Movie Nation

So Tom Hanks still has an audience. Clint Eastwood’s name in the director’s credit has renewed punch, thanks to “American Sniper.”

And “Sully” is the first break-out hit of the fall, opening to an estimated $30 million this weekend. 

That’s not top dollar for either of them, but for both, it’s a sign that their audience hasn’t aged entirely out of going to the movies. Good reviews and a familiar story helped “Sully” pay off, too. Warner Brothers hopes to get a few more movies out of Eastwood before he, like Altman and Lean, Huston and perhaps Woody Allen, has to show up with an oxygen tank on set.

Screen Gems has a niche with African American cast thrillers, and “When the Bough Breaks” is delivering to the tune of $14 million or $15, depending on Saturday. Friday night was big. Better marketing, preview screenings and reviews, would have helped.

“The Wild Life” animated flop needs a huge Saturday to reach “disappointing.” It won’t even crack $5 million. They needed to cast bigger English language speaking voices, hire an English speaking joke writer or three (it was a French film) and give it the familiar title, “Robinson Crusoe” or “Crusoe and Friends.” Whole lot of blunders evident on a flop this big. Good reviews aren’t a guarantee of a hit (See “Kubo and the Two Strings”). They would have helped this one, and they were terrible. 

Nothing else new, not the horror pic “The Disappointments Room,” nada, cracked the top ten.

Building a musical around an English neighborhood where five prostitutes were murdered is no slam-dunk of an idea, I don’t care what “Sweeney Todd” would say.

But, hey, Tom Hardy SINGS in “London Road,” a BBC Films production based on the stage musical. Who wouldn’t pay to hear that?

“London Road” is a street in Ipswich where five young working women were murdered in a very short period of time in 2006. That makes the crime look like more of a spree killer’s work than that of a serial killer. The play, and now the film, is built on the testimony gathered from the residents there in interviews, conversations that an opening title insists is “what they said exactly as they said it.”

Some liberties were taken with location and repetition, to turn statements into song and stage those songs in a pub, in a garden, on a bus or in assorted living rooms. But the idea is to show the locals as they really are, or were — frightened, annoyed, narrow-minded and judgmental.

The neighborhood, they insist, was only overrun with hookers after upgrades to the local football stadium. Street walkers flagging down cars, sex in alleyways, threats of violence if you called the coppers.

These “foul-mouthed slags” had it coming, several say.

Suspicions turn neighbor against neighbor. Smart-mouthed schoolgirls chirp “You auuuuuto-matically think…It could be HIM!…Is it him? Is it him? Is it HIM?”

Hardy, playing a serial-killer obsessed taxi driver, puts off one and all with his knowledge and theories.

The music uses minor chords and dark tones (very “Sweeney Todd”) and the singing is somewhat amateurish (not just Hardy’s). Not a single tune in it will stay in your head 30 seconds after it’s over.

Olivia Colman is a staple of British TV, not the pop charts. She plays Julia, very representative of the neighborhood’s views and someone willing to organize those who live around her as the cops overrun the place and the TV talking heads, doing their vapid, sing-songy stand-ups (a hoot) give the place a bad rap.

Kate Fleetwood stands out as a surviving street-walker convinced to give up the life by the crimes, the police, social services and neighborhood stigmatization.

We don’t meet the victims, or the accused killer (mercifully). But there is blood in the water when that suspect is arrested, a gleeful, choral rush to judgment.

I can’t say it all works, and there’s an epilogue that plays as more insipid than biting. But it’s a daring piece to put on the stage, even more daring to commit to film.

And if nothing else, the title is easy for tourists to remember as a place to avoid when visiting The Old Country.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, adult subject matter, offscreen violence, profanity

Cast: Olivia Colman, Tom Hardy, Anita Dobson, Kate Fleetwood, James Doherty

Credits: Directed by Rufus Norris, script by Alaecky Blythe, based on her London stage musical. A BBC Films release.

Running time: 1:31

You don’t have to remember the 1943 mid-WWII Oscar winning “The Human Comedy” to realize that Meg Ryan’s version, “Ithaca,” is missing something.

