Movie Nation

Tiny profundities, clever twists and a few giggles are the hallmarks of “Table 19,” a wedding comedy with on-the-nose casting and slight, uneven charms.

It started life as an off-center idea from the Duplass Brothers, of “Cyrus,” “Jeff, Who Lives at Home” and “The Puffy Chair.” Tell the story of strangers, seated together at a table at a wedding reception where none of them rated highly enough in the happy couple’s eyes to be seated closer to the bride and groom.

There’s the unhappily married diner owners (Lisa Kudrow, Craig Robinson), there because the father of the bride runs diners. Jo (June Squibb of “Nebraska”) was “Nanny Jo,” who helped raise the bride long ago. Walter (Stephen Merchant) is an ex-con nephew of the father of the bride. Renzo (Tony Revolori of “Grand Budapest Hotel”)? He’s an ill-dressed teen on the make with even slimmer connections to the Michigan island resort nuptials.

And then there’s Eloise, played by Anna Kendrick at her most put-upon. She’s the one who bluntly recognizes the Siberia they’ve all been exiled to. Why? She helped plan the wedding. She’s the bride’s oldest friend, and was her maid of honor. But when you split up with the bride’s dopey/hunk best man brother (Wyatt Russell, son of Kurt and Goldie) a month before the Big Event, Table 19 is what you get.

It’s “the table that should have known to ‘RSVP regrets,'” she cracks. And she’s right. Everybody is worried about the ex-maid of honor “causing a scene.” Yeah, it’s coming. They just make us wait for it…”wait for it.”

“I’m FINE.”

Running gags include Renzo’s pep-talking, micro-managing mom (Margo Martindale) whom we only hear in a string of needy, co-dependent cell phone calls. Bino (Kudrow) has worn a jacket that’s exactly the same color as the wait staff at the resort hotel. “Could you take these to table 5?” AWK-ward.

There’s another wedding scheduled for another hall in the hotel, and we repeatedly glimpse the mariachi band that they’ve booked. The Millner-Grotsky wedding has its own ’80s cover band, even though the marrying couple is too young to have experienced Cyndi Lauper, The Go-Gos or The Cars first-hand.

And then there’s the hunk Huck (Thomas Cocquerel) who spies Eloise staring at her ex, and delivers this judgement.

“Nobody deserves a full minute of your attention unless they’re giving it back.”

Might he be her emotional rescue? Will Renzo, sporting a fur bow-tie, get anywhere with the one girl his age at the reception? Will Walter reveal his criminal past? Will Jerry and Bino squabble it out?

“You have a pathological aversion to answering a direct question! You always answer a question with a question!”

Will anybody remember “Nanny Jo?”

“You children are such a disappointment.”

If you know the Duplass Brothers, you know the obvious questions aren’t the ones that’ll be answered, the obvious dilemmas have complications. And everybody — from the callous bride and groom to the jilting best man, the random adult (Andrew Daly) appalled at Renzo’s come-ons to a stranger’s daughter to the Aussie-accented Huck (“Nobody names their kid ‘Huck’ any more.”) has a point of view, and one worth hearing.

That’s a lot to squeeze into an 87 minute film, and not all of it works and much of what does work doesn’t really gel until the later acts. Kendrick, Merchant and Squibb’s casting are all a little too on-the-nose, and young Russell is a bit out of his acting league with this crew.

But if you’re willing to sit “in the upper teens” at a wedding you were only invited to as an afterthought, “Table 19” has its charms and its rewards, and they go beyond a slice of wedding cake and dancing to a cover of “Hold Me Now” by The Thompson Twins.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic elements, sexual content, drug use, language and some brief nudity

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Craig Robinson, Lisa Kudrow, June Squibb, Stephen Merchant,

Credits:Written and directed by Jeffrey Blitz, based on a story by Mark and Jay Duplass. A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:27

A nearly-forgotten pan-cultural romance and its role in an African national success story earns a stately, feel-good treatment in “A United Kingdom,” an historical romance from the director of “Belle.”

It’s well cast, and shot on striking locations. But it’s a love story/historical drama that lurches along in fits and starts thanks to a “hit the high spots” script and somewhat flat direction.

Rosamund Pike is Ruth Williams, a clerical worker in hard-pressed post-war London. When her missionary sister (Laura Carmichael of “Downton Abbey”) lures her to a missionary society dance, she’s open-minded enough to go, and thinks nothing of dancing with the assorted handsome African men she meets there.

