Movie Nation

Warners has been previewing this for a few weeks. Not sure if they’ve been showing it to critics in other markets earlier, but there were no posted reviews on “Game Night” last time I checked Metacritic and RT.

From the first trailer to this, the most recent one, it looks hilarious. Jason Baseman, Rachel McAdams for the comic heavy lifting, Kyle Chandler and Jesse Plemons (“The Post”) and Danny Huston. Another “wild night” run off the rails comedy, with a great blood on the poodle gag. Team “Horrible Bosses” made it, so we will see what we see. Who could use a good laugh right about now? Aside from “Fifty Shades Freed?”

The statistics are damning. Nobody locks up more people, keeps more of its citizens in prison, than the United States, home to “the largest prison population in the world.”

The videos, of police, from coast to coast, engaging in what can only be described as “wilding,” flipping out on would-be suspects, bystanders and citizen journalists video recording their tirades, pummeling anybody who crosses them or dares to question what they’re doing.

And if you think you’re immune, that you or your children or a relative is never going to run into “an out of control police officer,” that these high school graduates with guns are never going to mistake your call for an ambulance as some sort of excuse to arrest you, that prosecutors won’t try to intimidate you into admitting some form of guilt just to stave off a lawsuit, that you couldn’t be hurled into America’s prison industrial complex, you’ve got another thing coming.

That’s the message of “Survivors Guide to Prison,” a California-centric documentary built around a couple of heartbreaking cases of innocent people serving decades before exoneration, and a veritable tidal wave of others similarly seized by a broken system without the resources to prove their innocence in the face of a State and compliant public that has reversed the credo, “Innocent until proven guilty.”

Filmmaker Matthew Cooke, undercut somewhat by his own credits (he directed “How to Make Money Selling Drugs”) and a legion of Hollywood stars, victim advocates, journalists and academics make the case that with 13 million Americans having served time, with over a million in jail or prison at any given moment, the average citizen needs survival tactics for dealing with the possibility you will run afoul of a seriously twisted system. Over-burdened at every step, and broken, featuring poorly-vetted and oversight-free cops and no-consequences-for-their-mistakes prosecutors and a rising mountain of laws, racist politics focusing on arrested and imprisoning minor offenses by the poor, we have built a monstrous bureaucracy in which no one is immune from its abuses.

Cooke has a vast cast of actors (Susan Sarandon, Patricia Arquette, Ice-T, George Lopez) download mountains of stats and scores of cases where the innocent have been railroaded into jail in their narration.

The most credible of these narrators is, of course, Danny Trejo, the ex-con turned iconic screen heavy (“xXx,” “Machete,” “Heat”). Cooke doesn’t have Trejo tell his own story, which depersonalizes some of what he narrates. But Trejo reading the hard, blunt lessons of this “How to” guide has instant credibility, thanks to his persona.

“How to Survive an Out of Control Police Officer” has him telling viewers and potential victims of the legal system to “be polite,” to remember this all-important phrase.

“Am I being detained or am I free to go?” Cops abuse their authority by leaning on suspects, bystanders, those videoing their behavior, even accident or crime victims, just by keeping you there until they figure out something they can charge you with. Talk too much, you invite a search of yourself or your car, further questioning on how this or that happened to you or someone you called the ambulance for.

“The police can legally lie to you,” so don’t take their accusations, suggestions as gospel. Keep your cool and ask for a lawyer.

That extends into “How to Survive a Police Interrogation.” “Never talk without an attorney present.”

And keeping your mouth shut if you haven’t learned it by then follows you as a rule into incarceration. Jail, holding cell or prison, you have no friends there, one and all remind you. They’re out to incriminate you, lessen their own sentence, what have you.

“Mind your own business and be respectful” at every step of the way.

We hear parents of a child with schizophrenia call 911 to get help dealing with him, because we’ve made the police — again, high school educated men and women, for the most part, not elite thinkers known for their powers of reason — the default intervention in all manner societal ill. The cops tased the boy to death.

