Movie Nation

“Land of Bad” is a solid-enough B-movie combat thriller with the cast and production values of an A-picture.

It’s got Oscar winner Russell Crowe as an Air Force drone pilot guiding commandos played by Luke and Liam Hemsworth, Milo Ventimiglia and Ricky Whittle out of a jungle jam — a special ops “extraction” that goes wrong.

There’s something like a “remote control/video game warfare” vs. the “barbaric” intimacy of hand to band combat debate in this William Eubank actioner, as we see men tortured and fighting to the death as a drone pilot shops for “artisinal” cheeses and the like in an upscale market in Las Vegas after he clocks out.

But as Avenue Pictures has gotten into the Russ business — Crowe’s “Sleeping Dogs” is coming up later this spring — they indulge their no-longer-fighting-trim star in ways that hobble the picture at times, especially in the anti-climaxes that follow the finale.

Four commandos led by Lt. Sugar (Ventimiglia of TV’s “This is Us”) are sent into Southeast Asia to extract a kidnapped CIA asset. Three, played by Ventimiglia, Luke Hemsworth and Whittle, are hardened veterans. But “the kid,” Kinney (Liam Hemsworth) is a green Air Force specialist who isn’t HALO qualified, brought along as the JTAC, the guy who communicates with the drone crew.

Crowe is the Reaper pilot aptly-nicknamed “Reaper,” a long-in-the-tooth, couch-potato-bod captain whose real name, we can see on the Air Force tunic he wears over his shorts and Hawaian shirt, is “E. Grimm.”

Don’t fear “The Grimm Reaper,” you say? Wait until you get him on the radio.

“I am your eyes in the sky and bringer of doom,” he growls.

And when the mission goes wrong and the odds against them rise, all the never-miss-sniping in the world (gotta love combat film fantasies) won’t save our quartet. Mr. Surgical Strike (a higher tech fantasy), sitting in a chair in an air conditioned room at a Vegas Air Force base with a hula skirted dashboard doll for luck and a Ping golf glove on his trigger hand, just might.

The fights are furious and the explosions –staged in the jungles of Queensland, Australia, with power line towers plainly visible in the distance and our “super villain’s lair” “compound” a hydro-electric dam and its surroundings — are epic.

Our commandos are convincingly grizzled, and Hemsworth the Younger makes his character properly frazzled and out of his depth.

But director Eubank (“The Signal,””Underwater”) knows where the real money is, and the camera is never far from Crowe, who isn’t so much playing a character as a collection of “traits,” signifiers and accessories.

His clothes merit explanation, as does his age if not his gone-to-seed physique. Reaper is on-the-spectrum nerdy about his organized coffee pods, “my chair,” the phoneline that needs to be kept open in case his pregnant fourth wife (!?) calls — who is, he reminds us and his JTAC in the field, a vegan.

“How do you know when someone’s a vegan?” We give up. “They will TELL you.”

Crowe doesn’t hijack the film, because as a combat saga it crosses from predictably dire to amusingly far-fetched. Suffice it to say that in this war Western, “the cavalry” is always coming, be it a Hellfire missle fired from a drone, an evac chopper or other hardware or a character you underestimate or otherwise lose track of.

But Crowe’s swagger and showboating here is a double-edged sword, and not really the icing on the cake which he seems to believe it is.

Rating: R, violence and lots of it, profanity

Cast: Russell Crowe, Liam Hemsworth, Milo Ventimiglia, Chika Ikogwe, Ricky Whittle, Luke Hemsworth and Robert Rabiah.

Credits: Directed by William Eubank, scripted by William Eubank and David Frigerio. An Avenue release.

Running time: 1:50

Netflix International’s economy of scale scheme that sees the streamer financing remakes of films that were a success in one culture in another country continues with the new Polish comedy, “Kill Me If You Dare.”

“Zabij mnie, kochanie,” as it is titled in Polish (you can watch the film dubbed or in Polish with English subtittles) may be no better than the Turkish Netflix tale titled “Öldür Beni Sevgilim” when it was released in 2019. But hey, no new money had to be spent on a story they already owned.

