Movie Nation

The heavy in “The Bad Shepherd” shows up in a Dodge Challenger, a sports coat and a black turtleneck. And something about him is just…off.

It’s not the menacing presence, that cropped hired-killer haircut. Not even the “attempted mustache.”

The voice? An odd Jersey Shore accent, maybe an octave or an octave and a half higher than we’d associate with a generic movie tough — sort of Tom Selleck or sportscaster Jim Rome before they put a lot of effort into lowering theirs to something more butch.

And the words that come out sound as if the character reciting them has seen them on the page, but never spoken them aloud, or heard them spoken aloud.

He speaks of “watching your prey from afar.” As he is summoning up all the menace he can manage for a quartet of hunters who have come into possession of a cliched duffel bag full of cash, he has words of high-voiced warning.

“I know that money? It’s the beginning of your demise.”

I try to make it a point of not singling out performances in bad to middling films, unless it’s obvious that Dakota Johnson is a big part of the problem in “Madame Web.” Geo Santini, playing a mysterious menace in “The Bad Shepherd?” He’s also the director, and judging by the credits, he’s the writer as well (IMdb and other sources credit somebody else.).

As this information is conveyed in the CLOSING credits to the film, Geo is fair game. He chose to cast himself. If he’s going to direct himself, maybe he should be like Clint. Cut as many of your lines as you can get away with. Every time he opens his mouth, his movie gets worse.

It’s a formulaic thriller that opens with a bloodied woman with a gun fleeing from something or someone. She has a flat tire in the wintry woods, grabs that pistol and that duffel bag and tries to get away on foot.

Four “city” hunters in an oversized Ford pick-em-up run over her. She does not get up.

Paul (Christos Kalabogias) is ready to call the police. But John (Scotty Tovar) has searched the duffel bag.

“Put the phone away, Paul. We gotta think what we’re gonna do here.”

Driver Travis (Brett Zimmerman) notes his alcohol intake and “two DUIs.” Leonard (Justin Taite)? He’s willing to hear John out.

They’re just starting to carry out “the plan” when a cop rolls up, looking for something specific and not “calling it in.” Things get more serious in a flash.

And that hunting cabin they go to isn’t the safe haven/hideway they think it is. The stranger in the Challenger comes straight to their door, knowing their names and making them an offer they may or may not refuse.

He wants to “convince you that is in your best interest” to just give him the cash. Will anybody or everybody be convinced?

The preordained nature of the story has the four friends turning on each other over the cash, the predicament and the rising body count that carrying out their scheme entails.

Some of that works, much doesn’t. And let’s wait to figure out why “Sidney,” the stranger, knows so much about them.

Santini isn’t the only one miscast here. There’s a woodsman checking his traps who is about as woodsy as any customer at any suburban Williams Sonoma store on any given Saturday.

There’s suspense in a few stand-off moments, but the plot’s twists grow less unexpected by the minute.

And every time we return to our title character, the philosopher in the hitman’s turtleneck, we cringe, and not in a good way.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Christos Kalabogias, Scotty Tovar, Justin Taite, Brett Zimmerman and Geo Santini.

Credits: Directed by Geo Santini, scripted by Ryuan David Jahn (and Geo Santini?). A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:31

Matt Dillon channels his inner real-estate agent hustler, with Danny Glover and Kim Quinn also in the cast.

This one opens March 8 and looks to be fun.

There are a mountain of tropes you expect your typical disaster movie to deliver. It’s what makes them comfort food films.

We know there will be warnings unheeded. All will be tested, and some will wuss out. A relative will get reckless. A simple, single action coincides with or triggers the final calamity.

Some will be prepared, some overwhelmed. Not everybody we root for will make it. A family will be rent and torn and still cling together, even if the rending and the tearing started months before a catastrophe intervened.

