Movie Nation

I was about five minutes into re-watching “The Cincinnati Kid” when it struck me that I needed to read or re-read director Norman Jewison’s autobiography, or hunt down the recent biography of the Canadian director.

He’s not exactly an obscure filmmaker, with seven Oscar nominations and films like “Moonstruck” and “The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming” in his extensive filmography.

But his fifth feature film, his first “serious” movie, has threads that turn up so often in his later work that one wonders, “What made him such a righteous dude?”

The Toronto native who made the groundbreaking “In the Heat of the Night,” “A Soldier’s Story” and the very impressive bio-pic “The Hurricane” was astutely in touch with America’s shifting attitudes on race. And he made sure his films were ahead of the curve in that regard.

Jewison, a child of the Great Depression, took over a 1930s gambling drama Sam Peckinpah was hellbent on making dark and noirish (he filmed a few scenes in black and white, and was fired) and gently folded “representation” and “inclusion” into it so subtly that one barely notices it today.

Steve McQueen, the emerging icon of Hollywood cool, is the title character, a transplanted-to-New Orleans poker player living by his instincts and wits and occasionally surviving with his fists. And who’s the first person we see him show an interest in impressing?

It’s a Black shoeshine boy who always wants him to stop and “try me.” They pitch coins, and Eric, “The Cincinnati Kid” wins. Always. He smiles, tells the lad “You’re not ready for me, yet,” and keeps his coin.

The film, reset from the St. Louis of the Richard Jessup novel to the more racially-tolerant New Orleans, points us towards The Big Game, a showdown between The Kid and the best player of the day, Lancey Howard (Edward G. Robinson). But this being The Big Easy, Jewison made sure to include jazz singer and actor Cab Calloway at the table. “Yeller” the character is named, mixed in with players named “Pig” and “Ladyfingers.” The mere fact he’s in there, playing cards as equals, gives us a taste of New Orleans and an idea of all the “erased” history movies set in such milieus that Hollywood had served up prior to this.

“The Cincinnati Kid” is an inferior run through the similar milieu and themes of “The Hustler,” an unamusing Depression Era card-game precursor to “The Sting.” The plot sets up a love triangle, a potential cheat, misplaced loyalties and what feels like a low-stakes contest. Win or lose, how will The Kid’s life change?

But its muted colors, quiet tone and some impressive performances lift this classic also-ran into something worth watching.

The Kid wants to prove something — to himself, his peers and to his girl Christian (Tuesday Weld), whom he wants to impress.

“Listen, Christian, after the game, I’ll be The Man. I’ll be the best there is. People will sit down at the table with you, just so they can say they played with The Man. And that’s what I’m gonna be, Christian.”

But McQueen’s too cool to let on that his character is “desperate” for this new status. There’s none of the alcoholic resentment of “Fast Eddie” “The Hustler” in him. McQueen gave performances worthy of Oscars. Most of the time, though, he seemed more determined to define his steely cool image and stick to it.

Karl Malden’s The Kid’s old friend, Shooter, a gambler reduced to “playing the percentages” and trying to keep a seriously mercenary floozy of a wife (Ann-Margret, terrific) interested.

Rip Torn plays the scion of local gentry, a would-be card sharp who isn’t in the same league with The Kid or the legendary Lancey Howard.

Jack Weston seems a tad on-the-nose, cast as the skilled but faintly delusional “Pig,” a guy sure to let you see him sweat. Joan Blondell impresses as the blowsy old broad Lady Fingers, with Calloway and veteran character players Jeff Corey and Theodore Marcuse, and Milton Seltzer playing a note-taking/math-computing “Doc” at the card table. Dub Taylor shows up as a dealer at a lower-rent game early in the film.

The McQueen/Edward G. Robinson dynamic is one place “The Cincinnati Kid” had the potential to best “The Hustler.” The dapper Lancey is more present in the picture, more insidious in the ways he brushes off the challenge of “The Kid,” and gets into his opponent’s head over his love-life troubles — Christian, awaiting a commitment, the married Mebla (Ann-Margret) throwing herself at the possible New King of Cards.

But Jackie Gleason’s Minnesota Fats is a “presence” in “The Hustler,” a mostly off-camera myth, Fast Eddie’s Great White Whale. Robinson is too familiar as an actor and a character in the film to be Larger than Life. The movie needed less Edward G., more Edward G. mystique.