Sentimental and slow, this “Life on the Homefront” melodrama lacks the pathos and punch of its predecessor. And without those, a cast of name actors who did director Ryan a favor (Tom Hanks, Sam Shepard, Hamish Linklater) and the generous sprinkling of William Saroyan aphorisms and period-perfect setting lacks purpose or a reason for being made.

Homer Macaulay (Alex Neustaedter) is a 14 year-old ready to start his work life as a telegraph office delivery boy in 1942. His older brother Marcus (Jack Quaid, son of Dennis and Meg) is in the Army and about to ship out.

He’s got a much younger brother, Odysseus, and an older sister, Bess. Mom (Ryan) is carrying on and carrying grief in her every gesture. Her husband, Homer’s dad (Hanks) has recently passed. She still sees him in her more trying moments.

Homer works for the kindly office manager (Hamish Linklater) and an elderly lush of a telegraph operator (Sam Shepard). As he races to beat Western Union on every delivery, Homer sees the sadness and wrenching change of war, up close. He delivers “The Secretary of War regrets to inform you” notices to the families of the missing or killed.

But his brother writes him thoughtful, philosophical and fatherly letters about “this wonderful, senseless yet beautiful world.” The boss, Tom (Linklater) offers “The best part of a good man stays,” as an explanation of untimely unjust death.

And Mom has a few thoughts of her own, that “There will always be pain in this world…A good man will seek to take the pain out of things.”

Young Neustaedter (TV’s “The Colony”) is properly sensitive, but dull in a part that seems dulled down by the intervening decades. Mickey Rooney played the kid in 1943, and gave him more of that antic spark of life that the world has to beat out of him.

Ryan so underplays the ongoing grief that her character never once rises to “touching,” something she’s been famous for achieving all through her career.

In the rest of the cast, only Shepard stands out, a sauced sage who dodges the “death” question from the kid with a weary wit.

“That’s a very young question, and I’m an old man.”

Frequent collaborators Ryan and Hanks have just a couple of scenes together, only one with dialogue.

Richmond, Va. and environs ably substitutes for WWII inland California, and Ryan inventively gets around the movie’s military requirements by having letter-writing scenes set on board a train, or in a bunk. Battles are fought in the dark.

But even if this wasn’t a period piece, it would feel exhausted, dull and dated. The world has grown up a lot since WWII, grown more cynical. A wise barkeep (Scott Shepherd) can deliver his world-weary appraisal of the human race — “The fightin’s inside us. It’s what we are…till we ain’t.”

There’s just no way to make that sentiment, novel for its time, new to anyone hearing it today.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements, a war image, and smoking

Cast: Alex Neustaedter, Hamish Linklater, Sam Shepard, Jack Quaid, Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks
Credits: Directed by Meg Ryan, script by Erik Jendresen, based on the novel “The Human Comedy” by William Saroyan. A Momentum/eOne release.

Running time: 1:33

JT LeRoy was literature’s most “unreliable narrator.” An invented writer with a lurid, invented past and a talent appreciated mostly because of that fabrication, Jeremy “Terminator” LeRoy fooled the supposedly hip New York literary scene, and movie stars, rock stars, and famous filmmakers who came into “her” orbit in the late 1990s.

Because this 19 year-old West Virginia street hustler/heroin addict/AIDS suffering Street Lit phenom was actually an obese 30something Brooklynite who wrote in that voice, who curried favor with famous writers and agents, always by phone and fax, and with their gullible help made herself famous and at least rich enough to pay for gastric bypass surgery.

“Author: The JT LeRoy Story” lets LeRoy, aka Laura Albert, and a few of those who worked with her reveal how she did it. Some of that is the truth. Her motives, her murky early history? An abused childhood, institutionalization? That’s more suspect.

Because in the present-day interviews filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig did with her, and the decades of recorded and archived phone conversations with everyone from Billy Corgan and Courtney Love to Gus Van Sant and Michael Pitt, she-speaking-as-JT spins yarns.

It’s hard not to believe that very word coming of her mouth is a lie. And once the hoax added a cute public face for LeRoy — that of her boyfriend’s pixie-ish sister, Savannah Knoop — you wonder how any of these New York/Hollywood “sophisticates” could have been so stupid. I remember the first magazine profile I read of LeRoy, and I wasn’t fooled. Even in wig and glasses, Knoop was obviously no “Southern Gothic boy girl,” especially not a heroin addicted one who wanted to be a girl.

