Movie Nation

Zoe Bell, probably the most famous living stunt-woman thanks to Quentin Tarantino making her a co-star of “Grindhouse” and “The Hateful Eight,” takes her shot at leading lady in “Camino,” a chase-through-the-jungle B-picture set in revolutionary Latin America.

It’s a simple , if clumsy and obvious and unsatisfying story tailor-made to play to her strengths. She fights, she tumbles, she climbs and she runs like a Warrior Princess (The Kiwi Bell got her start doubling as Xena).

Bell is Avery Taggart, an award-winning combat photographer who has always put the job first. Still, she’s a little leery of her latest assignment. Her editor (Kevin Pollack) sends her into the jungles of Colombia, embedded with some do-gooder guerrillas led the cagey, cocky Guillermo (Nacho Vigalando). They provide medical help to remote villagers. They say.

But this coed-band of Robin Hoods do so armed to the teeth. They need to know Avery is down with their mission.

“I’m a woman without government,” she declares. “The camera sees what it sees. Nothing less, nothing more.”

But her camera sees something it shouldn’t. And before you can say “Saw THAT coming,” she’s on the run, hunted down by people more acclimated and better armed than she is. It’s just that we’ve all seen she’s a bit of a fitness nut. She’s built like a tougher Ronda Rousey. And she’s Zoe Bloody Bell. Bad news for the guerrillas.

The fights don’t defy the laws of physics and Bell makes us believe the terror Avery must overcome and that she has the cunning to fight back, fight and win, fight and kill.

Flashbacks — hallucinating about her love life, black and white stills of her previous assignments — dot the narrative.

But the story is trite and the dialogue hackneyed in the extreme. You just know that every time one of the fighters has her down, he or she is going to make a speech in “Hollywood Mexican Villain” Spanglish.

“I am goink to KEEL joo now, slow and painful.”

And then he doesn’t. Whoops. Spoiler alert?

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, sexual situations

Cast: Zoe Bell, Kevin Pollack, Nacho Vigalondo, Sheila Vand, Nancy Gomez
Credits: Directed by Josh C.  Waller, script by Daniel Noah. An XLRator Media release.

Running time: 1:44

Gerard Butler has been Jean-Claude Van Dammed to a career of blood-drenched B-movies like “London Has Fallen.”

Well, and big-budget dogs like “Gods of Egypt.”: At least he’s not all Egypto-tanned for this one.

“London,” the sequel to “Olympus Has Fallen,” is an ultra-violent F-bomb-laced hundred-body-bash through the British capital.

Because at a state funeral there, world leaders are slaughtered by a lot of guys dressed up at British cops. And British soldiers.

The Brits are going to be irked.

The French prime minister is killed being fashionably late.The French may fume over that.  Japanese prime minister is trying not to be late. The Canadian prime minister is politely right on time and dead. Oh, Canada.

The German president gets it from the palace guards at Buckingham Palace.

BOY, are the Brits going to be irked.

And the Italian one is caught stealing a smooch from his 29-turning-30 trophy on top of Westminster Abbey. OK, Italy won’t mind that.

But the American president (Aaron Eckhart) is early, a security thing pushed by his Secret Service minder, Mike Banning (Butler). Mike has a “Not on my watch” mania that keeps the Commander in Chief alive and at large.

“Mr. President, those had beter be comfortable shoes!”

The streets are filled with motorbiking terrorists, dressed as U.S. Delta Force terrorists. in control of the city’s closed circuit cameras and power grid.

Scotland Yard is slow-footed and impotent. In the White House, the VP (Morgan Freeman) and council of advisers (Jackie Earle Haley and Robert Forster and Melissa Leo among them) look on in horror as Internet threats about an Internet execution of the Leader of the Free World is promised.

Yeah, it’s about revenge and yes, Mike goes Super Sadist Super Quick — knives and neck-snappings and emptying all manner of automatic and semi-automatic weapons

Did I mention that Mike’s an expectant dad whose letter of resignation we’ve already seen his letter of resignation? As his wife (Radha Mitchell) would say, “Of all the days…”

That’s kind of how “London Has Fallen” goes — all action, a staggering body count, profane and forgettable tough-guy one-liners. The villain (Alon Aboutboul of “Body of Lies”) is Eastern Generic and Butler is infallibly Western Generic.

