Movie Nation

Wes Anderson’s latest is set in a Japan where dogs have been exiled to a garbage island, where a 12 year-old dodges the quarantine in search of his pet.

Bryan Cranston is the one voice that stands out in the cast. Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda, Edward Norton, Greta Gerwig — the usual hip lineup.

The writing may be uneven, just judging from the trailer. “Living, even at this moment, as a captive prisoner” is redundant. But it looks to be touching and witty.

“Isle of Dogs” arrives next year.

Although there are many ways to tell the story of how a writer’s life informs his or her talent, there’s something to be said for literary biographies that narrow their focus, zeroing on in a signal event that made a writer or made a career.

Truman Capote invents the “non-fiction novel” in “Capote,” which was about him writing “In Cold Blood.” Jane Austen experiences the heartbreak that will circumscribe her life and drive her fiction in “Becoming Jane.”

That’s the best part of “Rebel in the Rye,” the latest big screen attempt to get a handle on the prickly, standoffish genius who gave the world “The Catcher in the Rye.” Because what we’re really interested in is how Jerome David Salinger’s upper middle class upbringing, social limitations (he was half-Jewish) and World War II experiences informed his classic novel about that ultimate outsider — Holden Caulfield.

Actor-turned-writer Danny Strong and J.D. Salinger biographer Kenneth Slawenski manage that “the making of” story rather well. But they then struggle to shoehorn in a lot more of the man — his later years, avoiding the press, living in a remote corner of New Hampshire. While you can’t blame them for wanting to avoid something Salinger loathed — a “Hollywood ending” — the movie makes you wish they’d been clever enough to know when enough is enough, ending at the moment the book is published, blows up and sends the man into seclusion.

Nicholas Hoult (“Mad Max: Fury Road”) makes a less colorful and charismatic Salinger than we might have liked. He looks like Salinger and the script captures a hint of the sarcasm and cockiness that got him tossed from school after school, so sure of his own brilliance and appeal that he knows he’ll be a great writer. And the most eligible famous beauty his age in New York, Oona O’Neil (Zoey Deutch), daughter of the legendary playwright? Why not ask her out?

It takes that first great mentor — writer, publisher and Columbia University creative writing teacher Whit Burnett (Kevin Spacey) — to put him in his place and raise the bar on his writing. Their scenes have a light banter to them that hints at the tone the screenplay reaches for, but never achieves.

“You’re not the first wise-ass I’ve taught, you know.”

Jerry may haunt New York’s Stork Club and feed a passion for hot jazz. But he knows that “Uptown, I was a Jew. Downtown, I was a square.” All the encouragement his mother (Hope Davis, quite fine) can give his talent, his cruelly practical father (Victor Garber) takes away.

He’s old enough to know that his father “hides his Jewishness. First phony I ever met was on the day I was born.” But he’s too young to see the capricious, inconstant Miss O’Neil’s textbook “daddy” issues (She went on to marry Charlie Chaplin when he was well-over twice her age).

The film is framed within correspondence, a letter Jerry writes to Whit from “the nuthouse.” And the film sketches in the experiences — from heartache and disappointment to the horrors of D-Day and liberating a concentration camp — that put Salinger there.

Through it all, his imaginary muse, the one character Burnett insists will make him, ferments in Salinger’s head, providing the interior monologue that keeps life’s trials at arm’s length. Holden is the sarcastic misfit who rejects the “phonies” who dominate his world, who sees too much, feels too much, never fits in anywhere, who wants nothing more than to save little kids from this misery, from getting lost in the high weeds and falling off a cliff — to be their “Catcher in the Rye.”

The filmmakers do rather well at underlining or at least hitting on the integral components of Salinger’s art — his early appreciation for the wisdom of children (of his class), his uncompromising refusal to give in, even to The New Yorker, when others want to make his work more conventional, pat and upbeat. But the script is flat and linear, the dialogue mostly out of tune — utterly lacking crackle.

The casting is promising. Eric Bogosian plays Harold Ross, editor and doyenne of the magazine during it’s short fiction golden age. Sarah Paulson plays the agent who indulges Salinger, tries to salve his ego and smooth his rough edges.

But where’s the wit? And I couldn’t help but wish for the movie to show me less. The complete Salinger has already been revealed in a terrific documentary. The even lower-budgeted “Coming Through the Rye,” about an aspiring writer hunting down Salinger, long secluded, and almost befriending him (Chris Cooper played the grumpy old man) comes closer to the mark at capturing what it was about Salinger’s writing about being young that connects with each generation.

