Movie Nation

“Coco” should clear $25-30 million on its second weekend, and will be over $110 million overall by midnight Sunday, winning the box office by a safe margin over “Justice League.” It’s not doing epic business, but glowing reviews and lots of parents with tykes mean this one should cruise to $200 million even if “Ferdinand” sucks away some of the wind in its sails in two weeks.

Not that there’s weeping over at Warner Brothers. “Justice League” will finish second, again, and clear $200 million by late next week.

“Thor: Ragnarok” is closing in on $300 million. Which could cause Warners to weep.

“Wonder” has turned out to be the season’s sleeper, renewing Julia Roberts’ box office currency and warm hearts to the tune of another $14 million this weekend. $75 million already, dashing towards $100.

Yes, “The Star” and “Daddy’s Home 2” and “Bad Moms Christmas” are still making money, and with no new wide releases, they’ll be around for at least another weekend or two.

But this weekend is where the box office starts to reflect the Oscar ambitions of “Awards Season” pictures and the studios backing them.

Pictures like “The Disaster Artist” and “The Shape of Water” are opening in handpicked theaters in NY and LA with an eye toward piling up buzz slowly to begin an awards season push. They need, as Deadline.com points out, big per-screen numbers ($50,000?) to impress and make their case. The reviews are already stellar. 

Woody Allen’s “Wonder Wheel” is trying that limited release tack, and getting pounded. Poor reviews overall. Will anybody see it outside New York? Will anybody want to see it, in light of the highly-credible pedophilia charges renewed by Mia Farrow’s son, Ronan?

“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” expanded last weekend, and cracked the top ten. It’s hitting four hundred more screens this weekend (over 1000 now) and is making a case as an across the board hit packed with nomination-worthy performances (Frances, Sam and Woody?).

“The Florida Project” opened a bit early to make its case this way, and has only earned $4 million in two months. Expect A24 to roll it into more theaters if the Golden Globes are accommodating and honor it with nominations.

New York-centered awards buzz for “The Post” and Willem Dafoe (“Florida Project”) could be prophetic, or as the usual outlier “too early to count” attention. Nobody takes The National Board of Review seriously. Not in this millennium.

No more Kevin Spacey. An Oscar winner replaced by an Oscar winner in Ridley Scott’s take on the infamous 1970s Getty kidnapping.

People griping about the glacial pace of change should take a peek at this trailer for a spring teen romance by a major Hollywood movie studio and featuring A-listers in supporting roles.

Twenty years since Matthew Shepard and “Boys Don’t Cry,” less than a decade since the creators of “The Hangover” thought “That’s gay. Don’t be so gay” was the perfect put down, and here’s a romance that isn’t built around gay bashing, bullying, etc.

Or so it would seem.

“Love, Simon” is about a boy hiding his sexuality and finding what it takes to stop hiding it. Love the joke about “everybody” should have to “come out” and inform their loved ones what their sexual preference is.

Nick Robinson has the title role, with Jennifer Garner and Josh Duhamel as his parents, Tony Hale. “Love, Simon” is based on the Becky Albertalli novel “Simon Vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda,” and opens Mar. 16.

Hollywood has been hard-pressed to manage a decent heterosexual romance in recent years. Let somebody else have a go.

It looks serious-minded, sober. And if it aims for controversy, it’s soft-peddled in the film’s first trailer.

Aside from, oh, Jesus played by Joaquin Phoenix and Chiwetel Ejiofor playing St. Peter.

Rooney Mara has the title role, a “fallen woman” saved and redeemed by Jesus, and in a “Da Vinci Code” spin, picked by him to “lead” his flock/church after his death.

Look for “Mary Magdelene” right around Easter — March 30.

In America, we have been known to eat anything fried, to queue up for the films of Adam Sandler and the endless “Farewell” tours of Cher and KISS.

And in France, they still savor the taste of snails, and never quite lived down a mania for Jerry Lewis and too many atrocious pop stars to count.

“Vive la Difference,” as they would say, and they’re right.

Which is the most diplomatic way I can think of to deliver a backhanded slap at Dalida, a 1950s through disco era French obsession celebrated as much for her tragic life and death, which echoed that of the indisputably great Edith Piaf.

Born into an Italian musician’s family living in Egypt, she became a star in France, and sold millions of records all over the world in French, Italian, Spanish, Arabic and apparently German.