Director Babak Najafi lets Butler chew the scenery with thinly veiled racial rage — visceral, torturous stabbings and righteous, ritualized slaughter of the Middle Easterners. There’s little drama, but the fights and chases (Butler hanging out of a moving SUV) are exciting, if not very original.

Eckhart is stoic and mostly passive, his eyes betraying a “What went wrong?” curiosity about his career. The White House scenes are so static and stale that we laugh at the unlikely presence of Jackie Earle “Freddie Krueger” Haley out of boredom.

Only Angela Bassett aquits herself with honor. She has a scene that makes us feel the violence, the violation, the outrage and grief.

The rest of this short but clock-watching movie is as flat as only the digitally rendered destruction of London can make it. Good, clean — OK, not so clean — sadistic fun that won’t make anybody feel anything or remember a single scene within hours of seeing it.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and language throughout

Cast: Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Angela Bassett, Alon Aboutboul, Morgan Freeman, Radha Mitchell, Jackie Earle Haley, Robert Forster
Credits: Directed by Babak Najafi, script by .Creighton Rothenberger, Katrin Benedikt, Christian Gudegast, Chad St. John

Running time: 1:39. A Gramercy release.

You’ll want to catch “The Wave” because it’s fun to see Hollywood disaster movie cliches rendered in Norwegian.

It’s got a Jeremiah, warning the locals that The End is Nigh, the end in this case being a tsunami in their tiny fjord-side tourist town. He sees the signs — crevice’s shifting, birds abandoning their roosts.

You’ve got the doubters shouting “You need to calm down!” and “We can’t cry ‘Wolf!’ every time we suspect something up here!” The fools.

There’s his hotel clerk wife (Ane Dahl Torp) working right at sea level, their  teen son blithely skateboarding with headphones, unaware of the sirens.

Life is snatched from the jaws of death, and vice versa.

Good stuff, tried and true and formulaic, but benefiting from great effects and a classic ticking clock narrative.

Norway’s first movie in this genre has a prologue, news clips of how rock slides in fjords have killed many in the past. Norway’s seismic network of mountain watchers features Kristian (Kristoffer Joner), ready to leave cozy Geiranger for the big city and a job with an oil company.

But his last day on the job — his LAST DAY — he sees those signs, he shouts his warnings on the phone. He dashes through town, rounding up his family in his 1999 Cherokee, because even in Norway, there is Only One Jeep.

But will he be too late?

Terrific moment number one — the siren sounds at night, and all over the Norwegian mountainsides, lights pop on. Moment number two — Kristian stops to help a stranger and is forced to ride out the coming tidal wave in her car. Water plunges over them, the chaos beneath the surface is full of horrors.

It’s all standard-issue stuff, but rendered in realistic and compelling strokes by director  Roar Uthaug. With a name like that, you know the wave itself is going to be a doozy. 

Yes, we’ve seen all this before, often with an all-star cast and always with a “Hollywood Ending.”

But the tropes and cliches of these movies show up time and again for one reason. With or without subtitles, they work.

MPAA Rating: R for some language and disaster images

Cast: Kristoffer Joner, Thomas Bo Larsen, Ane Dahl Torp
Credits: Directed by Roar Uthaug, script by John Kåre Raake, Harald Rosenløw-Eeg. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:45

Tina Fey gives her finest, funniest big screen performance by essentially doing in “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” what she did so well on TV’s “30 Rock.”

She plays the lovelorn, put-upon and insecure woman in a man’s world, and surrounds herself with some absolutely hilarious co-stars.

There’s something just-so-right about seeing “the forgotten war” (Afghanistan) through the eyes of America’s smart, 40something sweetheart. It’s a Fey-out-of-water travelogue with Fey, as real-life TV newswriter Kim Barker, childless and single and north of 30, accepts re-assignment in the early 2000s to a war zone rendered a backwater by the invasion of Iraq.

She leaves behind her job “writing for stupid, pretty people” (news anchors), her beau (Josh Charles) for “the Kabubble,” Kabul, another place for Fey/Barker to be show she can be a naive klutz. She asks the wrong questions, brings the wrong backpack (bright orange) and takes stupid risks because she doesn’t know any better.

Her fixer, Fahim (Christopher Abbott) gently tries to set her straight. Her colleague, a surprisingly sassy Margot Robbie, warns her about how attractive she’s going to be to every man in country.

“You’re like a what, 6, maybe 7 back in New York?”

