Movie Nation

Director Jodie Foster’s “Money Monster” aims high, an attempt to be a riotous, righteous Jeremiad about our “rigged” financial system and the TV hustlers who try to pass off hype as “business news.”

It never quite gets there, never quite takes flight as a “romp” or achieves the level of satire. It’s not a “Network” for our times.

But a game cast and a reasonably tense take on a topic that is a major component of this election year’s zeitgeist — financial cheats stealing from America, and never brought to justice — make it work.

George Clooney is Lee Gates, a gimmicky, shtick-loving anchor/pundit for the Financial News Network’s popular “Money Monster” show. He dances, he jokes, he hypes. He’s flip and glib and acts as if it’s all “Other People’s Money.”

The only difference between Clooney’s Gates and real-life TV clowns like Jim Cramer is the hair, and we don’t actually want Gates shot or blown up by the end of “Money Monster.”

Because that could be his fate, thanks to one ill-informed, super-hyped stock tip too many. A delivery guy (Jack O’Connell) gets onto the set of his live show, pulls a gun and makes Gates don a bomb vest. The overwrought Kyle lost his shirt when IBIS Financial dropped $800 million in a single afternoon.

The CEO (Dominic West) is nowhere to be found. And the only explanation the company gives is that its automated, super-fast investment algorithm experienced “a glitch.”

Kyle fires shots into the ceiling, locks the doors and traps the crew and director (Julia Roberts) in their Manhattan studio.

“I’m not the REAL criminal,” he shouts. “It’s rigged. It’s all fixed! They literally OWN the airwaves!”

He wants answers. And he’s hellbent on getting them.

“I came in knowing I’m not walking out.”

Clooney lets us see the panic and growing sense of guilt Gates might feel at putting everybody he works with in mortal danger with “research” and tips that are basically corporate press releases. And yeah, a lot more people than Kyle were taken in by his hype.

Roberts’ director, Patti, has already joked that “We don’t do JOURNALISM here,” but her think-on-her-feet competence gets a lot of people out of the building when the chips are down. Can she remember enough of her journalist past to find the answers before that bomb goes off?

There are the inevitable hostage drama benchmarks (Giancarlo Esposito is the head cop), but the script finds laugh-out-loud surprises in those. However, Foster squanders the story’s urgency with slack direction that robs the thriller of its ticking clock.

The communications director (Caitriona Balfe) of IBIS isn’t the rigid stonewaller the story needs her to be. The reporting shortcuts are what passes for “deus ex machina” in the movies these days — computer nerds/hackers reached by cell-phone.

And truth be told, the movie pulls its punches when it comes to business cable TV’s culpability in all this.

But after a TV-savvy opening, with Gates and Patti seat-of-the-pantsing a dazzling, ditzy show, the outrage flares up and never drops below a simmer.

And Foster moves us ever-so-cleverly onto the fence about whether this Cramerish clown should die for his sins, even if he looks like George Clooney. That’s why the world drops what it’s doing to watch.

And that’s the money emotion of “Money Monster” — unfocused rage finally given something to that rage at, if only for 98 minutes.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, some sexuality and brief violence.

Cast: George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Jack O’Connell, Dominic West, Caitriona Balfe, Giancarlo Esposito
Credits: Directed by Jodie Foster, script by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore, Jim Koif. A Sony/Tristar release.

Running time: 1:38

Harry Hawkes is loud, boorish and overbearing, a real life of the party because he insists on being just that.

To state the obvious. Never was a man so intent on making a splash, or in his case, “A Bigger Splash.”

But there’s a desperation to this guy’s face-consuming grin, Harry’s backslapping way of bowling over friends or anyone more polite or genteel or considerate than he is.

Harry, given every ounce of impulsive, brash, unfiltered brio that Ralph Fiennes can give him, is the last thing rock star Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton) needs as she recovers from throat surgery. Her beau, Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) will say it even if she has no voice.

“Jesus, does he EVER stop?”

The answer is “No, never,” and before Paul can get out his objections on the phone, Harry is off the plane on the small Italian island where they’re staying, imposing himself and a young lady (Dakota Johnson) on these two with not so much as a “by your leave.”

