Movie Nation

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

“Teddy’s Christmas” is a holiday fantasy for children that’s long on charm and light — to the point of “slight” — in entertainment value.

It’s a Norwegian film (“Teddybjørnens jul”) dubbed for the English-speaking market, and now featuring the voice of Shazam himself, Zachary Levi, as a teddy bear determined to see and experience the world, and thus deadset on going home with somebody “loaded.”

But a little girl who sees and hears magical things figures out he’s special and could foil his sugar daddy search.

“This fellow here was sewn for something much bigger and much greater” than going home with a child.

Mariann (Marte Klerck-Nilssen) keeps getting into trouble for imagining trolls and talking snowmen in her corner of Norway. But when she takes a spin at a carny’s “Wheel of Fate” game, she can’t be sure what she’s seeing. She hit the lucky number. Did that rascally classist and golddigging Teddy change the number?

Maybe his pals, the spinning top and toy pig saw him pull that stunt.

As she scrambles to correct this Teddy altering of fate, the bear goes off to a “rich” guy, which is how he finds himself stuck in a chilly barn with a singing, dancing and questioning hedgehog Bolla (Marianne Graffam) who pauses between attempts to get him to join her in a dancing toys production number to check his grooming?

“So soft and fluffy! Do you use conditioner?”

There’s very little here that will hold the attention of anyone older than six. Lots of snow, a little taste of Norway and its holiday traditions. Rice pudding with dinner, but which lucky family member will get “the almond” in their serving?

Santa is discussed, in a childish existential sense (“Is he real?”) and family problems are addressed in comforting, behavior-correcting ways.

But Levi tones down his shtick for this vocal performance (he’s done a lot of voice work in “Tangled,” “Robot Chicken,” “Family Guy,” etc) and thus denies us anything clever or cute to hang onto.

The CGI talking toys are well-done. There’s a little dancing and a bit of ziplining for your tiny tot’s amusement.

But slim pickings at the “family” holiday box office or not, “Teddy’s Christmas” isn’t really the answer to the quality holiday film shortage this season.

Rating: G

Cast: Marte Klerck-Nilssen, Vegard Strand Eide, Mariann Hole, Jan Gunnar Røise and the voices of Marianne Graffam and Zachary Levi.

Credits: Directed by Andrea Eckerbom, scripted by Lars Gudmestad and Harald Rosenløw-Eeg. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:17

Based on a hit novel, coming to Netflix Jan 11.

It takes a few minutes to settle in and figure out just what the hell is going on in “Dark Journey,” a twisty and handsomely-mounted romantic thriller of the espionage variety produced on the eve of World War II.

The somewhat melodramatic World War I story is framed within a stop-and-search episode involving a Dutch coastal freighter/passenger ship and a suspiously-knowing German U-Boat crew. They’re looking for Allied spies living under cover in Sweden, one spy in particular. It’s 1918, and the German officer running the show wants to see more than just the lady’s passport.

As the tale flips back and forth, filling us in on how we got here, we see the intrigues, the wartime “neutral” trips to Paris, the cleverly-disguised maps and secret plans woven into the fabrics of French high fashion, the laborious means of decoding that and signaling, via semaphore, to offshore German agents just what the pretty “Swiss” agent has found out about French war plans.

The German aristocrat, new to Stockholm, appears to be disgraced, a “traitor to the Fatherland” but obviously on some playboy mission to Sweden to figure out the loyalties of Germany’s most beautiful agent.

Can Baron Karl Von Marwitz sell his womanizing reputation to such a degree that he will seem smitten with the fair Madeleine Goddard, dress-seller to the well-dressed and double agent extraordinaire? He’ll have to find a lot of excuses to visit Madeleine’s shop, buying dresses for his increasingly suspicious paramour (Joan Gardner).

“It used to be all girls with no clothes,” his valet gripes. “Now, it’s all clothes and no girls. Pity.”

Vivien Leigh — born Vivian Hartly in British India — was all of 24, a mercurial beauty and heartbreaker at the beginning of her big-screen career. “Gone With the Wind” wasn’t yet on her horizon. Hans Walter Conrad Veidt was 44, a screen legend immortalized in the silent classic “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” who’d emigrated to Britain as the Nazis came to power. He’d already made Germanic villains a specialty, and World War II would see Hollywood call for him to play a role in a “talkies” classic that rivals “Gone with the Wind” as among the most beloved films of all time — “Casablanca.”

