Movie Nation

It’s early November, 1939. Hitler and the Soviet Union have invaded Poland, Britain and France have honored treaties and World War II has officially begun in Europe.

And a mop-topped workman, his teeth clenching a flashlight, his hands and knees bloodied with effort, is finishing up a job. He’s filling a pillar at an infamous Munich beer hall with dynamite, setting the elaborate clockwork trigger, and carefully concealing his handiwork.

When others fell in line behind the Nazi regime, while children completed their sixth year of Brown Shirt/Hitler Youth indoctrination, when Reds and other dissenters either joined Jews in concentration camps, fled or went into hiding, machinist/clock builder and master woodworker Georg Elser saw a problem with a simple solution.

As one of his interrogators later put it, to Elser, “Hitler is war — and if he goes, there will be peace.”

“Downfall” director Oliver Hirshbiegel‘s “13 Minutes” is a taut, smart and straightforward bio-drama of this largely forgotten early figure in German resistance to the Hitler regime. Christian Friedel (“The White Ribbon”) makes Elser a sympathetic, over-compensating laborer whose hard life and personal disappointments have as much to do with this assassination attempt as his seething outrage at the injustices and thuggery of the Nazis and Germany’s compliant masses.

We know, even those who don’t know Elser’s story, that he failed. Hitler dodged that bomb, just as he dodged the one by the “Valkyrie” plotters in 1944. The film’s nervy early minutes dispense with that part of the plot. Hitler speaks (audio of the real speech playing behind a look-alike at the podium), makes an early exit and Elser makes a clumsy attempt at a get-away.

Hitler survives and Elser is picked up at the Swiss border, his pockets stuffed with bomb-making gear and schematics. “13 Minutes” is about his interrogation,  and through flashbacks, the life that led him to his date with destiny.

“Heil Hitler, Herr Esler,” Nazi police official Arthur Nebe (the wonderful character actor Burghart Klaußner) offers, upon meeting the prisoner. Elser pauses, thinks and replies “Good day.”

Whatever else he’s done or failed to do in his life up to this point, Elser finds the bravery to not give an inch to the torturers who surround him, whip, punch and burn him with a hot icepick.

Hirschbiegel’s film, based on a script by Leonie-Claire and Fred Breinersdorfer, makes clear that Elser’s past had frustrations, guilt and shame that this one act might atone for.

A womanizing accordion player who later hums to his torturers, he took up with a married woman (Katherina Schuttler, flinty), rented a room in her house and stood by too long as her brute of a husband beat her.

He resents the obligations his drunken father has imposed on his life through his blundering, carelessness and incapacity. He winces, speaks out but shrinks when he first sees uniformed fascists bullying a helpless woman in front of the whole town. Smart-mouthing Hitler Youth who taunt Elser and his family as they walk to a Wurttemburg church is about as brave as this man got.

But when the idea came to him and opportunities fell into place to allow this clever working class Fritz-of-All-Trades to “solve” Germany’s big problem, he took on the job.

There’s defiance in him, but also a sarcastic sense of humor. He taunts his fellow Red Front members for misspelling the graffiti they’re painting on a wall, scat-sings his way into women’s hearts and when asked who ordered him to plant the bomb, cooks up a yarn, through swollen eyes and bloodied lips, about how there are only two phones in the village where he grew up, but somehow Churchill got him on the line to give him his “orders.”

You’re going to feel the timing of this 2015 German (with English subtitles) production is oddly apt long before Elser is challenged by Nebe and the more thuggish Nazi interrogator Heinrich Muller (Johann Von Bulow, volcanic) about how “an ethnic German could hate the Fuhrer so much,” when Hitler is “making Germany great” again.

Ahem.

But as the world is roiled by divisive, history-repeating political shifts that draw comparisons to the 1930s and as Americans face, for the first time, a true “What would you/WE have done when faced with fascism at home” soul-searching, “13 Minutes” reminds us that if one evil man can start a movement, that can inspire one equally fanatical counterpart to try and end it.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violence and some sexuality

Cast: Christian Friedel, Katherina Schuttler, Burghart Klabner, Johann Von Bulow

Credits:Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel , script by Léonie-Claire Breinersdorfer, Fred Breinersdorfer. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:54

I have made it a point, for years, to make St. Goodell Day a travel day, having little or no interest in the copyright protected “big game” (the NFL’s version of calling their little sports party “yuuuuge”). So I missed this as it popped up.

