Movie Nation

“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

So here’s what we know about this one. Clint Eastwood, who had basically retired, finds a third act in his directing life with heartland America military true stories.

After “American Sniper,” he casts the real American heroes who stopped a terrorist attack in its tracks on “The 15:17 to Paris,” where U.S. soldiers on leave stopped an armed attacker from carrying out an attack on a French train.

It’s a Feb. movie. Not when Oscar contenders of potential blockbusters are released. “Ghost Rider,” sure. “Gnomeo & Juliet?” Why not?

And they’re not screening it widely. Florida has three NFL cities, two NBA cities, for instance. One showing in the entire state. Tampa.

Embargo? 9 am Thursday, 8-10 hours before the first showing.

Not exactly ringing votes of confidence. But we’ll see. Good story, good director, it could surprise. And reach an audience outside of its elderly Fox News target demo.

At least, that’s what this trailer suggests. A Summer “Die Hard” knockoff. With kids. And a hero with an artificial leg.

Major style points to the makers of “Dear Dictator” for finding, sixty-plus years and 150 or so credits into his career, something truly different for Sir Michael Caine to play.

A Castro-like Caribbean communist dictator? No, he doesn’t do a Latin accent. He’s a knight and two-time Oscar winner, one of the greatest film stars of all time. He doesn’t need to.

The movie? Well, if the filmmakers were as ballsy in scripting it as they were in asking Michael Caine to co-star in it, they’d have had something.

“Dictator” is a daft comedy about a high school rebel, played with sullen, pouty relish by Odeya Rush, who becomes pen pals with a Latin American tyrant just to irk her classmates, annoy her bad-decisions-specialist single mom (Katie Holmes, OUT there) and alarm the hippy social studies teacher (Jason Biggs) who assigned it.

Tatiana (Rush, of “Lady Bird”) wears camouflage shirts and platform combat boots and a bad attitude every day of her sophomore year in high school. She disapproves of her ulfiltered “skank mom,” the “biggest slut in the game” of love. Mom’s a dental hygienist who submits to foot lickings by her married dentist boss (Seth Green).

At school, Tatiana is such an outcast she’s subject to the charms of handsome fundamentalist Benny (Jackson Beard), who tempts her with Bible tracts detailing the parameters and decor of Hell. Which is catnip to her.

And when that “correspond with somebody you see as a role model” social studies assignment come up, she’s got one more way to lash out. Anton Vincent, bearded dictator of a backward, poor island nation that his family has been repressing for generations, is just the ticket.

“I admire his style,” she sneers. “Dictators get such a bad rap.”

And Vincent? With U.S. backed rebels threatening his hold on his sanctioned and embargoed island, he’s just happy to get a nice note from the kid.

“Dear Tatitiana, Welcome to the Revolution!”

They swap notes of mutual admiration until the coup occurs. Anton, needing somewhere to lay low, slips into the U.S. and into their house, where he upends their lives.

Co-writer/directors Lisa Addario, Joe Syracuse (“Amateur Night”) set this up as a fish-out-of-water comedy, but don’t find nearly enough about American suburbia for Anton to be shocked about. Mowing the lawn, confused by the neighbors for “Jose the Yard Man?” 

What they strike gold with is in having the general/president for life school the kid in how to seize control of her school, upending the social order and cracking the mean girls who run it.

“How is it that the few always rule the many?” he asks. “Factions.” In high school, they’re called cliques.

“Take out the leaders,” he teaches. “Foment unrest. Assume authority.”

The high school “types” are both recognizable and believable. None of these “straight from the runway to a film role” supermodels in the making in this cast. The filmmakers, who have been in the business for decades, still manage some sharply observed high school slang. “Whale tails” and “Red Lobstering” somebody make their screen debuts.

The inept violence and poverty of the General’s rule at home is played for laughs, but not broadly enough. And his many over-the-top suggestions for changing Tatiana (and her mom’s) lives, the ruthlessness with which tyrants follow those three listed rules and cling to power afterwards, is a tad toothless.

That gives “Dear Dictator” the feel of a pulled-punch, a movie that could have gone to far more dangerous places than it does. Read that “Take out the leaders” instruction line again and see if there isn’t a bumbling orange-haired authoritarian it reminds you of.

Caine and his stunt double give fair value here, the diminutive Rush is a rising star and Holmes, sharing the screen with her “Batman Begins” co-star, hurls herself at this woman as if she’s auditioning for her cable TV comeback.

Because “Dear Dictator,” as funny as it is (in spots), just isn’t it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, comic executions, adult situations, profanity

Cast: Odeya Rush, Michael Caine, Katie Holmes. Jason Biggs.

Credits: Written and directed by  Lisa Addario, Joe Syracuse. A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 1:30

These back-engineered “Star Wars” movies seem to have more promise than whatever direction Disney is taking the main post-Skywalker storyline.

To me, at least.

Back engineering Harrison Ford? Trickier.

“Solo: A Star Wars Story” has an interesting cast, familiar action beats, the suggestion of a “pilot” gone “rogue.” Probably a lovable rogue.

Stole his last name from a popular 1960s spy show on TV.

If they REALLY want to do something novel with this sort of story, I’d build it around Lando Calrissian, as “When Han Met Lando” is a lot more interesting and unfamiliar even than when Han Met  Chewie. I see some of that here. But at least there’s a little hope built into this one.

