Movie Nation

The worst thing about keeping a cinephile’s bucket list is that you never know what you’ve been missing until you hunt for something you know you’ve missed.

“Brute Force” might be the greatest prison break movie from the film noir era.

It stars Burt Lancaster and a near Who’s Who of the great character actors of the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.

It was scripted by Richard Brooks, who had launched star Lancaster’s career by adapting Hemingway for “The Killing,” and who went on to script “In Cold Blood,” “Elmer Gantry, “Blackboard Jungle,” $Dollars,” “The Professionals” and “Looking for Mr. Goodbar.”

Director Jules Dassin first showed his flash and flair with this film, and would go on to make “Topkapi,” “The Naked City,” “Rififi,””Night and the City” and “Never on Sunday.” Dassin ensured “Brute Force” would both live-up to its title, with inmate rough justice for “stool pigeons” and sadistic guard rubber-hosing and wanton mass shooting. But Dassin and Brooks tuck that brutality into a film of poetic dialogue and lovely grace notes.

“Everything’s OK? What’s OK? NOTHING’S OK. It never was and never will be until we’re out. GET that? OUT!”

The flawless compositions, with Garbo’s favorite cinematographer William H. Daniels’ camera work that takes us into an inmate-administered “execution” and hurls us into a riot in the yard make this film the epitome of “genre picture” as art.

My favorite touch? Casting singer and actor Sir Lancelot as a calypso singing Greek chorus, fleshing out character introductions and situations by tossing out this inmate’s (scripted) DIY verse explaining many a moment.

Lancaster’s Joe Collins comes out of solitary, and “Calypso” hints at what’s to come, and happen to the stoolie who put him there.

“My ol’friend Joe was in de hole, it was worse from where dey diggin’ coal. He comes out holdin’ very high his head, and the man to blame, soon be very dead!”

The athletic Lancaster’s Joe is one of the toughest and most powerful inmates at overcrowded Westgate Penitentiary. He doesn’t have to lift a finger, once he’s out of solitary. His five adoring cellmates — played by character acting legends John Hoyt, Jeff Corey and Whit Bissell, including the short-lived character mug Jack Overman as an ex-boxer and “introducing” Howard Duff, who’d make his mark as well — tell him “We’ve made arrangements.”

The prison is, as most prisons always are, a political football, packed and roiled with violence with an ineffectual warden (Roman Bohnen) at a loss and a higher-up telling him to “keep it under control” because “We don’t want to be bothered any more.”

Sadistic Capt. Munsey (Hume Cronyn, pint-sized evil) has his own way of doing things. Cross him and you end up digging “the drain pipe,” a tunneling job that’s basically a death sentence. Inmates have “accidents” around Munsey.

Joe wants out. Joe’s always wanted out. But things have to turn a tad more dire before his whole cell and the white-haired senior man in the yard (Charles Bickford) will buy into a scheme that starts to half-form in his and others’ heads.

I’ve watched quite a few Korean films over the years, and since cinema is an international language working with most of the same dramatic tropes, genres, conventions and plots, I’ve never had much trouble categorizing what I was watching or keeping up with the plot.

Kim Bong-han’s “The Wild,” a gangster film of old allegiances, old grudges, guilt and double crosses, tests that universal “coherence” belief.

It’s a violent revenge thriller with a whiff of “atonement” for one’s sins woven in. Easy enough to understand. But it’s absurdly chatty (in Korean with subtitles) and thin on explanation for who the various characters are and their relationship to each other, or at at the very least, slow to deliver that information.

A character or characters go by different names, always a problem for viewers dropping in from another culture on your Korean crime drama. Then there’s the many MANY spellings of character names and actor names on various websites (IMDb), which differ from how they appear on the subtitles.

Just watching it, from its prison release opening to the flashbacks to the crime that put our anti-hero behind bars, to various schemes and alliances set in motion to the bloody finale, would challenge any non-Korean, and perhaps a few folks from or on the Peninsula, too. But try taking notes so that you can keep it and “them” straight, as a critic must do.

The fights are furious, there’s a heartbreaking rape scene, and something just short of a wholly satisfactory finale delivers its message of redemption. But man, tying it all together is never more than an afterthought.

