Movie Nation

The idea, which two Afflecks and a Damon produced, one Affleck co-wrote and an Affleck and a Damon star in, was to throw Casey and Matt, Ving and Ron Perlman, Toby Jones and Alfred Molina and Hong Chau at a noisy, chatty caper comedy and see what stuck.

“You’re acting like this is ‘The Thomas Crown Affair or something,” Casey Affleck — apparently paid by the word as a co-writer and an actor, chortles at one point.

“The Instigators” isn’t “The Thomas Crown Affair” or “The Hot Rock,” which might be the real caper comedy this most closely resembles. It’s an ever devolving catastrophe about an ever unraveling robbery gone wrong.

At least they got Doug Liman (“Swingers,””Edge of Tomorrow,” the “Roadhouse” remake) to direct and every wintry Boston location they could get their hands on for a story of a heist gone wrong.

And if it’s not hilarious — it isn’t –– at least it gets a whole lot of Patriots fan police officers and firemen and actors playing them off the Common for a few days.

It’s a cascading cluster Affleck about a caper going wrong, more wrong and as wrong as it can go before we wind up where we kind of figure we might once we’ve established just what this scruffy, over-populated tumble isn’t.

And what it isn’t is “serious.”

Deaths and gunshot wounds aside, when you’ve got a corrupt mayor (Ron Perlman) who likes his bribes in cash, a dogged detective (Ving Rhames) who travels the city in a Special Ops tank, an armed robber in therapy (Matt Damon), a therapist (Hong Chau) willing to go above and beyond for a patient (“How does this make you feel?”), an alcoholic ex-con (Casey Affleck) who insists on driving assorted getaway vehicles despite being shot in the shoulder, incompetent, known-to-the-cops mobsters (Michael Stuhlbarg and Alfred Molina) who set this whole inept “job” in motion, you’ve got the makings of a farce.

It doesn’t quite get there. But it does get on your nerves, sometimes in a good way.

Damon and Affleck are strangers summoned to join Scalvo (Jack Harlow) for a robbery of a mayoral re-election celebration. That’s the night when the longtime mayor’s payoffs for contracts will be pouring in.

It does no good to ask the hothead Mr. Besegai (Stuhlbarg of “A Serious Man”) “What if the other guy wins?”

“The CHINAMEN (Ronnie Cho) ain’t gonna win!” the Boston racist rages.

Naturally, that’s exactly what happens. The money isn’t there. The venue is packed when it’s supposed to have emptied out and trigger-happy screwup Scalvo kills a police commissioner and gets killed himself.

The two surviving robbers have no real loot, but something belonging to the mayor that he just HAS to have. They’re hunted as cop killers and the mobsters who hired them call in a killer (Paul Walter Hauser) to “clean this up.”

The mayor brings in the city’s baddest cop (Rhames) to hunt them down.

And the therapist turns out to be willing to let herself be a hostage if it’ll help out a patient she’s been making “great progress” with.

As Damon’s 60ish floor-sander/ex Marine is hard up for cash and on his first “job,” he was guy who kept asking “One more thing” about the plans. He takes notes — “On a criminal CONSPIRACY?”

As Affleck’s ex-con can’t take a breath without running off at the mouth, this “odd couple on the lam” is one long one-liner.

“You just hit a f—–g COP car!”

“Yeah, well, they got more.”

“For a moment there, it was nice and quiet. I thought you were dead.”

Some jokes land, some twists surprise, a few even pay off.

Liman gets the chases, crashes, explosions and boy bonding gags right. But the picture doesn’t hold together, never delivers more than a chuckle and never ever seems to have a point or genuine finale that it’s working up to.

It’s good to see all these folks together in the same picture. But Affleck and Chuck MacLean don’t script enough clever bits, smart action beats and funny lines to let “The Instigators” instigate much of anything.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, Michael Stuhlbarg, Hong Chau, Jack Harlow, Ron Perlman, Paul Walter Hauser, Toby Jones, Ving Rhames and Alfred Molina.

Credits: Directed by Doug Liman, scripted by Chuck MacLean and Casey Affleck. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:41

There’s something refreshing about seeing Zach Braff renew his “Scrubs” card with a lighter-than-lightweight rom-com that leans into the “sensitive” side which he’s always played for laughs.

