Movie Nation

It’s great to see Gerard Butler take a break from mind-numbing action franchises, lame sword and sorcery flicks and decades of failed comedies and try something new.

But it must be the luck of the Scots that when he does change speeds, it’s in a movie with a title so banal Nicolas Cage already owns it and a melodrama so bland it could be a Lifetime Original Movie.

In “A Family Man,” he plays an unscrupulous workaholic who barely notices when his oldest son gets sick, and is rarely there when the kid is hospitalized for the cancer battle of his life.

Will Dane Jensen, a St. Louis native (from the Scottish Quarter?) see the error of his ways, not lying, cheating, hustling and absentee-parenting in time to “be there” for his kid?

One of the failings of “Family Man” is that this is rarely in doubt, and another is that the script clumsily wants him to have his cake, and time with his sickly son, too.

It’s a “Boiler Room/Wolf of Wall Street” peek inside the high-pressure world of corporate head-hunting. The stakes seem penny-ante when compared to stock hustling, real-estate hustling, etc. Who knew?

Dane is a fast-talking creep who keeps “a desk drawer full of ‘burner phones'” so that he can sweet talk desperate job seekers on his office line, and sabotage their chances if they find a job on their own (no fees) using another number, another name and a mouthful of slander and innuendo to scare off potential employers.

His ruthless boss (Willem Dafoe) expects no less. And if he doesn’t scramble, his slightly-less unethical colleague (Allison Brie) will get the jump on him.

So yeah, the three kids and wife (Gretchen Mol) and Highland Park home life take a back seat.

Screenwriter Bill Dubuque — forget that name — illustrates Dane’s sense of responsibility and victimhood by scribbling the clunkiest, clumsiest, most tin-eared “sex” scene in the history of the big screen. If that online screenwriting course offers a refund, pal, GRAB it.

Alfred Molina is one of the aging, desperate mid-level managers/engineers and execs trying not to beg Dane to do his job and cut them a break.

Dane has no real time for him, and only notices that his son (Max Jenkins) has grown a pot belly, and can’t keep up when he demands they go job it off. The bruises? Only his wife spies those.

It’s a life-threatening disease, and Dane learns the hard way that he can’t bully the doctor (Anupam Kher) into a quick fix.

To be fair, there are some touching moments as Dad tries to connect with his loves-to-draw-buildings kid by wandering the great old edifices of Chicago, in between chemos. Young Jenkins has the soulful qualities the movies give sick children.

But nothing in this slog of a picture is developed enough to make “Think I’ll do this movie with Gerard Butler” pay off for the supporting cast. Dane’s occasional tantrum eats up screen time that could have made the wife and boss more than caricatures, the “good man” Dane is letting down (Molina, with Mimi Kuzyk playing the wife) shown at the end of his tether, or the cutthroat nature of the office.

I seriously question whether that business has this sort of pressure, or rewards, attached to it.

Still, Butler took a shot, gave it a try and unless it’s his fault that all his scenes stay in and unbalance the picture while everybody else’s got cut — or he wrote that ridiculous “negotiated” oral sex scene — deserves credit for not picking up a gun, a sword or Jennifer Aniston one more time.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual content

Cast: Gerard Butler, Gretchen Mol, Willem Dafoe, Max Jenkins, Alfred Molina, Alison Brie, Anupam Kher

Credits:Directed by Mark Williams, script by Bill Dubuque. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:50

A big Thursday night and bigger Friday puts the last “Planet of the Apes” movie of this trilogy, “War for the Planet of the Apes,” into “King Kong” (“Skull Island”) territory — a $55 million opening weekend, based on the $24,000,000 it will have earned before the first showing Sat. AM.

That’s dead-center in the expectations for the dull, dark, glum and over-praised finale to this ambitious and surprising sci-fi franchise.

But there was always going to be a loser in this weekend’s “Spider-Man: Homecoming” second weekend vs. “Apes” showdown. And it’s Marvel’s webslinger.

Friday’s numbers for “Homecoming” point to a $40 (ouch) to $46 second weekend, a 61% to 65% plummet. Right in the kisser. A big drop is to be expected when a movie opens at over $117 million. But that’s steep enough to suggest little repeat business, middling word of mouth and an exit-by-August. If that holds up, next weekend could be under $20.

“Despicable Me 3” for instance, despite being merely a middling sequel in a summer riddled with them, is holding audience (in the absence of anything other than Pixar’s dreadful “Cars 3” to steal kiddie/family audience share. It is in the middle of adding another $21 million this weekend.