But one of them catches her eye. There’s something regal about Seretse Khama. He has a gallantry and gravitas about him. Some of that stems from the fact that he’s played by David Oyelowo, who made a noble Martin Luther King, Jr. in “Selma.” And some of it has been explained by a letter from Keretse’s uncle that opens the film.

“It is time to return home to Bechuana Land,” his regent uncle wrote. Time to take the throne and “ensure the advancement of our people.”

It’s the sort of thing he has to get out of the way after their first real date. He is to be king of his poor, desert-covered land-locked kingdom, lands under a British protectorate but coveted by the increasingly rebellious and racist South African regime to its south, hemmed in by racist Rhodesia to the east and Southwest Africa to the west.

And he cannot imagine going back there without a woman he’s fallen in love with.

The abruptness of this romance might be explained by the times. World War II left its survivors with an urgency that didn’t fade for years. That isn’t laid out in the script, nor is Ruth and Seretse’s ahead-of-their-times indifference to race.

Thirty minutes into the film, they’re married despite the fact that her father “will hate him on sight. He’s cleverer than him, and he’s black.” Thirty minutes in, they fly into apartheid South Africa and make the desert drive to Bechuana Land, where many disapprove of this union, including the ruling uncle (Vusi Kunene).

And thirty minutes in, the British government is all in a huff over this embarrassing marriage that is sure to rile up the wavering Empire commitments of South Africa. Jack Davenport (the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies) plays another imperious, sherry-drinking ogre of the Empire, determined to break up the marriage or force this future king to abdicate.

The sneering Tom Felton of the Harry Potter pictures is “our man in Africa,” the commissioner in charge of keeping the peace –doing the Empire’s bidding — in a tribe seemingly riven by this union.  Terry Pheto makes a vivid impression as the future king’s disapproving sister.

Director Amma Assante and screenwriter Guy Hibbert do a good job of re-introducing this piece of history — on a budget. But they lose themselves in the obstacles to romance and never give the players the chance to explore and explain the attraction. Yes, she’s Rosamund Pike. But he’s also very well educated, serious-minded. And Ruth is “a salesman’s daughter” with a clerical job and a little wartime ambulance-driving service.

What, aside from jazz and dancing, brought them together?

Each character shows some mettle in the later acts, when Churchillian chicanery threatens everything Seretse hopes for in his country, for his people and for his own happiness. But the script tips its hand and leans into “feel good” outcomes in a way that you don’t have to know Botswanan history to figure out where “United Kingdom” is going.

Still, it makes for a warm history lesson about a country and a love affair that prefigured a change in a corner of the world where the news, for decades, was dominated by violence, injustice and fear.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for some language including racial epithets and a scene of sensuality

Cast: David Oyelowo, Rosemund Pike, Jack Davenport, Tom Felton

Credits:Directed by Amma Asante, script by Guy Hibbert. A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:51

It’s easy– far too easy– to dismiss “Before I Fall” as a sad-faced teen “Groundhog Day.” Because for the first 45 minutes, that’s all it is. It’s only later that it gains weight and emotional heft. And it’s worth the wait.

Teenager Sam (Zoey Deutch) gets killed in a car crash at the end of a day in which she dismisses her family, kowtows to the Mean Girl in charge of her clique, saves her virginity for a dopey beau unworthy of her and is cruel to almost everybody she meets.

And she has to relive her last 24 hours over and over until she makes things right.

It is “Cupid Day” at rainy/foggy Pacific Northwest High. The whole school is organized around getting roses delivered to your teen beloved, in the middle of class. The gay girl (Liv Hewson) gets none.

“I’m in hetero-normative HELL!”

Even the tormented trainwreck Juliet (Elena Kampouris) gets a rose. But that’s just a cruel joke, played every year by Lindsay, the Mean Girl Queen played by Halston Sage.

There’s a party, with teen drinking. And then a drive home — a teen in charge of the rollover-prone late model Ford Explorer. That’s almost child abuse.

The gimmick, based on Lauren Oliver‘s “Groundhog” derivative YA novel of the same title, has Sam waking up, day after day, trying to alter her fate, trying to do better, trying to live up to the note of the boy (Logan Miller) whom she rebuffs, day after day, but who “knows” her like nobody else.

“This isn’t you.”

She is slow to figure that out, to seek redemption for the purgatory her 18 year-old life has become. She rattles through the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief over realizing your impending death — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Sort of.

