Movie Nation

Tomás didn’t want to make the trip. But he knew if he didn’t visit his old friend, Julián, “I’d regret it later.”

Julián (Ricardo Darín) is an Argentine actor who has made his life in Madrid. And now, that life is coming to an end. Getting that husky, smoker’s growl has a cost — lung cancer.

People, old friends/colleagues, “don’t know what to say to me,” he tells Tomás. And Tomás  (Javier Cámara) is no different. He’s often on the verge of tears. But he manned up, made the trip, even puts up with Julián’s aged, limping-drooling mastiff, Truman. It’s just for a few days, after all.

“Truman” is a soft-voiced Spanish melodrama about the final stages of death and dying. Julián has reached “acceptance.” Over the course of a four day visit, he drags Tomás into that stage with him.

But it’s going to be messy — sometimes amusingly so. Julián hasn’t told everybody — not his employer, the producer of the 18th century costume comedy he’s starring in, not his son away at college.

Julián is pretty much broke, which leaves Tomás to pick up a lot of checks, pay a dog walker, finance a last-minute flight to visit Julián’s son.

He’s most concerned about the dog. “Do dogs experience grief?” Tomás accompanies Julián to the vet, to interviews with people who might adopt the dog.

Tomás must deal with Julián’s sister (Dolores Fonzi), angry, worn-down yet vivacious and not as accepting of her sibling’s fate as that sibling is.

Cámara, best known for the Spanish import “Living is Easy With Eyes Closed,” about a teacher/Beatles fan trying to visit the set of a John Lennon filming in Spain in the ’60s, has a marvelous resignation about him. He makes Tomás a bit put-upon, unwilling to stand up to his friend’s many impositions even as he complains about them.

Darín, of “The Secret in Their Eyes,” has the swagger of a fading matinee idol, insensitive to the many ways his decisions are impositions on others. His Julián is also warm and charming and you easily believe others would bend to his easygoing will.

“Truman” doesn’t take us on a long journey, and despite the hook of naming it after the dog, we don’t get much of a sense of Julián’s undying affection for him. Truman is a life passage he’s about to finish, someone who was always there, through a divorce, good times and bad. Saying goodbye to the dog is saying “adios” to life.

But director and co-writer Cesc Gay (“Nico and Dani”) keeps the melancholy light and never lets the picture feel morose. “Truman” becomes a bittersweet character study in death and friendship, a film that lets the sweet overcome the bitter.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with adult subject matter, explicit sex

Cast: Ricardo Darín, Javier Cámara, Dolores Fonzi
Credits: Directed by Cesc Gay, written by Tomàs Aragay, Cesc Gay. A FilmRise release.
Running time: 1:48

A charitable view of the cutesy remake of 1979’s codger caper comedy “Going in Style” is that old age and the way we look at it have changed over the decades.

When three frail, lonely old men — Art Carney, George Burns, Lee Strasberg — decided to rob a bank out of boredom, raging against the acceptance of their own mortality, pushing 80 was a death sentence in and of itself.

Today, 80 is the new, um, 68? There are whole corners of the culture dedicated to the elderly — active senior communities, mobility scooters, age-friendly phones, senior dating websites, Fox News.

So sitcom vet Zac Braff and screenwriter Theodore Melfi had, at the very least, to cook up new motivations for three retirees (Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Alan Arkin) to knock off a bank. It’s just that they utterly defanged the movie, stripped it of pathos and any sense of reality and made it a simple “feel-good comedy” in the process.

There are hints of infirmity among the three former co-workers, Joe (Caine), Willie (Freeman) and Al (Arkin). Willie’s diabetic and needs a kidney. Mostly, it’s “other” old folks — guys in their lodge (Christopher Lloyd) who are doddering, on the verge of drooling incapacity. Mortality never really figures in it.

When a corporate merger eats their pensions and their bank is an enabler in this Wall Street sanctioned theft, these active seniors don’t have to take this sitting down. Joe’s witnessed a bank robbery. Why don’t they knock over that same bank, collect what’s owed to them and give the excess “to charity?”

That last detail scrubs what little edge this might have retained from the original film right off it.

“These banks practically destroyed this country,” Joe fumes.

“I want to live better than I am,” Willie agrees.