World War I veteran Victor Saville, who’d go on to direct “Green Dolphin Street” and a late-career Errol Flynn epic “Kim,” and his British team conjure up intrigues in tony clubs and boutiques of Stockholm and Paris, in German and British intelligence headquarters, give us a glimpse of the French battlefield and settle into a confrontation on the Baltic Sea, all filmed in and around the soundstages of Buckinghamshire, UK.

Soundstaginess notwithstanding, this British production is damned impressive all around, even as we ponder the anachronistic fashions, jazzier-than-it-should-be 1918 nightclub and the peculiar pairing of Leigh with Veidt, who was twenty years her senior.

“So our pretty little dressmaker is a spy! What will people say, an officer of the Kaiser like me and a woman like you, Madeline?”

“They’ll say, the poor girl couldn’t help herself!”

The romance never really clicks for me, but it’s easy to see why this pairing was packaged. Leigh was the very embodiment of a spirited “slip of a girl,” as Madeleine is described here. And British cinema was just a couple of years past that “Women fight for Conrad Veidt” marketing campaign for the expat with the Teutonic accent and a flair for wearing monocles.

Leigh is good at suggesting the fear that’s creeping into Madeleine’s thinking as, even though we never see those who procure the “intelligence” for her elaborate double-agent schemes, we hear of their fates.

There’s a wit, sophistication and edge to this 1937 production that’s largely missing from the Hollywood fare of the early Production Code era. Even the storytelling style, that present-day sea confrontation framework, the way the narrative bounces back and forth from that, the murky ethics of it all and the daring idea of whipping up a love story involving a German spy and an Anglo-French one as the world teetered towards another world war, seems “out there” for its age.

Leigh is radiant and subtle, and Veidt suggests a softening of his Fatherland Uber Alles soldier in his performance that makes this credulous tale credible. And the script, by Lajos Biró and Arthur Wimperis, has all this inventive spycraft — dress pattern maps, semaphore communications to an anchored sailing yacht with a wireless set for signaling Berlin — that adds to the film’s air of knowing sophistication.

Hard to follow or not, strained “relationship” to sell and all, “Dark Journey” is a still a classic whose appeal reaches beyond the cult of “Vivien Leigh completists,” an espionage thriller that might have benefited from The Hitchcock Touch but manages to have its moments even without the Master of Suspense’s input.

Rating: approved

Cast: Vivien Leigh, Conrad Veidt, Joan Gardner, Anthony Bushell, Robert Newton, Philip Ray and Henry Oscar.

Credits: Directed by Victor Saville, scripted by Lajos Biró and Arthur Wimperis. A London Films production, on Roku, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:17

Phylicia Rashad also stars in this dramedy, which Vertical landed (typically the distribute pictures larger studios have passed on) and which opens Dec. 8, streams Dec. 15.

Not a lot of pop or laughs or heart in this trailer. A teensy bit. But not a lot.

What Eddie Murphy has become, presented here without comment. Ahem.

Dec. 1, Amazon Prime Video.

Adam Sandler voices an aged lizard who wants to escape to the Everglades but finds himself dispensing life advice to fifth graders in the classroom where he’s one of the resident pet reptiles in “Leo,” an animated comedy that’s passably animated but generally unfunny.

The life lessons “Call me Leo (not Leonardo), that’s less ‘Ninja Turtley” passes on — often in song — include “You’re not that great” and “Don’t cry, crying’s for weaklings,” which is what passes for “against the grain” parenting these days.

A missing lesson in this film packed with alumni of “Saturday Night Live” and Sandler offspring is that success is about being born to or friends with somebody famous, which is a lot more important than whatever else you learn in fifth grade.

But since one of Sandler’s kids is the stand-out voice performer here, we won’t dwell on the cronyism/nepotism/tribalism that has informed much of career, outside of the odd break from character.

This Netflix production follows Leo and his pal/fifth grade “pet” partner Squirtle the Turtle (Bill Burr) after Leo hears a parent mention the life expectancy of his sort of lizard — 75 years.

Leo’s been in Fort Myers Elementary for 74 years and counting, and he’s facing his mortality, the fact that he never got to see the Everglades and the fact that despite decades in the classroom, he never learned Fort Myers is in Southwest Fla, on the coast, not “Central Florida,” as he says.

