Movie Nation

The totalitarianism of Tribalism is skewered without anesthetic in the darkly unpleasant satire “The Lobster,” a film about couples and loners and the ways they enforce their norms on others.

Then again, maybe not.

The latest obscure musings by Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos (“Dogtooth”) is full of shrewd observations about a world obsessed with everyone EVERYone’s relationship status and applies higher stakes to “We’re a couple” than modern society sanctions.

“The Lobster” is science fiction and social satire, and thanks to blood and bloodless choices, a pretty grim sit-through. Did I mention “unpleasant”? Yes? Just checking.

David, played by Colin Farrell at the pot-bellied onset of middle age, has just been dumped by his wife. That means he must go to this resort hotel in rural Ireland to meet someone new. He just must.

But this is a resort the same way “The Lord of the Flies” was an island vacation. Guests sit at a hundred tables-for-one until they find someone who will allow them to move to tables-for-two. They go to joyless mixers and have passionless sex with the staff as a way of preparing for couplehood.

And they compete with one another in daily dart-gun hunts for “loners,” with each “kill” adding a day to their 45 day stay, thus improving their odds.

Because the consequences of not coupling are dire. You choose an animal you’re content to spend the rest of yours days as upon arrival. Because that’s what they’ll transform you into if you fail. The loners, it is implied, already face this fate. That’s why the forests are populated with flamingos, camels, peacocks, wolves and rabbits. That’s why the world is overrun with cats and dogs.

That’s why David showed up with a lovely sheep dog. It was his brother. “He…didn’t make it.”

David has chosen “Lobster” as his spirit animal. Because “They can live 100 years, they stay fertile the entire time, and they have actual blue blood, just like royalty.”

We don’t have much hope for David. He’s painfully shy, fearful, even when he’s with his new posse, the lisping fellow guest (John C. Reilly) and the limping limp-wristed one (Ben Whishaw).

At least the limper is determined to find somebody, willing to do whatever it takes. David and the lisper seem lost before they begin.

It’s a world where every dismissal, every polite beg-off or rebuffed invitation to dance has life-or-death consequences. The sad “biscuit woman” (Ashley Jenson) lets her desperation and suicidal tendencies show.

The mixer dances, presided over by the singing couple in charge (Olivia Colman, James Finnegan) are like forlorn postcards of a long-faded romantic event. The punishments and humiliations for offenses like masturbation are excruciating, heartless and cruel, just like the hotel’s most “successful” hunter/guest (Angeliki Papoulia).

Which is why David flees and falls in with a gang of loners, led by the ruthless and just-as-cruel Loner Leader (Lea Seydoux).

The loners have their draconian rules, just like the totalitarian couplehood, where police check lone shoppers for their marital status. Loners in the woods cannot mate.

But in the woods with the loners is where David meets somebody just as short-sighted as he (Rachel Weisz, who narrates the story).

That’s one of the running digs of “The Lobster.” In this world, people are conditioned to look for superficial “compatibilities,” like a computer app. Got a limp? Find a woman with a limp. She gets nosebleeds? Better make sure you get them, too.

Every line sounds like something computer-written with all the feeling synthesized out of it.

“We dance alone. That’s why we only play electronic music.”

In spite of everything, David and his fellow short-sighted connect. Going through the motions of pretending to be in love (so that they can “pass” for a couple for excursions into the city) makes them fall in love. And the metaphor — love is short-sighted and can’t see all the way to an unhappy ending — is potent if obvious.

Farrell doesn’t give away much as David. But the Oscar-winning Weisz lets the lonely longing show behind her eyes. In the right role, she can be heartbreaking.

Seydoux is marvelously hateful, a lovely loner bent on breaking up the fascist-imposed couples.

Couples just starting out are assigned children to distract them from their problems with each other if they start fighting. The whole society is built upon misconceptions, traditions, what-must-be, like a theocracy or communist family planning state that imposes couplehood, procreation and “happiness” on one and all.

It’s all too droll and tinged with loveless sadism to go down easily, a “1984” for a loveless, disconnected but Facebook “connected” age.It hurts.

