Movie Nation

A couple of Oscar winners, some splendid stuntwork — some by the stars themselves — and lovely London, Slovenia and (allegedly) Jersey locations recommend “The Union,” an “I Spy/My Spy” action comedy where the money is on the screen, not in the script.

It’s generic in the extreme, predictable to a laughable degree and littered with dialogue as inane and cliched as the characters and the situations.

Note to aspiring screenwriters. If ever you find yourself typing “Well, well well, what do we have here?” get a lawyer. That film school degree was a waste and you should get your money back.

The pairing-up of Oscar winner Halle Berry and Oscar nominee Mark Wahlberg pays dividends, especially in the punchy, fun but paint-by-numbers finale’s car chase, rooftop fights and Slovenian shoot outs. Most everything else is of the “almost too silly to pitch” to a studio or describe in a review variety.

Wahlberg’s a construction worker who never left Patterson, N.J., never moved beyond high-beam bridge maintenance and never stopped picking up women in his and his lifelong pals’ favorite bar.

Waking up with your former seventh grade English teacher (Dana Delaney) is par for Mike McKenna’s course. His gossipy mom (Lorraine Bracco) knows all his business before he does, as does everybody elese in their tiny world.

But even she doesn’t foresee the return of “Rox” Hall (Berry) to her dead-end son’s life. It begins with a bar pickup, a little reminiscing about the old times and listening to “Bruuuuuuce.” It ends with her injecting him and kidnapping ol’Mike for a job in London.

“The Union” is a “blue collar” spy agency of “nobodies” who “get the job done.” Oscar winner J.K. Simmons runs a crew that just got decimated by an op that went South.

They need a nobody’s nobody — someone other agencies will not know anything about — to help retrieve “the device” that will allow them to bid on the stolen “intel” from that turncoat CIA agent who died, with much of their crew, in Trieste.

Mike’s got a life, such as it is. He’s slated to be best man at a buddy’s wedding. But sure, let’s take off for a two week crash course in spycraft and on-the-job-training because Rox is sure the ex-jock, unrepentent car thief is up to it.

Alice Lee, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Jackie Earle Haley are other members of the surviving team. Stephen Campbell Moore plays the walking sphincter CIA boss who interferes, wondering if he’ll have to “sell one of the states to pay for this.”

“You could sell Idaho. Nobody’d miss it.”

“I’M from Idaho!”

“You think I don’t know that?”

Jessica De Gouw (TV’s “Pennyworth” and “Ladies in Black”) is the posh-accented Brit-villain running the “auction” for the stolen files.

Rox throws Mike into the action, things don’t go according to plan and they’re bouncing all over London and around Europe trying to make all this right.

The funniest bit? Mike’s first desperate getaway has him stumble onstage with the singing “Lost Boys” in a West End (London) production of “Peter Pan.”

Like a lot of the glib lines and light moments mixed-in with the mayhem, not enough is done to make such clever ideas pay off in any meaningful way.

“Entourage” veteran director Julian Farino doesn’t bring much style to this, but the action beats pop and in the finale, Wahlberg goes almost Tom Cruise in the extent we can see him actually pulling off the fighting, jumping and driving stunts.

Berry, dashing in a blonde forelock and leather jumpsuits, holds her own in these bits, too, with or without stunt doubles.

Yes, we know where this is going and who the villain is far too early, and if “good villains make good thrillers,” as Hitchcock always said, “The Union” falls a bit short in that department.

A little more Jersey and a little less Trieste might have helped. But it is what it is and cast and crew are perfectly content being nothing more than that.

Rating: PG-13, lots of violence, sexual situations

Cast: Halle Berry, Mark Wahlberg, J.K. Simmons, Dana Delaney, Mike Colter, Jessica De Gouw, Lorraine Bracco, Stephen Campbell Moore, Alice Lee and Jackie Earle Haley.

