Movie Nation

This Aussie indie film is about a teen with Down Syndrome who doesn’t let social expectations or her brother’s concerns keep her from meeting her ambitions.

Hope the patrons of the Willie Jones Public Library appreciate “Poppy.”

Movie Nation, spreading cinema across the southeast, one movies one small public library at a time.

“Race” never figured in the comedies, thrillers and dramas of the great Austrian-American filmmaker Billy Wilder. You can wade through his entire 50 year career and wonder why you never see a Black face.

The rest of his industry in his adoptive home found places to at least recognize American diversity, even in subservient roles — waiters, porters, entertainers, etc. Not Wilder. “Double Indemnity,” “Ace in the Hole,” “Some Like It Hot,” his films can feel “erased” if you look at them through that lens.

And it’s not like he deserves “credit” when he finally made race and Black characters a part of his comic universe in “The Fortune Cookie.” A movie that came out years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it’s like he was half-heartedly jumping on the bandwagon just as it was finally leaving town.

The film is celebrated as the first teaming of the great comic duo Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, for finally tapping into Matthau’s comic grump persona and winning him an Academy Award. Lemmon and Matthau would go on to team up in nine films, Lemmon would direct his pal in one and act in Matthau’s son’s “The Grass Harp” with him.

But here’s what I distinctly remember about first watching “The Fortune Cookie” on TV as a child. A CBS Sports TV cameraman (Lemmon) gets bowled over on the sidelines of a Cleveland Browns game. His shyster lawyer brother-in-law, “Whiplash Willie” (Matthau) talks him into faking debilitating injuries and suing.

And despite his best efforts, the dogged insurance company investigator Purkey (Cliff Osmond) can’t unmask the fakery, despite staking-out and bugging the injured man’s apartment.

The cameraman, Harry Hinkle, has a conscience, and he sees what this scam is doing to the unknowing footballer (Ron Rich) who fears he has paralyzed the victim for life. The only thing that gets Harry up out of that chair is his outrage when Purkey baits him by calling his new friend a “coon” with a “Cadillac.” Harry decks the racist.

It seems such an obvious “the least he could do” scripted action now, 57 years after “The Fortune Cookie” came out. But it was startling enough to stand out and inform the way the movie sits in the memory, at least for some of us.

As for Wilder, “the least he could do” after making a sizable portion of America invisible for his entire career was to cast Rich, in what would become his biggest role, cast the boxer Archie Moore as running back/kick returner Luther “Boom Boom” Jackson’s dad, and give Boom Boom a story arc and agency, making him a compelling victim at the heart of this “harmless” comic scam.

Watching now, I’m touched by Rich’s sensitive and athletic turn — Boom Boom loses his love for the game and crawls into a bottle thanks to this accident. A guilt-stricken star athlete finds himself turned into Harry’s Black nurse and manservant, and Harry sees it, too, and starts to feel shame for it.

And then you take in the narrow scope of Rich’s career and remember just how difficult it was just to get even a day gig on film or TV in an era which we celebrate for letting Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Bill Cosby, James Earl Jones and Diahann Carroll break through.

I went into this re-viewing of “The Fortune Cookie” expecting to focus on The Making of Matthau, a mostly-dramatic actor who honked, bellowed and mugged his way into a persona that took over his career with this Oscar-winning turn.

Fast-talking “Whiplash Willie” has a dozen precedents to fling at the insurance company representing the Cleveland Browns, the NFL and Municipal Stadium. He gives everybody — wife, family, kids, nurses and Harry Hinkle the bum’s rush. He bulldozes them with his shtick, his certitude and his manic sales pitch.

“l don’t want my brother-in-law to be a nobody. I wanna see you in a fastback Mustang, Italian silk suits, a decent apartment, a go-go baby all the way!”

“Think of your mother. Think of your mother, Harry. Bronchitis every winter. She shouldn’t be in Cleveland. She should be in Florida, baking her chest!”