In “French Girl,” he’s trying to impress his hockey-crazed Canadian in-laws to be, but actually “I don’t follow hockey. I’m more into figure skating,” which he proves by naming a couple of decades of great skaters and marveling at “the dazzling costumes.”

The big sissy.

He likes dressing up in 16th century “pantaloons” when he reads Shakespeare to his classes.

And he’s Mr. Supportive Beau when it comes to his French Canadian girlfriend’s (Evelyn Brochu) returning to her native Quebec City to become a star chef there. Her farm family drafts him into duck hunting and lamb slaughtering, which goes against his nature.

All of which underscores that “French Girl” is a clafoutis dessert stuffed with nothing but low-hanging fruit.

It’s about a middle school teacher — Gordon — who travels to Quebec with his lady love Sophie where she has a test/tryout at a swank new restaurant that her culinary school rival and friend (Vanessa Hudgens) is opening.

Ruby is a culinary star, with cookbooks, TV shows and an “empire” of eateries under her name, which she is sure to tell you when you meet her.

One thing Gordon doesn’t pick up on is that she and Sophie used to be a thing. Her family (Luc Picard, Isabelle Vincent, Antoine Olivier Pilon and Charlotte Aubin) know what he doesn’t — at first — that Ruby and Sophie were close to inseperable.

That running gag of Gordon being in the dark doesn’t deliver many laughs, nor does the disastrous duck hunt, the waterbed he and Sophie have to share and the brother (Pilon) who wants to be a cop, but needs a crash course in English (from Gordon).

One cute touch — Gordon understands French, so everybody can talk to him and yell at him in French with him responding in English.

There’s granny with dementia (Muriel Dutil) who makes off with the “survived the sinking of the Titanic” family ring that Gordon plans to ask Sophie to marry him with. That almost manages a chuckle.

But Hudgens makes a splendid egomaniac mean girl hell bent on getting Sophie back, a woman whose every move screams “SHOWBOAT!” She belts out a self-written tune at a funeral, hosts her TV show like she’s done it all her life and seems to have all the advantages against hapless Gordon.

William Fichtner plays Gordon’s mystery-novelist dad with a nice twinkle.

But basically this “French (CANADIAN) Girl” is a 75 minute dawdle buried in a 106 minute movie. Braff can still land a punch line and manage goofy, “sensy” banter. There just isn’t enough of it here to hold one’s interest. Comedies do not live on low-hanging fruit alone.

Rating: R, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Zach Braff, Evelyn Brochu, Luc Picard, Antoine Olivier Pilon, William Fichtner and Vanessa Hudgens

Credits: Scripted and directed by James A. Woods and Nicholas Wright. A Paramount release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:46

Willem Dafoe and a mostly unknown cast of look-alikes take us back to 1975 with Lorne and Jane and Chevy and Gilda and Garrett and Dan and Laraine and Belushi, with Jim Henson and Andy Kaufman, as “Saturday Night” — a slice of post Python American counter-culture comedy — went “Live from New York.

Oct. 11.

Interns get to meet a volcano via their ranger supervisor in this travelogue with dramatic elements. The novelty in this scenic tale is the fact that it was shot with an erupting volcano — lava flows, the works — right behind the actors for many scenes.

The samples of dialogue suggest that maybe getting the shot and getting out of danger was a bigger priority than nailing the lines, or asking for quick re-writes of the clunkier ones.

In eptember, we’ll see if the trailer is teasing a better movie than this.

The laughs are cute and spare in the Swiss comedy “Golden Years,” a movie more interested in looking at what the novelist Tom Robbins said was the “ONLY” question in life worth asking — “How to make love stay.”

Are we entering an evolutionary change in the nature of marriage and “life partnership,” thanks to people living longer, with more access to more distractions — human and otherwise — even in life’s twilight?

“Will it go along like this until the end,” our frustrated heroine, Alice, asks her disinterested husband of 42 years, Peter? She can’t be the only one wondering this.

Peter (Stefan Kurt) retires, gets a pink balloon and a giant jug of cheap bourbon at the office and a congratulatory party at home. He seems all set to settle in to this new place in life.