For all the formative creative dots Strong and Salwenski strain to include, that’s something their informative and worthwhile film misses. They show us the rye, but not why Holden catches us and never lets go.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some language including sexual references, brief violence, and smoking

Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Kevin Spacey, Hope Davis, Victor Garber, Zoey Deutch, Sarah Paulson, James Urbaniak, Eric Bogosian

Credits: Directed by Danny Strong, script by Danny Strong and Kenneth Slawenski   An IFC Film.

Running Time: 1:49

Kind of sad when I heard this was happening. Lara Croft did Angelina Jolie no favors. But putting another Oscar winner into the role was meant to be. I guess. Kristen Scott Thomas and Dominic West play her parents, the picture looks less digital and gimmicky than its forebears. But video game adaptations are generally soul-sucking payday pictures, and giving up a year of your peak career to one feels like a sell-out.

The director is the Norwegian who gave us the tsunami thriller “The Wave,” which signifies nothing. Not the same sort of picture. Great name, though — Roar Uthaug.

“Tomb Raider” is due out March 16.

INTERIOR: A dark hallway, the camera tracks into a bedroom where a little boy is having a nightmare.

The title “Thirteen years ago” appears on the screen.

The little boy imagines himself in what looks like a graveyard, macabre figures greet him, direct him and then threaten him.

CUT TO: Interior, a shrink’s office. Zach, an expressionless child actor whom we’ll spare calling out on his limited future in films, has to listen to a smug psychotherapist (Cary Elwes) diagnose what ails him.  Repeated bad dreams? I have the answer!

CUT TO: Back home, where the boy, and then his mother, realize just how off the mark Dr. Feelgood was. The kid is speaking with a demonic growl.

“Don’t Speak” is a drab indie horror tale earning release thanks to a director whose next credit (as a producer) is the “Flatliners” remake. Rick Bieber’s achingly slow story is about the horrors of young Zach’s past assaulting him and all those around him in the present day.

Demons stalk, haunt and attack. Neighbors are sexually assaulted and go mad.

But law student Zach (Dominic Sherwood of TV’s “Shadowhunters”) and his art teacher girlfriend Shawn (Charlbi Dean Kriek of “Death Race: Inferno”) don’t know that as they move in together.

Nor do their neighbors/landlords (Drea de Matteo, Alex Carter), or elderly Poppy (the late Alex Rocco) who lives with them.

But cowled figures turn up — in darkened closets, in rear-view mirrors. Zach starts to wonder what mom (Jill Hennesy) and that long-ago therapist never told him.

As do we.

Shawn isn’t buying it — “You seem a little delicate these days.”

But Jo, the neighbor (de Matteo of “The Sopranos”) is the first to catch on.

“It’s a CURSE! A curse has come into our home!”

Well, OK. The movie’s pretty uncertain about that, though truthfully, the slack pacing and generally uninspired acting kind of dulled my sense of “What’s REALLY going on here?”

Not that plot much matters.

The South African beauty Kriek made her own deal with the Devil, or in this case, Bieber. She disrobes three times, but gets one moving speech and relationship-saving scene.

You want to see good screen acting? Watch Rocco, in his last screen performance (this was shot more than two years ago), bring pathos to an old man who loses his beloved dog, menace when that old man turns demonic. He’s animated in every scene, giving us something to cling to every time he’s on screen.

Otherwise, there’s nothing here to pull us in, no one to root for/fear for. Whatever Bieber’s gifts to the cinema as a producer — and his name was all over that abortion “Radio Flyer” — here, he’s working by formula, attempting straight exploitation.

And he doesn’t have the knack. “Don’t Sleep” is heartless, fright-free and, yes — sleep-inducing.

MPAA Rating: unrated, horror violence, some nudity, sex scenes

Cast: Dominic Sherwood, Charlbi Dean Kriek, Drea de Matteo, Alex Rocco, Jill Hennesy and Cary Elwes

Credits: Written and directed by Rick Bieber. A Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:35

There’s a lot of Ferris Bueller to Pearl Jam lead singer Eddie Vedder. That only becomes clear in “Let’s Play Two,” the new documentary about the band’s triumphant performance at Wrigley Field as the Cubs were rolling to their historic World Series win in 2016.

