Movie Nation

Considering the stiff and static new version of “The Little Mermaid” runs some 50 minutes LONGER than the classic it is remaking, the only reason to leave this out is…the violence.

If you’re giving us photo real (and emotionless) fish and crustaceans, I guess no one wants to see them hacked, filleted and fricasseed.

This scene’s omission illustrates my big complaints about the stiff live-action/FX-filled remake. This animation is fluid, it dances. The crab and the chef are emotive, all broad bouncy gestures easily registering with the viewer, especially the little kids for whom this masterpiece was made.

The new film lacks that riot of color and motion, scenes that literally dance, all overlapping, overlaying and stuffing the screen with fun and emotion.

As this review is publishing, Hollywood screenwriters are still on strike, hoping to acquire better compensation for all the platforms their work appears on and unionized protection from all the things that AI-generated writing could take away.

Watching a strictly-formula thriller like “Kandahar,” one can understand their alarm. It feels as if it was conceived, scripted and cast by machine.

It’s a quest/chase actioner that bounces through Middle East intrigues on the dusty roads of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

It stars Gerard Butler, a workaholic spy who’s just helped his CIA “black ops” unit sabotage and blow up an Iranian nuclear plant. Tom has an exit strategy, a wife waiting for him to “sign those papers” back in London and a daughter’s graduation to get to.

But as he’s about to dash home, “one more job” comes up. He takes it. He’s got his “reasons.”

He’s sent a translator/guide (Navid Negahban), an older man, an Afghan native now living in America with his own “reasons” for taking on this gig.

And when they’re compromised, they have to cover 400 miles by truck and luck to make it to an “extraction point,” the famous war-torn city of the title.

They will take help from friends and face double crosses as they’re pursued by Taliban warlords ISIS, Iranians and a matinee-idol Pakistani secret agent in a black jumpsuit on a black motorcycle.

The stakes have our man Tom/Gerry growling “You’ll last longer when they start pulling your fingernails off,” and an Iranian villain answering a hostage’s “You said I could GO HOME” pleas with “You WILL. As a MARTYR!”

Firefights, oddly-conceived battles, payoffs and secret grief and “noble sacrifice,” “Kandahar ” is just a grab bag of action pic cliches.

Tell me a machine couldn’t have conceived, negotiated, packaged/cast and scripted this utterly generic road picture. While another AI program filled in the blanks while generating a review. Ahem.

The multiple competing agendas/points of view give the film the veneer of complexity. We try to follow the Pakistani (Ali Fazal) as he works his sources, pays off warlords and hunts a quarry he wants to “sell on the open market.” The Iranians are led by a fanatical Revolutionary Guard Colonel (Bahador Foladi) whose “pawn” in this game is taking a journalist (Elnaaz Norouzi) who helped “expose” the CIA’s involvement, and is TV-reporter pretty, the perfect hostage.

Taliban and ISIS factions also figure, but no money was spent on casting “leaders” for them.

And naturally, generic CIA honchos are watching all this unfold via drone images with strict “rules of engagement” that don’t allow them to engage.

Characters are forgotten, story threads sort of left hanging and the Saudi locations are no more impressive than any other place substituting for Afghanistan, and make one wonder if Gerard Butler & Co. have gone Phil Mikkelson, cinema-washing a bloody regime by working with its entities to make a mediocre movie.

A few wowza sequences lift “Kandahar” — a spirited chase through city traffic in what is meant to be Herat, Afghanistan, a night pursuit uses that “Midnight Special” stunt of keeping the lights off driving with night-vision goggles, which help a little when they’re chased down and must shoot their way out of another jam.

I say “their way,” but really, the movie is strictly a Gerry Butler vehicle, and he does almost all the fighting, if not all the emoting.

But in surrounding him with an almost-faceless and limited-fame/little-screen-charisma supporting cast, the picture has no pop or pathos between the sometimes top drawer action beats.