But jazzercising free spirit Alice (Esther Gemsch) is more excited for the Mediterranean cruise their two adult children have bought for them. Peter wants to give it back, but Alice won’t hear of it.

Then their dear friend Magali (Elvira Plüss) dies in Alice’s arms on a hike. Alice is crushed. Peter is upset. And his solution for newly widowed Heinz’s (Ueli Jäggi) despair is to invite him on their “romantic” cruise.

Alice’s dismay is obvious from the first, and will only grow after they board and set sail. The fact that their children (Isabelle Barth and Martin Vischer) are in a troubled marriage and deep into a Tinder addiction respectively troubles her. And as Magali’s last words were for her to fetch “letters” from her nightstand, evidence of a years-long affair with in neighboring France gets Alice wondering about other ways to live the rest of her life.

Director Barbara Kulcsar takes her time setting up the contrasts — Peter’s life-extending exercise/vegetarian lifestyle vs. Alice’s “I’m only 65. I’m not 90 YET” (in German with English subtitles) fury at his disinterest — and takes more time pointing the picture in the direction we’ve known it would go from the moment we see the letters and that they have a French return address on them.

Our filmmakers tease the same sex lifestyle options and how attractive those might look to people whose sexual ardor has cooled, or is ripe for a “something different” revival.

“Golden Years” is a romantic comedy with questions and perhaps a very modern “answer” to that “Will it go on like this until the end?” challenge. But even though it’s well-acted, scenic and charming enough, perhaps finding a few more laughs should have been a higher priority.

Rating: 16+, adult themes and situations

Cast: Esther Gemsch, Stefan Kurt, Ueli Jäggi, Gundi Ellert and Elvira Plüss

Credits: Directed by Barbara Kulcsar, scripted by Petra Biondina Volpe. A Music Box release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:32

A mercenary mission goes wrong, very wrong, in this Sept. 20 thriller from the director of “Assassin’s Bullet.”

Rhona Mitra also stars.

An Oscar-winner-adorned series coming to Apple TV+, “Disclaimer” is about journalistic unmasking of revered institutions. In addition to Oscar winners Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen, Lesley Manville and Kodi Smit-McPhee also star in Alfonso Cuaron’s adaptation of a Renee Knight novel.

Oct. 11.

If you didn’t live through the ’70s, you can still pick up a pretty good idea of what the decade looked and felt like through the movies released and set then.

The working class grime, paranoia and diminished expectations wasn’t just a feature of urban thrillers such as “Three Days of the Condor.” You can feel it in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” just as much as you can in “Mean Streets” or “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

Looking back on all the grey-sky classics of the day, it could feel like the prevailing season was fall into winter, the mood of the nation was cynicism and a different breed of movie stars were our voices for that loss of faith.

You can hear paranoia in the overheard whispers captured on tape in “The Conversation,” and the distraction that thumping disco pumped into “Saturday Night Fever.”

But you can smell 1973 in “The Last Detail” — cheap stogeys and Schlitz, dank taxis running on leaded gas, smoke-filled rail cars and down-market brothels, simple burger-with-onion diner fare and sailors in salty pea coats, shivering on liberty between “orders” to board a new ship.

Hal Ashby’s film — a Robert Towne script adapted from Darryl Ponsican’s novel — is rightly regarded as one of the movies that made Jack Nicholson “JACK Nicholson.” The sarcastic cynic, amusing blowhard and bluff, even bullying everyman at war with his times and his station in life was a vital part of the Nicholson brand.

He’d been a dopey grown-ass-dropout in “Easy Rider,” a pianist from privilege who rejects that upbringing in “Five Easy Pieces,” the stable and responsible sibling of “The King of Marvin Gardens” and a sexual revolutionary who doesn’t know there’s a war on in “Carnal Knowlege.”

In this sentimental service comedy that plays as tragedy, he’s a Naval chief petty officer all but adrift on the land — waiting for a ship –in a Vietnam War era film that barely mentions Vietnam.

What’s striking about “The Last Detail” 50 years later isn’t the “service comedy” tropes — boozing up New York and chasing skirts on “liberty” (leave), a near meltdown in a D.C. bar and a brawl with Marines — but the easy camraderie that’s been one of Nicholson’s gifts.