And that makes “The Lobster” more a movie that you appreciate and ponder than one you embrace and enjoy. Whatever its intellectual pretensions, I am looking forward to never seeing it again.

MPAA Rating:R for sexual content including dialogue, and some violence

Cast: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, John C. Reilly, Léa Seydoux, Ben Whishaw, Jessica Barden
Credits: Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, script by Efthymis Filippou and Yorgos Lanthimos. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:58

Girls, parents may argue, are “twice as much trouble as boys.” So a movie about partying sorority sisters would have to offer double the trouble of one about frat bros.

That’s the logic behind “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising.” It has to be twice as raunchy, exponentially more transgressive — crossing lines you just don’t see comedies cross — right?

It doesn’t. It’s got just about enough laughs, but there’s so much more that the Script by Committee wants to shoehorn in, like female empowerment, bad parenting passed off as “doing our best” just like our parents, gay marriage and the incredibly sexist college Greek system, a relic of the “Animal House” era that remains as “rapey” as ever.

“Neighbors 2” is a 92 minute comedy that plays like a two hour drag, a real check-your-cell-messages endurance test.

Mac and Kelly (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne) have a toddler who loves playing with Kelly’s vibrator. Somehow, she’s not gotten her hand on Mac’s vast bong collection. Because whatever else these two have done, growing up themselves is not something they’ve mastered since “Neighbors.”

But Kelly’s pregnant again, or as Mac might put it, they’ve got a “little Jew in the oven.” Ahem. They find out when she vomits on him in the middle of intercourse.

They have a big house, but it’s time to get a bigger one. But things are afoot with the big, eight-bedroom monstrosity next door.

Shelby, Beth and Nora (Chloe Grace Moretz, Kiersey Clemons of “Dope” and Beanie Feldstein) meet each other as college misfits — unpopular girls turned off by the sexual salesmanship and second-class citizenship that sororities pass off as “sisterhood”(Selena Gomez leads the most popular one).

So the stoner Shelby (Moretz) and her pals resolve to start their own sorority, where young women have the same rights as frat bros. In other words, they can throw parties. Because sororities aren’t allowed to do that. Only fraternities. As Selena’s character snaps in the movie, “Google it.”

The “start our own” thing idea was stolen from an Amanda Bynes comedy, “Sydney White.” But never mind. Five credited writers can’t be expected to be original.

The stupid-high rent of the house forces the girls to enlist help. That’s where Teddy (Zac Efron), frat bro stuck in “quarter life crisis” and a Foot Locker job ever since college, comes in. He’ll mentor them. And have his revenge on Mac and Kelly.

He has a criminal record, thanks to them. He will “facilitate the act of partying in the house,” help them round up recruits who will pay the rent. “I just want to feel valued,” he says.

The “old people” are trying to sell their house. They’ve cluelessly nodded their way through the real-estate contract that put their house in escrow. They need the new owners not to see college coed chaos for 30 days. And the girls, just as childish, won’t cooperate. So they call the girls’ parents (Kelsey Grammer) to complain, and “It’s on.”

The “war” has a couple of funny battles — one involving a riot and chase as Mac and Kelly and their friends trying to steal the pot the girls want to sell to cover expenses.

Teddy, trying to find himself after his best-frat-bro (James Franco) gets engaged to another bro, switches sides.

Hilarious single-scene cameos score, with Grammer, Lisa Kudrow (snarky college chancellor) and Hannibal Buress (campus cop) landing laughs. The singing guy-to-guy engagement moment is adorable.

A sorority hazing ritual has the new girls dressed as (Universal’s) Minions, doing all the house chores. Cute.

Efron takes his shirt off, repeatedly, dances a striptease. Use it while it lasts, brother. The same goes for Rogen, whose plump, profane stoner act is wearing thin.

But the many random amusing moments are broken up by the girls’ questioning their values and the parents next door coming to grips with how bad they are at parenting. You just know “teachable moments” are on the way.

Director Nicholas Stoller puts WAY too much effort in “showing both sides,” and the girls aren’t remotely as funny or interesting as the alleged adults.