Lemmon’s twitchy, antic put-upon Everyman act got him through the ’50s (“Mister Roberts,” “Some Like It Hot,””The Apartment”). We see him aging into the Felix Unger of legend here, paired-up with the blowhard who’d become his perfect comic foil.

“Of course he’s upset. He’s a lawyer – he’s paid to be upset.”

Wilder and his longtime co-writer I.A.L. Diamond concocted a crooked caper that had roles for many a comic character actor, some of them (Sig Rumond as a “specialist” from “Vienna”) dating back to the Golden Age of Hollywood. William Christopher, billed as “Bill,” was years away from his role as the priest on TV’s “M*A*S*H,” when he played a young and insulted young internist here, and Howard McNear put down his “Andy Griffith Show” barber’s scissors to play another client of Whiplash Willie.

That gives the snarky, one-liner-laced script a hint of “screwball” about it.

They filmed this in black and white, which made mid-winter Cleveland even more “Cleveland,” and realistic. They scored something a lot harder to land for such “edgy” subject matter today, the full cooperation of the NFL. If you want to remember the glory that was Keith Jackson announcing a game in the booth, here he is in his salad days.

But beyond the monochromatic cinematography, there’s something faintly dispirited about it all, as if the movie — or at least the guy who made it — felt a little guilt about the “victimless crime” his movie is about, and a racist society’s victims he finally got around to acknowledging existed with this 1966 classic.

“The Fortune Cookie” still plays as funny. Not as funny as “One, Two, Three,” his grandest farce, or the more celebrated “Some Like It Hot.” Matthau makes it amusing. But there’s just a sliver of hope and the tiniest hint of “bittersweet” about it, something Wilder occasionally allowed into his screenplays.

The Old World filmmaker would basically slip into nostalgia after “The Fortune Cookie,” remaking “The Front Page,” setting a couple of his final films in Europe and becoming a Grand Old Man of the Cinema even before he hung it up. But just as in the beginning of his career, his latter years saw him never put another Black actor on screen again.

I wonder if Cameron Crowe, who idolized him and got to know him, ever asked him why that was?

Rating: “passed,” smoking, adult situations

Cast: Jack Lemmon Walter Matthau, Ron Rich, Judi West, Sig Rumond and Cliff Osmond.

Credits: Directed by Billy Wilder, scripted by I.A.L. Diamond and Billy Wilder. A United Artists release on Tubi, Youtube, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 2:05

“True Spirit” is a plucky feel-good tale of a teen girl’s quest to be the youngest to ever sail “Around Alone.” Directed and acted with a light touch, packed with bubbly pop music montages and finished off with a dollop of deep sea melodrama, what this “You sail like a girl” lacks in surprises it makes up in heart.

As any old salt would tell you, sailing solo around the world is the ultimate test of a seafarer. Australian Jessica Watson set her mind on doing it in her tweens and took her shot at being the youngest ever to solo circumnavigate in her teens.

She was inspired by Jesse Martin, who finished his “nonstop/unassisted” circumnavigation in 1999, in his late teens. Watson would do it even younger. Using the same world class bluewater yacht, a Sparkman & Stephens 34 footer, she’d set out in 2009 from her home port of Sydney, Australia, with the goal of making history.

Aylya Brown plays the very young Jessica, daughter of an unconventional Australian family, taught to sail young, a child with goals and her eye on one reluctant old salt (Cliff Curtis) who might be her coach, a veteran offshore racer with a bit of sailing PTSD about a race that went wrong.

He’s a fictional character based on Jessica’s real coach, Bruce Arms, but exaggerated for cinematic effect. Curtis is perfectly engaging in the part.

The teenaged Jessica is played by Teagan Croft of “Titans,” sort of the prototypical winsome Aussie blonde of film, TV, tennis and surfing competitions.

The teen Jessica never shook the more childish Jessica’s chip on her shoulder, that “No one thinks I’m big or strong enough to do anything.”

She’d show them. She’d show us. She rounded up sponsors, a boat, the requisite sailing experience to attempt this “world record” (there are rules) and a lot of controversy.

