Movie Nation

Reason #19 you don’t want to sit next to Rodg at the movies. There’s always the chance I’m going to mutter the movie critic’s “quiet part out loud” judgement despite my best efforts not to.

“Boy, this has absolutely nothing that holds my interest” I found myself grumping very early in “Assassin Club,” an opinion that the remaining 100 minutes did not change.

It’s another star vehicle for hunky leading man Henry Golding, a “Crazy Rich Asian” with a seriously uneven post-“Crazy” track record in movies. “Snake Eyes?” “The Gentlemen?” “Last Christmas?” “Persuasion?”

Here, he’s a hired-killer who finds himself hunting and hunted by his fellow assassins as someone is putting out contracts on everybody who keeps a roof over her or his head via murdering people for money.

Sam Neill plays the glib, posh, harpsichord-playing epicurean who chatters away on the phone as “Morgan” (Golding) lines up his next shot.

“You love the sound of your own voice, don’t you, old man?”

When Morgan himself takes a bullet, handler Caldwell barely interrupts his latest pricy glass of wine to quip “little flesh wound, here and there, part of the job” before bringing up the next assignment.

It’s a multi-hit, multi-million dollar contract, a sort of “game,” really. But Morgan wants out of what Caldwell insists is still “good, necessary work,” taking out arms dealers, human traffickers and the like.

As Caldwell knows there are but “three reasons” people like his “gold standard” killer end their careers — “They find God, they find a woman” or they “die.” — we guess it’s the Italian school teacher Sophie (Daniella Melchior), who knows nothing of her lover’s injurious and deadly line of work, who motivates Morgan’s desire to be done with killing.

Noomi Rapace plays an Interpol-ish exec trying to track down the killers and those who are killing them.

Because whoever paid that big contract apparently offered it to others. Every hired killer in Europe (lots of second unit footage takes us from Prague to Paris to Portugal) is killing off every other hired killer.

It’s kill or be killed, with Caldwell giving the cell phone delivered resume of each target.

“Yuko is a martial arts master most feared for her bladework, with perhaps some lingering ‘Daddy’ issues.”

The fights are OK, the shootouts nothing to remember, the chases are passable and the killings themselves perfunctory.

In the pre-TV era mediocrities like “Assassin Club” were labeled programmers. Get a few stars featured in a generic plot and it might look like an “A-picture” but the studios, which then owned their own theater chains, knew better. It was just to keep lower-cost fresh content on their screens so that they didn’t lose their shirts between hits.

Those lesser films became “direct to video” in a later era. “Straight to streaming” we call them today.

The screenwriter of the Wes Bentley bomb “The Perfect Witness” plotted this one, and hasn’t improved in the decades since that barely-released “programmer” came and went. The indifferent direction here has neither flare nor signs of rank incompetence.

So the only reason to see it is the cast, right? But in or out of action, Golding isn’t anybody’s idea of a big draw, and pitting him against “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” Rapace, and pairing him up with Neill as the upper class Brit who gives the assassin his assignments doesn’t change that.

Rating: R, lots of violence, some profanity

Cast Henry Golding, Sam Neill, Daniella Melchior, Jimmy Jean-Louis, Anastasia Doaga and Noomi Rapace.

Credits: Directed by Camille Delamarre, scripted by Thomas Dunne. A Paramount+ release.

Running time: 1:51

Every now and then, a film comes along that could pass for the quintessence of what we used to mean when we invented the phrase “indie cinema.”

That label implies personal stories, an intimacy created between characters and the viewer, a talented cast that can be from “Hollywood” but rarely “OF” Hollywood, and locations off the cinematic beaten path.

“Stay Awake” is a soft, sentimental stroll through a “coming of age” story, a film that could have been inspired by “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” for reasons both obvious and more subtle.

Like many a coming-of-age tale, it’s about growing up in a provincial place and resolving to get out even as obstacles to that tug at the heart and soul. Here, the anchor that’s holding back two brothers — one an aspiring actor, the younger an aspiring writer with Ivy League dreams — is their depressed, morbidly obese and overdose-prone mother.

She’s sensitively played by Chrissy Metz of TV’s “This is Us,” cast for the first time as someone whose appearance betrays our baser instincts when we see someone that overweight. She’s got a problem.