“The Big Sick,” a much-praised dramedy built around the life and comedy of Kamail Nanjiani, is doing quite well in its first weekend of wide release — over $8.5 million.

Conversely, the not-scary/kinda-funny “Wish Upon” horror film is flopping and will be lucky to pull in $4 million for Broad Green.

In “Dunkirk,” perhaps this year’s earliest Best Picture Contender, a flight of RAF pilots make a crossing to keep the Stukas from strafing “our lads” on the beaches, awaiting their fate. Tom Hardy is in a Spitfire, and Jack Lowden. And the voice, over the radio from the third plane, is the unmistakable Cockney crackle of Michael Caine, sometime Alfred the Butler and decades removed from his RAF days in 1968’s “Battle of Britain. We never see him, or his classic British roadster (Riley, Vincent, Jaguar, Morgan? Alvis!). But he’s there, thanks to Christopher Nolan. You can feel it. That’s texture. That’s a connection to “There’ll always be an England.” #80somethingace.

The third and supposedly final film in the latest “Planet of the Apes” franchise is expected, by Fox, the producing studio, to turn out $50 million in ticket sales its opening weekend.

That would probably open it in second place, after “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” which will lose at least half its opening weekend turnout and still come in over $50 million, according to projections. It’s made big bucks all this week (over $9 million Wed.).

But “Apes” is enjoying the sort of breathless reviews that only asthmatic critics can deliver — “best movie of the summer” hype. It, too, is an established franchise. It’s not Marvel, but it’s got a big audience in its corner of science fiction.

Box Office Mojo figures it’ll win the weekend with a $70 million take, nowhere near as heady as the comic book adaptations of summer.

Box Office Guru is figuring this darker, downbeat “War for the Planet of the Apes” will do only about what the studio is projecting — around $53 million or so, which could make it finish in a dead heat with “Spider-Man.”

Bragging rights are not what this is about. A film built to blow up the box office for two weeks that doesn’t open #1 gets tainted in the audience’s perceptions, and that dampens box office. So not opening #1 would cripple the film all through its run, even if it holds more audience, by percentage over time, than “Spider-Man.”

Deadline.com is saying that based on Thursday night’s numbers, the $50-60 million range for “Apes” is the safest bet, over $115 million worldwide. “Spider-Man: Homecoming” did $117 just in the U.S. on its opening weekend.

If “Apes” opens at just $50, the “loser” or “over-rated” perception (not based on reality and quality) will settle in. If it opens over $60, and “Spider-Man” swoons into the $40-50 million range, the “forgotten before it hits Netflix” perception sinks in. And either scenario could happen.

The angry comments when you’re among the first to pan a hyped summer popcorn picture follow this pattern. Outraged and numerous for the week leading up to opening night, a few remaining annoyed comments after they’ve seen the film and still disagree. OR radio silence when viewers are calming down into, “Yeah, he’s got a point. Meh.” I’m getting a little of that vibe from “Homecoming,” with a sense that everybody who desperately wanted to see it and NEEDS for it to be the best thing ever, have bought their one and only ticket to it. And the heat is just not there for “Apes.”

I have no skin in this game, except for wishing a small shock to the studio system to break the endless cycle of sequels, re-boots and comic book fare. It’s been a desultory summer for those of us who want more to chew on than spandex tights, digital effects and rehashed sequels/reboots.

With “Valerian” and Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” on the way, there will be a lot of chiseling away of audience share next week and through the end of July. The stakes are high. Neither of those films has “Number One at the Box Office” prospects, but they could deflate the two big films of July.

Will audiences render unto Caesar? Or is Peter Parker sitting prettier? We’ll know within hours.

You’re going to see this hyped/fanboy-girl pandering poster in theater lobbies all across America this weekend.

Don’t you believe it. I’ve seen “The Movie of the Summer.” It doesn’t have digital apes in it. Or Chris Pratt. Or a kid in tights or a Gal in a bustier and skirt.

And it opens next weekend.

“Great directors make great movies.” Which great director has a movie opening July 21? Not non-“great” directors Matt Reeves or Jon Watts (Hahahahhahahaha) or Patty Jenkins.

Memories of many a cinematic spook tale waft through David Lowery’s “A Ghost Story,” a haunting, meditative and cryptic variation of age-old themes.

