Movie Nation

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

Bill Skarsgard…because there aren’t enough Skarsgardlings in the cinema, with Michelle Dockery, Jessica Roth, Sharlto Copley, Isaiah Mustafa and Old School Famke Janssen star in this gonzo bloodback about a dead and mute guy who goeth on a rampage.

And again, everybody’s favorite animation voice-over goofball, J. Jon Benjamin is the little nerdy voice inside of the “Boy’s” head.

April 26.

What a charming little animated whimsy “Chicken for Linda!” is.

It’s an adorable cartoon for French students of all ages, by turns sweetly sentimental and seriously slapshticky, a tale of a child who craves a dish her father used to make her, and her widowed mother’s frantic efforts to deliver it in the middle of a national strike, mass protests and freely-acknowledged incompetence when it comes to killing and butchering a live chicken.

Because that’s what this meal boils down to.

“Vive la France” and all that. But work stoppage/police action de damned. There’ll be hell to pay because “Linda veut du poulet!”

Co-writers/directors Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach show us a child who, as a toddler, saw her father die over dinner, whose mother Paulette still grieves and who only loses her temper when Linda keeps “borrowing” her ring from her late husband.

Accusing the child of “stealing” that ring, and “lying” about it, Paulette (voiced by Clotilde Esme) is in a fury right up to the moment she realizes the fat cat Gazzo swallowed it, and threw it back up.

She used the French word for “dumbass” in lashing out at her kid. She slapped Linda when she parrots the French word for “dumbass” back to her mom. Whatever can she do to make it up to her little girl?

“Tell me!” she pleads, apologetically (in French with subtitles). “Anything!”

“Chicken with peppers,” little Linda chirps.

It’s raining. There is no school because of the work stoppage. No stores are open. A restaurant that appears to be serving has a waiter who comes up to customers with a covered dish, under which is a simple note.

“En greve!” On strike!

A monkey at the zoo wears the same slogan, which is plastered on placards and grafitti in the city. There is no “chicken” to be found.

Desperate Paulette leans again on her had-enough-of-this-nonsense older sister, but practical Astrid (voiced by Laetitia Dosch) is no help.

But that egg farm on the edge of town? Surely they have chickens to sell. “Not dead,” the teen in charge declares. “Not for sale,” he adds, going back to practice his guitar.

Paulette comically unleashes a coop and clumsily catches one. And that’s where the REAL trouble begins.

The cops get involved. The neighbors, too. Astrid gets yanked out of a yoga class she teaches over this. Hard to stay “zen” with all the things her kid sister is messing up. And even if Paulette isn’t arrested, how will she deal with a live chicken?

“Cut off its head? Suffocate it? WRING its neck?”

Linda, who doesn’t know what a “strike” is, but knows she’s got to have that chicken with peppers, is full of ideas.

The animation style here is outline-sketch limited but fluid and lively. A lot of the drawn moving figures are reduced to simple blobs of color, especially when seen from afar.

The filmmakers throw in generational jokes, as in “How old does someone have to be to have grown up on a farm and know know to kill a chicken?”

There’s a “Breaking Away” homage involving mother and daughter on the lam in a melon truck and a dogged cop on a bike chasing them as the driver enjoys Felix Mendelssohn’s “Italian Symphony.”

The story skips through charming and grating supporting characters, through a near-riot and kid-led protest over police efforts to grab the chicken, along with a couple of musical moments, and a production number finale.

“Chicken for Linda!” is just edgy enough for adults to enjoy, but not so edgy as to alarm parents who want to watch this with their Pixar-aged children. Still, there is one question every adult must ask before unleashing “Linda,” her mom and that chicken on your little girl or little boy.

“How’s his or her French?”

Rating: unrated, mild profanity, avian peril

Cast: The voices of Mélinée Leclerc, Clotilde Hesme and
Laetitia Dosch

Credits: Scripted and directed by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach. A GKids release.

Running time: 1:16

I didn’t take a shine to Orson Welles‘ “Mr. Arkadin,” which I believe I saw under the “Confidential Report” title back in grad school. My recollection was that it screened as a very rough print, and probably short enough to not make nearly as much sense as it should have.

Such was the state of Welles’ legacy, his lesser known and even best known films, in the years after his death.

