Movie Nation

The late American journalist and fiction writer Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” has proven to have one of the most durable plots in all of fiction.

A 1924 short story also known as “The Hounds of Zaroff,” is about a man who makes sport of hunting other humans. There are almost too many filmed versions of it over the past century to count, starring everyone from Fay Wray to Ice-T (“Surviving the Game,”), Richard Widmark (“Run for the Sun”) to Andy Griffith (“Savages,” based on a Robb White novel inspired by “Most Dangerous Game”).

As Connell, who also wrote “Meet John Doe,” is long dead and wasn’t named Disney, his story is “fair game” — ahem — for director/co-writer Jonas Cuaron, Son of Oscar winning director Alfonso (they shared writing credit for “Gravity”).  Thus Cuaron’s “Desierto,” a lean desert thriller with immigration as its text and Connell’s story as its subtext.

It follows a truckload of illegal immigrants sneaking across the U.S. border in the desert Southwest. An embittered, hard-drinking, truck-driving, Confederate-flag-on-his-CB-radio-antenna “hunter” is hell bent on tracking them down.

As the unnamed killer, Jeffrey Dean Morgan doesn’t have a lot of lines. His dog, “Tracker,” is his only company. His one encounter with “government” is testy.

“I used to love this place,” he tells the dog. “It’s my HOME!”

Now, he mutters, “I hate it.”

His only satisfaction seems to be in doing what he figures the state or the Feds should be doing in his stead — stopping illegal migration with deadly force.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters, pointing his long-range rifle at another target. “They just keep comin’!”

Gael Garcia Bernal is just one of the dozen or so men and women who stumble out of a broken down truck and follow their impatient coyote (smuggler) across barren salt flats.

“Los Estados Unidos es de esa manera,” he yells when the truck dies. “The United States is that way!” But he doesn’t tell them how far “that way.”

Bernal’s unnamed migrant carries a teddy bear and has a do-gooder streak. Some in their party are weak, some are unscrupulous. He struggles to keep the peace, to keep a teen girl (Alondra Hidalgo) from being exploited by her escort.

And then the shooting starts, and his quest becomes a matter of life or death.

Cuaron captures the desolate beauty of mesas, dry washes and the Seguro cactus that is the only green thing is this land. But the story he and co-writer Mateo Garcia tell is melodramatic and conventional.

How long will the fat and out of shape migrant in their group last? What has to happen to make the “game” a fairer one? When do the rattlesnakes make their appearance?

Morgan, covered in tattoos, is the leanest he’s ever been on the screen, here. The lack of dialogue is the only thing that removes racial slurs from his vocabulary. He’s not some mustache-twirling “sportsman” murdering for fun. He’s wrapped up in the hunt, but never too busy to let the hate bubble through.

Bernal and Cuaron let us see the hero’s wheels turning, a desperate man reasoning his way out of a deadly jam with cunning and daring.

But the performances don’t keep us from realizing we’ve seen this story before — WAY too many times. Freighting the tale with a bloody satire of America’s immigration debate doesn’t change the basics — Mass murderer man with gun hunts people without guns.

And “Desierto” never amounts to much more than a variation on a theme we know by heart, predictable at every single sandy step they take.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and language

Cast: Gael Garcia Bernal, Jeffrey Dean Morgan,

Credits:Directed by Jonas Cuaron, script by Jonás Cuarón, Mateo Garcia. An STX release.

Running time: 1:27

How far into “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” did director Tim Burton get before he realized he’d split up with the only woman who could play the title role?

Because it’s pretty obvious Eva Green is just a younger, duller interpretation of a role Helena Bonham Carter would have blown up until it popped in a cloud of weirdly witty confetti.

Not to lay the somewhat lifeless film wholly at the feet of the one-time “Bond Girl,” Green. No, she just has too much in common with the actor playing the film’s young hero/narrator, Asa “Ender’s Game” Butterfield. They’re both pretty place-holders, not giving you the spark of life, they just “look right.”

“Peculiar,” based on the popular novel by Ransom Riggs, is a little Harry Potter, a little “X-Men,” and a little dark for its intended 12-and-under audience. Which is a good thing. Kids are molly-coddled enough these days. Have you tried to sit through the inoffensive swill that PBS, Disney and Nickelodeon are slopping onto kiddie palates?

Butterfield is Jake, a kid whose adored grandfather (Terence Stamp) used to tell him stories about this amazing school he’d attended on an island off the coast of Wales. Jake always believed the stories. His teachers, classmates and Dad (Chris O’Dowd)? Not at all.

When grandpa mysteriously dies, he leaves Jake a cryptic message. “Go to the island. The bird will explain everything!”