She vamps, insults, tries to be better, then stumbles and stumbles again. She’d have a clue if she picked up on what her literature teacher was talking about in that one class she has to take and re-take, time and again.

“Sisyphus. It’s NOT an STD!”

Like seemingly all her classmates, Sam is rich, a beautiful “girl next door” who is just the sort of knockout Jennifer Beals (playing her mom) would have. She’s spoiled. So we don’t like her. And looking in the mirror each day, she doesn’t like her, either.

Her story arc is pre-determined. But Deutch (“Everybody Wants Some!”, “Dirty Grandpa”) strains to make her character unlikable. Director Ry Russo-Young and screenwriter Maria Maggenti botch things up by having Sam narrate her tale, when it’s much more interesting and challenging to let the audience figure out what she’s learning, and how, by her actions. Deutch seems up to doing that without spoon-feeding the audience her journey with voice-over.

But damned if the picture doesn’t overcome that with some keen insights to teen thinking and teen behavior. The over-the-top girl-bonding, the sing-along with their favorite tunes (by Big Data, Scooter Island, Grimes, Kurt Vile), the obsession with appearance, tactless cruelty, the abrupt best-friend/worst enemy transitions — spot on.

Just wait for the third act, after all the “here we go agains” and failed attempts at living up to a poster — “Become Who You Are.”

We know the wrongs Sam must right, the unkindnesses she must replace with kindness, the misjudging that must be overturned. Sam gets her roses, every day. She rebuffs Kent (Miller) every day, tries to save herself from that Explorer wreck that awaits her almost every day.

Until she changes.

“Remind me again. Why do we hate Juliet?”

I love the way the movie has Sam seek redemption in the obvious places, and the non-obvious ones. How does a Mean Girl get to be mean? What hidden hurt is Lindsay hiding?

What tiny gestures could turn the tide with Sam’s parents? What gift can she give her baby sister that will last a lifetime?

Because her fate is set. It wouldn’t be a weeper without the tragedy we see repeated, in many variations, time and again.

Teens are immortal. Ask any teen you know. Look at their behavior, living every day like Keith Richards, texting and driving and taking heedless risks by the bushel basket full.

It’s not a great movie, a deep film or a transcendent experience, the way “Groundhog Day” is. But “Before I Fall” is an admirable knockoff, a “teachable moments” movie about that first time we take stock, realize the what and who we should treasure, and let them know it.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for mature thematic content involving drinking, sexuality, bullying, some violent images, and language-all involving teens.

Cast:  Zoey Deutch, Halston Sage, Logan Miller, Cynthy Wu, Medalion Rahimi, Jennifer Beals
Credits:Directed by Ry Russo-Young , script by Maria Maggenti, based on a Lauren Oliver novel. An Open Road release.

Running time: 1:39

It’s a real shock to learn of Bill Paxton’s untimely death  due to a post-heart-surgery stroke.  He was just 61, and made a career out of playing drawling smart guys, lovable galoots, heroes and villains.

The Fort Worth native got his start, alongside his lifelong pal, James Cameron, in the low-budget world of indie icon Roger Corman. He went on to make his mark in films, on TV, in front of and behind the camera.

His most recent gig was in the new series “Training Day.” But he was impressive in “Big Love,” “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” and “Texas Rising” and the superb “Hatfields & McCoys” on TV.

His best films might have been “A Simple Plan” and “Nightcrawler,”  “Tombstone” and “Traveller,” but he was in blockbusters like “Twister” and “Titanic” and “Apollo 13.” He classed up “Edge of Tomorrow” and “U-571” and many others.

He directed a couple of pretty good movies, too — the Biblical prophecy thriller “Frailty,” and Disney’s “The Greatest Game Ever Played.”

I interviewed him several times over the years, often about his buddy James Cameron, who cast Paxton in “The Terminator,””Aliens,””Titanic,” and “True Lies.”

“Jim got lucky, we ALL got lucky,” is the way I remember Paxton telling it.

He grinned by default, drawled like he meant it (he grew up in Fort Worth, after all) and had a pretty good time in Hollywood, start to finish.

Here’s how he got the job of directing Shia LaBeouf in “The Greatest Game Ever Played.” It was an action picture…about golf.