Hitchcock said, “Good villains make good thrillers,” and that’s really “Kandahar’s” undoing. All these possibilities, and nobody wanted to spend a dime on a “name” heavy — in the CIA, in Iran, in Afghanistan?

Fazal is a well-known Indian actor, and he gives us a taste of contemptuous professionalism and stands out from the many other villains. But he’s not on the screen enough, thanks to the many groups/agendas the Mitchell LaFortune script (tell me that doesn’t sound like an AI-generated “action film writer’s name”) piles on.

Every checkbox trope about this movie feels familiar, like we’ve seen it multiple times before, not necessarily always starring Gerry Butler.

Yes he’s a credible, charismatic action star who always delivers the goods, even in middling fare like this.

But if you have the money to fake a nuclear explosion, you’d still better set some of it aside for colorful actors and maybe a rewrite or two. “Kandahar” may only feel like the emotionally-flat, generic action beats AI future. But as of now, the only movies that work have to let us see and feel the human touch.

Rating: R for violence and language

Cast: Gerard Butler, Navid Negahban, Ali Fazal, Bahador Foladi and Elnaaz Norouzi

Credits: Directed by Ric Roman Waugh, scripted by Mitchell LaFortune. An Open Road release.

Running time: 1:59

Sebastian Maniscalo is a bouncy, animated stand-up comic who uses his Italian-American background in his act. So when he whipped up a screenplay with some of that material as a star vehicle, who’s he get to play the title character in “About My Father?”

Oscar-winner Robert DeNiro is who, The Greatest Screen Actor of his Generation — untouchable in dramatic roles, and pretty damned funny in comical ones.

So Maniscalo, who was in “Green Book” and “Tag” and “The Irishman,” whose biggest screen role before this might have been his turn as the “smart” younger brother in the Ray Romano dramedy “Somewhere in Queens,” is sharing scene after scene — riffing and parenting and pleading and swapping complaints and insults — with The Greatest Screen Actor of His Generation.

And whatever else you or I think about this “Family, amIright?” culture-clashing comedy, know this. The kid holds his own. Robert Freakin’ DeNiro is staring back at him and they’re male-bonding and all of that, and Maniscalo gives as good as he’s gets.

The film is a meet-the-prospective in-laws/”Meet the Fockers” variation. A Chicago boutique hotel manager (Maniscalo) travels to the posh part of coastal Virginia to be with the woman he hopes to marry (Leslie Bibb, down to play), her Senator Mom (Kim Cattrall, fierce), born-to-money hotelier Dad (David Rasche) and their amped-up and entitled “bro” son (Anders Holm) and his flaky New Age flake sibling (Brett Dier).

The catch? Sebastian Maniscalo — yes, he uses his real name — can’t leave his widowed, cheap, Sicilian-immigrant hairdresser Dad (DeNiro) alone on the Fourth, “his favorite holiday…because you don’t have to buy presents.” Besides, the old man won’t pass on his grandmother’s ring to Sebastian to give to his intended Ellie until he’s “checked ‘them’ out.”

The rich and privileged, in their golf course-side McMansion, where peacocks walk the grounds, will host “a working guy” who has a permanent, generational case of “How much a place like this/a table like this/a yacht like this cost?”

So yeah, cultures will clash and put-downs will be delivered, almost entirely from son to father — about his tact, his clothes and his shoes.

“You look like the guy who killed John Wick’s dog!”

The script has some funny lines, one outrageous sight gag and a few less outrageous ones, and director Laura Terruso (“Good Girls Get High” and “Work It”) keeps the camera tight for the zingers and wide for the slapstick.

But the best scenes — all of them — are the father-son dynamic, arguing at home, in Dad’s murderously-maintained garden (he poisons any wildlife that comes for his veg), in Dad’s seriously Sicilian beauty salon, in the attic dormer where they room together in Virginia.

