Movie Nation

What a maddening, convoluted and bizarrely complex comic thriller “I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me” is.

Maybe it’s the passive “hero,” the muddled morass this Mexican college student in Barcelona finds himself trapped in, the holes in the narrative that don’t satisfyingly take the tale from A-to-Z, but I found this as frustrating as any Spanish-language thriller or satire or darkly comic mystery I’ve seen.

Reading the Juan Pablo Villalobos source novel might help, as one suspects at least a couple of the reviewers endorsing the film might have as their rationale. But what’s on the screen is all that matters in a movie, and this plot has lots of holes, blundered motivations and in A-to-Z narrative terms, half a dozen letters in the alphabet are skipped.

Award winning director Fernando Frias (“I’m No Longer Here”) shows real amibition in tackling “No voy a pedirle a nadie que me crea.” But the leaden pacing, leaps in logic and long static passages where the plot doesn’t advance and the entertainment value flatlines overwhelm any New World vs Old World, Latin America vs. Spain satiric touches and (intended) dark laughs.

We meet JuanPa, aka Juan Pablo as a teen, sneaking off to watch grainy (and explicit) porn with his sketchy cousin Lorenzo and a pal, and committing the title of the porno — “I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me” — to memory.

A few years later, Guadalajara doctor’s son Juan Pablo (Dario Yazbek Bernal) has won a scholarship to study Latin American lit in Barcelona. He’s thrilled that girlfriend Valentina (Natalia Solián) can come along.

But his going away party is interrupted by an insistent call from Lorenzo (Darío Rocas), who has a new hustle going and a “project” he wants to talk over, and it just won’t wait.

That’s when Juan Pablo finds himself kidnapped from a store, stuffed into a van and hustled into the garage where Lorenzo is bound and gagged. That’s when he gets a call from the menacing man who only goes by “The Lawyer.” And aspiring writer Juan Pablo witnesses his first murder when his fast-talking cousin is silenced for good.

For me, “I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me” starts to go wrong right here. Juan Pablo’s passive reaction to this horror is what I don’t believe. His refusal to tell anyone — parents, girlfriend or police — about this isn’t rational, even considering the shock and the expectation that every cop in Mexico is dirty.

Add to that his presence of mind to try and protect Valentina and you’ve lapsed into melodrama. Juan Pablo is hustled off the plane by a dirty cop so that the The Lawyer can call him, make him make up with the dumped-to-save-her-from-this “Vale” so that they can both participate in this Barcelona “project,” threatening Juan Pablo’s parents and Vale in the process.

The film needs a performance and editing that let us see wheels turning, panic, shock, scheming, all of which young Bernal fails to get across.

“The Project” demands absolute obedience, changing the focus of his academic research and his advisor, plopping the Mexican lad who breaks out with excema under stress as the only male in the middle of a lesbian-dominated feminist “Gender Studies” curriculum, forced to fake his way to expertise in it to approach a coed (Anna Castillo) The Lawyer has targeted for courting and seduction.

The central thread of the plot, that “Project,” is forgotten for long stretches as we see the toll this “secret” is taking on Valentina, whom Juan Pablo mistreats and ignores and throws over, a lengthy detour that probably works much better in print than on the screen. We dive into her entire life outside of Juan Pablo, long phone chats with her sister, losing herself in alcohol, hit on by their landlord, lured into a threesome.

Like Elvis, Nicolas Cage is a pop culture figure who undergoes a revival every decade or so as a new generation rediscovers him, or new contemporaries find fresh reasons to appreciate the wonders of this sometimes forlorn icon of “out there.”

His latest run at relevence started with “Pig” and seemed to peak with the broken promise of “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.” But now, here’s “Dream Scenario,” an even more “out there” appreciation and ingenious use of not just the “massive talent,” but the oddball baggage carried by an Oscar winner still-remembered for eating a bug “in character” in “Vampire’s Kiss” some 35 years ago.

Who but the B-and-C-movie devouring Cage would take a flyer on a little known and under-credentialied Norwegian filmmaker (Kristoffer Borgli did music videos and shorts, and “Sick of Myself”) in a movie that touches on unearned notoriety and its impact on an undeserving, ill-equipped academic who finds himself lauded, feted, then reviled and hunted for appearing in the dreams of scores, then hundreds and then millions of strangers.

“Weird” doesn’t quite cover it. But the film’s oddness is its own recommendation. And while the windmills it tilts at are illusory and, we suspect, still spinning in the breeze, Cage is at his Cagiest in this creepy, endlessly-awkward satire of fame and infamy.