Park Sung-woong of “Hunt”stars as Woo-cheol, an ex-boxer we meet on the day he gets out of prison. His old running mates are there to greet him, backslap him for doing the time, ply him with drinks and make plans, plans which he smiles and seems to dismiss.

Woo-cheol once worked with gangsters, and had a hand in helping his childhood friend Jang Do Shik (Oh Dae-hwan) get rich through fixed fights. Do Shik is now “President Jang,” running gambling, prostitution and drug smuggling operations with the help of Kang (Jung Soo-Kyo) and the fishing boat smuggling gang led by Gak-su (Oh Dal-su).

President Jang accomplishes all this because he has inside help. But the Det. Cho (“Jo” on IMDb), played by Joo Suk-tae (“The Hard Day,” “The Great Battle”) is a drug addict and a sadist who loves beating prostitutes half-to-death. He’s a “problem” that Jang must contend with.

And when Woo-cheol rescues sex-worker Bom (Seo Ji-Hye), whom he’s met as a getting-out-of-prison “present” from Jang, and beats the hell out of the stoned detective, that “problem” gets even more complicated.

With lots of moving parts, many figures pursuing their own agendas and mutual mistrust all around, there’s little chance that smiling, quiet, remorseful Woo-cheol will get his wish of just living “a quiet life,” maybe signing on to a ship for a long work-voyage.

It would have been helpful to know this druggy-brute, shooting-up and torturing hookers, was a cop before well into the movie’s middle acts. Relationships are seriously under-explained early on, leaving me a bit unmoored as Woo-cheol is coered back in for muscle and negotiating help with the untrusting smuggler gang.

We can understand why the filmmaker would hide the fact that hooker-Bom isn’t who she seems.

But the betrayals and back-stabbing seems to come out of nowhere, the shifting allegiances hard to follow and the cluster of characters tossed into the opening scenes only truly understood by late in the second or early in the third act, make everything that’s going on in the interim something of a muddle.

Writer-director Kim stages some epic beat-downs and brawls, with knives and cleavers the weapon of choice among many. A lot of characters test the ex-boxer, and learn the error of their ways.

Through it all, leading man Park maintains a quiet stoicism that holds it all together. More or less. But that turns out to be a pretty tall order for a simple-enough-genre thriller whose director is hellbent on sowing confusion and creating narrative chaos for a huge portion of his picture.

Rating: unrated, rape, bloody violence, drug abuse, nudity, profanity

Cast: Park Sung-woong, Joo Suk-tae, Seo Ji-Hye, Jung Soo-Kyo, Oh Dal-su and Oh Dae-hwan

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kim Bong-han. A Well Go USA/Hi-Yah! release.

Running time: 1:50

Giancarlo Esposito…my FAVORITE, and Kathryn Newton and Dan “Downton was a LOoooong Time Ago” Stevens co-star in the bloody-minded comic thriller.

The second trailer teases more of the action. The plot? All we need to know is why these nice folks (Kevin Durand, Matthew Goode, Melissa Barrera, Angus Cloud) ended up having this ballerina-vampire to contend with.

April 19.

In cinephile shorthand, “The First Omen” comes off as an homage to the gory cinema of Dario Argento as imagined by someone who’s only heard descriptions of the famous/infamous Caravaggio of motion picture horror.

For a cynical, “Let’s milk this intellectual property for all its worth” exercise, this fifth film in the “Omen” franchise is self-consciously artistic, gruesomely grisly, and almost wrestling with big issues — abortion, the collapse of Catholicism and a plot to “bring people back to the Church” by scaring them via the Antichrist.

And it’s built around a riveting performance by”Game of Thrones” alumna Nell Tiger Free, as a nun new to a Roman orphanage and hospital where Satan’s spawn might be born.

The film is a prequel to the iconic 1976 Gregory Peck/Lee Remick thriller about a couple raising a little boy named Damien, whom they don’t realize is the Antichrist.

Set in 1971, this “”First Omen” meanders between the cheap-jolts filmmaker Arhasha Stevenson must have been contractually-obligated to provide. The plot is Byzantine, but can’t avoid predictable tropes and situations and “twists” of the genre.

Yet with Bill Nighy as an Archbishop, Charles Dance and Ralph Ineson as priests on opposite “sides” of whatever is going on, with Sonia Braga as a stern and sary nun in charge of the orphanage, you can’t write the film’s ambitions off.

