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The beautiful young thing takes a moment, sailing a half million dollar sloop past a cliffside villa on coastal Portugal, to turn to the male model next to her, point out that villa and say “That’s my dream.”

We don’t know how Natalie (Mimi Keene) came by that pricey to buy/ruinous to keep yacht in Lisbon, where she apparently makes a living as a wedding dress…saleslady? We haven’t quite figured out why this lovely Brit — who moved to Portugal to “get away from herself” and maybe the sex video the womanizing creep-turned-hit-novelist Hardin (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) spilled onto the Internet — has forgiven hunky, alcoholic narcissist Hardin.

But in “After Everything: The Final Chapter,” the third fourth FIFTH film in this vapid “After” sex and money comes LOVE LOVE LOVE series of moon-eyed Millennial romances, we’ve learned not to ask “Why?” or “How?” or “What’s the attraction, here?”

They’re just young and thin and beautiful and monied, and that’ll have to do.

Somehow, Netflix and assorted directors, screenwriters and a rotating cast of supporting players have managed to get five films out of Anna Todd’s IA (Immature Adult) Fiction novel “Before” and make Andrew Garfield Lite, young Mr. Fiennes Tiffin, a romantic hearthrob for the ages.

Wonders never cease.

This time, our hero (ahem) is fighting writer’s block and the loss of his beloved Tessa (Josephine Langford) to the betrayal of turning their love affair into a hit novel. She’s barely acknowledging his texts, and he’s barely keeping it together — drinking, swinging into a menage a trois with his publishing house’s editor (Rosa Escoda), insulting his mother (Louise Lombard) and stepfather figure…I think (Stephen Moyer).

There’s nothing for it but to jet down to Lisbon to start the process of “making amends” with Natalie. But not before a little “Mile High Club” action with a stewardess. Well, that’s just a fantasy and well… baby steps, right?

The movie is one long mope around Portugal as Hardin dodges calls from his publisher, which may want his advance back if he can’t whip up a new draft, and from his old friend Landon.

Money and affluence and leisure are birthrights to this crew, even if you are slumming it in a tony wedding dress shop. Narcissism is a given. But, you guys, Hardin is suffering.

“Nothing matters in this world is she’s not in it,” Hardin declares between slugs of whisky and trips to the beach, the cliffs, the finest restaurants and bars Portugal has to offer.

The lazy affluence of this script by writer-director Castille Landon, means no real locations are identified, no scenic spot is appreciated and nobody depicted isn’t beach-body ready to peel off this or that article of clothing for some PG-13 grinding that barely merits an R-rating.

Maybe the “R” is for the hilarious fistfight/beat-down between the male models, whose gym visits and tattoos tell us how tough they are. Hardin’s hardcore enought to head-butt? Do tell?

“After Everything,” which follows “After Ever Happy,” “After We Fell,” “After We Collided” and just plain “After,” isn’t particularly hateful. But one does wonder what this piffle is doing to impressionable young minds.

If so many other generations have problems with Millennials’ work ethic, values etc., maybe it’s a steady diet of vacuous, shiny, unearned affluence like this that is messing with their heads.

Rating: R, bloody fistfight, alocohol abuse, sex, near nudity, profanity

Cast: Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Mimi Keene, Josephine Langford, Stephen Moyer, Rosa Escoda and Arielle Kebbell.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Castille Landon, based on a novel by Anna Todd. A Netflix release.

Running time:

“The Promised Land” is a “troubles on the farm” thriller, with a lone stoic battling the elements, greedy nobles and the sandy, infertile soil itself in an effort to tame the place and make his fortune.

It’s “Places in the Heart,” “The Southerner” and “Shane” in Danish, with iconic Danish star Mads Mikkelsen as the stubborn army captain who will not be uprooted, even if the land literally repels those roots.

Danish novelist Ida Jessen imagined uninhabited 18th century Jutland, a vast, sandy and under-inhabited heath in the western third of her homeland, as Denmark’s Old West for her historical novel “The Captain and Anna Barbara.”

Director Nikolaj Arcel recovers from the debacle of “The Dark Tower” to give us a beautiful but unsentimental genre picture with all the elements of the formula for such films served in their proper doses.

Mikkelsen plays Captain Ludvig von Kahlen, perhaps the bastard son of a nobleman who spent his life fighting for the German army. In the 1750s, he’s returned to Denmark after 25 years of service, seeking an audience with the king because he has some notion of making Frederik V’s fondest wish come true.