We see another man lose nine years and eight months of his life “because he had a bad lawyer.” The tendency of a “brainwashed” public to believe “If you’re been arrested, you MUST be guilty” (the fatal flaw in the knee-jerk and often racist “Blue Lives Matter” backlash) works against you at every step of the way, especially in court, where juries of third-rate thinkers are all-too-willing to bend to whatever authority — the “infallible police,” prosecutors looking to inflate their conviction rates rather than actually seeking justice, “judges, draped in robes and put on a pedestal,” most of them political hacks, overwhelmed and under-motivated to sweat the details of every single case — tells them.

The actual “How to Survive Prison” section is too depressing to contemplate — innocent women losing years of their lives, innocent men trapped in a kill-or-be-killed environment where guards have little control or desire to control a murderous, survival-of-the-fittest Big House culture.

The narrators stress how difficult the work of those within the system is, and suggest that it’s no wonder they snap, no wonder that there are many, many incompetent cops, racist roid-raging police and police at the wrong end of the learning curve. Two of the innocent folks profiled here were busted by the same peer-pressured rookie officer who threw them into the system just to save face among her peers.

Cooke’s film clips along, using famous prison and courtroom movie scenes (“Cool Hand Luke,” “O Brother Where Art Thou,” “The Verdict”) to illustrate its points, or at times to just enliven the narrative. The movie wanders into reform ideas, recidivism cures and the like. Too often, it feels glib thanks to the lighter touches and the tag-team narration, acted-out by those narrators.

It would have been better to interview famous people who have dealt with the system about their first-hand experience of it. Rapper Busta Rhymes breaks into tears at the memory of a woman he knows who was jailed, too poor to effectively fight for her rights, losing years of her life to venal, incompetent police and prosecutors. Trejo, I know from first-hand experience, has stories to tell that are off-script.

But “Survivors Guide to Prison” still manages to overwhelm the viewer with alarm at how far things have gone wrong since “Tough on crime” became  Richard Nixon and then Ronald Reagan’s ticket to power, turning the “Land of the Free” into the “Nation of the Incarcerated.” It’s an alarming indictment of the way we’ve been taught to think, and where that warped thinking has put millions of our fellow citizens.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with graphic violence, blood, profanity.

Cast: Danny Trejo, Susan Sarandon, Ice-T, Busta Rhymes, RZA, George Lopez, Patricia Arquette, Matthew Cooke, Van Jones

Credits:Written and directed by Matthew Cooke. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:43

Allison Janney portrays LaVona Golden in I, Tonya.

Sure, they were displaying a little “Home Isles” bias, giving Martin McDonaugh’s film five top prizes. But the British Academy of Film and Television honored “Three Billboards” at the expense of the grossly over-rated “Shape of Water” in a big way, letting Guillermo del Toro take home the best directing prize and two others.

McDormand, Rockwell, Best Picture, etc. for “Three Billboards.”

They gave extremely short shrift to Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece, “Dunkirk.” Five years from now, “Dunkirk” and “Three Billboards” will still be drawing streaming and TV audiences. “Best Adapted Screenplay” winner James Ivory’s take on “Call Me By Your Name?” The gay audience will still connect with it, at least.

Twenty years from now, “Dunkirk” will still dominate Veterans Day/Memorial Day and “Movies for Guys Who Love Movies” programming.

Janney winning again for “I, Tonya” makes her a foregone Oscar conclusion. Gary Oldman’s “Darkest Hour” win should be as well (but you never know).

I still think Willem Dafoe, overdue for a CAREER award, has a shot at best supporting actor. Rockwell’s great and all, but, I mean come on.

As Oscar bait, “Breathe” never had a chance.

An upper class romance that morphs into an overcoming extreme disability bio-pic where that disability isn’t so much overcome as endured, its hero, Robin Cavendish (Andrew Garfield) is tad too passive, his wife (Claire Foy) a simple portrait in stiff upper lip stoicism.