And the Marine officer (Billy Bob Thornton) she deals with most is the most blunt of all — growling about her “4-10-4” status (A “4” in New York, a 10, briefly, in Kabul, back to a 4 when she leaves.) and offering her a “wet hooch” without ever cracking his thousand-yard-scowl.

That’s a tent with a shower. The military runs on slang (“Zero stupid thirty” is very early in the AM) and acronyms, as does “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.” Abbreviate the title, kids.

See Fey fumble into her first firefight. Hear Tina curse like a Bangor barmaid, something the film’s title in acronym form foretells. And through her, we see this world (actually, New Mexico) — clouds of U.S. dollars literally blowing away in the wind, Western women like Barker cursed and abused by an endless array of devout, women-oppressing locals — blood and carnage during their “embed” patrols, out-of-control drunken revels many nights.

Alfred Molina is the funniest he’s been in years as the rising star of Afghan politics who feigns interest in keeping Taliban ideas like running the rural districts on sharia law even as he’s coming on to the fetching Ms. Barker at every turn.

And Martin Freeman of British and American public TV’s “Sherlock” is the wiseacre, war-coverage-weary Scottish reporter who makes one move after another on Barker.

“An accent’s not the same as a personality,” she reminds him.

There’s a lot of dimly-lit, hand-held filming to get us into the nervous rush of a combat zone. But the best sequence in this Glenn Ficarra/John Requa action/comedy is when they put Barker/Fey into a burqa, the “blue prison” her fixer calls it. Covered, head-to-toe, seeing the patriarchy of the Islamic world at its most retrograde (Islamic Law enforcers “executing” TV sets) reminds us that political correctness aside, this is a world we have no connection to, that is beyond our efforts to “help” traverse the gulf that would get it into the 21st century.

War lords are “businessmen,” the poppy trade was all they had and no amount of school building/well-digging and Western pop music will change it overnight.

The filmmakers (“I Love You Philip Morris”) go on well past its climax and the movie’s indelicate assessment of Afghan culture and the bubble Westerners must live in while trying to “save it” won’t be to every taste. But Fey and “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” strike just the right tone (occasionally) in reminding us the endless nature of this mission, the grim effort to hold the American public’s attention long enough to accomplish it and the gonzo adrenaline junkies who take on that last and impossibly difficult mission.

MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, some sexual content, drug use and violent war images

Cast: Tina Fey, Margot Robbie, Alfred Molina, Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Freeman, Josh Charles
Credits: Directed by Glenn Ficarra, John Requa, script by Robert Carlock, based on the Kim Barker book. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:52

Funny that no one ever thought to pair up screen veterans Richard Schiff and Ricky Jay as brothers before. They look alike, and have this complimentary intensity — Schiff (“The West Wing”) and his quiet, simmering, rational rage, Mamet-pal Jay with his scary, streetwise and dangerous edge.

They aren’t the leads, but they’re the heart and driving force of “The Automatic Hate,” an indie family mystery masquerading as a puzzling, misguided romance.

Davis Green (“Lincoln”) is a Boston chef with a weepy, highly-strung ballerina girlfriend (Deborah Ann Woll). One night their romantic idyll is unsettled by this equally weepy, oh-so fetching blond (Adelaide Clemens of “The Great Gatsby”) who tells Davis “I’m your cousin, Alexis Green!”

That’s odd, because Davis knows his father (Schiff) was an only child. Oh no, Alexis assures him. “I’m not a crazy person.”

She then proceeds to act like one, insisting on a too-too-friendly hug that sets off the ballerina. And how.

But Davis is intrigued. He asks his developmental psychologist dad, who denies everything, discovers a clue in the attic, and questions demented granddad about the issue.

“We do not TALK about Joshua,” the old man rants.

Davis follows his curiosity to rural upstate New York, where he discovers a hippy branch of the family — three rowdy, vulgar daughters and their ex-flower child parents — running a thrift store, a farm and a medical marijuana dispensary.

Things go a bit sideways at this point, at least for me. Confronted by the coarseness of his blood-kin peers and the outright hostility of his “uncle” (Jay), Davis declares he’s not “afraid of what’s going on.” He should be. There’s bad blood here. The clues are laughably obvious (old home movies), the menace palpable.

And the kindest words his uncle has are “It’s easy to despite somebody from a distance.”