Credits: Directed by Julian Farino, scripted by Joe Barton and David Guggenheim. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

There’s only one way to properly pay tribute to a film legend who’s just passed. You pick out a favorite title on their resume and you re-watch it, remembering all that they were and meant on the big screen.

Gena Rowlands piled up a lot of credits in her seven decades in movies and TV. Her passing at 94 last week brought everything from “A Woman Under the Influence” to “The Notebook,” “Another Woman” to “Unhook the Stars” to mind when reading tributes and recalling her work.

I interviewed her prior to a commemorative showing of her late husband John Cassevetes indie classic “Faces” at the Florida Film Festival some years back, and had chatted with her when “The Notebook” became a late life blockbuster, reminding the world who she was in a sentimental romance that paired her up with James Garner as they played senior citizen versions of Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling.

She was a tireless champion of her husband’s work, and made sure to make time for their director son Nick Cassavetes whenever he went out of his way to hire mom (“Unlock the Stars,” “The Notebook”).

But “Gloria” (1980) reminds us that they weren’t just keeping it all in the family when turning the spotlight on Rowlands. Playing a brassy, post-menopausal mob moll forced to protect a neighbor’s kid from the same mobsters she calls “friends,” Rowlands is fierce, focused, and in every confrontation the kind of tough broad you don’t want to cross.

Cassavetes captures New York at its dirtiest, the late ’70s when mob shootings made headlines, but barely turned the heads among the jaded, downtrodden Big Apple citizenry. This was America in mid “malaise,” when the cars, the fashion and the very color palette of the culture reached a nadir. This was “Warriors” era New York, post “Serpico,” when the city thought twice about entrusting its safety on the lawless streets to corrupt, lazy, union-protected cops.

“Gloria” is a patient thriller that immerses us in that place and time in a story that is simplicity itself.

Gloria lives next door to a family whose breadwinner (funnyman/screenwriter Buck Henry) is a mob accountant who got careless. They’re slow to flee the doom they know is coming. A pouty teen daughter refuses to take shelter with Gloria, who isn’t that keen about the idea either.

“I hate kids, especially YOUR kids,” she laughs to the mother (Julie Carmen).

Is she joking? Maybe. But Gloria’s life of dealing with serious gangsters causes her to take in Phil (John Adames), a “Puerto Rican” six year-old who takes his Dad’s farewell “Be a MAN” command seriously. He doesn’t like Gloria, and makes a break for it from her more than once.

But he hears the shooting, the blast that blows out a window. Gloria tries to tell him “It’s all a dream,” but he knows better. His family is gone.

Gloria does a quick calculation, throws clothes and cash into a suicase and drags the sassy boy in disco togs down the stairs, into the streets and on the lam.

She has a place where she can lay low — for a few hours, anyway. It’s the love nest of the married mobster she used to “date.”

Getting out of New York with the child’s face plastered on the Daily News and her name on the TV would be bad enough. In pre-Internet NYC, the mob had enough guns to cover Penn Station, buses and any other route out of the city.

Gloria, packing a nickel-plated :38, will keep them alive with her wits, her moxy and her pistol-packing bravado. She repeatedly gets the drop on the bad guys, who either underestimate her or figure she can’t be serious about risking her neck for this kid and his father’s mob account book.

“Punks,” she calls them. “You gonna murder a six year old Puerto Rican kid in the middle of the street?” Only “sissies” need a “magnum” hand-gun. Not Gloria.

“Let a WOMAN beatcha!” she bellows at one point. As she’s outshot a carload of them on the street, others in an apartment and stared-down and dodged death on the subway and in a train station, Gloria allows herself to get seriously riled up, but never cocky. She is humiliating the wrong guys. Repeatedly.

Cassevetes populated this picture with a couple of veteran movie heavies — Lawrence Tierney plays a bartender, with familiar faces Tom Noonan and Sonny Landham as made men — but was more interested in finding “real” New York faces. The extras on the streets look as if they were filmed on the sly, guerilla filmmaking style.