Think about how much you worry about your teen driving on her or his own at that age, the carelessness/recklessness every parent fears. Now imagine letting her tackle “the four capes” and the perils — gigantic waves, ship traffic, etc — of the Southern Ocean in a small sailboat far out of the reach of help.

There were doubters, child welfare workers and public officials in Australia who wanted to stop this excessive bit of free range parenting. And then there’s the snide TV reporter (Todd Lasance) who seems to revel in her every misstep.

Taking a nap while on an overnight on a trial run offshore in “Ella’s Pink Lady,” she collides with an offshore freighter, which becomes press conference news.

No matter. Jessica will not give up “the magic and allure of the sea.” Her mother (Oscar winner Anna Paquin, no stranger to this Girl Powered Genre herself, thanks to “Fly Away Home”) tells her to “celebrate the moments, and don’t forget to dance in the rain.”

Her coach, who will be in sat-phone contact with her daily, tells her to “sing” to relieve the tedium. “We’re sailors. It’s what we’re supposed to do.”

She’ll record video along the way, her big sister will run her blog and she’ll be an inspiration to girls everywhere…if she makes it.

There are cute bits — the “Toast to King Neptune” ritual of crossing the equator (a requirement of any “around alone” attempt) — David Bowie sing-alongs (her coach lives aboard his yacht, “Bowie).

And there are hints of life passing by back on shore while Jessica is fighting storms, being becalmed in the doldrums, communing with whales and patching the boat.

Solo circumnavigations have been a thing since Joshua Slocum set out from Boston in 1895. By the 1960s, it had become a sailing endurance race, and the “Five Oceans” race is held every four years since the 1980s.

But as we learn every so often, it can end in tragedy. There have been films about Donald Crowhurst’s ill-fated attempt and about the first “youth” circumnavigation, Robin Lee Graham’s five year adventure (ports of call, romance, pet cats), “The Dove.” It’s even been the narrative hook for a refugee drama.

“True Spirit” doesn’t add anything fresh to the genre, just fresh faces and Aussie pluck, with even the tunes — girl-powered “Brighter Than the Sun” (an anachronism, as it came out two years after “Pink” set sail) and the Bowie choice– pretty much on the nose.

But that’s what “feel good” movies often are, comfort food, with the occasional surprise, a “darkest hour,” a little pathos and a lot of heart.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Teagan Croft, Cliff Curtis, Josh Lawson, Aylya Brown and Anna Paquin

Credits: Directed by Sarah Spillane, scripted by Cathy Randall, Rebecca Banner and Sarah Spillane, based on the memoir by Jessica Watson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:49

Stumbling across this lightly-amusing comedy on Roku, there are certain “truths” that are, as Mr. Jefferson would have noted, “self-evident.”

“We Are Not Alone” plays like a sitcom pilot, which it almost certainly is, a 90 minute set up for a series about life under alien occupation.

And the screenwriters must have watched Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and it’s dorkier descendent, “Red Dwarf,” and adored them. It looks and plays like a tonier, modern production values ’80s Britcom, a fish-out-of-water tale of brusque, occupying aliens and the unlikely human they use as their intermediary in occupying Brexittania, the Jolly Olde land of wordplay, interspecies sex jokes and the like.

But the fascinating subtext to all this is colonialism. Yes, those master colonizers, cultural-appropriators and inventors and popularizers or the world’s greatest racial slurs see what it’s like to be occupied by a “superior” race, one that isn’t really so superior after all.

It begins almost precisely like “Hitchhiker’s Guide,” in the Seven Bells pub in tiny Clitheroe, where assistant local planner Stewart (Declan Baxter) is resisting efforts by his more ambitious mate (Dane Baptiste) to apply for a promotion.

“Stew” is the classic “Keep my head down” functionary, timid and content to put in his hours and get by. All that changes when they stroll outside, missing TV reports about what’s just starting, and mate Jordan is disintegrated when a spherical probe plunges to Earth.