The latest “Guardians of the Galaxy” sequel gives us cool action beats, modest jokes and…

Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.”

Now, having long endorsed Wayne Campbell’s “Waynesworld” take on the Mac  — “Classic older brother’s favorite band,” I didn’t find the spot worth getting worked up over. But it works well enough.

Some, but not all of the bright, talented kids who got their big break in the Harry Potter movies have built careers after hanging up their wands.

So it’s nice to see that there’s life after Luna Lovegood for Evanna Lynch. The diminutive Irish actress, sort of a soulful pixie in the Potter films, makes the most of one last shot at playing a teenager in “My Name is Emily.”

It’s Irish, so there’s a romantic/literary bent to it and the titular heroine who narrates her story. More to the point, it’s a coming-of-age picture/road romance about a girl, her philosopher father and the boy she talks into helping her find him.

Emily, one and all seem to agree, isn’t like other children. Elementary school kids pick up on her bookishness, her odd relationship with swimming, reality and authority.

“They called me a WEIRDO,”  she whines to her dad (Martin Smiley).

“They’re right.” Being a teacher himself and a philosopher who will eventually take Ireland by storm with his book, “Swimming and Sex,” he then explains the definition of “weirdo” and tells her to wear it with pride.

Years later, her mother’s died, she’s living with foster families and missing her dad. But Emily can still bring the weird. Teachers, befuddled by her refusal to follow instructions (the smart teen has her reasons), demand “What’s WRONG with you?”

Classmates have moved on to call her “freak.”

But here’s how the fifth prettiest girl in class gets the attention of the tall, dark and handsome Auden (George Webster). She refuses to break down a poem by Wordsworth into its component parts.

“When you cut something up, you kill it.”

Auden, being named for a poet, is smitten.

Lynch and Webster give their characters an aching awkwardness, so that we can’t quite tell if Emily is rebuffing his little kindnesses/romantic entreaties. We can’t quite pick up on why Auden would stand for it.

And we’re as surprised as him when she shows up at his door, announces she’s “leaving, right now,” to find and rescue her father, and wants him to accompany her. But he does.

Up to this point, “My Name is Emily” is meditative, writerly. First-time feature director Simon Fitzmaurice fills the soundtrack with Emily’s narration, about her childhood, her mother and especially her father. Images of the teen holding herself under water as she ponders the universe (And suicide?) blend with flashbacks.

“If you hide from death, you hide from life.”

And then “My Name is Emily” becomes something far more conventional, a road picture. The kids hitchhike, drive and shoplift their way across Ireland, having fairly conventional (melodramatic) encounters with locals, coming to quite conventional conclusions about each other.

There’s not much to its second half, but the picture makes the most of a big romantic gesture or two and finds an excuse to drag out the trek over a full weekend so that we can see the windswept coast and rolling, bare hills between the bogs of rural Ireland.

And the winsome Lynch, narrating her story and irresistibly (to Auden) poker-faced in her dealings with the outside world, makes a heroine worth knowing and following to the ends of Ireland, with or without a wand.

MPAA Rating:unrated, adult situations, violence

Cast: Evanna Lynch, George Webster, Michael Smiley

Credits:Written and directed by Simon Fitzmaurice. A Monument release.

Running time: 1:33

The science is sloppy, the sentimentality is sloppier in “The Space Between Us,” a sci-fi romance pairing up agreeable leads in a cut-and-paste script.

Sci-fi buffs — imagine “Capricorn One” without the suspense, “Starman” without the pathos, all shot on sets left over from “The Martian.”

It stumbles, staggers and sputters out of the gate, and only comes to life after an hour of blundered, banal back story.

Asa Butterfield (“Hugo,” “Ender’s Game”) is Gardner, the first child born on Mars. Nobody knows it. His mother, the mission commander of the first team colonizing the Red Planet, “made a mistake.” Yeah, the script is that tone deaf. And she died in childbirth upon landing.

