Movie Nation

The screen special effect named Kevin Hart takes a back seat to gadgets, gear and CGI exploits in “Lift,” one hundred or so minutes in which the funnyman tries to remake himself as a cool, rough-and-tumble master thief/romantic lead.

Sure. Worth a try.

Hart produced this high-end heist picture, surrounds himself with a star-studded international cast including Gugu Mbatha-Raw as romantic interest, Jean Reno and Burn Gorman as villains, Vincent D’Onofrio as a colorful colleague and Sam Worthington as a troublesome Interpol cop.

“Set it Off/Straight Outta Compton/Fate of the Furious” director F. Gary Gray was brought in make the planes run on time in this tale of an airborne gold heist.

On paper, this story of art thieves strong-armed into stealing gold from a murderous financier of terrorists might have played. But right from the start, an over-explained art theft that includes kidnapping an identity-hiding NFT artist (Jacob Batalon, always funnier than this) to boost the resale value of the theft, “Lift” fails to get off the ground.

An insistent score by Dominic Kewis and Guillaume Roussel keeps reminding us we should be at the edge of our seat. We’re not. Hart’s presence suggests we’ll at least get some one-liners. But nah, he’s too cool, trying to “stretch” his persona with this lame, clunky caper comedy without laughs and heist thriller short on thrills.

Hart is Cyrus, mastermind who leads a crew that includes pilot Camilla (Úrsula Corberó), master of disguise Denton (D’Onofrio, kind of funny), hacker Mi-Sun (Yun Jee Kim), safecracker Magnus (Billy Magnussen) and I-forget-his-magic-skillset-Luke (Viveik Kalra).

Their mark is a financier/arms dealer/terrorist-backer (Reno), someone Mister Interpol (Worthington) orders Interpol Art Crimes unit cop Abby (Mbatha-Raw of “Belle” and TV’s “Loki”) to make happen.

Hart brings the star-power and Netflix deal that gets this movie made. But all he brings to the picture are a couple of sharp suits, one mid-air fight scene, and a whole lot of “explaining” what just happened/what “really” happened.

You’d think a guy with his ego would demand better dialogue than simple exposition, or lines meant to suggest “history” with “Remember Corsica?” “You remember Paris?” “Remember Venice?”

Yeah, the last one we remember, because “Venice” and an art auction robbery is what opens the picture.

There’s barely a laugh or interesting, much less exciting moment in this. Hart & Co. had little idea that it’s rarely the “heist” that makes a heist picture. It’s the colorful characters (mostly colorless here), the zippy twists and zingy one-liners.

F. Gary Gray should have pointed that out. He’s made a passable “Italian Job” remake, an audience-appreciating “Fast/Furious” film, and a lot of dogs — “A Man Apart,” “Law Abiding Citizen,” “Be Cool,” “Men in Black International.” He, at least, knows the difference between a promising script and one that isn’t remotely on target.

Rating: PG-13, violence, some profanity

Cast: Kevin Hart, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Jean Reno, Sam Worthington, Ursula Corbero, Jacob Batalon, Burn Gormen and Vincent D’Onofrio.

Credits: Directed by F. Gary Gray, scripted by Jeremy Donner and Daniel Kunka. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

There may be an alternate reality where “Big Bang Theory” and “Flight Attendant” veteran Kaley Cuoco could pull off the umpteenth professional assassin one and all agree is “the best” in an action comedy.

But it certainly won’t be one written by the screenwriter of the AI Kate Mara thriller nobody saw, “Morgan” and the director of TV’s “Reacher.”

Whatever you think about the perfunctory action beats — lame car chase, punchup at a subway stop, shootout in a Bavarian pine forest — “charmless” doesn’t really do justice to the corpse “Role Play” turns out to be.

Cuoco is Emma, another assassin-for-hire married to an unsuspecting spouse (David Oyelowo), with two unsuspecting kids. She takes her assignments from the mostly-unseen “Raj” (Rudi Dharmalingam), tells the fam she’s off to “Nebraska” or “St. Louis” for consulting work for “the regional office” or “the home office.”

And nobody asks, no one is the wiser.

But she’s mainly working these days, Raj insists, to pay the bills that keep this killer on “the dark net’s most-wanted list” hidden from Sovereign, an entity that wants her, or wants her dead.

But forgetting their wedding anniversary puts her in a bind. That’s how the murderous professional role player winds up in a swank NYC hotel bar in a little black dress, pretending to be in “finance,” waiting on her eager-to-role-play husband under a different name, but waylaid by a dapper, insistent and pushy older gent (Bill Nighy) who has plainly “made” her.

The deadly game’s afoot, with cops visiting her husband and an old foe (Connie Nielsen) filling the unsuspecting boob on who his wife really is.