The tunes? French originals, often of the syrupy ballad or novelty tune variety, and a never-ending parade of insipid, thin-voiced covers of English language hits from the likes of Cher, The Moody Blues and whoever made “I Wish You Love” (She dueted with Johnny Mathis once on this one) a pop “standard.”

“Dalida” is an absurdly long, jaw-droppingly tragic and soapy film of her life, which was cursed with the trauma of her father’s arrest during World War II (an Italian in British Egypt, he was accused of Axis sympathies), lovers who took their own lives, an abortion that took away her chance of having children, and her own suicide attempts.

Svelte Sveva Alviti looks enough like the real singer, whose real name was Yolande Christina Gigliotti, to accept the title role. But her colorless, charisma-free  performance matches the underwhelming songs she lip-syncs to. It’s a strained, dull movie that begs the non-French response, “I don’t get it.”

The film is set, mostly, in the aftermath of a suicide attempt. Her young Italian lover– a struggling singer– has taken his own life, and she’s decided to do the same.

Her producer, who took the name “Orlando” (Riccardo Scarmacio), her first manager, the ex-husband who made her a star (Jean-Paul Rouve) and others are kept at a distance, interrogated by a doctor who wants to know how to “rekindle her zest for life.”

Through them, and Dalida’s own sessions on a psychotherapist’s couch, we see the story of her life — her father’s arrest in Cairo, her Egyptian beauty-pageant big break, arrival in France and ensuing stardom, and all the broken love affairs, career challenges and phases her fame went through.

There’s the standard threat from her ex, whom she ditches just as she gets big, in French — “What I make, I can break.”

“You think I need you to exist?” she sneers back.

Her Paris Olympia Theatre triumphs, her efforts to prop up this younger lover or that one (Nicolas Duvauchelle makes a strong impression as “St. Germain,” a particularly weird self-promoting toy boy hustler), many of them are laid out in this survey of her life of sadness.

How sad?

“The hardest thing between life and death is choosing life,” she sighs. “Death is sweet.”

There’s no getting around what a rough time Dalida had, in between the curtain calls. There’s a hint of Judy Garland or Maria Callas in her bad luck and bad taste in men.

But the title performance, the awful lip-syncing, the utter lack of stage presence, cripples this movie in ways no mere maudlin cover of “Nights in White Satin” in Italian could.

The flashback structure, a well-worn device long before Marion Cotillard won an Oscar for playing Piaf, gives the picture a lurching forward progress that barely qualifies as “advancing the plot” at all.

Co-writer director Lisa Azuelos is content to serve up snippets of shows, TV appearances in disco wear, love scenes that generate no heat (It’s almost chaste enough to play in her native Egypt.) and inane bickering over her future with her entourage bracketed with montages of her radio, LP, TV, concert and film triumphs.

That may play in France, where Dalida is remembered and, one assumes, loved. But even trolling through youtube videos of the real deal, who had great stage presence and later in life, a darker, more interesting voice, can leave those who are not French, Italian or Egyptian a little lost.

Why did they latch onto this banal beauty in the first place?

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, suicide, nudity

Cast: Sveva Alviti, Jean-Paul Rouve, Riccardo Scarmacio, Alessandro Borghi, Nicolas Duvauchelle

Credits:Written and directed by Lisa Azuelos, with script assistance from Orlando and Jacques Pessis. A Pathe release.

Running time: 2:04

A good chase thriller isn’t so much scripted as diagrammed, mapped-out.

Characters have to get from Point A to Point B. Make the journey viable and scenic. Create interesting obstacles for them to overcome — a police dragnet, a dangerous cargo, betrayals, double-crosses, etc.

And you want to bring the film to a climax with mayhem in a finale hewn out of some form of rough justice, a criminal’s code of the road as it were.

The lean and immersive French thriller “Fast Convoy” (“Le Convoi,” to the natives) is a compactly mapped out addition to the genre. It packs four cars full of drug smugglers — mostly Muslim — and puts them on the road from Malaga to Paris. Over a day and a night (1100-1200 miles), they’ve got to dodge the cops — Spanish and French — work out internal conflicts, fight paranoia and panic, adapt when things go horribly wrong and survive long enough to collect twenty-thousand Euros.

It’s a chatty ride filled with bickering teams of drivers — scout teams in an Audi A4 and a VW Passat, a chaser/fixer in a Porsche Cayenne, and the cargo car, a Chrysler 300 — on a journey interrupted by explosions of violence.  Genre picture it may be, but it’s not really about the cars or the chase or the quest. Characters are everything in this “thirteenth” delivery, the one that’s sure to be their undoing.