They title “Stay Awake” comes from brothers Derek (Wyatt Oleff) and Ethan (Fin Argus). It’s what they shout whenever they’re pleading with their mother, singing songs from movies and begging her to ID “Everybody’s Talking” from “Midnight Cowboy” or “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

“Look at me! Look at me. Stay AWAKE!”

One brother or the other has found Mom Michelle unreponsive. Again. The other brother’s been fetched to help get her in the car for yet another urgent dash to the small Virginia town’s emergency room, where everybody knows their name.

Older brother Derek is the one inclined to be supportive and cut the woman some slack. He works at the bowling alley, and having graduated a couple of years before, goes out on auditions with dreams of landing a big TV commercial — Virginia Tourism in particular. Derek is still dating high school “girls” in his 20s, and that’s not good. Melanie (Cree Cicchino) sees through him.

“Why do you always gave to put a ‘bow’ on everything?”

Ethan is the brother willing to put his foot down, making “rehab” and “psychiatric commitment” threats. He is the more “parentified child,” the audience’s “tough love” surrogate.

“We’re DONE. We’re not searching for you ANY more!”

Ethan’s ready to go to college, has good news from two schools, one of which he never told his “We’ll go to (Virginia) Tech together!” girlfried at the Jolly Cow Drive-in (Quinn McColgan) about.

But here’s another and then another triggering moment for his mother, another trick she’s played to get her couldn’t-care-less doctor to refill her prescription, another controlled-panic race to the hospital.

She isn’t able to control herself enough to stop torturing her sons.

As you’d expect, “Stay Awake” is a soft-spoken film. The rare outburst can be jarring, or comical, as in the tirade Ms. Va. Tech Hokie launches into when she discovers Ethan’s “secret.”

First-time feature writer-director Jamie Sisley, expanding on a earlier short film, keeps the tone quiet and kind of exhausted. Everybody here is spent. And the narrative is given just enough problem-solving to keep the story honest about the limited and limiting choices everyone in this family faces thanks to Mom’s illness.

Yes, it’s sentimental and leans towards the soft side, even in its edgier moments. But “Stay Awake” is more about a situation and a story that will resonate with a lot of people than it is a New Direction in Indie Film.

That’s what intimate cinema like this has always done best — put believable characters in “lived in” places, in real world situations where the stakes are small but terminal and pretty damned important to those affected.

Whatever happens to this family, you can bet your last dollar that one and all who survive will damned sure “come of age.”

Rating: unrated, adult addiction subject matter, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Wyatt Oleff, Fin Argus, Cree Cichino, Quinn McColgan and Chrissy Metz

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jamie Sisley. A Mar Vista release.

Running time: 1:33

I wasn’t inclined to truth “Mrs. Chatterjee vs. Norway,” a somewhat soapy and heavy-handed drama about a child welfare case that turns into an international incident as it slow-walks towards the cliche that “No one can love a child as much as its mother” conclusion.

It’s a movie overrun with villainous archetypes — from an abusive husband to patriarchal in-laws, patronizing, sexist lawyers and smirking and inhumane Norwegian child welfare workers.

But it’s based on a true story, and if it’s told from an Indian perspective, its biases are understandable and defensible. If you’ve ever been a parent, it’s almost guaranteed to outrage you and sometimes tug at the heartstrings.

We meet Debika Bannerjee, played with great empathy and heart by Rani Mukerji, on her Worst Day Ever. She’s a traditional Indian wife who has made a life for herself in Norway with her shipping port executive husband Anirban (Anirban Bhattacharya).

And when we see them, their children are being spirited away by blonde Scandinavian welfare workers. Debika is beyond shocked and distraught, as most any mother would be.

The director and co-writer Ashima Chibber, a veteran of hundreds of episodes of Indian TV, then shows us how it came to this.

He works, she stays at home. He’s distracted by his job and the Norwegian citizenship he’s sought since he moved there long before marrying Debika. He dotes on his kids, but child -rearing, house cleaning and meal prep aren’t a man’s job, Anirban figures.

The social workers who spend months observing immigrant families notice that, and wonder if that is Debika’s “choice.” They hear that he has a temper and can see the house is cluttered with toys. And we see their noses turn up and the edges of their mouths turn down when they see Debika mix up some dairy curd dish with her fingers and feed it, with those same fingers, into her five year-old’s eager mouth.