The scenes with Nighy have something like a spark about them, banter as professional parry and thrust between vodka martinis and something one could never imagine Bill Nighy ordering in any guise, including that of rival killer “Bob” — “shots.”

“You see that Panamanian diplomant they pulled out of the East River last night?”

Maybe. Maybe not.

“You know the drill, Bob.”

That’s the burden “Role Play” never sheds. We know the drill. Every move, every twist, every quest, every moment of filler pointing us to a finale we see coming an hour off.

Cuoco only plays to her strengths in the Nighy scenes. Oyelowo can handle comedy, as he basically steals “The Book of Clarence.” But he has nothing funny or interesting to play, here.

Nielsen? Whatever. That goes for every cardboard character and every stale twist leading up to her appearance.

Rating: R, graphic violence, sexual situations, alcohol, profanity

Cast: Kaley Cuoco, David Oyelowo, Bill Nighy, Rudi Dharmalingam and Connie Nielsen.

Credits: Directed by Thomas Vincent, scripted by An MGM/Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:41

Abe Golfarb makes a reasonably convincing talk-show host confronted by a listener who can predict the beginning events of “End Times” in “First Time Caller,” a deathly-dull thriller severely limited by a lack of visual variety.

Goldfarb, as acerbic chat show host Brett Ziff, smarts-off and insults one and all on his streaming call-in show, “Brett Free…in your heads.” He zings advice to lovelorn Incels and their obsession with “quality women,” ridicules assorted conspiracy nuts and cultists, riffs on Anti-Semitism and punctures pronouns up and down the alphabet.

“Show me someone who’s still ‘non-binary at 50,” he challenges one and all, labeling that a “dorm room fad.”

Insult him back, stick up for an unnamed pop singer in the Taylor Swift mold and “You’re DUN-zo.” Cut-off.

All of which goes out the door when he takes the call from “Leo,” a guy who sounds like he’s “calling from the john,” and not because there’s an echoey quality to Leo’s inane fanboy musings.

Leo occasionally makes a noise like an old man seized up by too-much-cheese. The catch to this constipation is when Leo seizes up, tsunamis happen. And earthquakes. He’s in touch with the menopausal spasms of Planet Earth. He’s predicting the future.

That premise is moderately interesting. We just have to get past how long Brett would have given Leo (voiced by Brian Silliman) to get to some freaking point or other (any talk show host in America would have dumped out of the call within a minute) and find more entertainment value in an hour of visuals of Goldfarb complaining, questioning and grimacing at what he’s hearing, and what he’s confirming by picking up live-streams that go black or video of disasters he can find on the internet.

The film’s modestly-budgeted but not incompetently-made. Some of the talk-show patter is polished.

But the reason your average talk show host is leery of a “First Time Caller” is the risk that they’ll be as unfocused, digression-prone and vocally uninteresting as Leo the Sh–h–se Seer.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Abe Goldfarb, the voice of Brian Silliman.

Credits: Directed by J.D. Brynne and Abe Goldfarb, scripted by Mac Rogers. A Buffalo 8 release.

Running time: 1:15

A lot of living, loving, old grudges and new insights on life are worked out in a day of labor “Under the Fig Trees” of Tunisia, that country’s warm and universally human pick for submission as a Best International Feature Oscar contender.

Erige Sehiri’s compact and sweet story shows us life as it is lived among day laborers — young and old — in a beautiful, Islamic, under-filmed countryside. There’s a winsome tint to its depiction of flirtation and tentative courtship, and a hint of labor and sexual exploitation in its bittersweet undertones.

Fedi Ben Achour is “The Boss,” the gruff young hustler filling two battered Izuzu pickups with women and men — 16-to-60something — to harvest his rented fig orchards. He watches how the big, plump figs are plucked and notes who takes the most care in not breaking the fragile branches as they do.

“Breaking a branch is like breaking your arm,” the older women teach the youngest and newest, Melek (Feten Fdhili) in Arabic (with English subtitles) on her first day.

But Melek is distracted. Her first childhood crush, Aboud (Abdelhak Mrabti) is in today’s workforce, stuffed into a pickup with her. He left years ago, and she scolds him behind a coy, wide-eyed smile about not writing, not reaching out. He makes her heart skip a beat, she openly gushes to a friend.

Her sister Fide (Fide Fdhili) misses this, because she’s the privileged beauty, less conservative and open-minded enough to sit in the cab with the boss, her latest beau.

Sana (Ameni Fdhili) is more Muslim modest in her attire, and sees the burly Firas (Firas Amri) as her love connection. She packs him a lunch each day and figures he’s her future, somebody she can “change” the way Fide wouldn’t mind changing the boorish boss, Saber.

“If he loves me, he’ll listen to me,” Fide reasons.

