“Barfly,””Single White Female”) delights in showing us the ancient technology of DJ-ing, as it was practiced at the birth of Trance.

The few scenes where the debate over Germany’s soul is played out have a poetry to their reminiscences, but not novelty. They have the potential to bite, but are to a one toothless.

Catch the fact that this is a Swiss co-production in the opening credits and listen for an off-the-cuff polishing of Switzerland’s role in World War II’s Holocaust — taking in Jewish children. Tens of thousands were turned away, Jewish fortunes looted, but all that is dismissed with a sinfully myopic anecdote.

Keller gives color and purpose to Martha, but it’s a bloodless character and that deflates the performance. Ganz has a nice scene to play, but it feels trite and played-out coming on the heels of decades of German films wrestling the culture’s conscience about the war.

If you’ve never seen a film where Germans debate their national guilt, the tepid “Amnesia” will have more impact than it would with the rest of us. We’ve seen “Labyrinth of Lies,” “The Marriage of Maria Braun,” “The Nasty Girl,””Ida” and “The Reader” and many others like them. And we haven’t forgotten.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult subject matter

Cast: Marthe Keller, Max Riemelt, Bruno Ganz

Credits: Directed by Barbet Schroeder, script by Emilie Bickerton, Peter F. Steinbach, Susan Hoffman and Barbet Schroeder. A Film Movement release.

Running Time: 1:31

Is there a point to “Liza, Liza, Skies are Grey,” a coming-of-age tale that trots out every 1960s trope and cliche and treats each as if it’s a new discovery?

The picture takes its title from a song Al Jolson made famous in the ’20s, its story beats from every “road” picture since “The Odyssey” and its cast from the legions of Pretty Young Things gathered in Los Angeles at the Hotel “Haven’t Made it Yet.”

And it’s basically just a random collection of cliches filtered through the movies its veteran documentary producer-director seems to have half-forgotten.

Here I was, all set to ridicule this callow, puerile take on romance amidst the turmoil of the era and attribute it to some first-time filmmaker who wouldn’t know any better, and there’s Terry Sanders credited as writer-director. He’s 85, which explains the Jolson reference. His tin-eared take on an era he should remember suggests he was too old to get what was going on then.

Mikey Madison is the title character, a 16 year-old who spends the summer of ’66 having nightmares about her father’s suicide, getting hit-on by mom’s creepy swinger boyfriend, and letting the Vietnam War coverage and Civil Rights struggle she hears on the news fly over her head.

She seems almost oblivious to war, to The Bomb, to the fact that the family housekeeper is black, and dares not broach that subject or any other with her. After all, one of her best friends (Kwame Boateng) is black. She needn’t worry over anything serious.

After conferring with her sexually experienced tutor — “So, you’ve been to bed with a lot of men?” — she decides to tell her casual beau (Sean H. Scully) “I want to be the first.” So they set off on his Triumph on a blue highway adventure up the coast, brawling with California rednecks, quarreling with seedy motel clerks and partying with tripping hippies.

“Where’s Liza?”

“Where’s ANYbody?”

There’s nothing sexy or even particularly sexual about “Liza,” no heat — even casual — to Madison and Scully’s pairing.

“Don’t make me pregnant!”

Which is why the motorcycle gets star billing.

Characters blurt out random cliches, with no motivation or warning. Mom (Kristin Minter) fumes about Liza “hating” her and “judging” her. Mom’s boyfriend (John-Paul Lavoisier) lures Liza with “See my framed lithographs” as bait.

Wow.

The upshot of which is a hard life lesson for filmmakers aged 15, 25 or 85. Just because you have the money and wherewithal to get a movie made doesn’t mean you should.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult situations, violence

Cast: Mikey Madison, Sean H. Scully

Credits:  Written and directed by Terry Sanders.  An Ocean Releasing film.

Running time: 1:25

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Hardcore fans might glean insights into the psyche of England’s iconic-ironic post-punk poet-singer fashion-political statement Morrissey from “England is Mine,” Mark Gill’s unauthorized bio-pic about Steven Patrick Morrissey’s formative years.

The film has the glum, mopey vibe of depression about it and depicts its hero tap-tap-tapping at the typewriter, venturing into music journalism and cultural criticism, scribbling snippets of inspiration into poetry notebooks.

We don’t hear much of what he’s listening to or get a sense at what he wants out of life, “Jane Austen” put-downs aside.

But it has Morrissey — blandly-played by Jack Lowden of “Tommy’s Honour” —  falling under the beguiling influence of ahead-of-the-curve Goth artist/punk performer Linder Sterling (Jessica Brown Findlay of “Downton Abbey”).  They sit and swap Oscar Wilde bon mots on a bench in a cemetery, inspiring a Morrissey song. Which we don’t hear. But Oscar Wilde isn’t protected by copyright.

“Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”

That “unauthorized” cross is an impossible one for this atmospheric period piece to carry. Young Steven posts “band wanted” ads for his singing aspiration. Influences? “New York Dolls, Lou Reed, Patti Smith” and forms The Nosebleeds.

The Smiths are in the distant future, all but off-camera as the picture ends just as meets Johnny Marr (Laurie Kynaston). 

But this cannot be about music if you don’t have the rights. So there’s virtually no on-stage performance content. That means you have to downplay the significance of meeting the big musical collaborators of his life, too.

At least the piled-up pompadour his hair became isn’t protected by copyright. In this coming-of-age tale, the only thing that comes of age is his fashion sense, and that hair.

And as Morrissey has made hay out of being gay and advocating celibacy, there’s nothing racy in his allure to assorted young women (Katherine Pearce, Jodie Comer) — just a comical stand-offishness.

Musical biographies of this sort are well-served when they can take you into the music scene — the milieu — of their subject, show the ferment that created their art. “24 Hour Party People” painted a vivid portrait of the Manchester where Morrissey grew up. Some overlap with that film’s personas seems inevitable, but it isn’t. More rights issues?

In dramatic terms, Morrissey’s self-absorbed ennui doesn’t reach the level of Ian Curtis, recreated for “Control.”

Lowden, a supporting player in many a film (including “Dunkirk”) can’t make his version of brooding and bookish charismatic. Which lets the vivacious Findlay walk off with the picture. She makes the case for his commitment to celibacy in a heartbeat. She’s utterly irresistible here.

What Gill is confined to is a sort of impressionist sketch of Morrissey’s world —  “Coronation Street” era Manchester, rusting and depressed, a social welfare state where young Steven squanders a civil service job-for-life by not showing up, and not fitting in when he does.

“Why can’t you be more like everyone else?” his boss barks at him.

The big problem with “England is Mine” is that that’s exactly who this Morrissey is. When your film biography is this circumscribed and unlike Jimi Hendrix (“Jimi: All is By My Side”), is still living with access to lawyers, the smart play is to pick somebody else’s story to tell.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Jack Lowden, Jessica Brown Findlay

Credits: Directed by Mark Gill, script by  Mark Gill, William Thacker.  A Cleopatra release.

Running time:  1:34

With its adoring close-ups, lingering shots in the bath, repeated stripping and endless designer costume changes, “Atomic Blonde” plays like a vanity project for its producer-star, willowy model turned Oscar-winner Charlize Theron.

There is no cell phone application for generating generic spy movie dialogue, but if there was, this film could be an ad for it.

“Berlin is a cruel mistress…Berlin is like the Wild West…Berlin is a small town. I am sure our paths will cross again…Maybe we can make some sort of arrangement…I’ve read your file…Shall we begin?”

Yeah, it started life as a comic book, but come on.

The plot’s twists are foretold too far in advance for there to be much in the way of real suspense. The soundtrack for this set-in-1989 thriller is packed with overly-appropriate ’80s pop. You know a spy picture in ’89 Berlin will have “Der Kommissar” and “99 Luftballoons.” But setting a chase to “I Ran,” covering a secret conversation with “Voices Carry?” The songs match the situations so on the nose they become self-mocking.

But all that said, ALL of it — the short/shorter/shortest skirts, the bottomless shots of Stoli and clouds of cigarettes and hailstorms of bullets — pays off because Theron wills it so.

They’re selling this cut-and-paste parody of a spy thriller on its epic fights, and Theron in the title role takes and delivers beatings in visceral, pulse-pounding, eyes-averting stab-him-with-a-corkscrew bloodbaths.

After which, her body tattooed in bruises, our Atomic Blonde eases herself into a nice ice bath.

So yeah, we buy in.

British Agent Lorraine Broughton is sent to Berlin just as the Wall is about to come down. There’s an East German Stasi agent (Eddie Marsan) ready to defect with a vast collection of names of agents, double-agents, something or other “atomic” in its explosiveness.

Her contact in town is hard-drinking, trade bottles of Jack Daniels for information
Agent Percival (James McAvoy doing his psycho/gonzo/dissolute thing).

But the best laid plans “gang aft a-gley,” as the Scottish poet said. We’re privy to the interrogation of Agent Broughton, bruised and bloodied, by her controller (Toby Jones of “Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy”) and a CIA watchdog (John Goodman). This grilling frames the film and leads us — entirely too easily — to understanding what went wrong.

Stuntman (“Fight Club,””300”) turned director (he had a hand in “John Wick”) David Leitch proves he was the right guy for the job with every furious blast of onscreen mayhem.

The car chase is comically over-the-top, but at least the endless succession of flips and crashes are tactile and real — done by stuntfolk.