An investigating priest (Ineson) finds his way to an aged cleric (Dance) with the message, “Hiding won’t absolve your sins.” The old priest was mixed-up in a conspiracy that the younger one is trying to unravel.

In Rome, the once-orphaned American Margaret (Free) has arrived to the warm embrace of the Archbishop (Nighy) who sponsored her to be a novitiate at the convent that runs Roman Catholic orphanage and hospital.

She is “taking the veil” in 1971 Rome, where unrest has workers on the streets, as it was in many European capitals. Youth are protesting the Vietnam War and out-of-touch governments everywhere. People “are turning away from the church in droves,” in part because of its ancient rituals, but also thanks to its historical/institutional connection to money, power, dictatorships and authoritarian politics.

And weird things are going on in that hospital. A disturbed teen who draws nightmarish visions of how she sees the world is kept isolated from the others. Treatments and punishments are done behind closed doors.

When now-defrocked Father Brennan (Ineson) gets Margaret’s attention, he tries to enlist her help in finding “proof” of his suspicions, that the Church is manufacturing a crisis to save itself from an indifferent world.

Director Stevenson, tapped to make his feature filmmaking debut with an episode of TV’s “Legion” his most significant credit, treats us to faintly-chilling settings, to shadows and extreme closeups, and a riveting meltdown turn by Free, as Margaret cannot believe what she’s discovering and lives in terror at what her role in it all might be.

The few effects are grisly and old-school shocking, and the period detail — novice nuns enjoying a bit of Roman nightclubbing before they “hide this body (theirs) forever,” getting caught up in marches and riots — is spot on.

But this “Omen” lurches between “dull” and “soul-sucking boredom” more often than any edit or re-edit could fix. The tedium sets in as the pacing slacks, and as the pacing slackens off the stakes are lowered.

There’s little of the “Future of Humanity” urgency of the 1976 Richard Donner film, released after “The Exorcist” and “Rosemary’s Baby” got an increasingly secular world all worked-up over the Devil and what he might do to get our attention.

This script gets so wrapped up in the back-engineering of the story, the nuts and bolts of “There is a beast they’re making,” that it loses track of just how shocking that might have seemed, then and now.

And the shocks themselves are less shocking than you’d hope, and far too few in number.

But to her credit, the cast, especially Nell Tiger Free, never lets on that the terror isn’t real. She never loses her commitment to the character’s reality, even when the picture is serving up the trite, tried and true pro forma epilogue of many an “historic” horror saga.

If only the film around these players had been more worthy of their efforts.

Rating: R, violent content, grisly/disturbing images, and brief graphic nudity.

Cast: Nell Tiger Free, Ralph Ineson, Sonia Braga, Maria Caballero, Charles Dance and Bill Nighy.

Credits: Directed by Arkasha Stevenson, scripted by Tim Smith, Arkasha Stevenson and Keith Thomas. A 20th Century release.

Running time: 2:00

A “YA” best-seller drowns in the lazy screenwriter’s worst enemy, endless “VO” of the lead character, constantly telling us her innermost thoughts, in “The Tearsmith,” a tale of orphans who reach puberty bonded by more than just shared trauma.

The constant eye contact and personal space violations just tease out what we know is coming. His protests to “Keep her away from me” (in Italian, or dubbed into English) can’t hide his hunger.And her professed loathing doesn’t disguise her longing.

It’s a pity they’ve been adopted out as brother and sister.

Some clever young adult novelist taking the nom de plume Erin Doom wrote this turgid melodrama, which has been translated into 26 languages so far. But director and co-writer Alessandro Genovesi (“My Big Gay Italian Wedding,” “When Mom is Away”) treats the novelist’s every word like Old Testament Truths. The film is voice-over narrated to death.

“I wanted to wash away his sadness.” “So many times I was unable to feel the raw detachment that I wish I could.”

Voice-over narration takes the film out of the hands of the actors, who could SHOW us literally every emotion, reaction and consideration the author presents as interior monologue on the written page. It’s the crutch Genovesi and co-screenwriter Eleanora Fiorini use to beat this slight but forbidden fruit-edgy teen romance to death.

We meet tween Nica on the day her parents are killed in a crash on a road trip. Her mother had just told her “The wolf is just the villain (in fairy tales) because somebody said so.”