Feuerzeig makes the fateful choice of telling the whole story through Albert’s eyes, and decked out in too-old-for-this leather and straightened hair and piercings, she conjures up a hellish life — raped at 3, fat because her molester preferred her thin, abandoned by her parents.

And the filmmaker does nothing to verify any of this. As all fiction writers are by definition, liars, he kind of was obligated to at least try.

Albert was a lifelong phone-calling role player, adapting accents (British, West Virginia, also obviously fake) to call suicide hotlines and eventually a San Francisco shrink who urged her to write as a means of coping with her anxieties. “Terminator” was born, and eventually in fringe magazines, under the guise of a short memoir essays of a 13 year-old hustler.

That got her phone numbers of her favorite writers — Bruce Benderson (“User”) and Dennis Cooper (“Try”). Next thing you know, her writing is in the hands of an agent and publishers, and Terminator has morphed into “JT LeRoy.” With “Sarah,” JT was a literary star, “The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things” ensured the movies would come courting, that he’d end up backstage at concerts, that he’d hear “The Bono Talk,” about not letting success keep him — her — from staying “true to yourself.”

Doing interviews only by phone, JT’s mystery and allure grew. Some were suspicious from the start. But as the movie accidentally makes obvious, JT was someone that scene and those people wanted to believe — son of a West Virginia “lot lizard,” a truck-stop hooker, on the streets, servicing Johns in his tweens, on heroin and infected with AIDS by his teens.

Want to prey on New York prejudices? Play a grotesque parody of assorted Southern stereotypes.

The tape-recorded phone calls — with director Van Sant, Smashing Pumpkin Corgan, Courtney Love and actress/director Asia Argento — never stop feeling like the violations they are. But did Feuerzeig even try to get Winona Ryder, Tom Waits or anybody (other than Cooper and Benderson and her agent) to speak to how they felt after the hoax was revealed?

Feuerzeig gets Albert to talk about the role-playing she settled into early on, passing herself off as a British punk to land her first serious boyfriend, adapting voices and guises to anybody she got on the phone.

The logistics of the visual hustle are scantily covered (despite the movie’s two-hour running time) and are absurdly elaborate. Finding an “avatar,” was easy. Did Albert drill her on the writing? That young Ms. Knoop was able to “play” LeRoy to everyone’s satisfaction reinforces the sense that there’s no gullible rube like a famous one, a New York literary one. And Albert, playing first a British friend and “manager” to JT and then, transformed again into a musician-pal, had a front row seat to the circus she created.

If Oprah could be suckered by James Frey (“A Million Little Pieces”) and if an Alabama racist can secretly write about “his” Cherokee childhood, and get away with it for decades (“The Education of Little Tree”), if failed writer Richard Patrick Russ could abandon a life, a wife and children and reinvent himself as the sailing scion of Irish gentility Patrick O’Brian (“Master and Commander”), you’d think the literary world would be on its guard.

It wasn’t, and probably still isn’t.

Albert? The avatar-creating literary lioness of modest talents was just giving that world what they wanted. Her only crime might have been that she was ahead of her time.

MPAA Rating:R for language throughout, sexual content, some drug material and violent images

Cast: Laura Albert, Winona Ryder, Billy Corgan, Bruce Benderson ,Dennis Cooper
Credits: Directed by Jeff Feuerzeig.  A Magnolia/Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:50

Computer-assisted animation has gotten so sharp, detailed and fluid that it’s almost a given that any animated film with any ambition at all is going to look sharp.

“The Wild Life,” a European riff on the story of Robinson Crusoe, is no exception. The colors are vibrant, the sea, palm trees, birds, bird-feathers and Crusoe’s red hair are almost photo-realistic.

But as a kids’ cartoon, “Wild Life” is a an utter dud. It’s a comic version of the tale told from the point of view of the animals on board various ships, and on the island where Crusoe (voiced by Yuri Lowenthal) is shipwrecked. And there isn’t a single laugh in it.