And the brawls put the beanpole-thin Theron into some of the toughest fight choreography ever staged with a woman. Theron commits, and huge chunks of these punchouts/shootouts are delivered in long-takes, no edits to protect the star or hide the presence of a stunt double.

The confrontations are so in your face that you may want to don an icepack when you get home. I certainly did.

The action beats are such spectacles that they’ll make you laugh. Not that there isn’t the odd funny line.

“David Hasselhoff is in town…Berlin is truly DOOMED.”

Not really, but you could see how they might think that back in 1989.

In between the fights, we’re reminded of how beautiful Theron is by those lingering, hair-over-one-eye close-ups, the Olivia-Wilde-in-“TRON” perfect makeup, the wondrous selection of fishnet stockings and some pretty serious grappling with the fetching Sofia Boutella (“The Mummy”) as a possible rival, or friendly agent.

The ending feels written by committee, and that laundry list of other quibbles can take you out of the picture. But the camera puts you right in the fights, in the car and facing down the barrel of a gun with our heroine.

And Theron and Leitch give this lightweight LeCarre the heft to punch well above its atomic throw-weight.

MPAA Rating: R for sequences of strong violence, language throughout, and some sexuality/nudity

Cast: Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, John Goodman, Toby Jones, Sofia Boutella

Credits:Directed by David Leitch, script by Kurt Johnstad, based on the comic book series “The Coldest City” by Anthony Johnston and Sam Hart . A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:55

Yes, when his entry in the Big Book is written on college athlete turned Yale School of Drama character actor Raymond J. Barry, we’ll hear about “Training Day” — the movie and the TV series.

There’ll be mention of “The X-Files,” where the white-haired character heavy played a senator, and “Steel City” and “Little Children” and “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.”

But never let it be forgotten that “Brave New Jersey,” a no-budget indie comedy with Kickstarter connections and Tony Hale as its star, just might be Barry’s finest hour.

Where else could he, as a 70something WWI vet facing down a town panicked over Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast, utter the immortal line “Don’t give me any of that half-assed half-assedness?”

Where but here will we hear him growl, “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it!”

Barry, as the Lullaby, N.J. town curmudgeon and Hale (“Veep”), as its loopy, put-upon mayor, class up a somewhat lifeless farce about “the Night that Panicked America,” when a vivid, credulous Orson Welles Mercury Theatre of the Air broadcast convinced America’s most gullible that Martians were attacking, and that they’d made their beachhead the wilds of rural New Jersey.

It’s a village that might have become famous as the home of the Rotolactor, a mass-milking machine that village swell Paul Davison (Sam Jaeger) plans to introduce on that fateful All Hallow’s Eve in 1938. But no.

His long-suffering wife (Heather Burns) is the object of the mayor’s lovesick blues, but she can’t notice him, so long as Paul is about to make them all rich.

Then there’s the plucky school teacher (Anna Camp) whose escape from her dull local intended (Matt Oberg) might be the fact that the world is coming to an end.

Or so they all think.

The kids (Grace Kaufman) are convinced. I mean, it’s ON the RADIO, it must be TRUE.

“Mom, how MUCH more do you need to hear? We’re under ATTACK!”

As do assorted locals. And who do they turn to in their desperate hour? The town crank, at 70something entirely too old to be playing a WWI doughboy vet (Those guys would have been about 40 in 1938).

The film’s anachronistic score and assorted chronological/logical errors like that one wouldn’t be an issue if every character was as funny as Old Man Ambrose Collins (Barry) or his profane takes on their situation.

“I’ve seen things that’d make you s— a GREEN carrot!”

The TV movie “The Night that Panicked America” was the definitive spin on this story, decades old and G-rated (none of the F-bombs this movie features). But there’s no sin in taking another shot at it. It’s just that this one has nothing much to offer, archetypal characters giving rote performances of a script that needed serious workshopping and edge-adding.

At least Barry, growling and dressed in a trench coat back when we knew what TRENCH coat meant, gives fair value. Hell, the man’s seen things that…well, you know.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity

Cast:Tony Hale, Anna Camp, Heather Burns, Raymond J. Barry,  Sam Jaeger

Credits:Directed by Jody Lambert, script by  Michael Dowling, Jody Lambert. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:30

It took seven weeks to do it, but “Wonder Woman,” holding onto more audience and more screens for a longer period of time, finally passed “Guardians of the Galaxy 2” to become the biggest hit of the summer cinema season.

With “Spider-Man” fading and “Apes” falling off dramatically, that’s going to hold true for the entire summer, all the way through Labor Day.

It happened Sunday night, with “Woman” edging over $389 million, and “Guardians,” losing screens after a long and lucrative run, topping out at $387. It won’t reach $400 million domestically, but “Woman” has a slim chance, slimmer thanks to “Atomic Blonde” coming in and taking screens and femme-powered BO punch away this coming Friday.