“We come in peace,” it beams in friendly lit-up letters across its surface.

Aliens are invading — hovering airships, patrolling drones, soldiers in “Battlestar Galactica” armor, the works.

Weeks later, the shock is still with one and all, the “We are Not Alone” headlines still lingering on the last newspaper’s front page.

The Internet is gone. You can’t drive your Mini Cooper because attempting to start it produces a shock. And the aliens, whom the locals have taken to calling “Blue Man Group” or “Smurfs,” have simply taken over.

“Under New Management.”

Showing up for work, Stew is appalled that the officious, somewhat bumbling blue-faced/blue-wigged Tories have decided to run Occupied Britain from Clitheroe, which, let’s face it, is A), not “LON-DON,” B) is a nevertheless a real British town and C), one with a funny name calling to mind a sex organ.

“You can’t run the country from here!” Stewart protests. But he’d best keep his head about him. Everybody over him on the local, national and global totem pole is “unavailable,” having been shoved out of an airlock from the orbiting death disc circling the planet.

The aliens adapt the accent and language of whatever “sector” they’re governing — China, Russia, US. Here, they’re “Yes, Minister” fussbudget-o-crats fighting turf wars with the Russian occupiers, the Chinese occupation zone, the Americas, etc. And they have a lot of questions.

“Is there anything else we should know?”

“You INVADED our planet!” “ARRIVED. And we were ‘invited.”

That’s the nature of a lot of the conversations, the “new management” trying to figure out what “money” is and how to run an “economy,” Stewart tamping down his outrage as he’s given a “consultant” job — one where termination might mean “termination.” He’s also given a big house and a lot of “colored paper” (money) for selling out his species. But every now and then, he can’t help but blurt out his true feelings.

“You blew up NEW ZEALAND!”

“Only the edges.”

Still, the new overlords aren’t rocket scientists or even very observant sociologists. They have advanced weapons, which can’t fully charge on the “grid” of their new colony. The sector premiere (Vicki Pepperdine), her even-more-authoritarian subcommander (Mike Wozniak) and bumbling third in command (Joe Thomas) may have all the tech, holograms, and may take on British-ish names — “Traytor,” “GOR-DAN” and “Greggs” — but they’re going to need help getting local compliance.

Which is where Stew comes in.

But when the fetching local barmaid (Georgia May Foote) gives him the eye for the first time ever, he should smell a rat. The AAA, “Anti-Alien Alliance,” needs his help to “steal the plans” and set their “Independence Day/Star Wars, Episode IV” blow-up-the-spaceship-and-liberate-themselves plan in motion.

It’s funny to think about how late Hollywood was in figuring out Walter Matthau was a natural comic actor. For the first couple of decades of his film and TV career, nobody thought to let him go for a laugh.

His most famous early roles were as a club-owning gangster in Elvis’s “King Creole,” the cynical talent agent in “A Face in the Crowd,” mixed with assorted villains and straight dramatic characters on TV.

Even in Andy Griffith’s Naval service comedy “Onionhead,” Matthau wasn’t there to land laughs.

But watch him in the opening scene, and the flirtation with the librarian bit (Carol Grace, the new Mrs. Matthau, played her) in the first and last film the Oscar-winning actor ever directed, “Gangster Story.”

As a two-fisted bank robber who overpowered his guards and escaped on the way to prison, he’s laid back and downright playful as he negotiates ground rules at the seedy, underworld-friendly greater-Anaheim hotel he’s ducked into.

Check out the way he “gets back to work,” casing a bank, pretending to want to rent an office in their building when all he’s doing is waiting to hear the bank president (David Leonard) confess, “Banks rely on vaults, not alarm systems.”

In his later films, after his Oscar for “The Fortune Cookie” and the career-making success of “The Odd Couple,” you saw this wry, whimsical air affected in every Matthau performance, even in the bank robber pic “Charlie Varrick,” the gritty “The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three” and the like.