Of course they’ll pick them up at the airport. Of course they can stay in their modest villa.

“Christ, THAT took long enough,” is what passes for “Thanks” from Harry.

He’s a record producer, and the young woman is a daughter he never knew he had. Harry and Marianne have history. Paul knows this history and is wary.

Harry’s flirtatiousness extends to one and all, even his supposed daughter. And sparks are sure to fly, as the woman who cannot talk cannot get in a word edgewise to protest this blast from her past that threatens to blow everything up all over again.

“A Bigger Splash,” a remake of “La Piscine (The Pool),” a 1969 French film starring Alain Delon, is directed with a tantalizing sexual tension by Luca Guadagnino, who also gave Swinton the sexually charged star vehicle “I Am Love.”

It is a movie of sumptuous, sun-baked and terraced hillsides, tiny, curvy dirt roads, a quaint town, remote tidal pools and a real pool…which Harry dives into naked, always without invitation.

There’s a competition set up. Who will bed whom, who will get out of here with what he or she wants? Flashbacks fill in the characters’ history together, third act revelations undercut some of that history.

The performances are of the meaningful, lingering stares variety, everybody working out what everybody else’s game is.

Fiennes exults and explodes and throws his weight around, Schoenaerts simmers and Swinton, sort of playing a Patti Smith/Joan Jett/Bowie mashup, sways back and forth in the tug of war.

Johnson tries on a Lolita-tease, hinting that there’s nothing innocent going on behind those bangs. She is, as she has been ever since “Fifty Shades of Grey,” attractive without creating anything interesting to watch. Guadagnino lets his camera linger over her more enticing body parts. She is piling up a lot of performances that call for her to be naked, but at least she isn’t alone here.

There’s heat and confrontation and a big dollop of melodrama in “A Bigger Splash,” a film whose location and situation dredge up memories of ’60s Euro-thrillers (“Knife in Water”) and Italian sexual melodramas (“Swept Away”).

It never measures up to any of those, as Guadagnino melodramatically telegraphs the script’s foreshadowing. It’s a slow film — patient might be a more apt description — as we can sense betrayals and confrontations almost from the start. I was actually disappointed that more anticipated red herrings weren’t tossed into the simmering sexual soup cooked up here.

But the striking Italian setting encourages the nudity, and the filmmaker and cast lead us into temptation, even though we can see it coming from a long way off.

MPAA Rating:R for graphic nudity, some strong sexual content, language and brief drug use

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Ralph Fiennes, Matthias Schoenaerts, Dakota Johnson
Credits: Directed by Luca Guadagnino, script by David Kajganich, based on the French film “La Piscine.” A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 2:04

Addiction and overcoming it is the most traumatic thing most people who endure it will ever experience.

Harrowing, dangerous, destroying your health and relationships and taking lives all around you, its very intensity must convince you that nobody has ever experienced anything like this.

Unfortunately, millions have. There’s so little that’s new or unique to say about it that it’s a subject that rarely makes for an enlightening or surprising movie.

So even though director Rob Reiner’s son co-wrote “Being Charlie,” an addiction/recovery drama loosely based on his own problems, there’s nothing here we haven’t seen before. That makes the movie a 97 minute slog to a conclusion we see coming in minute one.

We meet Charlie (Nick Robinson) as he’s bailing out of yet another rehab. It’s in Utah, and he leaves with an act of defiance — breaking the stained glass windows of the chapel.

His second act upon escaping? Hitchhiking. His third act? Stealing oxy pills from the driver’s elderly mother who is dying of cancer.

That’s the sort of creep Charlie is, an affluent punk of 18 who is deep down the rabbit hole of denial, arrogantly lying that “This time it’ll be different” to his wants-to-believe-mom (Susan Misner).

But it isn’t. The guy who dashes out to fetch him in Barstow (Devon Bostick) is his best friend, and best enabler. He’s into drugs and girls who are into drugs.

Spoiler alert. Charlie must A) figure this out the hard way and B) finally decide to “accept” his disease, and vow to help himself.

The wrinkles in that standard issue AA narrative are that Charlie’s dad is a famous pirate actor (Cary Elwes) running for governor, that Charlie meets a fetching, damaged girl (Morgan Saylor of “Homeland”) in recovery and that he’s an aspiring stand-up comic.