Majid (Foëd Amara) is a grump. In quick snippets of conversation, we figure out he’s got a pregnant woman waiting for him, that they work for “The Mahmoudis,” and that nobody told him that their trunk load of Moroccan hash has been augmented with bundles of cocaine. Young Elyes (Mahdi Belemlih) is behind the wheel and shrugs it off. Majid, who knows the “next level” legal consequences, flips out.

“What’ll you tell the JUDGE? ‘I only had SEVEN kilos! For PERSONAL use!”

Their convoy is built around burner phones, and Majid is quick to burn up his cussing out convoy leader Imad (Tewfik Jallab). That keeps Yacine and Remi (Amir El Kacem and Leon Garel) in the lead car from getting through and warning them all about a Guardia Civil (Spanish police) roadblock. And in Majid’s agitated state, that’s not a good thing.

Will the convoy’s mysterious “fixer,” Alex (Benoît Magimel) be able to tidy this up? Depends on how big a mess he finds when he rolls in with his Cayenne. 

Alex is from a rich tradition in French crime films, a “cleaner” in the “Leon” (“The Professional”) mold. He knows how to dispose of a shot-up vehicle, what to do with a body. But his sunglassed cool is tested when he sees young Elyes has grabbed a hostage (Nadia Kherici).

Layers of intrigue are added as the shaken team dashes north to the Franco-Spanish border, through stunning Pyrenees passes, racing the clock.

But it’s the banter, in French with English subtitles, that titillates. Yacine is every bit as paranoid as Majid, and he’s seething with fury over the Gallic dope, Remi, he’s riding with. Remi wants to go all-in with this profession, changing his name to something Muslim. “Osama” is the fool’s first choice.

Imad tangles with his much-younger driver Reda (Sofian Khammes) over where they store their grenades. For, you know, just in case. 

Alex is the mystery. Cold-hearted killer, cunning calculator, or is there humanity in there? He’s not happy having a hostage mixed in with these bungling, panic-prone chatterboxes.

“Either she comes too, or you kill her.”

Genre director Frederic Schoendoerffer (“96 Hours,” “Scene of the Crime”) won’t make anyone think of “The Transporter” with his pedestrian handling of the automotive stuff. He co-wrote a script that is more interesting for its run-of-the-mill logistics (gas cans in the scout cars, keeping the cargo car out of CCTV-covered gas stations and rest areas), dialogue and shoot-outs than its oddly-inept escape attempts, lax roadblocks and coincidences.

The players — believable, not particularly sympathetic, with Magimel’s Alex providing the requisite “cool” — make this work, and the violent interludes kick “Fast Convoy” up a notch. When Hollywood remakes it, and they should, they should stick to the diagram worked out here.

It won’t need all that “Fast & Furious” clutter to come off. Just a little more supercharged driving, if you please.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, graphic violence, drug abuse

Cast: Benoit Magimel, Rheem Kherici  Tewfik Jallab, Mahdi Belemlih, Amir El Kacem, Leon Garel

Credits: Frédéric Schoendoerffer, script by Yann Brion and  Frédéric Schoendoerffer. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:42

Not knowing that Dan Gilroy, writer-director of “Nightcrawler,” brother of Tony Gilroy (“Michael Clayton”) wrote and directed it would help “Roman J. Israel, Esq.,” simply by lowering expectations for the Denzel Washington legal drama.

Strip away any pretense of “Oscar contender” attached to Washington’s turn as an unreformed activist lawyer who never left his Civil Rights Movement past, faced with the moral dilemma of his life’s first, big mistake. Forget that his lumpy, “on the spectrum” character turn is designed to attract Oscar attention, and maybe this overlong but engaging character study in crisis goes down easier.

Sony/Columbia certainly wanted that to be the case, releasing this picture with little fanfare or pre-release attention from critics. They knew it was problematic, from Washington’s inconsistent-with-classic-Aspergers symptoms performance to a meandering, moralistic story that takes forever to get to its moment of crisis, and even longer to resolve it in the way we know it will.

Washington’s title character is “the pillar” behind a famous L.A. activist practice, for 36 years the “man behind the curtain” — doing the research, memorizing California statutes, compiling briefs and never erring in his judgement of the law and the injustices in the ways it is enforced.

“I’m quite confident of my recollections.”