My favorite running gag is the father-passed-down-to-son affection for colognes, a bit of shtick borrowed from Maniscalco’s physically-demonstrative stage act. Each man has his “signature scent.” Each sprays his into the air, and each peacocks his way through the mist to achieve the perfect application. It’s freaking hilarious.

The rest of the movie? Frankly, that’s a bit on the “meh” side. Jokes and situations we’ve seen in lots of other comedies, and none them helped by the hack screenwriter’s laziest or in this cast most egocentric crutch — voice-over narration.

We don’t need to hear “I WORSHIPPED my father” or the other pages and pages of lines narrated. Just SHOW us, and if it’s funny enough, it’ll work. Maniscalco’s incessant narrating sounds like a desperate stand-up comic hitting material too hard to let it land.

The supporting cast has its moments, but this movie sinks or swims with this father-son dynamic. And their banter, not the constant “ba-da-BING” of would-be punchlines voiced-over by Maniscalco, is what’s funny.

The kid indeed does hold his own in his many scenes with the master. If only he’d known enough to shut his yap off camera…

Rating: PG-13 for suggestive material, (profanity) and partial nudity

Cast: Robert DeNiro, Sebastian Maniscalco, Leslie Bibb, Kim Cattrall, Brett Dier, Anders Holm and David Rasche

Credits: Directed by Laura Terruso, scripted by Austen Earl and Sebastian Maniscalco. A Lionsgate release.

Running time:

“Mending the Line” is a simple, sentimental story of combat veterans bonding and healing the wounds of war via fly fishing in Montana.

A fine cast doesn’t turn this into any sort of existential epic, as it doesn’t transcend any of the genres it mashes up. No, it isn’t “A River Runs Through It.”

But the the PTSD is treated realisticially and with sympathy. And the metaphors for fishing and life, the appreciation of fly fishing as a subject for some of the most sensory and soulful sports literature and meditative moments on the stream lift it and make it worth your while.

A prologue tells us how Marine John Colter (Sinqua Walls) came to be in a VA hospital in Montana, healing his broken bones and torn skin, but crawling into a bottle to cope with the survivor’s guilt over the fateful command decision he came to make and lives altered by it.

His doctor (Patricia Heaton) hears his hopes of “going back home,” to the Corps, “the only real family I’ve ever had.” And she sees how little good group therapy is doing him.

As she’s got this cranky old Vietnam War vet (Brian Cox) who won’t heed her advice about not going fishing alone thanks to his advanced years and shaky health, she takes a shot at solving both her problems.

Colter is sent to see Old Man Ike about learning to fish.

Ike Fletcher’s regular fishing buddy is just as timeworn. And if you didn’t think you needed to see the star of “Succession” swapping jibes and casts with Oscar winner Wes Studi, you haven’t been thinking hard enough. Their scenes are a little underwritten, but they don’t need a lot of help creating crusty but sweet chemistry.

Perry Mattfield plays Lucy, a sad-eyed local librarian who occasionally goes to the VA hospital to read to the veterans. When Ike puts Colter to work cleaning the back room at the local flyfishing shop, he not only chides him with “There’s tactical training and there’s boot camp. THIS is boot camp.” He assigns his reluctant pupil reading.

“There’s more great literature written about fly fishing than any other sport.” That’s how Colter meets Lucy and discovers books like “Casting Forward.”

“There’s a great deal about living that trout can teach us.”

There’s not a lot to this picture, even though our three leads harbor “secrets” and even though not all problems can be solved by “healing on the water,” learning how to properly cast. The pacing is a bit slack, as well.

But Walls lets us feel the pain of his injuries and his imagined guilt, Cox uses his new student to try and find one last “recon” mission and Mattfield lets us ponder her “secret” and the ways it has taken away her spirit and being trapped in this town and human reminders of this tragedy is killing her spirit.

And the patience of the sport and the tranquility of the settings casts a spell, and it all comes together in modestly, honestly moving ways.