We’ve seen all that, the cover-up that the visionary (Gary Oldman) who financed the mission and NASA started, heard the speech about a damaged Earth climate that prompted the effort a solid hour of preliminaries.

And then, abruptly, the kid grows up and as a teen is shown flirting with his email pen pal. Britt Robertson (“Tomorrowland,” “The Longest Ride”) plays a rebellious orphan who lives in Colorado and is named Tulsa. Gardner he lives uh, in New York. And he’s, uh, sick. Rare disease. That’s why he can’t come see her.

The world doesn’t know he’s on Mars, how could she? But hormones being hormones, Gardner is ready to fly. Sure, his bones aren’t dense enough and his heart and body aren’t used to working in Earth’s gravity. But science can fix that. They still can’t talk about him with anyone, but one surgery and one spaceflight later, Gardner is on Earth and giving NASA the slip in search of the one girl who will give him the time of day, and the father he’s never met.

“What’s your favorite thing about Earth?” he asks one and all. How does he feel? “Heavy.” Being an alien, he’s got all this Earth stuff — colors, smells, courtship, banter, gravity — to figure out.

“Sorry, he doesn’t speak ‘sarcasm.'”

And NASA? They’re scared to death word will get out, or the kid will die, or something.

Director Peter Chelsom, who voices the obligatory cute robot on Mars (Centaur), did “Serendipity” and “Funny Bones” and more recently, “Hector and the Search for Happiness.” He should know how to make this work.

But the first laughs in the movie show up when Robertson arrives, the first sparks of life are in her spunky/testy scenes with Butterfield. That’s an hour in. The film has already been stillborn.

Butterfield has the right frail, pale, spindly and wide-eyed look of a child raised in low gravity. The camera just loves the perky, animated Robertson. Oldman always gives fair value. And Carla Gugino is well-cast as the scientist/mother figure who looks after Gardner on Mars.

But the screenwriters should have binge-watched “The Martian” before this went in front of the cameras, instead of stealing action beats and story arc from “Starman” and Capricorn One.” The many science blunders might not have mattered had they simply started the film with the only reason to see it — young love, and the obstacles to it.

It’s the space before “The Space Between Us” that is the a fatal blow to the movie.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for brief sensuality and language

Cast: Asa Butterfield, Britt Robertson, Gary Oldman, Carla Gugino

Credits:Directed by Peter Chelsom, script by Allan Loeb (screenplay), Stewart Schill. An SFX release.

Running time: 2:00

If you’ve ever wondered just how co-dependent the relationship between filmmaker and subject can be in the course of filming a documentary, “Left on Purpose” answers that question. And how.

Documentarian Justin Schein harbored a lifelong interest in the Yippies –the  Youth International Party — pranksters and protesters in the 1960s and early 70s.

So he set out to do a movie about Mayer Vishner, a Greenwich Village fixture and key figure in the group that Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin fronted. Vishner was a fresh-faced junior member of the top tier of the Yippies.

“I wasn’t just hanging out with giants,” he explains, on camera. “I was helping them BE giants.”

An anti-Vietnam War rally organizer, public speaker and later alternative press reporter, critic and editor (of LA Weekly), Vishner seems, even as we meet him in his 60s, like a man who affects change. There’s a neighborhood veggie garden he managed to start, later in life, in his little corner of Greenwich Village.

But Schein points his camera at a 60something hoarder, a not-quite-shut-in who lives off disability payments and family charity. He wanders his cluttered apartment in his underwear and assorted T-shirts, plays with his cat and watches TV.

And he and drinks. A lot. Ironically, the old leftist drinks giant bottles of Coors Light, the product of right wing oligarch Adolph Coors.

About 30 minutes into the movie, he lets Schein know, on camera, that “I’m dying of loneliness…I don’t want to do this any more.” He’s not talking about the movie, which he regards as his autobiography. He wants his “final political act” to reflect his existential angst. He wants to die on camera.

Schein is rattled and over the last hour of “Left on Purpose” he tries to find a way out — bringing Vishner to family and old friends who might talk him out of suicide, filming Vishner’s doctor and others refusing to help him end his life.

“I can’t just stay behind the camera and watch him kill himself.”

