Movie Nation

The pert perfection of Sarah Gadon — think Taylor Swift without the autotune — is given its first real test on the screen as something almost totally new in the movies — a “Mom Fatale” — in “The 9th Life of Louis Drax.” Alas, she’s no better here than she was in the woebegone “Indignation.”

“Drax” is an oddly remote and unaffecting (and unthrilling) thriller about a cruel and precocious nine year-old (Aiden Longworth of “Hector and the Search for Happiness”) whose mother is just catnip to the guys.

And that’s bad for the guys. Because young Louis, called “Lulu” by his parents, mistrusts men, thinking they only want “to sex” his mother and then hurt her. That leads to written , in nine-year-old scrawl, to one and all.

“Bad things will happen!”

But the bad things are already happening to Louis. He’s had an accident, at a picnic. He’s in a coma. It’s not, his doctor (Jamie Dornan) learns, the kid’s first dance with death. Read the title if you want to know how many preceded it.

Dr. Pascal (Dornan) tries to unravel the mystery of that day of the accident, and the kid’s past. There was a sympathetic shrink (Oliver Platt, terrific as always) treating him, puzzled by the child’s almost monstrous cruelty. He loves having pet hamsters, who all meet ugly ends.

There’s the boy’s boxer-with-a-temper dad (Aaron Paul), who’d have to be a suspect in any foul play. But not his mom. Oh no. Dr. Pascal is sure “You deserve better than this.”

“How do you know?”

“I can just TELL.”

The cop on the case (Molly Parker, so sarcastic you want to tear her head off) suspects one and all. Perhaps, like us, she’s seen any of the scads of TV medical dramas that have fed us remedial lessons in this sort of always-threatened/injured child cases.

Director Alexandre Aja has never come close to giving Hollywood a film as taut and frightening as his French breakout hit, “High Tension.” “Louis” has a creepily compelling young lead, but not much else. Paul isn’t scary enough to be the obvious suspect everyone else is sure he is.

There’s little suspense, and Dornan and Gadon both fail to register empathy, compassion, menace or fear.

The story shuffles between dark comedy and clumsy mystery, monster movie and psycho-drama, with no character or performance generating a whit of sympathy.

But in the movie’s big scene, Platt’s shrink is our guide into one of the cinema’s most informative trips into hypnosis. And that lets “9th Life” do something that few movies that fail this completely in the first two acts ever manage.

It finishes well.

MPAA Rating:R (for some disturbing images and brief strong language)

Cast: Aiden Longworth, Jamie Dornan, Sarah Gadon, Aaron Paul,
Credits: Directed by Alexandre Aja, script by Max Minghella, based on the Liz Jensen novel. A Summit release.

Running time: 1:30

The “big surprise” in “Morgan,” a bloody sci fi thriller spun around genetic engineering, is so obvious I won’t insult your intelligence by giving it away.

Hell, some of you have already figured it out, anyway, based on the headline, the still photo and my mention that there’s a “surprise” twist.

What they were shooting for here is an action-packed/bloodstained suspense pic about a scientifically engineered “It” who — OK “which” — is in danger of escaping from the lab where it was created.

Seth W. Owen’s script has moments that suggest he might have seen “A.I.,” or “Blade Runner” or “Ex Machina.”  And many, many more moments that suggest he didn’t and should have.

“Morgan” (Anya Taylor-Joy) is a paler-than-pale test-tube engineered human who with ashen lips, a teenage “girl” who is five years out of the test tube. And now she’s hurt somebody and a corporate “risk assessment” officer (Kate Mara) has been sent to the remote forest lab to figure out if she is too risky to bring to market, and how the isolated team that developed her — Toby Jones, Michelle Yeoh, Rose Leslie, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Boyd Holbrook, Michael Yare, Vinette Robinson and Chris Sullivan — screwed up. 

The team refers to Morgan as “her.” Lee isn’t having it. An “It” is what they’re dealing with, as in “after ‘It’s’ so-called birth” and the like. It hurt somebody.