Even the Jessup novel was compared to “The Hustler” and found wanting.

Jewison still makes a perfectly entertaining movie out of a card game, a love triangle and a lot of competing agendas in play with every “fold,” “call” or “raise.” A game about “making the wrong move at the right time” becomes the right movie for Jewison, one that transformed a comedy guy into somebody who’d make dramas a lot better than this, often with a social subtext that couldn’t help but strike a nerve.

Rating: PG-13ish

Cast: Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson, Ann-Margret, Tuesday Weld, Cab Calloway, Rip Torn and Karl Malden.

Credits: Directed by Norman Jewison, scripted by Ring Lardner Jr. and Terry Southern, based on a novel by Richard Jessup. An MGM release on Amazon, Youtube and Movies!

Running time: 1:42

“Beauty and the Beast” may have been put in book form by a Frenchwoman in the 18th century. But as Disney and lyricist Howard Ashman reminded us, it’s a “tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme.” Researchers have found its plot elements and themes in stories from many cultures, some of which push its origins back some 4,000 years.

One of those “origin” lineages is Scandinavian. So California filmmaker Max Gold is on firm “Morphology of the Folk Tale” footing in setting “Belle,” his no-dancing-teapots version of the story, in a stark “Seventh Seal” (Icelandic) landscape.

It’s a violent variation of the story somewhat more in keeping with the grim darkness of the original tale, ignoring the “Disney” versions and the softening up the famous 90s’ TV adaptation gave it. But as recognizable as its themes and story beats are, as striking as the settings might be, “Belle” is a clumsy film, uncertain of its tone, unsatisfying in its performances and handling of those themes.

Andrea Snædal‘s Belle is a farm girl living with a widowed father (Gudmundur Thorvaldsson) who’d like nothing better than to marry her off to one of the local lumps. But she’s not having it.

Where they live, a legend has become more than local lore. Men poking around the cave where a rose of immortality is kept find themselves slaughtered and eaten by The Beast. The location of that magical rose seems well-known. But its origins, a “curse” rendered unto a man by a jilted witch-lover, are not.

That’s why that witch (Hana Vagnerová) is our narrator. She can set the story straight.

When Belle’s father grows deathly ill, she goes hunting for the rose. The cave where it is kept is guarded by a mute and blind young torch-bearer. Belle won’t be dissuaded. She meets the man who sometimes transforms into a beast (Ingi Hrafn Hilmarsson) and begs the rose off him. He seems nice enough, “kind” and all that.

With a little help from the conjure-woman, Papa is cured. But the “spell” that fixes him “has an ‘unless.'” It won’t last “unless” Belle goes to stay with the beast, and over Dad’s objections, she does.

His “curse” stares them both in the face, and in this version “I have to fall in love” is “the rule” that will break it. That’s a switch from the traditional point of the story, that the Beast has to be sweet enough for someone to fall for him.

The fetching, spirited Belle seems like a cute catch. But not so fast, there, fairytale fans!

The film, in English with bits of Icelandic dialogue and a folk song, reaches for a lighter touch as Belle tries to “test” ideas about the “rules,” the things that turn the rugged hermit into The Beast. Throwing rocks at his head doesn’t provoke him. Tying him up and pouring hot candle wax may have its kinky fans, but it does nothing to change man into Beast.

The film never quite finds its sweet spot. The violence mixed with flippant modern vernacular is never quite darkly funny, and the film leaves one puzzled about Belle’s agenda, or the Witch’s. The Beast’s, at least, we understand.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say Gold doesn’t “get” the meaning of the tale, whose best film version might still be the 1946 Jean Cocteau French classic. But at least the animated “Disney version” was moving.

This one just meanders about a striking landscape and struggles to strike a chord, or at other times, to simply make sense.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, nudity

Cast: Andrea Snædal, Ingi Hrafn Hilmarsson, Gudmundur Thorvaldsson and Hana Vagnerová

Credits: Scripted and directed by Max Gold. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:30

The first tune that grabs your attention in this horror film, directed by and starring Patrick Wilson, is a re-recorded Kevin Cronin cover of REO Speedwagon’s “Roll with the Changes.”