Since Jake’s shrink (Allison Janney) doesn’t believe Jake’s version of his grandfather’s tales of odd classmates and their battles with monsters, and since the island of Cairnholm is a birder’s paradise (Dad is an ornithologist), Jake and his father take that trip. For “closure,” you understand.

And that’s where the kid stumbles into the school, bombed to pieces during World War II but still extant in a bubble in time, “a loop” where the kids and Miss Peregrine (Green) relive versions of the same day in 1943 over and over again, in perpetuity, as a means of hiding from “hollows,” empty-eyed villains led by Barron (Samuel L. Jackson) who command fierce, invisible monsters in a quest for “loops,” “peculiar children” and eyeballs.

There’s blood and death in this fantasy world, and peril. And coolly keeping it all in check is Miss Peregrine, an “ymbryne” who changes into — you guessed it, a falcon — and who keeps a pocket watch that allows her to stay on schedule and maintain the time loop.

The kids are an odd lot — a boy who has bees living in his mouth, a superstrong tiny girl, a fire-fingered redhead (Lauren McCrostie) who wears gloves to keep from accidentally torching everyone and everything. And then there’s the fair Emma, played with a winsome warmth by This Season’s English Rose, Ella Purnell.

Emma wears lead boots because she’s lighter than air, and her deep sea bubble blowing is one of the great movie effects of recent years. Her scenes sparkle, even though she shares most of them with the leaden Butterfield.

Burton fleshed out the cast with some wondrous talents — Oscar winner Judy Dench (as another ymbryune), Rupert Everett, Stamp (wonderfully de-aged for flashback scenes) and O’Dowd, whose whimsy and magic disappeared when he ditched his Irish accent for the Dad role. But only Jackson stands out in this lot, registering through the wild makeup, dental appliances and effects.

I was a little awestruck, here and there, at the world “Miss Peregrine” serves up. And I liked the dark and deadly sensibility Burton was reaching for.

But the cast is and the oh-so-conventional third act Battle Royale let a promising premise down. I dare say Burton realized that himself long before filming that finale — maybe back in 2014, when he and wild-haired Helena split up.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for intense sequences of fantasy action/violence and peril

Cast: Eva Green, Asa Butterfield, Chris O’Dowd, Ella Purnell, Samuel L. Jackson, Terence Stamp, Rupert Everett

Credits:Directed by Tim Burton, script by Jane Goodman, based on the Ransom Riggs. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:07

All you need for screen romance is two characters, either in love, about to fall in love or remembering past love.

But as simple as that template is, Hollywood rarely gets it right or even attempts to get it right. Which is why there’s indie cinema and the extended cinematic family of The Duplass Brothers to remind them how it’s done.

“Blue Jay” pairs up Sarah Paulson (the recent O.J. Simpson TV series) with writer-actor Mark Duplass (“Safety Not Guaranteed,” TV’s “The Mindy Project”), two high school sweethearts meeting again after decades apart.

All they do, pretty much, is talk. This subgenre of cinema was labeled “mumblecore” some years back, and even though that faded from use as the films turned less talky, it still fits in this case.

Amanda moved away years before. She’s married, running an animal rescue shelter, back in town to visit her sister. That’s when she stumbles into Jim (Duplass).

They were, the weathered clerk (Clu Gallagher of “The Last Picture Show”) at their favorite convenience store confirms, “the famous lovebirds.”

But a chance meeting leads to coffee, emotions awkwardly held in check, two people playing with fire but also rediscovering why they parted.

Amanda finds herself “smiling until it hurts,” and Jim has to apologize for tears.

“My face leaks.”

Over the course of an afternoon and an evening, they talk, flirt and peel away layers revealing the wounds, the entanglements, the lives they’ve half-lived in the decades since.

They may have been in love but frankly, “We weren’t very cool.”

No. “UNcool.”

She has moved on. Maybe. He’s drifted through towns and different jobs, and now he’s back at the cluttered old house he grew up in. Everything he didn’t throw is away is a shrine to the Great Love of His Life.

The Duplass script takes the ex-couple through role-playing of the sort they used to do, reminiscing about their “40th anniversary” and the like. None of which can be healthy for either of them.

Paulson plays Amanda as awakened from a comfy slumber, a woman curious to see if the hold she had over Jim is still there, but remembering, from time to time, how to be kind and gentle with someone more fragile than her. Duplass makes Jim more of a cliche, the classic arrested development mess whose spirit was broken by a love affair that was his only hope for the future.

They dance to Annie Lennox, accuse each other and clash over what went wrong. The script has a few groaningly obvious devices and twists. The direction (by Alex Lehmann) is fairly pedestrian and the black and white is more “nice effect” and technical afterthought, even if it does suit the material perfectly.

