Movie Nation

Oh, that “RED” was the giddy romp it might have been, it promises to be or it thinks it is. It has the best cast of any action comedy movie, maybe ever:  four-Oscar-winners plus  Bruce Willis. But despite that and a winning concept — that somebody, maybe in government, is trying to kill off aged, retired CIA assassins — director Robert “Flightplan” Schwentke never lets this one achieve takeoff.

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Clint Eastwood’s late life/late career fascination with mortality, death and grieving devolves, at long last, into a cheap parlor trick in “Hereafter.” This wholly unsatisfying variation on “what lies beyond” shows him to be ill-suited to the subject and to the sort of tale that involves setting three disparate characters on a path toward one another for a finale that isn’t so much a pay off as a “Yeah, and?”

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In the “Guardians of Ga’Hoole” novels of Kathryn Lasky, owls have mastered fire and metallurgy and have been known to play the lute as they sing their epic poems about epic battles from days of yore.

And in the film about them, they all speak with Aussie accents.

Zack Snyder’s film “Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole” is a gorgeously animated combat fantasy — “The Lord of the Rings” meets “Happy Feet” — with cute cuddly owls of every description flashing their talons and sometimes donning metal talon-tips as they battle for control of the owl kingdoms.

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M. Night Shyamalan indulges his messianic side with “Devil,” a quasi-religious supernatural thriller he has released under his The Night Chronicles production banner. It’s a tidy tale about the Devil picking off folks trapped in an elevator in a Philadelphia high-rise while cops and security guards look on, in horror, through closed-circuit TV. “Devil” is the sort of story Rod Serling would have taken for a spin in “The Twilight Zone,” back in the day.  Shyamalan came up with the idea, produced it and got others to script and direct this 76 minute exercise in movie minimalism.

Our superstitious narrator regales us with memories of “stories my mom used to tell,” tales about how “the Devil roams the Earth.” And a sure sign Satan is about to torment the doomed before they make it to Hell is a suicide. Thus, that jolt when somebody plunges through a top floor window clutching a Rosary sets us up for the elevator that won’t elevate.

Five are trapped — a rude and abrasive salesman (Geoffrey Arend), a looker (Bojana Novakovic), a sweaty security guard (Bokeem Woodbine), a testy older woman (Jenny O’Hara) and a mysterious young man in a hoodie (Logan Marshall-Green). Even though they’re irked — not to worry, the head of security (Matt Craven) says over the PA system. They’ll be out before the panic attacks start.

But they aren’t, and the cop (Chris Messina of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”) sent to investigate the suicide is on a new case, looking in on a body — somebody killed during one of the many moments when the lights blink out and the pounding sounds of a basketball in a dryer emerge from the closed compartment. That’s when we realize the narrator is the guy with the answers — a Catholic Latino security guard, Ramirez, who flirts with being a stereotype.

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Disney’s effort to turn Kristen Bell into America’s Sweetheart reaches its tipping point with “You Again,” a flat romantic comedy that packages her in a funny setup and surrounds her with funny people.

That the experiment tips over backwards isn’t wholly Bell’s fault. She’s certainly more interesting to watch here than she was in “When in Rome.” But the laughs are few in this variation on a “Mean Girls” theme. And not surprisingly, most of them come from the supporting cast.

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