Rating: R (Language|Some Violent Images)

Cast: Sinqua Walls, Brian Cox, Patricia Heaton, Perry Mattfield and Wes Studi

Credits: Directed by Joshua Caldwell, scripted by Stephen Camelio. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 2:02

She was a fair villainess in a “Mad Max” movie, sang an underrated James Bond theme.

She was subject of a good almost great bio pic starring Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne.

Oh, and she was the headliner in the best concert I ever saw.

This, BTW, is how you shoot and edit a legend’s concert film.

A singular talent, an electrifying live performer, icon, role model, survivor.

Look at all her concert clips on YouTube. Her backing band loved her, her backup dancers so awed they dare not let her down.

RIP, Tina Turner.

The title of the new documentary, “Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me,” is almost a play on words. Anybody who remembers Smith in her time — the ’90s and early 2000s — figures “Oh, I KNOW her all right.”

But Ursula Macfarlane’s film, sort of a post mortem version of the recent Pamela Anderson and Britney Spears docs, spends much of its running time interviewing people who puncture that “golddigger,” “fame whore” famous-for-being-famous image.

“How dumb is Anna Nicole?” a tabloid headline from back then wondered. Cagey enough to bet on her best assets, play the angles, work the paparazzi, seize her chances and get famous and turn that into great wealth.

Golddigging? Yes, she turned on the Betty Boop (phone) voice for doddering, wheelchair-bound J. Howard Marshall, the rich old fool four times her age who pursued her, “protected” and financed her rise to fame and whose riches she sought a share of after his death. But “there was love there” witnesses interviewed here declare.

No real talent? Well, she mastered the stripper pole in a hurry, landed a laugh in her few big screen appearances (“The Hudsucker Proxy,” for one) and made the “reality” of her life as comical as it needed to be for chat show appearances and the reality TV series she starred in.

But as this portrait, painted by friends, confidantes, relatives, colleagues, tabloid journalists and a doctor seems finished and settled on the easel, just waiting for the pigment to dry, Macfarlane — who directed films on the “Charlie Hebdo” French magazine massacre and the fall of Harvey Weinstein — smears that paint to allow the viewer to return to a more manipulative, calculating and dishonest view of Smith.

We’ve picked up on the fact that the woman born Vicky Lynn Hogan “loved being the center of attention,” craved fame and wealth and reinvented herself more than once in the pursuit of her goals.

Some of the relatives who helped raise her — her late law-enforcement officer single mom Virgie is heard and seen in archival footage — talk about her impulsiveness, her pursuit of older men even as a teen, and her eagerness to use her libido and her looks to get out of Mexia, Texas.

Marrying a fry cook at the fried chicken joint where she worked at 17, having a son shortly after, gives credence to that impulsive reputation. Bailing on that marriage (that husband is missing from the interviews here) and becoming a stripper verifies her “I want lotsa money and didn’t-care-how-she-got-it reputation.

But as her origin story brings her into a Houston strip club, as her “flat chested” complaint becomes a goal that she works to pay for, as the newly-curvaceous bombshell finds herself summoned to be in front of Playboy cameras (like Pamela Anderson and Marilyn Monroe before her), a Guess Jeans honcho signs her up and “my dreams” all start coming true, the viewer can become swept up in how swiftly these things can happen to a beautiful woman in our Attention Economy Culture.

Smith was not just an inspiration to all things Kardashian. Look at TikTok and Facebook “Reels” and witness the explosion of attractive young women, in particular, doing anything and everything to get their faces out there and be “discovered,” just like Anna Nicole.

We’re no longer surpised this can happen, thanks to Anderson and Anna Nicole Smith. But it’s still possible to be bowled-over in revisiting the way Smith bombshelled her way into Playboy, and she and a Guess honcho changed her name and her billboards and magazine ads made her LA famous, then world famous, “adored by millions” but “loved by few,” her “life lived out in the tabloids.”

A close-friend-turned-lover from her stripping days talks about her “sweetness” and bisexuality.