Although he was making a genre picture, the writer-director took care to keep it real at all times. The violence is shocking, the players the most convincing NYC mobsters (bitching about “traffic” when they’re late to a hit) and mob-connected victims, and Gloria’s trial-and-error problem solving is wholly relatable and believable.

Her ex-lover in the mob may insist “all women are mothers,” but Gloria’s not convinced. “Maternal” shmaternal, she may have to ditch this kid. Or she may be able to bargain or sweet-talk her way out of this. But when all else fails, that pistol in her purse is the last thing they expect her to reach for.

Cassavetes lets this story unfold in a naturalistic time frame. Gloria herself may be near panic, but nothing that happens arrives in a rush or blows by in a blur. We, like our heroine, have time to try and reason a way out of this jam, this city and this fate.

“Gloria” was remade, with Sharon Stone adequate in the title role, in 1999 and ripped-off (or paid homage to) by Luc Besson with “The Professional,” another take of an armed hard-case parenting/protecting a child survivor of a mass mob shooting.

The big difference between other versions of this sort of story may be the nature of the relationship between the 50something Gloria and her charge, a little boy (Adames is too raw to seem a “child actor”) who trembles with fear then sputters with brass at the woman he tells “I HATE you” before deciding “I love you,” a child misunderstanding and too young to take his father’s “Be a MAN” commandment seriously, because he doesn’t know what that means.

The confused, laughed-off sexual subtext here was creepily pushed to the fore in Besson’s gonzo and edgier “The Professional,” which gives that picture an icky edge that hasn’t dulled with the passing decades.

“Gloria,” the movie and the heroine, are too canny to let that be a trap, too sentimental to take such child speak seriously and too determined to make that one belated shot at motherhood pay-off to let that spoil their rough-and-ready thriller that feels indie, even though Cassavetes and Rowlands were well into their studio picture careers by this point.

Whatever movie you think of when you remember Cassavetes, when you think of Rowland you sure as shooting better think of “Gloria.” Over forty years since its release, the film and the legend who played the title role remain pistol-packing empowerment incarnate, a reminder about the life experience and toughness of “post menopausal women” that only sexist “sisstes” would dare underestimate.

Rating: PG? With bloody gun violence, sexual situations, profanity?

Cast: Gena Rowlands, John Adames, Julie Carmen and Buck Henry.

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Cassavetes. A Columbia release on Tubi.

Running time: 2:03

Trueba is best known for the film that truly launched future Oscar winner Penelope Cruz, “Belle Epoque.” This romantic thriller was retitled from “Haunted Heart.” Which was a better title.

Aug. 23, limited release, Sept. 23, streaming.

His latest wife goes into rehab, so adult daughter Mila is who he summons to help with two little kids.

Andie MacDowell, Carmen Ejogo and Kevin Pollack also star in this Oct.18 dramedy.

Paul Feig created the cult series “Freaks and Geeks,” directed “Bridesmaids” and “A Simple Favor” and the first twenty minutes of “Jackpot!” — which he also directed — is bad enough to make one forget ALL of that.

Bad one-liners, performers straining to find a laugh, Awkwafina making one question why stardom ever came her way, and even John Cena is at a loss about what to do to make this abortion of an action comedy show a pulse.

“It’s a dead end!”

“I’ve seen deader!”

The dystopian premise had promise. You know how much harder and harder its become to win a lottery? It’s because The State doesn’t want anybody to win.

And a few years in the future, California has figured out a sort of final “Purge” solution to that, declaring open season on big “Jackpot!” winners, with those who kill (no collateral murders and no “guns” allowed) the winner before sundown collecting a cash bounty.

The interactive electronic tickets track the “winner,” drones give away their location, and it’s open season on some poor devil’s “lucky” day. Seann William Scott gets Stiflered for his winning ticket in the opening sequence.