Al? He’s the sane one and has to be pretty much tricked into helping out.

There’s cute senior cursing and faintly lewd senior flirting (Ann-Margret, still getting it done). A trial run — attempting to shoplift at their local supermarket — earns them a sarcastic (and funny) dressing down from SNL’s Kenan Thompson.  Making your getaway in a store mobility scooter is good for a laugh.

And I liked the philosopher robber who refuses Joe’s wallet in the hold-up that inspires him to pull such a heist himself. The masked gunman tells Joe he’s “a casualty of a corrupt system that no longer serves The People,” and chides a society that doesn’t cherish the elderly. No, that’s not heavy-handed at all.

Mostly, though, Braff and Melfi trot out endless variations of “Maybe you’re having a stroke,” and “Life is short” jokes, trite plot points about a lack of visits from distant family and F-bombs delivered for cheap laughs by three Oscar-winning screen legends.

John Ortiz is their instructor in the rules of bank robbery and Matt Dillon is the FBI agent on their tail, both solid in supporting roles.

But for all its revelations about the changing definition of “aged,” “Going in Style” is never more than watered-down pandering. It has about as much satiric bite as a Polident commercial, a reverse mortgage of a movie promising dividends its enfeebled script never delivers.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for drug content, language and some suggestive material
Cast: Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Alan Arkin, Ann-Margret, John Ortiz, Matt Dillon
Credits: Directed by Zac Braff, written by Theodore Melfi, based on the Edward Cannon script to the 1979 film of the same title. A New Line/Warner Brothers release.
Running time:

There may be more accomplished, more famous “rock” photographers than Mick Rock.

But none were born with that perfect and instantly-memorable name. And few could match his stories, gathered from his insider, embedded background in the glam, punk and New Wave scenes of the 70s and 80s.

“Shot! The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock” is just Mick, telling those stories, rummaging through his vast archives, sharing the incisive insights of a smart, Cambridge educated artist who just happened to make his art by taking pictures of an era in music.

Barnaby Clay is the credited director, but as the filmed interview is shot in black and white, as it is framed in a recreation of Rock’s 1996 near death experience and as it follows him — still working, still shooting concerts and album covers and fashion spreads with rockers — you’d swear the 69 year-old master of stills and early music videos was directing himself.

Rock has the vainglorious swagger, the self-studied style polished by years in the spotlight. And he delivers the expected bravura — “I’m an assassin. I’ve got my sights on you, and I’m going to take you out!”

He broke through with Pink Floyd alumnus Syd Barrett, made his mark by attaching himself to David Bowie (and through him Lou Reed and Iggy Pop) and blew up with that iconic cover to “Queen II.” Which, in the best of his “How I got that shot” anecdotes, Rock admits he cribbed from an iconic image of Marlene Dietrich.

That’s the genius of his method. He took a lot of great concert shots — of Bowie, Reed, Marley, et al. But for his fabulous posed images, Rock made a visual association.

Freddie Mercury, rock’s rising glamour “queen?” Dietrich. Joan Jett? Elvis. Talking Heads? “Children of the Damned.” Debbie “Blondie” Harry? “Monroe. Lolita.”

Rock, who hosted a provocative rock profiles TV show a couple of years back, can drop Rimbaud and Baudelaire and snippets of poetry and French into his bon mots. He has audio cassettes of conversations with Bowie and Reed to prove the closeness of his connection to him.

He’s frank about the poor pay, and his photo barter system for drugs when he was “heavily chemicalized” and least dependable. “Carly Simon said, ‘Oh he’s the best. But after the shoot, you can’t ever find him” to get the negatives and finish the job.

He’s obsessed with Reed, endlessly dropping the proto-punk poet’s name, lamenting that they fell out, for a time, because Rock was supposed to shoot Reed’s wedding and was a “chemicalized” no-show.

But for all the name-dropping and self-serving, self-glamorizing anecdotes, there’s a disarming casualness about Rock. Yeah, he shot The Ramones (“Ugliest band on the scene. At the time.”), but there were Motley Crue and Carly Simon shoots, and all these forgotten bands whose album covers he kept and looks at now with a “What the f— was THAT about?” And he’s there with TV on the Radio and Snoop and Father John Misty, just to show he’s still hip. Or determined to appear that way.