Romance “gets in the way of your recovery,” his counselor (Common) lectures. But Charlie knows better. Such sponsors, group therapy leaders and the like, are righteous folks, many of them recovering addicts themselves. But to Charlie, they’re just voyeurs looking for “courtside seats to human suffering.”

It’s hard to develop much sympathy for this rich kid’s self-inflicted trauma. And Reiner, whose last good movie was “Flipped” (2010), does nothing to help young Robinson (“Jurassic World”) rise above the utterly routine script. The direction is pedestrian and the movie, start to finish, makes us feel nothing.

Whatever high-mindedness was behind it, “Being Charlie” is no different from being any other addict. From intervention to check-in, group “sharing” at the halfway house to backsliding and skipping some of the twelve steps, we’ve seen it all before.

It takes nothing away from the awful thing people who experience this go through in saying that movies about it all too often are all tropes that render it trite.

MPAA Rating:unrated, with violence, drug abuse, nudity and sex, profanity

Cast: Nick Robinson, Morgn Saylor, Devon Bostick, Common, Cary Elwes
Credits: Directed by Rob Reiner , script by Matt Elisofon, Nick Reiner. A Paladin release.

Running time: 1:37

The best of this year’s admittedly weak selection of Mother’s Day movies, the one getting a wider release AFTER the Hallmark holiday, is “The Meddler,” a broad and uneven comedy that coasts by on the charms of Susan Sarandon and the twinkle of J.K. Simmons.

Writer-director Lorene Scafaria won this battle with the casting. Her slight, unchallenging comedy about a hovering Jersey mom who has moved to LA to be nearer her “We need some boundaries” daughter, relies on low-hanging fruit for its jokes. But Sarandon in the title role, Rose Byrne as the put-upon daughter and Simmons doing his best Sam Elliott impression as the possible “love interest” give it the spark of life.

Marnie has been widowed a while, and has decided to fill her days with phone calls to her daughter, a TV writer (Byrne). Or pop in visits.

“I brought bagels!”

Marnie is lonely, given to impulsive gestures like, well “bagels.” Oh, and paying for the wedding of “what’s-her-name” (Cecily Strong of “Saturday Night Live”), a distant friend of her daughter’s.

But daughter Lori has her own issues. She’s newly dumped, by an actor, no less. She’s got a sitcom script to polish. She’s barely keeping it together and Mom cannot help but bring up her ex. Incessantly.

” I think we should get you a hobby.” Why not volunteer at the hospital? At least that’ll keep her from grilling Lori’s shrink for details about why she’s so sad.

Marnie is outgoing, though you sense she was something of a shrinking violet around her late husband’s gregarious Italian family. She trots out astrological judgments, unsolicited advice and presents. She still misses her husband and is in a little denial over that. She fills her time by imposing her generosity of spirit upon others.

“The Meddler” is a film of cute moments and the odd touching scene, which serve to interrupt the steady cavalcade of cliches. Marnie stumbles onto a movie set and is mistaken for “background” (an extra). Marnie stumbles across an old woman who has lost her voice in the hospital. Marnie takes too much of an interest in her favorite Apple Store employee’s (Jerrod Carmichael) education and life.

But Sarandon gives this material plenty of grace notes, imparting the sensual delights of the perfectly prepared, farm-fresh egg-in-a-hole.

She gets to play that because Marnie is set up to be charmed by the mustachioed and twinkly ex-cop turned chicken farmer Zipper. Simmons literally lights up the movie in his scenes with her.

Will Marnie learn to move on, live again and maybe stop bugging her only child to death? You don’t have to be a mom to know the answers. You just have to have a mom, “a birth mom” or that winning substitute characters talk about her, “an Earth mom” — somebody who cares enough to get under foot, and stay there.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for brief drug content

Cast: Susan Sarandon, Rose Byrne, J.K. Simmons, Cecily Strong
Credits: Written and directed by Lorene Scafaria.  A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:40

It has eye-popping special effects and a true larger-than-life villain.

“X-Men: Apocalypse,” is actually about something, with the intramural/intra-mutant quarrel built on a reality that the shoe-horned in fight in the blockbuster “Captain America: Civil War”lacks.

