Movie Nation

Lee Daniels’ “The Deliverance” is lumbering and lurid long before it shows its African American-styled exorcism hand and turns ludicrous.

It’s a sordid wallow in working poor Black poverty, and the presence of Glenn Close as the white matriarch of this struggling family invites comparison to Netflix’s “Hillbilly Elegy.” If anything, this is even more embarassing for her than that J.D. Vance-written abortion.

I could have gone my whole life without hearing the Always Oscar’s Bridesmaid Close appropriate an affected, half-drawled oversexed and way-over-60 white-woman-in-Black-culture accent, playing the abusive mother of an abusive alcoholic (Andra Day).

“Girl, I’m just tryin’ to get you t’live a clean life.“

“The Deliverance” never shakes that cringy “Hood-billy Elegy” mantle, even as it descends into something that merits its “horror” film label.

Day, last seen in “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” is Ebony, struggling to house and feed and clothe two teens (played by Demi Singleton and Caleb McLaughlin) and a younger son, Dre (Anthony B. Jenkins) in 2011 Pittsburgh.

It’s worth avoiding the word “raise” in describing what she does for these children. Because while she might indulge her “Little Basquiat” in helping him paint a bedroom wall mural in their latest rental house, Ebony will never win mother of the year.

She’s a foul-mouthed, foul-tempered sometime drunk who took in her white mother Alberta (Close) to help them cover expenses. A social worker, played by Mo’Nique, who won an Oscar for Daniels’ “Precious,” is “on my ass” because Ebony & Fam are constantly on the move as she tries to keep her distance from “the system.”

But her kids get bruised. A lot. It’s just that in this new house, it may not be Ebony doing all the bruising.

She sees her littlest boy exhibit simptoms of trances, as if he’s possessed. She experiences a bit of this demonic possession herself. And then all three kids have meltdowns at school.

The medical profession is baffled. But maybe mother ‘Berta’s “apostle” preacher (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who reaches out and explains the concept of “deliverance” in “It’s NOT an exorcism” (actually, it is) terms.

Day is a solid presence at the heart of the story, and the kids aren’t bad. Mo’Nique is the stand-out supporting player, but Close manages something she’s never come close to in her long career. She embarasses herself.

Daniels, who co-wrote this “inspired by true events” script, tries to one-up “The Exorcist” in at least one regard — profanity. He lays it on thick in dialogue laced with f-bombs and worse (when the “exorcism” begins).

“Clean up your f—–g mouth, Shante,” Day’s Ebony shrieks at one cussing kid.

Daniels has made a couple of half-decent dramas (“The Butler,” “The United States vs. Billie Holiday”) since his “Precious” breakthrough. But he’s always a filmmaker who tends towards the tawdry, the overwrought and the soapy, and when he goes wrong — “Shadowboxer,” “The Paperboy” — his pictures tumble into tacky, cliche ridden camp.

“The Deliverance” has plenty of examples of those excesses, as well as evidence that Daniels is lost in this genre. A horror movie with a message about Black poverty and parenting might seem ambitious, and he makes sure to be inclusive, including a transgender character, throwing in a swipe about white women who prefer Black men (and Black women’s loathing of such women) and such.

But for a guy who jumped straight into putting his name before the title of his films, Lee Daniels is still too ham-fisted and clumsy to make these down-market melodramas come off.

And he’s got no clue about building suspense and delivering shocks.

If Lee Daniels is not as embarassed as Glenn Close probably is by this, he ought to be.

Rating: R, violence, alcohol abuse, graphic scatological content, constant profanity

Cast: Andra Day, Glenn Close, Anthony B. Jenkins, Caleb McLaughlin, Omar Epps, Demi Singleton, Lawrence Washington, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Mo’Nique.

Credits: Directed by Lee Daniels, scripted by David Coggeshall, Elijah Bynum and Lee Daniels. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:53

Every now and then the last weekend of the summer cinema season produces a movie that lands, even a movie that sticks around to make itself an Oscar contender.

The John LeCarre adaptation “The Constant Gardener” is the exception that proves that rule.

This summer ends in far more typical fashion, with four cast-off titles — “Reagan,” released by a conservative-targeting start up distributor, the John Cho AI horror tale “AfrAId,” the shelved-then-released Lionsgate thriller “1992,” a final bow for the late Ray Liotta, and a Bleecker Street sci-fi offering that doesn’t have enough screens or star power (Casey Affleck and Laurence Fishburne) to make a mark — “Slingshot.”