The Swedish mine disaster thriller “The Abyss” checks all those boxes, one after the other. Writer-director Richard Holm, a Swedish TV veteran, takes care to hit every mark, to leave no trope unturned in his debut feature. Genre fans might enjoy it as he puts his picture through its pokey paces. I thought it was entirely too on-the-nose, time and again, as it saunters towards a finale sure to surprise no one, even those it leaves feeling film-comfort-food satisfied at the end.

Tuva Novotny, seen in “Annihilation,” plays Frigga, a stoic geologist in charge of safety at the world’s largest mine in Kiruna, Sweden. She’s the daughter of a miner who died getting out the iron ore the mine is famous for, and married to Tage (Peter Franzén), the operations director there.

Frigga keeps her dead grandad’s good luck charm with her, and like him refers to the mine and the mountain that sits over it as “she,” greeting the mountain and The Lady of the Mine every time she enters it. But the mountain’s ever “settling” seams and rock formations mean that it’s going to collapse, and soon. Plans are underway to move the entire town.

Disaster film fans can guess those plans might have to be moved up a bit.

But why today? It’s her son Simon’s birthday. Her daughter, Mika (Felicia Truedsson) is willing to lie down in front of Frigga’s work truck in protect a business not slated to be moved with the rest of the town. Her husband is living elsewhere, just waiting for her to sign the divorce papers.

And today of all days, Frigga’s new lover, Dabir (Kardo Razzizi) has shown up early for a sleepover. Did I mention he’s a firefighter from Upsala? Maybe he has skills that are about to come in handy in this town where partying teens are vanishing into new cracks in the Earth, where a child’s sandbox empties out from under him when he plays in it, where the dogs are barking like they might know something and the bugs are coming out from underground because they’re damned sure they know something.

Not to worry about the insects. “They only come out of the ground when the mountain moves.”

Holm leans into the melodrama of this genre archtype-populated tale. There’s a “Was that you making the Earth move?” joke (in Swedish with subtitles, or dubbed into English). Helluva moment for the “old guy” ex to meet the “new guy” fireman.

And daughter Mike picks the worst time ever to have a fight with her girlfriend (Tinton Poggats Sarri).

The narrative teases us with a calamity in the opening scene, then takes a good solid hour to establish what’s coming and oh, by the way, our son/brother is missing.

The dialogue is a tad trite in Swedish, worse in dubbed English.

And as we track a couple of points of view — Mika dragging Dabir in search of her sibling, Frigga forced to babysit Tage when she leads a team down to inspect the mountain’s mineshafts — “The Abyss” struggles to find a surprise in all the cracks, collapses, impalings and trapped-in-SUV escapes.

Some of the performances are pretty blasé, considering the rising peril of everyone’s respective situations. There’s professionalism and there’s shock, and then there’s waiting for a take when all the effects around you trigger at once. Again.

When “The Abyss” finally gets going, it serves up a little suspense, a moment of humor and a grim and touching piece of pathos. But even those are straight out of the genre playbook, the one the Norwegians beat the Swedes to and mastered with “The Wave,” “The Quake” and “The Tunnel.”

Rating: TV-MA, violent injuries, profanity

Cast: Tuva Novotny, Felicia Truedsson, Kardo Razzizi, Tintin Poggats Sarri and Peter Franzén

Credits: Scripted and directed by Richard Holm. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43

Every so often in the Spanish-Mexican co-production “Friends Till Death” (Amigos Hasta la Muerte) there’s a new situation, plot twist or character reaction so idiotic and tone-deaf that one is forced to recall how stupid the premise of the picture has been from the get-go.

It’s about a marriage that ends when the wife cheats, breaking up a decades-long friendship because she hooked-up with her husband’s best friend.

But years later, it becomes important to that hospital doctor (or lab tech, unclear) ex-wife that they all make-up because the cuckolder has cancer and mere weeks to live.

Maria (Marta Hazas) tells her ex, pub-owner Suso (Javier Veiga, who wrote and directed this debacle) about the fate of their Mexican friend/classmate/lover/cuckolder Nacho (Mauricio Ochmann). But, get this. She DOESN’T tell the patient. And neither does Suso.