The boy and their baby sleep in their bed with them. And when Anirban’s temper leads him and his wife out of the room to bicker, in Hindi (subtitled), about all the ways she hasn’t assimilated and is thus triggering much scribbling on clibboards by the Norwegian “Velferd” ladies, their kids are grabbed and hustled into a state-owned SUV.

Our jaws, as viewers, drop. But Debika flips out, chasing the car, pounding on windows, falling down in the street with those inhuman Norske automatons videoing her “unstable” and “unbalanced” behavior, which they’ll use against her in justifying this kidnapping.

The film proceeds from what looks like “just a misinderstanding” through the many months Mrs. Chatterjee fights this seeming injustice as her already-strained marriage unravels, she refuses to abide by Norwegian decorum in and out of court and takes extreme “Not Without My Daughter” and then international incident measures to retrieve her children when the system refuses to let them go.

In reserved, buttoned down and accept authority Norway, she has to seem like the hysteric they label her to be.

The seemingly “open and shut case” has all these revelations that turn a black and white story into shades of grey. When we see how her husband turns on her with a “This is all YOUR fault,” we can guess just how ugly things have been how much uglier they can get.

The system, which pays for foster care and pays for lawyers to supposedly represent those caught up in that “system,” is ripe for corruption. European Union laws and regulations may also come into play. Debika buys into the conspiratorial side of what is happening and as The State refuses to back down, listen to reason or have a heart.

“We want your children to have the best opportunities available to them in Norway” (in Norwegian, with English subtitles) gives voice to the implicit bigotry of a Western culture imposing its values on Easterners who believe in ancient homeopathic medicine, a more patriarchal society and feeding your child with your hands, which the screenplay suggest is what REALLY got the Norwegians’ dander up.

But a host country insisting that she “Be more integrated with Norwegian society,” is making a reasonable request. Debika is told this by the courts and chewed-out even by her own court-appointed lawyer (Jim Sarbh) when she protests at this injustice.

“Let’s just follow the rules,” her citizenship-obsessed spouse advises.

In Hollywood genre-speak, this is a “Stella Dallas” variation, a tale of how far a mother will go and just what she’ll sacrifice to make a better life for her child. And aside for that occasionally heavy-handed moment, and being a tad slow, with four or five musical flashback interludes that pad the running time, it’s not bad.

Mukerji and the screenplay let us consider this woman’s flaws, her humanity and her fury, and then upends our “close call” judgments as we learn more about her and come to see her point of view.

If The System’s best evidence is video of someone freaking out because an uncaring, overreaching entity is grabbing her children, they’ve already lost. And if her own family can’t see that, they’re just as lost.

This Around the World with Netflix tale succeeds on the most basic level every imported international feature film must, by letting us see a story we can take sides on, and forcing us to see another culture’s point of view as we do.

Rating: TV-14, profanity, domestic violence

Cast: Rani Mukerji, Anirban Bhattacharya,
Balaji Gauri, Barun Chanda, Sara Soulié and Jim Sarbh

Credits: Directed by Ashima Chibber, scripted by Ashima Chibber, Rahul Handa and Sameer Satija .A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:13

A lightly fiesty performance by Leslie Uggams in the title role and a general feel-good vibe are the chief recommendations of “Dotty & Soul,” a plucky but corny comedy from actor turned writer, director and star Adam Saunders.

The movie’s got some clever plot ideas and the odd moment of amusing sass from Uggams, a veteran of 1960s TV who’s had a career renaissance thanks to a killer recurring character in “Deadpool” and TV’s “Empire.” The reliably vile David Koechner makes an amusing fat cat villain. But the script doesn’t have much spark, and Saunders, writing himself a co-starrring role, never rises above “bland” as a screen presence and comic foil.

Saunders plays Ethan Cox, a hotshot Dallas tech entrepreneur whose Big Idea is a self-driving luxury car non-sharing ride-share company. Private Car will pick you up and deliver you in style in a Ferrari, a high end Beemer or in Ethan’s case, a vintage self-driving Bentley.

Now a big ride-share operator wants to buy him and his venture capital backer Brannigan (Koechner) out.

Uggams is Dotty, a 71 year-old vending machine franchisee and general fixer for her wide circle of mostly elderly, working class friends, including the residents of Creekside Nursing Home, where Ethan’s mom (dementia) lives and old Mr. Eichelbaum (M. Emmet Walsh) pushes her wheelchair and nurses his diabetes between Dotty’s snack-machine replenishings.

