Movie Nation

This opens Friday and could go either way, but it’s got a good cast. Brit taking on a Southern accent?

Two of my favorite Brits are in it, both “Star Wars” alumni.

The easiest “tell” when you’re trying to figure out if what you’re watching is a B-movie or something further down the action budget alphabet is in the effects.

How do the gunshots look and sound? How realistic is the bloody makeup? How convincing are the bullets to the head/skull explosions?

Lots of filmmakers know they can get their film financed if they line up a couple of B-list or lower stars, actors years past their peak popularity. But few are able to follow through and scrounge up good makeup and effects cash as well.

Heads burst and pistol barrels are pushed against craniums for a self-administered head-shots in “Black Noise,” a C-movie starring Alex Pettyfer (“Magic Mike,” the “Endless Love” remake) and Jackson Rathbone (“Twilight”). And the results are second-year-in-film-school bad.

The players make the best of this “Havana Syndrome” thriller about private commandos sent to save rich folks from an exclusive resort island where something or someone is putting deafening noises in their ears and triggering memories in their minds to gruesome effect.

Everybody in the five person “team” (Pettyfer, Rathbone, Eve Mauro, Wayne Gordon and Sadie Newman) is troubled and ripe for sonic attack and flashbacks to some earlier trauma.

It’s a good thing the island’s collection of rich folks who were the first assaulted seem to have been all but wiped out, as this C-Team Six Five is pretty wrapped-up in their own issues, start to finish.

Rathbone rolls out a Southern drawl as the team’s tech guy. Pettyfer and others put in the time to look like they know what they’re doing with firearms.

But there’s no urgency, no sense the narrative is propelling us forward and no real surprises as we watch the team endure shattering memories that mess with their heads and Our Hero tries to explode-the-heads of the terrorists/personal demons/aliens or whoever is pulling the strings.

With cardboard characters and lines like “No one is safe. No one,” it’s hard for anybody to work up much enthusiasm for their performances, relying on simple professionalism to carry the day. The script isn’t utter trash, but it’s close.

And then the post-production effects are layered in, and any effort made on set makes one hope that all involved at least got a nice paid working vacation to St. Kitts and St. Nevis out of it. From reading the trades, other actors were going to take some of these roles, and thought better of it.

Rating: R, graphic violence

Cast: Alex Pettyfer, Jackson Rathbone, Eve Mauro, Wayne Gordon and Sadie Newman

Credits: Directed by Philippe Martinez, scripted by Sean-Michael Argo, Philippe Martinez and Leigh Scott. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:26

I think it’s safe to lay credit…or blame for this kid-friendly comedy at the feet of Keke Palmer.

She hosted “SNL” and if memory serves, she not only inspired the sketch below, she’s the one who pushed for a little reunion of the early Nickelodeon stars Kenan Thompson (longtime “Saturday Night Life” cast member) and Kel Mitchell.

It had been a series, turned into a movie. Decades ago. It became a self-mocking and edgy (ish) riff in the “SNL” tradition.

That was, what, a year or so ago?

Now there’s a sequel with Kenan and Kel and Jillian Bell and Lil Rel, lots of cameos and…no Keke? Dudes…

Kenan and Kel are being “Good Burger” replaced by robots, something White Castle and other fast food chains are doing right this very moment.

Paramount+ will stream “Good Burger 2” to anyone ready for a little PG nostalgia.

You have never seen Sandra Oh like this.

The “Sideways/Killing Eve/The Same Storm” dramatic star has given us a dose of deadpan, here and there. But in “Quiz Lady,” she vamps through a ditzy, unfiltered and comically mercurial turn as a never-quite-focused older sister without letting us sense one moment of restraint.

Oh turns star Awkwafina, in the title role, into the film’s straight woman in a story of sisters, racial stereotypes, family baggage and overcoming the little voices inside our heads that hold us back.

Not that Jenny, Oh’s failed actress turned life-coach, holds anything back. Ever.

The film is a sputtering, miss-or-hit affair that never finds its footing or a tone that works. Documentarian Jessica Yu (“Last Call at the Oasis,” “Misconception”) struggles with an uneven script peppered with low-hanging fruit gags, implausible set-ups and a random blast of drug humor, and completely blows the Big Finish that the title “Quiz” promises us. And no anti-climax, Big Cameo and seriously lame closing credits “what happened to” atones for that.