Awkwafina plays a former child star of commercials — Katie Kim — who returns to the even-more-cutthroat-than-now LA to take another shot at stardom, only to stumble into a Lotto “win.” She cannot survive the day without the help of a Lottery Protection Agent, played here by big goofy “face like a human ear” John Cena.

Simu Lu runs the biggest protection racket in town, a rich hustler with questionable motives. Ayden Mayeri is the AirBnB Hostess from Hell who torments and robs hapless Katie Kim before her “win,” and would love to collect that murderous bounty.

“Jackpot!” starts out unwatchably bad, without a single line or situation landing and the few cameos pretty much wasted. A tussle in a downmarket Hollywood wax museum (Almost all Kardashians, with John Cleese’s “None Shall Pass” knight from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”), “stage parent” gags, a little old lady pickpocket, nothing and no one works.

But then the violence begins — roiling through a karate studio, yoga class and the like. Cena’s big lovable “bootleg Captain America” lump crashes in, Machine Gun Kelly is called out by his real name and takes a beating, just for laughs and Noel the lottery body guard earns his keep.

“You look like Wreck-it-Ralph after a 14 hour cocaine bender!”

No, the picture doesn’t come around. But the mayhem — bike chases, mob brawls, etc — keeps the lukewarm mess on the move.

And we finally hit that one funny line. It’s about Hollywood’s love-hate relationship with LaCroix sparkling water, especially coconut flavor.

“It tastes like a DRAWING of a coconut!”

“Jackpot!” is the LaCroix of Cena/Awkwafina action comedies. It plays like a drawing of the comic and the wrestler, one that doesn’t come to life.

Feig? Well, maybe “A Simple Favor 2” will mark his comeback.

R: Violence, profanity

Cast: Awkwafina, John Cena, Simu Lu, Ayden Mayeri, Donald Elise Watkins and Seann William Scott

Credits: Directed by Paul Feig, scripted by Paul Yescombe. An Amazon Prime release.

Everything old is a box office hit again as 20th Century’s venerable “Alien” franchise eats up one of the last weekend’s of summer with a brawny $41.5 million opening, and Henry Selick’s 2009 animated masterpiece “Coraline” cracks the $10 million mark, and the top five as it returns to theaters.

Deadline.com reports that the Thursday night/Friday numbers for “Alien: Romulus” were a sturdy if not stupendous $18.5 or so. That should lift it over $40, perhaps as high as the mid $40s.

Is word of mouth strong? They seem to think so. It’s alarmingly unoriginal, and director Fede Alvarez blows any sense of suspense and the “ticking clock, but reviews haven’t been bad and the audience — in the mood for chest-busting comfort food — is more than willing to dive back into this dystopian, bug-monster future.

“Deadpool & Wolverine” might manage another $29 million at the box office and could clear the $600 million mark by the end of NEXT weekend.

It should be neck and neck again with “This Ends with Us,” which is fresher, reaching a different audience and cleared $24 on its second weekend. It will hurdle past $100 million by Tuesday at the latest.

“Twisters” is still hanging around ($8+), closing in on the $250 million mark, which it should clear by Sept. 1.

“Coraline” ($7.3 over three days) joins “This Ends with Us” as the only “original” script in this mid August cinematic top five, and its a 15 year old re-release.

“Borderlands,” an epic bomb, is lurching into oblivion, “Skincare” (I saw it in an otherwise empty theater) won’t crack the top ten, nor will “Rob Peace” in limited release.

Updated top 3 via Box Office Pro

Those of us old enough to remember catching the original “Alien” in a theater recall which cinema we saw it in, how it was worth going to this or that city’s lone “70mm Dolby Stereo” film palace to experience it.

A lot of us would round up friends to go for follow-up visits back in the summer of ’79, wanting them to be as immersed in this dank, damp and dark “industrial” spaceflight monster movie, ready to look away from the screen long enough to check out how shocked those friends were at the jolts Ridley Scott & Co. delivered.