Like Ferris, Edward Louis Severson grew up in suburban Chicago (Evanston, in his case). He loves loves LOVES those Cubs. And whatever else one thinks of the handsome, much-imitated baritone of the Last Grunge Band Standing, the Hall of Fame honored, defender of the Memphis Three, Ticketmaster-hating, selling out shows but refusing to “sell-out,” is surely the poster boy for “righteous dude.”

“Let’s Play Two” is another peak moment for America’s most popular stadium band. Photographer Danny Clinch and a film crew capture Vedder’s Chicago homecoming and the Seattle band’s victory lap in a city which helped nurture them as they were just breaking out in the early ’90s.

There’s backstage banter, a rooftop rehearsal/jam session at the popular Murphy’s Bleachers Wrigley-side pub and a lot of Eddie in Cubs gear, in the stands or in a sky box, diligently keeping a score card. He first visited the park “45 years ago,” when his favorite player was Jose Cardenal.

The concert footage, where the band runs through hits from “Jeremy” and “Better Man,” and much of their back catalog — “Hearts and Thoughts,” etc., isn’t really for the uninitiated. The live soundmix and Vedder’s plummy growl don’t let you decipher lyrics, if you don’t already know them by heart.

But the many tunes performed are intercut with snippets of the Cubs marching into the playoffs, through the playoffs and toward their first world championship in over a century. And nobody could be happier about that than Vedder.

“Let’s Play Two” doesn’t re-invent or for that matter add anything to the concert doc genre. But for fans, it’s a lovely time capsule, a bunch of 50somethings, still sporting the torn jeans and well-worn t-shirts, leaping about, playing with feeling and getting a joyous job done.

Righteous dudes, one and all.

MPAA Rating: unrated, alcohol consumption

Cast: Eddie Vedder, Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, Mike McReady, Matt Cameron, Boom Gaspar

Credits: Directed by Danny Clinch. An Abramorama release

Running time: 2:01

Remember when you were 11, had never seen a James Bond movie and thought somebody, ANYbody, dropping the F-word was the funniest thing ever?

That’s what “Kingsman: The Golden Circle” is like — recycled Bond gags and settings, sophomoric humor, and maybe an hour of dead time scattered throughout a two hour and fifteen minute mess.

The comic book adaptation meant to step into the comic void that the rarely-funny latest reboot of James Bond created, this sequel blend of spoof mixed with splatter picture is truly excruciating. It’s badly written, stupidly violent and digitally-set — almost every setting looks “Fantastic Mr. Fox” fake. It throws another roundhouse punch at Taron Egerton as a leading man and is an utter waste of Oscar winners Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Halle Berry and Jeff Bridges.

Yes, Firth’s dapper lead was killed-off, shot through the eye in “Kingsman: The Secret Service.” No, he’s not really dead. He’s needed here because a ditzy drug queenpin, Poppy (Moore) wipes out the Kingsman “private intelligence agency” based in a Saville Row tailor’s shop in pursuit of her evil schemes. And the whole franchise is utterly pointless without him.

Poppy has already kidnapped Elton John, forcing him to play Gershwin because the producers were too cheap to buy the rights to more than one Elton song for the soundtrack. She’s surrounded herself in a jungle stronghold that she’s turned into a ’50s Americana theme park style main street — Poppyland — with robots as her most trusted aides.

The surviving Kingsmen, Galahad (Egerton) and Merlin (Mark Strong) must get help from their American cousins, the Statesmen, who work out of a Kentucky bourbon distillery.

Berry plays “Ginger Ale,” their version of Merlin or “Q.” Bridges is the boss, “Champ” (short for champagne) and Channing Tatum — despite getting all dolled-up in cliched gay bar Western gear (a Statesman flask is his belt-buckle) is Tequila, an agent barely in the movie at all.

And the longer this mirthless f-bombing fiasco goes on, the luckier he seems.

I’d quote funny lines, but there aren’t any. I’d point out that Tatum has been in two misfires in a row that use John Denver’s “Country Roads” as an ironic laugh, but that’d be mean.

I’d say the only thing “Golden” about this is circling around a shower drain, but that’s a crude joke they attempt here.

The fights are all stop-motion assisted blurs. The villainess is colorless. And revisiting Mont Blanc in the Italian Alps and using a national flag parachute just reminds anybody older than 11 that Bond got there first, and made it funnier.