“Reagan” had a weak pulse Thursday –$500k or so — but constant promotion on right wing media might give this critically derided hagiography a shot at $9 million over a four day holiday weekend, closer to $7 over three days.

“AfrAId” did only $400K Thursday and underscores my long-standing question, “Where did the horror audience go?” Poor reviews won’t help. A John Cho thriller (“Searching”) made a very late August mark a few years back. Not this time. $4 million.

“1992” got middling to decent reviews, but its star power is as limited as all the others, and it doesn’t have Fox/OAN/Rogan cheerleading it. It won’t crack the top ten.

“Slingshot” got the best (mixed) reviews of any of them but that won’t keep it from flatlining.

Deadline.com reports that the summer season, lacking that second Marvel tentpole, fell about half a billion below last summer. “Deadpool & Wolverine” — just now crossing the $600 million domestic line — and the summer’s biggest hit ($642 million) “Inside/Out 2” did great. But “This Ends with Us,” a solid hit, was no “Barbie” or “Oppenheimer,” Kevin Costner’s “Horizon” underwhelmed, so summer 2024 underperformed, start to finish.

I’ll update this Labor Day weekend take as more data bubbles up.

A Sinister slice of between-the-World Wars sci-fi about German scientists,a ski lodge, jealousy, murder and their version of “The Theory of Everything.”

“The Universal Theory” isn’t history, but a thriller about Big Science, Evil Schemes and such.

Black and white, performed mostly in German, the trailer labels it neo-noir, “Nazi era David Lynch” in feel.

Sept. 27, Oscilloscope Laboratories unleashes this one.

Lionsgate finally found a place for the 2022 thriller “1992” to be released, the last weekend of summer, traditionally a dumping ground for films that can’t find a theatrical home.

But that allows this solid if unsurprising Tyrese Gibson star vehicle a moment in the sun, and gives his late co-star Ray Liotta, who died shortly after this film was completed, a flinty curtail call.

Few actors are better at playing “old school” and “gangster” hard than Gibson, cast here as an ex-con trying to raise his troubled teen, only to have the Rodney King Verdict riots and a mid-riot murderous armed robbery at the factory where he works hurl him back into the violent life he’s tried to escape.

And nobody was a better bad guy than Liotta, a blue-eyed fury who made malevolence his brand in a career that ran from “Something Wild” to “Goodfellas” to “Cocaine Bear.”

Director and co-writer Ariel Vromen returns to something closer to his “Iceman” form with this heist-gone-wrong variation on a theme from “Trespass.”

It’s the end of April, 1992. Los Angeles, California and America are bracing for a Simi Valley verdict in the case of cops, caught on video beating up an unarmed Black motorist named Rodney King.

Gibson plays Mercer “Merc” Bey, whose “O.G. Merc” keychain is the only reminder he allows himself of his former life. The gang banger is six months out of jail, with temporary custody of his teen son Antoine (Christopher Ammanuel), which is a challenge.

“You’re a boy that I’m tryin’ to raise to be a MAN.”

With the bubbling cauldron that tells all that a riot might be on the horizon, Antoine could go either way.

Scott Eastwood is Reagan, a breaking-and-entering specialist who has been trying to sell his little brother Dennis (Dylan Arnold) and father Lowell (Liotta) on a catalytic converter factory heist that is “out of our league” with “too much security” for them to attempt, the old man decides.

But April 29, 1992, all that changes. A verdict comes in (summed up in TV coverage from the day). A jury lets the abusive cops go. The heist — of platinum ingots used to make converters — is on.

“Turns out, all we needed was 12 racist mother—-ers out in Simi Valley,” they crow, the script’s best line.

The robbery of the nearly-empty factory goes deathly wrong. And when Merc manages to get his kid to the supposed “safety” of his workplace, it goes completely off the rails. Two hardened gangster patriarchs face off in a battle of wits and will.

The best scenes in “1992” establish Merc’s bonafides as a tough man trying to be righteous — stepping up to stop intimidation at a Korean-owned bodega, letting former gang brothers know he’s not about that any more.

Liotta’s steely “My word is law” dictatorship over “the fruit of my loins” is implicit, with older son Reagan bristling at his father’s limitations and younger son Dylan cowed into following orders.

The script and Eastwood’s performance of it soften his character into a son ready to rebel against the old man, even in the middle of the job.

The riots are well presented — real footage and recreations — but it’s more a TV coverage “presentational” experience than a harrowing and immersive one.