An early lawyer of Smith’s turns herself into a pretzel, trying to describe Smith’s using and marrying aged, frail J. Howard Marshall as anything but predatory.

We see the day she met her biological father, having tracked him down and flown him and a stepbrother out to LA, greeting them with a limo, a trip to Disneyland and an evening at the Playboy mansion with — of course — a camera crew in tow.

Macfarlane doesn’t get as close to the litigious inner circle leeches clinging to Smith in her last years as you would like — a sister of the lawyer-turned-lover/advisor Howard K. Stern is here, and people who knew the tabloid photographer who fathered her second child are as close as the film gets to Larry Birkhead.

But we hear from the attorney whom the Marshall family hired to fight her in court, who let the delusional, egomaniacal and somewhat dim Smith dig herself into a hole no jury would let her out of.

And we learn about the diet drugs and pain meds she got addicted to that made her seem stoned most of the last decade of her life, even as she put on and lost weight and attempted a “comeback.”

It’s a sad story, of course, with overdoses and deaths and sort of classical American “price of fame” arc. But it’s also revealing, and only rarely judgemental — even handed, I thought.

No, “You Don’t Know Me” isn’t high art or even fair in the way it baits us into thinking “That title is right” only to pull us back towards “Maybe we knew her all along.”

In prepping this review, I noted that the NY Times published a critique that suggests Smith “deserves better than this.” Actually, a film that’s revealing, humanizing and an honest depiction of the course of her life, meeting some of the people she loved and who loved her, recalling the isolation and joys she experienced as well as the sordid and dishonest sides of her is exactly the sort of documentary biography Smith deserved.

Unfortunately, it’s only those who survive their deal with the Devil who get the Britney/Pamela “lived through it and this is who I really am now” treatment.

Rating: TV-MA, nudity, discussion of rape and sexual abuse, drugs

Cast: Anna Nicole Smith, Marilyn Grabowski, “Missy,” Donald Hogan, George Beall, Dr. Sandeep Kapoor, Marcus J. Fox

Credits: Directed by Ursula Macfarlane. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:57

It was, in hindsight, probably a mistake to try and send off “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” at the Cannes Film Festival. It was also a mistake for Lucasfilm to migrate the entirety of this franchise from Paramount to Disney, but nobody asked me.

Film festivals, like studio movie junkets (inviting critics to fly in, review a film and interview the cast), are a boiling cauldron of “group think.” And Cannes, famous for going all-in on the artsy, the pretentious and the “single minded vision” of this or that celebrated filmmaker, is rarely friendly to straight-up Hollywood popcorn pictures. That’s been the case with “Dial of Destiny.” The earliest reviews are, to put it charitably, mixed.

Fine. Harrison Ford is very old, and this franchise has been flogged to death. I look at the trailers and know to expect a lot of repetition, and a protracted effort to wring emotion out of our sentimental attachment to the character.

You know going in that this might feel gassed, and that winning over viewers, new ones especially, will be an uphill battle for its distributor. I mean, “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” sucked, after all.

Having a very old leading man — de-aged for flashbacks — means that more of the movie’s action will be in the hands of his “goddaughter” sidekick, played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

Cool. Women have played big roles in this saga, with Karen Allen‘s Marion Ravenwood setting the too-tough-to-be-a-damsel-in-distress standard, and Mrs. Spielberg being a sort of lone exception to that rule. Sorry, Kate.

But conservatives, smelling a movie that’s going to struggle, a DISNEY movie at that, have decided that “the worst reviewed Indiana Jones movie” is “bad” because it’s “woke.”

That whole “blood in the water,” “take credit for killing something” for political points thing. Maybe prop up Florida’s would-be dictator governor and would-be presidential candidate in his public spat with a publicly-traded company.

It’s all over the interwebs. The wingnutoisie are foaming at the mouth for a Disney flop. Not just the usual suspects. Or the most cynical opportunists. And not just the North American wingnuts. Oh noooo.