The great coup that makes Private Car so valuable and a company for “the future” is a local ordinance Ethan and Brannigan pushed through in a tony Dallas suburb, banning “public transportation.”

His high-end ride share service just might be the only game in town, thanks to that. And if that ordinance isn’t the most Texas thing ever, I don’t know what is. And like other legislation from that bad idea incubator state, it could catch on.

Dotty can’t get around without buses, and nobody in her income bracket could afford Private Car or any other pricy ride share alternative. She and her aspiring clothier daughter (Margot Bingham) are already way behind on the rent.

Not Ethan’s problem. He’s too busy wearing bedazzled cowboy pimpwear in the company of his influencer and “future trophy wife” (Alexis Ren), hitting the clubs, dropping the Benjamins.

Until, that is, a private party that he shows up for in Hammer pants sees him tempted to don blackface to complete the M.C. Hammer impersonation. He goes viral in a bad way, and could lose it all if he can’t find a “person of color” to be his “stooge” to front the company so that it can sell.

Hey Dotty, ol’ buddy, ol’pal!

She’s down to cover for his “tired ass white boy ignorance.” But it’s going to cost him.

And being a savvy businesswoman from an era when Black women didn’t get the same opportunities as Jewish frat-bros who change their name to “pass,” she’s got ideas and she’s not shy about shaking things up.

The banter here goes down easily — too easily.

“You’re faker’n a Chinatown handbag” is kind of “racist,” and worse, it’s as edgy as this thing gets. Even Koechner can’t kick things up to the notch they need to reach for “Dotty & Soul” (pun titles are almost always a mistake) to come off.

Saunders is never as colorful as his costumes and never lifts his performance to the height of his hairdo, making him the dead weight at the heart of a movie he wrote and directed as a stardom-making vehicle.

Which is a shame, because the movie has an earnest, class-divide/transportation “future” message. The packaging that message comes in is so watered-down it lands like a raindrop, not a comically cold ice bucket challenge shock.

Rating: unrated, PG-ish

Cast: Leslie Uggams, Adam Saunders, David Koechner, Margot Bingham, Alexis Ren and M. Emmet Walsh.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Adam Saunders. A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:28

A Bollywood-length comic satire, “¡Que viva México!” is not a film for those wholly unfamiliar with Mexico and its political schisms and their history, or for the faint of bladder.

Director and co-writer Luis Estrada gives us an immersion in the internal fissures in Mexican society wrapped in a sloppy, insanely-slow film that leans into almost every Mexican stereotype in the book.

Machete-wielding banditos who rob anybody foolish enough to get off the paved road and whose only excuse for not muttering “Badges, we ain’t got to show you no es-stinkin’ badges!” is the fact that they don’t hablo ingles.

A cop waiting for that next bribe, a judgementally unsavory Catholic priest, a rural province relative who “made it” by becoming a corrupt elected official, the callous and contemptous big city rich, the leeching, clinging, begging poor — they’re all here.

And always, the local mariachis, ready to enliven and render “authentic” every celebration or solemn ceremony with the second biggest musical cliche in Mexico — the song that comes AFTER a norteamericano thinks of “La Cucurcha.”

I gave serious consideration to just posting this much-repeated (in the film) brassy cliche of a video as my review of “¡Que viva México!” It gets the point of the movie across — repeatedly.

STEREOTYPES.

I mean, I watched it to brush up on my espanol. What’s your excuse, if you don’t live “South of the Border” and north of Nicaragua?

The story concerns a ruthlessly ambitious Mexico City factory manager (Alfonso Herrera) who is badgered by his aged father (Damián Alcázar) to come “home” to the mid-desert village of Prosperidad because his miner-grandfather (Joaquín Cosio) has died.

Pancho Francisco won’t go…until he’s shamed and shamed again…until he learns of an inheritance.

So, in the middle of eagerly carrying out layoffs at work, he begs for time off from his sexist, fat cat boss (José Sefami), packs the kids and upper class spendthrift wife Mari (Ana de la Reguera) into the Mercedes and sets off cross country, to a simpler place and simpler people.

