Movie Nation

“Reviewing” entails watching a movie, taking notes on it and then using those notes and your memory, your tastes, your idea of touchstone performances, screenplays, directing, editing and production design, to form an opinion of the film and its many components.

But that model kind of goes to pieces — or at least gets a thorough shaking — when you’re plowing all the way through the film and asking yourself “What the hell is going on?” and “What the hell is this about?”

So once again, we doff our hat to the Dutch master of misdirection, Alex van Warmerdam. The director of “Borgman” and “Schneider vs. Bax” lures us into “Nr. 10,” makes us ponder everything from what the title means to a beyond-abrupt third act turn that had me jotting down “Wait, what the hell just happened?” And then he leaves us with one of the more delightfully nasty shots at The Mother Church ever filmed.

I am sorely tempted to simply repeat my blurb for my review of “Borgman” and leave this at that.

“Maddeningly inscrutable, but it gets away with not playing by the rules. Somehow.”

“Nr. 10” breaks even more rules, most importantly the one in which we expect our screen storyteller to “play fair.” It’s not remotely as visceral an experience as “Borgman,” probably not as cerebral, either. It’s certainly more frustrating and less satisfying.

The opening acts are about a new play being rehearsed and kind of coming to pieces as it does.

Leading man Günter (Tom Dewispelaere) is somewhat at odds with distracted, older co-star Marius (Pierre Bokma). We’d feel sorry for Marius, who can’t remember his lines, because Günter and director Karl (Hans Kesting) are messing around with the blocking to put poor Marius in one “inferior” and submissive (overshadowed) position on stage after another. But we’ve seen Marius dismiss his dangerously sick wife’s concerns at being left at home alone.

Acting is a profession that lures the self-absorbed, and amplifies that absorption, after all.

Then we note that leading lady Isabel (Anniek Pheifer) has told her director/husband she needs alone time for “preparation,” and that’s she’s staying elsewhere until opening night. Turns out, she’s motor-scootering straight into Günter’s bed.

And self-involved Günter wants to keep this selfish affair from everyone, especially his adult daughter Lizzy (Frieda Barnhard), for reasons we can’t quite figure out.

Get used to that feeling. It’s van Warmerdam’s calling card.

Marius is about to up the stakes in his war with Günter by telling Karl what’s going on. Karl starts to spy on Isabel. Lizzy is following her dad around to see what Günter is up to.

Karl proceeds to sabotage his own absurdist play, yanking lines to punish this player and perhaps reward that one.

“There are no parts any more, just lines,” he declares (in Dutch with English subtitles). “It’s not a play, it’s a collage…an abstract collage without logic!”

The cast panics.

And there’s a spy in the company who is reporting back to this sports-addicted Catholic bishop (Dirk Böhling) who seems to want to know everything about everyone in this stage fiasco-in-the-making. He is pulling strings to manipulate one and all in service of some grand scheme that, as the headline to this review suggests, has more than a whiff of Kurt Vonnegut about it.

If you react to how this backstage backbiting builds towards something, and then is suddenly abandoned, with a “You have got to be kidding me,” you won’t be the first.

Warmerdam isn’t so much building a puzzle that he’ll solve, or invite us to solve, as grafting two wholly-formed, partly over-lapping long short films together and daring us to make sense of it all.

The third act’s turn towards theological debate seems utterly illogical, no matter how much about a character’s true past is explained and back-engineered. Mysterious strangers whispering mysterious words in your ear is nothing you want to burn through bandwidth on if you’re being forced to learn all new lines with opening night rushing at you so fast you’re sure to snap.

The theater scenes are so cleverly conceived — theater companies are notorious for such “Noises Off” shenanigans — and so well-acted that the film can only become a disappointment when this setting and story thread are abandoned.

As much as I like the challenge van Warmerdam’s satiric experiments always are, including this 1992 film I got into earlier this year, I found “Nr. 10” less coherent and much less satisfying than anything of his that I’ve seen.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Tom Dewispelaere, Frieda Barnhard, Hans Kesting, Anniek Pheifer, Dirk Böhling, and Mandela Wee Wee

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alex van Warmerdam. A Drafthouse release.