How and where could this ever happen? Who in healthcare, even in the most repressive states, would allow it? People who aren’t blood relatives conspiring to ensure that no one tells a former loved-one he’s dying? I mean, even cuckolders have rights, right?

Everything else that doesn’t make sense in a COMMON sense way spins out of this whopper of a “Never would happen.” Maria being willing to fake her way back into a Suso relationship, even though she gets new evidence how that never really worked. Not that Suso can tell.

Maria wants a baby and can’t have one with Suso, so “Let’s have one with Nacho!”

And Suso? He just rolls with it in “It was meant to be” fatalism.

“Life works out that I had to be cuckolded and he had to get terminal cancer,” he shrugs (in Spanish or dubbed into English).

“Friends Till Death” is meant to be a comedy/dramedy, with Maria and Suso breaking the fourth wall and narrating/giving their spin to the camera about all this nonsense, comical bickering and comical brawling included. The Galicia (northwestern Spain) settings are pretty.

But there’s little heart, humor or pathos to any of this.Nothing clicks between the characters or engages the viewer with them.

And every time something else doesn’t play, every slow-to-develop dopey new twist this tale takes, we’re reminded that it hasn’t made sense, pretty much from the start.

Rating: unrated, fisticuffs and profanity

Cast: Marta Hazas, Mauricio Ochmann and Javier Veiga.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Javier Veiga. A Medio Limón film on Amazon Prime

Running time: 1:37

It’s hard, even for people who lived through it, to remember how weird the American cinema was in the years between “Easy Rider” and “Jaws.”

Old Hollywood, comprising the studios that were being swallowed into conglomerates as the last of the barons who ran them died off, seemed lost. The post World War II audience that sustained them even as public attention shifted mostly to TV were ageing out of moviegoing.

Screenwriter William Goldman’s famous phrase about the town, that “nobody knows anything” was never truer, as a rare blockbuster like “2001” was followed by the Oscar-winning smash “True Grit,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” was chased by “Patton,” and then “M*A*S*H” and “Love Story” and “Posiedon Adventure.”

They knew “genres,” but damned if anybody could figure out the secret to what the public wanted. It was a crapshoot, a time when low-budget projects and newborn filmmakers seemed a safer bet than big budget spectacles, and when nostalgia seemed the safest bet of all.

One way to get a grip on the seismic shift underway 50 years ago is to check into Netflix’s “classics” section and look at the wide range of titles from 1974 on display there — “Chinatown,” “Blazing Saddles,” “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” The weirdest thing on offer has to be “The Little Prince.”

This 1974 children’s film was a musical by Lerner and Loewe, who’d scored with films of “My Fair Lady” and “Camelot,” and most recently bombed with the Western “Paint Your Wagon.”

But fresh on the heels of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” Paramount lined up Gene Wilder for a role, put legend Stanley Donen of “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Funny Face” behind the camera and went all-in a screen version of a musical based on one of the most beloved children’s books of the last century, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “The Little Prince.”

It’s old-fashioned and trippy, a stumbling novelty picture with sparkling interludes and more heart than life. But where else are you going to hear future character heavy Joss Ackland (“Lethal Weapon 2,” “White Mischief”) sing? What other kid’s musical features Bob Fosse, dressed all in black, from his bowler hot to his spats, complete with gloves, showing us vintage Fosse moves and lines (No “jazz hands,” dammit.) as a “snake in the grass” song-and-dance number staged in the middle of a desert?

The man suffered for his art, never more than in this, I dare say.

Wilder plays a wary, human-hating fox who befriends the prince (Steven Warner, a child with but three screen credits) on the lad’s trip — via a flock of animated doves — from one small planetoid to another.

And Ackland’s a king with no subjects to follow his orders on another solitary asteroid.

Richard Kiley, one of Broadway’s greatest stars of that era, brings his melifluous baritone to The Aviator, a French pilot who crashes on a flight from Paris to India, only to have his attempts to repair the between-the-wars aircraft interrupted by a mop-topped blonde in a military coat, using a sword as his cane.