The label was applied even before the damned movie was shown to anybody, which has more to do with DeSantis-loving Disney bashers than anything Waller-Bridge has ever said or any film director James Mangold has ever made.

If this sounds like the pushback that’s been going on ever since Disney announced that a Black woman would be starring in the live-action fairytale “The Little Mermaid,” it is. Same crowd. Same “issues.”

One of the most defensible reasons for carrying the Indiana Jones franchise on for over 40 years –on film and on TV — is watching the character do what humans have ALWAYS done — EVOLVE. From his regressive, post “white man’s burden” racial regard for Arabs in “Raiders” and somewhat patronizing treatment of Asians in the early films, he, like most of the world, has been enlightened and changed with the times.

He is, after all, an academic and a scientist. But wait, modern conservatism hates those folks, too. Ask the guy in the white lab coat named Fauci about that, or for that matter the tsunami of scientists who predicted and are now documenting the ever-worsening impact of climate change, which is what they had to re-label “Global Warming” because conservative billionaires smeared that simpler, more direct and bluntly-correct name for it.

By the way, most of these folks buying into the cynical “anti-wokism” trolling of opportunists are just further examples of know how easily led the reactionary are. Even Trump figured that out. This crowd is just looking for someone to validate the narrow-mindedness they refuse to let go of. They stopped going out to movies before Clinton left the White House. So they’re all worked-up about something they don’t have a stake in other than letting us know something else they just “hate.”

If there’s one thing that all these “very fine people, ” none of whom seem very good at defining “woke,” have in common, it’s a hatred for “the other” races and a soul-sucking desire to keep women in their place.

Remember that the next time some Eva Braun blonde on Fox denies she’s a racist, or some middle aged white rabble rouser declares “There’s no such THING as a Republican/Conservative war on Blacks/Asians/Latinos/Gays or Women.”

The actual negative reviews of “Dial of Destiny” don’t typically fault the movie for broadening its canvas or widening its demographic appeal. “Woke” is being attached to those reviews to score political points. I’ve had run-ins with some of the folks doing the sh-t-stirring, and have run into and/or read some of the critics beating this drum about this “element” of this movie. And there’s not a one of them I’d follow over a cliff like Glen Beck’s lemmings.

Deeper into June, other reviews will come out, mine included (updated, linked here). And June 30, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” is released. I dare say if it’s got shortcomings, they won’t have a damned thing to do with politics.

And here’s a news flash. Indiana Jones has ALWAYS been “woke.” He hates Nazis, which is modern western conservatism’s REAL beef with the old man with the whip.

Nazis HATE Indiana Jones, too. As if we needed more proof.

Low stakes, low key, low lighting and generally low energy, there’s not much to recommend the Indonesian Around the World with Netflix offering “Arini by Love, inc.”

Yes it’s quite short, by Western feature film standards. But not a lot happens and none of what does amounts to anything that would hold a viewer’s interest.

We meet Arini (Della Dartyan) as she’s scrambling, with her suitcase, trying to dodge a uniformed guard and street toughs and escape. Something.

But when she stops a cab and climbs in, the sinister woman whose face we don’t see knows her by name.

A flashback to “three years ago” shows us what led up to that escape attempt. Arini enrolls in some sort of total immersion personality-makeover “dating” service, “Love, inc.”

“I want to be happy,” she admits (in Indonesian with English subtitles) upon acceptance.

In a closed campus compound with only unnatural (low) lighting, Arini and other women and men dressed in colorless, shapeless clothes with be put through lessons on everything from table settings (to maximize “emotional intimacy”) to salsa dancing.

The stern Ms. Diana (Marissa Anita) presides over all this, each inmate locked in her or his dorm room, every meal finishing with a (drugged) dessert designed to sedate them for more indoctrination, every lesson aiming to help those there “convince the client that the you role you play is YOU.”

But memories and real identity are what you risk, something Arini picks up from another Love, inc. “customer” inmate, Tiara (Kelly Tandiono). She keeps a book of “memories” that are being erased.