Schein’s touching film has him and his wife Eden Wormfeld wrestle over the increasingly needy Vishner’s demands on Schein’s time, just as they’re having a baby. Vishner comes off  as clinically depressed (he was once in a psychotherapist’s care) self-absorbed, stubborn, smart and resolute.

“It’s time to go.”

Those closest to him, those he hasn’t pushed away, see the problem clearly. It’s the wall of empty beer bottles, the never-idle-long bong, that sapped his will to live, or even to organize the treasure trove of ’60s-70s radical life that he’s saved but never archived.

Will Vishner go through with it? Will Schein stick around to the end?

Either way, Schein has captured a life story worth remembering and the pursuit of a death with purpose. And he’s probably learned a valuable lesson about journalistic distance, when to maintain it and be just “the observer,” and when to give in to your humanity when you see suffering right in front of you.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with adult subject matter, profanity

Cast: Mayer Vishner, Andrew Hoffman, Michael Ventura, Justin Schein, Eden Wurmfeld

Credits:Directed by Justin Schein,  David Mehlman. A FilmBuff release.

Running time: 1:25

It wasn’t much of a stretch to say, back in 1993, when I got writer-director Harold Ramis on the phone to talk about “Groundhog Day,” that “Man, you’ve just made your masterpiece.”

He was a modest guy who always seemed happiest “that Bill lets me score.” In the comedies in which they acted opposite each other — “Stripes,” “Ghostbusters” — the deadpan Ramis just relished getting a few layups while the star toted the comic load.

And as a writer-director there was nothing in the gently cerebral Canadian’s filmography up to that point that came even close to the warmth, wit, pathos and punch of “Groundhog Day.” “Caddie Shack” and “National Lampoon’s Vacation” were coarse and crude and obvious.

“Groundhog Day” is sublime.

“Analyze This” and “Analyze That” were his two greatest post-“Groundhog” successes. And they hold up fine.

But “Groundhog Day” is one for the ages.

Consider its story arc, an angry, self-loathing and cynical TV weatherman (Murray) is condemned to repeat, forever, one grim day doing stand-up segments in quaint, quirky and backward Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.

He rolls his eyes for another day with the folks who made a groundhog famous. Phil the jerk weatherman becomes another Punxsutawney Phil, forced to deal with everything and every sort of rube he cannot stand if he ever hopes to break the grim cycle of his life and win the love of a good-hearted producer (Andie MacDowell) who could never enter an inappropriate office romance with the likes of him.

Every day, Phil sets out to change his fate and change this hellish day of awkward encounters, rude rejoinders and blunt rebuffs from the producer whose heart he covets.

But every day ends/begins with Phil awakened by a clock radio striking 6:00 and a dorky morning radio team playing Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You, Babe.”

The repeated days offer near endless variations on Phil’s encounters with a nerdy/annoying old high school classmate (Stephen Tobolowsky), a dying homeless man, fellow hotel guests, the mayor (Brian Doyle Murray) and his own production team (Chris Elliott is the put-upon cameraman).

There’s a Nietzsche novel, “The Gay Science,” about a man forced to live the same day over and over again. But Ramis, who co-wrote the film with Danny Rubin, was going through a deep embrace of Buddhism at the time, and any analysis of the film can start there with an appreciation of the self-improvement/self-awareness teachings that suggest that it can take a soul 10,000 years to achieve enlightenment.

And every step of the way, Buddha Bill hears “I Got You, Babe” differently. It’s a joke, then a resigned taunt, then a gateway to despair invitation to ending it all — and finally, a moment of quiet exultation, triumph over despair and the failed philosophy that was ruining his life.

“Put your little hand in mine, there ain’t no hill of mountain we can’t climb.”

Caustic Phil might need longer than 10,000 years to travel from self-absorbed, heartless creep to “The Catcher in the Rye.” As he gradually embraces his epiphany — he quite literally journeys from ignoring the life, loneliness, anxiety and anguish all around him to empathy, caring and concern.

Not before turning suicidal, of course. He is “Wonderful Life’s” George Bailey meets Holden Caulfield, despairing and wanting to end a wasted life, then making every moment of every day count by serving his fellow man…and woman. Catching a kid as he’s falling out of a tree every day is exactly what the equally cynical Caulfield (of “Catcher”) wants to believe he’s capable of doing — saving the innocent.