The second is a peculiar little flourish playing on the turntable of our nightmares, this ditty by ditty dynamo Tiny Tim.

And then there’s the one you have to stay through the closing credits to get to, the one that reminds us that Patrick Wilson’s a singing actor, when the need or the urge arises.

He’s “featured” on this, which plays under the credits.

Patrick Wilson has become something of the poster boy for “When Good Actors Do Horror.”

One thing you can be sure of, when Wilson does an “Annabelle,” “Insidious” or “Conjuring” movie, when something that can’t be happening starts happening, he’s going to give you an award-worthy interpretation of puzzlement, alarm and freaking the f-out.

Wilson co-stars in, steps behind the camera to direct and even sings in the closing credits song in his latest, “Insidious: The Red Door.” The movie’s a near triumph of murky tone and general spookiness. And the acting is sharp, up and down the line, another testament to actors turning director. They know what their players need.

The plot? It’s a muddle, especially if all these titles run together and the through-line of this “Poltergeist” derived saga of a family being sucked into “The Further” isn’t fresh in your memory.

Wilson doesn’t help matters in this regard by showing up in three horror franchises concurrently. They can’t help but get mixed up in the memory. “Insidious” is the one co-starring Rose Byrne. Vera Farmiga plays his better half in the “Conjuring” and “Annabelle” films about the “Amityville” investigators, the Warrens.

In “The Red Door,” the Lamberts have broken up. Josh (Wilson) has just lost his mother (Barbara Hershey, remembered in a photo), and that trauma may be triggering things in him that Renai (Byrne) had just as soon not have around.

A prologue tells us that after the last “Insidious” visitation from “The Further,” Josh and tween son Dalton were hypnotized and told to erase “the past year.”

Now Dalton (Ty Simpkins) is an aspiring artist headed off to college, and Josh is having recovered-memory flashbacks. Father and son aren’t communicating, which is a pity. Because if Josh remembers anything, it might be the “astral projection” that goes on when one dozes off under the right conditions.

Mom, who didn’t go under hypnosis, might have clearer answers, but she’s busy raising their other two kids and she’s not talking.

Josh is visited and haunted at his mother’s house. Nightmare-tormented Dalton has only his accidental college roomie Chris’s (Sinclair Daniel) Black Girl Magic, empathy and facility with Google Search to lean on.

The movie features the requisite jolts, few of which have much punch. But the first truly creepy thing in it is a lulu. Josh is texting in his parked SUV, unaware of the unfocused, grunge-attired figure behind his car which is barely discernable as human. Ish.

The film’s depiction of college life is an amusing mix of cliches — the frat “baby” party (wearing diapers, eating “diaper pudding” out of other diapers) — and a bracing college art class built around two bravura scenes with Hiam Abbass (“Blade Runner: 2049,” “The Visitor” and “Munich”). She plays the demanding professor whose “dredge up your darkest, innermost thoughts” is what triggers Dalton to start having nightmares and “astral projection” strolls and forces him to recover memories he was hypnotized out of at age 10.

Wilson doesn’t utterly lose the thread, but “The Red Door” tends to meander, over-decorating the monstrous “Entity” scenes, reaching for “explanations” that explain nothing other than “This franchise will go on” and serving up a little Tiny Tim to set the mood.

One sure way to gauge a horror film’s success is whether it shocks and shakes you, makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. That never happened for me, here. For all the interesting performances and promising characters in this one, I think the actor/director and actor’s director lets us off the hook entirely too easily.

Well at least he gets to sing again, if only over the properly creepy rocker playing under the closing credits.

Rating: PG-13 for violence, terror, frightening images, strong language and suggestive references

Cast: Ty Simpkins, Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Sinclair Daniel, Hiam Abbass and Lin Shaye..

Credits: Directed by Patrick Wilson, scripted by Scott Teems, based on Leigh Whannell’s characters and story. A Sony/Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:47

The cognescenti burn a lot of electrons typing out odes to the adored, enduring superhero of science fiction, Philip K. Dick. But the ongoing appeal of a writer who arrived on the scene right after the author of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” had his moment is just as fascinating.