Attempts to have the gang mirror the racial attitudes of the “all white” Simi Valley jury feel strained and half-worked-out. The racism and police aggression that sparked the riots is nicely suggested in a couple of tense scenes mid-riot, including a humiliating traffic stop.

The action beats feature brawls and shoot-outs are overty-designed to cut the odds (gang of six vs. father-and-son), with a chase or two thrown in and a grim finale struggles to summon up “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “Trespass” echoes.

Gibson and Liotta are magnetic, but the picture feels rushed and unfinished in places — blown lines, under-developed relationships, etc.

But even straining to get to the label “solid,” “1992” delivers on the two things its intent and delayed release promise. It’s a Gibson showcase and a Liotta curtain call worth seeing, shortcomings be damned.

Rating: R, bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Tyrese Gibson, Scott Eastwood, Christopher Ammanuel, Michael Beasley, Oleg Taktarov, Ori Pfeffer and Ray Liotta.

Credits: Directed by Ariel Vromen, scripted by Sascha Penn and Ariel Vromen. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:36

Movies likes “Reagan,” a new screen hagiography of actor turned politician and conservative icon Ronald Reagan, exist in the sort of alternative reality that George Orwell warned us about.

It’s a sanitized, whitewashed love letter to “The Man who Brought Down the Soviet Union,” President “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

Serious scholarship on Reagan is thin, seemingly by fiat, and biographies that seek to lay out a “warts and all” portrait of the beloved but scandalized idealogue whose missteps were as epic as his achievements, and whose dementia was undeniable years before he left office, are shouted down by zealots who still insist St. Ron should be added to Mount Rushmore.

One respected biographer apologized for reporting “There is no ‘there’ there” in the actor’s life, an empty suit/figurehead, a man of all-surface traits, an image with narrow focus and whose infamous napping, insensititivity, inattention to details and disregard for the law were papered over with scripted jokes and anecdotes he repeated for decades.

That critical view of Reagan during his presidency was memorably sent-up by “Saturday Night Live,” with Dan Aykroyd playing Reagan as a micromanaging “mastermind,” flying in the face of the widely reported truth of the day.

And when CBS tried to make a mini-series about “The Reagans,” conservatives attacked it over its depiction of his incompetent response to the AIDS crisis. The series was compromised, with any attempt at a warts and all” portrait watered down, and eventually dumped onto paid cable.

For conservatives, Reagan has become Muhammad, the Prophet whose name no non-believer ever dare utter.

But that’s the “Reagan” of this new movie, a flattering-to-the-point-of-fawning rewriting of history from the director of “Soul Surfer” and starring Dennis Quaid and Penelope Ann Miller, with Oscar-winner-turned-crank Jon Voight and assorted other lesser lights of conservative activist cinema (Kevin Sorbo, Robert Davi).

While it’s useful in reminding us of a time when Republicans made Soviet-hating/Russia-mistrusting their brand, their idealogy and their passion, long before taking them on as political allies and election collaboraters, “Reagan” is a bad movie — a choppy spin on “Reagan’s Greatest Hits,” a highlight reel that doesn’t so much get us closer to the man as serve up warmed-over agitprop that faithful want to believe about him.

Howard Klausner’s script, based on a literary hagiography “The Crusader” by Paul Kengor (Try and find a serious review of that. Good luck.), bounces back and forth in time, from childhood and Hollywood Screen Actor’s Guild activism to the politics that replaced the faded film career.

It’s a story framed by the view his “enemies” allegedly take of Reagan, a “Patton” device of having an aged Russian expert (Russian-accented Voight) explain to a young Putin acolyte the man who did so much harm to “the Motherland,” the U.S. president who “denied us (Russia) our rightful place in the world.”

Voight’s retired comrade claims the KGB were warily watching Reagan from the 1940s, notes how studio chief Harry Warner (Kevin Dillon) tried to enlist Reagan near his peak stardom to “break” the unions, and over-simplifies the union climate of 1945 before noting Reagan became an FBI informant back then.

We track a marriage to Jane Wyman (Mena Suvari) whom the film smears by claiming she dismissed Reagan’s union activities, and who finally split from his as his war-augmented career (his poor eyesight kept him from combat service, not mentioned) went down the toilet after VJ Day.

And we see the odd “courtship” of Nancy Davis (Miller), who needs Reagan’s help escaping the Hollywood Blacklist, which he turns into a quid pro quo dinner and relationship that she partnered all the way to the White House.

“Reagan” isn’t without humor, capturing the “career-ending” Vegas stage act that saw him shilling for Pabst Blue Ribbon beer while glossing past the TV series that kept him relevent. And the only way to regard the death throes of the Soviet “Evil Empire,” with its succession of very old, sick comrades dying off as Reagan was trying to “bankrupt” them by starting a new arms race is in a comical montage of funerals.