He’s a heavy in “Charade,” but he’s still giving the impatient, comic business to Audrey Hepburn in every scene.

“Gangster Story” is a bare bones crime noir tale with bank robberies, a visit to the harness racing track, a car chase and a “let’s lay low with the cute librarian” bit that we know won’t let our anti-hero, Jack Martin, escape his past.

He’s ruthless, never hesitating to conk this car owner or that bank president on the head when it suits his purposes. People die in robberies he masterminds.

But watch Jack don a fake name in calling the cops telling them of a movie shoot’s “bank hold up” scene that he needs a couple of uniforms to monitor, maybe hold back the crowds. The bank president, tricked into being a vault-opening accomplice, says the only thing anybody in his position could say as that’s going on.

“You’ll never get away with this!” It’s such a cliche he can’t resist saying it twice.

Our robber has a background, which he drops into conversation with the librarian. He was on the beach at D-Day. A visit to Huntington Beach makes him remember that. This is after he’s ducked into her library and started putting the moves on the blonde with the glasses.

“Uh, do you have any BOOKS here?”

Jack’s got to worry about the cops, and about the mobster (Bruce MacFarlane) whose “territory” he practicing his trade in.

This film is a seedy no-frills affair and looks it, a $75k non-union shoot with all its exteriors in the bright, just-after-sunup light that washes the black and white out. Characters are “types,” plot elements are cliches and scenes are perfunctory.

But there’s that hint of playfulness, here and there, that prefigures the “Hopscotch” to come. The man is naturally funny.

In chat show interviews over the years, he used to play up his comic “background” in the Yiddish theater. Big deal. He sold tickets there as a kid. But he obviously had an ear and a memory for jokes.

One of the few times I interviewed him was tied to the release of “I.Q.,” in which he played the tallest Albert Einstein on record. As their lives overlapped quite a bit, I asked him what he would have said to the great physicist if they’d ever met.

“He LOVED the Yiddish theater,” Matthau gushed, without a moment’s hesitation. “I’d have told him a Yiddish joke.” He proceeded to do the whole thing in Yiddish with snappy, well-oiled timing because he’d told this one MANY times. And then he translated it, hilariously.

Whatever his career and life came to after “Gangster Story,” you can see hints of what he would be — grumpy, gruff, that honk of a voice applied to faux outrage and skewering one-liners, save for his amusing pick-up lines meant only for the actress and ex-wife of playwright William Saroyan, the woman who would become the second and last Mrs. Matthau.

“Gangster Story” thus becomes the most generic of genre pictures that still has something to dig into, thanks to all it foretold and everything Matthau was just starting to try out as part of his comic persona.

Rating: unrated, lots of violence

Cast: Walter Matthau, Carol Grace, Bruce MacFarlane and Gary Walberg.

Credits: Directed by Walter Matthau, scripted by Paul Purcell. An RCIP release on Youtube, Tubi, etc.

Running time: 1:07

“Millennium Bugs” is a murky look back at Y2K Eve, a comedy that struggles to find laughs in end-of-the-90s fashions, slang and panic over what the world might look like when computers glitch as the year 2000 begins.

It’s a mirth-starved “romp” about two friends, hearing “The End is Nigh” and not taking that nonsense literally even as each recognizes they’re at a crossroads, and their lives are due a reset, starting Jan. 1, 2000.

Think “American Graffiti” and “High Fidelity” in terms of themes and genre, without the wit, budget, or cast to pull that off.

Kelly (Katy Erin) is a wild child winding down a year-long-bender, finally at the end of the estate her dead-before-their-time parents left her. She is drunk, irresponsible, a loose cannon whom we meet as the cops pick her up at home, someone who sees rules as for “other” people.”

Michael Lovato plays Miguel, her more-focused friend, a clerk at Vulcan Video who tolerates Kelly’s impositions, ignoring of rules and the fact that she’s been known to stash a joint in DVDs nobody ever rents at the shop.