So maybe we’re too worldwise/movie-savvy and jaded to be very impressed by a “Lost Boys and Girls Meet Aliens” entry in this forty-five year old franchise. That’s all that director and co-writer Fede Alvarez’s “Alien: Romulus” is — very young people, implausibly hurled into orbit, encountering the face-suckers, chest-busters and teeth-within-teeth penis-headed monsters on the resurrected set of “Aliens” (1986).

One can appreciate the back-engineered screenwriting necessary to take us “back there,” to the James Cameron space station sequel that launched the “bug hunt” that went so very wrong on behalf of corporate interests that did not have humanity’s interests at heart. Careful viewers will glimpse the wreckage of the old space freighter “Nostromo” and remember the Joseph Conrad reference it implied.

But as younger, callower characters get to experience what we viewers have experienced and re-experienced repeatedly for nearly half a centiury, reviving dead-characters played by long-gone actors and even repeating lines from the earlier movies, a cynical moviegoer is wholly-entitled to made a Fede case out of “Yeah? That’s all you’ve got?”

Alvarez — of the remade “Evil Dead,” “Don’t Breathe” and the “Girl in the Spider’s Web” remake — gets a little novelty and even less suspense out of rediscoveries, re-imagined pursuits and murders and ill-considered fights with “the perfect (killer) creature” that cinematic spacefarers have been stumbling into for generations.

So much is repeated, recycled and rehashed here that the delight of seeing long-gone “synthetic” science officer Rook (the late Ian Holm) brought back to digital life for more “mission” priority logic and advice wears off almost before it sets in.

On a distance ringed planet, the workforce, bound in their labor for generations, is mining and dying in accidents and deadly-unhealthy work conditions. Some of their orphaned kids are sure they’ve worked and earned enough “credits” to migrate somewhere less dingy and deadly to live.

No way, say representatives of Weyland/Yukani Corp., a reminder that back in ’79, Japan seemed destined to share in planetary domination with the West’s Greatest Oligarchs.

But some of the children of colonists, fearing their parents’ fates, are hellbent on escaping. Something has drifted into orbit around their planet that could help them flee, via cryo-sleep spaceflight, to planetary Nirvana. They just need to go up there and salvage what they need from this “decommissioned” space station, conventiently divided into halves named “Romulus” and “Remus.”

The only reason the plucky Rain (Cailee Spaeny of “Priscilla,” “Civil War”) is included in their half-dozen is that she’s friends with/protective of her “defective” “synthetic person” “brother,” “Andy.”

He (David Jonsson) is a glitchy, inarticulate “special needs” robot fond of bad puns and worse jokes.

“Why don’t monsters eat clowns? They taste funny.” “I’m reading a great book on zero gravity. I just can’t put it down.”

Andy, being synthetic, may have the digital codes in his memory to gain them entry to this station. As pilot Navarro (Aileen Wu), handyman Tyler (Archie Renaux), Kay (Isabella Merced) and rudeboy Bjorn (Spike Fearn) conveniently have access to a low-orbit access cargo hauler, they seem set.

The characters are barely sketched in before all hell breaks loose on that derelict station, which wasn’t so much “decommissioned” as slaughtered and abandoned years before.

Only the half-ruined corpse of Rook (Holm) can give them a clue about what happened, what’s coming and how they might survive it. And dormant for decades or not, he’s still got a corporate agenda to uphold.

Alvarez struggles to find fresh takes on old set pieces — a little zero gravity here, a bit of freeze-fighting there — and only manages moments of suspense, not sustained peril.

The “ticking clock” countdown here isn’t a self-destruct mechanism, but the impending decay of orbit that will crash the station into the planet’s icy, asteroid-riddled rings. It is a mishandled yawner. Seriously, dude, re-watch “Alien.”

The performances are perfunctory, by the book for the most part. Spaeny doesn’t dazzle. Jonsson’s Andy is given an Anglo-Android accent so garbled it sounds as if Christopher Nolan recorded it.

