Movie Nation

Those wags at Aardman, the British animation studio which uses artists and clay and a lot of patience to make funny movies, visit the ancient history of the human race and of “the beautiful game” for their latest, “Early Man.”

It’s a daft, adorable and decidedly English film, hand-made figures creating hand-made laughs out of sight gags, puns and inside soccer “futbol” humor. So what if it has about as much to do with ancient human history as that Creationist museum in Kentucky? They embrace the silliness of that in a movie that reminds us that English humor has been post-war Britain’s most reliable export.

Somewhere near Manchester, surviving cave men and women and their pet boar live in an idyllic crater created when asteroids hit the Earth and did in the dinosaurs (shown in the prologue). They’re hunter-gatherers, and what they gather is rabbits.

But Dug, voiced by Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne, wonders just how far they’d advance as a tribe if they aimed higher. You know, hunted Woolly Mammoths instead. Maybe after mastering the organization it would take to undertake such a  hunt. You know, learning sign language and bird call signals. Improving their clubs, rocks and stone spears. Evolving. Just a bit.

The aged chief (Timothy Spall) is a traditionalist and won’t hear of it. He’s got the white haired wisdom of the ages on his side.

“I’m 32!”

Then “progress” comes crashing down around their ears. The French-accented, armored warriors show up on bronze-plated elephants.

“Zee age of STONE eez oh-VAIR,” Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston, hilarious declares). “Lahng LEEV zee age of BRONZE!”

Dug’s tribe’s valley is rich in tin and copper. Mines are in order. Bronzeworks to follow. They are dispossessed, chased into “the badlands.” It’s up to Dug to (accidentally) visit the Bronze city and find a way to get the interlopers to give them their valley back.

Street vendors sell Jurassic Pork, and pots and pans and Swiss Army knives made out of the wonder metal. And Lord Nooth (pronounced “Lord Knows”) collects bronze coins as tax and keeps the masses in line with a little bloodsport.

“Gladiatorial combat,” you wonder? I did, and that’s what they want us to believe. But no, those rude, brawny armored warriors that have the crowd baying for blood in their coliseum are on the holy pitch, ‘our ‘allowed ground,” playing “the beautiful game.”

If Dug and his people can remember the sport they’ve only seen on long-forgotten cave-paintings, maybe they can play Jurgen, Gonad and the champions in a winner-take-the-valley soccer match.

The sight gags are everywhere in these little jewel-box movies — giant caterpillars that can double as Adidas soccer shoes, a clockwork front gate lock so intricate it relies upon a final tiny sliding latch, an asteroid that hits the Earth and turns out to be the shape of a soccer ball.

And you don’t have to have played soccer — though generations of American kids now have — to get the many football/futbol gags. An appreciation of post-Python British humor doesn’t hurt, especially if you want to understand the digs at organized religion, violence and the xenophobia that led to Brexit.

How is it that the place where football was born is no longer competitive? Maybe, the movie suggests, Dug’s tribe just quit trying.

It’s not on a par with the sublime “Wallace & Gromit” films or the brilliant “Chicken Run.” But it’s quite funny, and delightful to see finger prints in not-quite-perfect clay arms and legs.  And it’s comforting to know that there’ll always be an Aardman.

MPAA Rating: PG for rude humor and some action

Cast: The voices of Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Maisie Williams, Miriam Margolyes, Timothy Spall, Rob Brydon

Credits:Directed by Nick Park, script by Mark Burton and James Higginson. A Summit/Studio Canal/Aardman release.

Running time: 1:29

Antic, manic and stuffed up to its ears with cuddly, realistically animated critters, sing-along pop hits and slapstick violence, there’s no reason every child at around age four would not adore the new “Peter Rabbit.”

And there’s little to no reason anybody over that age would get much out of it. Unless, of course, you’re an Anglophile and enjoy British wordplay, English country and London city locations. Adoring stars Rose Byrne and Domhnall Gleeson doesn’t hurt.

This “Rabbit,” which has almost nothing to do with Beatrix Potter’s mild-mannered imp, is a provincial punk whom we see trigger the heart attack that kills the hated neighbor (Sam Neill) who chases rabbits out of his garden. Gleeson plays Thomas, the old man’s officious OCD suffering Harrods manager heir, who moves in and faces renewed hostilities from Peter, his rabbit relatives and assorted woodland pal.