It’s about love’s link to the afterlife, more Tibetan Book of the Dead than its warm and fuzzy big screen interpretations “Ghost” or “Truly, Madly Deeply.”

The ever-downbeat Lowery casts his “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” stars, Oscar winner Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara, as a musician and his wife. The husband ever-so-softly resists his wife’s efforts to move them out of the rundown suburban ranch house that’s been their home. It needs paint. Things go thump in the night there.

But he’s accepted that move, and they’re slowly packing up. Then he dies, and as we see her  (Rooney Mara) tearlessly identify the body in the morgue, he rises up, under the sheet, and follows her home.

We have to take Lowery’s word for it that this is Affleck under that elaborate, layered bed clothing. There’s no spoken conversation in the afterlife. No living person sees the sheet, much less the spirit allegedly looking through the two coal-black eyeholes out of it.

The dead husband watches her grieve. He drifts through the silence, with only the wind, wind-chimes and the sound of distant children playing to ease his solitude.

A startling moment — he spies another ghost in a neighboring house, “waiting for someone,” and realize that’s his fate, too. He sees his wife start to move on, and as she does, she slips a note into a crack in the wall.

Then? Oblivion. Or a rental’s version of it. Other tenants show up, and there are endless efforts to retrieve, without corporeal fingers (covered by the sheet) the hidden note and moments of supernatural rage and frustration and a long lecture on the metaphysical by the sharpest drunk at a Texas party.

Lowery shot this in a square aspect ratio, giving the picture the feel of a series of photos in an old family album. He is sparing with sound effects, more sparing with action and incident, giving the actors little to work with other than a whisper and their eyes.

As both Mara and Affleck have made brooding silences their forte, that minimal plot, dialogue and story arc feel complex even when the movie has stumbled into gazing into its own navel. They don’t give us much to cling to, here.

“A Ghost Story” is just cryptic enough to spark conversation, but cut-and-dried enough to make that debate a short one. The odd hair-raising moment — it is a supernatural romantic mystery, after all — doesn’t explain why it was ridiculously saddled with an “R” rating.

Its spooky tone and the odd jolt don’t remedy its chilly remoteness or self-conscious longueurs. But it’s good to be reminded that there’s a reason we cling to the afterlife as a concept and flock to films that indulge that belief, the warm and fuzzy versions, anyway.

MPAA Rating: R for brief language and a disturbing image

Cast: Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara

Credits:Written and directed by David Lowery. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:32

A teen discovers a magical Chinese Wish Pot, makes a few wishes and is slow to grasp or accept responsibility for the consequences of her actions in “Wish Upon.”

Yeah, that’s a worn plot device and the movie has the same theme as a thousand and one morality tales, starting with Aladdin and taking in assorted “Twilight Zone” episodes, plus films like “The Box” and “The Brass Teapot.”

The twist here is that, since it’s set in high school, the pot can be used to punish mean girls, lure the boy you’re crushing on and bling up your life without credit cards. And the high school stuff, at least, is nasty-tasty fun. The rest? A mildly unpleasant shrug of a movie.

Joey King, of “Independence Day: Resurgence” and “Going in Style,” is Clare, our pouty, put-upon heroine. We root for her because in the opening scene, we see the five year-old Clare park her training-wheeled pink bike, run upstairs and witness her mother’s suicide.

Years later, that bike is still lying in the grass where she left it. Life goes on, with her dumpster-diving junkman dad (Ryan Phillippe) adding to their unkempt hoard and Clare enduring the ceaseless teasing of the mean girls (Josephine Langford, Daniela Barbosa) and their cell-photo-shaming gay mean boy accomplice (Alexander Nunez).

The balance of power between Clare and her outcast pals (Sydney Park, Shannon Purser) and Team Mean changes the day her dad brings home a clockwork six-sided music box with Chinese inscriptions all over it. A random wish “I wish Darcie Chapman (Langford) would just ROT” comes true.

But it’s not until Clare has made other wishes that come true, followed by dark fates for friends, relatives and others, that she turns to the Chinese nerd boy (Ki Hong Lee) who harbors a not-so-secret love for her, and they figure out what she’s got.

For every one of the seven wishes she’s in store for, there are seven ugly repercussions — death dealt with wildly varying degrees of skill and little suspense by cinematographer turned director John J. Leonetti (“Annabelle”). Most of the “repercussions” fritter away the chills and eyes-averting horrors to come, although a couple almost pay off.