Michael Crichton was a to-the-manner-born Harvard educated doctor who decided medicine wasn’t for him, so he wrote “Jurassic Park” and wrote and directed “Westworld,” some of the most enduring franchises in cinematic science fiction.

“Andromeda Strain,” TV’s “ER,” “Runaway,” he was prolific, an Emmy winning writer and show-creator, a writer-director of films as disparate as the classic “original” caper tale, “The Great Train Robbery” and “Coma,” a paranoid thriller set in the mysterious world of Big Medicine, a subject ripe for conspiracy theorizing.

Critchton had his finger on the pulse of the culture and its connection to science for most of his life. Movies based on his books (“Looker,” about cosmetic surgery’s end game) and “Rising Sun” (about “The Japanese Century,” which lasted about 8 years) weren’t all hits.

But the man did his research and did a pretty good job of convincing us that dinosaurs could be brought back to life, that theme park animatronics could reach a dangerous level of sophistication and sentience and that a first encounter with alien “life” would probably be a virus.

“Coma” was based on a Robin Cook novel that was right in Crichton’s wheelhouse. A hospital and its corrupt leadership conspire to knock people into comas for organ harvesting to the highest bidder. Be honest. That sounds a LOT less far-fetched today than it did 45 years ago.

It’s a Geneviève Bujold star vehicle, allowing this acclaimed Canadian actress primacy in beating Sigourney Weaver (“Alien”) to the punch in playing a heroine fronting a major sci-fi thriller.

“Coma” is a movie made memorable by that one iconic image — naked coma victims, dangling from wires on life support, their lives “preserved” ostensibly until something could be done for them, or even to them when “society” changed its minds about them.

The medical profession? We’re just taking “care of the vegetables,” one cynically notes.

Dr. Susan Wheeler (Bujold) is a surgeon-in-training at Boston Memorial, where her doctor boyfriend (Michael Douglas) is in line to be head internist. When Susan’s friend (“Bond girl” Lois Chiles) comes in for an abortion, Dr. Wheeler is there to comfort her. Imagine her shock when this “routine” surgery goes awry and Nancy is left in a coma.

When Susan starts asking questions, the hospital’s usual CYA deflection reaches a whole new level. She’s constantly called into the office of the chief of medicine (Richard Widmark, a real villain’s villain) .

“I certainly don’t want to lose a good surgeon,” he growls, with a menacing smile.

Every place Susan goes, she gets either a run-around or vague, noncommittal answers. Even when she learns something, whoever she’s asking flips-out and squeals on her. A terrific scene has her question the cynical, kind of callous pathologists, one of whom is played by a very young Ed Harris.

“Suppose you wanted to put people into a coma,” she asks. “What would you do?”

And where do those patients end up after “our lousy luck” at Boston Memorial has rendered them unrevivable? The Jefferson Institute, where a real rival to Nurse Ratched (Elizabeth Ashley) presides.

“Coma” is about Susan’s empathetic curiosity and dogged determination to find out what’s going on, her lover’s blindness to what’s increasingly obvious to her, and how far people will go to keep the surgeon with the sexy accent from finding them out.

Critchton was a competent director whose greatest contributions here might have been recognizing the hook in Cook’s novel, the plausibility of it all, and in making sure he cast well and hired the right production designer (Albert Brenner, art director or production designer on “Bullitt, “Backdraft,” “2010”).

That image of dangling “vegetables” is just as haunting today as it ever was. Now, it’s iconic.

The film is enough of a watershed moment in cinema to deserve “classic” status, even if it’s a tad mild-mannered (PG rated) and convoluted.

Watching it now, we can see Critchton’s attention to medical detail, which found its fullest flower on TV in his series “ER.”

The suspense is well-handled, here and there, but the shocks and surprises are few. The minute we see that Susan drives an MGB convertible we know there’ll be a moment when it won’t start and she’ll be A) kicking it and B) put in peril.

One of the coma patients is a monobrowed smart aleck who would go on to hustle “reverse mortgages” — Tom Selleck.

Critchton’s best directing job remains the Brit film about two 19th century thieves — Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland — out to stage the first “Great Train Robbery.”

But every thriller that uses science and makes informed, somewhat plausible (NOT “Timeline”) fictional speculations about where science might take us owes something to Michael Critchton, the guy who started worrying about AI ahead of the curve, and who will deserve at least some of the credit when we bring a wooly mammoth, a passenger pigeon, a Tasmanian tiger or dodo bird back to life.