Paul Matthews is a balding, dad-bodied evolutionary biologist at Osler U, a boring, under-achieving family man with a loving wife (Julianne Nicholson) who has her own career, and two smart and “normal” daughters — one a tween (Lily Bird), the other a teen (Jessica Clements).

His big gripe is how he’s never rolled up his sleeves to publish his “ANT-telligence” groupthink thesis in a book, and that a former lover is about to publish on that very subject. His academic career isn’t really that fulfulling. His students are easily distracted from his lectures on why zebras developed stripes, until that day when a lot more interesting distraction pops up.

Paul is turning up in their dreams. Not all of them. Not all at once. He’s just “there,” an eyewitness to whatever trauma the nightmare delivers, a befuddled voyeuristic “bystander” in his glasses, sweater or sometimes that too-practical oversized winter coat we see him traipsing about campus in while wearing his too-practical waterproof Storm Chaser slippers.

Paul’s reactions to hearing this — from the students, colleagues, strangers at restaurants, family members and old flames– is befuddlement and annoyance at how “passive” he appears to be, rattling his “inadequate loser” insecurity complex.

“”Still searching for the insult,” is how one ex puts it.

But as this “virus” spreads, his teen daughter notes his growing notoriety and he grasps at that straw.

“So, I’m finally cool, huh?”

Wife Janet, who came from money and whose last name pushover Paul took, advises caution. But when Paul is approached by an ethically-sketchy PR/marketing start-up founder (Michael Cera, terrific), who envisions talking the dream traveler into promoting Sprite with his newfound “Most interesting person in the world” status, Paul sees this as his chance to change his fate, his image and his publishing history.

NOW he’ll get to write and publiush that book.

That’s when it all abruptly goes south.

Beautifully-cast and well-acted, handsomely-mounted and comically topical, “American Fiction” strikes a precise blow at publishing culture, stereotypes of The Black Experience in America, expectations of The Reading Public and just what “they” let the African American “us” write about, sell and popularize.

But the canny casting of great character actors like Jeffrey Wright, Issa Rae, John Ortiz and Sterling K. Brown and the hot topic subject matter don’t make that “precise blow” a knockout punch in this wandering and somewhat slow-footed debut feature film by the TV writer (“Watchmen,” “The Good Place,” “Master of None”) Cord Jefferson.

There’s a sort of knowing comfort and warmth to this all-star satire that muffles its impact as a takedown of its targets. And like a lot of series TV writers, pacing and boiling a good story (Percival Everett’s novel “Erasure”) with real bite down to a feature film is a transition Jefferson doesn’t fully master.

Ah, but the pleasures here are rich. Pairing up the great character actor Wright and Leslie Uggams as a college professor and “serious” novelist and his regal but mentally failing mother, giving him Tracee Ellis Ross as his accomplished OB-GYN sister, Brown as his narcissistic plastic surgeon brother, late to figure out he’s gay, and Ortiz has his disappointed, despairing and then delighted agent could hardly be better.

And the milieu — Boston, the world of books, the clubbiness of “publishing, higher education and its “snowflake” student culture, a Black family of affluence and accomplishment — is “fall film” lived-in and a four course dinner one eagerly dives into.

Wright plays Thelonious “Monk” Ellis, a grumpy professor and struggling author, a literary fiction novelist and “Black writer” who rejects that last label and is revolted by what publishing, the “white liberal” audience that reads books and the culture at large “demands” of writers who look like him.

“You know, I don’t even believe in ‘race.'” “Look at what they publish. Look at what they expect us to write.”

His dismay grows in a steady drumbeat — the fragile white coed who takes offense at Monk’s teaching Flannery O’Conner’s “The Articificial Nigger” in a post-“woke” lit class, the frustrations of getting his latest “serious” novel published and his horror at the dialect-slinging “Black trauma porn” success of Sintara Golden’s (Rae) best seller “We’s Live in Da Ghetto.”

It’s enough to make a self-respecting/self-serious writer blow a fuse, especially if his agent (Ortiz) never has any good news for him.

“The ‘blackest’ thing about this one is the ink.”

Forced by his department chair to take a “leave” and return to Boston and his not-quite-estranged family, “Monk” is rattled by reminders of his upbringing and buffeted by tragedies that force him to stick around, take stock of what he’s not doing — selling books — and what he must do to take care of his regal, dementia-impaired mother.