It’s about a quarreling couple who win the Lotto and when their dreams of what to do with the money collide, they conspire to murder each other in the middle of a resort vacation.

No, that idea doesn’t sound like cinematic “gold,” and user reviews of the Turkish film trended negative. But maybe the Poles figured out how to make it work.

Long Netflix movie review short, they don’t.

Piotr (Mateusz Banasiuk of “Furioza”) proposes to Natalia (Weronika Ksiazkiewicz, also of “Furioza”) in a big romantic gesture at the train station. But five years later, his stinginess is getting on her nerves and her jealousy over him working for a gorgeous ex (Paulina Galazka) have run their marriage into a wall.

Each bitches to her or his bestie — Agata (Agnieszka Wiedlocha) and Lukasz (Piotr Rogucki) respectively. Can this marraige be saved?

Then a Lotto ticket he buys but which she paid for comes up a winner. They have a $million, which solves all their problems, right?

Nope. He has conservative investment plans. She dreams of opening a business, traveling and shopping.

There’s nothing for it but for each to plot to rub the other out. That’s almost how abruptly this idea enters the narrative, which has Agata and Lukasz driving suspicions over this or that “accident” each has at the other’s hands, egging their respective friends into taking “action.”

Piotr’s working vacation to a survivalist/adventure resort gives each her or his chances. What will it be, a sabotaged bit of skydiving, rock climbing, poison at a meal, cooked to death in a sauna?

Our stars don’t have much of a flair for dark comedy, but this heartless, humorless, joyless screenplay is the murder weapon here. It kills this lame idea for a movie.

Still, I can hardly wait for the Spanish language and North American versions of this Netflix is sure to commission. Because who needs to hire clever writers when you already own a “can’t miss” “intellectual property?”

Rating: TV-14, murderous situations, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Weronika Ksiazkiewicz, Mateusz Banasiuk, Agnieszka Wiedlocha, Piotr Rogucki, Paulina Galazka and Miroslaw Baka

Credits: Directed by Filip Zylber, scripted by Hanna Węsiersk, based on the 2019 Turkish film scripted by Murat Disli. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

There’s a laugh-out-loud meltdown in the third act of “Five Blind Dates” that makes up for some of the tedium that’s come before and almost atones for all that doesn’t amuse or charm about the finale to come.

It’s a tirade over tea, and like the movie surrounding it, it’s much ado about very little.

“Five Blind Dates” is a rigidly fomulaic, stunningly dull rom-com with nary a whiff of “rom” and barely a nod towards “com.”

But it’s about the Chinese diaspora in Australia, about Chinese engagement and wedding and tea traditions, all of which are novel enough to at least warrant a glance.

Lia, played by co-writer Shuang Hu, is a Townsville girl trying to make a go of it with a Sydney tea shop she named for her beloved granny.

It’s a place to “explain our culture” to their Aussie neighbors, showing how “the ballet” of preparing Chinese tea fits within that culture. It is NOT where you want to try and get a “to go” cup of the sacrilege called bubble tea.

Lia has a gay bestie (Ilai Swindells) just dying to do that “gay bestie makeover” of the self-serious Lia and her too-serious-to-be-saved tea shop. But gay Mason will just have to wait until he’s asked.

That ask won’t be long in coming as he’s accompanying Lia to her younger sister Alice’s (Tiffany Wong) engagement party back in her hometown, where she can lie to teacher Mom (Renee Lim of “The Invisible Man”) and divorced, money-obsessed Dad (the terrific character actor Tzi Ma, of “The Farewell,””Mulan” and TV’s “Kung Fu” reboot) about how well her shop is doing.

But she can’t lie to the fortune teller, who we’re told is a traditional guest at Chinese engagements.

Lia is advised, in front of the entire wedding-to-be party, that her love life and career are intertwined, and that things won’t work out for her until she marries one of the next five men she dates. She must meet and date them BEFORE the wedding.