I never fail to be touched by Phil’s efforts to alter the fate of an aged, dying homeless man (Les Podewell) — scenes that play like the darkest moments of George Bailey’s darkest night.

Murray was at his box office peak when the film came out. And Andie MacDowell, an unlikely model-turned-star, entered into film history as the object of desire of three great romantic comedies of the ’90s — “Groundhog Day,””Green Card” and “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

Michael Keaton and Tom Hanks both turned down the lead. The fools.

Hollywood legend has it that Murray was the one who pushed the film in its philosophical direction, being bored with the comedy trap he found himself in. He and Ramis feuded during filming, and didn’t speak for years and years after the movie wrapped, despite their lucrative history together. Murray only visited Ramis shortly before the writer-director died.

But their legacy lives on. Just as a Christmas never passes where I don’t watch and tear up a little over Frank Capra’s masterpiece, every Groundhog Day sends me back to “Groundhog Day.” It’s the one date movie I push on young lovers looking for something to stay in and watch together on Valentine’s Day.

There’s a very young Michael Shannon in a bit part, as Fred, whose having-second-thoughts bride must be charmed — by Phil — into going through with it. And there’s Harold Ramis himself, an inscrutably Buddhist neurologist incapable, in his modest talents, of medically fathoming the profound quest that the unwilling Phil finds himself on.

Back when I first spoke with Ramis about the film, he seemed surprised by how profound some people were finding his light-hearted picture. Buddhists, Hassidic Jews, Christian theologians, psychologists and others tapped into it almost instantly once it opened. But as journalists like me started quizzing him about it, before opening, Ramis was slack-jawed at this marvel he’d made.

“Every day, Jews all over the world read the Torah, the same page on the same day, every year. And the Torah doesn’t change. We do. We’re supposed to change, evolve. Our relationships change, our lives and loves are different and we find new meaning in it.”

And years later? We talked when “Analyze This” (or “That”) came out.

“People seem to be re-watching it” he told me. “Maybe they’re using it to take stock, see where they are now. And I hope, be better people and not make the same mistakes we all make, over and over. It’s not just Phil reliving the same day over and over again, you know.”

It’s a secret every stand-up comic must master if she or he is to have any chance of success.

Know when to get off stage, when to as the rappers say, “drop the mike.”

“The Comedian” is an 85 minute dramedy trapped in a two hour movie. Another version of the “bitter old comic tries to grow a heart” story, it is built around an amusingly grating Robert DeNiro performance utterly immersed in the down and dirty world of stand-up.

Director Taylor Hackford (“Ray,””Dolores Clairborne”) lets every off-color set Jackie Burke (DeNiro) launches into go on too long, lets too many static scenes with big-name bit players make the final cut. “Comedian” never knows when enough is enough, or when too much is unnecessary.

Jackie Burke’s an insult comic living in an insult comic’s version of Hell.

Everybody over a certain age recognizes him. And nobody can call him by his real name. Thirty years ago, he played a cop in an inane sitcom, with inane catch-phrases. Everybody loved “Eddie’s Home.” Nobody loves Jackie.

The best his long-suffering manager (Edie Falco) can do is attach him to “nostalgia” stand-up nights with the likes of other ex-TV stars like Jimmie Walker (“Good Times”) and Brett Butler (“Grace Under Fire”).

Bitter? Yeah. But Jackie’s still quick off-the-cuff, even if he never seems to know when he’s crossed the line with audience, or if there is such a thing as a line.

But loose cannons like Jackie can still draw an online crowd. A confrontation with a comic-baiting web series host goes viral, even as it puts Jackie in court. And when he’s ordered to apologize and do community service for punching that jerk, Jackie takes 30 days in the joint.

Enough is enough. He is escorted behind bars to a convict chorus singing, and clanging their coffee cups in time, the theme song to his old show.

When he gets out, he still has community service. Even at the soup kitchen, Jackie’s “on,” working the homeless, coming up with material. If only he could get one more break.