Miguel is an aspiring stand-up who desperately wants admission to an LA improv troupe. His more traditional Mexican-American parents see grad school in his future.

So here they are, broken Kelly and despairing, just-dumped Miguel, counting down the days, hitting the stand-up clubs and bars of “Duke City” (filmed in New Mexico), night-crawling because stopping and thinking means they’d have to make a decision about where to go and what to do to give their aimless lives direction and purpose.

The script appears to have been researched by binge-watching “Friends,” with the dialogue littered with movie-and TV series title punchlines.

Kelly’s knocking back the drinks, so it’s “Slow DOWN, ‘Leaving Las Vegas.'”

Miguel’s about to go on stage, so knock’em dead, “King of Comedy.”

The had-his-shot headliner at the club is a local who actually landed an HBO series canceled after two episodes. He blames being on opposite “Monday Night Football,” but his name — Jim Dawson — sets up the put-down to come.

“Yeah, that’s what it was, ‘Dawson’s Creek.'”

To be honest, that’s not an inaccurate mimicry of the comedy of the late ’90s, but to quote Chandler Bing channeling Jackie Gleason, “Har-de-har-har.” Not funny.

The “Graffiti-ish” hijinks include scheming to steal Kelly’s Jeep Cherokee from an impound lot, confronting the joke-thief comic, and getting loaded.

One sentimental moments lands, the jokes pretty much never do. The performances are kind of flat, although Erin fights that with over-the-top rants and leaning into that Every Young Brunette Actress These Days Mary Elizabeth Winstead bobbed haircut.

“Millennium Bugs” has a clever hook to hang a comedy on — Y2K — complete with the soundtrack of “bug” TV coverage, “End is nigh” preachers and ’90s video game sound effects. But this script is too pale and wan to attract bigger-name talent and studio backing bucks, and there’s just no de-bugging that will change that.

Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol and drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Katy Erin and Michael Lovato

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alejandro Montoya Marín. An Indican release.

Running time: 1:30

I’ve developed a passion for Spanish police procedurals. Or rather, Netflix’s “What you should try next” algorithm has. And I’m OK with that, as it’s a genre the Spanish cinema has a good handle on, and these “Around the World with Netflix” mystery-thrillers have the novelty of striking, under-filmed Spanish settings as a bonus.

“Infiesto” is a solid entry in the genre, a serial kidnapper tale set against the backdrop of the beginning of lockdown as the COVID pandemic broke out. One striking characteristic of the film is how its two leading characters, cops on the case, are damned reluctant to give in to early 2020 masking protocols.

A boss hands them masks, says “Use these,” which they won’t put on in most situations. One cop has a spouse who catches the virus and is hauled off to the hospital. She still won’t mask up, or obey the physician’s orders that she self-isolate.

It calls attention to itself, and yet writer-director Patxi Amezcua doesn’t do anything with this bit of supposed foreshadowing. That’s a failing of his film, a ticking clock thriller of limited urgency set over 10 days at the beginning of Spain’s battle against the pandemic.

“Infiesto” takes its title from the Asturian town near where federal cops Garcia (Isak Férriz of Netflix’s “Feria: The Darkest Light” series) and Castro (Iria Del Río of “Visitor”) are summoned. A kidnapping victim has escaped her captor and showsnup in a town square, her rope bindings still dangling from her emaciated wrists.

With a pandemic raging and no one yet-knowing how to stop it or save victims of it, they find themselves elbow-deep in a crime that leads to other crimes, suspects who lead to other suspects and the fear that there may be living victims still in their clutches.

It “feels like the end of the world,” the inspectors say to each other, and others suggest this as well. But the first real suspect they confront adds a chilling proviso to that worry.

“This is just the beginning (in Spanish or dubbed into English)!”

Amezcua (“Gun City”) does a decent job of doling out his story’s clues and hiding its general direction just long enough to make a difference. His script has the usual personal issues added to our police inspectors’ burdens, all of them with a pandemic twist — an elderly relative in isolation, separation from children of divorce, a sick spouse.