That doesn’t mean this feel-good true story isn’t uplifting, that it doesn’t have its moments. The beatific smile Garfield unleashes here and there is simply electric. Especially when Cavendish, a polio patient condemned like all of his lot to the “prison” of a hospital where he cannot manage anything for himself, where a machine does his breathing for him , ventures back outside for the first time.

And other tiny triumphs build towards his “If this can be done for me, why not for everybody in an iron lung” or its equivalent life of advocacy.

We meet Robin just after “the War,” meeting the English Rose Diana (Foy) where all the posh Brits met — at a club cricket match. Rides in his Morgan roadster, picnics, swank dances follow, then married life where he, as an overseas tea broker, brings her with him wherever he goes.

And Kenya has the best tea of all.

But that’s where the free spirited pilot, hiker and athlete is struck low by one of history’s most accursed viruses. Polio brings him down, and his pals, the twins (Tom Hollander, comic relief and good at it) are the only ones he can croak out one last request to.

“Let…me…die.”

Pregnant Diana won’t hear of that. Back in the UK, the hidebound doctor (Jonathan Hyde) isn’t lying when he lays it all out there, the same way the doctors in Kenya did.

“This is about as good as its going to get.”

But there’s a professor-tinkerer in their circle of friends. As Teddy, Hugh Bonneville quite literally rides to the rescue, all jokes and quips and classic English optimism. He’ll strap a car-battery powered ventilator underneath a makeshift wheelchair, By Jove.

And just like that, high-maintenance Robin is mobile, able to get about (pushed about), ready to show his little boy the great wide world with his unbendingly optimistic wife.

Actor Andy Serkis (“Black Panther”) steps behind the camera to direct here, and manages a genial, slow-moving and upbeat picture — for the middle acts. The first act courtship is strictly “Masterpiece Theater,” and the drawn-out third-act a grim different picture with an altogether different agenda.

As awards bait, the hero’s journey feels too circumscribed, his accomplishments after his illness — advocating for improved mobility for his fellow patients, not merely warehousing them — noble, but limited. Serkis doesn’t wring as much emotion out of Robin’s big moments, or get anything at all when he “frees” the fellow trapped in the bed next to him (David Wilmot).

But one scene almost overcomes all those shortcomings, an argument for human dignity, the rights of those society had written off but refused to let die, for the holy calling of easing suffering and bettering lives. It occurs in Spain, where Teddy must be summoned to fix a life-threatening failure of the chair and shows up to an impromptu roadside fiesta where the locals have embraced Robin’s cause and his humanity and shown one and all just what can be gained by saving one life from this trap.

If you haven’t thought before now of Stephen Hawking and legions of others saved and contributing to the advancement of human civilization because of this change in attitude and deployment of technology, this is the moment you will.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic material including some bloody medical images

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Claire Foy, Hugh Bonneville, Tom Hollander, Amit Shah, Jonathan Hyde

Credits:Directed by Andy Serkis, script by William Nicholson. A Bleecker Street release.

Running time: 1:58

Marvel’s “Black Panther” is winding down a weekend when it sets all the box office records. A big Saturday pushed the African-American cast and directed, African themed blockbuster into the stratosphere.

It’s in the $193-96 range for a three day opening. And since it opened with a huge $25 million Thursday night, it’ll be in the $220-230 range by midnight Sunday, depending on how many folks treat it like church and MUST GO today.

Summer blockbuster numbers during Black History month. Go figure. Pictures like “Ghost Rider” proved you can make your big money on a comic book adaptation in mid to late winter. “Black Panther” is setting the bar high for every other movie opening this year.

Comic book movie, that is.

It looks as if “Early Man” improved to a still awful $4.7-5 million weekend. Pity, because American kids play soccer and the movie’s another Brit delight. Take the kids!

“Samson” fell out of the top ten, barely clearing $2. Stories from the Bible isn’t what Pure Flix faith-based audience craves, it’s Christian victimhood. Another “God’s Not Dead” is on the way. Wouldn’t have hurt them to spend a little money on the thing. “Risen” was their goal, and nothing arose.