In person and in interviews, DeNiro is a shy and reticent man, so it’s almost awe-inspiring every time he takes on an extrovert like this. He’s perfectly believable as a Jackie Mason type — a stand-up with an imperious bitter streak and serious anger-management issues.

Then Leslie Mann shows up at that same soup kitchen, an irritable community service sentence “victim” with jilted lover issues, daddy issues and the like, and we see what’s missing in The Great DeNiro.

Mann is funny in her bones. DeNiro can swap rehearsed zingers with a raft of stand-ups (Jessica Kirson, Hannibal Burress, Jim Norton, Nick DiPaolo), yelling from the crowd or exchanging punches on a comedy roast dais. His timing is superb, and we can believe he’d find R-rated laughs in the audience when he’s shoved, unprovoked, onstage at a senior citizen’s center or handed the mike at his niece’s Jewish lesbian wedding.

But Mann, playing the put-upon daughter of an out-of-town mobster (Harvey Keitel) makes every double-blink, every stammer or hesitation in her voice, every hearty laugh hilarious. DeNiro reminds you of every backstage documentary about comedians (Jerry Seinfeld’s “Comedian,” certainly), the ones that reveal how mean, competitive and cruel they can be. Mann is just…funny. Their scenes together sparkle as Mann softens DeNiro’s textbook comic edge, makes him human.

The script, co-written by raunchy comedy roast vulgarian Jeffrey Ross, has a few laughs on stage and a lot more grimaces. Jamming Danny DeVito and Patti  Lupone in as Jackie’s long-suffering brother and testy sister-in-law — cliches, the both of them — pays-off. And Cloris Leachman has a funny third act cameo.

But there’s so much filler, so many scenes that dawdle as we wait for the easily-anticipated payoff. Park Billy Crystal on an elevator with Jackie and all you get is the sense that Crystal is irked that somebody is trying to better his own bitter-old-comic comedy, “Mr. Saturday Night.”

And the possibilities of June-December romance seem like a hackneyed non-starter, and icky to boot.

Hackford, DeNiro and the movie are more at home in the seedy dives that are Jackie’s purgatory, clubs so down on the heel that it’s no wonder he sees the nothing-to-rave-about Comedy Cellar in Manhattan as his Mecca, a dump he must earn his way back into.

Too often, though, this “Comedian” is — like many a desperate stand-up — content to go for the dirty/easy laugh, the kind you see coming a mile off, the kind you feel coarse for rewarding with a snicker, the kind you can hear in any high school locker room.

MPAA Rating: R for crude sexual references and language throughout

Cast: Robert DeNiro, Leslie Mann, Danny DeVito, Edie Falco, Harvey Keitel, Charles Grodin, Cloris Leachman

Credits: Directed by Taylor Hackford, script by Art Linson, Jeffrey Ross, Richard LaGravanese and Lewis Friedman. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:55

A lot of top flight talent wanted to be a part of James Franco‘s most ambitious movie as a director. Scene after scene of “In Dubious Battle” is filled with the faces of Ed Harris, Bryan Cranston, Robert Duvall, Sam Shepard and others.

Selena Gomez, Josh Hutcherson, Zach Braff, Vincent D’Onofrio — generations of Hollywood signed on for this film of John Steinbeck‘s sober, archetypal account of a fruit pickers strike in Great Depression California.

It’s no “Grapes of Wrath,” but the period detail is impressive enough, and the clear-eyed cynicism of strikers veering from victims to violence still stings, even if the story tends towards the dated and the melodramatic.

And Franco is somewhat let down by his lead, the former child actor Nat Wolff (“The Naked Brothers Band,” “The Intern”), who plays a naive young organizer meant to grow into a leader during the course of the strike.

Franco plays Mac, a battle-scarred veteran of the labor movement who leads young Jim (Wolff) into the apple groves in 1933, where desperate pickers have been lured by a promised price that the apple baron (Robert Duvall) refuses to honor.

“You can either whine or go to work,” he sneers.

Mac sidles up to the one picker with some backbone (Vincent D’Onofrio). He picks the fighters and the martyrs out in the crowd and uses them to his own aims. Jim gets close to the pregnant Lisa (Gomez), old timer Dan (John Savage) and others.