That “savant” thing makes up for his bluntness, Roman’s prickliness, his never-changed hairstyle, unbending racial attitudes and slang — he still calls every black woman he meets “Sister,” ever black man “Brother.” He’s got one suit, and a sort of naive idealism that rarely stepping into court has never forced him to abandon.

And then his unseen partner has a heart attack, the practice is about to close and his one lifeline is from a man who is everything he is not, his partner’s sell-out super-successful protege, played with uncanny canniness by Colin Farrell. George Pierce may want to tidy up this in-the-red law firm run by his law school mentor. He may have an angle he’s playing as he tactfully tries to re-direct Roman’s rude brilliance into something his semi-predatory criminal law firm could use.

That’s the hide-his-hand style Farrell brings to the part. But on the surface, George is a rich, slick, smooth-talker who wants to do right by a man his mentor trusted as the brains of a practice that had social impact far beyond its billable hours.

Roman, who uses “Esquire” after his name, even though he often has to explain it, has not yet tired of “doing the impossible for the ungrateful.”

“I believe because of my beliefs.”

But he takes the job offer from George, because he cannot help but label the civil rights organization he’d like to work for “nickel and dime reformers” to its young director (Carmen Ejogo) when he’s begging for a job.

At some point, Roman will abandon some piece of himself, lose idealism and look for the easy, unethical way out. It’s just that Gilroy takes his damn sweet time getting us to that point.

Trying to create some sort of romantic interest between Roman and the younger activist played by Ejogo is laughable. We never do get a handle on what motivates George to indulge this square peg so hell-bent on seeking “justice” and so inept at asking for it.

The murder case that gets Roman into hot water isn’t remotely interesting, and his efforts to extract himself from it clumsily handled. Washington’s take on Roman, all-knowing, socially inept, “shy” and yet verbose, clueless and yet self-aware, callous and intensely compassionate, is jarring.

But we do get some fine civil rights lawyer sermonizing, Reverend Al Meets Johnny Cochrane.

“NOT speaking out is ordinary,” Roman preaches. The legally obvious is “an enema of sunshine,” “Freedom is something you can only give yourself.” “Lack of success is self-imposed.”

So what we have with the most honorable “Roman J. Israel, Esq.,” is a lawyer better suited to being a judge, and a character — with all the inconsistencies of Washington’s performance (there are many variations of “on the spectrum”) — deserving of a better movie built around him.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language and some violence

Cast: Denzel Washington, Colin Farrell, Carmen Ejogo, Tony Plana

Credits: Written and directed by Dan Gilroy. A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 2:0

Charles Dickens is pacing his study, muttering loudly enough that the servants can hear. And giggle.

“SCRATCH!” he says. “Scroooou-ples. SCRAMPLE.”

It’s important work, a big part of his process.

“Get the name right,” says Dickens, who delighted in “collecting” unusual names for later use in his fiction, “and if you’re lucky, the character will appear.”

And in any version of “A Christmas Carol,” if you get the right Scrooge, all else falls into place.

That’s what “The Man Who Invented Christmas” is, a fanciful, semi-historical spin on Dickens’ most famous work, ostensibly about how he came to write it. And while its Dickens, played by Dan Stevens, the oft-employed “Downton Abbey” alumnus, is fine, its Scrooge is one for the ages.

Christopher Plummer, an actor whose career’s third act has been filled with Dickens — it began with a dazzling villainous turn in “Nicholas Nickleby” in 2002 — and assorted other Oscar nominated and Oscar-winning delights, is a perfectly adorable grouse, a towering cadaver of Victorian sarcasm, the muse who haunts Dickens as he frantically searches his past, his acquaintances and his city’s streets in a mad scramble to finish his self-financed masterpiece in a mere six weeks in 1843.

It’s obvious Plummer is perfect from his first scene, a chance encounter where Dickens observes him as the sole mourner of his late “business partner.”

“Hum—-bug.”

And as Dickens leads his the growing cast of this novella (in his head) through London, looking for a Fezziwig, a Ghost of Christmas Present or Bob Cratchit, Plummer’s Scrooge is his droll, bored critic-in-residence, there to comment on anything or any place that gives the manic writer inspiration.

“It’s a market, you idiot.”

It’s not the first film or play to use this writer-haunted-by-his-characters device, but that pays dividends in a cute, sentimental holiday film whose ethos is uttered by Dickens’ long-suffering mother (Ger Ryan) when explaining her Christmas pudding recipe to Dickens’ wife (Morfydd Clark).