The anecdote-centered portrait here never gets past the Aykroyd spin of Reagan as “mastermind” and “prophet” who oversaw America’s victory in the Cold War. It ignores his singularly disastrous energy policites, AIDS, union-busting and the media deregulation and tax “reforms” that battered the middle and working classes while ensuring they’d be bombarded with “news” that flattered their prejudices. It rewrites his landslide re-election by overplaying the set-up “my opponent’s inexperience” scripted quip he delivered against Walter Mondale in a debate.

The characters portrayed here are whittled down to caricatures of Reagan staff, confidantes and Soviet ogres. Lesley Anne Down plays Margaret Thatcher, with Dan Hedaya a gregarious “fellow Irishman” Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill and a look-alike is glimpsed as Gen. Colin Powell, because efforts to whitewash Reagan’s attitudes on race was a non-starter for true believers.

Miller’s Nancy has more shades, suggesting the careerist of Nancy “rumors,” a devoted defender of her husband’s image and health, with nary a hint of her AIDS hypocrisy (the Reagans didn’t acknowledge the peril until Hollywood friends started dying) or weird obsession with astrology.

Quaid’s impersonation is solid, and makes one wish he’d been given the chance to take on a more nuanced version of the title character. He could easily flesh-out a flawed and ambitious, embittered and opportunistic Reagan, an intellectually-limited political puppet of Big Oil and the super rich, but also a canny political operator who used humor and feigned folksiness — as fake as his dyed hair — to turn himself into “The Teflon President,” one whose myriad scandals were easy for his devoted fans to dismiss.

We may never get that movie, as no studio or streaming service seems motivated to attempt it and endure the abuse of true believers who prefer the myth to the real man. And while movies that scrub off all his flaws may merit plenty of attention in Right Wing “alternate” reality, they do real history and those who learn from it no favors.

Rating: PG-13, violent content and smoking

Cast: Dennis Quaid, Penelope Ann Miller, Jon Voight, Robert Davi, Kevin Sorbo, Kevin Dillon, C. Thomas Howell and Mena Suvari

Credits: Directed by Sean McNamara, scripted Howard Klausner, based on “The Crusader” book by Paul Kengor. A Showbiz release.

Running time: 2:15

There’s rarely a tuxedo to be seen in your average American casino. The ones a long way from Vegas have a distinctly down market air.

The first few I visited on the Ohio River or the Gulf Coast reinforced the working class folks with a gambling problem, bored and/or addicted senior citizens and the like.

I’ve been pitched stories a few times about casinos and the movies. I turn them down as only one picture really gets that corner of the gambling industry right.

“Mississippi Grind” could be titled “Metropolis, Illinois Grind” or “Cairo, Illinois” or “Mobile”  in this case “Danville, VA Grind.”

The locations change, the low rollers frequenting them do not.

This is the temp tent Caesar’s located on a former textile plant property, with the actual casino finishing construction right behind it.

“One Fast Move” is several scenes of solid if unspectacular motorcycle racing and stunt driving footage in search of a plot.

Actor turned writer-director Kelly Blatz (“Senior Love Triangle”) never rises above banality with a sentimental story of fathers and sons and racing the clock on a racing dream when “your expiration dates’s fast approaching.”

Basically, it’s an inefficient delivery vehicle for sports movie bromides and cliches, almost all of them growled by Eric Dane of “Euphoria” and “Grey’s Anatomy.”

As the father-he-never-knew for dishonorably discharged misfit son Wes (K.J. Apa of “Riverdale”), Dane rattles through salty motivational quotes.

“Grip it and rip it!” “Unless you’re willing to risk everything, you’re already dead.” “You’ll be chewing old gum off the asphalt!” “Repeat after me, ‘I don’t know how to ride.” “You don’t even CRASH right.”

There’s barely enough screen time for Apa or grizzled screen legend Edward James Olmos to get in a cliche edgewise.

Wes misbehaves on a bike, is arrested by the MPs and drummed out of the military, which sends him in search of the man his mother told him was his father. Racing legend Dean Miller (Dane) is cocky, grumpy and way too old to be burning up the track on 600cc Supersports. But here he is.

Dean’s all old trophies and swagger and closing the bar down and waking up with a stranger most mornings. He works on bikes in Georgia shop for aged ex-racer Abel (Olmost). That’s where the kid lands, given a job when his dad finally agrees to “train” him for the track.

