Movie Nation

The late historian David McCullough told me something once in an interview that I’ve applied to most every historical drama I’ve reviewed ever since.

“The people living through” historical events, McCullough noted, “don’t know how any of this will turn out.”

The Founding Fathers gambled their lives that America would somehow gain independence from Britain. A lot of Germans made the decision to thow in their lot in with the Nazis before and well into World War II.

And in the Occupied Countries of Europe and Asia, nobody knew who would prevail. Some saw short term certainty and immediate gain by collaborating. Others, the real outliers, followed their conscience and clung to hope that compassion, humanity and justice would turn back the tide of fascism that had swept over much of the world at the time.

“Wil,” a Belgian thriller retitled “Will” by Netflix as a play on words, is about that awful dilemma as faced by a couple of green Belgian policemen in 1942, when the outcome of the war was very much in doubt.

Wilfried (Stef Aerts) and Lode (Matteo Simoni) are Antwerp 20somethings with two and a half weeks of training and a lecture on how they’re here to be “the buffer between our people and the Germans” by their weathered commanding officer, Jean (Jan Bijvoet).

But Jean finishes his instructions (in Flemish, or dubbed into English) to the recruits with a sing-along, an old children’s song about a bear who butters its own bread. The chorus provides their Antwerp P.D. credo.

“I stood by and watched it all.”

Uniformed but unarmed, leaned-on by the Germans, but not trusted by them, and serving in the most vital port in Europe, these peace officers are destined to see a lot, maybe even take part in things they know to be wrong. The Germans have the power, the guns and the ruthlessness. What can mere cops do? “Follow orders?”

Wil and Lode stumble into the ultimate dilemma of their age on their first night on the job. A belligerent, pill-popping non-commissioned Nazi officer has orders to arrest some Jews for “non work,” code for “Arrest them and seize their property because they’re Jewish,” and the police are required to provide assistance.

As he terrorizes the family inside, the wife begs to slip out the door, which Lode and Wil are to guard. Wil lets her pass and hand-off her little girl to a neighbor. But when the neighbor’s husband cruelly shoves the child back out the door, the wife rushes past her captor and grabs the kid and flees. The German gives chase, and when he catches them, Wil’s conscience kicks in and there’s one less Nazi on Earth.

The Jewish family escapes, and Wil and Lode, being cops, know how to get away with this killing. What they don’t know is what reprisals will come, how far they will reach and just how much their guilt will eat at them as “innocent” people are rounded-up, tortured and often summarily shot.

The two rookies find themselves connected to the White Brigade, the nascent Belgian resistance. Lode’s sister, Yvette (Annelore Crollet) becomes a prod for Wil’s conscience, and a romantic temptation.

But she isn’t the only one. A friend of Wil’s politically-connected father, Verschaffel (Dirk Roofthooft), offers the easy temptations of greed, status and go-along-to-get-along sins. He could get them through this ordeal fat, drunk and alive, but only if Wil “picks a side,” embraces Verschaffel’s anti-Semitism, his venal opportunism and his affection for “my friend Gregor.”

Gregor turns out to be the German secret police chief (Dimitrij Schaad) who is hellbent on finding out who murdered this German soldier, and in testing Wil and breaking up the resistance.

Collaboration offers Wil access to a seized Jewish home as a painting studio and an easier life for himself and his family. Resistance offers a possibly clearer conscience, but deathly risk — “the Wall” is how the Belgian cops put it, the structure the Germans stand you up against as they shoot you.

The fights are furious enough, but the script for the Vietnamese martial arts thriller “The Foggy Mountain” (Dinh Mu Suong) is as weary a collection of cliches, trite tropes and recycled Eastern “wisdom” as one could imagine.

And having seen many a martial arts movie, one can imagine much.

A fighter — played by star and fight choreographer Peter Pham — is forced to face “one last fight.” His blind wife (Truc May) objects. But gambling gangster Ba Rau (Kim Long Thach) insists. When things don’t go the gangster’s way, fighter Phi must have his revenge. Not the he isn’t warned.