Rating: PG, violence

Cast: Geneviève Bujold, Michael Douglas, Rip Torn, Elizabeth Ashley, Hari Rhodes and Richard Widmark.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Critchton, based on the novel by Robin Cook. An MGM release now on Amazon, Youtube, Movies! etc.

Running time: 1:53

The reason we mention the credits of actors, writers and directors in reviews of their films is that “past is prologue” and “What you’ve done is what film producers will let you do again.”

“The Out-Laws” is from Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison production company, part of his deal with Netflix. Hey, anything to keep him out of cinemas, amIright?

It stars Adam Devine, sort of the less talented photo-copy of Jack Black. Never been a fan. Ever. No, I’m not kidding.

Actor turned director Tyler Spindel is another Sandler protege. And as grateful as we are that The Sandman moved on from trying to prop up Nick Swardson, Rob Schneider, David Spade and Colin Quinn, this Spindel dude is nobody’s idea of the next Penny Marshall. Oy.

But “The Out-Laws” has Pierce Brosnan — making Bond jokes as he channels Billy Connolly — playing a broad, rogue-with-a-brogue bank robber married to the force that is Ellen Barkin.

Yeah, she looks as at home with a gun as he does, and both of them can handle a one-liner.

They have their moments as the secret-robber in-laws who show up to see their yoga insctuctor daughter (Nina Dobrev) tie the knot with a nerdy bank manager who’s into arts and crafts and Jack Blackisms — presents as “prezzies,” etc.

Yeah, she’s totally out of Owen’s league. But at least his insanely annoying parents — Julia Haggerty, still getting a ditzy job done, Richard Kind, still saying “I’m just saying” — are coming to their wedding.

Her parents only agree to come at the last minute. Mom’s all brass and bullet casings. Dad’s goateed Irish-accented menace.

“He’s AWESOME. He smells like sandlewood…and DANGER!”

But the folks have “history” and “unfinished” business in town, money they owe the Russian murderess Rehan, played by “Never Have I Ever” alumna Poorna Jagannathan, who steals the movie.

Thanks to crude masturbation jokes that don’t play, zingers that don’t land, Lil Rel Howery‘s act wearing thin, Michael Rooker playing the least convincing FBI agent ever and a lot of obvious sight gags and random F-bombs for (failed) comic effect, “stealing” “The Out-Laws” amounts to petty theft.

A bit of action mayhem at the midway mark plays. Brosnan and Barkin are as amusing as the script allows them to be and Devine works himself up to “maybe I don’t need to gouge my eyes/ears out every time he appears.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement. But the Adam Sandler/Happy Madison comic universe needs to think younger, and a better HR department as they’re plainly not finding fresh B or even C-list talent, in front of or behind the camera, these days.

Rating: R, violence, crude humor, profanity

Credits: Adam Devine, Nina Dobrev, Pierce Brosnan, Ellen Barkin, Lil Rel Howrey, Julie Haggerty, Richard Kind, and Michael Rooker.

Credits: Directed by Tyler Spindel, scripted by Evan Turner and Ben Zazove. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

So who WILL they get to be the next James Bond, eh?

Who CARES? Not while we’ve got Tom Cruise, in the saddle and laying it all on the line in the franchise that out-Bonds James Bond a little more every time there’s an “impossible mission,”
should Ethan Hunt “choose to accept it.”

“Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” may have an ungainly title and a star “getting on up there,” occasionally showing the miles, if not always the years. The story is derivative, lurching along its excessive run-time in fits and starts. But this frothy, breathless and over-long popcorn extravaganza completes the job of co-opting Bond, James Bond.

Cruise, director Christopher McQuarrie & Co. remember what the Daniel Craig-as-Bond years let us forget. This espionage action thing can be fun, over-the-top bits need a proper double-take and yeah, the very idea of this guy doing all that, with help, is inherently laugh-out-loud amusing. And when you think about it, even the theme music for the franchise is Bond-only-better, an Americanized classic.

The script lines up a palpable threat — AI run amok, threatening to end “truth” and dominate human civilization — and a deliciously credible villain in Esai Morales.