An army surveyor raised by a gardener, he will settle the infertile sandscape of Jutland, start a colony there of German farmers, and make it pay off.

“All soil can be cultivated,” he declares (in Danish with English subtitles). And he won’t listen to the huffing of bureaucrats and nobles who insist “better men than you have tried and failed.”

He rides out alone, takes core sample after core sample to try and find some patch that will support a crop. He then builds his “King’s House” on The King’s Land, and hires a couple of runaway serfs (Amanda Collin and Morten Hee Andersen) to make his start.

But there’s a sinister, titled fop who claims that land. And as he’s inherited not just an estate, but a judgeship in the region, Frederik de Schickel (Simon Bennebjerg) is ideally placed to stop the “bastard” son from succeeding.

The way de Schickel freely admits he added the “de” to his name to sound more royal and insults the poverty, uniform and everything else about the captain suggests the depth of his fear and resentment of this man who would be his social equal if he pulls this feat off.

Essentially, Bennebjerg has the Alan Rickman/Richard E. Grant role in this parable. He’s hatefully good in the part, playing a sadist who rapes servants and has been bribed to marry his Norwegian cousin (Kristine Kujath Thorp) to keep all the money in that gene line.

Denmarks’s official submission for Best International Feature in the 96th Academy Awards even gives us a “tater,” a “darkling,” the smart-mouthed Anmai Mus (Melina Hagberg) who runs with the thieving bands who roam the moors as an outlaw class. The captain takes her in, reluctantly, after she leads him to her clan, which he hopes to turn into a workforce.

But being dark skinned, she is “bad luck” to the Germanic Danes he wants to help him colonize this forbidding land.

Mikkelsen is well-cast as the guarded man of few words single-mindedly-pursuing land and the “set for life” noble title that he feels are his due.

“God put man on Earth to make civilization,” he tells the local priest (Gustav Lindh), his only ally. With the king’s backing, he is sure of success. But de Schickel is the law here, and the unreachable, alcoholic (it is suggested) king has no idea he exists.

Still, Kahlen refuses to take Schickel’s bait, won’t be goaded into fighting Schickel’s hired army officer goon (Olaf Højgaard) and resists the temptations of the unhappy cousin who has no interest in marrying the sadistic Schickel, whom the captain refuses to address as “de Schickel.”

But as sabotage is added to the myriad other challenges our intrepid frontiersman/farmer faces, as blood is shed and indignities pile up, we know a reckoning is coming.

The narrative sticks closely enough to historical events to feel believable and realistic. The setting is striking and the period detail ensures that we’re immersed in this hardscrabble world where being sentimnental about a goat, a woman or a child is a luxury our grim hero can ill afford.

It won’t hold many surprises for anyone who’s ever seen a Western or a movie Alan Rickman sneered his way through. But “The Promised Land,” with its themes of futilely fighting a “rigged” system to change one’s status, with dubious rewards even if you win, makes a most worthy saga, even without the sagebrush.

Rating: R, bloody violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Amanda Collin, Gustav Lindh, Kristine Kujath Thorp, Melina Hagberg and
Simon Bennebjerg

Credits: Directed by Nikolaj Arcel, scripted by Anders Thomas Jensen and Nikolaj Arcel, based on the novel by Ida Jessen. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 2:07

“Origin” is an important film, a movie that attempts to tie — in intellectual terms — the oppression and enslavement of Africans in the Americas with the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany and the immobility of India’s “untouchable” “caste” system.

It’s a “writer’s journey” tale about a Pulitzer-prize-winning American journalist and non-fiction writer Isabel Wilkerson’s efforts to understand why “racism” is “the primary language to understand everything” about American racial inequality, and her realization that the term “racism” is “inadequate” in that role.

“Caste” was the key, she came to believe, and she turned that thesis and exploration into a best seller — “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents” — which came out just as the 2020 presidential election was entering its crucial last weeks.

There’s no dishonor in writer-director Ava Duvernay’s reach exceeding her grasp with this big, broad and meaningful subject. Her movie meanders when it’s meant to sprawl and drifts between melodramatic — Wilkerson’s personal tragedies informing the book as she began it — and pedantic even when it’s at its most moving.