And he is, and “Shot!” makes for a light, smart and often funny/trippy dance through an era with the man whose images made icons out of many, and burned those icons into our visual memory.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with drug use, nudity, profanity

Cast: Mick Rock, Lou Reed, David Bowie

Credits:Directed by, script by Barnaby Clay . A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:30

We can imagine greater horrors than anything most movie makers can conjure up visually. It’s the unseen unknown that truly terrifies.

And for about 25 minutes, “The Void” lives up to that credo and the promise of its title. We witness a killing spree. A sheriff’s deputy collects a bloodied survivor and gets him to a tiny remote hospital.

Almost instantly, the violence explodes inside the building, and the hospital itself is under siege, encircled by mysterious hooded figures with giant black triangles on their cowls.

What’s going on here? We’ve barely caught our breath long enough to figure out the deputy’s (Aaron Poole) marginally competent and over-matched, the staff (Kenneth Welsh, Kathleen Munroe, et al) is isolated and in shock. Leave one of them alone, and she just might kill a patient.

A nurse trainee (Ellen Wong) is the last person you’d want to lean on in a crisis.

“Statistically, you’re much more likely to die in a hospital!”

There’s a pregnant girl (Grace Munro), her grandpa (James Millington), a state trooper (Art Hindle), and the fellow leading that killing spree (Daniel Fathers) has arrived to finish the job, not-exactly-explaining what the escaped victim (Evan Stern) did to bring all this horror down on them all.

“Yeah? What about you, Man of Mystery?”

“Mind your own business!”

And then, wham! We see tentacles crawling out of the mouths of the dead. We see the giant blob these belong to. The mystery evaporates and the siege and the movie built around fritter away every iota of tension that a good-at-showing-terror cast and the scenario have built up.

“The Void” devolves into a creature feature. The legions of hooded cultists, the people inside who “turn,” all routine and gory and not the least bit frightening.

Killer cult pictures are almost as common as monsters among us films. But the moment co-writers/directors Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski turn their movie over to the blob wrangler, “The Void” — with its wise-cracks and crackling, static-filled radios, it’s desperate dashes to fetch a shotgun from a police cruiser — exhausts all interest and falls apart.

The blob isn’t nearly as scary as something we cannot see. Nothing they do to finesse that — human acolytes of the blob, cult leaders — fixes that hole in the middle of “The Void.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence

Cast: Aaron Poole, Ellen Wong, Kenneth Welsh, Kathleen Munroe, Grace Munro, Daniel Fathers

Credits: Written and directed by Jeremy Gillespie, Steven Kostanski. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:30

Those sexist eunuchs that warped a generation discover “The Future is Female” in “Smurfs: The Lost Village,” a Neil Patrick Harris-free reboot of this insipid franchise.

There’s no live-action, Smurfs-in-the-Real-World element to the first Smurfs movie since 2013, just polished animation with a fresh set of famous actors doing the voices.

Same Smurf puns — “Code Blue!”

Same patriarchy, with Papa Smurf trying to rein in the adventurous Single Smurf Female, Smurfette.

Same “Smurf-obsessed wannabe wizard,” Gargamel.

“Smurfs! Why won’t they just DIE?”

Same candy-colored forest, this time with colorful dragonflies, Smurf-eating plants and the like. Same sort of unchallenging story, traveling through The Forbidden Forest and The Swamp of No Return, a tale aimed at five-and-unders.

Only this time, we have Oscar winner Julia Roberts as leader of an Amazonian branch of the Smurf diaspora, Michelle Rodriguez as the toughest Smurf of them all, Rainn Wilson as Gargamel, Demi Lovato as Smurfette, and Joe Manganiello as Hefty Smurf.

And since there is no point to making any cartoon without the cartoon-voiced Jack McBrayer, he’s Clumsy Smurf.

That’s the sole challenge and only entertainment value in this nicely-animated drivel, figuring out the voices. And there I’ve gone and spoiled it for you.

Do Gordon Ramsay, Titus Burgess, Ellie Kemper and Ariel Winter really voice bit parts?