But maybe this movie will do some good. If “Animal House” brought generations back into the fraternities, “little sisters” of fraternities and sororities of America, maybe “Neighbors” will awaken the parents who write the checks to exactly the sort of warped system and even more warped values system (albeit, sometimes hilariously so) going Greek perpetuates.

Judging from such parents as Mac and Kelly, though, it’ll never happen.

MPAA Rating:R for crude sexual content including brief graphic nudity, language throughout, drug use and teen partying

Cast: Seth Rogen, Chloe Grace Moretz, Rose Byrne, Zac Efron, Kiersey Clemons, Lisa Kudrow
Credits: Directed by Nicholas Stoller, script by Andrew J. Cohen, Brendan O’Brien, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Nicolas Stoller. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:32

Why, exactly? Dead horse and all.

In “The Nice Guys,” director Shane Black and producer Joel Silver go back to the ’70s to relive their 1980s glory, those guns, giggles and gore action comedies like “Lethal Weapon” and “The Last Boy Scout.”

A hilarious Ryan Gosling and a gruff and grumpy Russell Crowe are the oddball pair in this “48 Hours” riff, two LA detectives — actually, one’s more an “Equalizer” than PI — thrown together in the search for a supposedly dead porn star.

It’s too long, and the mistaken-identity porn star bit makes only so much sense. There’s a “cute kid” for the guys to shoot, kill and cuss around. And the body count is packed with innocent bystanders.

But hey, it’s LA in the ’70s. It’s all in good fun!

Crowe is Jackson Healey, a guy you hire when you want somebody to stop coming-on to your under-age daughter, or to stop somebody from stalking you. That latter request comes from Amelia (Margaret Qualley), a fetching 20something who wants this guy to stop following her.

Gosling is Holland March, an actual private detective. He’s been hired to find Amelia, but Healey doesn’t know that as he’s breaking his arm. Literally.

March is a single dad, and that sassy, worldwise 13 year-old (Angourie Rice) amply illustrates one of Healey’s narrated gripes about the city.

“Kids today, they know too much.”

Her daddy? Not so much. He’s a lousy private eye. He’s clumsy, he cheats his clients and he’s plainly not tough in that LA detective Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe mold. Sunglasses, a license to carry, a love of booze and cigarettes are just not enough.

“I’m done. Put a fork in me. Don’t…put a fork in me.”

Gosling’s impish side is put on display here, as is his gift for physical comedy. Funniest scene? Him, a toilet, a .38 and a cigarette dropped down his pants. He gives that bit a run for its money several other times in the movie’s two hour run.

Crowe, as he proved when he bombed on “Saturday Night Live” a few weeks back, doesn’t have those gifts. He’s a born, gruff straight-man, 50something, barrel-chested, good at playing a cynic whose divorce made him bitter. How bitter?

“Marriage is buying a house for someone you hate.”

As in co-writer/director Black’s best movie, the film noir detective comedy “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang”, “Nice Guys” is peppered with wisecracks and “funny,” bloody deaths, like the nude porn starlet who dies in a gruesome car crash in the film’s opening scene. We see people in adjoining apartments or bystanders at a party go down in a hail of bullets.

Hilarious.

The porn industry of the era is as much a part of the movie as the classic cars (re-used in the background, in scene after scene) and the leisure suits.

But the zingers, which fall off markedly in the latter third when the energy flags and the plot unravels, always pack a punch.

The single-dad finds himself around 13 year-olds, some of whom aren’t his daughter. He can’t help but let a profanity fly.

“Jesus top-popping Christ!”

“You took the Lord’s name in vain!”

“No, I didn’t, Janet. I find it very useful.”

Kim Basinger plays a Fed, the great Keith David plays one more heavy and there’s a hit-man with a certain physical resemblance to a popular TV star of the ’70s.

And there’s Crowe, an Oscar winning outcast still trying to win the audience back, never cracking a grin, occasionally letting us see his softer side (he does more of that in “Fathers and Daughters,” opening in July). He should have studied Nick Nolte’s bearishly over-the-top turn in “48 Hours” more closely, because he needed to play this guy bigger, louder, testier.