The violence has consequences. Blood is spilled, and people die.

And it has, for the most part, better actors — James McAvoy, the tormented and empathetic Micheal Fassbender, Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence and the omnipresent Oscar Isaac’s jawline and furrowed brow  are visible under the makeup and effects as that villain.

With Bryan Singer back behind the camera, the action beats are meaty and the odd lump-in-the-throat is possible as the story sums up so much of what we’ve learned about these characters, who have survived brawls, betrayals, discrimination, the Holocaust and the Atomic bombing of Japan between them.

But the epic effects, titanic struggles timed out every 30 minutes or so and ever-growing, ever-evolving line-up of characters of “Apocalypse,” coming hot on the heels of “Civil War” and “Batman v. Superman” and “Deadpool,” underline the exhausted ingredients of the formula these movies all use. So many movies, so many mutants, with filmmakers straining to find something new to do with them, and watching them try too hard is wearying. They’re joyless technical exercises, as predictable as a video game.

It’s 1983, and Xavier (McAvoy) is happily running his school for the “gifted” (mutants). Magneto (Fassbender) has been in hiding since trying to overthrow the government back in ’73. He’s sweating away in a steelworks in Poland, married with a little girl.

Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) is every schoolkid’s heroine after besting Magneto a decade before. But she’s keeping a low profile through the ’80s her own self.

Scott Summers (Tye Sheridan) is discovering he’s just as “special” as his brother, Alex, aka Havok (Lucas), and maybe an ordinary high school isn’t for a guy whose eyes can burn through steel.

The lightning-quick Peter Maximoff (Evan Peters) figures it’s time to leave home and show his stuff.

There’s an underground world of mutant cage-fighters in Berlin and a cult dedicated to this long-gone mutant in Egypt. And that cult may get its wish if En Sabah Nur, the Original mutant (Oscar Isaac) comes back from the dead and fulfills his dream of remaking, “cleansing” and ruling the world.

Puny humans have no prayer against the First X-Man. Might the other X-Men have a shot?

This finale to the “prequels” sees Xavier finish rounding up the technology we saw in the original trilogy, and hears McAvoy sound a LOT more like Original Xavier Patrick Stewart in the role.

Xavier preaches “hope” and cautions that every gift can sometimes be considered “a curse.” Especially the most special gifts of all — reading minds, moving objects with your brain, shooting fire out of your eyes and what not.

And the junior mutants learn this lesson the hard way.

The most interesting new character is Quicksilver (Evan Peters), and Singer shows off the best stop-time effects the movies have ever seen as he dashes in to save others in less than a blink of an eye. He gets a his own showcase scene set to ’80s Eurythmics pop.

Least interesting is Psylocke, mostly due to the fetching Olivia Munn’s lack of comfort in her skimpy costume and the elbow-length gloves that confuse her about what to do with her hands.

The most fascinating continuing character is Magneto — Holocaust survivor, given to switching sides and turning on humans because he’s seen the worst the human race has to offer. He’s the most motivated villain these movies have produced.

The coolest character? You know who that is, and can only hope he skips that barber’s appointment and makes an appearance.

Fassbender makes us feel things in ways nobody in the “Avengers” universe seems inclined to try. McAvoy, too, gives his character heart and motivation.

But Lawrence’s disengagement as an actress in her two past-their-expiration-date franchises (“Hunger Games” and X-Men) has been obvious in her performances. She has a “big speech” in this just as she did in the last “Hunger Games,” and she never looks more like a gawky teen than when she’s supposed to be commanding.

Isaac is mostly lost under prosthetics and effects.

“Who rules this world?” he growls, upon awakening to the sight of “$25,000 Pyramid” and “Knight Rider” on TV, ’80s haircuts and Atari and “Six Million Dollar Man” T-shirts.

The attempts at humor don’t have the light touch of the best “Avengers” pictures. Singer and the script and the newby characters try too hard.

Take away “Deadpool’s” self-referential sarcasm and the genuine gloom “Batman” still conjures up, and one is hard-pressed to think of anything novel any of these movies have brought to the medium or the comic book popcorn picture this year.