Rather than be shamed by her handsome but dull hometown ex Richard (Yoson An) at “the Lonely Hearts table” at the upcoming wedding, she resolves to let Dad, Mom, Sister and others fix her up in a mad scramble to be attached to somebody at that sibling’s wedding.

The blind dates barely register, although touchy-feely guru-vibe of Curtis (Rob Collins) kind of tickles.

The tea-making allegory barely merits a mention, much less a subtext.

The dialogue ranges from inane to insipid, and the direction (by Shawn Seet) just underscores that.

Example — Lia changes blouses for the engagement lunch and somehow packed a puffy/frilly shirt. In case we miss that limp joke, gay Mason pipes up “You look like a crew member from ‘Pirates of the Caribbean.'”

The visual was the gag, Mason. Your punchline didn’t help.

A shot opens on a bouncing, dancing and drinking fiesta, the engagement party that Lia traveled home to attend. But “ENGAGEMENT PARTY” is slapped up as a big, remedial graphic for the elderly in the viewing audience. I guess.

The fortune teller is a stereotype, others lean into Chinese cinematic tropes — money-obsessed, gauche, practical-not-emotional, quick to change languages to insult the non-Chinese. And then there’s Mason.

“You know me, Boo, I don’t KINK-shame. But straight people? Are wild!“

This entire enterprise is so familiar as to be “one from column A), two from column B)” predictable, a cut-and-paste job assembled according to a Screenwriting 101 textbook.

There’s no guesswork to any of it, not in its “viral” climax or its inevitable Mr. Right.

But maybe people who’ve never seen a rom-com will get something out of it.

Rating: TV-13+, profanity, innuendo

Cast: Shuang Hu, Ilai Swindells, Tiffany Wong, Yoson An, Renee Lim, Rob Collins and Tzi Ma.

Credits: Directed by Shawn Seet, scripted by Shuang Hu and Nathan Ramos-Park. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:24

Oscar contender Bening is the wife and mom who goes missing from her country club set family, alarming the adult kids and casting suspicion on her husband (Neill).

It’s based on a novel by Liane Moriarty of “Big Little Lies,” so this drew a big name cAt for a reason.

March 14, on Peacock.

A hitman with brain cancer, “like a curtain coming down.” Unfinished business, threats, and blowback.

The usual stuff you face when you murder people for a living.

James Marsden and Joanna Kulig are also in the cast of this thriller, due out March 15.

In the mood for a “Shaolin Soccer/Kung Fu Hustle” martial arts comedy, a Soviet era period piece reminding the world of the Bad Old Days when Russia was even more repressive than it is today?

Well, so was I. But “The Invisible Fight (Nähtamatu võitlus)” doesn’t really sate one’s “Hi-Yah” craving.

It’s a ponderous Estonian farce that takes swipes at Mother Russia, the early ’70s Soviet cars, fashions, politics and foreign policy. And those riffs are built around a wild-eyed Estonian survivor of a kung fu massacre on the Chinese border, a long-haired punk who comes home mad for kung fu and the music of Black Sabbath.

Can this comedy be saved? Not if it’s got one third the jokes of “Shaolin Soccer” spread out over a narrative nearly 30 minutes longer than that cult classic.

But there are enough funny elements in writer-director Rainer Sarnet’s (“November”) latest that it’s a pity he didn’t bring in an Estonian, Latvian or Finnish script doctor to joke this up and nag him into abandoning the many dead spaces between the laughs. Financiers from those three Baltic countries produced the picture., and they’d have been well-served badgering him over final cut.

The film opens on the tense 1973 border between the People’s Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Rafael (Ursel Tilk) is one of the Estonian “republic’s” contributions to this guard force, and the witness and sole survivor of an attack by wild-haired/boom-box wielding Chinese martial artists (Eddie Tsai, Johnny X. Wang and Kyle Wavebourne).

