Movie Nation

For everyone who has been waiting waiting waiting for a dark and glib French take on “Les anges de Charlie,” here it is, a flippant and somewhat blood-spattered star vehicle for four French leading ladies titled “Wingwomen.”

Director and star Mélanie Laurent picked up on the “La Femme Nikita/Thelma & Louise” elements of the comic book by  Jérôme Mulot and Bastien Vives and ran with it for this long and sleek French exercise in action heroines with attitude.

It’s a heist picture that skips over almost everything about the “heists,” a thriller content that always feels as though the stakes are absurdly low. Its trigger-woman, Alex (Adèle Exarchopoulos) shoots down drones with a pistol and downs “civilians” with her never-misses tranquilizer dart gun.

But when it comes to revenge, it’s “full metal jacket” time — kill-shots galore, delivered by a silenced sniper rifle. And when it comes to a finale, well, no climax would be complete without a throw-away-the-last-whiff-of-integrity anti-climax.

We meet Carole (Laurent, of “Inglourious Basterds,” “Beginners” and “Now You See Me”) as she’s finishing a Swiss “job.” She escapes the killer drones thanks to her easily-distracted, always-lovelorn wingwoman/wheelwoman/trigger-woman (Exarchaopolous was in “Blue is the Warmest Color”).

Distracted Alex can’t hit her droning targets until bestie Carole tells her to “think of Karim,” the guy who just dumped her by text.

So yeah, it’s like that.

They’re in the employ of The Godmother, a ruthless, sunglassed tyrant (screen legend Isabelle Adjani of “Camille Claudel”) who likes taking meetings in an emptied revival house cinema.

“You’re my masterpiece,” she tells Carole, which isn’t a compliment. It’s a threat. Carole is ready to “get out.” And that’s not allowed. She doesn’t mention the fact that she’s just found out she’s pregnant, because it wouldn’t help. Godmother is ruthless.

Attempts to lay low in a stealth-tech forest hideaway end in mayhem, so there’s nothing for it but to agree to that “final job.”

They’ll need to consult planner/go-between Abner (Philippe Katherine). Alex will want to flirt with the Corsican gun-dealer/supplier (Félix Moati) of their Corsican art gallery heist.

“I just love...penetration.”

And they’ll need a better getaway driver than Alex. The something and someone Alex comes to resent is named Sam (Manon Bresch).

As a director, Laurent and her screenwriters choose to skip over many of the conventions of the genre — “training” aspiring Formula 1 driver Sam to shoot and handle herself on a “job,” the “jobs” themselves.

The one heist we see has a film production element to it, which is lazy and adds nothing to the proceedings.

The idea here is to focus on the fights and the zingers. Alex gets all the best lines, such as when a possible “menage a trois” turns into a brawl.

“Wanna take a break?” she taunts her foe (in French or dubbed into English). “Wanna call your mommy?”

The eccentric touches added to the characters are kind of fun, but even they have a played-out air. Tightly-executed or not, there’s a blandness to the action beats, a dullness to the messaging (“It’s not what you do, it’s who you do it with.”) and a general disconcern with logic — a stand-off over payment for their opening act job ends with Carole inexplicably leaving without that payment — and a disinterest in wrapping this up with a decent drop the mike moment.

It’s slick and scenic and the stars wear their black robber unitards with French elan. But “Wingwomen” never adds up to the sum of its parts, no matter how many are added to it.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, nudity, smoking, profanity

Cast: Mélanie Laurent, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Manon Bresch, Philippe Katerine and Isabelle Adjani

Credits: Directed by Mélanie Laurent, scripted by Cédric Anger and Christophe Deslandes, inspired by the comic book by Jérôme Mulot and Bastien Vives. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55

“Your Lucky Day” is a somewhat hackneyed B-movie about the violence that a big lottery ticket unleashes in a small New York convenience store.

It stumbles into its inciting incident and drifts through some pitiless and bloody violence before taking a turn towards modestly interesting as the characters settle into “We need to think this over/What’s our story?”

IAnd it’s notable for being the final film of promising young actor Angus Cloud, who died of an overdose this past summer. The “Euphoria” actor’s final film is a solid piece of work and a sad coda to a life and career cut short by his own misadventures.