He blinks slowly and walks slowly and lives for the bugs fed to him or that cross his tongue’s kill radius in the terrarium he calls home. But now, as a no-nonsense, computer-eschewing, dream-killing “substitute” (Cecily Strong) teacher takes over from the pregnant and popular Mrs. Salinas (Allison Strong), Leo feels his time running out.

The teacher’s determination to teach these kids “discipline” and “responsibility” by getting one to take a classroom animal home each weekend gives Leo his chance. He’ll make a break for it. Then that first self-absorbed chatterbox (Sadie Sandler, on the money) takes him home, accidentally discovers he can talk, and he’s handing out life advice.

Maybe stop talking so much, “ask a question” in conversation and show an interest in somebody else for one. You know, “listen.”

Other kids face “common sense” advice about vanity, insecurity about their looks (being as hairy as dad), their divorcing parents, their practice of bullying, which isn’t making them popular, all sorts of things kids today face.

Even the eyebrow-raising pearls of wisdom are pretty tame. Alas, so are the one-liners, the comic situations and complications and the perils of the “real” Everglades.

The film, with three credited directors and three credited screenwriters, begins with promise as Leo and Squirtle instantly size-up kids’ as “types” on the first day of school — “parents going through divorce,” “first child” in a family (spoiled), born bully, born mean girl, “cheese doodle kid” and the like.

But those insights turn out to be the comic highlights of the picture, with “Mother of Godzilla!” par for the course among the punchlines, and the animation only occasionally crossing the line from static to slapshticky.

Sandler fans will find more to cling to here than I did, as I long ago lost all patience for his lazy brand of “moron” comedy packed with cronies and relatives. Sandler trying on a funny voice that isn’t funny, and then singing in it isn’t exactly “new.” What’s novel about it is how he’s lost the knack for inventing amusing, offbeat characters and funny things for them to say (he co-wrote the script) or sing.

Rating: PG, innuendo, bits of “rude humor”

Cast: The voices of Adam Sandler, Bill Burr, Cecily Strong, Allison Strong, Jason Alexander, assorted Sandler children and that Schneider fellow.

Credits: Directed by Robert Marianetti, Robert Smigel and David Wachtenheim, scripted by Robert Smigel, Adam Sandler and Paul Sado. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

Medical experiments that are revealed just as World War II is ending, with a tortured humans and “creatures” as their results.

You could call this a series, seeing as how this 1945 Korean Dec. 22 and Jan. 5.

Let’s label it a movie in two parts. It looks intriguing, and looks to be another way of Korea reminding the world what the Japanese did to the people there.

This 2024 series looks like yet another variation on a “galaxy far away” theme, sort of a “Guardians” and “Firefly” riff — without laughs.

Jude Law leads a cast of…kids?

Too old, too tall, too American, too introverted and mumbly to be a mesmirizing leader of men and commanding presence at court, perhaps your first thoughts on hearing about a new big screen “Napoleon” were “Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon Bonaparte? LOL.”

I know mine were. The new Ridley Scott movie didn’t really disabuse me of that prejudice, either.

As a screen subject, “Napoleon” foiled Stanley Kubrick and sorely challenged anybody else who took a shot at rendering the emperor/conqueror in a big screen epic.

He’s been played by Brando and Rod Steiger, Herbert Lom, Claude Rains, Tom Burke, Daniel Auteuil and Armand Assante among others. Few register.

Ian Holm got two cracks at making Bonaparte an object of fun, as a whimsically grumpy commander who loved people (dwarves) shorter than himself in “Time Bandits” and an even grumpier exile in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

Scott’s magnum opus is a collection of red letter dates in Bonaparte’s rise and fall, a couple of brilliantly realized set-piece battles, and the big love story that is a part of the man’s myth.

We see his cold-bloodedness, his cruel calculus and flashes of ego.

But do we learn anything about the man who brought public education, The Napoleonic Code and measurement standardization to Europe, used science to govern, a dictator whose arrival promised to end European nobility and the class structure that benefited from monarchies and winner-take-all economies? Do we glimpse the potential greatness which prompted Beethoven to compose his “Eroica” symphony for the young commoner who promised to bring down the kings?

No. We get instead a bit of a pot-bellied slob, with Phoenix’s costumes somewhat less custom-fit than most of his co-stars. We get the petulance and the ego.

“You think you’re so great because you have BOATS,” he bitches about the British.

What we’re treated to is very much an Englishman’s idea of Napoleon, gauche and common and bloodthirsty and callous, two and a half hours of that. Scott has announced that the film will be over four hours long when it transitions to Apple TV+. Yay.