And no matter how convuluted and contrived the situations, motivations and conflicts within might seem, no matter how obvious the need to jam in other exotic, tourist-brochure locations, no matter how many female leads Cruise interacts-but-never-quite-“clicks” with, the entertainment value remains right on the edge of off-the-charts.

A Russian sub sinks in the “opening gambit,” with both the situation and the idea of that pre-credits/pre-theme song “gambit” borrowed from Bond. There was this “key” on board. Somehow, that ties into this digital Internet, CCTV, GPS and everything-in-digital-life manipulating “Entity” that has made itself known to the world’s intelligence agencies and its most notorious villains.

Mr. Hunt is needed to fetch that key, with his boss (Henry Czerny) particularly adamant that Hunt’s “habitual rogue behavior will not be tolerated.” His team (Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg) will back him up. And wouldn’t you know it? His old rival/flame Isla (Rebecca Ferguson) figures in all this, and must be pursued to an inexplicable Arabian Desert ruin of a hideout before “bounty hunters” get her…in hte middle of a sandstorm.

Another woman-from-his-past, The White Widow (Vanessa Kirby) must be foiled. And Hunt’s fellow agent Briggs (Shea Whigham) is hellbent on chasing him down and bringing him to heel, or shooting him if he goes “rogue” with that key.

Then there’s this key-hand-off that’s interrupted by The World’s Sexiest Pickpocket, played to the hilt by Hayley Atwell. She will be in the way, in the mix and on the lam as our story takes us from Amsterdam and Abu Dhabi to Rome and — wouldn’t you know it — The Orient Express!

The script leans HARD on hoary thriller tropes (that steam-powered train) and that Alfred Hitchcock “MacGuffin,” that gimmick that drives the plot.

“There’s this key...Where’s the key…Do you HAVE the key…GET the key…How’d He/SHE get the key?”

Movie pickpockets have almost supernatural powers, and when you throw in tech-guy Benji’s 3D “perfect disguise mask” one more time you have a good idea of the magical thinking that is supposed to make these slightly-possible, wholly-implausible plots “believable.”

The action beats are grand fun, but in addition to “the money shot” — that motorcycle jump we’ve all seen TC take in the previews — they cleverly recycle car gags from not one but multiple James Bond outings, courtesy of one vintage Fiat 500.

The car and motorcycle chases, by the way? Next level thrilling, visceral and downright comical.

Morales makes a marvelously malevolent old-foe/new-villain. The exotic Pom Klementieff of “Guardians of the Galaxy” announces her presence with authority, a suicide blonde henchwoman with blood in her eye and Hunt in her sights.

Atwell, Rhames, Kirby and Whigham hit exactly the right notes, with Atwell’s jaw-dropping reactions to the mayhem she’s stumbled into and Rhames nicely rewarded with take-stock, accept the stakes with fatalism and explain-the-“mission” and its perception/reality dilemma monologues to Hunt and the audience.

“You’re playing four-dimesional chess with an algorithm!”

But these movies hang on Hunt and Cruise, the character somehow motivated to serve “the greater good,” no matter what and the actor that makes this spy game palpably real, no matter how over-the-top or under-motivated this gets.

“We live and die in the shadows, for those we hold close and those we never met.”

Cruise will finish this “mission” soon enough, with “Part Two” currently slated for next June and sure to cement his place as “The Greatest Action Star Ever” and “The Guy who Saved The Cinema.”

At least by that time, we might have some notion of the Next James Bond. But we and whoever joins His Majesty’s Secret Service will know, that shaken-not-stirred martinis aside, Bond is now a spy playing catchup to the world’s favorte “rogue agent.” And this one does his own stunts.

Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some language and suggestive material.

Cast: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Esai Morales, Vanessa Kirby, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Henry Czerny, Carey Elwes and Rebecca Ferguson

Credits: Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, scripted by Erik Jendresen and Christopher McQuarrie, based on the Bruce Geller TV series. A Paramount release.

Running time: 2:43

A compelling hot-button subject and engrossing “true story” runs up against a ponderous script, pedestrian direction and the limited range of star Jim Caviezel in “Sound of Freedom,” a lumbering thriller about international child sex trafficking that flatlines when it’s meant to be moving, uplifting and inspiring.