But his comic shortcomings don’t ruin the movie. They just put restraints on a comedy , a potential franchise, that could have really taken flight. Because we’re rooting for these “Nice Guys” to finish not last, but first.

MPAA Rating:R for violence, sexuality, nudity, language and brief drug use

Cast: Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Kim Basinger, Keith David, Angourie Rice, Margaret Qualley
Credits: Directed by Shane Black, script by Shane Black and Anthony Bagarozzi. A  Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:56

You don’t have to be Ridley Scott or have $100 million to make a Trip to Mars movie.

A couple of minimalist sets, video monitors to bring other settings/characters and a desert you can film in reddish filters and voila — we’ve got our Mission to Mars.

But whatever Paramount’s modest intentions in green-lighting “Approaching the Unknown,” losing the race into theaters to “The Martian” renders it superfluous.

Some good actors make it worth checking out, but it feels like the rough draft for a prequel to the Matt Damon movie. It’s meditative without being deep, brief without feeling taut and tense. The most important thing it shares with “The Martian” is a sense of “We’re going to Mars. It’s time. Might as well get on with it.” Everything it does — survival space science, etc. — “Martian” does better, and with humor.

“Approaching the Unknown” is something of a tour de force for the great British character actor Mark Strong. As Captain William Stanaforth, an American on his way to be the First Man on Mars, he is all interior monologues about his suitability for solitude and the nature of the challenge.

“Nothing lives there. Nothing has ever died there,” he narrates. “But I’m going to bring it to life.”

Stanaforth is a biologist who has concocted a reactor that renders rocks and soil down to hydrogen and oxygen atoms, which it then links up for H2O — water.

NASA (never mentioned by name) has shipped some habitat units and supplies to the Red Planet. And since there’s now  a deep space two-man space station, Stanaforth and his ship, the Zephyr, will stop there to collect more supplies. That way not everything he needs has to be lifted from Earth by the same Heavy Lift rocket that will carry him to Mars.

It’s a “one-way mission,” but he’s not going there to die. He will set up camp, crank up his reactor, make water and grow plants. You know, like Matt Damon in “The Martian.” And others will follow.

The Big Idea here isn’t a new one. The pilot of TV’s “The Twilight Zone” was also spun off the conceit that the solitude facing one-man missions in space might drive an astronaut mad. And when things go wrong for Stanaforth, his Mission Control cap-com (capsule communicator), played by Luke Wilson, harangues  him about that from long distance.

“Keep it together. Stay sane. Stay focused.”

For a biologist, Stanaforth has mad engineering skills. He’s brought an old wooden tool box he no doubt inherited from his grandfather, and his trouble-shooting and tinkering talents are well-established in flashbacks (inventing the reactor) and fixing early issues.

But the one mission component that doesn’t have a backup is him. Even though there’s another astronaut following him a few weeks later (Sanaa Lathan) in another ship.

His supply stop at the space station tips him, and us, that this isn’t going to all go according to plan. The two man crew there is jittery, testy and nothing like the all-business/gung-ho astronauts we met from “The Right Stuff” generation. They’ve gone metaphysical thanks to the loneliness and prolonged pairing up.

That’s the main novelty of Mark Elijah Rosenberg’s debut film. The casual, caustic and curse-filled conversations, blame-slinging and blame shifting and disobeying of orders seen here has been pretty much winnowed out of the astronaut pool from the start by NASA’s rigorous psychological testing in the real world. Lathan has only a couple of (video monitor) scenes, and she shows human defensiveness and sass that we’ve never heard from real astronauts.

The Zephyr’s interior looks like the inside of the Space Shuttle (especially the Shuttle’s cargo bay), and Wilson’s Mission Control video images could have been filmed in a storefront office in any office park. Much of the effects budget was spent on dreamy Hubble Space Telescope-mimicking imagery.

I liked the practicality of the spaceship, and Strong’s performance. But “Approaching the Unknown” feels incomplete. The drama comes from situations that are old hat — “Approaching the Overfamiliar.” The third act is straight-up recycling which any classic sci-fi film fan will recognize. Rosenberg is nobody’s idea of a “Star Child.”