But it’s the 21st century. The younger pickers have cell phones, Facebook and Instagram accounts, and the alleged freedom to play the field, even out in the Islamic boondocks. And even without cell phone distractions, Fide would turn heads.

Seheri’s sublime second feature (“Railway Men” was the first) doesn’t waste a moment of screen time, setting the couples and the potential conflicts up, pairing young women up with young men (who carefully climb the trees for the higher figs) for work and circumspect, modest discussions about how fig picking and packing is done, how “close-minded” the most religious among them are and how “bogus” “love” is.

Sehiri’s spare marvel of a drama lets us get a glimpse of each’s hardships and bigger concerns — an inheritance that one is being cheated out of, labor that they’re not being paid for, ways to “steal” some of their fruit from the bullying boss. Over lunch, some pray, some nap, some smoke or vape, some play on their phones and others gossip, eat and flirt their way towards what they hope is a secure coupling and marriage.

Good films often make it a point to remind us how the human race is basically the same, everywhere you find it, every shade you find it in, every language you hear coming out of it. That’s a particularly important message to get out with movies from the Arab world.

Sehiri’s Oscar-nomination-worthy film reminds us that at the end of the day, we all labor and stumble into and out of love “Under the Fig Trees.”

Rating: unrated, light violence

Cast: Fide Fdhili, Ameni Fdhili, Feten Fdhili, Abdelhak Mrabti, Gaith Mendassi, Firas Amri and Fedi Ben Achour

Credits: Directed by Erige Sehiri, scripted by Erige Sehiri, Ghalya Lacroix and Peggy Hamann. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:33

“Christian values” vs. “Christian Power.”

Dan Partland directed this alarming and provocative doc, an Oscilloscope Laboratories Feb. 16. release.

This Polish entry for Best International Feature Oscar contention is from the creators of the animated classic “Loving Vincent.”

The filmmakers are going to some pains in not allowing this filmed/then-animated movie to be described as “rotoscoped,” as they employed 100 oil painters, Photoshop, and CGI in creating some critters to go along with the characters.

But it looks like Rotoscope 2.0, lush and gorgeous, real next-level animation in this most painterly of styles.

This adaptation of a novel by Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont, this adaptation has a turgid, melodramatic feel — a love triangle, a period piece, etc.

Sony Pictures Classics and we’ll know more about its release schedule when they learn if it merits an Oscar nomination.

George Lucas once said “If you can tune into the fantasy life of an 11-year-old girl, you can make a fortune in this business.”

Greta Gerwig did that, and tapped into the inner child of women and girls as future feminists with last summer’s “Barbie.” Now Tiny Fey & Co. have slapped Hollywood’s patriarchal movie mindset again with a musical “Mean Girls” remake that is connecting with that estrogen-charged audience.

A fun, zippy and tuneful revisiting of all things “fetch” about North Shore High, with no real “stars” to drive demand and a HARD PG-13 rating opened big enough Thursday night and quite healthily Friday to point to a $29 million opening weekend, $33 when you add in Martin Luther King Day Monday.

By comparsion, “The Color Purple,” the Christmas Day-released musical remake, took over a week to earn that much.

That, per Deadline.com, allows these “Girls” to dethrone “Wonka,” this Christmas holidays’ biggest hit.

Jason Statham’s best B-movie in years has a couple of A-list co-stars, a righteous story about wiping out online scammers and a ton of paying customers to see him smoke out the bad guys and kick-ass. “The Beekeeper” is rolling up $20 million.

“Wonka,” the other holiday musical, is still raking it in with $9 million this weekend, $12 million by midnight Monday.

“Anyone But You” continues to have the rom-com market all to itself, and will clear another $7 over three days, over $9 over four.

I’d say the male audience for that picture overlaps a bit with the “Mean Girls” one, at least in a Russ Meyers’ appeal sense.

The Biblical parable/satire “The Book of Clarence” isn’t finding an audience. The best new film in theaters this weekend is managing a mere $3 million, per Deadline. Perhaps the after-church crowd Sunday will boost its take.

Here’s the three day weekend take as of Sunday noon from @BoxOfficePro.

A chef faces a diner who’d like to order…off the menu.

Looks like this one starts with the cheese plate, and serves another and another.

“Alice and the Vampire Queen” streams, or bleeds out, Feb. 13.

Power is an aspiring video journalist, Jacob Tremblay is the story she stumbles among that she might love to regret, and Ross is the journalist teaching her student to swing for the fences.

“Cold Copy” was a film festival darling that Vertical got its hands on. Limited release, quick transition to VOD/streaming.

You get your hands on a pre-tween ballerina who comes from money, you figure “What can go wrong?”

Giancarlo Esposito, Kathryn Newton and Dan Stevens are among the familiar faces in this horror comedy about who is “trapped in here” with whom.

At least we’re all in agreement about how terrifying none year-old girls can be.

April 19.