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” doesn’t move him, even in Vietnamese (with English subtitles), because “The punch has no eye.”

Phi must travel into the jungle, to The Foggy Mountain hideout. He will bring school-teacher and trained fighter Bang Tam (Le Thao), just to be sure.

Because you just know that human trafficking is involved, and legions of villains must be faced (Truong Dinh Hoang and Simon Kook play the most formidable ones), victims will be chased and heroes and villains will die and aphorisms must be intoned.

“Killing is addiction. No addiction is good.”

Neither is this movie, alas. The acting is stiff, almost every scene without a chase or a fight is dull and static.

“Mountain” is a thriller that’s all punched-up and no place to go but down the mountain, downhill to cliche town.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Peter Pham, Kim Long Thach, Le Thao, Truc May, Truong Dinh Hoang and Simon Kook

Credits: Directed by Phan Anh and Ken Dinh, scripted by Phan Ahn, Phan Ngoc and Ken Dinh. A Hi-Yah!/Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:27

Rudy Pankow has the title role in this oil patch comedy, which also stars Bruce Dern.

Looks good, and that combo has comic promise. Love that THC.

March 8.

An all-star cast doing another variation of Matthew Vaughn’s intro to spycraft “Kingsman” formula failed to pay dividends as middling Thursday night and not overwhelming Friday put “Argylle” on track to fall short of $17 million on its opening weekend.

Deadline.com notes that That’s enough to chase “Mean Girls” and “The Beekeeper” out of the top spot, with Jason Statham’s best action pic in decades coming in second at over $5 million ($50 total by Monday), the long in the tooth holiday hit “Wonka” coming in third with “Mean Girls” ($66 million to date) further down the ladder, falling to fifth (after “Migration,” which cleared the $100 million mark this week) and well under $5 million in ticket sales after almost a month in theaters.

Apple TV better hope “Argylle” pulls in subscribers for the streamer, as it won’t break even theatrically. It did nobody on board any favors, especially Vaughn and star Bryce Dallas Howard.

“Aquaman’s” last weekend in the top ten sent it over $120 million in North American ticket sales alone.

“Anyone But You” continues adding to its take, an R dates Rom-com that keeps on producing. It’s over $76, and while it won’t hit $100, Sydney Sweeney and that lucky co star from “Top Gun” will be bankable thanks to this sleeper.

This “one last fight” thriller, from Well Go USA’s “Hi-Yah!” division, comes out way Feb. 6.

One reason that funny filmmakers obsesses about “pacing” is their knowledge that, slow-burn comedies aside, speed overcomes many a sin when it comes to generating laughs.

You never go far wrong, comically, when everything in your play/movie/sitcom happens at a sprint.

The basic ingredients to a funny film that works are introduced in the Mexican mob farce “Divine Intervention” (” Divina Señal”).

It’s got mobsters who need to disappear when their boss blows himself up and they have enough of his money to “get out” of their line of work. So they dress up as nuns, just like something they saw “in a movie, once.” That movie was “Nuns on the Run.”

The mobsters — “collectors” Chema (veteran funnyman Adrian Uribe of “Overboard”) and Chumo (Guillermo Villegas of “Sin Nombre” and “Where the Tracks End”) — figure only a “miracle” saved them from a bomb blast, and from those hunting them, forcing them to don the habits of Sacred Socorro of the Divine Perpetually Shoeless Heart.

Yeah, they made that up on the fly.

So they must manufacture miracles for others, using old school mob tactics when necessary. Broke guy needs his job back? Maybe his callous boss can be “persuaded.” Teen steals a quinceañera dress? Maybe she and her mom can use a little mob money to make her fifteenth birthday memorable. And so on.

The nuns might be able to hide from their mob boss, but they make no effort to add makeup and high voices to that disguise. Because Chema isn’t putting up with any “transcatholophobic BS.” It’s the 2020s, amigos.