“The Post” stands a slim chance to be the only Oscar contender besides the REAL BEST PICTURE, “Dunkirk,” to clear $100 million.

“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” just cleared $100 million…worldwide.

Hollywood likes to provide lives with closure and chapters in those lives with a sense of resolution.

Real life? Not so much.

“A Fantastic Woman” follows a transgender Chilean woman through the trauma of the death of her lover. Shock and grief are followed by humiliations, petty and grievous, as she comes to appreciate how much she has lost — a lover, a provider, happiness, acceptance and the simple status of someone allowed to grieve for a dead loved one.

Like life, it’s frustrating, a story of little a proud, capable and self-confident woman who hasn’t needed society’s acceptance before now. Or hasn’t realized she needed it. Her burden is to carry on as all around her refuse to let her be “normal” — in their eyes, or hers. It’s a sublime essay on identity, what it means to lose it, how fiercely we fight to get it back.

Marina, played with a sensitive stoicism by Daniela Vega, is a waitress by day and lounge meringue/salsa singer by night. Whatever Santiago at large might think of her, in her world, she has friends, supporters and a lover.

Orlando (Francisco Reyes) runs a textiles mill and lives the comfortable life of saunas, a good table at the club where Marina is singing, and at long last, the great love of his life. Director Sebastian Lelio teases out their connection, “Crying Game” style, as if Marina’s sultry voice and lack of an Adam’s Apple doesn’t give her away.

They go home, make out, and in the middle of the night, Orlando — who is much older — wakes up ill. He tumbles down the stairs before Marina can get him to the hospital, where he dies. And that’s where Marina’s bubble is burst.

A call to Orlando’s sympathetic brother is the last “normal” moment in this tragedy. Gabo (Luis Gnecco) is comforting, reassuring.

But the medical staff is sympathetic, but tactless. Marina, in shock, flees the building, leaving Orlando’s Volvo there. The the police show up. “Tactless” is their default setting. Suspicious beyond reason is where they’re headed.

The “delicate situation” Gabo warned of blows up into a full-fledged investigation, blunt questions about the nature of this May-November affair — “It was a healthy, consensual relationship,” Marina declares (in Spanish, with English subtitles). But Orlando’s injuries, and perhaps family suspicions, have the cops wondering.

We keep waiting for Marina to reiterate the fall down the stairs, to testily turn the family’s “suspicions” into a condemnation of their motives. The ex-wife (Aline Kuppenheim) is still put-out at who her husband ended up with and rather pointedly demands that Marina only deal with her.

And whatever her manners, let her talk long enough and her inner shrew, her intolerance and her determination to have her revenge — on Marina — pops out about her “perversion,” that she regards Marina as but “a chimera” of Orlando’s life — inconsequential, easily erased.

Lelio and co-writer Gonzalo Maza tease us with suggestions of Marina’s toughness, only to have Vega play her as acquiescent, overly accommodating as she deals with the family’s grief. She visits the arcade next to the restaurant where she works to vent frustrations on a punching bag machine. The stuff she has moved into Orlando’s apartment (they had just moved in together) includes punching bags. She can take care of herself.

But she stands there and takes the drunken rudeness of Orlando’s son (Nicolás Saavedra) from what we can guess was his first marriage, a brute who comes into the apartment, unannounced, with ugly questions (“Did you get the operation?”) and threats — “If you steal anything, I’ll know.”

A persistent detective (Amparo Noguera) can’t decide if Marina was abused, or the abuser. 

And in the film’s opening, we’ve seen Orlando search for a mysterious lost envelope, and that Marina has found a mysterious key that could be the solution to her unofficial status with her man. Throughout the film, she searches for that status, utterly bereft at all she’s lost, hallucinating Orlando’s ghost — in the car, in the shadows.

Vega carries the picture with just her face, its pained, lantern-jawed delicacy incongruously carried on “footballer’s legs.” She absorbs the blows, some of them literal, grieving and aggrieved — not hesitating to stick up for her rights with the cops, increasingly defiant to a family hellbent on writing her out of their lives via the funeral.