Duvernay, who has held most every position and job one can collect a check for on film and TV sets, and who directed “Selma” and “A Wrinkle in Time,” remains a better producer than director, even if what this picture sorely lacks is a producer who tells the director what to trim, tighten, streamline and emphasize.

But she’s made her “Malcolm X,” a quest story about the search for that curse that ties so much human misery together, the need to segregate, isolate, stigmatize and demonize in order to create a hierarchy to one group’s advantage and many others’ disadvantage.

We meet Wilkerson, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor of “King Richard” and “The Color Purple,” as she makes the social scene in Washington with her doting husband Brett (Jon Bernthal), celebrating her latest book on America’s “Great Migration” of African Americans from the Jim Crow South to opportunity and new challenges in the North and West.

But she’s buttonholed by a newspaper editor (Blair Underwood) who insists she needs to write something about the Trayvon Martin case, which has just happened. Even as she recognizes the legacy of lynching, the violence of police towards African Americans and “Nazi symbolism all over the place” in the U.S., Wilkerson resists this story.

“I don’t do assignments any more,” she says. She doesn’t want to merely “report” a story, but the “be inside the story.” That takes a book.

She mulls over the “connective tissue” she starts to see in racism, anti-Semitism and the “caste” system that sentenced one group, the “Dalit” “untouchables” of India, to permanent degradation and servitude.

As Wilkerson does, tragedy strikes her life and makes her ponder the weight of racism and undersclass status on her accomplished mother (Emily Yancy), an educated Black woman “married to a Tuskegee Airman” who can’t stop herself from fretting that young Trayvon Martin didn’t answer “that man right,” blaming an innocent young Black victim for his own death.

Wilkerson also marvels at the white husband who left his “caste” behind to marry her.

With her editor’s (Vera Farmiga) backing, Wilkerson travels to Germany and India, following in the footsteps of Black researchers Allison and Elizabeth Davis (Isha Blaaker, Jasmine Cephas Jones), anthropologists doing research in Germany just as the Nazis took over.

The Nazis, Wilkerson and others note, studied American Jim Crow laws in order to make The Holocaust possible. Thus, the Davis’s book “Deep South” becomes one of the cornerstones of Wilkerson’s own work.

She travels to India to learn from academics following in the footsteps of B.R. Ambedkar, the Dalit caste Indian who studied in Bombay, London and New York, an economist who wrote and agitated about the injustice of India’s caste system and who had a hand in writing India’s constitution.

Wilkerson takes lessons from her own family (Niecy Nash plays her closest cousin) about racial faultlines and “race-mixing” in marriages, and from a MAGA-capped plumber (Nick Offerman) whom she tries to establish a human connection with.

There are few things a working critic dreads more these days than the prospect of reviewing a two hour long+ movie on the Yugo of movie streaming providers, Indee.TV.

I have two movies to get through today, both falling on that blighted server’s tech, both of them failing to play. I change browers, Internet providers, resolution that the film is screened in, it’ll play a few minutes and then mysteriously quit.

I started the process last night, with dread. Because when you see it’s in Indee.tv, you know it’s going to eat up a whole day just trying to get them to get their end right.

Their many work-arounds — they’re used to all these complaints becauses it is the glitchiest, most unreliable service a film distributor can use to send previews of its movies — mean I have to re-log in on every site I use on a daily basis, trying to reset to this or that “mode” just to get Indee.tv to work.

So my apologies to Neon and Magnolia, but I’m not getting to two very promising, very LONG titles today because today, as always, Indee.TV sucks.

Chinese-Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen lets us in on his favorite films from film school with “The Breaking Ice,” a Chinese love triangle redolent in images, themes and situations of The French New Wave.

There are references to Truffaut’s “Jules et Jim” and Goddard’s “Bande à part” in this story of lost souls that find each other in a wintry corner of China with a unique place in Chinese life.

Korean culture, cinema and TV interest enough Chinese that there are tourists who flock to Yanji on the North Korean border, a Chinese-established prefecture for Koreans who have immigrated there. It was meant to be as Korean as China would allow.

Haofeng (Haoran Liu) is a sad introvert who has come there for a Korean wedding.

Nana (Dongyu Zhou) is a tour guide, leading the curious travelers around “traditional” Korean village recreations, into Korean restaurants and shops, all with an idea of introducing them to a (past) Korean culture that existed before Korea was divided, and without the necessity of isolationist North Korea opening its borders to tourism from its fellow authoritarian state.