The actuals on “Dunkirk” were $50.5, “Girls Trip” just over $31, neither of them franchise pictures. And that will hold true next weekend and for the rest of the summer, barring some unforeseen blip in the already-released pictures staging a comeback.

“Big Sick” is hanging in the top ten, “47 Meters Down” will end up with almost $50 million in the bank — not bad for a straight-to-video loosed on theaters thanks to Mandy Moore and sharks.

There are basically two types of “ex-con” pictures. You have the ex-con who wants to go straight, but “the life” pulls the convict back into old alliances, old habits and murderous practices (“Straight Time”). Or we’re shown a released-inmate dive back into that life with relish (“The Get Away”).

And there’s generally just one version of con that we’re treated to — the innocent man/woman wronged, or at least unjustly punished.

“Shot Caller” gives us the latter in an overlong, brutally clumsy attempt to have the former both ways.

It’s yet another “Game of Thrones” star quickie, a place for Nikolaj Coster-Waldau to go shirtless between seasons of Blood, Sex, and Medieval Supernaturalism.

He plays a businessman whose DUI puts him in prison, into prison gangs and in a murderous place where he’ll be “validated” and “lose his cherry” as he stabs to save his skin. Yes, a DUI — with a fatality — sets all this in motion.

In writer-director Ric Roman Waugh‘s lumbering narrative, we meet Harlan, covered in tattoos, prison mustache, prison mullet and prison nickname (Money) writing a “farewell” letter to his son. But he isn’t about to die. Murky circumstances lead to his release after ten years.

The gang leader of the prison (Holt McCallany, monstrous) has something to do with Money’s early release. He’s the real “shot caller” behind those walls, with Jeffrey Donovan (“Burn Notice”) and Evan Jones (“Guardians of the Galaxy”) as lieutenants.

Money’s parole puts him back in the company of former prison buddy Shotgun (Jon Bernthal at his most menacing). Money is back in the game, in the middle of a big arms smuggling deal involving weapons from Afghanistan bound for Latin American drug gangs.

We also follow Money’s parole officer (Omari Hardwick) as he and other cops (Benjamin Bratt) try to zero in on this gun deal.

And then there’s the family that Money long ago left behind, though how one turns one’s back, even in prison, on Lake Bell is a mystery.

Treachery, double-crosses, drive-by shootings and brutal, bloody flashbacks to the escalating in-prison crimes that put Money in this position drag the movie’s stumbling march toward an obvious conclusion out to two hours.

I’ve summarized and summarized, boiling this down to a digestible/understandable thru-line, I hope. Writer-director Waugh does us no such favors. “Shot Caller” is all over the place, incoherent at times, with unnecessary characters (Bratt is here, why?), scenes, digressions and momentum-killing flashbacks. Waugh stages a prison riot that would have been more at home in an ex-con comedy.

The character follows an arc built upon abrupt alterations in his fundamental character, a “good” man who goes utterly amoral. It’s an arc that leaps up and down like an EKG readout.

And the plot is a gimmick-strewn “long con” — a chess game built on murderously amoral absurdities and laughable plot contrivances. If you’re not rolling your eyes by the ridiculously never-happen artificiality of the finale, there’s a Nigerian prince who’d love to have your money.

There are some interesting players involved here, TV actors mostly — not a big screen headliner in the bunch. But none of them, including the brooding star, get to play anything that draws us into the story or make us connect with any character.

Unless, of course, all it takes for you to develop empathy is a ripped Dane with his shirt off.

Among the players, Bernthal shows us commitment and his usual supporting ferocity (check him out in “Baby Driver”), Bell and McCallany don’t embarrass themselves, but  Hardwick’s part is both poorly written and unconvincingly played.

Coster-Waldau? He simmers, and when the scene calls for violence, he brings it — sort of. His first prison fight is a joke in the blows landed and the outcome, but the other bits of savagery feel uninhibited and “Who IS this guy?” scary. The movie kind of wallows in this stuff.

It’s the overall performance, party scene to bar scene to wife scene to teen son scene to make-a-gun-deal scene, that lacks a firm commitment and point of view. They figure they’re cleverly hiding the big twists in the story by keeping him poker-faced.

It’s as if star and the director are holding back, expecting to reveal a little more in “next week’s exciting episode” of a limited series, like the one he’s in on TV. Only there isn’t one.

MPAA Rating:R for strong bloody violence, pervasive language, some drug use and brief nudity

Cast: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Lake Bell, Jon Bernthal, Jeffrey Donovan, Benjamin Bratt

Credits:Written and directed by Ric Roman Waugh . A Saban Films/Lionsgate release.

Running time: 2:01