Still, if you want another lesson about why we should be going to Mars and what we’ll encounter and maybe find out about ourselves, “Unknown” will do until we have an actual liftoff.

MPAA Rating: R for language

Cast:Mark Strong, Luke Wilson, Sanaa Lathan
Credits: Written and directed by Mark Elijah Rosenberg. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:30

Children’s cartoons from most every film studio these days adhere to the Pixar model — especially in terms of themes and messages.

“You’ve got a friend in me,” and “friends stick together” and the like seems to be as deep as such movies’ screenplays go. They’re following the Hippocratic Oath of children’s entertainment — “First, do no harm.”

But there’s something unsettling about the film based on the popular “Angry Birds” video game — something almost sinister, and I’m not just talking about the game’s smart phone app reputation as “leaky,” as a data-mining tool used against those who download it.

In a sea of kids’ TV and films that preach diversity and pound an emasculating wimpiness into tiny noggins — think everything that came after “Arthur,” “Clifford, the Big Red Dog” and “Dragon Tales” on PBS, for instance — here’s a movie that embraces tantrums, lack of self-control, cynicism, violence and fear of “the other.”

Is it just about greedy pigs swarming over Bird Island and stealing all the birds’ eggs, and about slow-to-catch-on birds being shot into a pig fortress — missile, style — to retrieve them?

What are we to make of these invading/migrating pigs? What is the intellectual underpinning of Bird Island’s icon, the slovenly, inept and vain “Mighty Eagle” whose followers lose faith in him? An analogy for America, with this movie a commentary on a gullible but happy, peaceful Europe/West threatened by gauche, marauding “pigs”?

Nothing in any film is truly “here by accident,” and that’s especially true of animation. What was the veteran TV producer/writer who scripted this, Jon Vitti (“The Simpsons”, “The Office,” “The Larry Sanders Show”), trying to say or to slip in as subtext?

Unlike say, “Wall-E,” whose sermon about slothful, destructive consumption was out in the open, or “Inside Out,” which treated every facet of a personality as valuable and what makes us human, or “Zootopia,” with its blunt message of tolerance, “Angry Birds” (the film) is harder to deconstruct and parse.

The story concocted from the game concerns “Red” (the voice of Jason Sudeikis), who never really fits in on Bird Island because of his temper and eagerness to think the worst of others. He’s insulting, abrasive and a loner.

“Anger is  weed growing in our garden,” he is lectured. So something must be done about Red.

He’s sentenced to anger management therapy for one blow-up too many, and that’s where he meets the speedy but snarky Chuck (Josh Gad) the explosive Bomb (Danny McBride) and hulking, simmering Terence (Sean Penn). Matilda (Maya Rudolph) presides over them and runs their group therapy, to no avail.

Then the pigs show up. The pig everybody meets (Bill Hader) is amusing and charming and obsequious. He comes bearing gifts. All the flightless, conflict-avoiding birds let the pigs — there are others the head-pig isn’t admitting came with him — flatter them, entertain them with their country music hoedowns and the like.

But the pig ship hit Red’s house, and he’s not falling for them. He gripes, protests and embarrasses all the birds with his rudeness to their guests, who wear COEXIST bumper stickers on their polluting vehicles, but have this “Twilight Zone”-“To Serve Man” eagerness to their actions and “consume everything” lust in their eyes.

Red seeks counsel from the legendary Mighty Eagle (Peter Dinklage), a pot-bellied icon who caresses his many trophies and pees into his own “Pool of Wisdom” at the top of Bird Mountain. He’s no help.

But when the pigs reveal their true nature, Red must lead the birds out of their complacency and into the fight that the video game is famous for.

“We’re birds. We’re descended from dinosaurs. We’re not SUPPOSED to be nice!”

Sight-gags — a woodpecker is the courtroom artist/newspaper photographer, pecking out images on wood. There’s a Birds & Bees Fertility Clinic, and the pigs are into Pig Latin, Ham Radio and DVDs (“Kevin Bacon Is “Hamlet”!”).