“I told Disney, ‘Hire me, and I guarantee I’ll make a movie you can cut a cool trailer from,” he told me at the Toronto Film Festival some years back. He knew the business from the inside out, and he knew he’d have to whizz-bang the heck out of “a good walk spoiled” (still the best one-liner describing golf) to make people want to see a golf match drama. He did.

Oddly enough, the one quote that sticks from that Toronto conversation came from me teasing him about mocking the daylights out of Jimmy Buffett in a thinly-veiled spoof of the “Drunk Caribbean Rock’n Roll Music” maestro in that Broken Lizard comedy troupe horror farce, “Club Dread.” 

“Yeah, I got him PRETTY good,” Paxton joked, laughing. Then he got this serious look on his face. “You think he’s mad?”

Hopefully not, Bill old boy. But if he was, it was totally worth it.

RIP.

“Moonlight” was the big winner at last night’s Independent Spirit Awards. And for my money, that’s where this splendid film belonged in the accolades arena all along.

Indie in origin, indie in casting (save for Naomie Harris), indie in feel. Very good-not-quite-great film, but only an Oscar front-runner if you’re grading on the curve.

It won best ensemble, best picture honors.

Casey Affleck won best actor for “Manchester by the Sea,” another intimate small-scale picture that is this award’s bread and butter.

Isabelle Huppert (“Elle”) won best actress, Molly Shannon (“Other People”) was a surprise winner for beset supporting actress.

Great to see Ben Foster get some recognition for “Hell or High Water,” a top drawer late summer thriller that got a nice awards season bounce.

All docs are “indie” in nature, so giving one to “O.J.” seems a waste. “I Am Not Your Negro” is better. And “Toni Erdmann” isn’t the best foreign language film of last year, not by a long shot. But there you are.

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It’s a stupid, ill-plotted heist picture, but “Collide” does have its moments.

Start with the car chases. Sure, some of the sprints through the narrow streets of rural Germany look as if they were staged at half-speed and sped-up for the finished print. But the crashes are epic.

And the cars? They’re a plot point, a means of transporting drug money to Chile, Euros stuffed into the bodywork of pricey roadsters — Jaguars, Aston Martins, Maseratis, an AMG Mercedes and the like.

Then there’s the lip-smacking pleasure of seeing those Oscar winning British hams Ben Kingsley and Anthony Hopkins sharing a couple of scenes, devouring dialogue, embellishing it, exploding and generally overdoing it and plainly enjoying themselves as they do.

“You know deeefference between horse and hooker?” the Turkish drug dealer with a love of all things golden, Geran (Kingsley) bellows. “Me neither.”

Hopkins, playing a “respectable” British/German tycoon with a secret drug-smuggling side business, impersonates Sly Stallone, blurts “That’s the way it IS, bro,” and growls “Never was a story of more woe, than this of Juliet and her Romeoooooooo,” for good measure.

What a cackle.

The plot? Nicholas Hoult plays a street dealer in Cologne who gives up that life for the Girl with Something Extra. That would be the barmaid with the overbite, Felicity Jones.

It’s foolish to cast two Brits as two Americans in this, especially in Jones’s case, as much of her charm is her accent. But that’s the way a German movie with Chinese money aimed at the American market has to go, so there it is.

And nobody but nobody spreckenzies deutsch. Americans, Turks and Brits who have lived there forever, not a mein kamf among them. Only the odd “Raus!” and “Schnell!” from the minions.

Casey Stein (Hoult) used to be a car thief, something his old drug boss (Kingsley) knows. He keeps calling Casey “Burt Reynolds (“Boooort REE-nolds”)” when he’s not raving about the wonders of the 1985 workout video/thriller “Perfect,” starring Jamie Leigh Curtis and John Travolta.

“Should have got an OZZZZZCAR!”

When Casey needs “one last score,” Geran the Turk calls on the lad’s former skills as a thief and driver to get even with his uneven business partner (Hopkins).

The half-baked caper takes place in the first 25 minutes of “Collide,” and the rest of the movie is a chase/shootout/torture scene after torture scene extravaganza as Hoult’s Casey tries to escape one mobster and enlist the aid of another, stealing everything from Peugots and Astons to Mercs and Jags. The bad guys keep catching him, but they…want to TALK.

He’s got to get back to his girl, right?

Hopkins ranges from quiet menace to manic, Kingsley gives his charming-to-alarming thug the mien of a put-upon furious foreigner trying to fit in, with hookers, gilded guns and travel trailers and a gold colored Jaguar. These two going at it hammer and tong is a real movie buff’s delight.