A red parrot Crusoe names “Tuesday” (Jay Jones) tells the story to a couple of rats on the pirate ship that rescues Crusoe. And his version of this classic adventure presents the intrepid castaway as a klutz who can’t walk without tripping, can’t shoot straight and wouldn’t have survived without the help of the animals there, or fruity/fishy bounties of the remote Pacific rock where he was marooned.

There are evil, carnivorous shipwrecked cats out to kill him, and eat the other wildlife (tapir, etc.). The critters, to a one, look at every Crusoe action with the same worried scowl. He is the real threat, to them.

“This is NOT good.”

Rats with Brit accents wisecrack at each other — “You are one kidney short of a meat pie!”

The parrot longs to escape “paradise” and see the world he suspects is just over the horizon.

It’s got drunken pirates singing sea chanteys (So drunk they can’t tell port from starboard. Or maybe that was the screenwriters.) and the most reliable adventure yarn of all time to work with.

And none of it is the least bit funny.

But again, at least the animation’s passable.

MPAA Rating:PG for mild action/peril and some rude humor

Cast: The voices of Yuri Lowenthal, Jay Jones, Debi Tinsley, others.
Credits: Written and directed by Vincent Kesteloot, Ben Stassen. A Lionsgate/Studiocanal release.

Running time: 1:30

The great James Caan classes up and adds a modicum of mystery to “The Good Neighbor,” a teens-torment-the-wrong-old-man thriller in the “Don’t Breathe” vein.

Or rather, that’s how it’s pitched. And had the filmmakers seen “Don’t Breathe” early enough, there would have been head-slapping and rewrites, tweaking and the like, to make this one work.

Because what they deliver is a drawn-out “surveillance” story, with a couple of tech savvy teenagers using hidden cameras to both watch every move of the “creepy psycho hermit” who lives next door.

But as “an experiment in perception,” smart-mouthed Ethan (Logan Miller of “Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse”) wants to rig Old Man Grainey’s house so that the geezer thinks it’s haunted. And rich MIT-bound tech nerd Sean (Keir Gilchrist of “It Follows”) is just the guy to make this experiment come off.

They wire the old man’s house, switch on their monitors and giggle over Grainey’s reactions to thumps, power outages and a screen door that slams and clatters on a windless night, all by itself. They marvel at their power over him.

“It’s kind of beautiful, watching an old man sleep, wondering what he’s dreaming about.”

“World War I?”

Yeah, he’s going to MIT.

They wonder what’s behind that padlocked basement door. They call the cops, to rattle him. And they can’t figure out why this rude, mean old recluse “never once seemed afraid” of their every gimmick.

“Good Neighbor,” previously titled “The Waiting,” outstays its welcome, drifting on long after its climax. And the script forces an after-the-fact courtroom trial covered in flash-forwards into the structure, which art director turned director Kasra Farahani clumsily tries to disguise and integrate into the story without spoiling the suspense.

He fails.

Still, the kids are sharp, realistic and walk a fine line between unlikable and sympathetic.

And Caan plays this old man with a cagey resignation and menace. We do the math and try to figure out the possibilities. Is he keeping someone — perhaps his long-unseen wife — locked up downstairs? Did he kill her? Is he unafraid of the haunting because of guilt, or because he’s been haunted so long it rolls off his back?

The resolution would have had far more bite, suspense and satisfaction without the courtroom scenes. More moments were needed to establish Grainey as a realistic threat (again, see “Don’t Breathe”).

And a LOT less was needed after the climax, after the story has thrown its best punch.

Landing a lead like Caan underscores the fact that there was the germ of a twisty, tough thriller here. It’s too bad the script and uncertain direction let “The Good Neighbor” down.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, teen drinking

Cast: James Caan, Logan Miller, Keir Gilchrist, Laura Innes, Mindy Sterling
Credits: Directed by Kasra Farahani, script by Mark Bianculli, Jeff Richard. A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:36

Well, like most Americans, I had no doubts — zero — about the heroism and grace under pressure of U.S. Airways pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. But I do now, thanks to “Sully.”

So, thanks for that, Clint Eastwood.

“Sully” was the guy who brought that crippled Airbus down on the Hudson River back in 2009, right smack in the middle of New York, and saved 155 souls aboard. Eastwood’s movie is a study in cool, unshowy professionalism — that of Sullenberger, a pilot on the brink of retirement, his co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), the equally experienced stewardesses, who followed protocol as they barked “Brace brace brace, don’t look up” over and over at the alarmed passengers who had just taken off from LaGuardia Airport.