Sudeikis is well-cast as a bird whose “cardinal sin” is cynicism, but he has virtually nothing funny to say. The thinly-disguised avian profanity, “Well, pluck my life” is about it. Gad, McBride and the rest of the voice cast is similarly wasted.

There’s a funny 3D gag or two (never enough to warrant the higher ticket price). And the combat finale is visually inventive and explosive.

But if it’s not about the laughs, and this isn’t, then what is this exercise in brand marketing really going for?

The “Twilight Zone” episode that this ties to, based on a Damon Knight short story, had an anti-communist subtext. Was Vitti trying to turn Red into an anti-Red, or something broader? Anti-consumption/anti-capitalist? Anti-immigrant?

Children’s entertainment has long had more going on than is obvious on first blush, from Babar the Elephant to Peanuts to “Wall-E.” “The Angry Birds Movie, disquieting as it feels, is certainly trying to shove something between the lines.

But the effort is so clumsy and the lines themselves so limp that the entertainment that’s supposed to be the vehicle for this murky message fails, and with it the movie.

MPAA Rating:PG for rude humor and action |

Cast: The voices of Jason Sudeikis, Danny McBride, Maya Rudolph, Kate McKinnon, Bill Hader and Peter Dinklage
Credits: Directed by Clay Kaytis, Fergal Reilly, script by Jon Vitti. A Sony release.

Running time: 1:37

If horror movies are meals, “The Darkness” is one that takes the smorgasbord approach.

It’s got demons, a haunted house, portals to “the Third World,” a demon-targeted autistic kid, Native American rituals, an alcoholic mother who sees things but whom no one will believe, and a Mexican American exorcist.

The “Darkness” effects — shadows and ghost handprints and underworld storms projected onto a suburban bedroom ceiling — are decent.

Kevin Bacon and horror vet Radha Mitchell (“Silent Hill”) anchor a solid cast. Director Greg Mclean did the primal Aussie horror pic “Wolf Creek” and its sequel.

But it’s a lumbering affair, a fright-fest with no frights, a scary movie with zero sense of urgency.

A family vacation into the desert parks of the American southwest puts their tweenage autistic son, Mikey (David Mazouz) in touch with Native American spirits, thanks to his stumbling into a ritual religious cave. He puts some engraved stones into the backpack he never lets out of his Autism-focused sight.

And when they get home, all Native American hell breaks loose.

Only it doesn’t. This patchwork script meanders and dawdles. The neighbor’s canine barks an insistent warning.

“What is UP with that dog?”

And Mikey communes with the spirits, letting them and their menacing ceremonial masks and sooty footprints into Mom’s nice, clean house.

Too much time is spent establishing this family’s dysfunction. Mom used to drink, daughter (Lucy Fry) has rage and eating issues, architect Dad acts awfully guilty about…something.

It takes a good hour for anybody to catch on, and even longer to seek any sort of help. Of course, their first call is to a supernaturalist.

The frights have not punch to them and the slow pace — see Radha Mitchell in the tub, see Radha swim laps — is the result of a film stuffed with filler scenes that don’t advance either the plot or us to the edge of our seats.

The scariest thing about “The Darkness” turns out to be the trailers to this summer’s more promising horror offerings, “Lights Out” and “Don’t Breathe.”

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic elements, some disturbing violence, brief sensuality and language

Cast: Kevin Bacon, Radha Mitchell, Lucy Fry, Paul Reiser
Credits: Directed by Greg Mclean, script by Shayne Armstrong, Shane Krause, Greg Mclean.

Running time: 1:32. A High Top/BH Tilt release.

“Captain America: Civil War” still owns the box office this weekend. But it’s falling off over 60% from its robust $179 million opening frame. A 60% drop is a little steeper than average with a blockbuster with great reviews and audience enthusiasm. You’d expect a 40-50% fall-off, mainly because of the staggering numbers tallied on opening, and the fact that Thursday night tickets count in that mark.

That means it’ll hit $70 million, not the $80 million that was predicted. Nothing to sneeze at, but nothing that should have scared every other studio from opening anything close to it.