That’s what leads him to write a book just like Sintara Golden’s, a lurid, “Black Experience” potboiler, to hide behind the nom de plum “Stagg R. Leigh” and get his agent to pitch this “very real” story of a Black man against The World, The System and his own failings, “My Pafology.”

That’s a giant step down for an author accustomed to titling his dense, layered novels “The Haas Conundrum” and the like.

His agent may be thrilled when this sellout “stunt” seems destined for best seller status. Monk, a purist named for an uncompromising jazz purist, is horrified.

That sets up as a nice, tidy and funny satire, a tad familiar (“The Hoax,” “The Arrangement,” “Barton Fink”) but promising big laughs as the Man of Letters is corrupted by the system he rejects, “posing” as a “fugitive from justice” novelist on the phone with gullible publishers and on TV (disguised) for more gullible chat show hosts.

This film festival darling might have awards buzz no one’s quite aware of, or perhaps was misguided.

But the cast (Josh Charles included), the sadness that permeates the trailer — very much a “Fall” film and a “film festival” film — give one hope.

Yeah, I’m late getting to this. And maybe it’s the memory of “Thanksgiving” that has me pondering the state of this particular horror project.

Anybody get “This is another ‘fake’ trailer from ‘Grindhouse'” vibe from this one?

Goldie and Kurt’s kid Wyatt is among the stars. and I guess Amélie Hoeferle is the prime “victim” we’re seeing in the trailer.

Think they can get an 84 minute movie out of this? How about (per IMDb) a 116 minute one?

It’s the director’s feature filmmaking debut. So…

“Tropic” is tale of brotherly bonds sorely tested by an “accident,” set against their schooling for a competition to see who is fittest to be among France’s long-mission space colonists.

The latest by director and co-writer Edouard Salier (“Cabeza Madre”) is an incomplete allegory told in the fashion of the late period French New Wave. Think “Last Year in Marienbad” meets “THX-1138” — obscurant, with detours, puzzling character digressions, needless “chapter” headings and a Big Idea that maybe isn’t as big as everyone thought going in.

Tristan and Làzaro are twins and also friendly rivals in their Euro Space Camp/University, prepping to be among the elite chosen for the decades-long “Eternity” missions France and Europe have planned to compete with China, Russia and the US in space colonization.

They undergo a rigorous education in science and philosophy. The physical tests are straight out of “The Right Stuff” era NASA — including epic who-can-hold-his/her-breath-the-longest trials in the school pool.

“They’ll pick us both,” the cocky, outgoing Tristan (Louis Peres) declares (n French with English subtitles). Smart but bullied Làzaro (Pablo Cobo) isn’t as sure.

When their cruelest challenge faces them, it won’t come from the thuggish rival Louis (Marvin Dubart). A midnight swim at an off-campus lake coincides with some sort of meteor/space junk “event” that crashes in the water. Tristan, testing his shocking skills at holding his breath, is injured physically — boil-like scars and tumors — and cognitively. He’s “not the same” as before.

Their crushed Spanish single mom (Marta Nieto) endures andTristan moves from the space academy to the “special needs” school next door. Làzaro must soldier on. But even out of his brother’s shadow and missing his gravitational pull, he struggles.

Everything in a movie is invented for the story and supposedly included for a reason. But a lot of what Salier contrives for this five act drama sits on the fence between puzzling and pointless.

Documentary filmmaker Tylor Norwood embedded himself with California firefighters battling the million acre “Dixie Fire” of 2021 for “Fireline,” a new documentary about the dangerous work and ever-worsening fire situation in California and around the world in a warming, drying climate.

Norwood got access to the leaders in “Fire Incident” HQ for a top-down look at the “strategy,” “resource allocation” and other considerations political appointees face when battling a parade of calamitous wildfires every “fire season.”

“It’s a chessboard of resources and priorities,” with decision makers acting as generals, running the battle from behind the lines, says California Office of Emergency Services chief Mark Ghilarducci.”

And Norwood — the Robin Williams doc “Robin’s Wish” was his — got in the trucks and out on the lines with the young men and women rolling up to Janesville, Susanville and environs, trying to protect lives and property from “a 200 foot wall of flame” bearing down on them as they deployed.

Some 6,000 fire fighters were summoned to battle this blaze, “adrenalin junky” young folks who risk their necks in deadly, wearying work that is as intensely dangerous as any job in the world.

The firefighters talk about their fatigue, the homes they have to go back to, the “thousand hours of overtime” one says he collected that year because of the worsening fire climate.