But this somber monochromatic marvel, shot over seven days (Where? Big Bear Lake, California, maybe?) is an emotionally challenging and mature romance that is, like “Tallulah,” exactly the sort of movie the streaming service Netflix should be producing.

And Paulson and Duplass make all this talk (never once mumbling) fascinating, lived-in and real, taking us into the sad, lost lives of these two long lost lovers. “You can’t go home again,” the novelist taught us. But if you do, the most dangerous enterprise you can undertake is wallowing in “what might have been.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with alcohol consumption, adult situations and subject matter, profanity

Cast: Sarah Paulson, Mark Duplass,Clu Gallagher

Credits:Directed by Alexandre Lehmann, script by Mark Duplass. A Netflix/The Orchard Orchard release.

Running time: 1:20

It seems so ludicrous, now.

An American college student with a solid alibi and zero motive, almost no DNA evidence implicating her and no history of violence, arrested and convicted of taking part in a “sex party” ritualistic murder with her boyfriend of five days and another man she doesn’t even know.

“Italian Justice” never seemed like more of a punch line.

But Amanda Knox went through it, lost years of her life and wears the weight of that awful crime’s tsunami-sized ripple on her to this day.

The new Netflix documentary “Amanda Knox” lets us see how it happened, a years-in-the-making investigative film that interviews almost all the principals — from suspects to prosecutors — and paints a portrait of doubt, or at least lets us see how conclusions might have been reached by people you’d hope would know better.

“Italian Justice” indeed.

Filmmakers Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn followed the case, in Italy, for years — got to know the players and gained access to evidence footage, home movies, social media pages, leaked “secret” prison cell recordings and taped phone calls, all the stuff that prosecutor and detective fiction fan Giuliano Mignini looked at to decide that DNA evidence shouldn’t take precedence over his own gut instincts.

“I like Sherlock Holmes”

We get a hint of Italian mores and prejudices. American college girls studying abroad? Easy. Oversexed. And heck, she nicknamed herself “Foxy Knoxy.”

She’s smooching on some Italian guy she met five days before the murder, at the CRIME SCENE as the cops are digging around a bloodied house with Meredith Kercher’s body still in it. A shallow, self-involved, foul-mouthed sexually active 20 year old, Knox didn’t grieve, didn’t seem to act the way Italians expect somebody to act under those circumstances.

She didn’t seem to take it in, didn’t act like somebody who SHOULD have thought, “Oh my God, I spent the night somewhere else, but that could have been ME,” or “If I’d been here, maybe I could have SAVED Meredith.” Knox, to do this, doesn’t articulate such thoughts.

Within a day or so of the crime, she was on the phone talking about “the best year of my life” to a friend, as if nothing awful had happened.

So, bad on her.

But again, her British roommate was a veritable stranger. They’d moved into the Perugia rental house together, sight-unseen, a couple of weeks before. Think of the self-absorbed 20 year old (Americans) you know and tell me the reaction is outside the norm.

Nick Pisa, the British freelance journalist out in front of the story, smirks about his “page one bylines” piling up as he unveiled “Foxy Knoxy” and painted the “girl on girl crime” picture that the British press, and then Italian and European press, picked up on.

And that, in turn, drove the harried prosecutors and demonized Knox in British and Italian public opinion. I love the reaction shot the filmmakers get of Pisa when the verdict is overturned.

“Who me? I knew she was innocent all along!” That’s the look.

Generous helpings of cable news coverage pepper the proceedings, raising the case’s profile. Who could get a fair trial anywhere under such circumstances?

The through-line interview that all this is built on is with a haggard, high-mileage Knox today, weeping at what went wrong, defiant at the conclusions the viewer must reach — that either she’s a diabolical murderess, cold-blooded, “a psychopath in sheep’s clothing.”

Or, “I am you.” This could have happened to anyone who doesn’t know local customs and mores, maybe a little shaky on the local language. It could happen to anyone.

A telling line, explaining her “reputation” in Italy — “In Seattle, I was cute. In Italy, I was the beautiful blonde American girl.” That was new to her. She’d never been in love, never been this far from home and family. She was 20.

The most chilling details — not necessarily new, but parked here all in one place — are the Italian police tactics revealed by the case. They told Knox she was HIV positive to break her. They leaned on her and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and he caved like the Italian Army in North Africa in 1941.

Video from the investigation shows Keystone Cops in Italian uniforms creating chaos at the crime scene. And there’s that ridiculous prosecutor, “a hero” to his people, admitting his “instints” and his love of melodramatic crime fiction.