Cloud plays Sterling, a street dealer soft enough to get himself mugged by a couple of bougie teens — he won’t pull the trigger to stop them — but who makes the rash decision to rob a well-heeled racist (Spencer Garrett) who’s celebrated his “Mega Ball” winning ticket a little too loudly in the bodega.

That endangers the bluff, blowhard winner, the store owner (Mousa Hussein Kraish), the ice-cream eating pregnant couple (Jessica Garza and Elliot Knight) and the cop (Sterling Beauman) who just stopped by to use the bathroom.

One shootout later, there’s a dead victim, a “cop down,” and a lot of working-the-problem to do for our impulsive, armed idiot and the three people he has under a gun and making him wonder “What’s your story” going to be?

Writer-director Dan Brown, expanding a “comic” short film of the same title that he made over a dozen years ago, trots out tropes and complications of the most cynical and even sinister variety here. Human nature and human decency are tested. We’re a long way from “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” so lower those expectations for “noble” character behavior.

The action is well-staged, shot and edited, and the acting is uniformly good. But the plotting is somewhat eye-rolling and the pacing uncertain and slow. There are characters, agendas, bursts of violence and a somewhat overreaching “add characters for the third act” that has to be shoved into 88 or so minutes, and it isn’t handled all that gracefully.

It’d be great to be able to say that young Angus Cloud’s final, ironically-titled film underscores the tragedy of his untimely death. But irony or not, the mixed bag that is “Your Lucky Day” just isn’t good enough to use as an epitaph.

Rating: R, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Angus Cloud, Jessica Garza, Mousa Hussein Kraish, Elliot Knight, Sterling Beauman, Jason O’Mara and Spencer Garrett

Credits: Scripted and directed by Dan Brown. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:29

Musical cliches are a rich part of any sports movie’s appeal, especially a formulaic comedy like “Next Goal Wins.”

The chunky team needs to train to get in shape? A little Dolly Parton and “Nine to Five.”

And then there’s this curio served up during “The Big Game,” music meant to convey the first glimmers of hope, players finally “getting it.”

It’s not The Allman Brothers’ original version, on the most famous cover of it, by Molly Hatchet.

It is Buddy Miles‘ 1970 take on “Dreams.”

A musical mainstay of the ’60s, member of Jimi’s Band of Gypsies, and a guy remembered on the soundtrack of a quirky sports comedy about soccer on American Samoa.

Has the Marvel Studios team lost its mojo? Have comic book movies finally oversaturated the market (all over Disney TV, etc.) and jumped the shark? Run their course?

Maybe. I liked Brie Larson as “Captain Marvel.” I’ve enjoyed Samuel L. Jackson in an eyepatch. Up to a point.

But none of the trailers to this annointed Blockbuster of the Fall have moved the needle for me. At all.

Lowered expectations couldn’t hurt, as this exhausted genre has transcended “entertainment value” as long-overdue “inclusion” becomes its rai·son d’ê·tre.

Fingers crossed.

“Next Goal Wins” is a scruffy, formulaic sports comedy that offers a Taiki Waititi take on a 2014 documentary about “the worst” soccer team “in the world” and the ill-tempered coach brought in to change that status.

Even the titles are the same. What does the director of “Jo Jo Rabbit” bring to the table that’s novel and fresh? Not bloody much, to be honest. A lot of movie references, including the ones he tries to base this generic “inspiring” sports story on — “The Karate Kid”– and the ones he tries to pretend he isn’t cribbing from (“Cool Runnings,”:”The Air Up There”).

But when it’s going for lightly amusing and living off the spectacle of the great Michael Fassbender trying his dramatic, international star hand at comedy, it’s a pleasant sit.

If nothing else, the Kiwi Waititi teaches America about its sleepy, South Pacific possession, American Samoa, the culture and the Christian Polynesian rituals among its tiny populace. Getting a handle on how to pronounce it — “SAH-moa” — will be news to most of us.

American Samoa had a reputation for humiliating itself on the pitch, most infamously surrendering 31 goals in a match against Australia at one point. Years after that debacle — Australia has just as many World Cop titles as the U.S. — they’re no better. But they lure a troubled, tantrum-tossing tippler named Thomas Rongen in to try and lessen the humiliation.

“Just one goal” is the mantra of the multi-job head of Samoan soccer (the amusing Oscar Kightley). All he wants is for the Dutch-American hothead to coach them into scoring “just one goal.”