And Han Xiao (Chuxiao Qu) is a cook at one of those Korean eateries. He’s sweet on the petite pixie Nana, but she’s a brittle soul, seemingly-resigned to this grueling work of standing and walking and grinning to strangers.

“Whether I like it or not, I have to do it” is how she sums that up, in Mandarin with English subtitles. She lightly mocks Xiao for his affection and puts him down to Haofeng by insulting his “mediocre” cooking.

Everybody has a secret or not so secret desire. Everyone is wallowing in quiet desperation. They are, in a way, as trapped as a local fugitive (Ruguang Wei), whose “wanted” poster is everywhere, thanks to a series of snatch-and-run thefts.

Haofeng loses his phone, the one he’s been mumbling “Wrong number” into every time his mental health clinic calls to try and reschedule his missed appointment. Haofeng tells strangers at the wedding and his two new acquaintances that he’s in “finance” and from “Shanghai.” The always-calling clinic is in Pujiang, a long way from Shanghai.

The three are brought together because she takes pity on the tourist with the lost phone (no access to money or the world without that) and introduces “handsome” but “always frowning” Haofeng to her not-quite-suitor Xiao. But they’re really drawn together the way lost souls always find their own in the movies, especially those from the French New Wave.

They chat and drink, sing karaoke and pub-crawl. But there’s something about the forlourn way she looks at skaters on a local lake, something in the way the cook describes never having “been anywhere,” and something in Haofeng’s despairing, clumsy courtship of Nana that suggests a world of hurt in which any one of the three could jump off a roof or cliff, wander off into the snow or drive into oncoming traffic.

Chen (“Wet Season” was his previous film) has made a movie of familiar themes and recognizable antecedents. But he offsets that by dropping us into an alien world so disorienting that little here neatly fits into a narrative box.

The characters can wander up to the Yalu River and shout across it at North Korea. They can pass checkpoints to go see a legendary lake in the bordering Changbai Mountains, a trio emotionally out of their depth soon literally out of their snow depth. And they can dare each other to see who can “steal the biggest book” from a bookstore they impulsively visit, “wanted” posters in a surveillance state be damned.

Chen adapts his characters from their New Wave or wherever origins to this world and lets the viewer peel away their mysteries, but he doesn’t give us pat answers about how they will face their respective fates.

“The Breaking Ice” thus becomes an obscure parable about belonging and connecting in a crowded, impersonal world, connections that are necessary for our well-being and are all the more difficult to make when we’re all uprooted from our past and rendered remote from human interaction right up to that moment we lose our all-important/all-demanding cell phones.

Rating: unrated, sex, some nudity

Cast: Dongyu Zhou, Haoran Liu and Chuxiao Qu

Credits: Scripted and directed by Anthony Chen. A Strand release.

Running time: 1:40

A young Belarusian immigrant finds himself questioning his “deal” with the French Foreign Legion — enlistment and service in exchange for citizenship — after a particularly brutal combat encounter in “Disco Boy,” a dreamy Immigrant’s Experience Odyssey from writer-director Giacomo Abbruzzese.

Abbruzzese, a documentary filmmaker making his fictional feature debut, tells a story of outsider struggle and a sort of shared victimhood between the Belarusian who joins the Legion for citizenship in a better country with the promise of a better life, and a young man from Niger who sees his country and people still exploited by its former colonial masters, who are all European and often French.

Our tale takes two young men, Alex and Mikhail, from their wily escape from Belarus through Poland to France. Only one survives. His journey is a terrible trial and takes days. At the end of it, his easy pass into French life is joining the Foreign Legion, a largely-immigrant force that trades fighting service for citizenship and “a new life.”

Alex will be tested by the usual boot camp ordeals. And he will come to question the entire bargain when he’s sent as part of an elite team that must ignore the other horrors of a conflict zone and only rescue the French hostages who are their mission.

Alex (Franz Rogowksi) is destined to run afoul of Jomo (Morr Ndiaye), a young African revolutionary fighting in the Niger River Delta, whose group kidnaps French oil workers and others to draw the world’s attention to their plight via foreign media coverage. And if Alex and Jomo must tangle, Jomo’s sister Udoka (Laetitia Ky) is sure to be drawn into this conflict.