The story can withstand no scrutiny whatsoever.

But those hams — and I grew up in Virginia, I know from hams — distract us enough that we don’t mind the mess between the car chases. Not that much, anyway.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for violence, frenetic action, some sexuality, language, and drug material

Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Felicity Jones, Anthony Hopkins, Ben Kingsley

Credits:Directed by Eran Creevy, script by F. Scott Frazier, Eran Creevy. An Open Road release.

Running time: 1:39

Those immortals among us, teens, get a taste of mortality and what to do with the one life you get in “Before I Fall.” Zoey Deutch stars in this repeat-your-last-day over and over drama, which opens March 3. Which means “Logan” is going to swallow it whole.

The smartest horror movie in ages — one with a satiric edge and political bite one with a satiric edge and political bite — owns the box office this weekend.

“Get Out” rolled up almost $2 million Thursday night, blew up Friday and seems headed to a $27-28 million opening weekend, based on those numbers.

For a movie whose biggest stars are Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford and Brian Williams’ skinny daughter, that’s money in the bank.

If you’ve been tempted, over the years, to refer to Keegan Michael Key as “the funny one” of Key and Peele, Jordan Peele, the writer-director of “Get Out” is worth a better label now — “The Brilliant One.”

“Get Out” didn’t open as well as “Split,” which cleared $33 million when it hit screens back in January. But for a horror picture to clear $25 — especially one without anything brand-name about it — is very impressive.

That opening weekend take was enough to dethrone “The LEGO Batman Movie,” which has made well over $100 million and adds another $16 or so this weekend.

“Fifty Shades” is still bringing in closet female porn fans. “John Wick Chapter 2” is closing in on $100 million.

“Rock Dog,” a pricey Chinese cartoon about a Tibetan dog who longs to play power chords, opens at just $3-4.

The under-publicized “Collide” may have Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins, but if you don’t preview it for critics few people know about it. It opened very wide and didn’t even crack the Top Ten.

“Hidden Figures,” “La La Land” and “Lion” are the only Oscar contenders to stay in the top ten. That could change if a “Manchester by the Sea” or some other best picture dark horse collects a lot of wins Sunday night.

There’s a reason one hears little about the screen comedy of Germany, and it becomes obvious in the last two hours and forty minutes of “Toni Erdmann,” Germany’s contender for the Best Foreign Language Oscar at this year’s Academy Awards.

The first gag in it — showing the elderly practical joker Winnifred (Peter Simonischek) having one over on a  hapless delivery man , pretending the package “is for my brother…just out of prison…mail bomber,” then donning fake teeth to come to the door as that twin — is the funniest.

But there are riches in this meandering dramedy about a father trying to find a bigger place in his workaholic daughter’s life, and to lighten her stress-load, by posing as a “life coach” to her superiors. That’s why Hollywood has snapped up the remake rights and supposedly lured Jack Nicholson out of retirement to take on the title role, with Kristen Wiig (on the nose) as the frazzled, overwhelmed daughter.

Hollywood will simplify it to that big concept, and trim writer-director Maren Ade’s flaccid storytelling and many aimless scenes into something tighter, funnier and almost certainly less German.

Winfried lives with his elderly dog and inspires wackiness at the Aachen middle school where he teaches music (and dresses the kids like zombies for an ironic “going away” party for another teacher). He’s divorced and rarely sees his daughter Ines (Sandra Hüller), a consultant who jets between Shanghai and Bucharest, courting clients and telling them who to lay off from their companies.

Even when she shows up at a party at her mother’s house, she can’t tear herself away from the phone. She has no time to see granny? No worries, he’s hired an actress to play her and grandma cannot tell the difference.

“It’s a JOKE,” he bellows (in German), the mantra of failed jokers in any language. All she sees is an old man who lacks ambition now, and probably always has.

So Winfried drops in on her life in Bucharest, sees what’s she’s become, senses that she’s miserable, and after repeating his “hired somebody to play her” gag with her client (Micheal Wittenborn), resolves to inject some of his sort of fun into her stressed-out life.

He dons a wig, fake teeth and a rumpled suit and crashes her parties, her restaurant meetings, passing himself off as Toni Erdmann, sometimes a life coach (and friend to tennis coach Ian Tiriac, one of the most famous Romanians), sometimes the German ambassador to Romania.