Their work on the line is all about “doing the right thing in the right place at the right time for the right reasons,” one of their chiefs exhorts them.

The units speak in a mix of military lingo mixed with fire jargon all their own. The “battle” is a game of showing up, make sure people have evacuated, prepping the ground and “reading” the fire — its clouds, its shifts in direction and intensity.

And as they wait “for the fire to come to us,” they weight “risk vs. gain” scenarios, all the ways this coming fight could turn out. Their priorities? Protect lives, protect property and when it comes down to it, protect firefighters, because a house is “just a house,” and not worth anybody dying for.

The film is a little repetitive, and for all the “embedded” access Norwood was granted, striking shots of firefighters silhouetted against an orange inferno was the main payoff.

We don’t gain many insights about where to make your stand, how to prep a defensive line (cutting dead trees) or how to attack the blaze once it’s there, tracking your limited water as you drain the tanks on your truck hosing down this or that spot.

Neither the top-down nor bottom-up points of view give us a taste of the “strategy” everyone seen here — a few leaders at the top, three firefighters in the line — talks about so much.

Like many a documentary on such a subject, what we’re treated to is something lacking in drama and characters and suspense and a sense of the stakes. A victim is briefly chatted up here, a home is defended there, with a lot of tedious but necessary routine eating up time on the line awaiting the blaze.

“Fireline” is worthwhile mainly as the background research for a more coherent, tense and nuts and bolts (fictional) feature film that recreates much of what we see here in more easily grasped recreations and better organized storytelling.

Rating: unrated, profanity, graphic descriptions of burns

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tylor Norwood. A Quotable Pictures release.

Running time: 1:21

“Frybread Face and Me” is a sweet, downbeat and somewhat melancholy coming-of-age tale about a Navajo “city Indian” sent to spend the summer of 1990 in the reservation where his mother grew up.

Writer-director Billy Luther, who is of Navajo, Hopi and Pueblo heritage, tells us a not-wholly-autobiographical story of broken families, heritage, family history and gender identity on a tiny sheep ranch near Pinon, Arizona.

Benny (Keir Tallman) is 11, and uneasily settled in San Diego with parents whose marriage is on shaky ground. He’s saving up to see his favorite band that summer, and expecting Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac to rock his world.

But wayward dad and unhappy mom bus him to her aged mother’s (Sarah Natani) ranch as they sort out their coming divorce.

Not that Benny knows this. He’s just trapped in a place he has no experience of, where he doesn’t speak Grandma’s language. A kid who likes Fleetwood Mac and playing with “action figures” is sure to be bullied by his bitter, broke sheepherding uncle (Martin Senmeier).

“You a cowboy or a cowgirl?”

Uncle Marvin won’t have the kid wearing his mom’s cowboy hat, or doing anything else “cowboy” until he proves himself. We get the feeling that’s not going to happen.

Help might have come from slacker/jewelry seller Aunt Lucy (Kahara Hodges), his mom’s free spirit sister. But she’s into her own thing. It takes the arrival of another dropped-off-for-the-summer cousin for Benny to meet his tour guide through this alien world.

She is roughly the same age, a big girl named “Dawn” but nicknamed “Frybread Face” pretty much for good. She speaks Navajo and has nothing but contempt for this “city Indian” cousin from San Diego.

“Have you met Shamu?”

Over the course of the summer, the family will be tested, granny will weave woolen rugs and dispense wisdom Benny can’t understand and Benny will plot his escape in lieu of developing a taste for mutton — sheep’s head included.

But the cousins will bond, playing dress up, dancing in makeup, skirts and scarves just like Stevie Nicks, and watching and rewatching the only video in their generator-powered single-wide, the sci-fi epic “Starman,” whose climax is set in nearby Meteor Crater.

Luther doesn’t hit the story’s discovering-one’s-sexuality elements hard, and serves up little dollops of tribal wisdom that play as weary bromides. Benny should be hunting for “hózhǫ́,” a life that will make him happy and content.

“If you go too far on the white man’s road, you lose your way.”

“Frybread and Me” succeeds by immersing us in this myopic world of laborious poverty. Marvin is resigned to being the “last in the bloodline” sheep farmer in the family, with hardscrabble “Indian Rodeo” fame a fleeting dream. Wandering fathers, beater trucks and barely-running cars with no windshields and life offering you little more than subsistence stares the viewer in the face.

The kids must figure out their own worth and consider what paths their futures hold, which parts of their traditions they will embrace and which they will flee. Their dysfunctional families must reckon with them and their choices.