He’d play loners, Lotharios, amusingly manipulative jerks, brooding artists and head-cases. But for his era, he came to embody an idea of a man among men, a hale fellow of sorts. He settles into this Naval milieu, a CPO assigned to the company of two strangers, as easily as he mastered the fox in the mental ward henhouse of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” the veteran detective/cock-of-the-walk of “Chinatown” or a horse thief trying to stay alive in “The Missouri Breaks.”

Ensembles just formed around Nicholson, and larger-than-life or not, in his best pictures, there’s plenty of room for others to shine in his magnanimous company.

Buddusky is just one of the petty officers assigned to wear the SP (shore patrol) arm band and side-arm required to escort a sailor who has been convicted of a crime to Portsmouth Naval Prison in Maine. His partner “chaser” on this “s–t detail” is Mulhall. And once Buddosky gets past his teasing mispronunciations — “Mulehead…Mule House” — they’re practically old shipmates, each at ease in their shared rank and not thrilled about their shared duty and shared contempt for “The Old Man” in charge of their corner of Naval Station Norfolk (Va.).

That’s significant because the Navy was just a couple of decades into true integration. And while the bluff Master at Arms (Clifton James, who played a good ol’boy sheriff in a couple of James Bond films of the day) might default to putting Buddusky in charge, he barely acts like it, always treating the more sensible, by-the-book and Black Mulhall (Otis Young) as an equal, with the odd “shine” joke never meant to jab.

In a different era, Young — terrific, testy, droll and wholly empathatic — might have enjoyed a much bigger career based on this performance.

“I don’t know what I would’a done without the Navy,” the Louisana native Mulhall declares. We, like Buddusky, get it. Getting out of Louisiana was the thing the service offered.

Young holds his own with Nicholson, and the “star” shares the spotlight like a movie icon just now realizing he’s made it and feeling generous.

Randy Quaid benefits from this as well. As the 18 year-old pathological shoplifter facing eight years in the brig, Quaid leans into tall, wide-eyed and dumb so hard it’s no wonder that first Buddusky and then Mulhall soften towards him and decide to make this last few days of freedom memorable.

They’ll stretch a two-day trip to the fully-allotted five they’re allowed to get Meadows from Norfolk to Richmond, Washington, New York, Boston and then Portsmouth.

They’ll have the luxury of missing a train or a bus, holing up in cheap per diem hotels, drinking Schlitz from a can and PBR out of the old fat bottles, watching black and white movies on TV and taking their sweet time.

“Is your word worth anything,” Buddusky wants to know of the kid? Can he take off the handcuffs, treat him like a shipmate and not embarass him in transit? Maybe. Maybe not.

But as Buddusky’s efforts to give this boy a taste of the world before he’s locked out of it for eight years extend to threatening a D.C. barman  reluctant to serve Mulhall who will flatly NOT serve an underage sailor, and finding Meadows “a woman,” Mulhall recognizes the threat to both their careers, long time service be damned.

“I consider myself in jeopardy with you, man, understand? In jeopardy. This ain’t no farewell party an’ he ain’t retirin’. Understand? He’s a prisoner an’ we’re takin’ ‘im to the jailhouse. An’ you have a tendency to forget that. You’re a menace, man.” 

How much of a menace and just how much “jeopardy” is what “The Last Detail” is about.

Director Ashby had “Harold & Maude” behind him, “Shampoo” and “Being There” ahead of him, as well as drug addiction that would kill him and seriously damage his reputation. Some of us learned the hard way not to mention his name in front of “Jinxed” star Bette Midler.

The upper class fustiness Ashby upended in “Harold & Maude,” the gauche and shallow sexual commerce of Hollywood of “Shampoo” and the hollow gravitas of the old men running Washington of “Being There” is joined by a post-60s “Detail” America where the youth are into chanting cults (“SNL” legend Gilda Radner and “Carrie/Dressed to Kill/Blowout” star Nancy Allen among them), hippies quizzing servicemen about Vietnam and a working class that, in or out of uniform, could be cohesive or at odds if the wrong buttons are punched.

There’s a quirky absurdity to Ashby’s best films balanced with a keen eye for humanity at that moment. His Woody Guthrie biopic “Bound for Glory” was a misfire, if sweet and well-intentioned. Some filmmakers aren’t great at period pieces or capturing larger than life figures and events.