And once there, as Pancho is welcomed and criticized for not visiting for 20 years and tapped for this or that funeral expense, as his father continues with the guilting and his salty grandmother (Angelina Peláez, the funniest character and performance) insults him and his “fifi” (old leftist slang for bourgeois conservative shill) lifestyle and politics, and curses her late husband — along with the rest of the family — at the reading of the dead miner’s will, maybe Pancho gets a clue.

After delays, as legal problems, vandalism and shootings add up and his hot sister-in-law Gloria (Mayra Hermosillo) takes shot after shot at getting her some of that and the financial stakes rise and competing agendas clash, Pancho and we get the idea that maybe this is all a peasant trap.

Fine. All well and good. But did we need almost 200 minutes of movie to get to that point? No. Estrada (“The Perfect Dictatorship” was his) is muy desdeñoso of the viewer’s time.

Is this some sort of leftist or rightest revenge on us for plunging into his latest “comedy?”

“¡Que viva México!” is a movie mired in controversy and burdened by wildly differing “takes” passing for “reviews.”

The director and Netflix had a falling out. That’s a fact. The film is an indulgent assault on the viewer’s patience. That’s my opinion of it.

The online troll-wars for the film have each extreme staking out turf.

The film is a parody of the shift in the battle lines of class warfare, finding “the poor” a rapacious, indolent lot who are holding the rest of the country back. Or is Estrada condemning the intolerant rich elite who have forgotten the poor majority, whom they have preyed upon for generations?

He’s skewering Eternal Mexico and its ever-insoluable class differences with a suggestion the country grapple with that which it seems to never come to grips with. Or is our intrepid filmmaker seeing his homeland as a basket case that cannot be saved?

He’s ridiculing “progressive” government and its naivete about the “lazy” rural poor! He’s eviscerating the corruption that has dogged the place since Montezuma tried to buy off the carnivorous Spanish!

“Luckily, in this country, there’s no problem that can’t be solved with a lot of money.”

It seems like such a simple story, but as actors play multiple characters and the number of characters continues to grow with the complications of this “trap” Pancho & familia are in, Estrada seems hellbent on ensuring it isn’t as simple as it seems.

But what he’s really doing is cluttering his narrative, watering down his message and billing Netflix by the minute, the best possible explanation for the wretched excess of it all.

Estrada is sticking it to “El hombre,” and in this case, “The Man” is Netflix. After sitting through “¡Que viva México!” the viewer is entitled to think she or he is “The Man” he’s sticking it to as well.

Rating: R, violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Alfonso Herrera, Damián Alcázar, Ana de la Reguera, Angelina Peláez, Mayra Hermosillo, Joaquín Cosio and Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez and many others

Credits: Directed by Luis Estrada, scripted by Luis Estrada and Jaime Sampietro. A Netflix release.

Running time: 3:12

The truly revolutionary films hit you with how ordinary they can seem on first glance. But that’s just how much they changed the cinema that followed. What they did transformed the way people watched, considered and made movies, rendering all that followed some sort of imitation of what they accomplished.

“The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” is a drab looking artifact of 1962 Britain, a black and white film of shades of grey telling a penny-plain story of one working class lad’s limited life and the release that running gives him in the Borstal school where “troubled” youth heading towards lives in the criminal classes were kept in line and “reformed.”

It’s got the conventions of “prison” and reform school films — fights, a rigid heirarchy, a mess hall riot and an idealistic psychotherapist who hopes to “help” these boys and the warden (“guvner”) who sees sport as a way out for a “promising” young runner.

The cinematography is stark, with bits of pre-Steadicam hand-held footage — on the run — that call attention to themselves thanks to their gritty shakiness. It’s only shaken out of its ordinariness in its extraordinary, still jolting third act and climax.

But it was a groundbreaking film about the post-war “decline” of Britain and the prospects of working class life in a hidebound, class-organized society, and the generation coming up that wasn’t going to take that, or so they hoped.

Now it’s seen as “angry young men” British film of the French New Wave style, flirting with the fringes of “kitchen sink realism” of British theater and cinema.

But back then it was a looking glass for the United Kingdom, kids growing up in a Cold War that Britain wouldn’t be a chief protatogonist in, no matter what Mr. Bond’s exploits might suggest, a society where money and prospects were limited for everyone but those who’ve always enjoyed them.