Egerton isn’t the only charisma-starved nobody in the cast. Pedro Pascal makes no impression as American agent Whiskey, who’s borrowed Wonder Woman’s lasso. Egerton’s Eggsy character, the street punk turned “gentleman,” is still romantically paired up with that Swedish bore played by Hanna Alstrom from the first film, and Edward Holcroft has the shaved head Mark Strong-styled villain role, from back when Strong was doing villains and bloody well doing them better than anybody here.

At least Strong gets to sing on screen (A first?), and the looks-like-he’s-at-death’s-door  Elton John lands a few laughs, most courtesy of the F-word. Eleven year-olds will be thrilled.

MPAA Rating: R for sequences of strong violence, drug content, language throughout and some sexual material

Cast: Taron Egerton, Julianne Moore, Jeff Bridges, Mark Strong, Channing Tatum, Colin Firth, Elton John, Edward Holcroft

Credits:Directed by Matthew Vaughn, script by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:21

Movies about vets struggling with post traumatic stress or other issues after service in the Middle East are so common that Hollywood has, on a few occasions, declined to release even productions with big stars on that subject. Nowadays, you pretty much have to co-star a dog (“Megan Leavey”) to find novelty in those stories and get your picture into theaters.

But the intimate, cryptic and under-stated “Blood Stripe” is compelling enough and just novel enough to break through the noise and engage us.

It’s too over-familiar and soft to be a great movie, but it is a damned good one — well-acted by its star, character-actress Kate Nowlin (“Young Adult”), who also co-wrote it.

She plays “Our Sergeant,” who returns from Iraq, a Marine Corps “Lioness,” a female warrior tough enough to alter the “Few Good Men” motto. Nowlin gives her the ramrod posture and physical confidence of a combat-tested soldier.

And that’s pretty much all we know about her as she comes home to rural Minnesota, husband Rusty (Chris Sullivan) and work as a foreman on a highway road crew.

But bright reds — a rare steak, a fresh redheaded rinse from her beautician sister-in-law, call her up short. Men make her wary, even if she endures the somewhat brutish welcome-home sex Rusty performs.

He’s on what’s called Red State Welfare — disability. He doesn’t work. Our Sergeant soldiers on, drinking too much, eating too little, jogging obsessively, mowing the lawn in the dark.

Yeah, she could use some help, but the VA waiting list is hundreds of days of long.

So she just walks off the job, takes Rusty’s truck and stumbles onto the lakeside church camp she attended as a child. She keeps to herself, does manual labor, recoils from men and doesn’t reveal much about herself to the kindly camp director (Rusty Schwimmer).

“What’d you DO over there?”

The script, by Nolan and director and co-writer Remy Auberjonois, goes easy on the flashbacks even as Our Sergeant’s antennae pick up on perceived dangers around the camp — redneck hunters, the too-friendly old handyman/fisherman who works there. There are startling scenes that take the sergeant into full combat mode — stalking, hunting for a reason to take care of any threat she perceives.

Then, some friendly churchgoers and their pastor (Rene Auberjonois, actor-turned-director Remy’s father) show up, and we begin to wonder if Our Sergeant will finally snap, or respond to the sympathetic ears of elderly Minnesota Christians.

There’s too much that’s conventional here — a love/lust interest (Tom Lipinski), suggestions of sexual assault trauma — for “Blood Stripe” (the title refers to the red stripe on the Marine Corps dress uniform) to transcend its genre and offer something totally new on the subject. It’s not quite faith-based, with a sexual edge that eschews that label, but it has a lot of the squishy attempts at “inspiring” in its tone and message.

Still, Nowlin has written and performed a fascinating character, who curses like a Marine and hurts like anyone subjected to the horrors of combat and whatever else happened to her “back there.” She makes “Blood Stripe” a solid, compelling drama about the post traumatic stresses unique to women in combat, a film that — thanks to her stoic performance and intimate, unfussy direction — engenders sympathy but never pity.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with violence, strong sexual content, alcohol abuse and profanity

Cast: Kate Nowlin, Rusty Schwimmer, Chris Sullivan, Tom Lipinski, Rene Auberjonois

Credits: Directed by Remy Auberjonois, script by Remy Auberjonois and Kate Nowlin. A Tandem/WakeMUp release.

Running time: 1:25

All he wanted to do was skip out of work early, make a fancy poster and charm his way back into his ex-girlfriend’s life as she crossed the finish line at the Boston Marathon. If, of course, he can avoid his usual distractions — Boston sports, drinking with his buddies, oblivious to what time it is.