See what I’m doing there? I’m playing on stereotypes, pre-conceived notions of how this culture could have produced this debacle. Because that’s exactly what the cocksure Giuliano Mignini did. And Italian appellate courts have done the same, reacting against “being lectured by the American media,” buttressed in their bigotry by the Brits and their rabid, race-to-wrong-conclusion press, hell bent on re-convicting her, mainly out of spite.

“Amanda Knox” may not change anybody’s mind. But it should. Sure, there’s doubt lingering around the fringes of the case, and Kercher’s family may be the last ones to give up the condemnation of the American they want to believe had a hand in Meredith’s death.

But in a part of the world where convicted murderers face far fewer consequences than punishment-crazy America would fling at them, maybe they should be a little less quick to indict those who look guilty simply through the lens of their culture.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence crime scene footage, frank sexual conservation

Cast:Amanda Knox, Nick Pisa, Raffaele Sollecito,  Giuliano Mignini

Credits:Directed by Rod Blackhurst, Brian McGinn, script by Matthew Hamachek and Brian McGinn. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

Tim Burton’s Harry Potterish “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” is showing he still has a brand name at the box office, as late night Thursday and all-day Friday numbers put the film on track to hit $26 million or so on its opening weekend. Will that let it break even? Middling reviews suggest “Not so fast.”

Louisiana, as has been its wont, gave away the bank in incentives to get “Deepwater Horizon” made. So the break even bar is lower, and the film is opening to very good reviews and a possible $20 million opening weekend.

“Masterminds,” a caper comedy that was sort of dumped out this weekend by Relativity, is doing poorly. Zach Galifianakis still isn’t box office, nor is Kristen Wiig. Owen Wilson is no longer that big a draw. Figure $6 million will be a “win” for this “true” NC rubes rob an armored car company.

“Storks” and “Sully” are holding onto a much higher percentage of their audience than “Magnificent Seven,” which is falling off 50-55% on its second weekend (about average for an action film).

“Queen of Katwe” is doing pretty good in limited release, cracking the top ten with 1200 theaters. 

“Bridget Jones” is officially over and done with, barely over $20 million by the end of its third weekend.

“Suicide Squad” is in the top ten, which tells you how weak the fall films have performed.

The statistics are damning, the dots connect and the admissions — secretly recorded or otherwise admitted, are conclusive.

There’s been a concerted effort to criminalize, incarcerate and stereotype black men as “super predators”, junkies and the like by opportunistic politicians, lobbyists and the corporations that profit from the decades of misery that “The War on Drugs” produced and the new “War on Illegal Immigration” promises.

“Selma” director Ava DuVernay’s documentary “The 13th” is peppered with experts who document the effects and lay out the causes of America’s skyrocketing, world-leading prison incarceration rate.

Talking heads — activists, academics, lawyers and legislators — sum up the sorry history of race relations in America. And they  zero in on the year — 1970 — when “Law & Order” President Richard M. Nixon launched the policies that filled prisons, got new prisons built and eventually allowed private companies to run prisons as the number of inmates, nationally, soared from 357,000 in 1970 to some 2.3 million today.

The culpable are held accountable — the nefarious American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) lobbying group whose members include corporations that benefit from the policies that they write and that their bought-and-paid-for legislators then introduce into law. For profit prisons push for laws that allow them to operate, and other laws that will keep those prisons full and profitable. Firearm companies and their mouthpiece groups all the way to retailers that sell guns (Walmart) back, through ALEC, anything that could boost gun sales (Florida’s infamous “Stand Your Ground” law).

DuVernay includes a few dissenting (GOP, white) voices, but the stats shout them down, backed by John Ehrlichman’s admission that Nixon went after drugs to disrupt black lives and disenfranchise black voters, by GOP strategist Lee Atwater admitting on tape that “Law & Order” was just what others call “dog whistle politics,” what polite Conservatives say because they can’t say the N-word in campaign speeches preying on White Fear of The Other.

It’s a solid film, but the mission creep of its many messages, its format — interviews broken up by vintage news footage, old movies (“The Birth of a Nation”) — and a stylistic choice by DuVernay dull its impact.

We’re subjected to a sea of faces and an ocean of voices. And for the first ten minutes, DuVernay doesn’t identify anyone giving her testimony. The titling and credentialing of these interviewees is more thorough afterward, but still spotty. That undercuts the authority of one and all.

Some of the experts are more expert than others — credentialed academics (Henry Louis Gates), politicians (Charles Rangel), published researcher/authors (Michelle Alexander, “The New Jim Crow”) — mixed in with folks you can’t vouch for because DuVernay is hiding their identity from you.