“Sully” celebrates air traffic control, the calm enforced there, the crisp exchange of requests, suggestions and alternatives unemotionally delivered by radio — from plane to tower, airport to airport and eventually, tourist helicopter to tower and so on.

Ferryboat captains and police scuba divers/rescue swimmers alike keep it together, improvise and make even the most astonishing rescue of its type seem like another day on the job. These were, one and all, men and women with “The Right Stuff.”

But “Sully” is also about nagging guilt, nightmare scenarios and the adversarial nature of NTSB (National Transporation Safety Board) hearings. If there’s a criticism built into Eastwood’s movie, based on Sullenberger’s book, it is in that process. It’s as if the political Clint doesn’t realize that tough government inquiries are how all those myriad procedures were decided upon, how every stewardess and steward flying today knows that “Brace! Brace! Brace!” mantra and must follow it to the letter.

We see the crash — “This was not a crash. It was a forced water landing!” — from several angles through the film, 208 seconds replayed from the cabin, the cockpit, the control tower, and finally on the CVR (cockpit voice recorder). It is vivid, but not remotely as harrowing as those depicted in movies like “Fearless” or “Alive.” That it wasn’t is a tribute to the quick thinking of the pilot. No, he didn’t check all his data points. He “felt” the plane go. And the landing choice?

“I eyeballed it.”

Hanks plays this guy as stoic, exceptionally buttoned down, just what you’d want in your airline pilot — experienced, a safety expert whose post-retirement future was to be in consulting on that very subject, an ex-Air Force pilot who once guided a crippled combat jet to a safe landing, as seen in a flashback. It’s not a dazzling performance, just a comforting one. Eastwood has found another tough, professional Texan to embrace.

But Sully’s nightmares the day or two after the crash are the what ifs — a jetliner tearing through lower Manhattan or coastal New Jersey. And the first words from the NTSB (Mike O’Malley, Anna Gunn, Jamey Sheridan) are that he guessed wrong, read the data and the plane wrong. Simulations show this as an aircraft that could have returned to the airport.

I like the way Sheridan’s NTSB questioner can’t look Sully in the eyes, at first, and I love the script’s treatment of the heady, unnerving nature of sudden New York celebrity. Random women hug him, give him kisses. Limo drivers and hotel managers call it “an honor” to serve him.

Bartenders (Michael Rappaport) and barflies want to drink a “Sully” with him — “That’s a shot’a Grey Goose, and a splash of water! Get it?”

Because the media have decided, based on the survival of one and all, that Sully is a hero. He’s not so sure, the NTSB has its data driven doubts, and his rattled wife (Laura Linney) seems in shock, at a loss, fumbling for words of comfort that just won’t come.

Still, there are obvious missteps. Sully never announced to the passengers and crew that the engines were out and they were crashing, just an abrupt “Brace for impact.” He’s shown as unhurried, not panicked, but too distracted to jump on the radio to the tower to alert them that air sea rescue was going to be needed. When the plane comes to a halt, the limits to procedures — nobody is there to guide passengers off the wings and into life rafts because the stewardesses are still inside getting everybody off the plane — pop up.

The brevity — “Sully” is just 96 minutes long — and few flashbacks don’t get us past the mask that Sully himself wears for public consumption. The performances are, to a one, poker-faced and guarded. Hanks is no weepy “Captain Phillips” here. And all that plays into Eastwood’s on-screen ethos. Man-up, be prepared, do your job.

“Sully” might not rank among Eastwood’s greatest films, but it shows his canny skill at deciding how to tell a story in which everybody knows the ending. That he manages to make it suspenseful and downright moving shows him at his professional best, just like every everyday hero he celebrates in the film.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some peril and brief strong language

Cast: Tom Hanks, Laura Linney, Aaron Eckhart, Anna Gunn
Credits: Directed by Clint Eastwood, script by Todd Komarnicki, based on the book by Chesley “Sully” SullenbergerA Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:36

As the best day of my professional life happened in the early 1990s, when I followed Leonard Nimoy around central North Carolina on a location scout, pardon me while I get all weepy about his son’s lovely documentary, “For the Love of Spock.”