Director Tony Richardson and young star Tom Courtenay came over from the English theater to tell this story of a teen, delivered in chains to Ruxton Towers prison-“trade school,” who shows extraordinary talent in sports, especially running.

Michael Redgrave plays “The Govenor,” the warden who sees that talent and envisions reform school “Chariots of Fire” Olympic glory for this model of the English reform school way. Colin lets us see and hear the impertinence that underclass kids like him and The Beatles would make famous.

 “Running’s always been a big thing in our family, especially running away from the police.”

The film shows us the drudgery of his fenced-in existence, the freedom he experiences while running to train for their big “sports day” meet with the poshes of Ranley School, a so-called “public school” open only to the wealthy and the elite, kids quite unlike young Colin Smith.

But running also gives Colin the escape of remembering the life he was living and the events that brought him here.

However useless his session with the new school counselor (Alec McCowen) went, we and that psychotherapist picked up on the fact and Colin just lost his father. As the flashbacks make clear, it isn’t grief for lost affection that Colin took from that experience. It’s rage.

His factory laborer Dad, barely glimpsed, fought against “hospitals” and treatment, bedridden at the end. His mother (Avis Brundage) barely cared and had a man lined-up for when the breadwinner and father of three passed.

Colin sullenly accompanies her to collect the death benefit from the factory, and he and his younger siblings go with her as she sees how much of this 500£ windfall she can blow through at once. That new man shows up with the TV she’s bought.

Colin burns the banknote she gives him in silent protest.

In between fights at Ruxton Towers he remembers taking up with his mate Mike (James Bolam), stealing a car for a joyride, double-dating (Topsy Jane, Julia Foster) at a Nottingham pub, taking an excursion to the sea shore, which was at good as it got for kids in his circumstances.

A Tory politician lectures the plebes on the telly, urging them to keep the “faith” in their unjust system. Colin’s brief flash of cash hasn’t blinded him to the inequities that hem him in.

And we see, bit by bit over several flashbacks, the crime Colin and Mike committed and the way they are hassled and targeted by the cops until evidence turns up that jails them.

Many of these memories come up in the reveries of running, all in prep for that coveted race against the rich boys (future star James Fox is their tall, well-bred ideal).

Screenwriter Alan Sillitoe, adapting his own short story, has Colin give voice to generational, economic and existential angst in a few symbolic moments, and just a few flashes of dialogue.

“Do you know what I’d do if I had the whip hand? I’d get all the coppers, governers, posh whores, army officers and members of parliament and I’d stick them up against this wall and let them have it ’cause that’s what they’d like to do to blokes like us.”

Courtenay, in his break-out role, broods and gives-as-good-as-he-gets in brawls, and doesn’t let us see the wheels turning in this despairing, possibly even enraged young man trying to decide whether to fit into the role society has assigned to him (menial work, low pay, patriotic obedience to queen and country, even in sport) or rebel.

Courtenay would go on to a long career that produced a couple of Oscar nominations in films as beloved as “Doctor Zhivago” and “The Dresser,” and delightful turns in the most fun versions of “Nicholas Nickleby” and “Little Dorrit.” He was just in “The Railway Children Return.”

Cinematographer Walter Lassally had a kind of era-defining style that he took to his black and white filming of “Zorba the Greek,” and enjoyed a career that carried him into the Golden Age of posh color period pieces (“The Bostonians”).

And director Tony Richardson had already made “A Taste of Honey” in this “kitchen sink” style. He collected Oscars for producing and directing the bawdy period piece “Tom Jones” and was making layered dramas (“The Border,” “Blue Sky”) and dramedies (“The Hotel New Hampshire”) all the way to the end of his career. His daughter with his then-wife Vanessa Redgrave, the late Natasha Richardson, was a great actress tragically killed in a skiing accident, leaving her husband Liam Neeson widowed.

But the movie that truly put Richardson and Courtenay on the map lives on, especially in the British cinema. Every working class screen tale that followed, every realistic depiction of those on the losing side of the ongoing class war, owes something to “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” a classic that only truly found its audience when critics and scholars realized just how different it was from almost everything that had come before, and how much it impacted so much of the cinema that came after it.

Rating: unrated, violence, smoking

Cast: Tom Courtenay, Avis Bunnage, James Bolam, Alec McCowan, Topsy Jane, Julia Foster, Dervis Ward, James Fox and Michael Redgrave

Credits: Directed by Tony Richardson, scripted by Alan Sillitoe, based on his short story. A on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:44

Our performative “Attention Culture” didn’t begin with Youtube. Actually, it pretty much did.