He sees Ines’s loneliness and shudders at the heartless line of work she’s in. He hurls her into a series of daft improvisations — lies on the fly. What brought him to Romania?

“I’m here for the famous dentist,” he improvs, flashing his grotesque choppers.

And she, taking up the challenge, drags him along, lets him see her using cocaine with her friends and the crippling pressure her boss (Thomas Loibl) hangs on her.

Ade treats us to the state of Ines’s psyche by putting us in her meetings, where she is but a yes-woman, careful to tell the client exactly what he wants to hear, and into the secret loveless love-affair she’s having with a colleague. Ade stages one of the most bizarre seduction scenes you’ll ever see, where Ines takes on a little of her father’s embrace of the surreal, manipulating that colleague (a subordinate) in a sexual sense.

Toni drags  her, calling her “my assistant,” into the real Romania, visits to the oil workers she will lay off, to a rural family gathering where he insists they gift their hostess with a song.

“Toni Erdmann,” in English and German with English subtitles, is a melancholy comedy about two lonely people that makes you wait for its laughs and special moments. But those moments, when they make their surprise arrival, are stunning in their emotional rawness and stark comic simplicity.

Still, that staggering running time and the leisure pacing of this, all the scenes that do little to further illuminate characters and do nothing to advance the plot, make one anxious, in this one case, to see “The Hollywood Version.” It will will probably be funnier and certainly be shorter, even if it is less German.

MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, language and brief drug use

Cast: Peter Simonischek, Sandra Hüller, Michael Wittenborn, Thomas Loibl, Ingrid Bisu

Credits:Written and directed by Maren Ade. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 2:42

A sheep dog abandons the family business — protecting the flocks of his Tibetan village — to seek fame and power chords in the Big City in “Rock Dog,” a Chinese cartoon based on a Chinese comic book.

How do we know it’s Chinese? Bodi, the strumming/singing Tibetan canine of the title, doesn’t quote the Dalai Lama or wear “Free Tibet” t-shirts.

It’s one of the most expensive movies ever made in China, wholly financed by one of the Chinese studios that also owns Chinese movie theaters. But those conditions, considered an anti-trust violation here in the States, and the fact that they threw a lot of money at a “Toy Story” director and International voice talent for the English language release, don’t save it.

Because there isn’t a laugh in it. Not one. And darned little charm, to boot.

Sam Elliott takes on the same role he played in “The Big Lebowkski,” as the drawling sage narrator, here named Fleetwood Yak (Haw!), telling us the story of Bodi (Luke Wilson), whose dad (J.K. Simmons) has figured out the best way to keep the wolves at bay — train the village of sheep to wear armored dog suits.

But the moment Bodi picks up a stringed instrument, he has other interests. And the moment a portable radio drops into his life, he has his own dream. He wants to develop some chops, visit the city, go to Rock and Roll Park where the rock buskers play and form a band.

He wants to be just like his new hero, a cat named Angus Scattergood (Eddie Izzard).

“Find the passion, the fire inside,” Fleetwood Yak counsels. And Bodi has. He sets out to study under the master, Angus. But along the way, he runs afoul of a competitor guitarist (Matt Dillon) who owns him in a shredding contest, a fighting bear and the wolf mob boss (Lewis Black) who longs to get his paws on every thing Bodi holds dear, especially that village of sheep where the young dog comes from.

Director Ash Brannon (“Surf’s Up”) and a slew of credited co-writers could not uncover a laugh in this material. Not a one-liner, not one single sight gag pays off. The animation is generic, but pretty enough. The music? Sort of a Chinese market research idea of “rock.”

You can’t really tell it’s Owen Wilson doing Bodi’s voice. Simmons sputters and fails to register. Kenan Thompson and Jorge Garcia do two sidekick voices, in the interest of diversifying the cast. Only Lewis Black, doing a few of his trademark meltdowns, comes close to finding a laugh.

And he’ll be a lot funnier telling the story, in stand-up routines or on talk shows, of how he took Chinese cash and giggled all the way to the bank making this made-by-a-committee-of-market-analysts disaster.

MPAA Rating: PG for action and language

Cast: The voices of Luke Wilson, Eddie Izzard, J.K. Simmons, Lewis Black, Mae Whitman, Jorge Garcia, Kenan Thompson, Sam Elliott, Matt Dillon

Credits:Directed by Ash Brannon, script by Ash Brannon, based on the comic book. A Summit release.

Running time: 1:20