First, a misguided dash down the Dragon’s Tail to establish how reckless the “kid” is. Then, track time, running the stairs of the stadium training montages, and endless in-the-helmet-intercom advice from the white-haired hardcase who is still nobody’s “idea of a father.”

“It’s either full throttle or full brakes! Everything in between is for pussies!”

Maia Reficco of TV’s “Kally’s Mashup” and “Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin” is Camilla the cute waitress who attracts the ex-con’s romantic attention. There’s barely a whiff of character scripted into this overfamiliar part.

Sketch in a generic “rich brat” villain on the track, and that’s that, or so thought Blatz. And his agent. And Amazon.

Dane dominates the picture, which among all the bad to middling things about “One Fast Movie,” isn’t a bad thing. If he’s auditioning to be the new white-haired villain hunk, as Neal McDonaugh closes in on 60, this could be the gateway role to that.

Rating: R, violence, alcohol abuse, sex, profanity

Cast: K.J. Apa, Eric Dane, Maia Reficco and Edward James Olmos.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kelly Blatz. An MGM/Amazon Studios release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:47

Kind of a woodlands virus zombie movie?

Perhaps. Oct. 18.

Dystopian sci fi is just the best.

The baseball is sloppy and the sentiments border on maudlin in “You Gotta Believe,” the latest “true story” Texas sports dramedy from director Ty Roberts and writer Lane Garrison.

Luke Wilson plays a Little League coach with cancer — he was in Roberts and Garrison’s “12 Mighty Orphans” — in what’s meant to be a plucky account of (what was back in 2002) “The Longest Little League World Series Game Ever Played.”

A good supporting cast includes Greg Kinnear as a fellow coach, and Sarah Gadon and Molly Parker as the coach’s wives, mothers to Little League players called on to “Win One for Coach Bobby” when Coach Ratliff (Wilson) gets a terminal diagnosis.

But everything from the Westside League’s all star team to the games themselves tumbles off a cliff into nonsensical as we march towards that “longest game” through the usual “conditioning” montages and games littered with errors and skinny child actor home runs.

And entrusting mostly inexperienced child actors to play the assorted player “types” on this underdog squad from tiny, remote Fort Worth (ahem) ensures that a sitcom season’s worth of corny punchlines are blown — neither enunciated or delivered with any sense of timing or emphasis.

“Is that a forced error?”

“His old man ‘forced’ him to play.”

OK, that one lands.

Kinnear’s a distracted lawyer-coach Jon and Wilson’s the ever-upbeat Coach Bobby, who is full of “Life’s short, the time is NOW” aphorisms for their inept nine.

We see their bad team lose a game — badly — at the end of a losing season. That in itself is amusing. Their pitcher beans an opposing batter, the ump ejects the pitcher, and calls the inning without anybody on the other team being called out for the BEANBALL on THEIR player. Next think we know, incompetent Westside comes back up to bat.

How do we SCORE that, kids?

Logic dictates that a lousy team with one distracted coach and another enthusiastic one, neither of whom has fathered kids who can play, should be named all star team coaches, with the ability to fill their league’s team with bad players from their own squad, including their kids.

Then screenwriter Garrison and director Roberts skip other steps as this motley crew abruptly plays its way out of their corner of Texas, out of Texas and into Williamsport, PA.

The kids are “types” — the Romeo, the half-blind catcher shifted to one position after another, the coach’s kid they nickname “Rocket” because of how slow he runs the basepaths, the Hispanic kid who is their best player, but works — at 12 — to save for college.

Hey, they need him because this may be the least diverse Little League movie since the Truman administration (I know, Fort Worth).

Parker’s (“Small Crimes,” recently seen n TV’s “Lost in Space”) the wife who won’t let Coach Jon let Coach Bobby down.

“Laughter is like Prozac without side effects.”

Gadon (“Enemy,” TV’s “True Detective”) classes the joint up as the wife who would rather her husband concentrate on treatment.

They and Wilson and Kinnear do what they can with the material. But Roberts and Garrison stumble and fumble through a melodramatic version of real events, one so cut and dried that it should have been easy to render at least tolerable.

One kid speaks for us all when he chirps “What in the name of Willie Mays are you doing now, Coach?”

God only knows.

Rating: PG, tweens brawling, mild profanity

Cast: Luke Wilson, Greg Kinnear, Sarah Gadon, Michael Cash, Etienne Kellichi and Molly Parker.

Credits: Directed by Ty Roberts, scripted by Lane Garrison. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:45