All of which sounds kind of funny — a “Nuns on the Run” for the post-Catholic Church sexual abuse scandals, “woke” enough to make trans-tolerance a punch line.

But aside from a chuckle here and there, this silly, violent grind just doesn’t play. Whatever novelty there is in a “psycho” one-legged mob boss (Jorge Perugorría) who uses a bomb he’s always threatening to set-off as his artificial leg, and then having that bomb go off accidentally, is lost in aimless and uncertain scenes that follow, in sentiment and in slower-than-slow pacing.

Chemo and Chuma are good and somewhat pitiless at their jobs until that fateful day when they survive the psycho/idiot Yuca’s accidental leg-bombing. They steal his briefcase of “collections,” amd figure it’ll take another “sign” from above to even get the damned thing open.

That second “miracle” sends the more superstitious Chumo into a faith spiral. They must seek other “signs,” do good deeds for others who fall in their path.

They’ll lay low as their late boss had an equally psychopathic brother (Perugorría again), with enforcers on the payroll. No, Chema won’t acknowledge his little boy, an aspiring soccer star. But Chuma will see to it that the kid has attention, praise and a father figure who might fall in love with baby-mama Elsa (Gionvanna Romo).

Chema, meanwhile, will take too much interest in the mother (Ana Serradilla) of the quinceañera thief.

Even less interesting complications pile-up even as the hapless mob can’t seem to track down two dudes who put so little effort into their disguises that even 15 year-olds see them as “two guys disguised as nuns.” So that nun hideout gag is quickly introduced and just as quickly abandoned.

Everything that takes away that “Some Like it Hot” on the lam urgency deflates this would-be-balloon of a comedy.

Funny lines wither on the vine, amusing scenes and sequences die of loneliness.

More could have been made of the mob men being “good Catholics,” with comic guilt added on. More could have been done with the nun disguise.

The “miracles” are so labored they become convoluted. The mob bosses are too comical to fear. And everything, much of it pointlessly over-complicated, just lumbers by like a comic catterpilar that can’t get out of its own way.

The only “intervention” the viewer prays for is that the filmmakers take pity and put this strained comedy and us out of our misery.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, innuendo

Cast: Adrian Uribe, Guillermo Villegas, Gionvanna Romo, Ana Serradilla, Enoc Leaño and Jorge Perugorría

Credits: Directed by Pitipol Ybarra, scripted by Santiago Garcia Galvan, Emiliano Mansilla, Fernando Perez Gavilan and Pitipol Ybarra. A Sony Pictures International release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:41

Laugh-out loud moments pepper the fight scenes and random child-mishandling moments of “Bogeyman,” an Egyptian action farce that serves as a star vehicle for veteran character actor Amir Karara.

Bearded, burly and in on the joke, Karara (of “Mousa”) is a Middle Eastern Jeffrey Dean Morgan in this caper comedy about a stolen ancient Egyptian cat statue carved from basalt.

Yasmine Sabri (of “El Diesel”) plays a med student anxious to finish her studies abroad, suddenly entangled in a heist that involves double, triple and quadruple crosses, multiple offended parties chasing our titular hero and two kids — slapped on him because he doesn’t have enough to worry about.

In prison, nobody messes with Sultan (Karara), aka “The Bogeyman.” But he’s got one last ass-kicking to deliver before getting out.

And “outside,” his old pal, mob underboss Shokry (Basem Samrah, an Egyptian James Remar look-alike), has no intention of letting the 40ish Bogeyman go straight. There’s this “one last job” (in Arabic with English subtitles). It’ll be easy.

The statue has been swiped and is due to change hands again, with a payoff. That’s where the first-double cross kicks in. Rival mobster Saadah (Mohamed Anwar) turns out to be in on the heist, until Sultan shoots his secret confederate in the buttocks.

Punch-outs, shoot-outs and foot-chases ensue. And just when our anti-hero is ready to leave his mother’s apartment and make his getaway to the airport, two under-8 children show up at his door with a letter, saying their Mom is remarried and leaving the country, that it’s time Sultan stepped-up.