All she wanted was to get on with her life, starting with moving on from this lovable but commitment-phobic, self-involved lump and his abrasive, smoking, drinking, F-bomb as a noun/verb/adjective and adverb cliche of a working class family.  The Marathon represented just that sort of fresh start to Erin Hurley.

But not this April 15, and not this Boston Marathon. This was 2013, and two radicalized social misfits set off bombs that took away Jeff Bauman’s legs. “Stronger” is not about that tragedy, but about its aftermath — the stumbling recovery, the self-pity, the loving but enabling and frankly loutish family and the impact it has on a broken relationship, the guilt, regret and arc these two real-people’s lives tracked in the months and years after Mark Wahlberg single-handedly cracked the case of that “Patriots Day” bombing four years ago.

Jake Gyllenhaal has the showy role, that of happy-go-lucky Jeff, just charming and good-looking enough that he figures he can win Erin (Tatiana Maslany) back with The Big Gesture. If only he can stay focused on it long enough to get to that finish line ahead of her. With his hard-drinking “Sawks/Bruins/Patriots/Celts” rooting pals, and his chain-smoking harridan of a mother (Miranda Richardson), that’s going to be a near-run thing.

Maslany, of TV’s “Orphan Black,” has the subtler role and turns it into a heart-breaking performance. Erin may show up at Jeff’s favorite bar and let him gregariously pass the hat to raise money for the charity she’s to run on behalf of. He has that way with people.

But she’s got low expectations for him keeping his latest unsolicited promise — that he’ll be there to cheer her across the line at the finish. And from the moment she hears the blast, Maslany lets you see the fear — “Surely THIS one time he didn’t actually show up?” She lets us feel the grief, the guilt once she realizes yes, he was only there because of her.

And as his loud, foul-mouthed family rallies to his side but shuns her, rails at doctors and generally amps up the chaos at the hospital on that fateful day, Maslany gives us a peek at what grim resignation looks like. She’s not free to move on, free to escape this mob. She bears some responsibility. So this is her future, a trap laid by two punks named Tsarnaev.

Director David Gordon Green, far removed from the indie sensibilities of “All the Real Girls” and “Joe,” just as far from his “Pineapple Express” stoner comedy comfort zone, brings out both the humor and the pathos in this intimate and circuitous story of two people who fell out of love — and yet are forced back together by necessity (he lost his legs), responsibility and guilt.

The movie’s journey has just enough room for growth to sneak into Jeff’s world and his family (Clancy Brown is his raging-at-the-world dad). It may be generic and inspiring TV movie subject matter, but Green immerses us in this world and punches up the limited horizons that face these characters, even as Jeff becomes something he’s not suited for — an icon for “Boston Strong,” the city’s post-bombing image.

A nice subtext — the script highlights the humane capitalism of wholesaler Costco. Jeff may be just a meat-cutter in the discount store’s deli, but his homophobic family is in for a shock when they start in on his gay boss (Danny McCarthy) for showing up at the hospital because they’re sure he will lay Jeff off.

“We’re not letting him go,” he says, silencing the torrent of F-bombs, if only for a moment. He’s just here to let them know, “Jeffrey has insurance.”

The great Gyllenhaal brilliantly fleshes out a Boston “type,” letting us see Jeff’s limited vocabulary and big heart, his fragility, but also his impulse-control unsuitability as boyfriend material. Self-pity figures into it, and old habits (booze and Bruins games). They give Oscars to actors who vividly recreate real people with great handicaps — physical and emotional — to overcome.

And they pass out Academy Awards to actresses who fearlessly grab hold of abrasive, broken and hatefully self-involved and self-destructive mother figures and play the hell out of them, the way Richardson does here.

But if there’s justice, the Academy will also remember Tatiana Maslany’s heart-breaking turn as a woman who was taking stock, moving on and re-planning her life, when life blew up — literally — in her face, not just Jeff’s.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, some graphic injury images, and brief sexuality/nudity

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Tatiana Maslany, Miranda Richardson, Clancy Brown

Credits: Directed by David Gordon Green, script by John Pollono, based on Jeff Bauman’s autobiography, co-written by Brett Witter.   A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:56

A shorter weekend means that Stephen King’s “It” will only pull in another $54 million this frame, based on Friday night’s numbers as assessed by Deadline.com. 

It’s already earned over $212 million. And it isn’t facing any serious opposition from this weekend’s challengers. It is now the biggest box office hit ever to open in Sept.