This trio of nascent metalheads leap walls, dance on the barrels of raised AK-47s and fend off bullets from those semi-automatic weapons with those flimsy, floppy swords common in Bruce Lee-era martial arts movies.

The wirework fights are as amusing as they are impressive. The swishing missed-blows and punches landing sound effects and quick-zoom close-ups of the leering masters of their craft adorably mimic the style of such movies back in the day.

Rafael is told “God saved you” for a higher calling. And when he comes home, long-haired and kung-fu and Black Sabbath-obsessed, life is nothing but frustration.

“Everything cool is banned in Soviet Union,” he bitches, in Estoninan with English subtitles.

But then he stumbles into some Eastern Orthodox monks who are anything but passive preachers of The Word. They take their martial arts seriously, so seriously that one and all bark at Mister “Tiger Style, Eagle Claw” and clucking “Chicken” style and his weak kung fu.

“Go home, you clown!”

But he doesn’t. And under the tutelage of Irinei (Kaarel Pogg) and Nafanail (Indrek Sammul), the metalhead monk just might learn humility, kung fu and how to Get the Girl (Ester Kuntu) whose fiance beat Rafeal to a pulp before the kid’s kung fu/kingdom of heaven conversion.

The action comedy bits here work, no matter how far-fetched the reasons for the fight. The objects of fun — Soviet repression, Soviet cars (a ZAZ, Zaporozhets is a supporting character), Eastern Orthodox icon-worship and monastic rites — are ripe for mockery.

But the middle acts of this, with Rafael studying (boring training and indoctrination sequences) and the rituals and sects within the monastery explained, are tedium itself.

Tilk is properly gonzo in the lead role. But too much of what surrounds him is static, dull and listless. A vigorous edit might have helped. A bit of joking up the screenplay before rolling camera would have helped more.

And everybody knows Blue Öyster Cult was always cooler than any band Ozzy Osbourne fronted.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Ursel Tilk, Ester Kuntu, Kaarel Pogga and Indrek Sammul, with Eddie Tsai

Credit: Scripted and directed by Rainer Sarnet. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:55

Kaiju away,  Lizard King and Ape Emperor.

Normal sized Rebecca Hall and Dan Bennett also star.

Mar. 29.

“Players” is a pre-#MeToo rom-com sitcom masquerading as a feature length comedy.

It’s a leering, light but never funny and rarely charming throwback about a group of friends who run “plays” to help each other score one-night stands. They get away with it by paying lip-service to a “switch hitter” (bisexual) in the ranks and telling a story about trying to “convert a one night stand into a romance.”

So yes, it covers a lot of sexual bases. And yes, it’s unamusingly dated as the profession of most of this “play” running quartet — a New York newspaper.

Gina Rodriguez is Mackenzie, aka “Mack,” 33 and one of the boys when it comes to hit-it-and-quit-it-and-brag-about-it one night stands.

Mack and Brannagan (Augustus Prew), Brannagan’s brother “Little” (Joel Courtney) and newspaper “visuals” designer Adam (Damon Wayans Jr.) are supposed to be college chums who have been inventing and “running plays” like “Chemical Spill,” “Betsy Ross’s Mother” and “Drip Drop” for twelve years.

First comes the targeting, then comes the analysis (“tourist,” etc.) and then the play-call.

After it’s over, it’s time to break it all down for the others.

“He’s not a groomer, so I got lost a bit in the woods.”

Mack and her team run their best game at the hot freelance Brit journalist Nick (Tom Ellis) is serious and self-serious and “I might ‘like’ him.”

“I’m 33 and I’m exhausted. I want an adult…a grown-ass man.”

Can they come up with the plays that will a playbook Nick into a “boyfriend” “landing.”

“What constitutes ‘landing?'”

“I want a DRAWER.” In his tony apartment, amidst all the trophies, combat zone mementos and such.