But but but…he has no idea he has children. They’re presented to him as his “twins.” And as much as they quack about “non-identical,” the damned birth certificates show them as born a year and a half apart.

Sultan smells a rat. Sultan lets us imagine the steam coming out of his panicked ears. Sultan can’t ditch these moppets fast enough. But they refuse to go to their aunt. His every miscreant move is met with a “See? Mom said he’d be like this” crack from Mariam, the older sister.

Yes, he’s a “thief, a swindler and a murderer.” But he won’t abandon these two until he can ensure their safety. He steals a Volvo wagon to get them to this “aunt,” the kids help him out of a jam with the cops, but at the airport, he gets really desperate as rival gangs close in around him.

He grabs a robe and impersonates a Muslim pilgrim. He pretends to be a political terrorist (“Muslim Brotherhood” is never uttered) when he takes the med-student Salma (Sabri) hostage and orders her to hand-off the kids for him.

But no way, no how is this oaf going to get out of the country by plane.

The laughs can be sight-gags — Bogeyman/Sultan hoisting and tossing about smart-mouthed little boy Malek by the seat of his pants, terrorizing a child who is smitten with “daughter” Mariam — in the toilet, no less.

The film’s random acts of Egyptianness amuse too. Sultan sprints into a belly dancing club in one get-away, and like all the other ogling oafs in there, he uses some of his loot to “make it rain” for the scantily-dressed dancer.

Very Western. Very frat-boy. Very Egyptian, in this case.

Heroes and villains shoot to wound, and every now and then, our Bubba Ho-tep Hulk runs into somebody hulkier.

The jokes run right up to the edge of rude. The mouthy kids don’t completely wear out their welcome. And roping Sultan’s no-good/debtor “brother” (Mohamed Abdel-Rahman) Soka to the festivities just add to the mobsters chasing them, setting up a rambunctious city-bus bust-up/hijacking sequence.

The stunts range from adequate to excellent. Karara has great presence, a real swagger that adds to the fun.

This action comedy runs out of steam and staggers into sentiment. But the mere fact that Egyptian screen comedies are steadily getting better at delivering laughs to the Islamic world makes “Bogeyman” worth a look and a laugh or two or three or four.

Rating: TV-14, violence, toilet jokes

Cast: Amir Karara, Yasmine Sabri, Basem Samrah,
Mohamed Abdel-Rahman, Mohamed Anwar, and two kids playing Mariam and Malek.

Credits: Directed by Husain El-Minbawi, scripted by
Ehab Blebel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

Dirk Bogarde makes a devilishly vile, eyebrow-arching villain in “Cast a Dark Shadow,” a tasty tale in that most British of genres, the murder mystery.

Not that there’s much “mystery” to who our murderer is. But as dastardly as Mr. Marry and Murder for Money Edward “Teddy” Bare is, we’re riveted by who and what will be his undoing.

It’s based on an early ’50s play by the actress turned playwright and screenwriter Janet Green, whose later work included the BAFTA-nominated “social issue” dramas “Sapphire” and “Victim,” and the script for John Ford’s final film, “7 Women.”

Star Dirk Bogarde launched his career on British film by playing a sort of John Mills evil twin, with villainous turns in “The Blue Lamp”and “Cast a Dark Shadow,” playing criminals, Nazis (in “Ill Met by Moonlight” and “The Night Porter”) balanced against the wildly popular British “Doctor in the House” comedies.

In this 1955 thriller by future Bond director Lewis Gilbert, Bogarde’s Teddy Bare is married to wealthy, much-older Monica (Mona Washbourne), whom he calls “Moni,” which sounds suspiciously like “money.”

She keeps him in style in a big house with beach trips and his own Sunbeam roadster. And he reassures her with professions of love.

“I wouldn’t trade you for fifty younger ones!”