What’s the point of going to the trouble of becoming an expert if the filmmaker is going to treat the weight you bring to the subject so cavalierly? Not naming names here, but some of these folks have more opinions than authority.

That waters down “The 13th” — the title comes from the Constitutional Amendment that abolished slavery — rendering a good film on an important subject a somewhat less compelling argument than it might have been. A simpler narrative with fewer voices, properly identified, would have made a stronger argument.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violent images, profanity, racial slurs

Cast: Angela Davis, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Grover Norquist, Charles Rangel, Cory Booker, Newt Gingrich, many others.

Credits:Directed by Ava DuVernay. A Netflix  release.

Running time:1:40

I had an editor early in my career who repeated her grandmother’s favorite oath any time the culture served up fresh evidence of the dire and depraved straits America was plunging into.

“Fall of Rome. Fall of Rome.”

It’s a phrase that came to mind often in the two hour and 43 minute “American Honey,” an odyssey about poverty, predators and prey in Meth Mouth America.

Open bottles in every car ride, joints passed back and forth from driver to passengers, people at the bottom preying on anybody empathetic or gullible enough to fall for their spiel. This is what American desperation looks like, a “Winter’s Bone” that’s gotten a grip far beyond the Ozarks.

And everywhere, in every motel parking lot or backwater backstreet, we spy a sea of unsupervised children raising themselves because their self-involved lowlife parents (almost all white, BTW) can’t be bothered to stop drinking, line-dancing and lighting up a pipe to do it themselves.

If this is how the heartland’s hardest up are living and raising their kids, “fall of Rome. Fall of Rome.”

“Honey” is about a dead-end teen trapped raising her worthless trailer-trash mother’s children in the company of Mom’s groping/handsy ex-boyfriend. Star (Sasha Lane) leaps at the chance when she’s recruited to join a traveling band of hustling, drinking, partying kids who invade town after town, “selling magazines” and stealing and doing anything else they can to make a buck.

Star is lured by the flirtatious “Jack” (Shia LaBeouf) and the free-spirits of the “Tornado Publishers LLC” sales squad — kids “nobody will come looking for,” kids covered in tattoos and piercings, kids who to a one must have a sadder-than-sad family history that made them this desperate and vulnerable.

But the only sad stories they tell are fiction — about losing Dad “in Iraq,” or Mom “to cancer,” or “trying to win a prize so I can go to college and make something of myself.” Their real stories they keep to themselves.

It’s all a lie, and the prickly Star isn’t exactly a natural at it. Training with Jake, she bristles at his ad lib fibbing and is rude to his “marks.” She’ll never make a salesgirl who keeps Krystal, the sexy boss lording over this brood (Elvis granddaughter Riley Keough of :Mad Max: Fury Road”) content and flush.

But love might transform her. Jake is certainly willing to play that card, if it’ll make her a success. And as the kids and their handlers trek from Texas to Kansas, North Dakota to South Dakota, singing along to filthy rap and catchy pop (including the Lady Antebellum song that gives the movie its title), trotting out their rituals (beating up the kid with the worst sales, streaking, setting off fireworks for every occasion), we see Star evolve into someone with that potential.

And we see a love story that plays like two kids in heat, but finds a tender center thanks to Star’s sweet and nurturing nature.

Writer-director Andrea Arnold doesn’t make short movies. But even her breakout film “Fishtank” and her Kaya Scodelario “Wuthering Heights” are but warm-ups for this langorous, sensual film. It’s basically a 100 minute film padded out to 2:43.

But surprisingly, it never loses our interest as we wait for Jake’s inevitable moment of showing his hand, wait for the violence that surely awaits the reckless Star as she gets into semis at truck stops and roughneck pickups in North Dakota’s Bakken shale oil fracking fields, or hitches a ride with a trio of rich good ol’boys in cowboy hats (look for Will Patton) who introduce her to mescal.

There’s a fantastical unreality to a lot of this– the lack of conflict within the group, the threatened “punishment” of non-performers, the general lack of cell phones in a generation grafted to them, the utter absence of police, who would almost surely stumble across people this loud, this unruly in stores, at motels, this committed to under-age drinking and drug using.

The dreadlocked newcomer Lane is more sexual than sweet or conventionally beautiful. But she makes the character’s innate goodness peek through the hard shell Star has grown to cope with the misery of her life. We meet her dumpster-diving to feed her siblings. The adults in her life are that worthless.

We grimace when she ditches the kids with her lout of a mother. But with every honeybee she saves from a pool or trapped inside a window, with every kind stranger she does her damnedest not to cheat, with every moment she recognizes “These people are just like me — just as bad off” Lane lets us see Star learning and makes us hope that she will complete her education before something in this “life” she’s entered into puts her in harm’s way.