The joke of course is that the bunnies are doted on by Bea, the cute failing artist who lives next door.  Thomas won’t get anywhere with Bea if she suspects there’s a blood feud a’bubbling just over the garden wall.

Co-writer/director Will Gluck, who has lurched from “Easy A” to “Annie” to this, borrows as much from the Aussie kiddie classic “Babe” as can be allowed by law.

“That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.”

The running gags include a Greek chorus of pop song singing birds, whose lip-sync repertoire ranges from the syrupy classics to hip hop, a dieting/gorging pig and cracked rooster (voiced by Will Reichelt) who procreates like crazy because he’s never considered that each day isn’t going to be his last.

“No WAY the sun comes up again! No way!”

Another running “gag?” Death. Peter’s parents died, one of them violently. And then there’s the hated old man Peter gave a heart attack to.

Corden’s breathless line-readings may be right for an animal known to be in a bloody hurry to get on with things, life being short and foxes being almost as fast as rabbits and all. He’s exhausting to listen to, and the script barely keeps his Peter just this side of insufferable — winking at the camera and such.

“Did he just wink? I didn’t know we could wink.”

The best line goes to a feed store clerk (Dave Lawson) who takes it upon himself to “diagnose” Miss Bea to new-in-town-Thomas.

“If I was a learned fellow,” he opines, “I’d say she ANTHROPOMORPHIZES them,” critters taking the place of human friends and love. Clever fellow, “learned” or not.

This all adds up to a movie whose net laughs exceed any annoyance Corden, the endless pop song action montages and frantic, “Ace Ventura” animal antics create. Feel free to sidle up to any four year old you know and give them a “Have I got a movie for you.”

MPAA Rating: PG for some rude humor and action

Cast: Rose Byrne, Domhnall Gleeson, Sam Neill, the voices of James Corden, Daisy Ridley, Margot Robbie

Credits:Directed by Will Gluck, script by Ro Lieer and Will Gluck, barely based on the Beatrix Potter books. A  Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:33

We still call them “combat photographers,” even though the more exact term these days is “conflict photographers.” The dangers they face are broader, the conflicts murkier than mere “wars.”

But to master the craft, the risks are the same. “You have to get close,” one and all will tell you. Get right in the thick of things. The opening images of “Hondros,” about acclaimed Getty Images photographer Chris Hondros, make that clear.

Shaky video captures a firefight. And in the middle of it, Hondros takes a call.

“Fine. Things are fine,” he tells the caller as AK-47s go off all around him. “Let me call you back in about a half hour or so.”

For decades, Hondros could be found in every hot spot the world produced, Kosovo to Liberia, Afghanistan to Iraq.

He was not in it for the rush, he declares. “I’m not into adventure sports” or any of the other telltale cliches attached to people in this field. He was all about the journalism, “shining a light” on international tragedies, hoping to awaken the world to human-made disasters, and in so doing perhaps getting the world to put a stop to them.

As his longtime friend and sometime colleague Greg Campbell’s film makes clear, Hondros was moved by what he saw and photographed on the battlefields of the world, men and child soldier weeping over crimson covered bodies of the fallen, a little girl wailing at her parents, accidentally shot as they drove their car through a U.S. checkpoint in Iraq.

What separated Hondros from his colleagues, legions of whom appear in testament to his life and work in “Hondros,” was the extra steps he took.

A Liberian rebel teen has just fired his rocket propelled grenade at the dictator Samuel Taylor’s army, a shot that would make Hondros famous.

Hondros goes back to Liberia after the conflict, friends help him find that young man, and he pays for the kid’s college.

An Iraqi family is all but wiped out in another famous shot. Hondros helps get  a wounded little boy to America for live-saving surgery.

His editors, rivals and colleagues marvel at how anyone was able to get there just ahead of the news, arriving in Egypt to cover the nascent “Arab Spring,” tumbling ahead of the U.S. forces in the invasion of Iraq, “deeply empathizing” with those he photographed at every step of the way.

“Hondros” has to go to some pains to separate itself from other films on this sort of subject, their story “arc” and their many over-familiar tropes. Swashbuckling shooters dashing from war zone to war zone, partying behind the lines, risking their necks under fire when they go into battle.

If you’ve read or seen any film about combat photographers, fiction (“Salvador,””Under Fire”) or documentary (“Which is the Front from Here: The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington”) you know how such films and such careers inevitably turn out. Hondros found his calling, found fame, found love and then was killed.