The words will haunt her, and turn up in that voice-over once or twice, as Nica — named for a butterfly — is sent to a Gothic orphanage where cruel Miss Margaret reigns.

It takes years for this damaged child (played by Caterina Ferioli) to be adopted out, time enough for her to make friends among her fellow orphans, and make one enemy for life.

Rigel (Simone Baldassari) is a piano prodigy, a brooding, pale, mop-topped hunk with voluptuous lips and faraway eyes. All Nica can think of when he’s around is her mother’s necklace, which he snatched off her neck on Miss Margaret’s orders the day she arrived.

Then a family takes her in, and just as they’re leaving on the day they pick her up, they stop — transfixed by the soulful piano stylings of the boy named for a star.

Next thing she knows, Nica’s escape from this institution whose inmates nicknamed it “Grave” is ruined because she’s to finish her teens in the company of her tormentor.

“Moth,” Rigel calls the butterfly-named Nica.

Rigel has a scary intensity, and that shows itself in violence at school, where he busts up a school bully and tries to intimidate the boys who are drawn to Nica like you-know-whats to a flame.

As she makes friends and gets the attention of even more boys, Nica starts to ponder just why she hates Rigel, how that started, and if it was ever fair. And he’s easy on the eyes. As their “parents” are formalizing the adoption process, her love/lust timing could not be worse.

“The Tearsmith,” taking its title from a nightmarish fairytale figure whom Nica accuses Rigel of being, with Rigel returning the accusation, draws out this long mating ritual, giving us clues about just what went on in that orphange and how everybody who spent too much time there is “broken” — most too broken to cry.

Like a lot of Italian teen romances and sex-comedies made for Netflix, “Tearsmith” is a little titillating, but never terribly interesting. The characters are bland archetypes, right down to their haircuts.

One curious thing about it is how the story’s timeframe is handled. The fashions and the 1970s Jeep Wagoneer that Nica’s parents are driving when they crash suggests she’s a tween 50 or so years ago. The later teen scenes show us 1980s cars, and older ’70s models, in the background. That works.

And then somebody pulls out a cell phone. For all the YAs out there unaware of this, there were no “smart phones” in the ’80s or even the ’90s.

It’s not enough to make you write off the entire enterprise. But it does add to the unreality of it all, with all that voice-over, all that torpid dialogue — “I beg of you.” “This path is nothing but thorns!” The chest heaving performances are sort of “Twilight Lite.”

The lack of surprises, the contrived nature of the conflicts that turn into love connections and the cumbersome voiced-over-to-death technique and the abandonment of the whole “tearsmith” metaphor render this potential teen tearjerker nothing to cry over.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Caterina Ferioli, Simone Baldassari, Alessandro Bedetti and Nicky Passsarella

Credits: Directed by Alessandro Genovesi, scripted by Eleanora Fiorini and Alessandro Genovesi, based on the novel by Erin Doom. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:46

For his feature film directing debut, the British-born Indian star Dev Patel takes a simple vengeance tale and all but overwhelms it with furious action, flashy camera work and breathtaking editing. And I’m kind of OK with that.

A Jaipur “John Wick,” with exotic settings, extensive blood-letting and Subcontinent magical realism? Who wouldn’t be?

The Wick franchise is jokingly referenced in “Monkey Man,” and that’s apt, as the name-check comes from an underground gun dealer peddling “Chinese” counterfeit pistols like the ones featured in those films, our hero lost someone close to him and will kill his way through villains to have his revenge, and even though the “someone close” wasn’t his dog, he does befriend and train a puppy in one sequence.

It’s a bloodbath featuring a Man with No Name hunting a murderous police chief and those in league with him, including a guru/religious leader (Makrand Deshpande, smooth, self-righteous and sinister) who has used his prominence to endorse a new, discriminatory and violent nationalist political party.

Yes, it’s got Indian cuisine, Indian affluence and Indian squalor, the myth of the Hanuman (Monkey Man), underground mixed martial arts brawling and hero haunted and triggered by trauma in his past.

But there are themes ripped worldwide headlines of the moment — religious intolerance, transgender abuse and the rich, connected and corrupted practicing populist “State Capture” in the world’s largest democracy.

Patel’s hero-figure shares a crowded hovel with many poor street people like himself. His primary means of support is masking up as a monkey and throwing fights in the underworld gym of promoter/hustler Tiger (Sharlto Copley, hilariously brutish). There’s a “blood bonus” if “The Kid” lets himself get beaten up in the ugliest ways.