If Johnny Depp spent too many years taking roles that didn’t force him to cut his hair, LaBeouf has made it a point, post-“Transformers” — to tackle more interesting indie fare, especially if it has intense sex scenes in it. He’s more interesting as Jake — all ill-fitting suit and hustler patter, and under the thumb of the mature and in-control Krystal — than he’s been in years.

Arnold has made a bleak romance that shimmers with hope, an overlong odyssey that we smell just as surely as we feel. The lengthy scenes in the van, traveling from city to city, make us taste the close quarters that prevent rather than promote conflict and imagine just what this crowded circus’s scent must be, even as we wonder who, in this day and age, would buy magazine subscriptions, especially from these ‘hood rats.

But if this is how they live in the moment, and this is the limit of their shrinking horizons, when not one of them has ever been asked “How do you see your future?”

“Fall of Rome. Fall of Rome.”

MPAA Rating:R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, language throughout, drug/alcohol abuse-all involving teens

Cast: Sasha Lane, Shia LaBeouf, Tom Paxton

Credits:Written and directed by Andrea Arnold. An A24 release.

Running time: 2:43

The real “hillbilly heist” was funny enough, without a lot of Hollywood embellishment. A gang of rubes from rural N.C. robbed a Loomis Fargo armored truck storage facility safe of $17 million, and almost got away with it.

They just couldn’t resist the siren’s call, “Attention Wal-Mart shoppers!”

But Hollywood overcast, over-complicated and overthought this folktale of rednecks who soared, and got too close to the sun. There are laughs, but the uneven cast and the odd wonderful bit of physical shtick don’t add up to the sustained silliness that “Masterminds” cries out for.

Only a native of Andy Griffith’s North Carolina could pull off a line like this.

“Ah never been to the arr-port but twiced.”

Zach Galifianakis, no longer hung over but always and forever “Between Two Ferns,” is that Tarheel. And I dare say nobody else could have played the drawling rube David Ghantt, bag-man and patsy in the infamous 1997 caper.

Ghantt is a fey mop-topped doofus engaged to the dull Born Again Christian Jandice (deadpan Kate McKinnon), but smitten by the new gal sitting beside him in his Loomis Fargo armored truck. That would be the sassy Kelly (Kristen Wiig).

Kelly might suggest they swipe some of that mountain of cash, but can’t-shoot-straight David is worried about consequences.

“We could get FIRED!” To say nothing of prison and what not.

But when Kelly is fired for cause after an epic meltdown with the boss, her disreputable pals in the “high rise double-wide” they call home grab hold of the idea. She becomes the bait as the mysterious “Geppetto” (Owen Wilson) — a puppet master “pulling the strings behind the scenes — plots the robbery.

Ghantt’s best throw away line in the movie might be his correcting the “mastermind’s” mistake — “Actually, Stromboli pulled the strings. Geppetto was just a poor woodcarver.”

Kelly leads David on, the plan is set up and rehearsed, and then the big night — complete with bungles — plays out, and they’re all $17 million richer.

It’s funny, but Relativity, the releasing studio, was shy about letting this one into theaters, and didn’t show it to critics in advance. You’d think Loomis Fargo would have tried to stop it on their own. Blithering idiots like this hit them for that much money, and in the film, at least, it looks as if the vaunted armored car company was so lax that “inside jobs” were bound to happen. And they almost got away clean.

Steve, the mastermind’s real name, has Kelly convince David to flee to Mexico and lay low with just a little cash and a disguise that includes very unusual contact lenses.

“I thought ‘Anaconda’ was the BRAND name.”

The lovesick David falls for it hook, line and sinker. But as the FBI (Leslie Jones) strains to unravel the robbery, David stumbles into the truth. And that’s when Steve sends a redneck hitman (Jason Sudeikis) to Mexico to do the extravagant boob in.

Because Steve and his family (he and his wife think nothing of discussing the robbery in front of their young sons) are busy spending all the money on themselves — braces, Beemers and tacky matching Members Only jackets and the like.

The dream? To not work at the take-out window at Hardee’s, but “to be on the OTHER side of that window, driving up in a Rolls Royce, getting a year’s supply of CURLY fries!”

One of the delights of “Masterminds” is how easy it is to take Wiig’s natural cheap tartness to the next level. A half-midriff tattoo (Of her Mama, maybe?), a hint of a drawl, a funny shooting range (accident) scene and a “sexual harassment” tirade were almost enough to make this work.