And our filmmaker/narrator — Luther made “Miss Navajo,” and comes from a documentary background — will observe it all from the warm distance of memory. He’s given us a film that lets us assume that however close to his own story it is, we can be sure the filmmaker has achieved something like “hózhǫ” about his place within this world and how life worked out.

Rating: unrated, gay slur

Cast: Keir Tallman, Charley Hogan, Martin Sensmeier, Kahara Hodges and Sarah H. Natani.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Billy Luther. An Array release.

Running time: 1:23

Silly me, I kept thinking about David Fincher’s dry and somewhat overpraised hitman film “The Killer” during sequences of the French comic thriller “Nouveaux riches,” retitled “All-Time High” and dubbed — if you prefer — for English speaking consumption.

The biggest point of praise in “The Killer,” adapted from a French comic book, is an epic fight-to-the-death between our hired assassin and a hulking “Florida Man.”

You like fights? “All-Time High” has a couple of all-time winners, bone-snapping brawls shot in long, beautifully-choreographed takes. But here, no matter how much blood is spilled and debilitating injuries or even death meted out, it’s mostly played for laughs.

Seriously, “John Wick” stuntman and stuntman/fight-choreographer (here) Amedéo Cazzella, take a bow. The gambling club, gymnasium, apartment and inside-a-kidnapping-van fights here are epic in their own right, damned funny and help make this one of the most entertaining films on Netflix.

Nassim Lyes of “Mayhem!” stars as Youssef, a hunky street hustler with a manic patter that wears out most everyone he encounters. He’s unfiltered, and physically fit enough to get away with being boorish to even a celebrity boxer in a nightclub. Because Algerian-born Youssef used to box back in Belgium.

He lies like he breathes — constantly, rapid-fire patter about this Hermes handbag scheme or that Birkin hustle. He crosses lines and ignores “Where’s your dignity?” insults, because he has none.

Youssef is wearing out his rich live-in girlfriend Yael (Yovel Lewkowski), so much so that all it takes is the wrong joke at her mother’s birthday dinner to sink that. Sure, he’s convinced her his real name is Mikael and that he works for Hermes. But every now and then, “unfiltered” and gauche gets him in trouble

“All you talk about is money,” Yael’s mother gripes to her crypto-crazed son and her second husband (Guillaume Canet). “What will Mikael think of us?”

“That you’re Jews?” he offers. Dude, read the room. And you know, global anti-Semitism coverage.

That’s just who this guy is, a big mouth who can’t get into a poker club without creating a scene. Losing his shirt to a woman he doesn’t find attractive, whom he insults about her “forehead” and “buckteeth” puts him in a mood.

Little does he know that when Yael makes the right decision and dumps him, this equally uncouth “ugly” woman who hustled him at poker will be his nightclub hookup.

Stephanie (French nepo baby Zoé Marchal, who was in “Overdose” with Lyes) is boorish, tomboyish and unconcerned with appearances, including her attire. She “pees with the bathroom door open,” and having an Olympic wrestling (and cheating at it) background is the perfect match for the cheating ex-boxer Youssef.

Not that he’d see that. Not right away. Not that he’d admit it. Hell, he won’t even tell her his real name.

“All-Time High” is about all the trouble that swirls in around them when they start their affair — his financial troubles, lying and “loser” status, her issues with the switchblade-wielding thug Papillion (“Butterfly,” played by Adrien Essamir) who owned that small but high-end gambling club and who has goons at his beck and call.

Some people are going to want to hurt one or both of them, maybe at the same time.

Director and co-writer Julien Hollande — Lyes co-wrote the script — serves up a lively underworld of hustlers and and outcasts, including a pal who rents crummy “kit” cars that look like Ferraris and GT-40s, and drive like worn-out Toyotas. Hollande decided to shoot the over-the-top fights in long takes, a daring choice as when you film in a gym, there are mirrors everywhere. He keeps the tone light, which the joke-littered script ensures with laugh-out loud one-liners and more than a few sight gags.

“I’m such a f—–g moron,” Yael complains at discovering the extent of Youssef’s lies.

“Honey, DON’T say that! You went to fashion school!”

Lyes is hilarious in a part that calls for Vince Vaughn/”Swingers” fast patter, with the added bonus of being an actor who can handle fight choreography with ease.

Marchal gets even bigger laughs simply by being a woman whose looks are insulted and whose liberty and life are physically threatened repeatedly, only for her to unleash headlocks, Japanese arm drags and back body drops (Yeah, I looked them up.) to the viewer’s unexpected delight.