“If you please, draw me a sheep!”

The pilot’s puzzlement has its limits, as he must wonder if he’s hallucinating this peculiar, other-worldy lad (read the Wikipedia bio of de Saint-Exupéry to see how much of this he took from his own experiences) who begs for drawings and regales him with tales of his travels and fanciful child’s-eye-view of the world.

The allegory the author was going for, which the musical adaptors watered-down, was the loss of innocence and a way of looking at the world. The Aviator has grown up avoiding adults who didn’t appreciate his childhood art.

The Aviator hears that the King, the assorted military men, business folk, vain Rose (Donna McKechnie, another Broadway legend) and the thorns of international totalitarianism threaten the Prince, making the child despair of ever finding his way home, to peace and tranquility.

Some of that is in there, but you have to be looking for it.

Bond movie credits king Maurice Binder never did a sloppier animated opening credits than he did for this picture. At least the film’s short running time was merciful to parents, even if it can’t do justice to the material.

There have been revivals of the musical, but it’s plainly not one of Lerner and Loewe’s most beloved shows. There’s a newer version of this tale, with music by Hans Zimmer, that’s on Broadway through May.

Still, Donen and his crew give us playful in-camera effects and fantastical “Wonka” ish asteroid sets. Kiley shines and is in fine voice, Wilder playfully does what he’s paid to do, McKechnie and Ackland have a little fun and Fosse choreographs himself a little pre-“Chicago” razzle dazzle in a role that is best appreciated excerpted on Youtube.

Whatever its shortcomings, “The Little Prince” remains a curiosity, a fascinating artifact of a Hollywood age when the industry as a whole was lost enough to give auteur directors free rein to make “The Godfather,” “American Graffiti” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Walt Disney was long gone, and children’s cinema practically flatlined. But fear not, because musicals were about to experience the “Chicago/Chorus Line” earthquake.

And whatever you think of the “blockbuster” mentality that set in did to the cinema, “Jaws,” “Star Wars,” “E.T.” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” stopped theaters from closing, brought forth the birth of the multiplex and saved the movies for generations to come.

Rating: G

Cast: Richard Kiley, Steven Warner, Gene Wilder, Donna McKechnie, Joss Ackland and Bob Fosse.

Credits: Directed by Stanley Donen, scripted by Alan J. Lerner, based on Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical adapted from the novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. A Paramount release on Netflix, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:28

“Monolith” is an exercise in the simple power of storytelling, compelling voices summoning up all the acting gravitas they can to evoke chills and a fear of a vague, unknown “something.”

Built around a dogged podcaster, her recording studio and her phone, it is the picture of minimalism, a primer on no-budget movie-making and a reminder of what people with imagination were forced to strip down to making movies during COVID lockdowns.

But one can appreciate all that is accomplished with the bare minimum of visual variety and external clues, threats or assistance and still find this thiller wanting. At the end of the day, you’ve got to deliver some payoff worthy of the paranoia and suspense everybody is talking themselves into.

Lily Sullivan plays our interviewer, whom we meet, mid-call, on her “Beyond Believable” podcast. She’s pandering to an audience of the conspiracy-minded, trying to modulate the crazy, and doing it from a position of weakness.

She needs their attention, and as a recently-disgraced journalist whose career took a huge hit when she published what she believed to be true, not what she could verify, she can’t talk down to anybody and be taken seriously.

An anonymous email tip mentions somebody who got something once in her corner of Australia — a “brick.” And from that unpromising tease, she plunges into days of calls, interviews, “verifications” and stories told by a housekeeper, an art dealer, scientists and others as she tries to ascertain who got such “bricks,” what they looked and felt like, what their arrival portends, what the “writing” on them means and how they changed the people who received them.

“It felt like something of someone was trying to talk to me,” assorted nervous interview subjects declare.

And as out interviewer plunges deeper into this “unsolved mystery,” fretting over “something awful is coming” and “the dark forces behind this,” the viewer is allowed to recall her assertion “I’ve just got to make a story that will make people listen.”