The big idea such stories all boil down to is “What would you be willing to subject others to in order to get what you want?” Leonetti and screenwriter Barbara Marshall pretty much botch that, too, and King doesn’t do well at playing “moral dilemma.”

The Chinese subject matter and characters suggest this one was built for a lucrative foreign market, one in particular.

What works here is the gothic nightmare of a modern American high school — filled with rude, cruel and even violent kids, all of whom want to look like Taylor Swift, their queen.

King makes a gawky, accessible girl-next-door, the short, dark girl the class dreamboat would never notice. Her scenes with sassy BFF Meredith (Park) have some snap.

“I think he said ‘Hi’ to me once…”

“Well, that’s something!”

“…in the FIFTH grade!”

But once the magic box, its allure and its consequences take over, the run-of-the-mill “Wish Upon” loses its promise and its footing, like a character about to tumble into a randomly-placed set of cow horns. Ahem.

Maybe it’ll feel smarter and tighter once it’s dubbed into Chinese.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violent and disturbing images, thematic elements and language

Cast: Joey King, Ryan Phillippe, Sydney Park, Ki Hong Lee, Josephine Langford, Alice Lee

Credits:Directed by John R. Leonetti, script by Barbara Marshall. A — release.

Running time: 1:24

As its all-encompassing title suggests, “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” is a vast sci-fi cornucopia.

It is an eye-popping encore from the director of “The Fifth Element,” a densely packed screen that overwhelms you with sights unseen and worlds beyond imagination.  Luc Besson and his team out-“Avatar” James Cameron when it comes to state-of-the-art eye candy.

It’s light and goofy, a “Flash Gordon” for our times pairing up two pretty young space commandos on a meandering video game string of quests — magical talismans included — that somehow fit into their simple, original mission. Skewing young, it plays like the many lesser “Harry Potter” pictures, interested in our hero and heroine’s quest, more interested in the exotic creatures and stunning things it can show us.

Costumes, alien races, technology and geography dazzle, and if that’s not enough — there’s model-turned-actress Cara Delevingne and her eyebrows-without-end, and sleepy-eyed island siren Rihanna and sleepier-eyed Dane DeHaan center stage.

If summer movies are morphing into game-inspired thrill rides, “Valerian” is the next logical step — pointless chases that hurtle through wildly imaginative gamescapes as seen by the character doing the running, shootouts that have everything but a body-count scorecard at the bottom of the screen, banal dialogue and thinly developed characters.

It’s a lot to take in, with nothing worth absorbing.

DeHaan is the title character, a government agent long teamed up with Agent Laureline (Delivingne, of “Pan” and “Paper Towns”). He’s a player who longs to marry his partner, and she’s not having it. Not pre-mission, with them parked on a Holodeck beach, or on the mission itself — racing their spaceship across the cosmos to pluck the last Mul Converter from an other-dimensional “million stores” bazaar.

Naturally, that’s in the desert. Science fiction films should swear off alien deserts for a decade or two.

We’ve already seen this alien world, Mul, peopled by lanky, glittery digitally-enhanced runway ready transgender models, destroyed  — collateral damage in some vast battle in space. The movie’s most touching and fanciful scenes are here, on Mul in the film’s prologue.

Valerian and Laureline dash back to Alpha, the ultimate outcome of humanity’s space-station-building mania. It’s a vast interstellar cosmopolis, with a myriad of races in an endless variety of environments — underwater, underground — all cobbled together in a floating mass that supports millions.

Clive Owen is their trigger-happy commander, the jazz icon Herbie Hancock is the “minister” in charge of their team. There are battlebots and spies, portly American tourists, alien hustlers and smugglers (John Goodman voices this film’s version of Jabba the Hutt), and a red light district where every sexual fantasy — and fanboy fantasy (look for a version of Jessica Rabbit) — can be fulfilled.

That’s where Bubble (Rihanna), a shape-shifting dancer, does her show-stopping act. Ethan Hawke, taking his costume cues from Mardi Gras, Captain Jack Sparrow and Woody Harrelson’s “Zombieland” hunter, is her musical accompanist and pimp.

Besson should have spent the money on a rewrite, to dress up the dreadfully dull comic book dialogue, if nothing else. “Valerian!” is exclaimed more often than “Harry Potter!” was, which was a lot — enough to warrant a drinking game.

The banter — “The honeymoon comes AFTER the wedding. You know that, right?” — rarely interrupts “Valerian, be careful!” variations.