You can almost predict just when one of our law enforcement officers will snap and turn to extra-legal means in a rush to save possible surviving kidnapping victims and catch those responsible.

The villains are colorful but generic in their MO and motivation. The confrontations are tense and the shootouts handled with harrowing professionalism by our well-matched leads.

And the novel setting of it all, dreary, wintry northwestern Spain, with abandoned factories and mines and rain-drenched gone-to-seed farms, gives it a timeworn yet unfamiliar look, just the sort of place where it’s easy to wonder if the world’s about to end.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Isak Férriz, Iria Del Río

Credits: Scripted and directed by Patxi Amezcua. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

As you can tell from her photograph, actress Nell Barlow exudes Big Mary Elizabeth Winstead energy in “Sweetheart,” a light British rom-com about coming of age when you’re gay, confused and in your teens.

It’s a pity her character April, or “AJ” as she’s now billing herself, can’t see that. That’d be a great confidence booster for someone at her age, when self-loathing is our default setting.

AJ is the caustic, hyper-critical narrator of her summer vacation/summer romance story, a reluctant hostage to her mother’s “caravan resort” (RV trailer rentals) family holiday somewhere near Bridport, Dorset, another piece of Britain’s White Cliffs coast.

That not-quite-incessant narration is a rare misstep in writer-director Marley Morrison’s sympathetic comedy about being at that “experimenting” age in life, something parents have even more trouble with than their confused, fumbling-about-in-the-dark kids. AJ is at her most quotable when speaking aloud, often arguing with her Mum (Jo Hartley).

“Why can’t I just do what I want?”

“Because it CHANGES every five minutes, April!”

To her credit, her mother is supportive of her middle daughter, even if she’s seeing a long list of passions, phobias and dreams that all look like “phases” to her. April abruptly decides to become “AJ.” April’s chopped off her own hair, which better suits her shapeless, fashion-free wardrobe. April wants to quit school, not go back for her senior year (she’s 17).

“AJ” plans to go to Indonesia to volunteer to “knit jumpers for elephants,” who are “freezing to death” due to climate change.

The dear. It’s no wonder so many parents are dismayed when we hit our middle to late teens. We’re all head cases.

But this trip to the caravan resort will be her chance to “switch off” her phone and her head for a few days. The family has long come here, although this year, Dad’s “not invited,” and maybe never will be again.

What Mum really needs is April’s baby-sitting help with her eight-year old sister, Dayna. What Mum really wants is bonding time with her oldest, 29 year-old Lucy (Sophia Di Martino), who is very pregnant, with laid-back boyfriend Steve (Samuel Anderson) in tow.

What AJ needs, she quickly figures out, is a girlfriend. But even if lifeguard Isla (Ella-Rae Smith) is a sexy combination of Scary Spice and Sporty Spice, even if she’s quick with a friendly smile, “Girls like her like boys.” Or so AJ believes.

There are dramatic moments, stretches of action and snatches of pithy dialogue that suggest there’s a half-decent thriller inside the ungainly, frustrating mess of “Among the Beasts.” But it goes wrong, right from the start, in an unnecessary, uninteresting story set-up that eats up a whopping 40 minutes of screen time.

It’s a movie about child trafficking, about an ex-Marine and a mob daughter tracking down the traffickers, off the books and beyond the reach of the cops.

But we don’t even meet the mob daughter — played by Libe Barer — until we hit the film’s halfway mark, which tells you all you need to know about the need for editing in the SCREENWRITING stage, and how NOT to give your thriller even the most remote sense of urgency.

We’re shown a little girl and a man (Tory Kittles) at the veterinarian’s office. Their relationship isn’t clear, but there’s an asthmatic pug involved, so there’s that.

It turns out the 40something guy, who goes by “Paul,” but whom a lot of people call “LT,” helps run a mixed martial arts gym. It turns out he’s pretty tough, very handy with his fists. And he’s coldblooded in his threats.