Vega makes Marina noble, martyred and yet defiant, fiercely clinging to her femininity when we’re so desperate for her to bust Bruno’s nose. It’s a performance of sublime, constrained fury and tender conciliation. Keeping the peace is what Orlando would have wanted.

Lelio captures her downward spiral, fantasy sequences in clubs, walking into a Buster Keaton storm of staggering headwinds, struggling to keep her sense of self in the face of all these headlong assaults on who she is.

But Vega is one who assures us that resolution or not, Marina will endure and her suffering won’t be in vain. Whatever humiliates us and tests us without killing us just makes us stronger.

MPAA Rating: R for language, sexual content, nudity and a disturbing assault

Cast: Daniela Vega, Francisco Reyes, Aline Küppenheim, Luis Gnecco, Nicolás Saavedra

Credits:Directed by Sebastián Lelio , script by Sebastián Lelio and Gonzalo Maza . A Sony Classics release.

Running time: 1:44

Huge Thursday night numbers and a big Friday point to “Black Panther” setting an all-time (4-day) box office record, when all is said and done and the cash is counted Sunday night.

Marvel’s long-anticipated African-flavored superhero adaptation, ladled with healthy doses of righteousness, anti-colonialist rhetoric and the usual loads and loads of digitally-augmented action, is on pace to earn $214-220 million dollars its opening weekend.

That challenges “The Avengers: Age of Ultron” which earned more over the three-days of a proper weekend, but slightly less when adding in Thursday.

“Panther” has changed the nature of February film openings, added a tentpole to Disney’s bottom line and generally sucked all the oxygen out of the multiplexes for this weekend, and probably well into March.

Rapturous reviews have hyped this thing through the roof. 

The weekend’s big disappointment has to be Aardman’s “Early Man,” which lacked that hype, is a kid-appropriate delight and yet isn’t managing a fraction of the inferior but similarly British “Peter Pan’s” haul. A sub-$5 million weekend for an animated film is a disaster. Period. It deserved better, but after “Paddington 2” and “Peter,” the audience has to be suffering from twee Brit cartoon fatigue.

“Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle” has steadily closed in on $400 million, overall, but may fall short with “Panther” taking screens and audience share.

Eastwood’s critically-panned “The 15:17 to Paris” is reaching its slower-to-show-up older audience, another $10 million or so making for a solid holdover. “Fifty Shades Freed” is on page to clear $100 million by the end of next weekend.

“The Post” is the only Oscar contender still in the top ten. And “The Greatest Showman” is showing up them all, closing in on $175, which is where I figure it’ll tap out. But you never know with this one.

The Biblical dud “Samson” from Pure Flix cracked the top ten, is on a lot of screens but only appears to be on track to earn $2-2.5 million this weekend. The trailers playing in front of it suggest there will be plenty other and hopefully better faith-base films opening between now and Easter.

In “Red Sparrow,” Jennifer Lawrence plays a Bolshoi Ballet dancer turned into a sex-is-her-weapon Russian spy. She seduces, flirts and her spy boss (Matthias Schoenaerts) is always remarking how cunning she is, “two steps ahead” in the cross and double-cross intrigues of this shadow world.

And even though she’s the best paid actress on Earth and an Oscar winner, it’s a stretch to see her in most of the guises her character, Dominika, is supposed to don. En pointe on the stage? Sultry seductress? Poker-faced gambler with her life, terrified and tortured, fearful for others? All these attitudes have a robotic quality in her performance in this tricky, twisty thriller.

But that kind of works in the film, an athletic, insanely-focused young stoic from a culture where it’s mostly the men famous for weeping.

Throwing her into a couple of sex scenes, plus showers, swimsuits, neo-stripteases as part of her spy “training,” and a couple of sexual assaults can seem exploitative, or inserted as misdirection plays added to the script to change our focus from her generally expressionless mien.