But Wiig puts such effort into making Kelly “conflicted” that all the fun flees the character. Her fellow SNL alumni and “Ghostbusters” castmates McKinnon (too few scenes) and Jones (virtually nothing funny to play) are wasted in thankless roles.

Wilson is the one member of the cast who doesn’t even attempt an accent, which leaves his character colorless.

Only Sudeikis is able to hilariously justify fictionalizing much of this story, giving us a drawling, mustachio’d parody of a hit man this clown must have seen in a movie at the drive-in.

And Galifianakis gamely gives his all, trying to carry this not-quite-hilarious/not-remotely-droll “romp” by the director of “Napoleon Dynamite.” He does the exaggerated drawl, wears the ridiculous wig and vamps it up in Mexico in too many scenes on the phone with Kelly, or bonding with the guy who’s supposed to kill him.

If you remember this heist at all, you’d have to have thought it would make a good movie someday. But in your mind, as in my mind, it was a quicker, broader and almost certainly funnier farce than “Masterminds.”

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for crude and sexual humor, some language and violence
Cast: Zach Galifianakis, Kristen Wiig, Owen Wilson, Kate McKinnon, Jason Sudeikis, Leslie Jones

Credits:Directed by Jared Hess, script by Chris Bowman, Emily Spivey, Hubbel Palme. A Relativity release.

Running time:1:34

If there’s a single good thing that has come out of the real-life rape controversy that has come to hang over Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation,” it is that is forces one and all to dispense with the Sundance hype attached to this bio-drama and regard it on its own terms.

And it’s not bad, a solid “Hollywood” history of the 1830s Nat Turner slave  revolt in Virginia with a love story, religion, injustices, torture and murder, a movie with middling, un-affecting acting but high artistic pretensions.

Parker (“The Great Debaters”) plays Turner, a Tidewater Virginia slave taught to read by a patronizing but semi-sympathetic landowner (Penelope Ann Miller).

The film’s genius is in showing Turner’s acceptance of the “slavery’s in the BIBLE” argument of the whites until the murderous, inhuman cruelty of the system and the injustice of it all has him finding his own Bible passages to condemn the slave holders and justify revolt among the slaves themselves.

Armie Hammer (“The Lone Ranger,” “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”) is the son of the plantation family that owned Turner, people who fell on the more humane end of the “peculiar institution” spectrum as it was practiced in the 19th century South. But even though Samuel Turner (Hammer) grew up with young Nat and tolerates his familiarity, and efforts to get better treatment for all the farm’s slaves than local tradition expects, and even helps Nat rescue a tortured young slave (Aja Naomi King) whom he eventually will marry, at the end of the day, “Massa” is still the white man who must be feared and obeyed. 

Nat has been told, almost since birth, that he’s “a child of God. You’ve got PURPOSE!” And as he turns his Bible education to sermons, he makes himself even more useful to the master. He can “help folks get their slaves to calm down a bit” with his lay sermons about obedience, “God’s will” and such.

And so he does, until the horrors of the life he and his wife live and the system he witnesses — barbaric cruelty and gruesome violence, much of it meted out by the murderous slave hunter Cobb (Jackie Earle Haley )– drives him to preach revolution and dream of freedom won by vengeful, righteous violence.

Parker does better at suggesting the shell shock Nat seems to wear as his lot in life. His urgent pleas go unheeded as his owner is peer-pressured into letting visitors enjoy the forced sexual favors of slave women. Parker is not as good at capturing the mesmerizing preacher that history tells us Turner was. Like Armie Hammer’s early-career efforts at depicting Billy Graham, it’s his lack of command in the pulpit that lets Parker down.

The supporting cast is bolstered by the presence of a whispering, acquiescent butler/house servant played by Roger Guenveur-Smith, and Miller, Hammer and Haley, but undercut by too many other players who were simply all Parker could afford on an indie film budget. Mark Boone Jr., in particular, seems miscast –a beefy bearded character actor who suggests nothing of a wily, conniving, argumentative and racist-to-the-marrow preacher.

The handy comparison here is to the Oscar-winning “Twelve Years a Slave,” and “Nation,” an attempt to re-brand that title from the racist KKK history D.W. Griffith filmed during the silent era, is nothing near as moving or impactful. Flashbacks to Nat’s childhood and his nightmarish “African in America” dreams show more ambition than plot necessity. The acting isn’t as good, the writing not as sharp, the directing pedestrian at best.

And then there’s the elephant in the room, a beast from the same herd that hangs around Woody Allen, Roman Polanski and child abuser Victor Salva’s films. That would be the after-Sundance disclosure that the director/writer/star of the film Parker and his college pal, co-writer and apparent partner in rape,  Jean McGianni Celestin behaved callously, despicably and almost certainly criminally in sexually assaulting a drunken coed whose life spiraled into drugs and an early death (so her family says) due to a Penn State University crime and the half-hearted prosecution of it.