The effects are good to very good. The film plays around with the silent vacuum of space, something the original film borrowed from “2001” and made perilous with its ad slogan — “In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream.”

Intellectual points about how humanity is unsuited for longterm space flight and life on other planets occupy the mind — briefly. Young people resisting the slavery of labor is a nice variation on an earlier “Alien” theme.

Mainly, though, this movie is in the same business as all the “Aliens” that came before it — unleashing beasties on hapless humans who must adapt, fight back and escape, or die grisly, gurgling, incubating-their-murderer deaths.

Nine movies into this franchise, we have the right to something fresh. “In space, no one can hear you yawn” is hardly a selling point.

Rating: R for bloody violent content and profanity

Cast: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabella Merced, Aileen Wu and Spike Fearn.

Credits: Directed by Fede Alvarez, scripted by Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues, based on characters created by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett. A Twentieth Century release.

Running time: 1:59

Elizabeth Banks has a face pretty much designed to be appreciated in extreme close-up.

A gifted comedienne and convincing dramatic lead with years as a talented and beautiful object of cinematic romantic desire under her belt, it’s not hard to imagine her as a Hollywood “Skincare” guru aspiring to “mogul” status, now that she has “my own line” of products “made in Italy” that promise to make you look as perfect, down to the follicles, as her.

But the dark, satiric thriller “Skincare” doesn’t come off as a thriller or satire. It’s just a slog through the downward spiral of a woman whose professional life is upended, who never considers her downfall might be a consequence of shallow goals in a superficial, high-stakes/low-importance “attention” and “beauty” culture.

The entire enterprise may turn deadly, but nothing wrestled with here gets beyond skin deep.

Allegedly “inspired” by a true story, it’s about a divorced beauty on the brink of making it, only to have it all unravel through a cascade of calamities, seemingly not of her own doing.

Hope Goldman is a Hollywood aesthetician whose Crossroads of the World shop has a few “celebrity” clients and enough promise that she’s gambled everything on starting “my own line.”

She’s landed a prime spot on a popular local morning chat show, whose co-host (Nathan Fillion, perfect), is “interested” in her. She has a devoted, gung-ho assistant (transgender performer Michaela Rodriguez) hustling up online attention and a truckload of product, ready to unload the moment “it” happens.

As we see flashing police lights in our first visit with her at a makeup mirror, painstakingly perfecting her painted on “glow,” we can guess this didn’t quite work out.

“Reputation is everything in this business,” Hope preaches. Watch what happens to hers.

A new neighbor in the once-tony courtyard mall, showing up just “a few weeks earlier” seems to be the reason. Hope Goldman Skin Care has a rival, Shimmer by Angel, right across from her years-in-the-making business.

If the landlord (John Billingsley) wants his over-due rent, maybe stabbing her in the chest like this wasn’t the best idea. This could be Hope’s ruin.

“Angel” (Luis Gerardo Méndez), pronounced with an exaggerated “An-HELL,” of course, is a pretentious poseuer who practically holds a mirror up to Hope’s life, dreams and entire aesthetic. How can she, after years of effort, be “the next big thing” when the gayer, younger, hipper version of her is visible right through her store window?

She says she isn’t worried about “the competition,” but we can see it in the tiny new lines creasing her perfect forehead.

Within hours of a grimly superficial meeting where they size each other up her email is hacked and her entire customer list is bombarded with a sexually desperate and deranged confessional “letter,” and her online profile is upended in the most explicit ways. Hope comes undone. Or rather, she thinks she knows who’s undoing her.

She calls on all her superficial feminine wiles, courting and reassuring old customers (Wendy Malick), her media “friend” Brett (Fillion), her tough, “protective” mechanic (Erik Palladino), a concerned cop (Jason Manuel Olazábal) and even the failed-actor toy-boy Jordan (Lewis Pullman) who seems interested enough to help this beauty he’s just met with her four-alarm-fire problem.