“The secret is to warm the treacle.”

Dickens’ impoverished, workhouse (child slave labor) past hangs over him, his debts and spendthrift ways remind him too much of his ne’er do well dad (Jonathan Pryce), his publishers skeptical, as he’s produced three flops in a row. Adored by his public, at home and in America, he’s got to get this short “Carol…in prose” done, perfectly illustrated (Simon Callow is Leech, the talented but imperious engraver) and into stores before Christmas.

But bless his soul, there’s inspiration all around him — the unemployed brother-in-law with the consumptive, crippled son, the creaky barrister/lender who keeps padlocks on his safe, the rattling old waiter named “Marley.”

Fans of British character actors will recognize the several, among them the great Scot Bill Paterson as a wealthy fan, a delusional “self-made man” undeterred by his wife’s reminder that her dad left them a factory, who supplies the author with his heartless “decrease the surplus population” quip.

It’s “A Christmas Carol” riff for those who already know the story, and entirely too on-the-nose for its own good. The Irish/Canadian production is handsome, beautifully-costumed if rather clumsily lit — not quite BBC/PBS level polish. And for all the suggestion of impending ruin, the script and Stevens’ performance of it lack urgency and desperation.

The odd boner — having Dickens feted with “Yankee Doodle Dandy” during his American tour of 1842 is about 60 years before the song was written – creeps in. And some plot contrivances, banishing the Irish maid (Anna Murphy) who gives Dickens his ghost story idea, are simple and overly-obvious plot devices.

But one of the greatest tales in the English language gets its moist-eyed due, simply by following the recipe the master laid out 174 Christmases ago.

“The secret is to warm the treacle.”

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements and some mild language

Cast: Dan Stevens, Christopher Plummer, Morfyyd Clark, Miriam Margolyes, Jonathan Pryce, Anna Murphy, Simon Callow

Credits: Directed by Bharat Nalluri, script by Susan Coyne, based on the Les Standiford. A Bleecker St. release.

Running time: 1:44

I was thinking, not long ago, that maybe it’s time we re-examined the life and work of Jim Carrey. And then Netflix releases this documentary which starts that process in earnest.

“Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond” is a fascinating, deep “behind the scenes” of the making of “Man on the Moon,” Carrey’s Golden Globe-winning impersonation/interpretation of the famous conceptual comic Andy Kaufman, an odd and “out there” funnyman who was subject of the R.E.M. song that became this movie’s title.

It’s built around absurdly unfettered access Carrey gave a video crew as he utterly immersed himself in Andy Kaufman, the only comic stranger than himself, playing the “Taxi” and “Saturday Night Live” star who became comedy’s greatest hoaxer. Carrey released this long-vaulted footage and then sat for a revealing, philosophical interview with filmmaker Chris Smith, who created a film out of it all.

So not only do we see Carrey become Kaufman, taking on his act, his mannerisms and his comedy credo — “The show doesn’t end when the director yells ‘cut.'” We also see him get into semi-real tussles with wrestler Jerry Lawler, who was playing himself in a movie about his fake feud with Kaufman. We see Carrey channeling Kaufman’s stoop-shouldered equal-opportunity offender lounge act alter ego, Tony Clifton. The film’s full-title includes “Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton.”

We hear Carrey psychoanalyze Kaufman, revealing much about himself –kindred comic spirits trying to “cross that line” in sometimes similar ways — in the process.

There’s Jim on set, insisting that befuddled Oscar-winning director Milos Forman (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Amadeus”) “Call me ANDY,” listening to the music of rock changeling David Bowie in the makeup chair, bringing production crew and family to tears off camera on the set. He’s seen blurring the lines between art and reality every day as he interacted with those who worked with, knew or were related to Kaufman, whose death of lung cancer in 1984 was regarded, by many, as just another hoax by a guy whose comedy had morphed into increasingly bizarre stunts, to which faking his own death would simply seem like a curtain call.

“I have a Hyde inside who shows up when people are watching,” Carrey admits, his version of the mania to perform that Kaufman took to other extremes. Of Kaufman, he adds, “I know him as well as I can know him.”

Both had “please my dad” issues, both took things too far in comic “guest appearances” too often to count. The more-malleable, broader talents of Carrey made him the world’s biggest movie star, for a while. Kaufman became a cult figure who lives on in the many TV appearances he squeezed into a short career that seemed to be spiraling downward at the time of his death.