Here, he’s just another top director of his era whose reputation is further burnished by capturing Nicholson at his peak.

The film’s jaunty, Naval anthem-laced Johnny Mandel score (“Anchor’s Aweigh,” etc.) belies the darkness of this odyssey. The weight of what they’re doing wears on Buddusky and Mulhall, and the actors playing them. They realize, as we do, that this harsh judgement has fallen upon a barely-shaving kid, somebody even viewers back then would have recognized as needing psychological help, not hard time under the thumb of Marine “grunts.”

The simmering sentimentality allows us to assume we’re about to meet the “Hooker with a Heart of Gold” when Carol Kane — in her first attention-grabbing role — shows up as the New York sex worker about to teach “the kid” about the birds and the bees.

But the jaded screenwriter Towne — best known for “Chinatown” — would never let the not-as-cynical Ashby get away with that, even if he gave Nicholson’s Buddusky the film’s most humanizing line for just this moment.

“They got feelings just like everybody else, kid.”

Rating: R, violence, nudity, sex, pot use and alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Otis Young, Randy Quaid, Michael Moriarty, Clifton James and Carol Kane.

Credits: Directed by Hal Ashby, scripted by Robert Towne, based on a novel by Darryl Ponsican. A Columbia Pictures release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:44

Saban sent this “trailer,” which is actually a sample scene — “garage ambush.”

They’re probably in a rush, seeing as how “Duchess” is sneaking into release Friday.

Colm Meany is in the cast, Charlotte Kirk has the title role. Neil Marshall (“The Descent,””Centurion,” the 2019 “Hellboy”) directed and co-wrote the script with Kirk and another writer.

For anyone who’s wondered if the over-extended, over-exposed Kevin Hart has “stopped trying,” it’s worth catching up with “Me Time,” an earlier stop on his Netflix content train that’s back on the streamer.

It pairs up Mr. Buddy Picture (“Ride Along,” etc.) with Mark Wahlberg (“The Other Guys”), no stranger to the comedy genre himself. The farce was written and directed by John Hamburg, whose “buddy” credits go back to “Safe Men” (1998) and include ” I Love You Man.”

And it doesn’t work. It should have, but it doesn’t, despite Hart’s best efforts.

His many pratfalls, frantic in his over-reactions to everything that goes wrong for a stay-at-home-dad (“Housewife”) trying to motivate and raise two children, keep a high-flying architect wife (Regina Hall) happy, volunteer at school and catch up with his former bestie Huck (Wahlberg) during an epic “Big 44” birthday party built to resemble a near-actual-size Burning Man/Coachella Festival pretty much comes to naught.

“HuckCHELLA!”

Wahlberg goes as over-the-top as he thinks this comedy, which also throws in Jimmy O. Yang as a loan shark, a digital mountain lion and its cub, a babysitter who turns out to be a stripper and John Amos as a grumpy father-in-law, requires. No dice.

There’s barely a laugh in it, most of them provided by musical interludes –Hart, playing a guy who gave up his music dream, duets with Seal, and Hart, as a micro-managing school talent show organizer, keeps rejecting an elementary schooler who delivers increasingly heartbreaking versions of Leonard Cohen’s iconic “Halleluhah.”

But that’s it.

Ducking Huck’s “come celebrate with me” calls until his distracted wife insists he get some “me time,” stumbling into Huck and friends skinny-dipping, riding the Huck party bus into the desert with a gang of unfunny strangers, figuring out Huck’s money troubles — the hard way — and trying to “grow” through all this as his wife may be falling for a rich “tooth fairy” dental care guru (Luis Gerardo Méndez), trying to get revenge in the “chess match” with that very unfunny guru, almost none of it merits so much as a smirk.

And when you give your all to something that was probably never going to work thanks to the script, “stop trying” can’t help but cross your mind. If only Hart had taken this as a sign that he needs to stop taking every Netflix/Amazon Prime offer and focus on finding good projects and making them funnier instead of taking the cash and phoning it in.

Rating: R, substance abuse, nudity and profanity

Cast: Kevin Hart, Mark Wahlberg, Regina Hall, Jimmy O. Yang, Ilia Isorelýs Paulino, Anna Maria Horsford and John Amos

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Hamburg. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41