Shades of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Well, except for the romance, the heartache, the humor and the pathos.

This all sounds more like a brainwashing school for spies or (like TV’s “The Prisoner”) ex-spies. But no. This is all about remaking yourself into the most attractive mate possible.

Or so Diana says, insisting that they will merely “feed your mind with happiness.”

Taken at its word, this movie is a laugh-out-loud comment on Islamic Indonesia’s dating scene. Are the Arini/Tiara attempts to get at the truth, to figure out if the guy Arini seems to be set up with is someone he’s met before, and to escape (Let’s crawl into the AIR DUCTS!) an allegory for escaping the trap of the culture and its dating mores?

Possibly. In any event, parable or simple, unlayered linear narrative, the flatlining plot and flat performances of this movie never makes one feel anything save for boredom.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Della Dartyan, Kelly Tandiono, Farish Nahdi and Marissa Anita

Credits: Directed by Adrianto Sinaga, scripted by Adrianto Sinagao and Widya Arifianti. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:12

“There was a little girl, Who had a little curl, Right in the middle of her forehead.

 “When she was good, She was very good indeed, But when she was bad she was horrid.”

But giving her a sequel, the original she won’t equal, wasn’t the cleverest plan.

Where “Becky” was fresh, when ripping bloodied flesh, her “Wrath” I simply must pan.

We all remember “Becky,” the rare villainous turn by Kevin James, the bloodbath unleashed when Becky’s Dad (Kevin McHale) is murdered by Nazi home invaders in search of a mysterious key.

“The Wrath of Becky,” the sequel to that “gonzo” 13-year-old avenging angel thriller, still has Lulu Wilson in the title role, and summons Seann William Scott as the new Nazi, an “insurrectionist” leader of the Noblemen (he’s too buff to be a Proud Boy) and an injured and stolen pet mastiff-looking dog that Becky is hellbent on retrieving.

The filmmakers have changed, if not the star and the movie’s anti-MAGA/Nazi “fake patriotic f—-rs” politics. And expecting to catch lightning in a bottle twice was mostly wishful thinking on the part of everyone involved.

Not Scott. He just seems almost embarassed to be here.

Becky is 16, having fled the foster care system to room with a crusty, kindly old woman (Denise Burse), paying the rent by working at the local diner.

That’s where she runs afoul of three redneck racists of the not-exactly-rocket-scientist persuasion (Michael Sirow, Aaron Dalla Villa and co-director Matt Angel). They mouth off to her, she dumps coffee on Dear Leader (Sirow).

Next thing you know, they follow her home, beat her dog and murder her landlady.

Becky didn’t anticipate this? Oh. Right. “Sixteen.” “Consequences” never crossed her mind.

There’s nothing for it but to DIY gear up, recollect clues to figure out where these female Congresswoman-hating goons were going, fetch her dog and commence to killing.

“To be honest, guns kinda bore me.”

To be honest, this movie kind of bored me. Becky narrates too much. The situations, traps and what not seem obvious or ludicrous. There’s little of the sense of inventively murderous fun of “Becky.”

Perhaps the cleverest line of the gathered Noblemen is one they use to size up the “little girl” they’re facing.

“She definitely still shops at Hot Topic.“

I cackled at a killing, here and there. But the writer/co-directors don’t show any flair for creating moments of jeopardy and logically reasoning/killing one’s way of them. Becky problem-solves like she’s a 16 year-old screenwriter.

(Note to writer/co-director Angel and other director Suzanne Coote, the CIA wouldn’t be involved in domestic terrorism. That’s against the law.).

To further paraphrase the “There Was a Little Girl” poet Becky quotes, Henry Wadsworth, when “Becky” was was good, she was at least funny. But when she made a sequel, she wasn’t.