As the workers are convinced, cajoled or tricked into striking, the seeds of the strike’s destruction seem right out in the open. Vinnie (Hutcherson) also has eyes on Lisa. The sympathetic farmer (Sam Shepard) who helps them has limits to his sympathies.

And Lisa, Jim and London start to see Mac as almost as ruthless as the owner, who brings in trigger-happy Pinkerton thugs, has the backing of a conniving county government, local law enforcement (Bryan Cranston), none of whom are shy about spilling the blood of “communists” — what the wealthy have long labeled anybody who stands up to them and demands fair pay.

It’s a heavy-handed book (Barack Obama has called it his favorite Steinbeck novel) that plays like a sermon on the screen, complete with cautionary homilies and the sage observations of a semi-sympathetic doctor, who has the distance to see evil in even the most righteous cause. The good lines are passed around democratically.

“That sounds like hope,” Savage’s weary old man growls, upon hearing one appeal. “Only the young’uns got time for hope.”

Franco is well-cast as the veteran organizer who sees the cause and the big picture as paramount. But Ed Harris all but steals the movie as Joy, a clear-eyed fanatic whose passion has not dimmed even as the years of beatings by armed strike-breakers have made him punch drunk.

Wolff, meant to be the soul of the story, the pupil who absorbs the passions and learns the lessons — sometimes violence can only be met by violence — of Mac, Joy and the pragmatic organizer Edie (Ahna O’Reilly), never swells into the Tom Joad figure he’s meant to become. There’s a lack of screen presence mirrored by his contemporaries in the cast — Gomez and Hutcherson.

So as thrilling as it is that Franco got “In Dubious Battle” made — the title comes from Milton’s “Paradise Lost” — and as impressive as the cast list is on paper, his inability to spot star power and screen charisma is actors younger than himself lets him and Steinbeck down.

Thanks to them, this “Battle” never feels like a sweeping victory. It’s often just a grudging draw.

MPAA Rating: R for some violence and brief sexuality

Cast: James Franco, Nat Wolff, Selena Gomez, Robert Duvall, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ahna O’Reilly, Bryan Cranston

Credits:Directed by James Franco, script by , based on the John Steinbeck novel. An eOne/Momentum release.

Running time: 1:53

A huge Thursday night had box office prognosticators thinking “Resident Evil: The Final Chapter,” would “go out” with a bang. Then again, maybe Variety and others were just trolling for gamer traffic.

But Friday proved otherwise, and it’s slated to hit about $12 million, in the middle of the pack of this weekend’s top ten films. It may be on track to become the biggest hit in this 15 year old video game film series. Probably not, though.

Yeah, they’ve all sucked. But familiarity trumps originality with this audience. It might be the end of this series. But maybe not. Don’t take the title’s word for it.

The opening of “A Dog’s Purpose” drew protests from PETA and others on its opening night in some cities. I saw very few walking into it at one of the busiest theaters in the Regal Cinemas chain on Thursday night. More people were there to see “Resident Evil.”

But “Purpose” seems headed to $18 million this weekend. Families immune to the viral video of a dog being forced to jump into a raging water tank for a rescue scene, and nearly drowning in the process, are expected to make this a Saturday matinee hit. It’s not very good, but if you take kids, maybe they’ll appreciate all the canine carnage — dog deaths.

The Weinstein Co. might have had Oscar delusions about Matthew McConaughey’s work in “Gold.” Those went by the wayside as this “inspired by true events” tale of prospectors and big money and foreign government machinations and the like, directed by the fellow who gave us “Syriana,” never amounted to much. Joyless, thrill-free, etc.

So they dumped its wide release in late January and called it a day. It barely cracked the top ten. McConaughey’s first serious misstep since his Oscar. About $3 million is the most they can hope for out of this.

“Hidden Figures” just cleared $100 million, or will by midnight Sunday. Good news for a high-minded feel-good real history dramedy.

“Split” is holding enough audience to win its second weekend at the box office. “xXx” is dying a speedy death.

It must have seemed like a good idea.

If losing a ton of weight to play an emaciated redneck AIDS patient who resolves to not go quietly into the dark Texas night in “Dallas Buyers’ Club” won Matthew McConaughey an Oscar, what might gaining a pot belly do for him with “Gold,” another “inspired by a true story” tale of greed and big dreams, this time of finding “the Mother Lode?”