Waititi of course beats that phrase to death, with sometimes amusing results. The writer-director and sometimes actor dons a ridiculous mustache to play our narrator, an American Samoan preacher, and reminds us that “this actually happened, with a couple of minor embellishments.”

This Rongen portrait folds in a soccer-connected ex-wife (Elisabeth Moss) who’s taken up with an American soccer federation chief (Will Arnett, who replaced Armie Hammer in reshoots), and other tragic and semi-tragic elements to this intense “European” trying to learn the “chill” ways of the simple happy natives.

Yeah, that phrase is a little offensive these days. But that’s what this culture clash comedy inelegantly and often clumsily goes for. Mocking clueless “white people” and this “white savior” the players consider as much of a “loser” as them is funny, but only takes you so far.

The team is a collection of “types,” who actually line-up with the “real” team Rongen found himself training. There’s a transgender star (Kaimana), and the not-too-tolerant Rongen has to learn the Samoan word Fa’afafine, which is their name for a long-accepted “third gender” among their populace, their version of the Filipino word “bakla.”

The Westerner has some things to learn about tolerance as well as “island time” and life priorities from the Samoans.

The story is otherwise strictly “Big Game Comedy” formula, with the added treat of focusing on “conditioning,” what screenwriters do when their grasp of the “game” they’re writing about is slim.

But it’s amusing seeing Fassbender try to exasperate, deadpan and impersonate Liam Neeson (his big speech from “Taken”) or Al Pacino (“Any Given Sunday”) as Rongen copes with the culture shock of a place that’s forever making the Westerner wonder “What IS this s–t?”

“It’s safe to say, ‘You’re useless‘” he mutters to his tattooed, often roly poly Polynesian charges.

The life coaching Rongen gets is worth a laugh, because of its self-aware lack of subtlety.

“You’re sitting alone because you ARE alone.”

The movie is Waititi’s clumsiest and laziest outing ever, with abrupt, under-motivated changes in tone, heavy-handed insertions of “Matrix” and “Karate Kid” references and shameless mugging when our writer-director trots out his mustache and tries to goose his picture just at the point it might finally flatline.

“Laziest?” It’s obvious that the soccer teams and the movie about them spent more time writing and rehearsing their “haka” pre match trash talk chants than practicing the sport.

All that said, “Next Goal Wins” never lapses into unlikeable. And Fassbender, about as convincing as a former athlete as he is as a comedian, gives it the old college try.

Rating: PG-13, alcohol abuse, profanity, rude images

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Oscar Kightley, Kaimana, David Fane, Rachel House, Will Arnett and Elisabeth Moss.

Credits: Directed by Taika Waititi, scripted by Taika Waititi and Iain Morris, based on the documentary “Next Goal Wins.” A Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:43

“The Pigeon Tunnel,” a documentary built around the dark but playful the 2016 memoir and consisting of the last and longest interview the greatest spy fiction novelist David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, ever gave, isn’t an expose, a confrontation between interviewer and subject.

That’s the way Errol Morris, perhaps at Apple TV+’s direction, edited trailers for the film. It would be the British spy, wise in the ways of interrogation matching wits with the documentary cinema’s foremost “interrogator.”

The film turns out to be collegial, a long chat via Morris and his famed look-straight-at-the-camera-and-see-me-ask-questions “Interrotron.” Some issues are pressed, big themes — “betrayal” chief among them — are visited and revisited.

But Cornwell knew the films of Morris, famous for getting something like straight answers out of the likes of disgraced former Defense Secretaries Robert McNamara (“The Fog of War”) and Donald Rumsfeld (“The Unknown Known”) and sized him up.

And Morris? He’s plainly a fan. The Oscar-winning documentarian and master “interrogator” (“The Thin Blue Line”) takes a moment between questions, clips of le Carré movies and TV series and recreations from the life of the spy novelist to tell his interview subject that he sees Cornwell as “an exquisite poet of self-hatred.”

“The Pigeon Tunnel” was a title Cornwell slapped on many a work in progress. As he expands on his autobiography early on on the film, and Morris recreates for the screen, it comes from the practice of a Monte Carlo casino, how it released pigeons trapped on its roof through tunnels for the rich swells, “gentlemen,” to shoot as they fled to the sea in a more barbaric age.

Even the escaped pigeons, Cornwell notes, returned to the same roof where they were first trapped. Saving themselves accomplished nothing. There’s a spy game metaphor in that.