“The future of skincare” is at stake, and damned if she’ll let Angel take it from her.

Everything about Hope’s plight is as predictable as it is disheartening. You don’t have to have had hostile people or entities go after your online profile and reputation to cringe at Hope’s problems and feel her pain. But we have reason to expect more “mystery” to the mystery and more logic to how all this unravels than director and co-writer Austin Peters (“Give Me Future”) serves up.

From Hope’s perfect daily “look” — highlights, blowout, chic suits and makeup — to her “How hip am I? I hired a transgender receptionist” “positioning,” nothing about the character is laudable beyond her pluck and chutzpah. “Made in Italy?” Sure. “Invested everything,” but in “what” that’s worthwhile? Outside of the Hollywood bubble, I mean?

Love Banks, who never fails to deliver fair value. But this is more of a good idea for a film than a vehicle for a tour de force turn.

“Skincare” sets us up for something dark and scintillating, a sinister descent into desperation. But it’s as frustrating as a fresh wedding day zit, and sadly, about as inconsequential.

Rating: R, violence, drug use, sexual content, nudity and profanity

Cast: Elizabeth Banks, Nathan Fillion, Michaela Rodriguez, Lewis Pullman and Luis Gerardo Méndez

Credits: Directed by Austin Peters, scripted by Sam Freilich, Austin Peters and
 Deering Regan. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:34

Gena Rowlands had a late life blockbuster, “The Notebook,” which made for a fine curtain call on a career that spanned half a century.

She played the older version of Rachel McAdams in a teary eyed romance about a devoted husband (James Garner) who reads to her of a great love story that they both lived through but which she — suffering from dementia — has forgotten.

Not bad. But she made her best films with her indie icon husband John Cassavettes in their salad days.

And the couple of times I interviewed her over the years all I wanted to talk about was “Gloria.”

Playing a former mob moll sucked into caring for the child of a mob accountant, whose entire family is then slaughtered with only Gloria standing between the kid and the same fate, she was uncharacteristically fierce in the part.

I love this fan-made trailer to the hard nosed but sentimental thriller, which came out in 1980.

I made her repeat her iconic line, after she’s just shot up another bunch of gangsters out to clean house, if memory serves.

“Let a WOMAN beat ya,” she bellowed, and laughed, both in the film and in that interview.

She collected a couple of Oscar nominations over the decades, worked with great directors and on TV, had Pedro Almodovar’s most famous film dedicated to her and showed up at film festivals to keep her late husband’s legacy alive by doing Q &As about his movies with his other frequent collaborator, Seymour Cassell.

She showed a Cassavettes classic at the Florida Film Festival some years back and entertained adoring fans afterwards.

But whatever else Rowland played, all the other honors she earned in her storied career, “Gloria” was the role a film buff never forgets.

Chiwetel Ejiofor‘s “Rob Peace” surfs the ebb and flow of one life in making an age-old point about race and life in America. Simply put, it underscores the message of generations of TV ads for The United Negro College Fund — “A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste.”

Here, we’re told a true story (base don a Jeff Hobbs biography) of a brilliant, focused mind aimed at a life of “curing cancer,” but redirected, time and again, by the demands of growing up Black in New Jersey.

We meet Robert DeShaun Peace (Jelani Dacres) as a seven year old math whiz, dazzling his Dad (Ejiofor) with his ability to work out baseball batting averages, his mother’s (Mary J. Blige) family budget and the like, a child who lives for Dad’s weekly visits.

His first memory, he narrates, is of “the day my father’s house burned down,” “the last day I remember being a child.”

He recalls an informal ball game listening party on the stoop of his mother’s apartment complex, the older neighbor who figures he’s “the cavalry that’s going to turn this neighborhood around.” His father’s old Lincoln broke down that day and limited where this weekly visit would wind up. But the kid noted his personable father Skeet’s circle of friends and connections, and the lesson Dad imparts from that.