“American Assassin,” another opportunity for Michael Keaton to swipe a thriller from a younger star, is on a $15-17 million clip. Not bad for an action picture opening. But “franchise?” That’s a stretch. We’ll see if Lionsgate revisits these characters and this Vince Flynn novel.

Deadline.com makes much of the fact that exit-polling (Cinemascore) has audiences confused and enraged — Explains the state of our politics, doesn’t it? — by “Mother!”, Darren Aronofsky’s well-reviewed but cryptic “Rosemary’s Baby” meets “The Creative Process” thriller. I’m not the only critic to take a stab at interpreting what it’s about. But I’m the one who got it right,  which explains the uptick in web traffic to this site this weekend. In any event, “Mother!” is doing a much-more-normal for a horror picture $8-9 million its opening weekend.

“Annabelle: Creation” will hit the $100 million mark by Monday. “Dunkirk” is in its last weekend in the top ten, and will cash out altogether just shy of $200 million, domestic.

“American Assassin” is a Big Action Beats formula thriller that overstays its welcome and never quite gels around its hunky young star, allowing Michael Keaton to steal the movie out from under him.

Just like “Spider-Man,” in other words.

It makes the most of what is a supremely silly premise — that a young man, grievously wounded in the terrorist attack that killed the woman he’d just asked to marry him — can have his revenge on his own terms thanks to self-help training he devises himself. And that the CIA would nab him, letting him skip from Ibiza to Warsaw, Istanbul to Rome, hurling this largely self-trained “assassin” at terrorists like the ones who did in that lovely fiance.

Dylan O’Brien of “The Maze Runner” and TV’s “Teen Wolf” is Mitch Rapp, just an ordinary American rule-breaker/rogue who channels his rage about the murder of his beloved into mixed martial arts training, practice-range precision and commitment to learn both Islam and Arabic.

Which he needs to pass the online “So you want to be a jihadi” quiz that the group he wants to infiltrate, the cell that carried out the mass murder on a Spanish beach, uses to test him.

“I want to bathe my hands in the Blood of Infidels!”

We’ve got a winner!

But his web presence has attracted the CIA’s attention, in the persons of functionaries played by Sanaa Lathan and David Suchet. And after some back-and-forth, Mitch goes into the program of the baddest of the Agency’s baddasses — Hurley, played with all the demonic glee the revived Michael Keaton can give him.

Keaton’s best scenes are the training sequences cooked up by director Michael Cuesta and the five credited writers who adapted Vince Flynn’s boilerplate terrorist-killer novel. Hand-to-hand combat drills, VR pick-out-terror-target practices, all manner of think-fast scenarios are hurled by Hurley at his Orion team. He likes shooting a pistol over their heads in mid-practice.

“You flinch, you die.”

They have to be ready because “The enemy dresses like a deer and kills like a lion!”

The mission they’re prepping for involves the usual missing Russian plutonium, a nuclear bomb headed into the wrong hands and the Hurley apprentice (Taylor Kitsch) gone rogue and helping the bad guys.

All standard-issue James Bond  plot points, circa 1989, with requisite chases, brawls and exotic settings.

But director Cuesta (“Kill the Messenger”) and his not-inhumanly beefed-up leading man do well with the many fights. The kid loses his shirt often enough for us to stop staring at the sexy agent (Shiva Negar) assigned to the mission. Almost.

But he’s stuck playing an worn-out archetype — a rebel with a cause, and a way with firearms and knives.

Cuesta shows his true focus early and often, and in the most obvious way the movies have of doing that. He gives Keaton close-up after close-up, almost ALL the close-ups — which throws the whole enterprise off balance. And Keaton knows what to do when the camera is that tight — chew that scenery and spit it out.

But if this is a potential “franchise,” it’s not going to be built around him — fit as he may be, he is newly-turned 66.

“Franchise” comes down to “the kid.” And O’Brien, even if he has the physical skills and a way with his flintiest lines — “My goal is to have them awake at night, knowing I’m coming for them.” — doesn’t pop off the screen, not in this star-vehicle at least, not for two hours worth of generic nuclear terror thriller.

MPAA Rating: R, for Strong violence throughout, some torture, language and brief nudity.

Cast: Dylan O’Brien, Michael Keaton, Taylor Kitsch, Sanaa Lathan, Shiva Negar, David Suchet

Credits: Directed by Michael Cuesta, script by Stephen Schiff, Michael Finch, Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, based on the Vince Flynn novel. A Lionsgate/CBS release.

Running time: 1:51