Abbruzzese serves up revolutionary PR and messaging — “performing” for an American (Vice) TV reporter — and gives us vivid first-person combat experience, commandos with radio coms and night-vision fighting gear who find themselves in a shootout with river rebels in the dark, with Alex fighting to the death with one foe seen only in a heat signature.

And we see the tribal life, ritual dances and African world interrupted by the intrusion of foreigners and their lust for oil.

It’s a somewhat unfocused narrative, relying on music and “disco” dance as a bonding device, one of a few novel touches in a story that’s all-too-familiar, with the Croatian-French drill instructor (Leon Lucev) being the one novelty in the boot-camp-to-combat film formula.

Their sergeant leads the men in “No Je ne regrette rien” as a marching song. That and the cryptic, curative dance-off finale break free of the cliches of the genre just enough to make “Disco Boy” worth taking in.

Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Franz Rogowski, Morr Ndiaye, Leon Lucev, Michal Balicki and Laetitia Ky

Credits: Scripted and directed by Giacomo Abbruzzese. A Charades release.

Running time: 1:38

There are worse ideas than resetting “Alice” of ”Through the Looking Glass/in Wonderland” fame as a culinary horror comedy about cooking for vampires. Any non-vampire sucked into that world is going to have it “explained” to her the way so much had to be shown, introduced or explained to Lewis Carroll’s heroine, after all.

But “Alice and the Vampire Queen” is a lumbering, stumbling affair, a cute idea in search of the pacing, pulse-pounding suspense and punchlines that might have made it come off.

Writer-director Dan Lantz introduces us to a beaten-down Alice (Shelby Hightower), an abused ex-con chef who can’t even hold a job at a greasy spoon, offered the chance to make steak tartare and its fresh-kill variations for Dinners with the Vampire queen (Brenna Carnuccio) and her “court.”

The picture takes too long to set up, and a bit longer than we’d like to “make the sale,” arm-twisting Alice into this new gig.

“You can either make the meal, or be the meal” is understood, even if Lantz figures it needs to be said in this tiresome telling.

“Cooking for bloodsuckers” will be tricky, she’s warned by her human “head hunter,” Charles (Graham Wolfe). She’ll have to hold back her revulsion, which isn’t that hard to do thanks to a gruesome past she and Charles know about. And she’ll have to train her assistant chef, creepy Gordon (Chris James Bolan), who doesn’t appear to know what a “sous-chef” is.

“Like, an Indian?”

The vampire “court” is colorful…ish. The venue, complete with blood-letting floor-shows, almost passes muster.

But the poor pacing means that even characters that might have clicked, come-uppance scenes that should have paid-off and jokes that should have landed don’t.

This Dinner with Vampires is a few courses short of being a meal.

Rating: unrated, gory violence, profanity

Cast: Shelby Hightower, Graham Wolfe, Brenna Carnuccio, Rachel Aspen, Xavier Michael, Chris James Bolan, Aaron Dalla Villa and Danielle Muehlen.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Dan Lantz. A Breaking Glass release.

Running time: 1:31

It is known by many titles — “Monster of London,” “L’Orchidée rouge” “Secret of the Red Orchid” and, in its original language — German — “Das Rätsel der roten Orchidee.”

And if this almost campy, daft and dumb crime thriller from Deutschland is remembered at all, it’s because future horror legend Christopher Lee and Werner Herzog muse Klaus Kinski were among its stars.

But a twisty German-language thriller about American gangsters battling for control of London dubbed (in this case) into English? We are…intrigued.

No, it’s not very good. But there are flashes of wit and the odd dash of style shows its face in Helmuth Ashley’s film of an Edgar Wallace pulp novel. Ashley, an Austrian cinematographer-turned-director who worked in Germany, was one of the first to film a G.K. Chesteron “Father Brown” mystery (“Das schwarze Schaf”) and cranked out thrillers based on pulp fiction, The Lindbergh Baby kidnapping and Brit traitor/spy Kim Philby in German.

He knew what he was doing, even if he lacked the light touch he seemed to be going for.

A poker game in 1960 Chicago is interrupted, St. Valentine’s Day Massacre style, with a brisk machine-gunning. Who gets away? The Minelli mobster, Kerkie (Eric Pohlmann) who planned it, and the O’Connor gang member Steve (Kinski) who smelled a rat and dodged death.

One is deported to Italy, the other flees to Europe. They both wind up in London where they try to set up shop, American Gangland style, by sending cut-and-paste threats and FORM letter extortion notes.