Running time: 1:39

“EO” is an odd animal’s life odyssey that takes the point of view of its mute, occasionally-braying title character, a donkey. It’s a picaresque adventure never far from the dark shadow that hangs over domesticated animals in the service of humans.

Mistreatment, abuse and even death are often the grim realities of their short lives.

This Cannes award winner makes for a fine curtain call for its 84 year-old filmmaker, Polish writer-director Jerzy Skolimowski, still best known outside of Poland for his 1982 Polish emigres in Britain drama “Moonlighting.” He and his camera crew take a shot at seeing what a donkey would see, and letting the viewer imagine donkey memories, donkey depression and donkey reasoning as they do.

If 2022 is the year of cute donkeys in the movies, “The Banshees of Inisherin” probably takes the prize for the cutest. But as with that film, “cute” is no guarantee of a happy life, a treasured life or a particularly kid-friendly film, which this most certainly isn’t.

We meet EO in strobing darkness, an attraction of the tiny Cyrk Orion, a Polish circus where he is his co-star Kassandra’s (Sandra Drzymalska) pride and joy. But in between shows under the big top, EO is a draft animal used to haul scrap by a cruel Polish carny struggling to supplement his income.

And then the circus goes bankrupt and the animals are sold off. Just like that, EO’s torn from his performing mistress and packed off, staring out the window of the equine hauler at the thoroughbreds cavorting in vast pastures.

EO has landed in a great situation, or so we think. But all the animals work — horses training for equestrian events and shows day and night, rarely cavorting, mostly confined to a big stable and training facility. One wrong move by EO, who is used for both draft work and calming the skittish show horses, and he’s sent off again — this time to a sanctuary farm/petting zoo where donkey trail rides are part of his duties.

Skolimowski emphasizes several things about domesticated animals’ existence in “EO,” among them the drudgery of routine and the pull of memory. EO still dreams of Kassandra.

Before this tale is done, EO will be rescued from a horse and donkey “meat wagon” and exact revenge on an employee at a fur farm. He will heeHAW at just the right moment to throw a soccer match, and be lauded by one team’s players and brutally abused by the losers.

“EO” has a message, and it’s somewhat bleak and generally told in a decidedly oblique fashion. There is a linear narrative, but it is filled with blips and gaps, as if the donkey doesn’t exactly remember how he ended up in the hands of a murderer or waking up in a large animal veterinary hospital.

Seemingly random images — upside down shots of night skiing — break the spell that this is a donkey’s eye-view of his life and Europe today. A third act spent briefly in the company of Isabella Huppert seems more a distraction than a source of essential truths. Nevertheless, this film is quite affecting and touching at times.

The earlier films this downbeat drama brings to mind are “White God,” a Hungarian drama about a girl separated from her dog, Spielberg’s adaptation of “War Horse,” the Turkish street dog documentary “Stray,” Andrea Arnold’s revelatory and myopic documentary “Cow” or going much further back, Robert Bresson’s donkey’s life tale “Au Hazard Balthazar.”

All of these films, even the ones that allow for sentiment, impress upon us the inconvenient truths about human/animal relationships. Anderson Cooper’s dog may love him, but at the end of the day, this co-dependency cuts both ways only because we insist that it does, until it’s no longer “practical.” And then the relationship, the commitment and even one of the two lives involved ends, or is ended.

Rating: unrated, violence, animal cruelty

Cast: Sandra Drzymalska, Michal Przybyslawski, Lorenzo Zurzolo and Isabelle Huppert

Credits: Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, scripted by Ewa Piaskowska and Jerzy Skolimowski. A Janus Films release.

Running time:

Scrawny, cadaverous and creepy, actor Javier Botet has graced many a chilling moment in Hollywood horror films — “The Mummy” and “It” and “Conjuring 2” among them. The man has a marketable “look.”

But he achieves something like a break-out performance in a film shot and set in his native Spain. “Amigo” is a simple, chilling and sometimes grimly-amusing two-handed thriller directed and co-written by Óscar Martín, a video game and short film veteran finally making his feature directing debut. Its a film whose minimalism only heightens its suspense and narrows and sharpens the focus of its intensity.