“You’re making a mistake,” he growls to one fool who tests him. “You. All by yourself.”

Another mug hears “Go sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done,” and does exactly that.

When the little girl he was with at the veterinary clinic is snatched, the viewer must figure out the relationship Paul had with her, her family and the like. The clues to that are stupidly slow in coming.

“LT” stands for “Lieutenant.” Lt. Paul is connected to little Kayla’s family because he served with her late father. Her mother’s a mess, so Kayla’s teenaged sister is the one who slaps him and gives him his orders when someone abducts Kayla.

“I’m just asking you to do what you always do. Bring. Her. Home.”

LT asks around, calls in cop favors and tosses the bar facing the sidewalk where the 12 year-old was abducted. No dice. A year later, he’s crawled into a bottle and up his own nose out of guilt.

That’s when the mob daughter Lola shows up with a story of a missing cousin, and a grudging “No cops, for obvious reasons” partnership forms.

Sure, you can give your movie a rapacious Viking prologue to a modern day werewolf story.

But it’s not until the new-to-town cop meets the grizzled, loony one-armed werewolf hunter whose name is Lars and not Quint, and the young academic wolf expert/veterinarian is consulted, and the locals attempt their own hunt — which goes badly — and the Norske blonde mayor tries to calm fears that this “Jaws” with fur has a shot at coming off.

“Viking Wolf” is a Norwegian werewolf movie that traffics in the tropes of the genre, from that first bloody attack to the “infection” that no rational person believes in, but which strikes a pretty teen who’s been bitten.

But it’s the amusingly obvious “Jaws” references that tickled me. The rest of the movie’s a muddle, with this back story under-explained and that empathetic thread not satisfyingly unraveled. But the moment Mr. “I’ve been hunting this my entire life” shows up, the picture becomes promising.

Thale (Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne) is the new teen in town, pretty enough to find herself invited to hang with the gang down at “The Bay,” a fjord-side beach where teenagers party. She’s arrived, mid-schoolyear, with gossip about her past. “Drugs” and stuff from Oslo, her classmates think. “I killed a man,” Thale says.

Wait, what? Perhaps her father, as we’ve seen she’s got a stepdad? I don’t think that’s ever explained, certainly not before some beast bursts out of the woods, bites Thale and then yanks the mayor’s screaming daughter into the inky black night.

Finding her body only gives the sheriff’s department more trouble. If it was a wolf, there are “local concerns” to be dealt with, the sheriff tells his newest deputy, the Swede Liv (Liv Mjönes), who happens to be Thale’s mom.

We’re allowed to wonder if the locals know all about what’s going on, some of them anyway. But that’s not developed any more than Thale’s “I killed a man.”

As she recovers, bullied by classmates who think she could have “saved” the dead girl, Thale notices her hearing getting sharp and her hallucinations turning “Norwegian Werewolf in Nybo.”

Mom is visited by the one-armed Lars, whom she dismisses, but not before he’s given her a silver bullet. They call in wolf expert William (Arthur Hakalahti), who has to abandon his “Wolves don’t kill people” education to help battle the beast.

There’s a bond that’s introduced between Thale and her deaf little sister, but that’s not built up into anything that generates pathos when it’s called for. The family dynamic is frayed, as mom has remarried and Thale is acting out, either through resentment or guilt.

The “Jaws” plot might have been the most entertaining direction this could have taken. You’d lose the teen “Twilight” hook, but enjoy a hunt with a cop, a wizened hunter and a callow, scientific method “expert,” battling the beast and bantering old werewolf tales rather than recounting the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis. “Viking Wolf” commits to some of that, but not nearly enough.

Write this one off as an interesting attempt to find a salty-fresh angle to the werewolf genre, but a “‘Jaws’ with Claws” that ends up being mostly toothless.

TV-MA, violence

Cast: Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne, Liv Mjönes, Arthur Hakalahti and Ståle Bjørnhaug

Credits: Directed by Stig Svensen, scripted by Espen Aukan and Stig Svendsen. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38