Box office numbers don’t back this up, but could 2016 be the year we finally overdose on comic book movies? The staggering ticket sales have producers all sure they’ve found the foolproof formula for a blockbuster — Lots of special people, The More Mutants the Merrier — wisecracking and brawling with one another.

But it’s getting to be enough, already. And when the end comes, studio executives, unlike our favorite mutants, are not clairvoyants. They’re killing the golden goose. And when it dies, they’ll never see it coming.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of violence, action and destruction, brief strong language and some suggestive images

Cast: James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, Oscar Isaac, Rose Byrne, Olivia Munn, Sophie Turner, Tye Sheridan, Nicholas Hoult
Credits: Directed by Bryan Singer, script by Simon Kenberg. A Fox/Marvel Studios release.

Running time: 2:23

The actual opening number, from Deadline.com’s reported studio estimates early Sat. am, is around $180 million. That’s better than “Iron Man 3” but still not as good as four other popcorn picture opening weekends.

“Star Wars: The Force Awakens,”  “Jurassic World,” just as much a remake as “Force Awakens,” “The Age of Ultron” (Remember the “Transformers?” Oh, were we ever that young?) outperformed it.

By the way, “The Avengers” was also in that list.

Could be as low as $174, as high as $182, based on how Saturday and Sunday shake out.

Good reviews, overall. It’s a 3D movie (pricier tickets) and on over 4200 screens.

And they opened it Thursday night, giving it a $25 million head start.

It’ll still open $26 million below the all-time best “Avengers” era opening weekend, which should be sobering to all the studios competing to get comic book adaptations out the door in the same limited release window. These things have a ceiling, a finite box office appeal. And even if guys-in-tights fatigue doesn’t seem to be setting in, there’s only so much they can wring out of them, even at inflated 3D prices.

Also of note on this week’s charts, “Mother’s Day” is holding its audience from last weekend. Not setting the world on fire, but Garry Marshall & Co. will have gotten a passable two weeks out of it by the time it fades. $30 million take, by the end, is all it’ll manage. It will have cleared $21 million by Monday AM.

“Keanu” is officially a complete bust, flopping on opening weekend, losing 70% of its audience the second. Key, say goodbye to Peele.

“Batman v. Superman” have both cried all the way to the bank — weak reviews, and they’ll hit the $335 million mark by the time they lose all their screens (next week).

Tina Fey never gave Katrina Bowden much to say or do on her TV show, “30 Rock.” All Cerie, her character, had to do was waltz on screen in some tight, revealing outfit, and Bowden’s work was done. Jaws dropped and clocks stopped.

Fey’s approach was, “Fair is fair. She was dealt a full-house, looks-wise. Why add to that stacked, um, deck, by letting her act?”

So it takes a little getting used to, Bowden acting impulsive, doling out advice to teens as a stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold in “Hard Sell.” She’s not bad, and neither is the movie, even if they’re both overly reliant on her other already-established assets.

Writer-director Sean Nalaboff has tried to cook up a “Risky Business” for a much MUCH more politically-correct era. No way you’d be able to remake the film that launched Tom Cruise and Rebecca DeMornay to stardom. A rich teenager acts as pimp for a hooker he hires to entertain his peers? Come on. Mothers Against…something would be up in arms.

The PC version has Hardy Buchanan (Skylar Gisondo, of “Vacation”) as a working class kid living with his mentally-broken mother (Kristin Chenoweth), wondering how he’s going to get into a good college, pay for a good college or finance the cancer operation on the family dog, the only thing keeping Mom going.

“I could’ve SWORN I made dinner!”

Never mind how this unemployed Long Island mom keeps her boy in Spirit Academy, where the preppies come to play.

A bit of extra-curricular volunteer work at a homeless shelter is how Hardy meets “Bo” (Bowden). He says the obvious, as if that makes us forget how much the entire set-up strains credulity.

She is “WAY too hot to be in your position.”

Bo is a stripper with “stage fright.” Funny, because we’ve seen her flee a mental hospital in that backless gowns that do nobody (save her) justice in the film’s opening scene.

Bo is casual by nature, and a little off. His horny teen peers gawk at her, she flashes them for cash and a lightbulb pops on in Hardy’s head. She’ll overcome her “stage fright” by taking off her top, for cash, in the boy’s locker room. And that’s just for starters.