A long, mostly dialogue-free opening shows us David (David Pareja) patiently loading his broken and emaciated friend Javi out of his old Fiat and into a wheelchair. It’s 1980 or thereabouts, and David has taken in his paralyzed childhood “amigo.”

It takes a while to establish that Javi is in this state due to an accident. It takes almost as long for us to figure out if he can speak. Even the visiting physical therapist (Patricia Estremera) has a hard time getting a peep out of him.

How noble of David to take him in, we think. How loyal he must be, accepting this responsibility and burden. I mean, sure, he can still carry on his affair with a married paramour. But David’s plainly giving up a lot, devoting himself to caring for this friend who could die soon, or could linger for years and years.

As the physical therapy kicks in, David locates a bell Javi can ring when he needs to go to the bathroom or wants something to eat or drink.

But the bell, the halting “You don’t get it, I want to die” (in Spanish with English subtitles), the Christmas blizzard that shuts down David’s supply of the pills that keep him sane, all merely set the table for the suspense to come.

And when it comes, who will turn out to be the more paranoid? Who will wonder if the other is faking paraplegia or faking sincere “caring,” and who will wonder if the supernatural is involved?

The chills are limited to the odd creepy moment — a passing shadow glimpsed out of the corner of your eye, when you think you’re the only person on your feet here, creaking floorboards in a remote country house, a bell that might be ringing by itself.

Botet and Pareja, who co-wrote this, play up the mistrust and the uncertainty in characters who have conflicting story arcs, each beginning at one point and evolving towards the other character’s starting point of view.

The surprises here aren’t that surprising, any more than the film’s tensest moment, which is brilliantly excruciating and beautifully shot and edited.

That helps the simple, understated “Amigo” achieve a jolt or two and a laugh or three as it takes us into the darker corners of guilt, revenge, friendship and commitment.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, nudity, sex

Cast: Javier Botet, David Pareja

Credits: Directed by Óscar Martín, scripted by
Óscar Martín, Javier Botet, David Pareja. A Dekanalog release.

Running time: 1:23

Top tip for watching “Lesson Plan (Plan lekcji),” a new thriller available on Netflix in its original Polish (with subtitles) or dubbed into English. Don’t look away from the screen to check your phone or dash into the kitchen for a snack.

You won’t miss a fight, considering how long these brawls are. But you won’t know how it started.

Our hero, the undercover cop nicknamed Jiu Jitsu (Piotr Witkowski), is always getting into scrapes — jumped at the liquor store, intervening when some homophobes pick on a lesbian couple at a bar. Some of the punchouts are to be expected. After all, he’s on the illegal fentanyl beat. But even after he takes on a job as a high school history teacher, he’s tested. And tested again.

The “measly history teacher” is always taunted. And he’s always ready with a come-back. “You’re about to BE history!”

“You hit like a WOMAN!” “Clearly, we know DIFFERENT women!”

Yes, what we have here is a straight-up B-picture, the “plot” an excuse for getting into the next fight, and then the next one, the brawls always pausing for pithy one-liners and the fighting staged at fight-choreographer 3/4 speed.

But it’s got a few laughs, and the fights are fun if a tad telegraphed.

Our hero is outed as undercover, wholly capable of beating and shooting his way out of that jam, but not in time to save his wife. He crawls into a bottle, only to crawl back out when his high school teacher brother (Marcin Bosak) is murdered, possibly framed for being his school’s one-man fentanyl food chain.

He will be the “measly history teacher” at problematic Jan Sobieski High, the worst of the worst high schools, where bullying and drugs and shakedowns are on the curriculum, and the teachers and administrators all but helpless in the face of all this.

Jiu Jitsu, who has to go by Damian — his real name — tries to comfort his enraged nephew, a student there and a kid who knows his dad tried to get uncle Damian to help before he was killed. Damian also starts laying down the law to the bullies and goons who roam the halls and starts looking out for the cute fellow teacher (Roma Gasiorowska) who finds herself caught between students and drug dealers and gangsters and this history teacher who isn’t above teaching his students a little self-defense while quoting that historical figure Bruce Lee.

It’s a slick looking film, even if its plot points and “surprises” are as obvious as the low-speed head-butts, punches and kicks we see coming from a mile off.

Witkowski, a supporting player stepping into his first leading man role, has charisma to burn and decent comic timing — for the one-liners — and is more credible in the fights than the fights themselves. If he gets the handle on fight choreography — fighting at full speed in future films — he could be Poland’s Jason Statham.

Not a bad goal, because that from Portland to Portugal to Pyonyang, B-movie action pics play.

Rating: TV-MA, nonstop violence, drug content

Cast: Piotr Witkowski, Marcin Bosak, Roma Gasiorowska

Credits: Directed by Daniel Markowicz, scripted by Daniel Bernardi. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

If you like your horror movies slasher-graphic and Ancient Greece demonic, has Shudder got a thriller for you.

Well-cast, cleverly plotted and just psychological and suspenseful enough, “A Wounded Fawn”is a serial killer thriller with an art world setting and a delicious comeuppance via carnage payoff.

It’s a bit slow in the later going, but Travis Stevens’ (“Girl on the Third Floor”) latest film works on several levels, due in no small part for a good cast that buys in completely.

An art auction ends with this disturbing perhaps-ancient Greek statue of some lesser deities not going to the guy who really, really wanted it.

But Bruce (Josh Ruben) is determined to get it, for “my client,” so he says. That’s why he followed highbidder (also by proxy) Kate (Malin Barr) home. Nothing at all creepy about that, or about Bruce’s twitchy, touchy vibe.

Bruce makes an offer, Kate drives a harder bargain, but eventually they reach a deal and she invites him in. That’s the last invitation she ever proffers.

Bruce is into art and artsy women and this statue, perhaps, in particular. And after this first murder, we see that he gets his jollies is “Psycho” sexual ways. How long before he gets the urge to “meet” another woman in art?

Meredith (Sarah Lind) is just getting over a breakup so bad it put her in therapy. But this weekend, she’s informed her BFFs, she’s about to get some. No, the friends don’t get to meet this guy until she decides if he’s worth their meeting.

When her paramour shows up at her place in a 1980s Mercedes for their trip to his tony, art-filled cabin-in-the-woods, our alarm bells go off for us — it’s Bruce — and she starts hearing disembodied female voices of warning.

“Get OUT of there!”

The effects — visions of an owl demon and dead women, bloody injuries caused by Bruce’s ancient Greek fist-maul — are simple and modestly effective. The entire enterprise has a trippy look and feel — darkness, fleeting images in the shadows, grisly injuries and demonic assaults and lots of close-ups and extreme close-ups of what is happening, and to whom.

It’s the players who make this, with Ruben, whom you might recognize from the movie “Plan B” or a couple of little-seen sketch comedy series, making a vile but almost funny psychopath, the sort who sees himself as a victim of what he does.

The Canadian Lind and Swedish-born Barr are also in the more-familiar-looking-than-famous category in their careers, but both buy in to the trauma they’re suddenly confronted with and build instant empathy as the real “victims” here, women we hope can fight back or at least find their revenge.

This isn’t “Babadook” alarming or “Barbarian” suspenseful, and it never quite overcomes the limited budget, which makes its tone all the more impressive despite the remove it creates between antagonists and the viewer. But it works, it gurgles and it bleeds out, right on queue, which is exactly what we come to want and expect it to do.

Rating: unrated, graphic, bloody violence

Cast: Sarah Lind, Josh Ruben, Malin Barr

Credits: Directed by Travis Stevens, scripted by Travis Stevens and Nathan Faudree. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:31

Of course, the QUADRUPLE threat who just passed WON her Oscar for writing a song, not acting in a film, singing in a film and dancing in a film. She co-wrote the lyrics to “What a Feeling.”

When you’re forced to serve up cinematic cheese, a certain enthusiasm in the performance can atone for some of the sins of the screenplay.

That’s the nice way to get into “Fantasy Football,” a kids’ movie about a tech nerd/gamer teen who accidentally rescues her dad’s NFL career, thanks to her mad Madden skillz and a timely lightning strike. It may be cheese, but it’s cheerfully served.

“Black-ish” starlet Marsai Martin plays Kayla, an only child who’s grown up in pro-baller affluence, but pro-baller rootlessness as well. Her dad, the running back Bobby Coleman, once won the Heisman trophy. But he and his well-traveled family have spent twelve years with his journeyman NFL career prone to fumbles, a runner who has “lost a step” in the parlance of TV broadcast booth announcers like Jim Nantz and Tony Romo (as themselves).

But maybe “The Dirty Birds,” aka The Atlanta Falcons, will be different and Kayla and her mom (Kelly Rowland) can finally settle for a while. It’s just that while Bobby (Omari Hardwick, terrific) may have the will, the body and the team know he’s lost “the way.”

“Practice squad” money will keep them in their Buckhead McMansion, but the writing’s on the wall for Bobby, second stringer to the new “star” — the cocky kid Anderson Fisher (Rome Flynn).

Bobby, getting the “You think I’m done (when) I’m just getting started” vibe from his wife, is 30something and bitter.

“That man has the life we were supposed to have,” he complains. Fat contracts, endorsements, fame and the starting job all went to Fisher.

If only he was as nimble as he is on “Madden.” If only nimble-fingered Kayla was controlling his moves on the field, and his end-zone dances after scoring.

One lightning strike that connects Bobby, Kayla and a new copy of the Madden NFL game later, that’s exactly what happens.

The big theme here is selfish parents figuring out it’s supposed to be “all about the kids,” knowing how to let your child have the spotlight and shimmer in it. Because Kayla could be the star designer on a championship high school robotics team. Only she’s burning through Sundays, one Monday night and one Thursday a season running her dad all over the field — controlling him with her game controller.

Elijah Richardson plays the sassy boy on that robotics team who has our girl’s eye, with the other students a collection of colorful or colorless “types.”

Director Anton Cropper, who knows Martin (who produced this) from directing “Black-ish,” gets decent performances out of the off-the-field moments, and he and Hardwick (“Nobody’s Fool,” “American Skin’) have fun making a mockery of the game on the gridiron.

The pacing is entirely too slow to have the Kayla, sprinting between robot battles and her home gaming station (or PC in a closet at school) running Dad’s football frolic play as quick and funny.

There’s no pop or rage to the younger running back’s suspicions about how the old man in the lineup suddenly started out shining him.

And there aren’t more than a couple of laughs mixed in with a couple of legitimately sweet interludes in “Fantasy Football,” when all’s said and done.

But everybody involved puts a cheerful face on things and makes this kids’ film endurable, if not quite passable entertainment.

Rating: PG

Cast: Marsai Martin, Omari Hardwick, Kelly Rowland, Rome Flynn and Elijah Richardson

Credits: Directed by Anton Cropper, scripted by Zoe Marshall, Daniel Gurewitch and David Young. A Paramount+ release.

Running time: 1:39

The characters are always alone and lonely, the leads are always lovely but bland, the settings snowy and the “secrets” nothing to summon gentleman detective Benoit Blanc over.

But holiday romances of the Hallmark school — a market Netflix has gone after with a vengeance — make for scenic cinematic comfort food at this time of year. Never spicy, rarely surprising, they’re romance novels sprinkled with tinsel and filmed in a flash, every one of them.

That includes “The Noel Diary,” a pleasant (ish) nothing from a director decades removed from his “Baby Boom/Father of the Bride/Parent Trap” heyday. Charles Shyer, who co-wrote this with a Netflix house hack (“Dangerous Lies”) blows too many of his shots at “charming,” never quite nails down the “romance” and dithers away the “mystery” in this flavorless variation on formula.

Justin Hartley, a bit player promoted to stardom via “This is Us,” is Jake Turner, our hunky, perma-stubbled star novelist pretty enough to be a romance novel cover model. He fends off flirts at his very-popular book signings with “got to get home to Ava.”

And who wouldn’t? Ava’s his beautiful Australian Shepherd, friendly and wise and almost smart enough to drive his vintage Land Rover, which is how Jake gets to and from his modernist McMansion in the Woods.

Jake’s rugged. You can tell by the stubble.

The cliched call-from-a-lawyer is how he learns his mother has died. Nothing for it but to motor out to Connecticut, tidy up her affairs and deal with her “hoarding.”

By the way, if you’ve ever dealt with a hoarder or watched TV’s “Hoarders,” let’s just say “Noel Diary” gives us a (that label again) “Hallmark version” of this illness.

Jake was estranged from his mother. Loner Jake is big on “estranged.”

But his mother’s pleasant longtime neighbor (Bonnie Bedelia, in fine form) gives him encouragement. And there’s this strange, beautiful woman staring at him from across the street. It turns out she has a connection to this house. Rachel, played by Barrett Doss of the Chadwick Boseman Supreme Court bio-pic “Marshall” and TV’s “Station 19,” is looking for a woman who used to work for Jake’s family.

That woman was their nanny. As we’ve heard this nanny reading from her diary in voice-over, we know that young woman was pregnant. And Rachel, as it turns out, is the daughter she had and gave up for adoption at 17.

No, Jake doesn’t remember the nanny. But a little sympathy and a hint of attraction means he’ll take Rachel out to dinner and send the dog to chase her car down the street when he has a belated idea about “someone who might know” as Rachel is driving away.

By the way, the smart dog chasing the Prius is the highlight of the movie.

As the snows settle in and the holidays loom, just-engaged-Rachel finds herself spending a lot of time on this quest with rich, famous and handsome Jake as we discover how many languages she speaks, tragic things about his past and whether or not she’s about to marry the right guy.

It’s so hard to approach stories like this with a fresh set of eyes and directorial enthusiasm, so it’s almost understandable that Shyer would brush past the various steps in the holiday romance recipe in a sort of “get on with it” regimen.

He blows the “meet cute,” and perfunctorily drops the elusive “diary” right into our laps because he and his fellow screenwriter can’t be bothered to make that a “Eureka” moment, or even an emotional one.

James Remar is brought in as the father Jake is also estranged from. Even though he’s built a career, from “The Warriors” and “48 Hrs.” onward, out of characters with edge and bite, there’s nothing remotely interesting about this sappy detour into syrup country.

The leads don’t have much in the way of chemistry, save that which can be almost manufactured with close-ups and sympathetic editing.

Shyer and co-writer David Golden don’t give Rachel any real romantic “choice” here — as her fiance is only glimpsed in a Facetime call. Once. All we learn from that is that she might be “settling” for a guy who “complements” her, and that she might leave one white guy for another white guy.

Shocking.

Not as shocking as noticing that fourth stringer critics from the New York Times and LA Times endorsed this room-temp treacle as something worth watching. But perhaps they’re new to the genre.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Justin Hartley, Barrett Doss, Bonnie Bedelia and James Remar.

Credits: Directed by Charles Shyer, scripted by David Golden and Charles Shyer. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

There have been several films titled “Girl with a Gun” or something very near that.

It’s catchy, alliterative and tells you what you think you need to know in just a couple of words.

There’s an attractive younger woman, and something in her life has forced, caused or tempted her into picking up a gun and taking matters into her own hands.

The title also builds in expectations, of pistol packing mayhem, epic shootouts, maybe a female-with-firearms learning curve.

That’s where this latest “Girl with a Gun,” written and directed by Kevin M. White, filmed and set in Louisiana, lets us down.

It’s got the beautiful young woman — Ronni Hawk, an alumna of the girl-growing up TV series “Stuck in the Middle.” We meet her at the firing range (in a different hair color), riddling a male target’s crotch with her pistol.

But it’s pretty bad, right from the start. The non-actors with her at the range don’t know how to marvel at her accuracy, or amusingly act intimidated by it. Nothing else is done with the scene — no compliments, crude come-ons, zilch.

That’s followed by a non-actor/ bad-actor packed argument, threat and pick-up vs. ATV chase involving a lot of shooting by guys who never hit what they’re shooting at. The ATV hurtles down a road, and never is used to its get-away advantage, OFF road.

Our practice range princess, Tomi (Hawk) then gets a call at her job tending bar in (I guess) New Orleans. Momma’s shot Daddy, then shot herself. As we’ve seen the threats and the murderously corrupt local sheriff (John Swider) already, we know better.

Writer-director White then proceeds to dawdle and fritter away the next hour on an emotion-free “sad” homecoming, dull reconnecting with assorted locals — the family friend (Ben Martin Williams) who called her with the bad news, the drawling neighbor who brings over “my world famous” hot dish, the loyal employee (Jeremy London) in the family crawdad business, assorted toughs.

The setting promises “bayou” but never gets that swampy.

And the big finale isn’t so much shoot-outs as executions with the bad guys getting the drop on our shorts-and-belly-shirted leading lady time after time and miraculously never finishing the job. It’s as if our filmmaker, like his villains, gets lost in his dreamy leading lady and forgets to TCB.

You make a promise when you title your movie “Girl with a Gun.” That’s a promise this version of that title never keeps.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Ronni Hawk, Jeremy London, Ben Martin Williams, John Swider and Armando Leduc

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kevin M. White. A Tubi release.

Running time: 1:24

“The Swimmers” is an old-fashioned against-all-odds sports drama set against the dramatic backdrop of Europe’s Middle Eastern refugee crisis. Director and co-writer Sally El Hosaini makes this conventionally unconventional “feel good” story of the Mardini sisters‘ trials and triumphs entertaining, if perhaps not nearly as dramatic as their real experiences.

Sarah Mardini and younger sister Yusra were upper middle class Syrians trained by their swimmer dad to seek Olympic glory.

“You aren’t a true athlete unless your aim is the Olympics,” he lectures them (in Arabic and English).

Sarah (Manal Issa) may be older, but Yusra (Nathalie) is the one where the family’s true hopes lie. Dad never made it to the Olympics, because, well, there’s a reason Syria isn’t known for swimmers. Lack of water, mainly.

But they train and compete and share the occasional “I HATE you,” because they’re sisters. Bossy, independent Sarah ducks out of Yusra’s “surprise” birthday party — after ruining the surprise — to watch online videos of The Arab Spring coming to Syria. It’s 2011.

It takes a while this turmoil to devolve into civil war, and to touch the Mardinis. An air raid interrupts one of their meets, with a small bomb landing right in the pool, mid-race.

Luckily, it doesn’t explode.

The good life in secular Damascus is over, and the family starts planning their escape. Dad’s priority is getting the two oldest children into Europe. Because OLYMPICS. He gets together cash, and their DJ cousin Nizar (Ahmed Malek) is convinced to escort them to Germany, where they hope to work the system to get the rest of their family out.

The most fascinating third of the film is their long, tortuous escape, by plane and bus, boat and car and truck and foot, hiring one sketchy “coyote” after another, facing arrest, deportation, rape and/or death at sea, and not in that order.

The dread El Hosaini builds into their boat crossing ordeal is real edge-ofyour-seat suspense filmmaking. Just as interesting are the ways these tests reveal the sisters’ characters.

Sarah is a born leader, assertive, compassionate and organized. Yusra is faster in the water, but more of a follower.

The film’s third act puts them in Germany, stateless, longing to get into the pool and fulfill their father’s dreams. Matthias Schweighöfer plays a young coach who reverses his quick dismissal to take an interest in their plight and take them on.

That’s a pleasant over-arching theme of this formulaic film. Greeks may be unwelcoming as their coast is overrun with undocumented foreigers, and Hungarians downright alarming. But kind, helpful people from country after country stood up and pitched-in when millions of Syrians and others from the Middle East and Africa flooded north in the 2010s and a modern crisis — conflict and climate-change driven — was born.

The Issa sisters, both seasoned performers, make these young woman plucky and convincingly athletic, to say nothing of the sibling rivalry that requires no real acting. The real Mardinis, like their actress counterparts, are beautiful young women and one wonders what the film does not — how much of a role their telegenic qualities played into their attention and refugee-status “stardom.”

And their tougher real-life stories don’t necessarily correspond to the film’s convenient and upbeat stopping point. But with her second feature — after the British street gang thriller “My Brother the Devil” — the Welsh-Egyptian filmmaker Hosaini proves you don’t have to film in Hollywood to cook up a decent “Hollywood Ending.”

Rating: PG-13, sexual assault, combat

Cast: Nathalie Issa, Manal Issa, Matthias Schweighöfer, Ali Suliman and Ahmed Malek

Credits: Directed by Sally El Hosaini, scripted by Jack Thorne and Sally El Hosaini. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:16