That baseline description pretty much gives away this limp “How I Finally made Friends with Your Mother” movie. Rodriguez, director Trish Sie and screenwriter Whit Anderson lack the nerve to make this truly raunchy and carnal. And the film wins few points for creating rituals, inside jokes and cameraderie amongst our quartet but can’t make much of a challenge out of who in the group — joined by office manager Ashley (Liza Koshy), an enthusiastic natural at these play-acting “games” — secretly crushes on Mack the “G.O.A.T.”

“Jane the Virgin” alumna Rodriguez has the timing and bubbly energy to make her character tolerable in a slick movie that’s unoriginal, trite and cliched. She gives it her all, but this was never more than a feeble excuse for a Valentine’s Day romantic comedy.

Rating: TV-MA, sex (not explicit), profanity, alcohol

Cast: Gina Rodriguez, Damon Wayans Jr., Tom Ellis, Augustus Prew, Joel Courtney, Ego Nwodim and Lia Koshy

Credits: Directed by Trish Sie, scripted by Whit Anderson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:45

The quiet inscrutability of the movies of Flemish filmmaker Bas Devos can be gleaned from their reviews, filled with vague appreciations and words like “unassuming” and “placidity.”

Which is the viewer’s clue that the drama depicted is subtle in the extreme in festival darlings such as “Violet,” “”Ghost Tropic” and “Hellhole.”

The one funny thing that stands out about “Here,” his latest, is that one film festival nominated it for “best documentary.” It isn’t a documentary. It has actors playing characters, a hint of a love story, and a lot of Belgian urban and suburban scenery. But one can understand the confusion. Nobody — critics, festival curators or festival-goers, wants to give away that maybe they don’t “get it.”

“Here” is something of a reverie, with a cosmopolitan context. The Brussels and environs settings are seen as a gathering place for transplants — immigrants. A simple bus ride has the look of committee meeting at the U.N.

And that ties into the film’s organizing metaphor — moss. A Chinese immigrant, ShuXiu (Liyo Gong), studies the tiny plant and its reactions to a changing environment. There is “a whole forest of life” in every accumulated clump, she tells Romanian construction worker Stefan (Stefan Gota).

It is a simple life form, the first plant to establish itself on land, and it thrives seemingly wherever it finds itself. ShuXiu plucks a clump from between cracks in a city sidewalk.

That’s an immigration metaphor writ large, or what passes for one in the “passivity” of Bas Devos.

Stefan hangs with his co-workers, meets up with friends, all of whom are immigrants, some of whom are doing favors for him — fixing his worn out car, for instance. He makes them soup from his homeland.

And now there’s a work break and he’s got on his shorts in preparation for “going home,” where his mother awaits and she hopes he will visit a friend there who has somehow wound up in prison.

Stefan’s wandering has only the vaguest of aims. How and when is he leaving? He’s emptying his fridge in preparation. Will he be coming back?

“This is home,” he says to no one but himself as he takes in one urban construction site view.

He meets with his sister (Alina Constantin), a long-settled immigrant nurse. And then he gets caught in the rain and ducks into a Chinese restaurant. ShuXiu is behind the counter, friendly and outgoing. He has no clue that she’s merely helping her “auntie,” who runs “La Longue Marche,” a landmark event in the history of communist China and a curious name for an eatery.

Stumbling into her on a forest shortcut he sometimes takes, Stefan learns of her true profession and passion for it. Maybe he should postpone his trip and, you know, make her some soup.

“Here,” which has little dialogue (in French, Flemish, Chinese and Romanian), isn’t a tale with action or many of what you’d call basic dramatic devices. It meanders, broods, and takes a shot at entrancing us with its vibe and passivity. Nothing much happens because no one is driven to make much happen.

Yes, it’s rather dull, with little here that could be confused for “entertaining,” and pardonnez moi for suggesting that “The Emperor has no clothes.”

But it’s interesting enough as it invites the viewer into interpretations, messages it might be sending and observations Devos is making about our changing world and those best adapted to roll with those changes, taking comfort and pleasure wherever they settle and accumulate. Like moss.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Stefan Gota, Liyo Gong, Teodor Corban and Alina Constantin

Credits: Scripted and directed by Bas Devos. A Rediance release.