Next thing you know, Hardy is full-on pimping the woman out to country club kids who need a date to the dance.

“No touching. No photos.”

That goes for Hardy himself, who doesn’t merit so much as a “You have GOT To be kidding” when he talks about coming on to Bo. That dispenses with the pity sex/pity striptease dilemma.

Another tricky dilemma to navigate — Hardy knows that she’s a bit mental. “All the women in my life are crazy.” He’s taking advantage of a gorgeous crazy woman.

The twist in the story is Bo’s sympathetic ear for all manner of high school angst — pressure from parents about college, about dating “the right person,” about sexual preference. There’s nothing here to suggest she has the wisdom to be dispensing advice, but she does. You either go with it or you don’t.

“Kids are like penguins — always lookin’ for a place to chill!”

More promising is the “Ferris Bueller” turn the story could take, at any minute, thanks to Hardy’s friendship with the disaffected Goth he keeps running into in the school infirmary. (Each is using up excuses to get out of class/tests, etc.)

Hannah Marks of TV’s “Awkward” is beguiling in that ethnic girl-next-door Hollywood way. And Gisondo is a competent leading boy/man, if little more.

Chenoweth dials down her bubbly musical theater persona to play depressed and smaller-than life.

But this “Risky Business” is averse to risk. There’s no edge to it. Only the sentimental stuff works.

The clumsy, makeshift, steer-clear-of-trouble plot forces us to reckon with the leading lady. And Bowden is simply not up to the heavy lifting.

She’s more than “30 Rock” ever let her be, but not by much, judging from “Hard Sell.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with adult situations, pot use and profanity

Cast: Skylar Gisondo, Katrina Bowden, Kristin Chenoweth, Hannah Marks
Credits: Written and directed by Sean Nalaboff. A Momentum release.

Running time: 1:36

The reviews of “Captain America: Civil War,” have been overwhelmingly positive. Many are raves.

Just like the reviews of “Barbershop: The Next Cut,” or “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”

I’ve been in that tiny minority, on all three occasions, shouting “Wait, this isn’t all that” or “this is crap” into the infinite void.

But at least I haven’t been alone. Movies have changed, Marvel has moved into mass production, a comic-book assembly line stretching out into the foreseeable future.

And the disappearance of so many legacy media critics has tilted reviewing in a new direction. Let’s call it, “Lie back and think of England.” Because that’s what it feels like, a lot of people sort of rolling over for this or that sure-to-be-blockbuster (“Barbershop” had many media entities sending their C-reviewers, which still doesn’t explain why Johnny and Jane have no taste. Or guts.).

Doesn’t matter that given just a tiny bit of time, fans and critics stop huffing whatever it is they’re inhaling and REALIZE what a more diverse cast but still inferior carbon copy of “Star Wars: A New Hope” “The Force Awakens” actually is.

Because it takes a certain nerve to endure the abuse you know you’re going to get from fanboys (it’s always the boys who’re the ugliest) when you pan a movie that’s set to become a temporary “phenomenon.”

Overwhelmingly positive reviews for “Captain America: Civil War,” which doesn’t deserve to be in the same conversation as “Captain America: The First Avenger,” or “Deadpool.” Not that the fanboys want to hear that. It’s not cinematic, the action is repetitive obviously sped-up to make movie stars look like superhuman superfighters and the script, not even bothering to ID this villain or that hottie in the short skirt and knee-highs, is strictly needs-based, as in “We need to invent a reason for these guys to fight. Doesn’t matter if anybody buys into it. It just needs to happen.”

Cynical. Marvel is watering down its brand while the brand is still platinum. 

Everybody in the Marvel universe (not even close) shows up in this one. But mention Ant Man, and some nerd from Puerto Rico is cussing you out for “spoilers.” Dude, it’s in the art the studio provided for the movie. See above.

Shakespeare brought back a crowd favorite, Falstaff, to make his “Merry Wives of Windsor” a surefire hit. More recently, Hollywood TV producers and film moguls have encouraged crossover mashups to draw a crowd. It’s an idea they borrowed from the comics of the ’60s.