But the kid has a goal, a quest. And he’s got friends. Pickpockets help him acquire a stolen purse and get a meeting with “Kings” nightclub/brothel owner Queenie (a fearsome Ashwini Kalsekar).

Broke, practically homeless, he begs her — “Give me the jobs no one wants to do.” That’s how he ends up washing dishes in the kitchen of the ground-floor restaurant. That’s how he gets close to his quarry, Chief Rana Singh (Sikandar Kher, a brutish hulk). That’s why he visits the illegal gun dealer who offers to “John Wick” him up. A .38 revolver will have to do.

But the best-laid plans of slumdog avengers oft go awry, as this tale will have fights, shootouts, breathless handheld chases on foot and by tuk tuk, and failures, along with a “training” sojourn with a temple occupied by oppressed transgender devotees guarding Shiva the Destroyer’s sacred tree.

There’s a reluctant, short, one-legged motormouthed confederate (Pitobash), a sympathetic hooker (Sobhita Dhulipala) and pretty much every action trope we’ve seen in 100 years of thrillers, many of the same ones that turned up in the “John Wick” films.

Patel and “Whiplash” cinematographer Sharone Meir keep the camera so close we can smell the street food, the blood, sweat and squalor, sample whatever the rich and infamous are snorting at King’s and have our heads snapped-back by the in-your-face violence.

The lithe, martial-arts-trained Patel makes a convincing fighter, and the “Slumdog” star makes us believe the nightmarish flashbacks his character went through that have him so hellbent on settling scores.

Even if the story beats are as obvious as the class war messaging — “They (the corrupt rich) don’t even see us!” — “Monkey Man” lures us in, just close enough to land a laugh, a kick or a savage knockout punch that will make you go “Wow.”

Patel, who makes most of his films in his native UK, has made a distinctly Indian (in Mumbai and Indonesia) thriller adhering to a strict Hollywood formula, a film tailor made to capitalize on the growing box office clout of Indian cinema in North America. And best of all, he’s managed it at a Western pace and running time, a full hour shorter than the equally over-the-top and somewhat overdone “RRR.”

He’s never had trouble finding work as an actor. From now on he should be juggling those demands with directing ones, because “Monkey Man” gives a well-worn genre a furious and funny kick in the ‘nads.

Rating:  R, strong bloody violence throughout, rape, profanity, sexual content/nudity and drug use.

Cast: Dev Patel, Sharlto Copley, Sobhita Dhulipala, Ashwini Kalsekar, Sikander Kher, Pitobash, Vipin Sharma, Adithi Kalkunte and Makrand Deshpande

Credits: Directed by Dev Patel, scripted by Paul Angunawela and John Collee A Universal release.

Running time: 2:01

Two 2-hour movies, previewing back to back.

“Omen” and “Monkey Man.”

It’s early April, so we’re not getting our hopes too high. But somebody’s gotta be good enough to get that pre summer money.

Here we go.

Golf, an elitist sport long identified with “white privilege,” is challenged in “The Long Game,” a feel-good dramedy about a plucky team of Mexican-American kids who took on racist Texas and racist Texans in the 1950s and integrated golf in the process.

A very good cast, timely themes and Colombian (!?) locations that pass for Del Rio and environs in the mid ’50s recommend this formulaic film, based on a true story, whose script struggles with too many contrived conflicts and cloying touches for its own good.

Jay Hernandez takes a break from “Magnum, P.I.” to star s J.B. Peña, the new superintendent of the Mexican-American corner of Del Rio, where San Felipe High School resides. A WWII combat veteran (the script erroneously puts this Marine at Monte Cassino) starting a prestigious job, with a former commanding officer now the club pro (Dennis Quaid) putting in a good word for him, J.B. figures he can get into the prestigious Del Rio Country Club.

No dice. The members “are just not used to seeing a Mexican on the golf course,” the “my hands are tied” club director (Richard Robichaux) says with a sigh.

The only “Mexicans” there are the “invisible” groundskeeper, Pollo (Cheech Marin) and a group of five teens who caddy for rich white folks and their spoiled offspring.