“The Automatic Hate” is a tricky melodrama to get a handle on, because characters — Davis, in particular, but others too — keep behaving in ways that defy reason. The “hate” may be automatic, but common sense dictates caution, and caution is thrown to the wind for reasons of plot convenience and cinematic prurience.

Both fathers have something they’re hiding from their children. But do their spouses know the crime at the heart of their dispute? We can see the train wreck Davis is wading into, why can’t he?

The elders of the cast steal the show from the heavy breathing youngsters, and the inevitable family dinner confrontation is a doozy.

But “The Automatic Hate” winds up a thoughtful puzzle of a movie that doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny, a slice of Southern Gothic displaced into rural, redneck New York that loses something in the geographic translation.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with sexual situations, nudity, profanity

Cast: Joseph Cross, Adelaide Clemens, Deborah Ann Woll, Richard Schiff, Ricky Jay
Credits: Directed by Justin Lerner, script by Justin Lerner, Katharine O’Brien . A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:37

Years have passed and the love triangle at the heart of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” is long gone. But the fights are even more amusingly spectacular and the visuals — every frame a painting — are as sumptuous as ever in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Sword of Destiny,” the sequel to the surprising 2000 Oscar winning hit.

Director Ang Lee is nowhere to be found, but actor turned stunt choreographer and director Yuen Woo-Ping (“Iron Monkey”) keeps this somewhat trite sequel on its feet and on the move, with the help of a willing and able (to fly) cast.

“The Sword of Destiny” finds Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) over 50 and long-removed from the noble but doomed love triangle that fired her actions nearly two decades ago. She has resolved to help protect this magically-endowed green sword from falling into the wrong hands.

That would be the West Lotus gang of Hades Dai, played by a balder, thicker and dubbed Jason Scott Lee (“Dragon”).

Yu Shu Lien is one of the last followers of “The Iron Way,” and she is entrusted not just with protecting the sword, but with taking on a pupil — the lithe and pale martial arts mistress Snow Vase (Natasha Liu Bordizzo). They capture one of Hades Dai’s masked villains (Harry Shum Jr.) and bide their time.

Because help is coming. It’s led by Yu Shu Lien’s long lost lover, now traveling the land in a wide-brimmed hat like some lone gunman of the Old West. “Silent Wolf” he is called, and the great martial artist Donnie Yen (“Hero”) returns from the dead to play him.

Yuen Woo-Ping gives Yen a star entrance, and hurls into one brawl after another, helped by a newly recruited gang of younger heroes such as “Silver Dart Shi” (Juju Chan) and Turtle Ma (Darryl Quon) and Flying Blade (Chris Pang), each with a particular skill

The fights and the wire work — You will believe a martial artist can fly! — are epic and beautifully staged. A scuffle on a frozen lake, beatdown in a forest roadhouse and the battle royale finale are real knee-slappers.

Yeoh and Yen wear a wonderful world weariness. The new players, stuck with switched baby stories, hidden birthmarks and such, are left high and dry.

Because the story is silly to the point of insipid. We sit through the usual montage of inscrutable training rituals (“A predictable attack has a predictable outcome.”) and brace ourselves for the blood that will be shed as the field is winnowed down for one final clash between the best of the best and the best of the worst.

The plot’s a yawner even if the action isn’t, all of it basically a set-up for a younger generation of wire-savvy young performers to move center stage in this not-really-a-saga. The world this is set in — super-saturated colors, pristine sets — feels surreal, less lived in than the best Jet Li/Jackie Chan/Donnie Yen kung for pictures.

Still, if the only martial arts movies you’re seeing are “Crouching Tiger” pictures, it’s good to know that they’re keeping up with the state of the art, even if they’re not actually inventing it.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for martial arts violence and brief partial nudity

Cast: Michelle Yeoh, Donnie Yen, Jason Scott Lee, Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Harry Shum, Jr. Juju Chan, Eugenia Yuan
Credits: Directed by Yuen Woo-Ping, script by John Fusco. A Weinstein Co./Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

You can’t go wrong starting your movie — ANY movie — with a version of “Bang Bang,” that seminal, signature Latin pop hit, the ne plus ultra of Latin Boogaloo.

So “We Like It Like That,” a documentary about that somewhat slighted era in American pop, does just that — bouncing, right out of the gate with the infectious, sexy, comical and danceable tune that every band leader and his hermano covered during the era when Mambo married to R & B and boogaloo was born.