It’s an unalloyed joy, a film about the journeyman character actor who got the biggest of big breaks, had all kinds of fun with it, but transformed the character, the role and himself into an icon of nobility, generosity and humanity. But it’s also about a son remembering his dad, the ebb and flow of that relationship and how that mirrored the elder Nimoy’s growing into his greatest role, living up to it, and being a better father thanks to it.

Former entertainment lawyer turned director Adam Nimoy’s Kickstarter-funded marvel covers pretty much the full scope of his father’s life, the trek to Los Angeles in the late 1940s, the years of odd jobs — day work in the movies and two week guest spots on TV shows — through “Star Trek” and everything that made possible.

Using old interviews with his dad and the ones Adam conducted just before his father’s death, and clips from the TV shows, the movies, and interviews with legions of his colleagues, friends and fans, Nimoy the Younger constructs a definitive History of Trek, and an adoring portrait of his father, the Man Who Was Spock.

It’s not just anecdotes or Leonard reading from the audio book version of his autobiography (“I Am Spock”).  Almost everybody (not his first wife, not his widow) who needed to be in this story was interviewed. From vintage radio interviews with Gene Roddenberry to J.J. Abrams, they gush the same gusher. They all loved this guy.

Here’s childhood pal Barry Newman (“Vanishing Point”) recalling his visit to the set of the “Star Trek” pilot and his dire warning into Leonard’s pointy ears.

“‘Run,’ I said. ‘Get out of this. It’s a treadmill to oblivion!'”

Fans from Neal DeGrasse Tyson and a couple of NASA engineers, to Jason Alexander (who can do whole Kirk monologues, from memory and in character) and Simon Pegg talk about what made the character and the man special.

George Takei and Walter Koenig marvel at how Nimoy ensured that they stayed in the franchise as it migrated from canceled TV series to animated series to film franchise.

And just as everybody is getting all misty-eyed, here’s Nimoy singing “Bilbo Baggins,” and Shatner cracking wise that yeah, Leonard was the better singer of the two. But even Leonard was off key.

The father-son stuff is terrific (Nimoy’s daughter is here, too). I would’ve enjoyed more of the early life, in Boston, the barber’s son. And it’s a pity there were no clips (with rights approval) of Nimoy’s post-“Trek” stage career, “Man in the Glass Booth,” “Fiddler on the Roof.”

But “For the Love of Spock” is everything you’d hope for in a biography of one of the most universally beloved characters and character actors of all time.

No, he didn’t get to make his Siamese Twins biography, the film he was scouting in N.C. (Chang and Eng retired to White Oak, near Andy Griffith’s hometown of Mount Airy) to film. Over the years, I have run into writers and others who found him to be a prima donna and a pill. This guy, for instance. 

Yes, he was an absentee dad for too long, and his first marriage didn’t endure. He still managed to ennoble an actor’s life, to be a mensch to friends, family and fans, even after he became so famous his life would never be the same.

He wore the ears, and wore them well.

MPAA Rating: unrated, a moment or two of profanity

Cast: Leonard Nimoy, Adam Nimoy, William Shatner, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, Zachary Quinto, Chris Pine, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, J.J. Abrams, Nicholas Meyer, Jim Parsons, Jason Alexander, Simon Pegg, Neal DeGrasse-Tyson
Credits: Directed by Adam Nimoy. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:45

Radar Online is reporting, and assorted British newspapers are doing what British newspapers do — stealing that reporting — that Sony and the Broccoli family and other producers backing the James Bond franchise are offering Daniel Craig $150 million Yankee greenbacks to return to the role for two more films.

Craig’s people have shot it down, because that’s a ridiculous amount seeing as how the films have shown diminishing returns, and it’s twice the amount he was reportedly offered back in May. Craig looked halfway out the door with “Spectre.” Two thirds of the way through it, he took on that “When is this over?” gaze. He met his obligation, and I said at the time in reviewing it (fanboy protests and British make-up-news scandal sheets notwithstanding) he was done. He’s young enough to more than manage a Pierce Brosnan length career post-Bond. And he’s a better actor, better than being pigeonholed like that.