The seriousness of the calls, sometimes treated in overlapping audio montages as this “story” “blows up,” the creeping way director Matt Vesely has the camera prowl her parents’ remote and empty — save for a pet turtle named Ian — house, makes us consider what might be coming, if someone on the phone is having her on or if what might be happening is all in this woman’s head.

But there are limits to how much of a chill we can get from implied-not-overt threats, and there’s risk in when you actually get to a put-up-or-shut-up point and a “Monolith” must be produced, that it won’t all have been worth it.

And that’s when this slow-simmer/not-really-building thriller sputters, having exhausted most of the tricks in the “scare you without showing you” filmmaking arsenal.

Not bad, as far as it goes. But not all that, either.

Rating: R, profanity, suggestions of violence

Cast: Lily Sullivan, with the voices of Linn Coper Tang, Matt Crook, Ansuya Nathan and Terence Crawford.

Credits: Directed by Matt Vesely, scripted by Lucy Campbell. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:34

“The Heartbreak Agency” sets up as a German variation on the relationship expert gets his or her just deserts rom-com formula, a Teutonic “Accidental Husband,” “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days” or “Failure to Launch.”

But after a first act that fails to find a single laugh, “Die Liebeskümmerer,” as it was titled in Deutschland, takes a turn towards soggy sentiment and doesn’t really manage that, either.

Rosalie Thomass plays Maria, owner and guru of the titular “agency,” somebody getting a lot of attention and raking in the bucks for running a post break-up counseling service that’s really just an unlicensed or at least under-licensed counseling business.

Karl (Laurence Rupp) doesn’t know a thing about it until his girlfriend (Paula Schramm) tells him he “can’t love,” and that their “sex and breakfast” romance is nothing of the sort. Karl figures “somebody else make her think I’m no good for her” and plots his revenge.

Because he’s a veteran magazine writer. He smells a hatchet job, and pursues it despite warnings from the boss (Arash Marandi). Karl sees Maria’s hearts-decorated office and hears the spiel while trying not to roll his eyes.

The “counselor” is an emotionally blank single mom and labeling her a “narcissistic ice queen” in an online profile is like shooting “fisch” in a barrel. But that gets Karl fired, and only by accepting therapy from Maria and her group counseling sessions and retreats and will he ever write in this town again.

Others in treatment include forlorn and over 40 Sibylle (Denise M’Baye) and ditched-and-won’t-accept it Turgay (Özgür Karadeniz), both of whom get Karl’s glib “advice” on their problems, which they take as seriously as counselor Maria’s.

None of this plays as amusing, and I should add that none of the films whose formula this movie seems inspired by worked all that well, either. Karl has a gay roomie (Jeffrey Hoffmann), for those collecting tired tropes in rom-coms.

Which is why Karl has to see Maria’s soft side, Maria has to see his tenderness and how good he is with her tween daughter because that’s where all this was always going, laughs or no laughs.

German comedies are an acquired taste, and some are so dry you can’t pick up on the fact that they’re supposed to be funny right away. Even by that bending-over-backwards criteria, even if comedy isn’t the main goal here, “The Heartbreak Agency” disappoints.

Stock characters in generic group therapy “sharing” sessions, a story arc as obvious as that big metal ring hanging over St. Louis and generally flat performances aren’t rescued by a Bangles musical running gag (“Eternal Flame”) or anything that points us to a happy ending that wouldn’t satisfy in Hollywood, Hollywood, Florida or Hamburg.

Rating: TV-14, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Rosalie Thomass, Laurence Rupp, Jeffrey Hoffmann, Özgür Karadeniz, Arash Marandi and Denise M’Baye

Credits: Directed by Shirel Peleg, scripted by Antonia Rothe-Liermann and Malte Welding, based on the book by Elena-Katharina Sohn. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

“Bob Marley” lives!

The reggae icon’s music endures, and his image and story have audiences lining up around the world for a bio pic that earned mixed reviews (I liked it).