“She has a right to make mistakes.”

“SHE has no rights whatsoever.”

Most have formed an attachment to Morgan, but not to Skip (Holbrook), whose scientific function is a mystery. He calls Morgan “C3PO,” at one point.

The story sets up a clumsy psycho-sexual dynamic and a faux family, but the film doesn’t develop those. The money scene is provided by “Corporate’s” psychologist, who carries out a psych evaluation. Paul Giamatti plays this scene the way you’d expect him to, with an utterly illogical eruption thrown in for bad measure.

There’s a lot of forest footage and production designed grays “Morgan,” down to the five year old teen’s omnipresent gray hoodie. What there isn’t is a lot of suspense. And I’m not just talking about the big reveal.

Mara and Taylor-Joy (“The Witch”) don’t give us much to cling to, as viewers. Only Michelle Yeoh (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) invites empathy. And only one moment has the poetry of its better sci-fi antecedents.

“Do you know the cruelest thing you can do to someone you’ve locked in a room? Press their face to the window.”

MPAA Rating: R for brutal violence, and some language

Cast: Kate Mara, Anya Taylor-Joy, Paul Giamatti, Michelle Yeoh, Rose Leslie, Toby Jones, Boyd Holbrook
Credits: Directed by Luke Scott, script by Seth W. Owen. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:32

When it’s all tallied up in that great counting house in the sky, or in Burbank, the summer cinema of 2016 may end up the second best ever (probably not) in terms of box office tmay end up the second best ever.

It sure didn’t feel that way. “Captain America” and “Finding Nemo” sequels did great, “Secret Life of Pets” performed and even “Suicide Squad” has cleared $300 million. But it wasn’t a season where the wind kept the sails full or audiences engaged.

The second horror hit of the summer owns this final weekend of the season. “Don’t Breathe” might catch “Lights Out” at the box office. Eventually.

But this weekend, which has, on occasion, produced an Oscar winner, won’t with “The Light Between Oceans,” a middling romance novel starring future Oscar contenders Fassbender and Vikander. Rachel Weisz, who won an Oscar in support in another late August release, “The Constant Gardener,” is the best thing in this one. “Light” is opening in the $5 million range, pathetic for a long holiday weekend. It’s a fall film that jumped the gun.

“Morgan,” a “we created a monster” in the lab thriller, is bombing — big time.

And nothing else, despite pushing “Hands of Stone” into more theaters and the superb quality of “Hell or High Water” or “Southside With You,” is making any money. “War Dogs” is indicative of the dogs of late summer. None of them have blown up.

“The Light Between Oceans” feels like a fall movie. It’s a sad romance, a period piece, a Michael Fassbender film with no funny costumes or comic book plot.

It’s lush and lovely, but a bit limp, like a well-written Nicholas Sparks novel filmed by an artist.  The director of “Blue Valentine” did it.

And it’s earning mixed reviews, a somber send off to a less than stellar summer. Or, if you prefer, a funereal fumble into fall.

I was re-watching “The Danish Girl” the other night, and couldn’t get over how much more adult Alicia Vikander came off in that one. Here, she’s more of a coquette, which makes her look entirely too impish and young for Fassbender.

“Morgan” is another “We’ve made a monster-person in the lab” thriller, with Kate Mara and Tobey Jones trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Poor reviews for that one. We’ve had two decent horror movies this summer, thank you. That’s all we’re entitled to.

Anything else opening wide? Well, Kevin Smith is still around, long after the era when he was “a thing.” “Yoga Hosers” is getting skewered for its amateurism, the fact that Smith put his daughter (and Johnny Depp’s kid) into a movie, despite a talent deficiency that suggested maybe bit parts were all they were up to.

Sometime, decades ago, somebody told Smith, “Don’t ever change, man.” And there you go.

The customs officer in Tokyo asks her, “Purpose of your visit?”

And Sweetpea (Dree Hemingway) is perfectly blunt in reply.

“I came here to break up with my boyfriend.”

But her boyfriend is a mercurial, fragile rock star. He’s shooting a video in a famous and mysterious Japanese forest, and he has other ideas. And since Sweetpea never saw the Natalie Dormer thriller “The Forest,” she has no idea what she’s in for.

Everybody in “The People Garden” goes out of his or her way not to name the location of this music video shoot. It’s Aokigahara, Japan’s “Suicide Forest” on the slopes of Mount Fuji. It’s where the despondent go to wander off, find an unoccupied tree, and hang themselves.

The only reason not to name the place is the earlier movie about this spooky, real-world oddity. A lot of people saw the earlier film, and naming the forest would have been admitting another movie beat you to the subject and amounted to a final nail in the coffin of this drab, dreary thriller.

Hemingway, daughter of Mariel, great grand-daughter of Ernest, is a model turned actress and a drab screen presence with no hint of spark or any other reason a rock star would be attracted to her or despondent over her ditching him.

Given an idiotic character name and playing almost every moment with a kind of resigned puzzlement, Hemingway sucks the oxygen right out of this mystery.

Because that’s what it is supposed to be. Sweetpea is left at the airport, and then ditched by the driver, Mak (Jai West) who is not supposed to “let her out of your sight.” He leaves her at the entrance to the woods with a crude map to the filming location, and police tape to stretch out between the trees to keep her from getting lost.

She finds the place — no thanks to Mak — and takes in the dullest, most unhurried video shoot in Japanese history. James Le Gros is the director, Pamela Anderson the 50ish model hired as eye-candy. Yes, she strips.

Jamie, the rock star? He’s gone missing. And no one seems that upset about it.

Did he flee before Sweetpea’s arrival to avoid being dumped? Did he get lost? Is he on strike? Or did he sneak out to kill himself in the “Suicide Forest” no one mentions by name?

The mystery in actress-turned-writer/director Nadia Litz’s (“Big Muddy”) narrative is no mystery at all if you’ve seen “The Forest.” Even if you haven’t, the funereal pace and willfully cryptic way everyone treats Sweetpea (Must be the name.) drives any interest out of the story before its big reveals are revealed to be not big at all.

The setting itself — a hardwood forest in Canada — is damp and grey and properly creepy. But “The People Garden” guards its feeble secrets so well audience ennui sets in, as it always does when we’re way ahead of where a movie is taking us.

And Hemingway? There are hints of her mother’s mousie voice in lines delivered through the same locked jaws Mariel was famous for, but no trace of mom’s empathetic charisma. There must be more suitable ways for Dree to capitalize on her famous  surname, because acting doesn’t seem to be her calling.

MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity, suicide

Cast: Dree Hemingway, Jai West, Pamela Anderson, James Le Gros
Credits: Written and directed by Nadia Litz. A FilmBuff release.

Running time: 1:22

They’ve made a big deal out of how inclusive and how much more diverse the cast is in the George Lucas “Star Wars” universe.

All well and good. No, the stories aren’t aching with originality, but this time around, there are role models for all. Women, men, a wide sampling of human races cast as alien races in films that more reflect our times.

Including, apparently, the droids. Meet C2-B5. A “droid of color.” Expect this matte-finish marvel in “Rogue One,” just in time for Christmas (shopping). 

It has an A-list cast of hot actors, an Oscar winner and a couple of Aussie acting icons.

It’s an evocative period piece based on a best-selling novel, an era and an exotic setting beautifully captured and lavishly photographed.

But change the locale from remote, coastal Australia to the beaches of Carolina, and all “The Light Between Oceans” adds up to is a Nicolas Sparks novel with more poetic writing.

It’s a romance novel, a romantic fable, brought to life by a pretty good cast that cannot make it more than is, that cannot give it more meaning and make it less frustrating than novelist M.L. Stedman intended.

Michael Fassbender is Thomas Sherbourne, a veteran of The Great War, home and in search of work that offers solitude, peace and purpose. He’s spent four years in the trenches of France. Maybe now he’d like to save lives for a change.

He’s to be the temporary new keeper of the light at Janus Island, a hundred miles from anywhere, keeping the light burning and the ships off the shoals around this island home.

A sensitive man of faith and a philosophical bent, he isn’t looking for companionship. But when the job turns permanent, he is drawn back to the bold, flirtatious free spirit he met at the nearest coastal town. Isabel (Alicia Vikander) has that effect on him. She, in essence, proposes to him on their second meeting. That unsettles Tom.

“I couldn’t stop seeing my life with you.”

What he couldn’t see, beyond the romantic idyll of two lovers on a windswept limestone rock, would be the miscarriages and how those would hit Isabel. The lonely place, the heartbreak, it could do her in. It broke the spirit of the previous lighthouse keeper.

So when a boat washes ashore with a dead man and a baby, she sees her lifeline. And Tom, slavishly devoted to duty and doing the right thing, relents. They raise the little girl as their own, covering up how they got her from everyone.

But the little girl has a mother (Rachel Weisz) who mourns for her and clings to the hope that she still lives.

In adapting the book, Derek Cianfrance (“Blue Valentine”) spares us no images of the sea or the surf. The wind blows Vikander and Fassbender’s hair, romantically as the fateful couple face their fate, then choose to let fate change that fate.

Vikander seems too young to be cast opposite Fassbender, even if we take into account the differing times and notion that the war has aged Tom beyond his years. But there’s chemistry there, just not enough to make anybody swoon.

The adorable workboat piloted by Captain Ralph, played by the great Australian character actor Jack Thompson, has many, many scenes of coming and going. Weisz suffers, nobly, and another Aussie character player, Bryan Brown, gives flint to the role of her rich father.

A couple of absurdly photogenic and adorable children (Florence Clery plays the little girl, Lucy, once she’s talking) animate the role of a child worth fighting for. 

But the lighthouse love story never adds up to much more than images or feelings, and the story wallows in melodrama as we see guilt weigh on Tom, and his dilemma. Two broken women — which one can he “save”? Either solution threatens to doom the other.

Nothing happy can come from this, and no epilogue can mend the frustrating, heartbreaking choices that come from the knowledge that Tom, and we, cannot save everyone.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic material and some sexual content

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Rachel Weisz, Jack Thompson, Bryan Brown
Credits: Written and directed by Derek Cianfrance, based on the M.L. Stedman novel . A Touchstone/Dreamworks release.

Running time: 2:12

What the hell do we do with Jason Statham these days?

Aside from putting him around water and making him strip off his shirt a few times, in between head-busting brawls and the like?

He shows up for “Mechanic: Resurrection,” but only just barely. It’s a travelogue action picture about an assassin blackmailed into carrying out three last hits. Sure, he was supposed to be dead after “The Mechanic.” A colleague from his past knows better.

“Do this job, and go back to being dead,” the bad guy’s henchwoman insists.

But it’s only when a combat vet turned Sex Trade Women’s Shelter operator (Jessica Alba) is thrown at him, then kidnapped and held hostage, that “Bishop” takes on the gig.

He has hidden caches of weapons everywhere. He has friends (Michelle Yeoh) who provide him safe haven. And as he bounces from Rio to Thailand, Malaysia to Sydney, never shaving along the way, The Mechanic does what he does best — “make it look like an accident.”

“Resurrection” is a cheap-looking film, with the fights in these exotic settings looking like green screen backdrops with Statham kicking the crap out of villains on a soundstage. Not always, but corner cutting was obvious. No, they didn’t really blow up all those cool boats that get wrecked here.

The camera lingers over Jessica Alba in a bikini, but otherwise, she has little to do except look good while she’s being menaced.

The script is a perfunctory exercise in getting Bishop from A to C, with no attention paid to the logic of how he stumbles into Alba’s character, how he accepts her motives at face value, and how he doesn’t instantly take-out his tormentor.

Tommy Lee Jones plays one of the targets. With a twist.

Statham is wasting his last good years as an action star in Z-movies like this, when he should be hunting down the new Guy Ritchie and doing gangster pics in the UK, or hunting for the new Nevaldine and Taylor (“Crank”).

The German director Dennis Gansel (“The Wave”) is no substitute. And stunt coordinator Allan Poppleton may have done “Avatar.” But he also did the fights for “Hunger Games.” He’s no Corey Yuen (“The Transporter” movies).

Statham should hold out for movies that offer him more than a few exotic stamps on his passport.

MPAA Rating:R for violence throughout and language

Cast: Jason Statham, Jessica Alba, Michelle Yeoh, Tommy Lee Jones
Credits: Directed by Dennis Gansel, script by Philip Selby, Tony Mosher. A Summit release.

Running time: 1:38

The faith-based football bio-drama “Greater” fails on so many levels one scarcely knows where to begin.

It’s an uninspiring “inspiring true story,” an emotionally barren trial of faith, a dry-eyed weeper in which we know the hero is living on borrowed time.

It’s a “Rudy” that fails to touch, a “When the Game Stands Tall” that isn’t the least bit moving, and a choppy, misshapen mess as narrative.

We have uninteresting actors playing”kids” with crows’ feet passed off as college students. And we have football games that in almost no way mimic the real thing.

It’s about Brandon Burlsworth, a fat kid (Christopher Severino) whose mama (Leslie Easterbrook) raised him to be a good Christian, to show character. But she never let on that at 335 pounds, he was obese.

“You’re not fat. You’re just a big ol’boy.”

His dream — her dream — his brother’s (Neal McDonagh) dream — his daddy’s (Michael Parks) dream — was for him to play for the University of Arkansas. He gambles everything on attending and getting on the team as a walk-on.

He’s picked up on by his teammates, who resent his goofy self-righteousness.

“Just’cause this guy thinks he’s BETTER than us doesn’t mean we have to agree with him!”

His coaches cuss him and consider him a klutz. But Brandon puts his mind to it, and outworks everybody else. At a time when football was in decline at this football mad SEC school, Burlsworth’s work ethic inspired his bad teams to improve.

“Character’s what you do when nobody’s looking,” a coach notes.

But to Burlsworth, “Somebody’s always looking.” That would be the Almighty.

Severino is convincingly fat when he needs to be, athletic as the script puts him through “the training montage,” but Burlsworth is dull as a character, and no amount of Razorback hype (“The greatest walk-on in college football history!”) changes that. He’s burnished and has any edge the real kid might have had rubbed off.

His faith makes him a teetotaler, setting up the teammates’ drinking prank scene that we know is coming.

But the faith stuff — with his brother, and others — seems shoehorned in, not organically part of the story or who Burlsworth was.  The film purports to wrestle with “Why do the good die young?” and “Why doesn’t God give us what we pray for?” But there’s no theological authority to answer that, and the choppy flashbacks of the story don’t come to grips with it.  The sage philosopher “farmer” (Nick Searcy) who talks about football and metaphysics and what-not to the older brother may be the silliest script device ever.

And the frame of the film — it’s told as a flashback the brother has on the day of the kid’s funeral — utterly deflates it long before it has run its two hour and ten minute course.

Burlsworth might be a big deal in Arkansas, with statues, a foundation and a myth to go with him. This movie does little to explain why. As a big screen entity, he’s no “Gipper.” Heck, he’s no “Rudy,” either.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements, some language and smoking

Cast: Christopher Severino, Neal McDonagh, Leslie Easterbrook, Michael Parks
Credits: Directed by David Hunt, script by Brian Reindl, David Hunt. A Hammond Entertainment release.

Running time: 2:10