Critics can and must separate the art from the artist, and on its own merits, “The Birth of a Nation” has value and is worth seeing, even if the breathless early praise seems to owe more to the high altitude and pack mentality of Sundance Film Festival hype.

But it is the audience that will ultimately pass judgement on Parker, Celestin, and their movie, a court of public opinion that will decide if the $17.5 million Fox Searchlight bought it for (pre-rape allegations) is money down the drain. And it’s simply not good enough to forgive and make anyone forget the filmmakers’ pre-movie sins.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violent content, and some brief nudity

Cast: Nate Parker, Armie Hammer, Aja Naomi King, Jackie Earle Haley, Penelope Ann Miller, Roger Guenveur Smith

Credits:Directed by Nate Parker, script by Jean McGianni Celestin and Nate Parker. A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 2:00

That grande dame of international cinema Mira Nair gives a gritty Third World texture to “Queen of Katwe,” a faith-based Disney drama about a poor, illiterate Ugandan who masters the lethal intricacies of chess.

It’s a conventionally inspiring feel-good dramedy with a lightness that Nair (“Mississippi Masala,” “The Namesake”) ably gives weight with on location veracity. Her directorial eye, trained on the slums of India (“Salaam Bombay”), knows where to look to find the beating heart of the Katwe ghetto of Kampala, Uganda.

“Queen” is about Phiona (Madina Nalwanga), a shy child who sees no future beyond the daily struggle to shuck and sell maize (corn) on the crowded dirt streets of Katwe. Her widowed mother, played by Oscar winner (“Twelve Years a Slave”) Lupita Nyong’o,  has lost one child, is about to lose Phiona’s pretty/flirty teenage sister (Taryn Kyaze) to the first guy who pays attention to her and is struggling to pay the rent on their shanty and keep them all fed.

And that’s when an under-employed engineer forced to take work as a youth soccer coach decides what this neighborhood’s kids need is chess. Robert Katende (David Oyelowo of “Selma”) is an earnest, generous do-gooder determined to find something for the kids who can’t or won’t play soccer to do.

Chess? “It teaches discipline and mental strength.” Her brother (Martin Kabaza) drifts into it. Phiona follows him.

Even at that local level, among the lowest of the low, Phiona is an object of scorn and teasing. She smells “like a pig.” She can’t read, doesn’t talk much. But she can see the board, reason through problems, and as her teacher teaches, “make a plan” to escape the dangers her opponents put her in.

Nair and screenwriter William Wheeler (“The Hoax”) simplify chess, letting an adorable younger girl (Nikita Waligwa) explain its rudiments to Phiona.

These pieces? “They kill each other.”

“In chess, the small one can become the big one.” 

And this? This is the Queen, “the most powerful of all the pieces.”

Phiona is a quick study and soon is making all the unsportsmanlike boys pout.

“A girl has given you checkmate!”

Nair’s ear for the music of English as a second (African) language is uncanny, and she leaves the thick accents intact, complete with non-verbal vocalized expressions of disgust, amazement and delight, African kid equivalents to “gee whiz” and the like.

The story arc, based on a true story first published by Disney’s ESPN, follows Phiona and the Katwe kids to posh private school tournaments and into international play. Nair lets us see Phiona’s determination — studying and practicing by paraffin lamp light, learning to read so that she can read books on chess — as a combination of nature and nurture.

Nyong’o never lets the mother, even in her most fraught moments, ever seem less than fierce, and even when Phiona turns cocky as gifted kids often do, that upbringing is the rock she leans on.

Young Nalwanga has a first-time actress’s stiffness, but a beatific smile. She lets us see the potential her coach does. And Oyelowo ably delivers the film’s aphorisms and life-lessons to Phiona and her “pioneer” teammates.

“Sometimes the place you are is NOT the place you belong.”

In lesser hands, this could have been patronizing (a common problem of Disney “African” films of the past) and heavy-handed. Nair downplays the faith part of “faith-based” and focuses on the class warfare — unmannered and uncultured poor kids proving they can hold their own, intellectually, with the uniformed upper-class private school dandies.

It’s overlong and rarely surprising, but Nair skillfully plays the limited board this story gives her, a queen among filmmakers making all the right moves.

MPAA Rating:PG for thematic elements, an accident scene and some suggestive material

Cast: Madina Nalwanga, David Oyelowo, Lupita Nyong’o, Taryn Kyaze
Credits: Directed by Mira Nair, script by William Wheeler, based on the Tim Crothers biography . A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 2:03