Special editions, or “Let’s make a boatload of money off our fans by giving them the team-ups they wanted” invaded the DC and Marvel titles, seemingly when they’d run out of other ideas and villains worth fighting.

So it is with the Avengers movies, and “Batman v. Superman.” They’re stealing some of the X-Men thunder, in the process. But at least those came to big screen life in that form — the more “mutants/enhanced beings” the better. More and more tickets sold, enthusiasm only grows.

I sat in the theater Tuesday, knowing that overseas reviewers and a few domestic fanboy critics had creamed their jeans over it. And up until the Battle Royale, I was scribbling in my notepad, “They’re all worked up over THIS?”

Just bandwagoning, I figured.

“Civil War” has already opened huge, overseas. That “America” brand has value everywhere, even among the Godless communists and third of the world that hates us. Go figure.

The Box Office Guru figures Marvel and its Disney overlords will pocket $185 million by midnight Sunday. That might be low.

Nothing else of note is opening wide, nothing else in theaters is going to make a dime.

And then the younger X-Men show up.

Let the summer comic book takeover begin.

There’s a “for fans only” feel to the latest “Avengers” movie, “Captain America: Civil War.”

A talky, often ponderous exercise in comic book movie elephantiasis, it overdoses on characters, old and new, sometimes not even bothering to name them.

The script has a villain with a point of view and motivation, though the “Civil War” of the title seems more a plot necessity than anything anyone thrown into conflict on screen actually believes in. And the villain is nobody we can sink our teeth into.

The film lacks Joss Whedon’s light touch with that script, Jon Favreau’s whimsical way with the characters or Joe Johnson’s lump-in-the-throat pathos behind the camera.

And there’s something unsavory about the absence of fanboy punching bag Pepper Potts, more precisely the actress playing her (Gwyneth Paltrow). She’s kicked out of Iron Man’s life in a manner that screams “pandering” or at least “market research.”

“We’re on a break!”

That said, “Civil War” makes for a watchable parable about infighting, hubris and all-powerful “enhanced” personalities who never ever can admit they were wrong. It’s about the limits to absolute power and the consequences of “avenging.”

A parable of America in the drone era of the endless “War on Terror”? Yeah, maybe. A Marvel riff on “The Incredibles”? Most certainly.

The “Winter Soldier” (Sebastian Stan) is still out there, Hydra’s last assassin, and is supposedly behind a bombing at a U.N. meeting. Captain America (Chris Evans) alone is sure his former childhood pal has been set up.

Bureaucrats (William Hurt, Martin Freeman) are all about reining in The Avengers, whose brawls have been cool to watch, but with a body-count and collateral damage only now being brought into question. Iron Man Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and War Machine (Don Cheadle) are reluctantly willing to accept some limits and responsibility for their “very public mistakes.”

Cap and Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and the unidentified Scarlet Witch (tarted up Elizabeth Olsen) are too high-handed for that. Their sense of certitude has them hunting for answers.

And this African prince (the wonderful Chadwick Boseman of “42”) resolves to don his own “enhanced” superhero suit (Black Panther) to avenge his father’s murder in that U.N. bombing, with or without help.

Meanwhile, this odd Putin-esque presence (Daniel Bruhl of “Rush”) is piecing together old Hydra manuals, digging into the Soviet-linked work that led to The Winter Soldier, pulling the strings.

“I want to see an Empire fall.”

Flashbacks foreshadow where the past — a younger (digitally de-aged Downey) Stark recalls his last conversation with his parents (Hope Davis, John Slattery) — ties into the present. We bounce from Vienna to Berlin, Washington to Cleveland, with every city ID’d with huge, portentous titles.

“CLEVELAND.”

All of which brings the SuperFriends, um, Avengers, to a breaking point, a “Whose side are you on?” rupture.

And that’s where “Civil War” finally finds its sense of fun, dragging in much of the rest of the Marvel universe so that they can all fight it out. Iron Man summons up his Marvel favorites. Captain America has his own superheroes up his sleeve.

Co-directors Anthony and Joe Russo are no better at comedy than they were back with “You, Me and Dupree.” The film’s pacing is slow, thanks mostly to a script that has all these waypoints to hit to reach its title-decreed destination. It takes a good hour and a half to really get going, not that there aren’t a few (action sped-up) fights and chases before then.