Caddies Lupe, Felipe and Mario (José Julián, Miguel Ángel García and Christian Gallegos) enjoy the game enough to play “at” it on a piece of land next to the abandoned railroad tracks, where they’ve improvised a couple of holes. They even let hapless Gene (Gregory Diaz IV) in on their tips-driven gig and their fake course.

But it is the rebel Joe (Julian Works) who has the real skill and talent. It’s just that he’s the one who doesn’t let insults from the patronizing members of the club — “You boys watch the fingerprints when you load the car with the bags.” — pass. The racist judge (Brett Cullen, perfectly vile) is sure to have his car urinated on for his contempt.

When Superintendent J.B. ID’s the “golf” kids at San Felipe High, he sees a way of gaining “acceptance” in this “gentleman’s” sport — for himself, for the kids and those who follow. He recruits these cuffed-jean punks to form a golf team that will finagle its way into high school competition and integrate the sport and that one country club in the process.

Quaid’s Frank Mitchell will be their assistant coach, the one who works on their swings, nerves and short game while J.B. teaches them to tuck in their shirt tales, dress appropriately and “look right” according to golf’s “unwritten rules,” showing that they belong on the course with the priveleged white boys.

“No Spanish” on the course, either. J.B. is trying to Booker T. Washington the kids into acceptance.

But as they endure racial slurs and cheating, we have to figure that approach won’t work, and won’t last.

Director and co-writer Julio Quintana (Neflix’s “Blue Miracle,” starring Quain, was his) and his co-writers do a good job of showing us the limited horizons and circumscribed lives of these Latino teens. Even their principal (Oscar Nuñez from “The Office”) spends his time giving them “a taste of military discipline” because the military might be their only escape from “working the fields” in this corner of the world.

Joe’s disapproving Dad (Jimmy Gonzales) tells his boy “You’d better bring your sombrero” to this white world. “Whenever you’re invited to a gringo party, you’re either the entertainment or the help.”

Groundskeeper Pollo, wearing a cage to keep the members from “accidentally” pelting him with balls as he maintains the course, may be ironic when he talks about “knowing my place.” But J.B. sees “the long game,” getting white folks used to seeing “Mexicans playing golf,” making them figure out that “We’re more than just caddies and cannon fodder.”

Yes, this is preachy. The teen love story (featuring Paulina Chávez) is shoehorned in, as is a “couples” golf outing that turns ugly. That contributes to the movie’s meandering pace. Some of the conflict is organic and historic, while other overreactions seem contrived.

There are anachronisms beyond that Marines at Monte Cassino bit (automobile vanity plates didn’t turn up until the ’70s). And Quaid, delivering a little twinkle and an occasional “right side of history” zinger, has to work extra hard at not portraying the cliched “white savior” in all this, much as Kevin Costner strained against that “type” in “McFarland, U.S.A.”

But for all its shortcomings and self-seriousness, the cast and the story strike the right almost-light tone for this latest appeal to the “better angels of our nature.” A teen excursion “across the border” doesn’t go as planned, or according to audience expectations. And Nuñez plays his principal character as comically-clueless and comically “related” to everybody.

A light tone, just enough compelling back-stories and just-high-enough stakes make all the difference in the world between formulaic “plucky underdog” sports movies that work, and those that don’t.

Rating: PG, some violence, mild profanity, racial slurs, thematic material.

Cast: Jay Hernandez, Julian Works, Jaina Lee Ortiz, Brett Cullen,
Paulina Chávez, Miguel Angel Garcia, José Julián, Gregory Diaz IV, Christian Gallegos, Cheech Marin and Dennis Quaid.

Credits: Directed by Julio Quintana, scripted by Paco Farias, Jennifer Stetson and Julio Quintana, based on a book by Humberto G. Garcia. A Mucho Mas Media release.

Running time: 1:52

Twentieth Century Studios takes a shot at rebooting their classic “Omen” property, and Universal acknowledges that Indian cinema is an increasingly important draw at the U.S. box office with their “Monkey Man” Dev Patel action pic.

Both are opening Friday, and both seem like safe bets to do well, maybe even launch franchises.

Let’s see if they deliver the goods.

The world’s most popular sport is bound to produce scads of formulaic sports dramedies about plucky underdogs and the challenges they face mastering or at least embracing “The Beautiful Game” in pursuit of some higher um, “goal.”