A big Valentine’s Day opening, and a big Friday have “Bob Marley: One Love”  opening over $46 million, Wed.-Monday (Presidents Day). It almost earned $28 this weekend alone.

That’s almost twice the take that Sony’s Marvel mess, “Madame Web,” is managing. It’s on track to do an underwhelming $24 million over that period. Ok “disastrous.” The weekend only-take is about $15.

“Argylle” is still pulling down $4 million this weekend.

“Migration” has no animated kid movie competition until March and is adding $3 million to its bottom line.

“Wonka” is below that and in fifth place.

And “Mean Girls: The Musical” has cleared the $100 million mark.

The box office isn’t “back,” but even taking into account two holidays, that’s a welcome change from the empty cinemas of the last couple of weeks.

Here’s the WEEKEND (not since Wed) take via @boxofficepro

Fan to be serviced or hate-watcher, you owe it to yourself to take a look at Jennifer Lopez’s “This is Me…Now: A Love Story,” an indulgent, album-tie in narrative whose over-the-top visuals and J-Lo explaining J-Lo story are something to see.

Eye candy? Oh my God, yes. Indulgent in the extreme? Sure. But funny? Sometimes.

“I hate that I can’t stop watching,” says Jane Fonda, in character as zodiac goddess Sagittarius. “It;s like a ‘Vanderpump Rules’ marathon, and it’s four in the morning and I stop judging them and I start judging me.”

If we’re judging folks, let’s just note that the Oscar winner is joined by Fat Joe, slightly less convincing as a therapist/marriage counselor than say, Charles Barkley might have been, former “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah, Jay Shetty, science pop star Neil deGrasse Tyson and Keke Palmer.

But there is no judging Keke. Every damned word out of her mouth is funny.

“What IS it with this woman and weddings?” she ponders as Scorpio, another of the zodiacs pondering the fate of the once-and-always “Jenny from the Block” as she passes through the many public romances of her “character’s” life — some tragic, one violent, many ill-advised.

Ben Affleck is seen in an opening image, a breathtaking couple-on-a-motorcycle dash across a sea covered tidal flat, a ride that ends in tragedy. Uh-oh, Benny boy.

Lopez and director Dave Meyers & Co. reimagine the song cycle here in visions of steampunk (a “heart” powered by rose petals factory) and epic nuptials to an abusive showdown in a penthouse prison of chrome, windows and shattering mirrors, to a little tribute to “Singing in the Rain” by our still fly flygirl, Ms. Lopez — in fine form and immaculate makeup and sexy outfits throughout.

“Jenny” weep-watches “The Way We Were,” faces a “relationship addict” intervention from her rainbow coalition of “friends,” endures therapy and declares “What is wrong with wanting to spend your life with someone?”

And for a minute or two, here and there, we take that to heart. It can’t be easy finding love and domestic happiness at that level of fame. The fact that Lopez has made that her brand, that she’s made music and movies about just that subject, that she’s never far from the headlines or another viral moment of couple exposure and over-exposure, most of them calculated by her, wakes us back up.

But “This is Me” is pretty to look at and intriging in ways that similarly indulgent, artsy and “revealing” productions by such contemporaries as Beyonce can’t quite match. Because while her thin voice might be best appreciated over-produced dance numbers, it’s affecting and plaintive in less adorned ballads. And the fact that Lopez is a good actress underneath the “image” (and vanity) makes us believe her, even when we know better.

Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity

Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Fat Joe, Jane Fonda, Keke Palmer, Trevor Noah, Jay Shetty, Kim Petras, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jenifer Lewis and Ben Affleck

Credits: Directed by Dave Meyers, scripted by Jennifer Lopez and Matt Walton. An MGM/Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:05

They spent some money on music rights for this 1991 period piece, cleverly timed to come out on the cusp of spring break.

The cast? They saved some cash there.

Beware the Ides of March, for that is when Republic Pictures unleashes a little known cast and a rude teen rom com that makes the flirting possible.