Bill Zehme, author of the definitive Kaufman biography “Lost in the Funhouse,” confirmed what even a haphazard reading of Kaufman’s career reveals. His act — lip-syncing and doing this dopey dance to novelty records, slinging that “the little foreign man” voice and managing a killer Elvis impersonation — was basically the same from high school up until the wrestling stuff, trying to become the most “hated” comic/wrestler/man in America took over. “Brilliant” but “limited” is a fair assessment.

What Carrey adds to our understanding of the man is his simpatico sense that you either become your creation and go to your grave as someone nobody really knows, or you move on from that and find ways of expressing someone closer to who you really are, leaving that “character” or persona you’ve created for public consumption behind.

Kaufman was the former. Carrey plainly has become the latter. I’ve interviewed Carrey (and for that matter, Zehme) and the bearded, thoughtful fellow who talks about his life, Andy Kaufman and the films he was making at around this time in this documentary is one far more recognizable than the manic funnyman who has made every talk show or awards show appearance memorable, wacky and out there.

Even though he’s been less active and spacier (still hilarious) in recent years, Carrey gave half a dozen enduring screen performances — in “The Truman Show,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Man on the Moon,” “The Cable Guy,” “Bruce Almighty,” “I Love You Phillips Morris” — that transcended the fellow who made “Alll-righty then!” a catch-phrase that paid.

It’s time we remembered that. And maybe it’s time somebody gave him another film role that underlined it.

MPAA Rating: profanity, violence

Cast: Jim Carrey, Andy Kaufman, Danny DeVito, Bob Zmuda, Milos Foreman

Credits: Directed by Chris Smith. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

The trick to getting most any script turned into a feature film is finding “names” who are interested in doing it.

But here’s a tip. If you’ve lined up Oscar winner Al Pacino, somehow, to make your movie, maybe re-write the thing so that he’s got better lines than this.

“So what are you SAYING to me?”

That is the laziest way of underlining a plot point, script-splaining for the slower members of the audience, having a character reiterate a patently-obvious point by restating it for the guy who just asked that question.

“Hangman” has Pacino’s character drawl versions of that line repeatedly. It makes his character the one true southerner (“Hoo HA, you all.”) in a southern city where a serial killer is on the loose. And it relies on coincidence, macabre murders and the presence of serial-killer bait (Brittany Snow) to get by.

Monroe (the film was shot in Atlanta) was the hometown of a New York Times reporter (Snow of “Pitch Perfect”) who has come home to do some sort of ride-along piece with a compliant, widowed detective (Karl Urban).

When Det. Ruiney (Seriously?) steps into crime scenes that start looking like a serial killer’s work — hanging victims, letters carved on their chests, the game “Hangman” scrawled in blood or whatever on the walls (in case the cops are too slow to figure out that’s what he’s playing) — he looks up a retired colleague, Archer, played by Pacino. Who wonders why his old pal is dragging around a member of the “paparazzi.”

“Sir, I was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize!”

Yeah? Who wasn’t?

The three of them pursue the somehow-connected killings all over town, each a sort of Jigsaw-lite booby-trap with elaborate clues that only their not-coincidental relationship to the murders should help them solve.

And at every step, the trio of screenwriters lays everything out so obviously, it’s as if they themselves need these crutches to explain it to the director (Johnny Martin).

“I’m good with numbers,” the reporter reports.

“Still doing crosswords?” Ruiney asks of the aged/ageless Archer. “And in LATIN!”

“Hangman” is ridiculous from the start, when Archer summons “all UNITS” to chase down a van that has sideswiped his bright-gold, classic ’71  Riviera, the PERFECT car to take on a stakeout. But yeah, we understand why he’d want the scofflaw caught.

A weary genre — the police procedural — is lessened by its creation, an exhausted archetype — the “cunning” serial killer — is further dumbed-down by its addition to its ranks.

All because Michael Caissie, Charles Huttiger and (with additional writing by) Phil Hawkins couldn’t think of anything cleverer than a serial killer who plays a game of “Hangman” (IMDB search the title, they’re not the first) and couldn’t cook up, among the three of them, better lines than “So, what’re you TELLING me?”

MPAA Rating: R for violent content, bloody images, and language

Cast: Al Pacino, Brittany Snow, Karl Urban

Credits:Directed by Johnny Martin, script by Michael Caissie, Charles Huttinger and Phil Hawkins . A Saban release.

Running time: 1:38