“Hondros” gets meaning out of that death by devoting itself, at length, to the dangers journalists now face in combat zones. In an era of controlling your own message and easy access to getting that message on the World Wide Web, foreigners filming, interviewing and taking pictures of your struggle can be seen as unnecessary or worse, a threat. Journalists are being targeted in combat zones around the world.

“Hondros” highlights that danger and brings out the humanity in a career that was above and beyond the stereotypes of their profession. (These guys are overwhelmingly hunky white males of the Sebastian Junger set, adrenaline junkies even if they deny it.)

And if this documentary, co-produced by Jake Gyllenhaal, leads to a feature on the most empathetic shooter of all, don’t be surprised. This was a life and career worth celebrating.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with images of graphic violence.

Cast: Christopher Hondros, Inge Hondros, Greg Campbell, many others

Credits: Directed by Greg Campbell, written by Jenny Golden and Greg Campbell.   An Entertainment Studios release.

Running time: 1:32

Stop motion clay-model animation is one of my favorite genres, and the Brits at Aardman are the undisputed masters of it. Their twee little kiddie films have a visual cleverness and richness that gives adults something to marvel over and laugh at as well.

“Wallace” has passed on, as have the beloved “Wallace & Gromit” films. But “Early Man” has a stellar voice cast, a witty setting and that unmistakable Aardman touch. It opens next Friday.

Universal previewed “Fifty Shades Freed” in two theaters Wednesday night in Orlando, where I saw it. Two nearly-packed houses, filled with (mostly) older women.

And as with the first two films in this trilogy, they ate it up. Me? Not so much. Other critics? Nope.

But a huge Thursday night opening and big Friday means “Fifty Shades Freed” will clear $40 million on its opening weekend. Epic numbers, even though all the other films opened bigger ($85 million for the first one). Either the audience is getting smarter, dying off or getting their softcore porn somewhere else. It’s a bad movie, even if they kind of seem to get that and have a few laughs about it as they do.

  “Peter Rabbit,” from the same folks who gave you “Hop!,” is doing roughly half the business that limp cartoon managed. The trailers don’t really sell it and reviews have been weak. They didn’t even bother previewing it in many markets ( I see it today, reluctantly).  A $22 million opening suggests audiences are over British kids’ films. “Paddington 2” overwhelmed as well, remember. Maybe Brexit is to blame.

  Clint Eastwood’s mawkish and poorly-acted “The 15:17 to Paris” isn’t opening on as many screens, was not previewed for critics in much of the country and is bombing, straight out of the gate. Warners knew what it had on its hands, a very old, impatient director who should have bowed out with “American Sniper.” A $12-13 million opening may mean Clint’s blank check with the studio has been cashed. Terrible reviews, some of the worst of Clint’s career, are not helping. ‘

“The Post” and “The Shape of Water” are the best performing Oscar contenders at this late date. “Shape” is nearing $50. Perhaps Hollywood is noting the staggering run of “The Greatest Showman” and wishing they’d given the always wonderful Hugh Jackman his due. $175 million and counting in ticket sale might actually get people to tune in to the Academy Awards this year.

Setting out to make a bad movie is rarely a good idea. And making a sequel to something you’d love to label “a cult film” is even more dubious.

“Surge of Power: Revenge of the Sequel” is a cut-and-paste/jokes with no punchline follow-up to 2004’s “Surge of Power: The Stuff of Heroes.” You don’t have to have attended a comic book convention to have ever heard of it.

Actually, you do.

It’s a superhero spoof made from a deathly combination of inept actors, tin-eared joke writing where the default gag is always swishy, retrograde gay, and snippets of convention video from a vast array of nerd-adored TV shows and movies,  from a “Doctor Who” nobody remembers to TV’s original Lois Lane, “Gilligan’s Island” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Battlestar Galactica” (original series) refugees.

There’s many a cameo, but barely a laugh in the entire 89 minutes of this.

Vincent J. Roth returns as “Surge,” comically closeted superhero who is a Big Enough Man in Big City to take his ex-nemesis, Metal Master (John Venturini) out for a drink after the supervillain gets out of prison.

Because “Everybody deserves a second chance…or nine.”

But Hector aka “Metal Master,” estranged from his homophobic parents (Gil Gerard, TV’s “Buck Rodgers” and Linda Blair of “The Exorcist”) has a confession to make.

“I feel naked without my powers, don’t you?”