If you’re rich, you’re going to get a note — Lord or Sir, wealthy widow or entitled Earl. And chances are, it’s going to be hand-delivered by your manservant, the most-employable butler in all of London, the fey, foppish Parker (comic actor Eddi Arent).

Funny how Parker is hired by everybody who is about to be targeted, more than a few of them to be “hit.”

“I will stand by like the Last Mohican!” he promises, in dubbed English. You’ve got to appreciate that level of loyalty.

Scotland Yard must be summoned. Inspector Weston (Adrian Hoven) is on the case, and making eyes at one potential victim’s secretary, confidante and possible heir, Lilian (Marissa Mell

And there’s Captain Allerman (Christopher Lee), also doggedly on the case, but a lot more inclined to pack heat and pull the trigger (twirling the pistol like a gunslinger afterward) when cornered. Is he meant to be an American hounding the mobsters to London, or is he local? I couldn’t make that out.

With two American mobs angling to grab a piece of the London action, shots will be fired, some of them from submachine guns. And blood will be spilled as the heir to one of the murdered men’s fortunes (Pinkas Braun) returns from his far-off searches for exotic orchids and tries to elbow his way into the proceedings.

The movie doesn’t make as much sense as it might, but the shootouts and showdowns can be fun, and Arent’s goofy, disguise-donning butler takes a decent stab at injecting some humor into all this.

Dubbing was more commonplace in that film era, and many a European production can be viewed where the camera avoids showing the lips of characters in dialogue scenes because they were planning on dubbing their Italian, German, French or whatever picture all along.

The big bucks were in international distribution, a “sale at Cannes,” and even a limited US/UK release could put you in the black.

But here, the two biggest names from the film suffer thanks to that. Not hearing Kinski, who spoke English in later films, or Lee, who spoke five languages fluently — German among them — is a serious detriment to an English-speaking cineaste’s appreciation of “Secret of the Red Orchid.”

The two most distinct, and in Lee’s case, sonorous voices are silenced in the dubbing.

Germany has never been known for its screen comedies, but one gets the sense that Britain’s “Carry On” movies were in the back of director Ashley’s mind in terms of tone. Lee could be funny in any language, and crazy-eyed Kinski had his walking sight-gag qualities. Ashley didn’t yet know that.

But “Red Orchid” is enough of a novelty to be worth checking out, a German attempt at making a semi-comic action mystery-thriller that might find a foothold in foreign markets, just so long as you ignore that the extortion notes pieced together by the American mobsters to put the screws on their British victims are plainly written in German.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Christopher Lee, Marissa Mell, Adrian Hoven, Pinkas Braun, Christiane Nielsen, Eric Pohlmann, Eddi Arent and Klaus Kinski

Credits: Directed by Helmuth Ashley, scripted by Egon Eis (writing as Trygve Larsen), based on a novel by Edgar Wallace.

Running time: 1:24

The screen special effect named Kevin Hart takes a back seat to gadgets, gear and CGI exploits in “Lift,” one hundred or so minutes in which the funnyman tries to remake himself as a cool, rough-and-tumble master thief/romantic lead.

Sure. Worth a try.

Hart produced this high-end heist picture, surrounds himself with a star-studded international cast including Gugu Mbatha-Raw as romantic interest, Jean Reno and Burn Gorman as villains, Vincent D’Onofrio as a colorful colleague and Sam Worthington as a troublesome Interpol cop.

“Set it Off/Straight Outta Compton/Fate of the Furious” director F. Gary Gray was brought in make the planes run on time in this tale of an airborne gold heist.

On paper, this story of art thieves strong-armed into stealing gold from a murderous financier of terrorists might have played. But right from the start, an over-explained art theft that includes kidnapping an identity-hiding NFT artist (Jacob Batalon, always funnier than this) to boost the resale value of the theft, “Lift” fails to get off the ground.

An insistent score by Dominic Kewis and Guillaume Roussel keeps reminding us we should be at the edge of our seat. We’re not. Hart’s presence suggests we’ll at least get some one-liners. But nah, he’s too cool, trying to “stretch” his persona with this lame, clunky caper comedy without laughs and heist thriller short on thrills.