The film also surrounds her with the likes of Schoenaerts (“Far from the Madding Crowd”), who plays the sinister uncle who recruits her into the spy game after a ballet injury ends that career, the leonine Ciaran Hinds (“Munich”) as the boss’s boss and Oscar winner Jeremy Irons (another high ranking commissar, even though they don’t call them that in the “new” Russia). Joely Richardson plays Dominka’s deathly-ill uninsured mother, a most scary Charlotte Rampling is “The Matron,” the Lotte Lenya-esque agent-trainer ripped out of “From Russia, With Love,”  and a delightfully tipsy Mary Louse Parker plays a “mark.”

So it doesn’t matter much that Lawrence suggests nothing other than a frigid, professional interest in the American (Australian Joel Edgerton) spy she is supposed to pursue, who in turn tries to recruit her as a double-agent. No conventional blossoming love affair springs from this, none that Lawrence lets us feel, anyway. From her frequently-unclad and perfectly fit body to her Bolshevik bangs hairstyle, the lady is all ice-cold business.

The end of her dancing means Dominika must find another way “to be of value to the State,” purrs her seductive spook of an uncle. That’s how he gets her into the Red Sparrow program, a deep-cover collection of spies chosen — male and female — for their beauty, their allure, their willingness to make themselves available to foreign operators, oligarchs, “enemies of the State.”

“Whore School,” Dominika calls it.

The Matron teaches one and all that “Every human being is a puzzle of need. Learn to be the missing piece, and they will give you anything.”

These are the best scenes in the film — chilling, sexual, violent, expositional and believable. Rampling is the very picture of menace in them, a Mother Russia Nurse Ratched.

There’s a mole in their spy hierarchy, a CIA agent (Edgerton) is that mole’s handler. Dominika is given a new name and life and sent to get that name from him. She must tease, tempt and bargain for that info, looking out for herself and her sick mom. And she must fend off the sexual advances and murderously double and triple crosses of her assorted bosses to accomplish this.

Lawrence tying her fate to director Francis Lawrence, veteran of her paint-by-numbers “Hunger Games” pictures, shows loyalty but wasn’t the smartest play here. He handles the violence  — bloody brawls and interrogations — and intrigues well enough. But Lawrence relies on her star power and persona to create empathy with the viewer. Little in her performance invites it. The normally more animated Edgerton dials down his visible intensity to match her tone, which further cools their “hot” scenes together.

The pacing is “Black Panther” slack, a 100 minute movie crammed into a 140 minute box.

And as much pleasure as one gets out of Lawrence’s stone-faced pairings with the formidable Irons, Schoenaerts and Rampling, her third act duet with the dazzling Parker (of “RED”) reminds us of what this one-dimensional “Sparrow” is lacking — the spark of life.

Rage and fury she lets us see, and an awful lot of her toned-and-fit body. There’s still not  much of anything — faked vulnerability, charm and physical attraction — that would draw us, or a potential target, into her trap. A better director would have challenged her to try for that.

MPAA Rating:R for strong violence, torture, sexual content, language and some graphic nudity

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Matthias Schoenaerts, Charlotte Rampling, Jeremy Irons, Ciaran Hinds, Bill Camp, Joely Richardson

Credits:Directed by Francis Lawrence, script by  Justin Haythe, based on the Jason Matthews novel. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:19

If you’ve ever wondered what a guy slaying legions of Philistines might look like, “Samson” shows you. And if you’ve ever wondered why there are no “real” Philistines left — not just the metaphoric kind — here’s a movie that answers that.

If you’ve ever been curious about what being “anointed with oil” might consist of, “Samson” has you covered.

Setting fire to fields of grain by tying torches to the tails of wolves or foxes? That’s a little trickier. And if you’ve pondered the idea that the Hebrew Hercules might have had dimples and the worst fake beard this side of “Gettysburg,” this not-exactly-epic of Biblical proportions might be the stuff of your nightmares.

“Samson” hides its threadbare budget with decent production design, period-rough costumes and rough-and-tumble action. It gives away the game in the casting, though.

My first thought on hearing about this was, “Did they have the guts to hire Jason Momoa? Now THAT’S a Samson.” The brawny tough guy with a winking wit did all sorts of B and C movies before landing the role of AquaMan. And killing in it.