Not much, it turns out. “Gold” is a reminder of all those bad movies McConaughey made before “The Lincoln Lawyer” made him a Lincoln pitch man.

He over-reaches. He commits to the part, heart and soul, or seems to. But the character is a cartoon we can’t connect with, the film lacks the spark of life or wit that might have made it work.

In the end, we find ourselves remembering “Sahara” and “Fool’s Gold,” wondering when Kate Hudson will show up. And we ponder what happened to the savvy McConaughey showed in picking and performing the hell out of parts from “”Mud” to “Magic Mike,””Killer Joe” to “True Detective.”

Whatever the virtues of showcasing a movie star as a portly, gauche and balding Nevada “prospector” entrepreneur, seen nude in some scenes, in not-quite-tidy-whiteys in others, Matthew M. signals the depth of his commitment to the part every time his character lights up. Which is almost constantly.

Watch him. The guy doesn’t inhale. He looks like a student actor pretending to smoke. I swear, the one time I see smoke coming out of Kenny Wells’ yellow-toothed mouth it looks digitally added in post-production.

Wells was a fourth-generation Nevada gold miner — a hustler who brags about “dirt under my fingernails” and “diggin’ into the side’a mountains,” but who actually works the phones, charming investors out of their dollars, for his family’s firm.

Washoe Mining Corp of Reno is down to its last dollar, its few remaining employees making calls out of a bar as they scramble to find investors and mine ventures worth investing in, when Kenny gets a whiff of that one, big score.

It’s in Indonesia, where a once-promising mineral geologist (Edgar Ramirez) has lost much of his reputation over the idea that gold deposits lurk all along the rim of the Pacific’s “Ring of Fire,” where tectonic plates collide and volcanoes erupt, earthquakes rattle and tsunamis roar.

The reluctant, down-on-his-luck Mike Acosta (Ramirez) drags Kenny out into the stunning jungle topography of Indonesia. And together, they find the thing that Kenny and those like him toast with every single bourbon-neat they gulp, from breakfast to bedtime.

“The Mother Lode!”

And that’s where things get complicated.

Director Stephen Gaghan (“Syriana”) and the script follow Kenny through a downward spiral of corporate conniving (Corey Stoll and Bruce Greenwood plays the connivers), Indonesian treachery and sexual temptation as an increasingly drunken Kenny tries to keep his crumbling “big break” together.

The movie has all these cheap and fake looking “financial report” TV updates delivering exposition about “the biggest gold strike of the decade” (the 1980s). The script uses such groaningly obvious devices as “an interview with Gold Digger Magazine” (a trade publication for gold prospectors that apparently doesn’t exist) to allow Kenny to discuss his gold strike, and an awards banquet, complete with acceptance speech, this “Golden Pick Axe” honor that prospectors give to one of their own who strikes it rich.

Corny balderdash.

McConaughey isn’t allowed to generate much empathy here, as the story is narrated through flashbacks as Kenny is interrogated by the Feds after-the-fact. He never quite gets up to his fast-talking hustler stride — we’ve seen him do this and do it well before. And he’s never larger-than-life, the way McConaughey’s natural instincts make him want to play the man.

Ramirez does the guarded and glamorous geologist thing well. But it’s a compact performance of a character that we need to be, like Kenny, big — engaging.

And Bryce Dallas Howard, given the chance to play an earthy, working class love of Kenny’s life, delivers her usual chilling turn — a beautiful woman who always seems removed, disconnected from the films and the roles she plays.

“Gold” might have had “Oscar bait” on it at some point in its development. But aside from the stunning Indonesian and Nevada scenery — all of which Kenny wants to despoil, by the way — there’s not much to engage us, not much to recommend it.

In the end, you’re left wishing for a film half as good as Kenny’s motto.

“The last card you turn over is the only one that matters.”

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout and some sexuality/nudity

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Edgar Ramirez, Bryce Dallas Howard, Corey Stoll, Stacy Keach

Credits:Directed by Stephen Gaghan, script by Patrick Massett, John Zinman. A Weinstein Co/Dimension release.

Running time: 2:01