Hart is Cyrus, mastermind who leads a crew that includes pilot Camilla (Úrsula Corberó), master of disguise Denton (D’Onofrio, kind of funny), hacker Mi-Sun (Yun Jee Kim), safecracker Magnus (Billy Magnussen) and I-forget-his-magic-skillset-Luke (Viveik Kalra).

Their mark is a financier/arms dealer/terrorist-backer (Reno), someone Mister Interpol (Worthington) orders Interpol Art Crimes unit cop Abby (Mbatha-Raw of “Belle” and TV’s “Loki”) to make happen.

Hart brings the star-power and Netflix deal that gets this movie made. But all he brings to the picture are a couple of sharp suits, one mid-air fight scene, and a whole lot of “explaining” what just happened/what “really” happened.

You’d think a guy with his ego would demand better dialogue than simple exposition, or lines meant to suggest “history” with “Remember Corsica?” “You remember Paris?” “Remember Venice?”

Yeah, the last one we remember, because “Venice” and an art auction robbery is what opens the picture.

There’s barely a laugh or interesting, much less exciting moment in this. Hart & Co. had little idea that it’s rarely the “heist” that makes a heist picture. It’s the colorful characters (mostly colorless here), the zippy twists and zingy one-liners.

F. Gary Gray should have pointed that out. He’s made a passable “Italian Job” remake, an audience-appreciating “Fast/Furious” film, and a lot of dogs — “A Man Apart,” “Law Abiding Citizen,” “Be Cool,” “Men in Black International.” He, at least, knows the difference between a promising script and one that isn’t remotely on target.

Rating: PG-13, violence, some profanity

Cast: Kevin Hart, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Jean Reno, Sam Worthington, Ursula Corbero, Jacob Batalon, Burn Gormen and Vincent D’Onofrio.

Credits: Directed by F. Gary Gray, scripted by Jeremy Donner and Daniel Kunka. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

There may be an alternate reality where “Big Bang Theory” and “Flight Attendant” veteran Kaley Cuoco could pull off the umpteenth professional assassin one and all agree is “the best” in an action comedy.

But it certainly won’t be one written by the screenwriter of the AI Kate Mara thriller nobody saw, “Morgan” and the director of TV’s “Reacher.”

Whatever you think about the perfunctory action beats — lame car chase, punchup at a subway stop, shootout in a Bavarian pine forest — “charmless” doesn’t really do justice to the corpse “Role Play” turns out to be.

Cuoco is Emma, another assassin-for-hire married to an unsuspecting spouse (David Oyelowo), with two unsuspecting kids. She takes her assignments from the mostly-unseen “Raj” (Rudi Dharmalingam), tells the fam she’s off to “Nebraska” or “St. Louis” for consulting work for “the regional office” or “the home office.”

And nobody asks, no one is the wiser.

But she’s mainly working these days, Raj insists, to pay the bills that keep this killer on “the dark net’s most-wanted list” hidden from Sovereign, an entity that wants her, or wants her dead.

But forgetting their wedding anniversary puts her in a bind. That’s how the murderous professional role player winds up in a swank NYC hotel bar in a little black dress, pretending to be in “finance,” waiting on her eager-to-role-play husband under a different name, but waylaid by a dapper, insistent and pushy older gent (Bill Nighy) who has plainly “made” her.

The deadly game’s afoot, with cops visiting her husband and an old foe (Connie Nielsen) filling the unsuspecting boob on who his wife really is.

The scenes with Nighy have something like a spark about them, banter as professional parry and thrust between vodka martinis and something one could never imagine Bill Nighy ordering in any guise, including that of rival killer “Bob” — “shots.”

“You see that Panamanian diplomant they pulled out of the East River last night?”

Maybe. Maybe not.

“You know the drill, Bob.”

That’s the burden “Role Play” never sheds. We know the drill. Every move, every twist, every quest, every moment of filler pointing us to a finale we see coming an hour off.

Cuoco only plays to her strengths in the Nighy scenes. Oyelowo can handle comedy, as he basically steals “The Book of Clarence.” But he has nothing funny or interesting to play, here.

Nielsen? Whatever. That goes for every cardboard character and every stale twist leading up to her appearance.

Rating: R, graphic violence, sexual situations, alcohol, profanity

Cast: Kaley Cuoco, David Oyelowo, Bill Nighy, Rudi Dharmalingam and Connie Nielsen.

Credits: Directed by Thomas Vincent, scripted by An MGM/Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:41