Young Cornwell witnessed the pigeon tunnels with his “confidence trickster,” gun runner, larcenist, politician, debt and rent dodger and general scofflaw father, Ronald “Ronnie” Cornwell. The film, with Morris pushing follow-up questions on occasion, is mostly content to simply stage — with actors — incidents from Cornwell’s troubled upbringing, college years and early days in “the spy game” set to the music of Philip Glass and Paul Leonard Morgan.

But Cornwell’s life – he died in 2020, shortly after these interviews were completed — is fascinating fodder for a documentary. He was a literary man and teacher recruited to assorted spy agencies at the height of the Cold War, eyewitness to the building of the Berlin Wall, the betrayals of Soviet moles into Britain’s spy agencies, an “outsider” with a few ideals who brought a lovely cynicism to the Game of Nations as he saw it once he started writing novels like “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” “Russia House” and “The Tailor of Panama.”

He talks about being abandoned by his mother, his father’s many prison sentences, the “betrayal” he felt at having to bail the old man out after he became famous. And he remembers the infamous Kim Philby defection to the U.S.S.R., offering his considered analysis of what drove “one of us,” as the British upper class regarded Philby (not Cornwell) to sell out his country for the murderous monster Stalin.

That “joy of self-imposed schizophrenia,” Cornwell reckons, “the very pleasure of being in the secret world” and being bored at the risks an entitled and protected figure like Philby never really faced is what drove Britain’s most infamous Cold War traitor.

Cornwell’s big admissions are no shocks. He includes some of himself, his own career — teaching and as a “very junior” agent, “not very successful,” “not told very much” — in every novel, which he labels “credible fables out of the worlds I visited, or visited me.”

His father’s unsavory scammer’s background put them both “on the run” early on. Even at “posh boarding schools,” young David never fit in even as he mastered the manners, speech and affectations of the class he didn’t belong to.

That contributed to his jaded view of the Cold War, when he found himself stationed in Cold War West Germany, wading through unrepentant, unpunished “Nazis” there and in East Germany.

He didn’t “do any of the dering do” of his novelistic spies. But then, they didn’t do much of that either. Writing “antedotes” to the James Bond fantasies of Ian Fleming, Cornwell kept things perfuntory, by the book, intimate, low key no matter how high the stakes.

Morris offers no “gotcha” moments here, seemingly content to let Cornwell retell his life story, embellishing and reinforcing the “beytrayal” theme, letting us in on the scarred and testing autobiography of a creative person.

“The Pigeon Tunnel” is a good book, a memoir, “illustrated” with archival interviews — Merv and “60 Minutes” — fresh interviews, recreations of events, people, places and times in Cornwell’s life. And in this case, that’s enough.

Rating: PG-13, suggested violence, smoking and some profanity.

Cast: David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, Jake Dove, Charlotte Hamblin, Alan Mehdizadeh and Errol Morris.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Errol Morris. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:33

As we enter another deluge of “holiday” streaming movies, I’d be remiss in not catching on a title or two I missed from assorted streaming services LAST holiday movie season.

“Something from Tiffany’s” comes with a Rotten Tomatoes critics seal of approval and stars She Who Rarely Does Wrong Zoey Deutch.

But it’s a not-remotely-funny/not-that romantic rom-com that just happens to be sprinkled with New York over the holidays tinsel.

Deutch stars as a Bryant Park baker who finds herself with somebody else’s engagement ring. So it’s a “wrong ring from the wrong guy” romance whose complications have to get that wrong ring into the wrong hands and onto the wrong finger, and for true love to bloom in the Big Apple’s loveliest season.

Rachel runs an Italian bakery and restaurant, a busy bee who is happily supportive of tattoo artist beau Gary (Ray Nicholson, you-know-who’s kid), who is always late and if she’s honest, a bit “self-involved.” But he’s “really trying,” she thinks. Hopes.

Gary has a lot of things to “make up for,” which has him thinking “one of those blue boxes (from Tiffany’s) might do the trick.” Earrings it is.

Ethan (Kendrick Sampson of TV’s “Insecure”) is a writer, UCLA college professor and widowed dad in town and in the store at the same time. But he and daughter Daisy (Leah Jeffries) are shopping for an engagement ring for gorgeous west coast publicist Vanessa (Shay Mitchell of “Pretty Little Liars”).