Writer-director Mathew Ramirez Warren tracked down the performers — some of whom are still playing, others resting on their laurels — who created this music in reaction to the mambo of Tito Puente and others that their parents loved. In the melting pot of New York City, Cuban-American and Nuyorican kids absorbed the doo wop pop, rock, R & B and soul, “developed a taste for collard greens and cornbread,” and Boogaloo was born.

“Bang Bang” was pretty much the source song of the genre and the movment, and hearing its creator chuckle through the PG-13 way it was created (live, on stage, trying to get an African American audience to dance) is a hoot.

Percussionists demonstrate the many varied sounds you can get off a standard Latin drum kit, playing the side of the drum head, the rim, the edge of the cowbell, etc.

Johnny Colon explains “adding blues notes” to Spanish-Cuban “guijara” music, and creating the sound.

Joe Bataan visits the church he used to break into, as a kid, to play a piano in the basement at all hours. They break the lock on that same piano so he can try it again, 60 years later.

The music was born, blew up and then died so suddenly — years before salsa surpassed it — that its many practitioners are full of conspiracy theories about why it went away.

And it’s the nature of such documentaries to end with an extended modern day concert clip, “Twenty Feet from Stardom” style. And as with all such films, the feeling generated by that is a mix of nostalgia, curiosity and fatigue. We’ve seen these guys at their peak, and seeing them still kicking it out as they’re pushing 70 is always somewhat deflating. They’re often fronting bands much younger than them, and they come off as elder statesmen propped up by youngsters who still have their A-game.

But “We Like It Like That” fills in some very necessary course requirements in Americans’ college of musical knowledge. Just hearing how that seminal, signature hit “Bang Bang” came about is worth the price of admission.

MPAA Rating:unrated

Cast: Joe Bataan, Johnny Colon, Pete Rodriquez, Benny Bonilla

Credits: Written and directed by Mathew Ramirez Warren. A Saboteur Media release.

Running time: 1:17

We tend to forget how godawful Eddie Redmayne was in the godawful “Jupiter Ascending.”

I mean, we remember how bad “Fantastic Four” and “Fifty Shades of Grey” were and they shared worst the Golden Raspberry Award for worst picture.

Dakota Johnson doubled down and won worst actress. And she was part of the “worst screen combo.”

And Eddie Redmayne, an Oscar winner and and Oscar nominee, collected worst actor.

Kaley Cuoco? They were just picking on her for voicing one of the chipmunks.

A first — a transgender non-actress takes a big acting prize for “Tangerine.”

Another boost for “Spotlight” — perhaps its final moment of glory, or one last Oscar best picture predictor.

Idris Elba and the kid take “Beasts of No Nation” wins. Netflix must be so proud.

And Brie Larson gets to polish her Oscar speech.

That was this year’s Indie Spirit Awards.

Best Feature: Spotlight

Best Director: Tom McCarthy, Spotlight

Best Female Lead: Brie Larson, Room

Best Male Lead: Abraham Attah, Beasts of No Nation

Best Supporting Female: Mya Taylor, Tangerine

Best Supporting Male: Idris Elba, Beasts of No Nation

Best Cinematography: Ed Lachman, Carol

Best International Film: Son of Saul

Best Screenplay: Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer, Spotlight

Best Documentary: The Look of Silence

Best Editing: Tom McArdle, Spotlight

Best First Feature: Marielle Heller, The Diary of a Teenage Girl

Best First Screenplay: Emma Donoghue, Room

John Cassavetes Award: Krisha

Robert Altman Award: Spotlight

Deadline.com is calling “Gods of Egypt” “the first big budget bomb of 2016.”

That may be. But a poor effort, all around (including marketing) still doubled the business the heavily-hyped “Eddie the Eagle” managed on opening weekend.

The all-star action picture “Triple 9” and “Eagle” each will manage about $5.5 million, maybe $6, based on Friday night’s numbers. “Gods of Egypt” may clear $13 million by Sunday night.

Bragging rights? Not really. “Deadpool” is about to pull in another $30-31 million, a runaway hit with repeat business and legs. “Deadpool” will slay and snark its way to $300 million by Wed., at the latest. Wow.

“The Revenant” is the only Oscar contender sticking to the top ten. Leo DiCaprio’s coronation is nigh.

“How to be Single” will be well over $40 million by next weekend, “Race” has turned into a badly-marketed Focus Features Flop. Shame on them.

And “The Witch” was too smart for the horror crowd to rally around.