Done. Find somebody else. But start with hiring a great screenwriter and it’ll be easier to fill the role, because that’s been an ongoing issue with this venerable franchise — crappy, recycled scripts.

Aristophanes’ comedy “Lysistrata,” the one about women refusing to make love until the men stop making making war, has proven as timely and malleable as any play the ancient Greeks gave us. Thousands of years before women got the vote in much of the world, the playwright spun a comic parable demonstrating the REAL power of women in a culture.

And it still resonates. Just last year, Spike Lee’s “Chi-Raq” re-set the women-on-a-sex-strike story in the mayhem of modern day Chicago.

Erase the violence and rub most of the sexual and political edge off that film, and you get something like “Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?”, a gun-crazy “Lysistrata” with the feel of a PG-13 TV movie, perhaps one more inspired by “The Andy Griffith Show’s” sexless spin on “Lysistrata” back in the ’60s.

Matt Cooper’s film takes place in Rockford, Texas, a fruit-packing town that’s actually a pistol-packers paradise. “Live free, shoot straight” is the motto they slap up on signs you see as you enter the town limits.

Everybody there loves hunting, sport shooting and the comfort and safety they think their guns give them. Until one day, a kid who has absorbed more of the gun worship than the gun safety ethos of his parents takes his dad’s new pistol to school to show a friend.

A hail of misplaced and fortunately not-fatal bullets later, the boy’s mom, Jenna (Andrea Anders of “Modern Family” and “About a Boy” and many other TV series) is taken aback enough to wonder what kind of fatal-accident prone world they’re raising their children in. Her boy got a slap on the wrist from the school and the sheriff (John Heard). Boys will be boys and boys with guns, etc.

She’s a minority of one, but Jenna thinks Rockford should give up its guns.

“Every avalanche starts with a single snowflake.”

Her avalanche starts with her bookclub and snowballs from there. The women will swear off sex with their men until they destroy their assault rifles, shotguns and pistols. The menfolk, including Jenna’s husband (Matt Passmore of “The Glades”) get their “Second Amendment” backs up over this. And a battle of the sexes and war of wills is on.

John Michael Higgins is the politically spineless mayor, Horatio Sanz and Fernanda Romero are a couple trying to have a baby, Katherine McNamara is a teen who has been making her boyfriend wait — for a year — only to have this protest interrupt their coital plans.

And Cloris Leachman plays the obligatory potty-mouthed granny in this debate. She has the best speech, the testiest scene, laying down the straw men that gun control foes throw up “just like when they were fighting chlorinated water and smoking bans.”

The movie throws a few mass shooting statistics, a history of how the meaning of the Second Amendment was quite recently twisted and broad portrait of the gun lobby that did the twisting, here called The National Gun Association (whose leader reveres his “Cold Dead Hands” portrait of NRA spokesmodel Charlton Heston).

“I doubt the Founding Fathers had this ‘no sex’ thing in mind when they wrote all that stupid crap.”

But this is a toothless satire, a sermon lacking the bite or broad wit of similar films. Cooper attracted a few names to his script, but he’s no Christopher Guest (“Best in Show”) or Norman Lear (“Cold Turkey”). There’s no bite to the debate, no edge to the satire, no sin in the sex.(How DID this earn an R? MPAA hypocrisy?). And, if you’d care to notice, there’s no racial component to all this, either. There isn’t a black face to be seen in this corner of Texas.

That makes “Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?” a sermon sorely in need of more sass, more silliness and more sting. It’s pointless to show Jenna scanning the Internet, paging through all the mass shootings and careless “accidents” at gun shows without making the pointed and still very funny (See “The Simpsons,” “The Cartridge Family”) connection in the movie.

The setting and subtext were ripe for lampooning, and Cooper sensed that with his simplest, pithiest argument. He just didn’t take it far enough.

“When did you become such a damn liberal?”

“When did you become such an idiot?”

MPAA Rating:R for sexual content and language

Cast: Andrea Anders, Matt Passmore, Katherine McNamara, John Heard, Cloris Leachman, John Michael Higgins, Horatio Sanz, Kevin Conroy
Credits: Written and directed by Matt Cooper. A Momentum release.

Running time: 1:35