All it takes is for self-absorbed Gary to bump them as he’s leaving the store so that he can get hit by a car for the “little blue boxes” to be mixed up. All it takes is Daisy pestering her dad to see if the injured fellow “is all right” for them to go to the hospital. And that leaves the door open for Rachel to hear them questioning a nurse, realize these folks “helped” (not really, a cop was on the scene) Gary, and to try and reward their gesture with a visit to her restaurant.

Christmas Day means Christmas and “Christmakkuh” gift exhanges (Rachel is Jewish), with “some memory loss” Gary not realizing he’s just gotten himself engaged and didn’t mean it and poor Ethan handing over earrings that he expected to be a ring.

Hilarity, heartbreak and romantic complications ensue. Well, two out of three will have to do.

Deutch’s sparkle and quirky line readings make her credible in most any rom-com situation. We believe most any couple she’s cast in. But she’s swimming against the current here, as the story is painfully contrived and the wit is in short supply.

Jojo T. Gibbs plays the disapproves-of-Gary bakery employee and pal and comic relief.

“I also identify as her best friend.”

“Tiffany’s” has holiday music in the score, an aged street corner doo wop quartet that serenades our fated-to-be-together couple with “I Only Have Eyes for You,” Zoey Deutch and a cute kid.

The ingredients are here. But “Something from Tiffany’s” never feels more than half-baked.

Rating: PG, a little profanity

Cast: Zoey Deutch, Kendrick Sampson, Ray Nicholson, Leah Jeffries, Shay Mitchell and Jojo T. Gibbs.

Credits: Directed by Daryl Wein, scripted by Melissa Hill and Tamara Chestna. An Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:27

The cornerstone of a good thriller is right there in the title to “Locked In,” a Famke Janssen star vehicle that loses track of the star almost as quickly as it tosses aside that essential building block.

This British thriller from Rowan Joffe, the nepo baby screenwriter who gave us George Clooney’s “The American,” as well as “Brighton Rock” and “The Informer,” sets up as the story of a “has-been” actress and hit-and-run victim who suffers from “locked-in syndrome.” Katherine drifts in and out of consciousness, perhaps “cognitively intact,” perhaps “vegetative,” and either way with no powers of movement, speech or telling anyone what happened to her.

But there’s this Irish nurse, Nicky (Anna Friel) who is assigned to Katherine (Janssen). She assures Katherine’s former ward, Lina (Rose Williams) that “if she’s in there, I’ll find her.”

As the first scene, which we see through Katherine’s blinking “one good eye,” has her code-spelling out “M-U-R-D-E-R” for Nurse Nicky, we know a mystery’s to be solved, and suspect young Lina might not want that to happen.

There’s a pretty good movie in the idea of a curious, slow-to-catch-on nurse helping her trapped patient cry for help and justice in piecing together blinked “alphabet board” coded messages about who put her in this spot. There are plenty of places for suspense, surprise twists and with our disabled “heroine,” perilous threats which she’s helpless to fend off.

Joffe and director first-time feature director Nour Wazzi instead give us endless flashbacks, most of them of Lina, the “heroine” of her own version of events, relating the story of how she came to be in the care of widowed Katherine, how Lina married Katherine’s seizure-prone, inherited-all-Daddy’s-money stepson (Finn Cole), and the doctor (Alex Hassell) who came into this world and played a role in the intrigues and tragedies to come.

“Locked In” struck me as one blown opportunity after another. The nurse is instantly suspicious and so brazen in her voicing of those suspicions that the film loses any sense of mystery about where it is going. We never fear the nurse, nor do we fear for this apparent “truth seeker.”

Yes, there are twists. But taking this tack eliminates one potential suspect and reduces the nurse’s role in the plot. As there are only three other characters, that’s going to be an issue.

Hassell, Cole and Williams stand out in the cast. But not much.

The snobby, fox-hunting country setting and haves-vs-have-nots friction are introduced but underdeveloped as the picture stumbles through longer and longer flashbacks to cast suspicion and aspersions on everybody we meet.

And the climax is so anti-climactic that twists or no twists, it just leaves the viewer frustrated that we didn’t get a tale of rising suspense, rising stakes and increasing peril instead of the movie they chose to muddle out of this promising premise.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex

Cast: Rose Williams, Alex Hassell, Anna Friel, Finn Cole and Famke Janssen

Credits: Directed by Nour Wazzi, scripted by Rowan Joffe. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

Michael Fassbender doesn’t do much that’s comic. But this Taika Waititi production looks hilarious, and putting ABBA on the trailer just doubled down on the adorable.