Running time: 1:22

Ten years after Harmony Korine gave us the downside of becoming “Spring Breakers,” a UK writer-director has given us the subtitled British version.

Writer-director Molly Manning Walker’s “How to Have Sex” follows three hedonistic teens on their quest for the perfect sex, sun and soaking-in-booze holiday, as they await their higher education fate in the form of final grades from high school.

It’s a rowdy, rambunctious bawdy girls abroad dramedy with a lot less edge and a lot more sentimentality than Korine’s corrosive take on that sort of cultural rite of passage.

Em (Enva Lewis) is tall, Black and gay, and obsessing over whether she “gets in” to a college that can take her somewhere in life. Skye (Lara Peake) is a smart young woman of experience, not sweating the college qualifying exams thing for the length of this planned bacchanale.

But “Sex” principally follows the shortest, Tara or “Taz” (Mia McKenna-Bruce), a Britneyish virgin who is most unsure of her future — even the losing-her-virginity business — as she struggles with social expectations, peer pressure and bad decisions that come right up to that line in the sand called “consent.”

When the girls go “Wooo-hoooo,” Taz “Woooo-hoos” the loudest. When the bottles open, she’s hitting them the hardest. And while all three are speaking of sex in score-keeping terms, Tara’s the most mission-oriented.

“I can’t die a virgin!”

When some “fit” lads from another part of the UK turn out to be in the “Romeo, Romeo” balcony suite next door, we and the girls — especially Taz — are allowed to think “How convenient.” Heck, one roomie in that next-door suite is a lesbian (Laura Ambler) who is A) just one of the lads and B) coincidentally convenient for our Em.

But it is Tara’s journey that this film focuses on, the attentions of the simple, tattooed and good-hearted “bro” Badger (Shaun Thomas) and his just as “fit” mate Paddy (Samuel Bottomly). Who will Tara choose? Will it be a wise choice? And just how certain can one be of a “choice” when someone is this young and there’s this much peer pressure and alcohol involved?

The subtlety and general lack of melodrama — save for the coincidences — is what’s winning in this film, which takes a few predictable turns before reaching a generally unsurprising conclusion. It’s well-acted, well-shot and edited in ways that play up the seeming spontaniety and improvisational skills of the cast.

Much of the movie is a series of montages, a whirl of insistent DJ’s egging on young people descending on Malia, Crete for binge drinking, promiscuity and “pressure” to just go along with the crowd. Historically, other films covered much the same ground, and “Spring Breakers” had a more stylized approach to this peer-pressure to cross lines “MTV’s Spring Break” value system.

The opposite-of-posh accents of one-and-all are so thick the U.S. version of “Sex” has subtitle. Memo to “Bob Marley” movie-makers. What were YOU thinking?

When “How to Have Sex” picked up “unexpected” BAFTA (British Oscar) nominations, one could easily guess that perhaps the acclaim attached to a fairly routine coming-of-age drama covering conventionally discomfiting ground was due to the filmmakers’ own story and how it ties into the serious messaging of the not wholly humorless movie.

But the players put this over, especially McKenna-Bruce (of the recent Netflix “Persuasion”), who captures the tough face girls reach for when covering for their vulnerability. One and all give us their take on the hedonism of youth, the limits of “best friends forever,” the way women eye another woman’s “man” and how guys live by similar rationalizations as they stab their mates in the back and treat women like carnival prizes to be acquired and discarded.

And writer-director Walker makes valid points about how youth culture is exploited and sexualized into a self-perpetuating monster where “the norm” is what’s been created to sell vacations, alcohol and “bad decisions” to generations, all in the name of an ever- bending and more fraught coming-of-age for generations of girls.

Rating:unrated, sex, teen binge drinking, smoking, profanity

Cast: Mia McKenna-Bruce, Enva Lewis, Shaun Thomas, Lara Peake, Laura Ambler and Samuel Bottomley

Credits: Scripted and directed by Molly Manning Walker. A Mubi release.

Running time: