Movie Nation

His was an unlikely stardom, arriving late as fashions and tastes in movie manhood changed to suit him.

“He wasn’t very tall,” Humphrey Bogart’s sometime co-star Mary Astor wrote. “Vocally, he had a range from A to B, his eyes were like coal nuggets pressed into his head and his smile was a mistake that he tried to keep from happening.”

Then there was the beauty queen turned model, half his age when they met, set off sparks onscreen and off. The newly-renamed Betty Joan Persky had an indifferent screen career, for the most part. It wasn’t until Lauren Bacall buried Bogie and became the permanent guardian of his legacy that she truly came into her own as an actress and regal presence, on stage and on the screen.

But her guardianship of that legend covered-up and otherwise misdirected the world into printing that legend, and not the truth about Bogart — the upper class drunk with self-esteem issues he took out on many a co-star, director or even close friend.

That’s the case William J. Mann makes in his crackling new bio, “Bogie & Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair.”

If there’s a classic film buff on your holiday shopping list, this is the film book to buy this year. Digging into studio archives, letters and archival interviews of those who knew them, Mann tears apart every “sanctioned” and “Betty Bacall-approved” biography that preceded it to give us a clear picture of two screen icons and the romance that blossomed when “wife number four” showed up, and the history various film publicists and later she spent decades minimizing or simply erasing.

Mann tracks through the years of Broadway, touring show and summer stock struggles of Manhattan doctor’s son and prep school dropout Humphrey, the “dandies” and “cads” he played as a young stage actor, the myths invented about his military service, his torn upper lip and the like.

The earlier marriages are remembered and deconstructed. He and third wife Mayo Methot might have been caricatured in the Hollywood press as “The Battling Bogarts,” two hard-drinking, loudmouthed brawlers. But she was his champion to Warner Bros. and Hollywood at the key juncture in his career, as much responsible for Bogie achieving stardom at 40 as anybody.

Bogie’s widow had the biggest hand in rubbing her and two other earlier marriages — all were actresses — right out of the picture.

“Official” versions of how Leslie Howard insisted Bogart get the role of Duke Mantee in “Petrofied Forest” so that they’d reprise the roles they’d had in the Howard-produced Broadway blockbuster that became Bogie’s big break, are broken down with “facts.”

Movies and plays are sketched in, Bogart’s succession of career setbacks, and personal ones, are listed and laid bare.

And his character comes through, if not wholly unscarred, at least rendered in realistic strokes, foibles and all.

It’s time to accept that those “Release the Snyder Cut” t-shirts aren’t aging well. Because as Joseph Campbell taught us, the most important element in any “hero’s journey” is to pick a hero worth following. Writer-director Zack Snyder isn’t that hero.

The clumsily-titled “Rebel Moon: Part One — A Child of Fire” is a sci-fi epic crippled by the limits of big budget sci-fi movie imagination. Whatever one thinks of Mr. “300,” “Justice League” and “Watchmen,” his “Rebel Moon” is corporate content engineering at its most cynical.

Campbell’s “Hero of a Thousand Faces” re-iterated the idea that there are only so many plots and basically only one heroine or hero to lead the reader, listener or viewer through them.

Fine. The “quest” can’t help but feel familiar.

But this Snyder exercise in “world building” for a new “Star Wars” or its ilk is basically “Star Wars” with fewer fresher faces.

It’s a humorless mash-up of “A New Hope” and “The Seven Samurai” (and its Old West remake, “The Magnificent Seven”) a tale of imperialism and brutal repression, with lawless towns and saloons (cantinas), Brit-accented robots, shoot-outs, swordfights and rumors of a “chosen one.”

The villains wear Soviet Bloc uniforms and Nazi attitudes, backed by the silent, acquiescent red-robed priests of conquistador Spain.

The tech is just a re-jiggering and somewhat more art moderne “streamlined” redesign of all the “rebels” vs. “empire” futurism of every sci-fi movie of the past 50 years.

There are gladiators and bounty hunters and farmers in bib overalls and undisciplined goons as soldiers wearing recycled “American Gladiators” armor, insectoids and humanoid insects and hints of inter-species kink.

Supernaturalism? Fascism? Native mysticism? Fantastic Beasts and where to find them? Sure. They’re mixed-in with gigantic “planet killer” space Dreadnoughts and Ed Skrein as a pasty-faced sadist out to foil a rebellion.

The fights are filled with slo-mo, the cast peopled with generic characters played by actors with skills and just enough cachet to merit their paychecks.

The story-beats follow The Book of George Lucas, almost to the letter, especially when it comes to dialogue.

“Kindness is a vice worth dying for.” “There is a difference between justice and revenge.”

The great Sir Anthony Hopkins voices an empathetic and utterly superfluous robot. Charlie Hunnam is an Irish-accented Han Solo substitute. Djimon Hounsou is a rebel general reduced to gladiatorial combat.

And fangirl and fanboy favorite Sofia Boutella of recent installments of “The Mummy,” “Kingsmen” and “Star Trek” is Kora, a space war survivor laying low on a Nordic-accented moon named Veldt, just a farm gal in overalls and a Parisian pixie haircut, waiting for the moment when we learn she is “the most wanted fugitive in the known universe.”

All that slo-mo as she fends off occupiers, imperial minions and treacherous locals of every stripe? It’s to minimize the incredubility of the fight choreography.

Kora’s village is visited by soldiers from The Realm who want their harvest. Don’t stop and ponder why this grain-“negotiation” would be carried out at an Eat Local level by a large, armed occupying force. It’ll give you a headache.

A murder or two and one vengeful slaughter later, Kora and sweet-on-Kora farmer Gunnar (Michiel Huisman) are off on a quest to find the Rebels, and get some help for their village.

They’ll need passage off-planet provided by a lovable smuggler-rogue (Hunnam).

As for other help. Toshiro Mifune and Yul Brenner aren’t available. Maybe this general (Hounsou), this sword-slinging vixen Nemesis (Bae Doona), a freed-slave Tarak (Staz Nair) and can be enlisted.

In flashbacks, Kora doles out bits and pieces of her past to Gunnar, and we see Cary Elwes as a bearded, uniformed heir to the Romanov crown, the powers of a possible “chosen one” “as prophesied,” and we never for an instant grasp anything resembling “what’s really at stake here.”

All these petty crimes against originality wouldn’t matter a whit if Snyder & Co. mashed it all up into something fun or at least more distracting.

I’ve liked some of these actors in other roles. But even with Hunnam’s down’tha pub accident, there is nobody here I’d care to follow down the primrose path of this heroine’s journey, no well-handled action beat that isn’t literally recycled from a thousand other action films and a dozen other “Star Wars” outings.

Not a note of this beast rings heartfelt, original and true, and I’m not just talking about the pedestrian, compose-by-numbers score.

With comic book and “Star Wars” content tumbling into over-saturation and finally losing their cultural currency, the timing of this imitation “galaxy far away” is pretty bad, as well.

But maybe “Part Two” of “Rebel Moon” will work better. If not, I’m sure some rocket scientist will start screaming for “The Snyder Cut” soon enough.

Rating: PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, sexual assault, bloody images, language, sexual material and partial nudity.

Cast: Sofia Boutella, Djimon Hounsou, Bae Doona, Ed Skrein, Sky Yang, Cleopatra Coleman, Ingvar SigurdssonCary Elwes, Fra Fees, Jena Malone, Charlotte Maggi, Cory Stoll, and the voice of Anthony Hopkins. kKurt John

Credits: Directed by Zack Snyder, scripted by Zack Snyder, Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten. A Netflix release

Running time: 2:13

Any resemblence between Shakespeare and the Polish rom-com franchise “The Taming of the Shrewd” is abandoned altogether for “The Taming of the Shrewd 2,” the sequel to the popular, franctious and almost-bawd rom-com of last year.

So I guess that’s something.

The sequel, a wintry bauble featuring Polish snow, Polish folk musicians and singers and renewed complications keeping our happy couple apart, is polished in every way save for the one that matters the most — the screenplay.

The script is a slapdash load of nonsense that includes a contrived trip to America, a contrived “cuckolded” crisis involving an ambush from our gal Kaska’s old flame “Bob,”contrived kidnappings, liquor smuggling, horse-drawn-sleigh racing and a bear.

There are two couples in trouble here, and in rom-coms, that means mixed-and-rematched “couplings” to make each others’ true loves jealous, a “polyamory” joke and a nude massage to sort of seal the deal and give the picture a TV-MA rating.

I wish I could say it all kind of comes together, but it doesn’t.

Beautiful and fiesty Kaska (Magdalena Lamparska) goes off to America to accept some dubious award she’s been given, and to make an appearance on West Coast TV. Hunky but hapless Patryk (Mikołaj Roznerski) is left behind, wondering if she’ll call, if she’ll renew her acquaintance with “Bob” (Martin Budny) and facing an entire town that feels the newlyweds are in trouble and that he’s being “cuckolded.”

If she comes back in time for the couples sleigh race, maybe it’ll all work out. Maybe not.

Meanwhile, RV drifters/extreme sports couple Wera (Agata Turkot) and Kacper (Piotr Nerlewski) find their never-ending search for slopes to snowboard and waves to surf and kiteboard coming to an abrupt halt when he accepts a steady job.

She storms out in a huff and a puff of raggedly old motor home smoke.

Events transpire that put Wera under Patryk’s roof, and Kacper grabbed by the returning Kaska. She’s furious at what Patryk thinks may have happened and at the fact that he appears to have taken up with another woman.

Concerned relatives intervene to save this couple, “the pride of Podhale,” their winter wonderland village. That’s when the kidnappings begin and the bear makes his entrance.

The cast is pretty all up and down the line and seems skilled enough to make the laugh lines and sight gags land. It’s just that there are so few of them, and virtually none of them take off, much less land.

I wouldn’t have figured a sequel could be as off-key as the original film. But that’s what I get for figuring.

Rating: TV-MA, nudity, profanity

Cast: Magdalena Lamparska, Mikołaj Roznerski, Agata Turkot, Piotr Nerlewski, Tomascz Sapryk and Elzbieta Trzaskos

Credits: Directed by Filip Zylber, scripted by Hanna Węsierska. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

The knock on early sound movies has become ingrained in Hollywood lore and immortalized in films about the transition from silent cinema to “talkies” such as “Singing in the Rain” all the way to “Babylon.”

The sound gear was cumbersome and touchy, and the techniques for mixing sound were being invented as they went along. Films transformed from being kinetic, artfully-shot with ever-moving cameras and increasingly complex tableaux back to more primitive, static affairs, often shot in close-up, with fewer actors on set and fewer physical bits of business to avoid muddying up the sound mix.

The notorious 1929 Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks version of Shakespeare’s knockabout farce “The Taming of the Shrew” gives the lie to some of that reputation. It opens with striking, heavily-populated tracking shots, immersing us in Renaissance Era Padua and its noisy street life. It is packed with pratfalls, as that was forever the way of treating this “battle of the sexes” comedy.

There’s little evidence of any limitations imposed on this United Artists production thanks to the advent of sound. A mid-1960s restoration, with improved sound mix, sound effects and tidied-up musical score as part of the bargain explains some of that. Producer and co-star Pickford, the Canadian-born actress and silent cinema star who was the first to wear the label “America’s Sweetheart,” owned the rights, financed that restoration and rather inexplicably cut seven minutes from what was always a brisk and Big Scenes Only version of “Shrew,” an hour or more shorter than any other screen adaptation.

I approached watching this classic with limited expectations on a variety of levels. Many veteran screen actors making the leap to sound took a while to shed some of their silent “art” — broader gestures, exaggerated laughs and leers and the like. There’s evidence of that here, in the way Pickford, as “curst Kate,” holds a pose or a scowl, in the way her off-screen husband Fairbanks, the great action star of his era, throws his head back with every oversized laugh.

Fairbanks is all headscarf, big grin, broad strides and grand gestures, the exaggerated way one sees the character in community theater and high school productions pretty much to this day. Watch the old Britcom “Blackadder” and you can see Rick Mayall sending Fairbanks up in his various incarnations of Flashheart.

But all things considered, this shortened “Shrew” works well enough on a bare bones/mostly-laughs level. The “abuse” scenes which productions of the play leaned into, on screen and off, until the early ’70s, are here mostly Pickford’s ill-tempered Katherine slapping the boorish, overbearing but irresistable Petruchio — repeatedly.

Chances for supporting player mugging — Joseph Cawthorn, Clyde Cook and Charles Stevens are Gremio, Grumio and a servant — are vastly reduced when you simplify the plot and eliminate pages and pages of wordplay, the puns and general bawdiness. This “Shrew” even loses a couple of suitors for old Baptista’s (Edwin Maxwell) sweeter and “fairer” younger daughter, Bianca (Dorothy Jordan), which can’t help but feel like less-funny filler in most productions I’ve seen.

The plot? Men pine for young Bianca, but her father Baptista will not allow her to be courted and married until his mouthy, ill-tempered older daughter Katherine is married. A plot to find her a suitor brings Petruchio into the picture, a bluff and blustery braggart with very specific needs and desires.

“I come to wive it wealthily in Padua;
 If wealthily, then happily in Padua.”

It takes a while to figure out the sweet spot that writer Mike White (“School of Rock”?) was going for with “Migration.”

It’s got a lot of funny people doing voices — Kumail Nanjiani, Awkwafina, Keegan-Michael Key going Jamaican “mon,” Danny DeVito and Carol Kane among them. But the it’s not what I’d call quotably funny. The lines aren’t jokes.

The characters, a family of mallards struggling to convince “Why can’t we be satisfied with what we already have?” dad (Nanjiani) into “finally” taking them on a migration, are barely a shadow of the funniest ducks of them all — Daffy and (referenced here) Donald.

But there are plenty of sight gags — Awkwafina, playing a New York streetwise-but-mangled, tough-enough-to-be-named “Chump” pigeon getting smacked by one Metropolitan Transit Authority Bus after another on the edge of Central Park.

And the animated flying footage is spectacular and occasionally jokey.

It’s the first big laugh that gives away White’s game. The tiniest duck in the family, just-past-duckling Gwen (Tresi Gazal) begs her afraid-of-the-big-wide-world Dad, after Mom (Elizabeth Banks) and teen brother Max (Casper Jennings) have failed to talk him into joining passing flocks, and gives it her best shot.

Her eyes give us a Tex Avery bulge, and her plea will be recognizing by every six year-old in North America.

“PLLEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAASE?”

Every parent will turn to his or her child, Every Child will guiltily grin back at said parent. It’s not inherently funny, but it’s so universally recognizable that it can be.

What White has scripted here, with co-director Benjamin Renner also a co-writer, is a “cartoon” that’s not just for kiddies, not really for adults, but plays right into the hands of parents taking their children to see it.

The “family vacation” gags — little Gwen being VERY shy about when and where and with whom she’ll go to the toilet — are simple, but on point. Vacation envy, the migrating teen girl duck who flirts with Max, grumpy Uncle Dan (Danny DeVito) coming along for the flight, fretting over accomodations and food at every stop, we’ve all been there. Most of us, anyway.

Keegan-Michael Key isn’t given a single quotably hilarious line. But as a caged long-tailed red macaw freed by the family in the one of their many quests/escapes on their journey, Key appropriates ALL of Jamaican culture with that most musical of accents in English. And every word he utters is adorable.

“Migration” shares a “fatten them up” captive ducks gag with “Chicken Run 2.” You have to be in a duck or chicken “cult” to fall for that, right?

But the threats are kind of novel here. There’s no Elmer Fudd duck hunter, perhaps because those guys have ceased to be funny. What we have instead are rumors of what duck predators HERONS are (Carol Kane? “Predator?” Don’t be ridic.), and the dread fear of that creature most feared by every sentient duck — tattooed hipster chefs and their passion for Duck a’la Orange.

The mallards free the (unspeaking) chef”s sad macaw, wreck his kitchen in the process, and are pursued to the ends of the Earth — Florida, anyway — by the man with a menu to make out.

Visually, this is a most impressive effort. But it’s not particularly smart or witty or even kiddie profound in its messaging, and in avoiding easy laughs (jokes), it achieves liftoff even if it never quite soars.

“Migration,” like that “Super Mario” blockbuster earlier this year, isn’t one of this animation outfit’s best outings. It’s their “Rio,” pleasantly diverting in the moment, not quite instantly forgotten, but almost.

Rating: PG.

Cast: The voices of Kumail Nanjiani, Elizabeth Banks, Keegan-Michael Key, Danny DeVito, Tresi Gazal, Casper Jennings, Carol Kane and Awkwafina

Credits: Directed by Benjamin Renner and Guylo Homsy, scripted by Mike White and Benjamin Renner. An Illumination/Universal release.

Running time: 1:32

There have always been movie remakes, as long before the words “intellectual property” became common currency, studios were remaking scripts or books they had the rights to.

Hemingway’s “To Have and Have Not” was not just a 1944 classic with Bogie and “introducing” Lauren Bacall. As long as the rights were active, other versions turned up.

But “Hello Ghost” has to be a peak intellectual property moment. It was a 2010 Korean film about a suicidal man haunted by four ghosts he can see but no one else does, thanks to his “final” attempt at taking his life.

It’s similar enough to the sentimental Ricky Gervais romp “Ghost Town” as to have been inspired by it, but different enough to pack a bigger punch with a “twist” at the end.

Not content to have the rights to the original film, Netflix is behind not one but TWO fresh remakes of it — an Indonesian version, and a Taiwanese one, which I’m reviewing here.

Netflix is reaching back to a practice common during the early days of the “talkies.” MGM and other studios would make a domestic market version of a movie, and one for the Latin market, or Germany or wherever. Sometimes the star, the story and the title would be the only thing common to all the different versions. That was what you did if you wanted your property to make lots of dollars, pesos, francs and rubles in the days before dubbing or “closed captioning.”

Here Tseng Jing-hua plays a suicidal Taiwanese 20something whose 21st try at ending his miserable life comes close enough to succeeding that a paramedic (Shao Yo-wei) must bring him back to life on the way to the hospital. He hallucinates that she’s an angel come to save him.

But in the hospital, a traumatized plump and matronly woman (Tsai Jia-yin) and a fiesty older lady (Ching Lu-yi) who’d love to bitch out the nurses, if they could only see and hear her. A pranks-prone little boy (Hung Chun-hao) and an Elvis-haired chain-smoker (Chang Zhang-xing) also manifest themselves to our patient

Our lad is haunted by these folks, leading a doctor to think he’s crazy. And he will continue to be haunted by them, according to a psychic he visits, until their “wishes” come true, thanks to him.

Next thing our hapless but no longer suicidal young man knows, he’s hunting for an ancient taxi in the wrecking yard because somebody would love a last ride in his car, visiting an amusement park and rooting through a huge jar of dried radishes for an old lotto ticket.

At every step of the way, he stumbles into the paramedic, who is perplexed at these coincidences, and seriously bent out of shape at the money trouble her hustler-brother has stirred up with some gangsters.

Some story threads you can figure out, even without that banger saved for the finale.

The best sight gag in any of these adaptations has to be all the ghosts hanging off our hero’s body or crowded onto his motorbike with him — unseen, except by him. Aside from that, many of the “Ghost” pranks feeled pretty played by this point.

And in the Taiwanese version, director Hsieh Pei-ju and screenwriter Chou Ching-wen half-ruin their Big Finish by over-explaining and back-engineering the story of how that “twist” impacted everything that happened before.

“Hello Ghost” proves to be a durable comedy that more or less “travels” and works in a lot of languages. But whatever was special about the Korean version seems watered-down and pretty tired by now.

God forbid Netflix trot out Peruvian and Canadian versions.

Rating: TV-14, suicide attempts, lots of smoking

Cast: Tseng Jing-hua, Shao Yo-wei, Tsai Jia-yin, Ching Lu-yi, Hung Chun-hao and Chang Zhang-xing

Credits: Directed by Hsieh Pei-ju, scripted by Chou Ching-wen, based on the Korean film by Kim Young-tak. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

It’s about time filmmakers turned their attention away from English-language young adult fantasy fiction and returned to the land where the Western tradition in literary fantasy began, in the land of the Brothers Grimm.

But the Amazon/MGM production of Kerstin Gier’s “Dream” trilogy has been seriously Anglicized for mass cinematic consumption.

“Silver and the Book of Dreams” transplants characters and situations to London, a posh (ish) high school and the weird goings on with dream-obsessed boys and the latest student to stuff her books and backpack in a “cursed” locker.” But it’s still oddly off-center in some distinctly German ways, and it doesn’t look like any other YA screen fantasy of recent memory.

That’s not so much an endorsement as a suggestion that it might pique your curiosity. It certainly did mine.

Liv and Mia (Jana McKinnon and Riva Krymalowski) are siblings who have been shuffled about a lot — “seven school (introductory) tours in five years,” according to older sister Liv — since the death of their father.

Now they’re in London, with their mother (Nicolette Krebitz) and the new makeshift family she and partner Ernest (Rory Nolan) have formed.

French step-sister Florence (Gwenaelle Gillet) is openly rude and hostile, demanding her dad pay her to spend time — even mealtime — with these two upstarts. Stepbrother Grayson (Théo Augier Bonaventure), named for the dirtiest player in the history of Dook basketball, is less judgmental.

Liv’s dreams are often about her dead father and her trapped under the ice, drowning with him. Moving into this London townhouse, she finds herself wandering into dreams with Grayson. Is she really following him and his three mates into Highgate Cemetery in the foggy wee hours of the morning?

What’s this talk about needing “four men and a maiden” to “complete the ritual?” And this “Book of Dreams,” is that why she’s “lucid dreaming” her way down a fancifully-colored enclosed alley, opening doors into the dreams of others?

Having a “cursed” locker at school that ties her to the missing Annabell Scott would seem the reason for all this. Grayson’s pals Jasper (Efeosa Afolabi), Arthur (Chaneil Kular) and sweet-on-Liv Henry (Rhys Mannion) insist she’s the “Chosen One,” “a natural dreamer.”

Perhaps the locker “chose” her?

All the business about initiating Liv Silver into their cult of dreams, the “rules” of visiting the dreams of others, making their “fondest dreams” come true and avoiding their “worst nightmares” are colorfully pedantic and dull. It’s the quirky but recognizable teen “types” and high school world that’s more interesting here.

Exotic and outgoing school class president Persephone (Samirah Breuer), the generic rites-of-affluent-teen passage depicted — raves, popularity contests, young love, inclusion — are all just set decoration for a story that lacks urgency and that has a difficult time selling us its hgh stakes.

Are kids “disappearing” into this dreamscape, or truly dying in their own “worst nightmares?” Helena Hufnagel’s film doesn’t manage the feat of making one care about that.

What I want to know is what got up French-girl Florence’s bum that has her hating and looking down on the world, aside from Euro-stereotypes in action? Setting up the Silver siblings as thick as thieves, and all but abandoning Mia as a character seems clumsy. But then, that might not leave time for Liv and Henry to make eyes at each other and eventually make out.

The whole business of dreamland being a Diagon Alley with “Monsters, Inc.” doors to the dreams of others is a bit of an eye-roller, no matter how luridly imagined. But perhaps that’s the idea, a YA fantasy made-to-order for kids of any nation where Pixar and J.K. Rowling are what they grew up on.

Rating: TV-16

Cast: Jana McKinnon, Rhys Mannion, Josephine Blazier, Théo Augier Bonaventure, Efeosa Afolabi, Chaneil Kular, Riva Krymalowski and Samirah Breuer

Credits: Directed by Helena Hufnagel, scripted by Sina Flammang based on a novel by Kerstin Gier. An MGM/Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:32

Don’t tell his momma, or his wife. But there’s something just right about casting Dermot Mulroney as an ex-con.

He’s got the look. Hell, he’s had it all along. But damned if that rough-hewn, more-rugged-than-handsome-mug wasn’t in “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” “The Family Stone,” lots of movies in which Dermot M. had no trouble at all passing for a sensitive romantic lead.

Mulroney’s at that “Here’s another offer to play a heavy” stage of his career, and in “Breakwater,” he’s all the richer for it, no matter how tiny the paycheck.

“Breakwater” is an indie thriller about a young ex-con (Darren Mann) send to find a “long lost daughter” for her “dying” daddy, the Old Man of the Yard in a prison in coastal Virginia.

The young guy, named “Dovey,” as in “Lovey Dovey,” only figures out that his prison mentor was using him when the hardened lifer busts out to settle matters with that “daughter (Alyssa Goss) after Dovey’s reported back that, yeah, that’s her, using a different name but running a bookstore in Currituck on the Outer Banks of N.C.

What has Dovey done? What can ”Eve” do? Will she let the gullible Dovey help her get out of this fix? Because at many a juncture, jailbird Ray has shown he’s capable of things and probably of a mind to do his worst.

Mulroney’s Ray charmed and counseled Dovey, warning him about “the straight and narrow” and how life for an ex-con has a “long way down, each side” set of choices.

But when he shows his true colors, staging his escape and calculating how long it’ll take “help” to arrive before plugging a guard, he’s downright sadistic.

“Ain’t no place to get shot better’n an ambulance!”

Goss, of TV’s “Bruh,” is convincingly salty as Eve, aka Marina, a single mom leading lighthouse tours and running a book shop full of “beach reads,” but more than willing to offload a few F-bombs to take the genteel edge off. She’s convincingly salty in other ways, showing off her 38 foot ketch to Dovey, who is a skilled swimmer and ex-con’s son who’s worked on the water — crabbing — his whole life.

Mann manages the unworldly side of Dovey with ease, letting him almost get mauled by the first barmaid he stumbles across when he “gets out” (Mena Suvari, in kinky mode).

And Carolina native filmmaker James Rowe, who’s made two films in 25 years (“Blue Ridge Fall”) really hit the jackpot with little Ezra DuVall, playing Eve’s little — VERY little — girl in documentary-real strokes.

“Breakwater” was shot in “Hollywood East,” as it used to be called — in and around Wilmington, N.C., with a little filming, from the looks of things, at the Currituck Lighthouse. Movies filmed there have a vivid sense of place about them — swamp and sand and salt-scented sea breezes, funky little fishing villages and crab shack tourist towns.

I know this part of the world well, and I loved the film’s grounding in that sense of place and appreciated the lack of false notes in the performances, the action beats and the generally unfussy plot.

This “simple” genre thriller is entirely too simple for its own good. It feels so familiar that we’ve seen it all before. But even if it never transcends its genre, Mulroney, Goss, Mann and the rest of the cast keep “Breakwater” pretty close to above water, start to finish.

Rating: R, violence, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Darren Mann, Alyssa Goss, Sonja Sohn, JD Evermore,
Daniel Williams-Lopez, Ezra DuVall, Mena Suvari and Dermot Mulroney.

Credits: Scripted and directed by James Rowe. An XYZ Films/Vertical release.

Running time: 1:37

A body builder — Katy M. O’Brian — draws the attention of lonely K-Stew, who comes to find out just what Ms. Muscles is into and all about — Murder for hire? — with Ed Harris and assorted other bad hombres.

Dave Franco and Jena Malone also star.

“Merry Good Enough” is an indifferent, listless and generally lifeless holiday comedy built around the admission, “It’s the holidays. We’re all a little suicidal.”

It’s about three unhappy 30ish children coming home to their long-divorced mom in Massachusetts suburbia wondering what the chances are that they could “wake up and be the perfect family.”

“Slim to none” seems like the safe answer.

When your only laugh line is uttered by actress Raye Levine to actor Sawyer Spielberg — “I always wished that I was Jewish.” — you have to know you aren’t quite “getting into the Christmas spirit.”

A leaden prologue introduces us to Lucy (Levine), who gets lectured on how “No one likes a Scrooge” over the holidays on the slowest elevator ride in Greater Boston.

She’s going “home” for Christmas, to the small-town Massachusetts where she grew up. Flaky Mom (Susan Gallagher) seems more forgetful than usual. When they get into an argument over Mom leaving a wedding album out to remind Lucy of her failed marriage, they fight.

Lucy and just-flew-in-from-Singapore brother Tim (Daniel Desmaris) wake up to an empty house. Mom is nowhere to be found, unreachable by phone.

Youngest sister Cynthia (Comfort Clinton) is hardly surprised. She’s a hard-driving Chicago lawyer with a fiance and big plans and little patience for her older sister/Mom drama.

Lucy seems the most concerned, but even she — like everybody else — kind of takes Mom disappearing in stride. We don’t need that much-delayed moment of checking the bathroom to see what medications Mom is on to get the drift.

She’s depressed. This is kind of in-character. Her long-divorced husband, a big shot TV host, shows up and confirms that.

By the way? Jovial, upbeat Joel Murray in this part is the life of this listless party.

“Merry Good Enough” is a motion picture of long, static stretches scored with colorless conversations and Christmas carols. We’re treated to a little eggnog dance party montage, a trip to the skating rink, and a stop at the police station — almost as an afterthought — to report a missing person.

There is history in this house and “baggage” in every trip to the store, the rink and that police station.

Levine makes a passable lead, but pairing her up with the neighbor boy (Spielberg), now all grown up and between love affairs, pays zero dividends.

The clumsy plot advances at a crawl, the resolution is nonsensical and a downmarket bar interlude is lame enough to make one long for the pleasures, the stakes and the performances of “The Family Stone” or any of a dozen other imperfect but as least lively and life-affirming holiday movies.

“Merry Good Enough” isn’t even good enough for The Hallmark Channel.

Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Raye Levine, Susan Gallagher, Daniel Desmaris, Comfort Clinton, Sawyer Spielberg, and Joel Murray.

Credits: Directed by Caroline Keene, scripted by Caroline Keene and Dan Kennedy. A Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:37