As monied Moni takes such expressions of affection seriously, she simply must make-over her will. Who needs that estranged sister in Jamaica? The house and that family money should all go to her beloved, the young man who takes her on “magic carpet rides” — which aren’t what you think. That’s him showing her the picture book of all the exotic places they’ll go.

“Bermuda!”

But the arch of the man’s eyebrow and his repeated offers of wine and stronger spirits tip us off. And before you can say “Coroner’s Court,” he’s gotten her drunk, built an alibi and staged an “accident” that takes her life.

Her “simple” housekeeper, Emmie (Kathleen Harrison) backs up Teddy’s tale. And her reward is him tricking her out of her inheritance from Moni, convincing her to continue working for free.

Teddy, who tried to talk Moni out of writing a will, which was to be signed the next day, finds himself outsmarting himself. He’s a cash-poor surviving spouse. He gets the house (he used to work in real estate). That estranged sister, Moni’s “family,” gets all the money.

Teddy must scheme his way into finding the cash to get to Jamaica to see what can be done without about that sister, or simply borrow bucks to head back to Brighton to seduce another wealther older woman.

But while brassy retired bar-owner Freda Jeffries (a crackling Margaret Lockwood) might let her head be turned by a handsome rake’s attention, she’s no pushover. She has long been on the lockout for cads who let on that “it’s the money bags they’re after, not the ‘Old Bag.'”

Has Teddy met his match?

Gilbert doesn’t let the film’s stage-thriller origins tie it down, taking us out of doors, down to the seaside, on road trips. The story skips along at a brisk pace, leaning us into the curves the way that Sunbeam takes corners on the B-roads of the day.

Robert Flemyng (“Funny Face”) plays the sneering family solicitor who isn’t shy about his suspicions. Veteran character player Robert Stainton (“The Ladykillers,” “Moby Dick”) plays a cynical old chum of Teddy’s. And Kay Walsh (“Oliver Twist,””Stage Fright”) plays a new neighbor who enters the picture.

But Bogarde is riveting as Teddy, a pitiless killer who lets us see the wheels turn and gives us a hint of the sick mind that works this way. The performance suggests that Green was tapping into that 1950s and ’60s “type,” the homicidal homosexual, in this character. Just a few years later she’d write the first mainstream British film on gay rights, “Victim.”

Green’s play gives us women as victims, ditzes, and characters with agency and cunning of their own, which makes “Cast a Dark Shadow” stand out for its era, setting up a sexy and sinister villain in a battle of wits with women he underestimates.

Sure, it’s old-fashioned and melodramatic. But “Cast a Dark Shadow” wastes no character, no scene and no screen time in its dash from the earliest plotting to the dastardly undoings, a thriller worthy of (lesser) Hitchcock but directed with plenty of panache by the filmmaker who gave us “You Only Live Twice,””Alfie” and “Educating Rita.”

Rating: Approved

Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Margaret Lockwood, Kay Walsh, Mona Washbourne, Robert Flemyng and Kathleen Harrison

Credits: Directed by Lewis Gilbert, scripted by John Cresswell, based on a play by Janet Green. A Cohen Media release on Tubi, Amazon etc.

Running time: 1:22

It would be hard to understate how intensely lovable “Scrambled” is.

Writer, director and star Leah McKendrick has made a scruffy, raunchy, rough-and-ready comedy about a Millennial whose biological clock has been sped up to the point where she puzzles over past loves and realizes she has quite a pile of regrets and a limited supply of eggs — her own — at 34.

McKendrick invites mockery for a generation that’s become a cultural punching bag. But she slips in reasons, explanations and the occasional legit or lame excuse for this particular demographic’s struggles at this particular time in America’s history.

And while “Scrambled” has sympathy for at least some of its Millennial characters, it’s as close to a cinematic “self-own” as that much-maligned generation has ever given us.

We encounter Nelly (McKendrick) at a wedding, not her own but somehow her natural environment. Jewelry-making (“Nellery” wearables), hard-partying ditz Nelly is that take-a-bullet for the bride bridesmaid that every young woman wants on her wedding day — at least in TV and the movies.