Which puts him in the employ of veteran villain Augur (Eric Roberts) and sends Surge from Big City to Las Vegas in his superhero Mazda RX-7 to foil an evil plot.

“Sin City will NEVER be the same!” Augur chortles.

“What about Big City?” Hector corrects.

That’s a blown-line, and it may be the funniest one in the movie.

Cheesy costumes, cheap but cute effects, and a tidal wave of guest appearances ensue. Self-aware jokes at Frank Marino’s Vegas drag show and elsewhere, all of which help Surge come to grips with who he is, with the help of his on-car computer (comedy writer Bruce Vilanch) and supernatural savior, Omen (“Star Trek” retirees Nichelle Nichols and Roert Picardi).

It’s meant to be viewed with a crowd of fellow travelers/Comic Con goers, preferably drunk ones. Sober? The attempts at jokes don’t land and cameos are no substitute for story, performances or wit in the script.

This super hero spoof is a played out idea excruciatingly executed.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some suggestive material

Cast: Vincent J. Roth, Eric Roberts, John Venturini, Nichelle Nichols, Linda Blair, Frank Marino, Lou Ferigno

Credits: Written and directed byAntonio Lexerot, Vincent J. Roth.  An Indie Rights release.

Running time: 1:29

The voice Tom Hardy trots out here isn’t his “Revenent” accent, isn’t his Bane mumble. It’s working class Joe, straight out of the mob movie “The Drop.”

The one thing that strikes me in this Sony/Marvel trailer (an October release) is this question. Just how rich is Stan Lee, and how does one get in his will?

“Vengeance is mine,” sayeth the Lord.

But not in the movies. Revenge thrillers in their many forms are among the most reliable film genres, reaching for visceral reactions. Wanting to get even is in our nature, and the movies know this.

The best ones involve peaceable characters with no “particular skills” forced to confront their own mortality, and taking the lives of others, in their quest. Maybe they learn that line from Robert Palmer’s “Every Kind of People,” “Wise men know that revenge does not taste sweet.” Not before blood is spilled and tit for tat seizes their hearts, if only for a while.

“Bad Day for the Cut” is about a farmer whose mother is murdered. He sees the seemingly motiveless murderers escape. At some fateful moment, he decides the cops are no help. And with each awful assassination on his way to “The Boss,” we sense his soul dying, even as others try to pull him back from the brink.

As Chris Baugh’s film is set in Northern Ireland, the parable for “The Troubles” is plain as day. Tit for tats get everybody killed.

Donal (Nigel O’Neill, Everyman good) cannot positively ID the people who killed his mother. He has no clue that they were involved in a hospital bed murder we witnessed in the opening scene. He’s stunned when two other masked men show up to do him in.

Fortunately for us, they’re blundering idiots. Donal, sixtyish and hardened by hard work, gets the drop on them. And when the one survivor of the murderous duo blubbers what he knows about the chain of murderous command, Donal won’t be making a second call to the cops.

It turns out that blubbering henchman, Bartosz (Joseph Pawlowski) was blackmailed into helping with the hit. He’s no killer. His sister’s being held hostage. He reluctantly helps Donal on his quest, acting as his conscience as he does.

“They instigated this,” the farmer growls, on digging a fresh grave. “This is not our fault.”

“We may have to take some of the blame for this,” the kid argues.

Cell phones and cell numbers change hands, and Donal gets a whiff of who he’s up against. And in this case vengeance, as the old saying goes, is a harpy.

That would be Frankie, given a crazed ruthlessness by Susan Lynch, years removed from “Waking Ned Devine.” This bloody-minded shrew won’t be dissuaded from her lust for blood. Her polished, patient lover/subordinate Trevor (Stuart Graham of “The Foreigner” and “Tinker, Tailor Soldier Spy”) is little comfort to her.

“Your mommy is surrounded by silly men, pet,” she coos to her little girl.

“If you use the word ‘kill’ in front of my daughter again, I’ll shoot you through BOTH eyes,” she hisses at Trevor.

The bodies pile up — or get buried by a tractor on the farm or a hole in the woods — and we come to appreciate Donal’s resourcefulness. We may not wholly buy in to his ability to take a beating and come out on top. He’s Liam Neeson’s age, if not nearly his size.

But there are a lot of useful things around a farm — that tractor, a sledgehammer, etc. The iron you find in the closet of a hotel room comes in handy for torture. Cooking a meal with a thug (David Pearse) as your hostage in your old van provides more instruments for extracting information.

The “ordinary man faced with the extraordinary” makes “Bad Day for the Cut” (a harvest term) and films like it — the superb Norwegian snowplowman’s revenge tale “In Order of Disappearance” — more engrossing, more edge-of-your seat than “The 15:17 for Paris,” Clint Eastwood’s comparably slack and unsuspenseful, if true story about a terrorist foiled in the act. The one way Clint Eastwood’s true-life story of confronting a potential mass murderer scores over your typical thriller such as this one is in illustrating how very hard it is to disarm and disable or kill a really determined foe.

Movies like this one dispatch them with a bullet, a shotgun blast or a blow to the head. Takes a lot more than that, as Clint’s train ride movie reminds us.

But for shout at the screen, redemptive revenge that you can sink your teeth into, “Bad Day for the Cut” is hard to beat. Even if you almost need subtitles to unravel the dialogue at times.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, graphic violence

Cast:  Nigel O’Neill, Susan Lynch, Józef Pawlowski, David Pearse

Credits: Directed by Chris Baugh, script by Chris Baugh, Brendan Mullin. A Well Go USA/Netflix release. 

Running time: 1:39

In retrospect, Clint “One Take” Eastwood was probably the wrong guy to direct a movie in which he cast three non-actors to play the lead roles, and three underwhelming little boys to play the leads as children.

And it’s no comment on the heroism of the men cast to play themselves in “The 15:17 to Paris” to describe the first two thirds of the story of their lives together, from middle school to military careers to a fateful train ride from Amsterdam to Paris one August day in 2015, as almost excruciating to sit through. A mawkish Dorothy Blyskal script, based on a memoir by the three, a cumbersome flashback structure that lacks suspense, a grasped-then-quickly-abandoned cloying voice-over narration and the unaffected and ineffective acting make this feel like the worst movie Clint’s made since he stopped teaming up with a baboon.

Then the climactic event arrives, and it’s “Sully” redux — trained professionals doing what they’ve been trained to do, saving lives, confronting a threat and becoming national heroes in the process. “The 15:17” climaxes with a flourish. And then, doggone it, Eastwood runs on at length past the climax to remind us, “Oh yeah, this was a dreadfully dull picture before THAT just happened.”

That brief and grating narration is by Anthony Sadler, the non-military member of the trio who stopped a terrorist attack in its tracks — literally — on that train. They were old friends taking the Grand Tour of Europe, “but let me take you back to where it all began,” he says.

We see Spencer Stone and Alex Skarlatos in a Sacramento middle school, bullied, clinging to each other, their camouflage wardrobes and their mania for guns and playing war, and we hear talking the way middle school boys never talk.

“I tried to fit in! I tried!” Spencer cries.

“You fit in with me,” his shorter pal Alex reassures him.

These early scenes, with their devoutly Christian single moms (Judy Greer and Jenna Fischer) standing up to principals (Thomas Lennon) running out of patience and teachers who suggest “ADHD” and medication, based on the boys’ attention spans and disruptive behavior, are unintentionally chilling.

These kids are headed for trouble. I can’t be the only one reminded of those bullied, rebellious and camo and gun-crazed outcasts who went on to shoot up Columbine High School. Their teacher cites statistics to that effect.

“My God is bigger than your statistics!” Greer’s Mother Stone shouts.

Changing schools, meeting their third musketeer (Sadler) and playing Airsoft war games and pranks on neighbors, one is hard-pressed to see what the older Sadler later sees as Stone’s true calling, “helping others. It’s who you’ve always been.”

Maybe Clint forget to shoot one take of a scene illustrating that.

The meaningful part of the movie is Spencer Stone’s conversion from unfocused, aimless Jamba Juice seller to young man with a plan, a plan that evolves as he bombs out of his first choices for military service. Being a medic is where he settles.

Neither Alex nor Anthony are followed through these years, but one ends up in the infantry in Afghanistan and the other in a job that allows him to at least get a credit card so he can charge his part of their Rome to Venice to Berlin to Amsterdam to Paris trip.

The travelogue — seeing the sights, arguing with better educated tour guides about WWII history, meeting girls and hitting the clubs — is some of the dullest footage Eastwood has ever committed to the screen — filler, a paid vacation for one and all.

There are eye rolling moments of foreshadowing, delivered first by Alex’s mom and then by Spencer, who feels his struggles are “catapulting me towards some higher purpose.”