I’d dwell on the three short, obsequious anteater-snouted aliens (Shingouz) who sell information as a little old-fashioned intergalactic French anti-Semitism. But you’ll see that for yourself.

It’s epic, the action beats are sturdy and the laughs — while not plentiful — give it a “Guardians Lite” tone. “Valerian” has more of a sense of wonder about this exotica than the “Star Wars” universe,  and more of a universe for that matter.

But for all that, it needed effort on a higher plane to eclipse the other ambitious but generally disappointing sci-fi of this summer. Workshop the story, script-doctor the dialogue and recast the lovely leads with actors who generate a little actual sexual heat and Besson might have had another “Fifth Element,” a minor classic on his hands.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sci-fi violence and action, suggestive material and brief language

Cast: Cara Delevingne, Dane DeHaan, Clive Owen, Rihanna, Ethan Hawke

Credits:Written and directed by, Luc Besson, based on the French comic book. An STX/Europa release.

Running time: 2:12

Love that Luc Besson, or as he likes to refer to himself, “Monsieur Luc.” As in, “I prefer to produce. Zat way, when dinner time comes, I say to the director, ‘Bon chance,’ and he says, ‘Leaving, Monsieur Luc? But we have hours to film.”

“Not Monsieur Luc.”

Told me that one of the times I’ve interviewed him.

But as a director, he is probably the one guy in Europe with the behind-the-camera clout and the vast team it takes to get something as ambitious as this comic book adaptation on the screen. He’s a justly-celebrated action director. So as odd as the trailers are, promising eye candy and Besson’s famous eye (leer) for young talent (Cara Delevingne, Dane DeHaan) and little else, I’m remembering how low I set the bar for “The Fifth Element,” and was pleasantly surprised.

We’ll see, Monsieur Luc. We shall see. “Valerian” opens July 21. 

“Battle Scars” wraps itself in the flag, the Corps, the Purple Heart and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

But really, it’s just a lowdown and dirty B-thriller set in the underworld of any city in America that Johnny comes marching home to.

“Johnny” in this case is Luke Stephens, played by Zane Holtz of the TV version of “From Dusk Till Dawn.” Luke is just back from Afghanistan and has locked himself in the bathroom where he can stare in the mirror, or look down at the bodily injury settlement check he got from Uncle Sam.

He doesn’t seem to be missing any limbs. There’s no empty shirt-sleeve, no limp, just the screeching of his concerned “You won’t TOUCH me” wife (Amy Davidson) to clue us in on his injury. He silently packs a bag and storms out, into a strip club where he runs afoul of credit card theft, then he drops in on his low-level drug-dealer brother (Ryan Eggold).

But brother Nicky is having a fling with one of the strippers, and “Summer” (Kristen Renton) is best buds with Michelle (Heather McComb), the fishnet-bedecked fox who filched Luke’s card numbers to finance a shopping spree.

And that little crime entangles Luke in Michelle’s world — her Russian thug-boss (Fairuza Balk, scary as ever) and that boss’s muscle (Jamal Woolard, best known for playing Biggie Smalls in a couple of movies).

There are beat-downs and threats, kidnapping and confrontations with “The Colonel,” the brothers’ nickname for their Corps-to-the-Core dad (David James Elliott).

” I KNEW that Purple Heart was going to go to your head!”

Every now and then, there’s a flashback. Luke only remembers that last day of combat in Afghanistan, different details come forward in every dream. There’s little hint of PTSD in the script, or Holtz’s performance. It doesn’t drive the plot or really connect to the mess he finds himself in.

It’s forgotten altogether when Luke gets into tussles. Fellows in his condition shouldn’t submit themselves to a beating, “hero” or not. And the reasons this married man takes an interest in the stripper who stole from him are as laughable as the surprise third-act “twist.”

There’s one touching scene — just one. It hints at a movie that might have been, one that didn’t involve strippers and strip clubs. The performances are mostly flat, but let’s not lay this mess at the feet of the actors.

The assorted fights and arguments are blandly written and staged by writer-director Danny Buday. And he does a less-than-half-hearted job of working his big PTSD subtext into his utterly generic thriller.

But there are opening and closing titles that throw statistics about injuries, the alarming suicide rate among veterans of the Afghan and Iraq wars. So, um, support the troops and see it? Is that what he had in mind?

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, combat, drug content and strip club sexual content.

Cast: Zane Holtz, Fairuza Balk, Jamal Woolard

Credits:Written and directed by Danny Buday. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:34