But efforts in the early 2000s to restore it and perhaps return some of the “lost” footage recovered in other prints fleshed the movie out. The Criterion Collection has a “comprehensive” cut of it that runs 1:47, the shortest versions — there are seven in all — ran just under or over an hour and a half.

And now the cheap cineaste’s best friend, Tubi, has a fine-looking print that runs 1:40, the so-called “Corinth” version (discovered and rescued by Welles’ pal Peter Bogdanovich), which may be pretty close to Welles’ original intention. It makes sense. It’s flashy in all the best Wellesian ways, echoing earlier films of his and others (“The Third Man” and “Journey into Fear,” for instance), presaging his turn as Falstaff in “Chimes at Midnight.”

Welles himself pops off the screen in one of his most colorful performances, a brooding, bearded, towering presence (often filmed from below) to whom he’d add a twinkle to become “Falstaffian” for “Chimes.”

As a Welles thriller, it’s fun and brisk, and compares favorably to “The Stranger” and his work in Norman Foster’s (Welles directed some of it) “Journey into Fear,” if not on a par with “Lady from Shanghai” or that masterpiece that was Charlton Heston’s gift to Welles and cinema history — “Touch of Evil.”

The future Mrs. Welles, Paola Mori, was “introduced” in this film, playing the jealously-protected daughter of the title character. Her dialogue was looped/dubbed by Billie Whitelaw, but the soundtrack and editing here don’t give away Welles’ frequent dubbing of co-stars’ dialogue during his broke, “bad sound” years of Euro-filmmaking.

But those years also offered him an embarassment of riches when it came to casting. Michael Redgrave and veteran character players Akim Tamiroff, Mischa Auer, Jack Watling, Suzanne Flon, Peter Van Eyck and even Gert Frobe (as a German cop) turn up, most of them heard in their own voices.

The plot, which Welles cobbled together out of episodes of his British radio series, “The Adventures of Harry Lime,” based on his character from “The Third Man,” concerns an American hustler and cigarette smuggler, Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden) who gets caught up in intrigues and murder when he’s hired to investigate Europe’s most mysterious post-war millionaire, Gregory Arkadin.

The fellow who hires Van Stratten is Arkadin himself (Welles), whose name was whispered to Guy and his “bubble dancer” girlfriend Mily (Patricia Medina) by a man (Grégoire Aslan) they find bleeding out, freshly-stabbed on the docks of Naples.

Despite the fact that Arkadin “runs the greatest spy system in Europe,” he wants Van Stratten to follow the clues offered by that dying man in Italy. Claiming “amnesia,” Arkadin is plainly concerned about his past, perhaps because the rich man with villas all over and a castle in Spain (Segovia was a filming location) doesn’t want his daughter to know who and what made him. References to running faulty guns to “the communists in China” and “building roads for Mussolini” in Ethiopia tip us off.

As Van Stratten starts traveling the world on Arkadin’s dime, learning Arkadin’s “story,” the word “gang” comes up, time and again. What has he gotten himself into?

As the story is framed within a flashbacks from a fretful “I’d better tell you my story” conversation with a broke German ex-con (Tamiroff) in snowy Munich. As Van Stratten insists that he “save” this crook’s life “to save my own,” we know the young American has finally figured this mystery out. He has 100 minutes to clue us in.

Former child actress Sasha Pieterse has the dual role lead, with Parker Young the hunk trapped in the sites of twin sisters up to no good.

Nestor Carbonell and Mira Sorvino also star.

One Twitter wag this morning called “SCTV” comic Joe Flaherty “an American so cool we all thought he was Canadian.”

Flaherty, an Emmy winner on TV (“Freaks & Geeks” was his other famous series) and a mainstay in movies, from “Back to the Future II” to “Detroit Rock City,” “The Wrong Guy” and “Happy Gilmore,” had retired over a decade ago. He was 82 when he passed away yesterday.

Yeah, he died on April 1. Timing.

But some of his characters — Count Floyd and Guy Cabellero among them — live on.

And I can’t go to a “critics’ screening” to this very day without thinking of the role models the late John Candy and the late Joe Flaherty were to…so many movie reviewers. All that’s missing are the bib overalls.

Rest in peace, funnyman. You blowed it up real good.