They’ve made a film claiming life-or-death consequences for uses of force (Alfre Woodard is given half-a-scene to make that point), without the guts to deliver those consequences. They’ve introduced a villain with a real Magneto-sized beef with the world, but the script and Bruhl never let us see that.

They’ve split up the Avengers with no more thought than they gave the other bone they tossed the fanboys with the removal of the GOOP gal.

“We’re on a BREAK.”

As shown by “Batman v. Superman”and earlier “Avengers,” comic book movies have morphed into the ensemble era with a sense of their own gravitas, with screenwriters determined to freight them with analogies to the state of America and the world. It works here about as well as it did with the Bat and the Man of Steel. Only this series — A”Captain America” movie without the heart, or an “Avengers” movie without the comic sizzle? — strains to find its footing in either tone.

What might be lost without a Whedon, Favreau, Johnson or others of like mind, is a sense of fun, the real marvel of Marvel. And if you’re not having fun with guys and gals in tights and capes, what is the point?

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Cast: Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Anthony Mackie, Elisabeth Olsen, Don Cheadle, Daniel Bruhl, William Hurt, Paul Bettany and Chadwick Boseman.
Credits: Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. A Marvel Studios release.

Running time: 2:26

As much as we all love “discovering” fresh, new talent, there’s something to be said for casting your film with, if you can, movie stars.

They understand, perhaps intuitively, something about the camera, how to leap through the lens, make us forget every other role they’ve played and connect.

Movie star moments light up the otherwise drab ensemble melodrama “Mothers and Daughters,” a soapy serial about a wide range of somewhat inter-connected mothers and daughters and how they relate.

Mira Sorvino, playing a designer of “haute couture brassieres,” will make you a little moist-eyed.

And Susan Sarandon, as a mom still supporting the daughter who can’t be bothered to visit home, will stick with you for laying a little mother-daughter wisdom on us all.

“I needed to have you to teach me to be a daughter to MY mother.”

Christina Ricci and Courteney Cox have too few scenes to make an impact, Sharon Stone, Eva Amurri Martino, Alexandra Daniels and Selma Blair play assorted mothers and daughters (and both) in the film, which covers a lot of variations on motherhood/daughterhood in its 91 minutes.

One woman has just found out she wasn’t raised by her mother, and that her “sister” isn’t exactly her sister. That sister is dealing with some big-time guilt.

Another is living off mom’s cash, supporting her cupcake chef-to-be boyfriend but keeping mom at a distance for some long-ago offense.

Another mother is trying to figure out why her Princeton-educated daughter is waiting tables. That daughter is coping with a dying friend.

One is about to meet the daughter she gave up for adoption long before.

And one woman’s a careerist who discovers she’s pregnant and has to decide what to do.

Paige Cameron’s script attracted two Oscar winners and some pretty big names, but director Paul Duddridge (TV’s “McKenna”) delivers a movie that emotionally flatlines through this material.

Every intersection had the characters take the road more soapy — terminal illnesses, terminal grievances, sexy OB-GYNs, an “abortion” choice that the movies long ago lost the courage to make.

The stories don’t give any of the mother-daughter pairings enough screen time. Cox looks as if she needed a few more weeks off for whatever procedure that’s frozen/deadened her facial muscles to wear off. She looks like a “Real Housewife,” with the plastic to prove it. It’s worth mentioning because it’s distracting enough to make you wince.

Ricci, Sorvino and Blair have been criminally under-employed for years. But there’s little here to make Hollywood make amends for that.

There’s one funny line — “You’re a straight guy who wants to sell pastries in lower Manhattan. Not exactly a slam-dunk.”

Otherwise, “Mothers and Daughters” is drabness on the screen personified, a “Lifetime Original Movie” too unoriginal for Lifetime to want anything to do with it.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some mature thematic elements and brief drug use

Cast: Selma Blair, Susan Sarandon, Mira Sorvino, Christina Ricci, Sharon Stone, Courteney Cox, Eva Amurri Martino
Credits: Directed by Paul Duddridge, script by Paige Cameron. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:31