“Next Goal Wins,” “Holy Goalie,” and “Bend it Like Beckham,” even the delightful Egyptian “Best International Feature” submission “Voy! Voy!” are just variations on the same formula that Hollywood trotted out for “The Big Green” or “Kicking & Screaming” — soccer as a backdrop for some other life lesson that characters need to learn.

But I’m not sure the world needed a maddeningly half-hearted two-hours-plus soccer dramedy about the “journey” and trials of players who take part “The Homeless World Cup” of soccer.

Surely the director of “Wicked Little Letters” and the screenwriter of “Millions,” “24 Hour Party People” and “The Railway Man” had better offers than this lame take-the-money-and-phone-it-in “feel good” soccer comedy.

The story of the English club recruited by a former pro soccer scout and coach to play in that year’s Rome Homeless World Cup, this “Beautiful Game” (that Pele-coined phrase/title’s been beaten to death on many other soccer films) barely humanizes the players and fails to raise the “How I became homeless” sentimental stakes that would give the story pathos.

It even shifts points of view and tries to show the “trials” of a Japanese team, a South African squad and an American all-women team competing against men, but doesn’t come close to justifying those sidebars from the main story.

Lacking much of anything else, “Game” becomes about “the games.” And while those four-on-four, 14 minute “tests” played on outdoor basketball-sized courts are novel, the odd bicycle kick or umpteenth tie-score “shoot out” isn’t enough to build a movie around.

Michael Ward of “Empire of Light” and “The Old Guard” plays Vinny, a soccer fanatic who haunts the fields near where he lives, mimicking radio broadcasts of matches as he watches and then showboats his way into youth games.

Bill Nighy is Mal, a “retired” scout who spies him, sizes Vinny up and rescues him from a pummeling by parents for messing up their kids’ match. Mal suspects something about Vinny, something he’s picked up on by coaching this men’s team he’s been in charge of for years.

Vinny, like the other members of this English world cup team, is homeless. Estranged from his wife and daughter, barely employed and living in his car, Vinny’s too proud to admit the dire nature of his situation. But judgment-free Mal sees all these players as men who have “fallen through the cracks, lost their way.” He persuades the 20something with the flashy moves to join in, take a free trip to Rome and help England “score some goals” in the Homeless World Cup.

The other players have back stories of varying degrees of interest. Enthusiastic and hyper Nathan (Callum Scott Howells) is a recovering junkie. Pedantic numbers-cruncher Aldar (Robin Nazari) is a Syrian refugee, with a shoplifter and others whose “How I ended up homeless” stories are less sketched in.

There’s very little practice and zero bonding as they make their perfunctory way to Rome, where the viewer is given a taste of the older and more shame-filled Japanese team managed by the idealistic martinet Mika (Aoi Okuyama) and the South African squad, managed by a Jesus-praying/trash-talking nun (Susan Wokoma) and the “illegal” South American refugee (Cristina Rodlo) who is the emotionally fragile star striker for the U.S. team.

Vinny judges and shuns his teammates, and he and we must learn the “secret” shame each has and “reasons” soccer legend Mal takes on this quixotic quest.

Ward gives the most interesting performance, on and off the (paved) pitch, and seems the most real character in the thing. I love Bill Nighy, but this script ensures he’s the least convincing soccer coach since Will Ferrell. Valeria Golino is colorlessly cast as the director of this “cup.”

About the only thing I took from this “Beautiful Game” was an understanding of the Homeless World Cup as an event. Homeless players are only allowed to participate in one “cup.” You can’t make a career out of homelessness, or game the system that way.

And the four-on-four, small “pitch” and short games produce a hockey-like sport that is a helluva lot more intense and entertaining than the film’s opening “It’s still nil-nil (0-0), but WHAT A game!” commentating.

But otherwise, this is just a “big game” formula sports movie that aims low and still comes up short.

Hey Netflix, maybe try spending the money to option that Egyptian marvel “Voy! Voy!” with its bigger laughs, higher stakes and genuine suspense. This “Beautiful Game” is an ugly waste of two hours and five minutes.

Rating: PG-13 for some language, a suggestive reference, brief partial nudity and drug references.

Cast: Michael Ward, Bill Nighy, Callum Scott Howells, Kit Young, Robin Nazari, Sheyi Cole, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor and Valeria Golino.

Credits: Directed by Thea Sharrock, scripted by Frank Cottrell Boyce. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:05