Winter did great explainer docs about Blockchain and The Panama Papers.

This looks like another winner from the Bill to Keanu’s Ted.

“Road Rally Racers” is an Anglo-Welsh production of an Anglo-American animated film set in China, and released by U.S. based distributor Viva Kids.

I think I have all that straight — Vanguard Animation, Riverstone Pictures, Viva Kids. Right.

It’s an animated reminder that everything old is new again — a not-all-that-pleasant reminder.

Any kid growing up in the late ’60s or early ’70s would have been exposed to a sort of pan cultural obsession with “racing” narratives, many of them comic. These were all over the big screen — “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines,” “The Great Race” — and they were on Saturday AM TV.

“Speed Racer,” “Wacky Races,” “The Perils of Penelope Pitstop,” you couldn’t miss this “content” in the East (“Speed Racer” was a Japanese franchise) or West fifty years ago. In the American versions, screwball characters, often in the form of critters, would race bizarre cartoon cars across all manner of terrain — usually in rallies.

That’s exactly what “Road Rally Racers” is, a cross-China “Silk Road Ralley” race featuring a tycoon “cane toad” villain (John Cleese, of course) competing with everything from an Italian seahorse (he’s pregnant) to Indian Gibbons (apes), Tigers, British weasels, a racing team that looks like pangolins, with an Aussie kangaroo (Sharon Horgan) delivering broadcast commentary.

The plucky underdog is actually a Slow Loris, a primate native to China.

Why the producers chose this little known, panda-cute creature may have had something to do with its name. A Slow Loris named Zhi (Jimmy O. Yang) whose “tao” is out of whack is determined to become a famous race car driver. Funny. Because he’s “slow” by species, you see.

Another feature of lorises is that some species have a seriously venomous bite, so maybe there’s a message in that, too.

Zhi was raised by his Granny (Lisa Lu), who never can get him to stop painting soup pots and wearing them as helmets. His tao is never going to be in sync with his destiny if he keeps racing and crashing the way he always has.

When Archie Vaingloriuous (Cleese) and his Vainglorious Industries roll into to take over the village of Muddy Meadows, bulldoze and flood it, Zhi must race to save Granny Bai, the village, all of them.

J.K. Simmons sports a Russian accent voicing a goat and retired veteran racer who chomps down on pieces of metal that he then spits out of something useful — a piston or a grappling hook). He’s here to help Zhi. But he speaks in bumper-sticker slogans, because that’s now his business.

“The heart of a champion beats in all of us.” “Winners are always winning, even when they’re losing.”

Cleese’s “Vainglorious” villain keeps a ready supply of yes-men toads he calls “echoes,” ejecting one after another from his car all through the race. A new one always pops out of the trunk and into the passenger seat as he does.

The toothy toad Vainglorious sizes up the kid and mutters “SUPER nice guy. Looking forward to annihilating him!”

No, there is nothing here for adults, even the grandparents who might recall the shows this movie borrows from. Barely a laugh, even though Cleese gives it that old Cambridge try.

The animation’s not bad, even if it won’t be giving Pixar (“Cars”) or Disney (“Wreck it Ralph/Ralph Breaks the Internet” had a similar car race game sequence) any sleepless nights. The one clever bit has the action switching to sketched black and white in an homage to the music video to a-ha’s “Take on Me.”

Still, parents looking for anything that isn’t “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” in their local cineplex might be fooled into ducking into this. I wouldn’t count on it to distract your average five year old for 90 minutes.

Rating: PG, the odd rude bit

Cast: The voices of Jimmy O. Yang, Chloe Bennet, Lisa Lu, Sharon Horgan, J.K. Simmons and John Cleese.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ross Venokur. A Viva Kids release of a Riverstone Pictures production.

Running time: 1:31

In action pictures, “over the top” is rarely a bad thing. A little “ludicrous” is a given.

But even by those grade-on-the-curve standards, “The Mother,” the new Jennifer Lopez thriller about an assassin trying to protect the daughter she never knew, is a bit much.