Only after an hour of that do we finally get to the climax, which is harrowing, violent, bloody and is as gripping as all that wonderful stuff in “Sully” showing New York first responders as the dazzling professionals they were that day that plane went down in the Hudson.

Eastwood has latched onto real-life heroes in this, the third act of his storied directing career. And that’s worthy of praise. But non-actors are rarely dazzling in portraying themselves on the screen, and that compounds the problem that the script seems to be giving us a sanitized and humility-filtered version of the tale. Sharing the credit like a band of brothers isn’t the most dramatically compelling way to go.

That also goes for the heroism itself. The movies have lurched towards heroes with “special skills,” which we see the real-life Spencer Stone acquire and put to use. Fair enough. It’s still not remotely as dramatic as people out of their depth responding to a crisis they’re not trained to deal with.

But that’s Eastwood’s larger point, here. Here are young men, screw-ups in a sense redeemed by their commitment to “save others” via the military. They act when others cower.

We should never forget how lucky we are to have them around. And if a Hollywood legend decides to put them on the payroll as an extra reward, and is nakedly pandering to the “American Sniper” and Christian conservative audience they represent, we can indulge him that.

Just don’t be fooled that any of those indulgences helps a movie that could use all the help better actors and a better script might have given it.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 on appeal for bloody images, violence, some suggestive material, drug references and language

Cast: Spencer Stone, Judy Greer, Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos, Jenna Fischer, Thomas Lennon

Credits: Directed by Clint Eastwood, script by  Dorothy Blyskal. A Warner Brothers release.

Runnng time: 1:34

Draw we now the curtain upon the insipid, kinky romance novel blockbusters of “Fifty Shades of Grey.” 

No more breathless lip-bites of orgasmic shock from the mousy-voiced beauty Dakota Johnson, as the improbably-named Anastasia Steel. No more hunky Jamie Dornan perma-stubble, as by now his Christian Grey is refusing a clean shave even on his wedding day.

Perhaps with “Fifty Shades Freed”  we’ve seen the last of the female wish-fulfillment fantasy, a smart young woman being dominated by an S & M craving billionaire whose private jet, unlimited shopping budget, assorted yachts and many swank townhouses, chalets and farms are the secret to his real sex appeal.  One can hope.

The couple that handcuffs together stays together in this finale, with Dornan’s Grey marrying Anastasia, who’s a little reluctant to show off a new last name at the publishing house where she’s jumped from flunky to fiction editor, entirely thanks to the guy who ties her up in “The Red Room.”

Tellingly, the self-written vows conclude with the un-PC pronunciation, “I now pronounce you MAN and wife…”

There’s jealousy, danger from the old nemesis Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson), intrigue and sex. Six or seven not-that-inventive couplings, depending on how you count them.

And Audi product placement. All the movies about the limitless rich skip right to German automotive ostentation, whenever possible.

There’s a kidnapping and another one foiled, with a kidnapper subdued by the bodyguards that are now part of Anastasia’s daily routine. They have no “restraints” to hold him until the cops arrive.

“We um, have some,” the bride confesses.

At least this time, some of the laughs are intentional.

These movies have all been slick, with the sheen of high-tone porn about them, which partly explains why the middle aged (and younger) of middle America have flocked to them. James Foley, who sexualized Reese Witherspoon in “Fear” way back in the last millennium, has no new tricks up his sleeve.

Thus, more sex scenes, only slightly more titillating than those that preceded it.

The soap suds bubble through clearer than ever, the laughably melodramatic twists in the plot, the car chase, the conspicuous consumption of E.L. James’s novels — who knew “If you write it, you will eventually own it, when the public eats this soft-core swill up. ”

  Arielle Kebbel of “John Tucker Must Die” is practically the sole new addition to this soap opera, as a flirtatious architect who must be taught her place by the new Mrs. Grey.

Dornan trots out a passable “Maybe I’m Amazed” at the piano.

And there’s sex in the Red Room, sex in an Audi, sex on a kitchen counter and threats of sex on the plane, in the shower, etc.

All to be devoured by the devoted fans of the series. Yes, their daddies used to “read” Playboy — for the fiction. So they said. And that’s what the ladies are here for, right? “The story?”

Right.

God, I hope not.

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

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Arielle Kebbel, Eric Johnson, Marcia Gay Harden

Credits:Directed by James Foley, script by  Niall Leonard (screenplay by), based on the E.L. James novel. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:42