Last I checked, “Next Goal Wins” opens Nov. 17.

I’m hard-pressed to think of a screen role Aaron Eckhart didn’t commit to, heart and soul. A-pictures and B-movies, bit parts or leads, he’s present, prepped and accounted for every time somebody yells “Action!”

For his latest, he’s hit the gym, mastered a faint drawl and studied that confused, punch-drunk look of a veteran fighter whose memory and very consciousness comes and goes as he staggers towards 50. Stoop-shouldered, he leans so far into his gait that it’s like he’s stalking a foe, or about to fall down in the process. It’s a lovely, lived-in performance.

“Rumble Through the Dark” is a Bayou brawler noir, a film about a back alley fighter who never really “put on the gloves.” Anybody who keeps brass knuckles in his pocket isn’t a “boxer,” and probably never was going to be.

Jack Boucher’s last name isn’t the only source of his nickname. “The Butcher” the Cajuns and their neighbors call the guy with the French surname to suit his profession. Jack makes a mess out of his foes, except when he’s paid to take a dive. And even then, he makes a punishing show of it, making them pay to “fix” the fight.

Jack’s in hock to the madam and bookie they call Big Momma because of course they do. Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who broke through with Mike Leigh’s “Secrets & Lies” nearly 30 years ago, brings a world weary/worldwise menace to a character others speak of warily, as she has a habit of branding a “$” sign on those who owe her money.

Jack fights and he gambles. He wakes up and passes back out again. He’s spending an awful lot of time trapped in memories of childhood abandonment, experiencing flashbacks of the stepmother who took him in and who taught him to stand up to bullies with extreme prejudice.

In Louisiana, having a “lesbian mom” is going to get you teased. Got to be tough to deal with that.

Just as Jack thinks he’s going to get square with Big Momma thanks to a lucky turn or ten of the roulette wheel, he loses the cash. Annette the Tattoo’d (fleshy, inked-up Bella Thorne) lady in a traveling carnival is the one who finds his winnings.

Filmmaking siblings Graham and Parker Phillips take their movie’s sweet time getting the carny with the cash and “lots of questions” in the same truck with the bloodied, broke brawler who might have the answers.

Yes, their picture dawdles. They give screen time for supporting players like Ritchie Coster, as Baron, who runs the seedy carnival, Mike McColl as a greedy carny/mechanic and Christopher Winchester, as Big Momma’s muscle, to make their marks.

And they give Jean-Baptiste almost all the best lines.

“I wish you knew how bad I wanna put you outta your misery.” Fight or don’t fight. You might get hurt if you do, you WILL get hurt if you don’t.”

“I can’t figure out whether you’re gettin’ braver or dumber.” To her, he’s just a guy prone to “rumble through the dark, chasin’ something he ain’t never gonna catch.”

The Phillips (“The Bygone” was theirs) allow director of photography David J. Myrick the time to light for mood — gloom, poverty, downmarket despair — and compose one immaculate shot after another. This modestly-budgeted indie is so gorgeous to look at you hope Martin Scorsese doesn’t see it. “Killers of the Flower Moon” has the air of a movie shot on a cell phone by comparison.

That “dawdling” thing gets in the way of this simple, sometimes trite and even corny narrative. This is a B-movie by genre — a “Big Fight” picture — by tropes and by design. Yet the Phillips never let a single spare scene get across a plot point when five long, often wordless and evocative ones will do.

But it’s never less than watchable. And Eckhart rewards the obvious care and time it takes to make a film look this polished, gritty and immersive by giving these young filmmakers every penny’s worth in every take. Thorne makes the most of a role that’s downmarket, but sentimental.

And Jean-Baptiste takes a stereotypical character and makes her pop off screen, playing a woman with agency, an eye for spectacle, an unforgiving streak and a branding iron she’s not shy about heating up when the need or the sadistic urge arises.

Rating: R, grisly, graphic violence, profanity, smoking

Cast: Aaron Eckhart, Bella Thorne, Ritchie Coster, Christopher Winchester, Mike McColl and Marianne Jean-Baptiste.

Credits: Directed by Graham Phillips and Parker Phillips, scripted by Michael Farris Smith. A Lionsgate/Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:54