Rating: R, graphic violence

Cast:Lulu Wilson, Denise Burse, Michael Sirow, Matt Angel, Aaron Dalla Villa, Courtney Gains and Seann William Scott

Credits: Directed by Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote, scripted by Matt Angel, based on the character created by Nick Morris, Lane Skye and Ruckus Skye. A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:24

“A Hole in the Fence” is an allegorical rendition of how the “elites” get to stay that way, generation after generation. It’s not just money which buys politicians who rewrite tax laws protecting extreme wealth. There’s a veritable cradle-to-the-grave infrastructure designed to breed, train and finance the new leaders in a class war that they pay their media shills to pretend isn’t happening.

Filmmaker Joaquin del Paso, who directed the similarly allegorical “Panamerican Machinery,” gives us a Mexican “Lord of the Flies,” a creepy-as-all-get-out summer camp tale where the children of the rich and powerful are groomed for their roles as the ruling class by professors who teach class contempt and Catholicism, hand in mail-fisted glove.

“Acting in your best interest is the best response to any dilemma,” the martinet Professor Monteros teaches. Empathy? Compassion? They’ll just slow your roll. Stick up for yourself and your own kind is what they’re teaching the Los Pinos boys.

“Remember,” he and his fellow drill instructors intone, in Spanish with English subtitles. “Our creator is always watching!”

The boys have camp labor and Catholic sermons, with a healthy dose of paranoia about the “poor” and “troubled” (crime) part of Mexico where this exclusive experience is nestled.

The 30 or so boys are left to their own devices — somewhat — which leads to the expected hazing, bullying gangs and picking on “the scholarship boy,” working class Eduardo (Yubah Ortega), the “beaner,” “f—–g brownie” in their ranks. He is merely the darkest skinned and the first to be singled out.

The lack of adult intervention in these beatings, homophobic taunts and the like is by design, we gather.

“He who is free from sin may have ice cream!”

There’s a student monitor (Raúl Vasconcelos) who knows first aid, is in charge of making sure the kid with his foot and arm and neck in casts (Eric David Walker) takes his depression meds. Edwin may be taking a special interest in tiny, injured Diego.

And there’s an existential threat. Something tore a hole in the fence around the compound. Gunfire is heard in the surrounding hills and forest. The “locals” are described as “narcos” and worse.

Monteros may preach that he wants to toughen up these boys, that he wants “men with juevos.” But as much time as the kids spend observing birds that they’re told are all male and have managing a monosexual avian culture (Say what?), you’ve got to wonder if that isn’t part of the grooming going on here as well.

This Bohemian Grove for the children of the Mexican oligarchy features tastes of opera for evening entertainment and daytime play/work with axes and shovels mixed with a Darwinian social mix that selects the mouthy, the noncomforists, for beating down as it rewards the bullies.

Jordi, played by transgender actress Valeria Lamm, is the brattiest of the bratty. Joaquincito (Lucciano Kurti) is destined for adult and peer hazing and abuse, but only after they’ve come after poor Eduardo, hammer and tong. Until he fights back.

It’s all so disturbing that the viewer, recognizing the British stories this seems based on, keeps looking around for which kid will snap. We’re almost rooting for “Lord of the Flies” to transition to “If…”

Director del Paso was making a statement about Mexico’s heirarchy, the Catholic faith that rewards the rich by keeping the poor meek. But this story could be set in many places at this point in time.

When you see the brutish incuriosity, the cowardly pack-mentality cruelty and utter disregard for “selflessness” and “compassion,” it’s hard not to see its North American analogs among the most self-serving, system-rigging raised-to-be-authoritarians among us. And pray that they devour each other rather than us.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Enrique Lascurain, Eric David Walker, Diego Lozano, Valeria Lamm, Lucciano Kurti, Yubah Ortega, Charles Oppenheim, Jacek Poniedzialek and Takahiro Murokawa

Credits: Directed by Joaquin del Paso, scripted by Lucy Pawlak and Joaquin del Paso. An Altered Innocence release.

Running time: 1:42