Alden Ehrenreich as Han, Donald Glover as Lando, with Woody Harrelson and Emilia Clarke and Paul Bettany. And since Ron Howard is directing — a special appearance by Clint Howard.

Jon Kasdan, I am sure, “EARNED” the right to co-script this with his dad, screenwriter/director Lawrence Kasdan. No nepotism involved there.

May 25 is when it opens.

More dinosaurs, the hint of “science” creating a “new” species, even deadlier, more Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, more young folks in peril.

And Toby Jones. But no…Jeff…Goldblum.

No, Tom Cruise is not getting “too old for this s—.”

Alec Baldwin, Angela Bassett, Ving, Simon…yeah. Henry Cavill as a villain? I buy it.

When “Ishtar,” one of the most expensive comedies ever made and a flop, to boot, came out, Dustin Hoffman defended it by saying this.

“A baby doesn’t know how rich his parents are!”

How much a movie cost can hinder our enjoyment of it, but shouldn’t. And that cuts both ways. We celebrate “El Mariachi,” “Slacker,” “Tangerine” and “The Blair Witch Project” at least in part because well, heck, look what they did without any money.

“From Hollywood to Rose” is an occasionally amusing LA bus trip comedy that strains and strains to achieve “charming.” Stock characters with an occasional twist, a daft heroine who could pass for shopping cart lady crazy, it upends a couple of expectations and finds a couple of good laughs.

Ignore the back story that the filmmakers made this micro-budget movie in the home of the movies for less than $200,000 and the city bus-bound, stagey (lots of characters enter the story, do monologues, and exit) laugher wouldn’t warrant much more than a passing thought, or a “Let’s try this out” gander on Netflix.

I mean, aside from an implicit slap at Hollywood for throwing cash at plenty of comedies that cost 500 to 1,000 times more than this, most of which are no funnier, dwelling on its cost gets it graded on the curve. And the script, characters and players who perform it often aren’t up to snuff.

  Eve Annenberg (“Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish”) is our unnamed heroine, stumbling to a Hollywood Blvd. bus stop in the middle of the night in a cheap wedding dress, cats-eye glasses and a lot of makeup that’s run down her face thanks to tears. During a night-long odyssey, she flees that part of town for another, making her way home or wherever else her not-thinking-straight impulses send her.

At first she doesn’t speak, and even after she starts blabbing, she’s mainly reacting to those she meets, an improbably odd cross-section of Late Night La La Land. The loud, indiscreet coed chattering and over-sharing on her cell phone, the businessman (or so dressed) out for a middle-of-the-night commute, the tattooed, muscle-bound biker, the mouthy, rude Chinese woman who gets her back up when her pidgin English gives her away as an immigrant (Chia Chen), bickering drag queens and two chivalrous nerds (Bradley Herman, Maxx Maulion), most of them start weirdly one-sided chats with her.

The polite ones try to avoid prying.

“Excuse me, miss. Did you ever see ‘The Graduate?'”

Yeah, she’s running away from her own wedding. Or could be. And opening her mouth and her purse (with a “fish” night light in it) suggests she’s touched in the head. Mostly though, the strangers sound her out by making a quick sketch of their own story, hopes, etc.

A woman her age over-shares about her own failed marriage, the muscle-bound biker comforts her choice of dresses and shockingly, knows the crinkly fabric tulle when he sees it. A strung-out bus driver launches into a monologue that sounds like something out of every bad “readers theater” performance you’ve ever heard.

“Y’know what I wanted to do when I was a kid?”

Our runaway bride’s sanity is reassured by the nerds, two bemused observers of the passing human comedy who bicker endlessly about “Batman” and “Blade Runner,” and their relative merits.

“First of all, you’re an IDIOT. Second, ‘Batman’s’ not a cartoon, he’s a SUPER hero!”

The bride knows “Blade Runner,” although her rambling recollection of her relationship to it does nothing to advocate her sanity. She knows Bruce Lee movies, too.

There’s a wildly improbable encounter or two with others from her wedding party, missed buses, eye rolls from some passengers, cringes from others and a stop-off for a food fight.

Through it all, the runaway bride’s makeup miraculously renews itself, the dress endures unspeakable indignities and you learn to appreciate the randomness of the public transportation set.

Like the “real” shopping cart homeless lady who knows where the only all-night yogurt place is, the nerds who know every all-night burrito stand in their corner of LA, and that flash-back suffering “tulle” expert, who looks like Dave Bautista and sounds like Sean Hayes .

Co-directors Liz Graham and Matt Jacobs (he wrote it, too) never let us fear for anybody’s safety, and never for one second let us doubt that the bride will change her mind about getting home to Culver City and instead go where any self-respecting Angelino would end her crosstown bus odyssey — to the beach.

I appreciated its randomness, the underlying sweetness, even if too many of the monologues were more grating than charming. And the novel setting, while it doesn’t show us as much of the city as we’ve never seen (I’ve ridden the bus along these routes a few times) on screen, does count for something.

But “From Hollywood to Rose” doesn’t amount to much more than maybe four good laughs, a few grins and a lot of eye-rolls. And how little it cost doesn’t figure into it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity.

Cast: Eve Annenberg, Bradley Herman, Maxx Maulion, Chia Chen

Credits: Directed by Liz Graham, Matt Jacobs, script by Matt Jacobs. An Indie Rights release.

Running Time: 1:24