The only chuckle any savvy viewer will pull from this is the sound of Mandy Patinkin as Papa Smurf. His reputation as the most unpleasant diva in Hollywood makes one laugh at him being sentenced to this Belgian blue hell, if only for the single afternoon it must have taken him to record his part.

MPAA Rating: PG for some mild action and rude humor

Cast:  The voices of Demi Lovato, Julia Roberts, Rainn Wilson, Mandy Patinkin, Joe Manganiello, Michelle Rodriguez, Jack McBrayer

Credits:Directed by Kelly Asbury, script by Stacey Harman, Pamela Ribon. A Columbia/Sony Animation release.

Running time: 1:29

Any  honest, accurate sequel to “Trainspotting,” the 1996 film based on Irvine Welsh’s flinty-funny novel about heroin addiction, love, hijinks and capers going wrong in Edinburgh, would have to be even more littered with corpses than the original.

Twenty years on and most of these needle-sharing losers would be dead — and not just walking dead, with the faces and physiques that betray years of abuse.

But that would be a mighty short Danny Boyle film, and totally spoil the nostalgia and affection he and his cast felt by revisiting that story, that place and that time. Amusing and toothless is what they went for.

So in “T2 Trainspotting,” Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) comes home for a brief visit. He took off with the loot from the caper from the first film, heading to Amsterdam to get his life on track. That’s like retiring to North Carolina to quit smoking, but the irony’s intentional (no doubt).

He’s a married accountant, and catching up with the former Sick Boy, Simon (Jonny Lee Miller), he discovers his old mate has moved on to cocaine and digital blackmail schemes with a Bulgarian hooker (Anjela Nedyalkova), and that he’s never forgiven Renton for the betrayal.

“I’m gonna make him sorry he ever came back.”

Begbie (Robert Carlyle) still needs subtitles for us to understand his slang-riddled Scots accent. He’s spent years in prison, which probably extended his life. He, too, hasn’t forgiven and forgotten Renton.

Only Spud (Ewen Bremner) has maintained the lifestyle, clinging to the Horse as his only true friend, losing touch with his one-love Gail (Shirley Henderson) and their son despite AA meetings and an desperate desire to kick.

Whatever Renton’s intentions, he is lured back into this world. He’s just another nostalgic Brit swamped in a culture that lives in the past, “a tourist in your own youth.” He’s not unaware that “the world changes, even if we don’t.” Change is all around them, the Leith and Edinburgh of decay is mostly gone.

They’re all in their late 40s, and they each figure out the only way to feel alive is to recapture that past — the razor’s edge of drugs, casual relationships and violence that marked their youth.

Boyle revisits the early hallmarks of his style; extreme close-ups, artsy effects, pop-jangled score. He quotes from the original film’s dazzling soundtrack and iconic images. hiking the same hills, bathing in the changing textures of the times and wallowing, here and there, in nostalgia.

There’s one properly seedy pub, which the lads scheme to turn into a bordello (helped by government grants), and one flashy club scenes where those sing-along-Scots revel in the yesteryear of Queen and”Radio Gaga.”

And there two killer moments, though nothing on a par with the vile toilet or baby dying of neglect of the first film. Here, we have McGregor and Miller singing to weepy Catholic hating Orangemen and McGregor explaining, in a breathless riff full of sarcasm, rage and wit, the “Choose Life” motto of Thatcherite Britain, mock-embraced by Wham!, ridiculed in the original “Trainspotting.”

“Choose slut-shaming. Choose never learning from your mistakes…Choose 9/11 never happened.”

McGregor settles nicely back into Renton, and Miller shows his mileage in some early scenes (dyeing his hair gives us the Sick Boy of old). Carlyle’s Begbie is thick-featured, has lost some sex drive, but not the testosteroned urge to head-butt his way out of a jam.

And Bremner’s Spud, the longest survivor of the deadly addiction, turns out to be the one with the best memory, the bard for their “lost youth.”

That’s meant ironically, too, I suppose. But it’s not nitpicking to see that this is a seriously defanged affair, a sequel that lacks the punch or novelty of the original. Novelist Welsh and Boyle do little to bring gender equality to this world. Putting a new starlet into the gang’s midst upsets the balance and steals screen from Henderson, and in a glorified cameo, Kelly Macdonald (in a single scene, giving the film’s best performance)– female survivors of that epidemic.