If you can’t make a weeper out of a helpless, mostly Third World kids being lured away from their parents and snatched for online porn and prostitution to an audience that lines up to see every movie from the star of “The Passion of the Christ,” maybe you should watch some of the other films on this subject and see what you’re getting wrong.

Director Alejandro Montverde, who broke out in the faith-based corner of filmdom with his anti-abortion drama “Bella,” and Caviezel tell us the story of Homeland Security agent turned abducted child rescuer Tim Ballard, a veteran hunter of online “pedos” who has an abrupt, emotionally-lacking and dramatically-flat “conversion” from a guy who catches the “customers” in this heinous trade to a man who wants to save kids because “God’s children are not for sale.”

A colleague only has to mention how their work is seeing what a “sick world” this is a couple of times for Ballard to suddenly get up from his work computer, saunter (not storm) down to the most understaffed Homeland Security jail in America and cozy up to his latest bust, an ideologue who writes books about perverts’ insatiable lust for children, convince him he’s “one of us” and use the prisoner’s expertise to break into a Colombian child kidnapping ring.

Just like that, and with a single tear, shot in close-up, all that we get out of man-manikin Caviezel.

Tim makes his way to Colombia, working his way towards the “model” (Yessica Borroto Perryman) who recruits kids by convincing their Honduran (etc.) parents that “They should be in the entertainment business” (some scenes are in Spanish with subtitles) and the high roller Jeffrey Epstein types (unseen) who back this soulless recruiter.

Along the way, he links up with a Colombian cop (Javier Godino) who puts him in touch with a “cartel” veteran and ex-con who has experienced some sort of late-life conversion so that he’s saving kids his own way. The great character actor Bill Camp (“Birdman,” “Joker”) makes little attempt to go “Latin” here, feigning an accent for roughly half a scene, letting his Panama hat, Hawaian shirt and omnipresent cigar establish his Colombian cartel bonafides.

Tim, who takes on the name Spanish version of the name, “Timoteo,” will try to hunt down and free two Honduran kids who we see snatched thanks to their gullible father’s compliance in the opening sequence, setting up a Cartegena sting and even plunging into the “rebel” packed jungles to fulfill his personal mission.

We also see Tim’s big family and home life, with Oscar winner Mira Sorvino here to weep or be on the verge of tears in every appearance. Kurt Fuller plays the overly-sympathetic Homeland Security boss who doesn’t do much to corral this agent who’s “going rogue.”

“We’re Homeland Security! We can’t go rescuing Honduran kids in Colombia!”

And we’re treated to Caviezel’s attempts to smile — an unnatural act throughout his career — and show us the motivations, passions and vigilante-level fury this law enforcement office feels about this new mission he’s suddenly taken on.

The villainous characters are caritactures, but I didn’t buy virtually any of the performances. And “Sound of Freedom’s” funereal pacing and struggling manipulations left me cold, when I was expecting big emotional moments that never came. Movies like “Trade,” “The Whistleblower” and even the similar “Trade of Innocents” wrung more emotion out of this subject.

But “Sound of Freedom,” which takes its title from a children’s clapping game and our young victim (Cristal Aparicio) humming the movie’s theme song, relies on closeups of Caviezel’s inexpressive face to carry the story. It’s not enough.

Caviezel made it his business to cynically pander to this conservative religious “QAnon” friendly audience, long before he starred in TV’s “Person of Interest,” which was canceled because he’s just not an interesting, expressive actor person.

When your movie is “presold” by marketing, tagged with an appeal to “buy more tickets” to make it appear more popular than it is, you’re all but ensuring its profitability. Presold, extolling the values of a faith-based film even if this isn’t wholly confined to that genre, maybe you don’t try as hard to give it heart and get it right.

Rating: PG-13, violence, children in sexual jeopardy subject matter, profanity

Cast: Jim Caviezel, Bill Camp, Cristal Aparicio, Javier Godino, Lucás Ávila, Yessica Borroto Perryman, Kurt Fuller and Mira Sorvino.

Credits: Directed by Alejandro Montverde, scripted by Rod Barr and Alejandro Monteverde. An Angel Studios release.

Running time: 2:15

“Employee of the Month” is a dark comedy about a woman away under a soul crushing patriarchy only to have fellows who won’t promote her or plan on stealing her raise if she’s ever given one.