Thus, “Money Monster” opens in the $15 million range, reaching a different (older) audience, out-performing its predicted $12 million ceiling. Mixed reviews didn’t help it, but they aren’t killing off that Clooney/Roberts appeal either.

“The Darkness” tried to wrench away some of that comic book movie audience, the horror fans subset of it. And failed. It’s only managing about $5 million for the whole weekend, based on Friday night’s numbers.

“Captain America” will surpass Disney’s latest “Jungle Book” by early next week. The Kipling classic is just over $300 million now, and “Civil War” will be at $295 or so Sunday night.

No explanation required.

The pedigree for “Fathers and Daughters” suggests there were great expectations for this melodrama at one time.

Oscar winners Russell Crowe, Jane Fonda and Octavia Spencer, Oscar nominee Quvenzhane Wallis and reunited “Big Love” lovers Amanda Seyfried and Aaron Paul are in the cast.

The director, Gabriele Muccino, helmed two blatant grasps at Oscar nominations for Will Smith, “Seven Pounds” and “Pursuit of Happyness.”

It has Crowe, who has never recovered the fans he lost eleven years ago when he infamously tossed a phone at a hotel clerk, playing a novelist and doting daddy who is losing his mind, a sad, sick man who may lose his daughter to evil in-laws in the process. That’s what’s called “softening the image.”

It has Seyfried as that daughter, all grown up and dealing with intimacy issues by bedding and abandoning every man she fancies. What might happen if she finds Real Love (Paul)? She’s also a psychotherapist in training, trying to help a speechless child (Wallis, of “Beasts of the Southern Wild”) overcome her own “trust” issues.

Spencer is Katy the future-shrink’s mentor/adviser, Fonda is Jacob-the-cracking-up writer’s stoic literary agent.

And for good measure, there’s Diane Kruger as the brittle, drunken sister-in-law who can never forgive Jacob for being at the wheel in the accident that killed his wife, her sister and Katy’s mom. Bruce Greenwood plays her hatefully rich, heavy-handed husband, determined to wrench young Katy (the adorable Kylie Rogers) from her daddy.

But the sum of “Fathers and Daughters” is so much less than each of its individual parts. A misshapen attempt at maudlin (not unlike Muccino’s other Hollywood films), it enrages, here and there, but rarely touches or moves us.

Crowe is at his most sympathetic, a man having seizures, committing himself to a mental hospital in the film’s 1989 opening. He fetches six year old Katy from the in-laws upon getting out, but they’re all over him, determined to adopt her out of his life. He needs money. He needs a hit book. And he’s losing his mind.

Cut to the present, 27 years later, where Katy is pursuing her psychology degree. No, that college math doesn’t really add up. Seyfried, whatever wildly uneven career she is pursuing these days, is quite sympathetic as a broken woman whose psychic injuries date from decades before.

“I don’t love,” she tells her own therapist. “There’s nothing in here.”

The “Why is she still in college at 32?” math is just one of the lapses in the movie’s logic. Katy is constantly defying orders to break through to the child she’s treating, with no consequences. Greenwood and Krueger’s characters are insufferable caricatures of the worst in human behavior.

And the novel that the “blocked” writer frantically types away at is apparently inspired by the simple banalities of his own father-daughter relationship. That’s a best-seller?

Muccino should have thinned this out, picked up the pace to give urgency to the novelist’s impending madness and literary quest, spent less money on peripheral characters so that he’d feel less guilt about trimming their scenes to quick sketches that make the plot work. Fewer sex scenes (We get the point.,), fewer over-the-top seizures (Ditto), fewer father-daughter idylls.

Without those trims, “Fathers and Daughters” — The banality of the title is telling. That, and it makes no sense in the story as edited and presented here. — amounts to a lot of dead space with the odd great moment, a lot of plot and characters and dead-end scenes that add nothing to a story we have been twenty minutes ahead of after the first half hour.

MPAA Rating: R for some sexual content/references

Cast: Russell Crowe, Amanda Seyfried, Jane Fonda, Octavia Spencer, Diane Kruger, Quvenzhané Wallis
Credits: Directed by Gabriele Muccino, script by Brad Desch. A Voltage release.

Running time: 1:56