Instead, we’re given Taylor James, who plays one of AquaMan’s fellow Atlanteans in “Justice League,” a beefy, dimply and generally uncharismatic hunk who can’t light up a humorless, tragic and heroic chapter of the Old Testament.

And then there’s Caitlin Leahy, who might have the dark, exotic good looks of the Original Femme Fatale, Delilah, the would-be queen who lures The Hebrew Hammer to his doom. “Feminine wiles” may be instinctual, but “beguiling” takes acting, and she’s as bland as the leading man.

They’re not alone. Watch the fight scenes, where Philistines line up — literally staring at the ground to hit their marks — for slaughter. Crowd scenes? The extras can’t agree on a sight-line they’re supposed to focus on.

And let’s not get into that non-kosher ham Billy Zane as King Balek, eye-linered Jackson Rathbone as his son, the sadistic Prince Rallah, and the world-weary Lindsay Wagner (“The Bionic Woman”) and Rutger Hauer as Samson’s long-suffering parents.  Every performance puts the “p” in “perfunctory.”

In ancient Judah, or Israel, Samson is God’s “chosen one,” defender of the faith and The Tribe of Dan’s choice to be the Hebrew judge, leader of his people.

The Hebrews are under the thumb of the Philistines. And while Samson acknowledges his mission and keeps the faith by refusing wine, not touching the dead and not cutting his hair (Grand Funk Railroad @1974 is the coiffure of choice), he’s too busy swiping from the powers that be and making eyes at comely Philistine women.

Of course, his hand is forced, even though all he wants to do is wed the enchanting Taren (Frances Sholto-Douglas), history’s first known case of “shiksa appeal.”

Next thing you know, he’s smiting Philistines left and right, suffering tragedies, torturing and torching wildlife and growing this godawful fake beard.

All in a slow-motion stroll towards his “destiny.”

The script plays around with the ancient world’s mania for riddles — “At night I come without being called. By day I am lost without being stolen.”

What is “a star,” Alex Trebek!

The bad guys fret because “The Hebrew God is within him,” so it doesn’t matter that the King (Zane) tells his son, that “You must see gods for what they are, symbols — means of control.” When Samson is buried under a pile of Philistines in history’s first rugby scrum, you know he’s going to Popeye his way out of it.

It wouldn’t have been sacrilege to take a lighter tone with this. Samson’s head-butting/chop socky brawls are bloody and glum, but could have been violently amusing. The guy is unbeatable, and cocky. Think Disney’s “Hercules,” or even Gaston from “Beauty and the Beast.” That wouldn’t have demeaned the character in the least.

He’s a big, goofy hunk of meat who comes to feel the weight of the world, and weight of a palace, upon him. Funnier earlier scenes with his pilfering brother (Greg Kriek, under a dreadful wig and later awful beard) should have been played funnier, making the hero’s journey Shakespearean.

It’s a visually and dramatically flat picture in which the co-directors just check off the touchstones in Samson’s storied career, lurching forward, parking him in reasonably rustic settings with tunics and smocks and sometimes shirtless. There’s little character arc, and even less story arc.

It’s all enough to make you miss Victor Mature and Heddy Lamarr and a Cecil B. DeMille remake.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence and battle sequences

Cast: Taylor James, Caitlin Leahy, Jackson Rathbone, Frances Sholto-Douglas, Billy Zane, Lindsay Wagner, Rutger Hauer

Credits:Directed by Bruce Macdonald, Gabriel Sabloff , script by Jason Baumgardner, Galen Gilbert . A Pure Flix release.

Running time: 1:50

A little “Avatar,” a little “Iron Giant,” a lot of every YA novel turned movie about Young People who Must Join the Rebellion and Save the Future — “Ready Player One” looks like premium eye-candy, digital video game action built on a VR-avatars namescape.

Stuff blows up. And Ben Mendelsohn, who survived “Rogue One,” is Our Go to Bad Guy of the moment.

March 29.