Bride/bestie Sheila (Ego Nwodim) insists Nelly do “a shot” for her. She’s having the mother of all “I’m not a WIFE”” panic attacks of wedding day jitters. Sheila wants to know if Nelly would be content to have sex with the her groom and only her groom “for the rest of your life?” Sheila demands coke, and not the “diet” kind.

All Nelly has is “molly,” which she shares. Yes, she’d totally “do” that groom forever and ever, amen. Marriage or no marriage, she reassures Sheila, “We’re gonna stay like this forever!” And when she hears that the reason Sheila’s tripping is that she’s secretly pregnant, she makes her spit out that damned pill.

But that the fact that Nelly’s living through a parade of baby showers that has more or less replaced the procession of weddings she’s been invited to as her peers reach “that age” and some version of maturity, as anyone and everyone is consoling her over the recent-enough break-up with the beau everyone thought was “The One,” Nelly has to take stock.

“Your thirties” are supposed to be “just your twenties with money.” No, she doesn’t have any. And yes, she’s not yet 40 but there’s this “smorgasbord of sausage” she envisions as her near future, “all love in this club” and whatnot. But another friend at the wedding wakes her up to how hard it was to conceive after 40.

Her Irish-American Dad (Clancy Brown) is more tactless than her Latina Mom (Laura Ceró) about “I want GRANDkids” and when is she going to pop them out? Her wealthier douche bro older brother (Andrew Santino) is still in his dating-children phase, so it’s on her.

How can she make this all work out?

“I don’t even KNOW if I want kids! I’ve seen ‘Euphoria!'”

She will beg that richer sibling for the money to grow, harvest and freeze some of her eggs. Of course he’s considers that a loan with the eggs as collateral.

And our libidinous redhead will trip through bar pick-ups and hook-ups with exes — we’ve already seen a careless, condom-losing encounter with a waiter at the wedding — as she gives “plan A,” a “real baby” made the “real” way one or five more tries as she’s taking the shots and cooking those un-“Scrambled” eggs.

McKendrick, a perky actress/writer turned writer-director, serves up a colorful but mostly nameless series of exes, “types” and would-be baby daddies labeled “The Prom King” who peaked in high school, the hippy “Burning Man,” “The Cult Leader,””Peter Pan,” “The Nice Guy” who unloads on her callous mistreatment and dumping, and an instant “Nope.”

“My probation officer is SUPER chill” is that last “type’s” best line.

All along the way, as we hear of the dreams she had and the delusions she clings to — donning her prom dress and “high school goggles” to troll for ex-classmates, getting her “Britney” on to forget the wasted, indulgent years she’s blown through — Nelly is forced to take stock and “see” herself and diminishing “thirst trap” status.

And through it all, McKendrick makes this hot-but-cooling-off-fast mess an object of ridicule and pity, easy to judge, but just as easy to empathize with.

As a filmmaker/storyteller, McKendrick gives off an Amy Schumer generation Jennifer Westfeldt/Nicole Holofcener energy — funny, topical and biting.

“Scrambled” is not getting as wide a release as this “Bridesmaids Lite” comedy deserves. But there’s an amusing “voice of her generation” vibe in this have-her “sausage” and eat it too farce, a movie about growing up and facing adulthood, at long last, and better late than never less those unscrambled eggs go cold.

Rating:  R for sexual content, nudity, language throughout and some drug use.

Cast: Leah McKendrick, Ego Nwodim, Mimi Kennedy, Andrew Santino, Laura Ceró and Clancy Brown.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Leah McKendrick. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:37

A tale of growing up on the mean streets of Chicago, a loving family at home and family that you make when you make a great friend, this Minhal Baig drama is the embodiment of an Indie Spirit Award nominee.

It’s a social justice character study with heart and warmth, a festival darling. And Sony Pictures Classics has it.