It is a story of a reckoning — several reckonings — that is afraid of actually wrestling with the consequences of betrayal and self-abuse, of letting its characters naturally mellow or die because they can’t.

It may give fans like me a bit of the warm and fuzzies, seeing these lads again. But if “Trainspotting” was alternately life-sapping and life-affirming, giddy and grim, hilarious and alarming, “T2” never achieves either the same highs or lows and is all the poorer for it.

MPAA Rating: R for drug use, language throughout, strong sexual content, graphic nudity and some violence
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller, Anjela Nedyalkova, Robert Carlyle, Ewen Bremner, Shirley Henderson, Kelly Macdonald
Credits: Directed by Danny Boyle, script by John Hodge, based on the Irvine Welsh novels. A Sony/Tristar release.
Running time: 1:57

Animation, if you do it right, is still the surest way to a blockbuster in Hollywood.

Dreamworks’ “The Boss Baby” wasn’t to every taste — the very definition of a film earning “mixed reviews” (50% Metacritic), I found the grownup humor a hoot. But it is hitting $50 million its opening weekend, the low end of the animated blockbuster range. Not bad at all for a movie owned by Alec Baldwin, doing his callous business brat in a baby’s body act (“We could share!” “You obviously never went to business school.” ) 

That knocks (barely) “Beauty and the Beast,” Disney’s almost-animated remake of its animated classic, out of the top spot at the box office. “Beast” doesn’t care. “Beast” will clear $400 million by Wed.

Fangirl/fanboy fave “Ghost in the Shell,” the live action version of the manga/anime/game phenomenon, underwhelmed. Scarlett J. in a body suit wasn’t enough to drag them in to this Japanese-inspired “Blade Runner” riff. It’s doing OK — $20 million+. But that’s WAY below projections (Sorry, Box Office Mojo), WAY below ScarJo’s similar sexy-violent “Lucy,” which opened at over $40.

“The Zookeeper’s Wife” opened on 474  screens, and sits just inside the Top Ten. Weak reviews won’t help this Holocaust with Critters drama.

“Power Rangers” plummeted, “CHiPs” and “Life” are officially bombs.

“Logan” will end its run with about $225 million, “Get Out” is winding down towards $170.

So iconoclastic filmmaker Terrence Malick shows up at Austin’s South by Southwest music festival with a camera crew, a cluster of adoring movie stars and no real story.

And the result is “Song to Song,” a rambling, insomnia-curing meditation on music and the musical life that has too little of either to make any sense at all.

Incoherent? Yeah. Random, too. Not to point out how far Malick’s been crawling up his own bum the past ten years, but let’s just say he’s lucky  “Song” didn’t find polyps, which he would have been tempted to show us.

As has been his habit for years, he’s “scripted” the movie out of what he’s shot. So the story, such as it is, and the dialogue if you can call it that is mostly after-thought and voice-over. He’s shot a silent film with sound, and “fixed” it with voice over — the lazy movie-maker’s crutch.

“Song” is an improvised-feeling tale of ambition and love triangles — “Jules and Jim” with Ryan Gosling and Michael Fassbender as the pals pursuing the wannabe played by Rooney Mara.

She’s a guitarist looking for a break, aspiring for fame and a career, but mumbling nonsense about wanting the “simple” life “living from song to song.”

Natalie Portman breaks that triangle, playing a dishy waitress charmed by the producer (Fassbender) who notices the important things about the rich guy.

“You have everything.”

Gosling has never looked more beautiful on camera, Portman never sexier. But the performances don’t register. At all. The dialogue ranges from inane to tedious.

There are musician (Iggy and Patty and assorted Chili Peppers) and actor (Val Kilmer) cameos . Some pointless conversations take place backstage, in a mosh pit or at posh parties tied to this vast music festival.

And here’s what’s memorable — Holly Hunter, as the mother of one of the characters, weeping and lurching about an empty Sears parking lot.  Patty Smith going on and on about her life and her late husband.

Some critics bought into and let Malick get away with his indulgent piffle, “The Tree of Life,” and he’s honored that graded-on-the-curve pass by giving us “To the Wonder,” “Knight of Cups” and this. They’re movies only inside the brilliant man’s head.

This is crap. Which is what everybody finds if they stick their heads far enough up their you-know-what.

MPAA Rating: R for some sexuality, nudity, drug use and language
Cast: Rooney Mara, Ryan Gosling, Michael Fassbender, Natalie Portman, Holly Hunter
Credits: Written and directed by Terrence Malick. A Broad Green release.
Running time: 2:09

There is no shortage of Holocaust stories that Hollywood wants to tell, and since they concern history’s ultimate “Never forget” horror, that is all well and good.

The risk, of course, is that the subject becomes trivialized, rendered trite and cute in the endless variations on a theme. There is merit in a “Boy in the Striped Pajamas” or “The Book Thief.” But does that overcome the inherent cuteness of the telling?

“The Zookeeper’s Wife” slams into that conundrum, a true story of Warsaw zookeepers who smuggled Jews out of the ghetto, into their hidden animal paddocks and out of the city during the darkest days of World War II.

But from the very title you can guess the problems. There are cute animals, tended to by a kind and gorgeous woman, played with earthy empathy by Jessica Chastain.

This could very well have slipped into “Here’s a movie that explains the Holocaust to children” genre, cuddly and kid-friendly. But director Niki Caro (“Whale Rider,” “McFarland, USA”) repeatedly jolts the viewer with graphic violence and almost comical sex, as if to say, “Thought this was for KIDS, didya?”

The result is a film with too many rough edges for kids, edges too polished and precious to connect with adults.

Chastain and Johan Heldenbergh are Antonina and Jan Zabinski, zookeepers of Poland’s most celebrated zoo. Jan is the scientist, respected by his peers. But Antonina is his Dr. Doolittle, “a magician” with animals. From the camel that follows her on her rounds to the lion cubs she lets sleep with their little boy (Timothy Radford), they adore her.

And when there’s trouble with an elephant calf’s birth, Antonina can be counted on to flee a dinner party, in party dress, to grapple with the calf and fend off the frightened, insistent and persistent trunk of the mother to save it.

That scene, by the way, is stunning — an actress literally wrestling with a trunk in the middle of a performance. Alarming, but no Oscar nominees were harmed in the making of this movie.

The warning signs are there for everyone in Warsaw, but Antonina refuses to let them flee. Instead, she subjects her family and her young son to the bombing of Warsaw and the slaughter of the animals in their charge.

This subjects the audience to this horror as well. And that’s just the beginning.

Caro and crew treat us to a lightly sanitized version of the forced starvation and mass murder of the Jews of Warsaw, with the intrepid Zabinski’s figuring out a way to keep their zoo useful to the Nazis (it becomes a pig farm) and use it to hide refugees they help escape.

The victims are a saintly collection of the wronged and innocent — friends, children, a girl who has just been raped. Only that girl (Shira Haas) has enough of a character to play to make an impression.

Daniel Brühl of “Rush” is the generic smooth-talking Nazi zookeeper they have to fool, a “Good German” who only wants to “protect their breeding stock,” but who has eyes for Antonina, something she uses to keep the family’s secret.

The genetically obsessed German drags Antonina into his buffalo breeding experiment, a rutting/mating, bumping and grinding metaphor so laughable and obvious that you feel for Chastain and wonder why she didn’t veto this idiotic scene. The movie has sexual elements that feel frankly out of place, simply here to escape that “Children’s Movie about the Holocaust” label.

Historically, the ghetto and the war feel sanitized and the villainous Soviets are let off the hook, almost entirely. Dramatically, Caro and screenwriter Angela Workman serve up a couple of whoppers in between the standard tropes of the genre.

The players effect faint Polish accents, but Chastain is such a soulful actress that this wasn’t a bother. It’s not her most emotional performance, however. She’s too caught up playing an icon on a pedestal to make the polymath Antonina frightened, desperate to save lives.

There’s little tension, little sense of the suffering even if we understand the stakes.

The best you can say about the whole enterprise is that it’s a righteous story, clumsily told.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, disturbing images, violence, brief sexuality, nudity and smoking

Cast: Jessica Chastain, Johan Heldenbergh, Daniel Brühl

Credits:Directed by Niki Caro, script by Angela Workman, based on the Diane Ackerman book. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:04

“Ghost in the Shell” is a sensory overload, eye-popping eye candy movie a visual feast of the “Blade Runner” “Fifth Element” variety.

Based on the popular and enduring comic book/anime/Japanese media franchise, it’s dark and dazzling to look at. And whatever side you’ve taken in the “Why’d they cast a white actress as this beloved Japanese assassin?” debate, Scarlett Johansson works in this pan cultural-pan racial filmic universe.

Not that this will surprise anyone who saw her in “Lucy.” Or “Under the Skin.”

But the story, stretching back to the late ’80s origins of this franchise (famously turned into an anime film in 1995) feels worn and dated. And not just because comic writer Masumune Shirow was entirely too enamored of “Blade Runner” for his own good.

Johansson is Major, a trained killer made up of a dead woman’s brain and the best body futurescience can manage, a thinking, problem-solving person in a synthetic shell.

She is the ultimate “enhancement” in an era when eyes can be upgraded, body parts of all types replaced (at assorted price points), livers made hangover proof.

“You’re what everyone will become one day,” her creator (Juliette Binoche) purrs.

And she’s great at what she’s been created for — killing. Her boss, played by Japanese director/actor Beat Kitano, has but to rattle off a command (in Japanese, you can upload any language into your brain, even upgrade to a non-verbal wireless telepathy network) and she dives in to deliver justice and rescue the threatened.

But the company behind her and most of the world’s “enhancement” business, Hanka Robotics, is under threat. A mysterious hooded figure, Kuze (Michael Pitt), is hacking and sending insta-minions, Geisha-bots or humans nobody will miss, after Hanka employees.

Major must track him down before he spills more blood, wreaks more havoc in their world, on Hanka’s stock price.

But she has these memories, inadequately illustrated visually in the film, barely-suppressed suggestions of her previous life. Maybe she wasn’t a refugee who drowned on her way to Japan after all.

Every scene is overstuffed with background imagery that grabs the eye — streets filled with sky-scraper-sized holographic advertising, all manner of hi-tech eyewear, backpacks, fashion and the like. This is the Los Angeles of “Blade Runner” transplanted to Asia, ignoring the warnings that a growing chunk of Japan may be eventually rendered unlivable by the ongoing meltdown and radiation crisis of Fukishima.

For some reason, we haven’t enhanced our way out of needing machine guns and big-mag pistols, which is how Major and her team (Pilou Asbæk plays her sidekick) dispatch the legions of masked corporate goods and other bad guys. There are robo-cops on every corner, body scanners at frequent intervals. 

And still, guns are everywhere. Not to worry. If you survive the shootout, 3D printing, electronics and hydraulics can quickly undo the damage.

They’ve cast one of the most famously shapely actresses of her era in the lead role, but “Ghost” is largely de-sexed, a movie with barely a hint of the pervy appeal of the manga.

And whatever novelty there was in this notion that brain (soul) transplants will leave shadow memories of who you used to be has been beaten to death in the decades since “Robocop” (which predated “Ghost”). What’s the sci-fi hook of “Get Out,” after all? It’s a tired trope.

Still, I love the yakuza nightclubs, the high-rises, the wearying visual noise of the streets that director Rupert Sanders (“Snow White and the Huntsman”) and his team cooked up — stunning electrified wallpaper, manifold variations of functional or fashion-conscious facial gear that has Major wondering, and asking, that big question of every new face she encounters.

“Are you human?”

Pitt earns a nice Roy Batty moment, but the whole enterprise is emotionally flat and arid. The unfamiliar feels overly familiar. And no matter how many shots of a leotarded Johansson Sanders throws at us — he has a “thing” for his leading ladies, remember — “Ghost in the Shell” can’t escape its own ghosts, the movies, stories, characters and even settings of truly original work that predates it.

For all its gory mayhem, it’s a movie as bloodless as it is sexless.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence, suggestive content and some disturbing images

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Takeshi “Beat” Kitano,  Pilou Asbæk, Juliette Binoche, Michael Pitt

Credits:Directed by Rupert Sanders script by Jamie Moss and William Wheeler, based on the Masamune Shirow comic. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:47