Screenwriters Misha Green, Andrea Berloff and Peter Craig mash up the George Clooney assassin-laying-low tale “The American” with the Saoirse Ronan “girl trained to be an assassin” blood on the snow epic “Hanna,” because “Hey — one came out in 2010, the other in 2011, who’ll remember them?”

Bring in the live-action “Mulan” director Niki Caro, her favorite editor and a bunch of stunt-folk and stylists and makeup specialists and we’ll make J Lo the new Jason Bourne.

But even though Lopez is in fighting trim and can certainly handle fight choreography, even though the editing covers up some of the stunt-doubling, and covering her in a motorcycle helmet helps at other times, it’s hard to buy into all the half-speed haymakers her character throws at the legions of villains she dispatches here.

And the “ludicrous” doesn’t stop there.

We meet the unnamed “Mother” in a safe house, which she insists is “NOT safe,” right up to the moment her chief FBI protector (Omari Hardwick) has to admit she’s right.

She’s been undercover, working both sides of an arms deal, sleeping with both villains she’s tied to. When the slaughter begins, she has the presence of mind to duck, the “particular skills” to DIY triage Agent Cruise’s (HAH!) wounds, and build a bomb out of what she finds under the bathroom sink.

“Curses,” the murderous operator Adrian (Joseph Fiennes) almost mutters, stabbing her in the gut. “BOOM!” Foiled again!

And look at that. The reason they named the movie “The Mother” is because our undercover agent/sharp-shooter is very pregnant.

No, she can’t keep the baby, because two different mass murderers are after her. No, she can’t go underground in the Lower 48. Let’s ship this dish off to Alaska where she won’t stand out — oh no — and her old comrade (Paul Raci) can help her keep her secret.

But 12 years later, it all comes back. Adrian returns to haunt her. Hector the Cuban gun runner (Gael García Bernal) grabs the now tweenage girl (Lucy Paez). Now “The Mother” without any real mothering experience has to do what she does best to free her child and rid the human race of a lot of bad hombres and master villain minions in the process.

The first idiotic thing in the movie is the girl-napping. Cruise brings The Mother to Cincinatti to watch over her child, sets her up with a sniper rifle, just so she can witness a kidnapping she can’t shoot her way into preventing?

Yeah.

She’s off to Havana, to confront her old lover/nemesis Hector in a half-ruined mansion stuffed with more candles than “Interview with the Vampire.”

Freeing the girl isn’t the whole “mission,” not in The Mother’s mind. She’s got to prepare her for her endangered future. Back to Alaska we go, because it’s “Hanna” time, a chance to learn the cold-hearted laws of nature and the cold-blooded nature of sniping and knife fighting. In the snow.

“You’re driving!”

“I’m 12!“

Lopez is a good enough actress to make her character interesting and somewhat plausible. Not “barbed wire wrapped around a fist” plausible. But when she makes a threat, you believe it.

“They can have a nice long look at me while I kill them every last one of them.”

The action beats — chases through Cuba (Gran Canaria, The Canary Islands), on snowmobiles in Alaska (British Columbia) — are expertly handled.

But this script couldn’t surprise a newborn babe watching her first action pic. Ham-handed foreshadowing, retrofitted with a lot of “I won’t shoot wolves” sensitivities, Mother bickering with Daughter over the “violence” that puts every morsel of food you eat on the table — even “tofu” and “cashews.”

No, she didn’t “murder” Bambi. The deer “was a stag. Bambi’s father.” And no, his carcas is hanging up for dressing. This is rabbit we’re eating.

“Thumper.”

Yeah, that’s kind of funny, but that’s pretty much it for wit in this cut-and-paste collection of cliches, action pic tropes and recycled Bond beats.

Yes, Hollywood writers are on strike. No, let’s not base the outcome of that labor stoppage on a mediocre mess mashed-up from others’ scripts like this.

“The Mother” is watchable, here and there. Decently acted. Over-the-top, but not far enough over it to make it fun. And “ludricrous?” Maybe half the situations that put the daughter in screaming jeopardy or that keep The Mother alive until the next scene have nothing logical backing them up.

Much like the lightweight punches our fit-and-50something movie star throws in scene after silly scene.

Rating: R, violence

Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Omari Hardwick, Gael García Bernal, Paul Raci, Lucy Paez and Joseph Fiennes.

Credits: Directed by Niki Caro, scripted by Misha Green, Andrea Berloff and Peter Craig. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55