“You look out for people” and someday they’ll “look out for you.”

There was a revolver, shots fired and a fire. And next thing he knows, Dad is in jail for a double homocide.

Hired-cook Mom vows to do whatever it takes to get Shaun into private school, to have Shaun use “your first name” so that he’s not associated with his father’s incarceration by anyone he meets. The kid’s fascination with the race-and-class-blind cut-and-dried truths of science will take a lifelong back seat to his father’s pleas — to a very young, impressionable and smart child — that he “get me out.”

Shaun will be Rob, and he will take on his father’s case, his crumbling neighborhood and the limited expectations of his circumstances because he’s the family hero on horseback and “the cavalry’s coming.”

Getting into all-Black parochial school St. Benedict’s is step one, where the kind priest in charge (Michael Kelly) makes sure the boys there learn the school motto — “Whatever hurts my brother hurts me.” Getting the grades and class achievements it takes to get into a great college is step two.

Dad’s case? There’s evidence that the State ignored, allegations of a murder weapon switch, enough for an appeal. “I can file that for you,” teenaged Rob (Jay Will) reassures his increasingly desperate father.

Yale? Whatever race or class challenges face him there, Rob’s obvious talent trumps them. He assures his classmates of color (Camilla Cabello, Caleb Eberhart, etc.) that “race” isn’t an issue there.

“I’m not about to keep my guard up if nobody’s swinging” at him, he chuckles.

Ejiofor’s film goes to great pains to avoid the “white savior” trap, emphasizing the American meritocracy that theoretically should celebrate brilliant minds like Rob. The priest, the college professor (Mare Winningham) who recognize his talent do what we’d expect people trained to nuture talent do.

But as Rob tells his story in voice-over narration taken from his grad school application essay, we see the many ways he’s been on his own and how he has to use that brilliance to add potency to marijuana he and a couple of classmates cook-up for the cash needed for school and to finance his father’s appeal.

Rob will parlay that into a long-gestating house-flipping scheme back home in East Orange, because that’s another thing that brilliant mind sees before everyone else. And as he does all this, he will bring change to his world and forever alter the lives of the friends who throw in with him.

He may guard his family “secret,” reluctant even to reveal his father’s imprisonment even to his Yale girlfriend (Cabello). He may be shaken by the degree to which his father expects his genius son to save him. But Rob somehow rolls with it, shrugging off the culture clashes inherent in an institution like Yale, bringing people together on schemes that don’t just result in ready cash, but put everybody on the same side pushing towards a common goal.

Ejiofor’s film struggles to contain all that ambition, a working poor kid who starts to improve his world while still an undergrad, a college science student navigating a legal system fraught with lazy prosecutors, corrupt cops and judges drunk on their own power, even the ones inclined to see the “rigged” system’s injustices.

Will, of TV’s “Tulsa King” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” holds his own with his Oscar-nominated writer-director co-star Ejiofor, and impresses in every scene. It’s no easy feat, conveying confidence and intelligence that sees beyond the simple inexperience of youth and limitations of class.

Rob can be cocky about his prospects in ways that persuade others to join his ventures. But they also see his sense of decency, the fairness and “We’re all in this together” ethos that supercedes any competitive edge he might be hiding.

“Rob Peace” meanders as it tries to get all this in. Narration as framework aside, it can be hard to keep track of this or that “prize” that Rob turns his eye towards.

But Will, Ejiofor and Blige, as a mother who never wavers from what she sees as her primary duty, make this odyssey feel personal and the pitfalls we see coming and ever-mounting life tests seem surmountable if only this brilliant mind isn’t wasted by an America reluctant to embrace “Whatever hurts my brother hurts me.”

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Jay Will, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mary J. Blige, Camilla Cabello, Juan Castono, Curt Morlaye, Caleb Eberhardt, Michael Kelly and Mare Winningham.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor, based on a book by Jeff Hobbs. A Republic Pictures/Paramount release.

Running time: 1:57