And then a Black intern shows up and gives her the spine to fight back, and maybe over up injuries and deaths of repressors.

I liked it. It’s harmless enough, pretty mild mannered in a “Nine to Five” sense.

But when I offered to donate it to this suburban Orlando library, located in an old hotel on the Northside of town, the young librarian looked as if I’d offered her a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book.

Fear driven by a nation wide right wing assault on libraries, science, history and truth, no doubt.

I’ve been donating DVDs and books for years and this is the first time this has happened.

Life under a Nazi regime in The Banana Republic of Florida. Nooo, “It can’t happen here ”

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Genre fans can pretty much tell when a Western is “off” just from a glance, and “Dead Man’s Hand” doesn’t pass that “This looks like a West that’s lived in” test.

But as this horse opera’s from the director of “The 2nd,” “Chokehold” and “Rottentail,” a “genre” specialist whose “genre” is stumbling formula B-and-C movies, one doesn’t get one’s hopes up. One mustn’t.

It’s got lovely, undeveloped Greater Sante Fe settings, some decent displays of horsemanship and amusing if not dazzling gunplay. Director and co-writer (it’s adapted from a comic book) Brian Skiba landed Cole Hauser, Brian Dorff, Costas Mandylor and Skiba’s pal Coren Nemec for his supporting cast.

The dialogue’s laced with anachronisms, the theme song is electrified country rock. But hell, they got the poker hand right. There’s something unexpected in the results when our hero draws a “Dead Man’s Hand,” which as any Western fan remembers is aces over eights.

Jack Kilmer — the son of you-know-her and you-know-who — brings strong (?) Zach Braff energy as a gambler/gunfighter named Reno, just married to the sagebrush sex worker Vegas (Camille Collard). They’e on their way to buy a saloon in Nevada when they’re waylaid by desperados in Confederate jackets, whom Jean-Jacques Renault dispatches with alacrity.

But dragging the gray-uniformed dead to the next town does Reno no favors. The saloon is filled with unconstructed Confederates and adorned with a stars and bars just above the bar. The “mayor” (Stephen Dorff) is former Col. Clancy T. Bishop, CSA.

The phrase, “What the hell, don’t you know the war is over?” pops up once or twice.

Reno’s a dead man, with or without that poker game where they “play for keeps,” with or without the help of the U.S. Marshal (Hauser) who’s come to town to take in Bishop, or aid by the livery stable owner (Vincent E. McDaniel) or the divine intervention of a wry Native American (Mo Brings Plenty).

The laughable elements include Kilmer, young enough to make this guy a pistol packing punk, but again “Zach Braff energy.” So, no. That’s not in the cards.

There’s a moment where Reno’s supposed to be shooting a rope about to hang somebody, and the take “One Take” Skiba uses plainly shows Kilmer discharging his rarely-reloaded six-shooter prematurely, as he’s raising it to aim it.

Vegas is ready for her nude bath with a nubile nude back-scrubber, a courtesy between “dance hall girl” sex workers in the Old West, I guess.

And Hauser and Dorff do what’s required of them, but a tad sheepishly, I must say.

The unintentional laughs pile up like corpses around almost every damned scene in this thing. Robbers refer to a stagecoach as a “wagon,” and considering the “stagecoach” has its canvas side covers rolled up and we can see one and all inside, only an unreconstructed Confederate would be dumb enough to ask “Got any women in there?” when two of them are in plain sight.

Once again, our director has tried his hand at injecting a little flashpoint politics into his tale. But at this point, one has to say that Skiba’s shown his cards in genre after genre after genre, and he’s still drawing nothing but deuces and one-eyed jacks, a loser’s hand every time.

The 2nd, Pursuit, Left for Dead

Rating: R, graphic violence, nudity, profanity

Credits: Directed by Brian Skiba, scripted by Corin Nemec and Brian Skiba, based on a graphic novel by Kevin Minor and Matthew Minor. A Lionsgate release.

Cast: Jack Kilmer, Stephen Dorff, Camille Collard, Costas Mandylor, Vincent E. McDaniel, Mo Brings Plenty, Corin Nemec and Cole Hauser

Running time: 1:35