The stunts in this picture are both funny and realistic enough to impress, no mean feat.

Essamir makes a vile villain, with Youssef Ramal standing out as the cousin-henchman who finds that getting his ass kicked is starting to hurt his feelings, but who has limits — unlike cousin “Papillon.”

“Why you keep putting holes in people? You think they’re cheese, or something?”

It’s an action comedy, so for all the violence and actual bones-breaking the film shows us, it’s never as serious as all that and coincidences and classic bits of “that awning/sofa/dumpster just happened to be there” to break this or that death-or-paralyzed fall intervene.

And as this or that unlikely twist in the story or each wild-and-wooly fight makes your eyes roll, there’s always Lyes and Marchal and their great two-fisted, old school feminist chemistry to ensure that “All-Time High” never loses its buzz.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Nassim Lyes, Zoé Marchal, Adrien Essamir and Youssef Ramal

Credits: Directed by Julien Hollande, scripted by Julien Hollande and Nassim Lyes. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

The first thing that leaps out at you from “Mercy Road” is the loud, insistent string-heavy “thriller” music, a score that’s reminiscent of “Psycho” in its aural urgency. It’s not an over-the-top miscalculation, as it was scored by its director and co-writer, John Curran.

The film is a claustrophic thriller that’s basically one paranoid and increasingly frantic father dashing hither and yon in rural Australia, trying to escape “consequences” for something he’s done, desperate to “save” his daughter, who’s gone missing in the aftermath of a crime.

With a camera right in oil field welder Tom’s sweaty, bug-eyed, gasping for breath face, the music and pace and pitch of Luke Bracey’s performance is all of a piece. “Mercy Road” is meant to wrong-foot us, rattle us and make us nevous-to-the-point-of-panic, just like Tom.

More often than not, that works in this, the latest film from the director of “Painted Veil,” “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” and “Chappaquidick.”

We meet Tom in the aftermath of something, dodging calls from his oil patch job, his ex-wife Terri (Alex Malone) and a couple of strangers.

Something’s happened, and Tom, prone to frantic impulses, is running from it. The “strangers” hint at it, and Tom gives away some of the details.

His ex remarried. Her “insurance” business husband has caused some trouble. There’s a “picture.”

Now 12 year-old Ruby (Martha Kate Morgan) is missing, a hostage negotiator is on the phone as there is someone or some corpse in Tom’s back seat, and the mysterious stranger (Toby Jones at his most sinister) is ringing in and trying to take control, as there was a “negotiation” Tom interrupted with his rash act.

“I’m a mediator of sorts,” the stranger purrs. “I deal only in action and consequences.“

Wait. What?

Tom, given a manic, sometimes over-the-the-top screaming edge by Bracey (“Hacksaw Ridge,” “Point Break,” TV’s “Little Fires Everywhere”), sets the tone here. His state of mind is the one we’re struggling to understand, his “crime” or attempt at redemption act has set him off, and no “professional calm” as expressed by a negotiator or a “mediator” is going to cool him off.

He’s given tasks, help in dodging the pursuiing police (heard in sirens, seen in the reflection off flashing lights) and forced to reckon with what’s happened and his role in it, all as he takes calls and makes calls and drives drives drives in an effort to “save” his pre-teen girl in this real-time thriller.

There are hackneyed conventions in the script, but most are given at least a taste of a twist — Ruby’s “boyfriend” is “older” (13) and thus wiser in the ways of the world. He frets that he might be in trouble, “dating” a 12 year-old. But he tries to help.

“I’ve listened to a lot of ‘true crime’ podcasts!”

Jones’ persistent, droning menace makes us and Tom fear for Ruby’s life.

“In my experience, no daughter was ever ‘saved’ by a father’s rage.”

The somewhat cryptic (easy to figure out) ending is seriously deflating, rather spoiling some of what’s come before.

But cinematographer Ross Giardina’s camera is so tight on Bracey (fisheye lenses in a couple of shots/scenes) that it’s unnerving.

Bracey’s presence has hints of Red Bull consumption between takes — antic and loud. And Curran’s in our-ears-and-in-our-face score ratchets up the manufactured tension more than enough to make this trip down “Mercy Road” something of a panic.

Rating: unrated, suggested violence, sex crime, profanity

Cast: Luke Bracey, Alex Malone, Martha Kate Morgan and Toby Jones.

Credits: Directed by John Curran, scripted by John Curran, Jesse Heffring and Christopher Lee Pelletier.. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:2