But we get what we can from Oh and Awkwafina’s chemistry, Will Ferrell’s sweetly amusing take on an idealized Alex Trebek-like game show host and trying-too-hard-and-it-shows performances by Jason Schwartzman as a smarmy contestant and Tony Hale as a one-joke “Ben Franklin Inn” proprietor in period costume, spectacles and bald cap.

Awkwafina is Anne, a solitary cubicle drone and loner who dotes on her pug and lives for her nightly ritual since childhood, “Can’t Stop the Quiz,” hosted by avuncular if a tad squishy host Tony McTeer (Ferrell) who “will be right here” tonight and every weeknight the wide-ranging quiz, complete with a “charades” segment, is on.

Anne rattles through answers to seemingly every bit of geography, geology, pop culture and sports history McTeer chirps out.

Oh’s Jenny, eight years or so older, catches up with Anne at a low point.

“Are you living in your car?”

“I’m focusing all my energy on manifesting the life I want!”

Flashbacks, scattered quite randomly throughout the film, show us the unhappy childhood that pointed them in different directions. Flaky Jenny ditched her dog and their gambling-addict mother years ago. Now she’s back and crashing at Anne’s place.

That’s when she notices her sister’s acumen at “Can’t Stop the Quiz.” That prompts Jenny to secretly record and post video of Anne’s savant-like trance prattling through answers. That video goes “viral,” and sets us on the path of seeing Anne on her favorite show, meeting her bow-tied idol, McTeer, and facing off with the show’s reigning champ, an insufferable McTeer wannabe played by Schwartzman and based on a certain “Jeopardy” champ turned host.

I’m reaching the point where I wonder how screenwriters (Jen D’Angelo, “Hocus Pocus 2”) can look themselves in the mirror in the morning knowing they’ve written the 479th “goes viral” screenplay twist of the past two years.

But sure, let’s double down on that with a “mom’s fled to Macau leaving gambling debts” that get Anne in trouble with Mom’s bookie, Ken (Jon ‘Dumbfoundead’ Park) who kidnaps her dog and sends cutesy-threats to her about what he’s doing to the pooch.

Ferrell is a delight in his few scenes, and Awkwafina is getting to be an old hand at the downtrodden, slumped-shouldered young woman with loneliness issues. It’s all most people let her play.

Holland Taylor has a moment — and only one — as a grumpy neighbor.

But this is Oh’s show, playing a flake too quick to yell “Racist,” but ready to play the “Eastern medicine,” “Old Chinese saying” cards and ask “Do you know how hard it is to be an Asian woman in this country?”

No, none of that is exactly “out there.” It’s all just familiar enough to mute the effect of one of the best things about a comedy that is desperate enough to toss in drug humor to give it edge, and struggles to make even that easy laugh come off.

Rating: R (Some Drug Use and Language)

Cast: Awkwafina, Sandra Oh, Jason Schwartzman, Holland Taylor, Tony Hale and Will Ferrell.

Credits: Directed by Jessica Yu, scripted by Jen D’Angelo. A 20th Century Studios release on Hulu.

Running time:

What a shock to the British system the satire “The Admirable Crichton” must have been when it premiered on stage in 1902.

Written by J.M. Barrie, the Scottish novelist and playwright who had himself quite a year in 1902 — producing “Crichton” for the stage and introducing “Peter Pan” in a novel that he’d turn into a play two years later — it had a hint of 19th and 20th century boogeyman Karl Marx in its class-upending story of a “Downton” era English servant, shipwrecked with his master’s family on a desert island and proving himself not only their equal, but their superior in every way in terms of social usefulness, intelligence, humility and compassion.

The very idea! A man in “service” showing enterprise, intelligence, natural “leadership” and useful life skills in the face of the dead weight nobility and inherited wealth?

You can get a taste of that original jolt in director Lewis Gilbert’s fine 1957 film adaptation of “Crichton,” which made the perfect vehicle for Stiff Upper Lip star Kenneth More. He so embodied the character’s ever-so-polite/ever-so-English way that the argument that maybe this “class” thing they were so obsessed with was reaching its overdue end in the wake of the trauma and social upheaval that followed World War II seemed ever-so-reasonable coming from him.

In the film, Crichton is the fastidious, class-conscious/class-enforcing butler at Loam Hall, a great house in the National Trust mold, in the employ of the widowed Lord Loam (Cecil Parker), a liberal intent on teaching his three spoiled and beautiful daughters ( Sally Ann Howes, Mercy Haystead and Miranda Connell) a lesson in “equality.”

It’s 1905, and the suffragette movement is all the rage. But in Loam Hall, the young ladies are being lectured that “no one (is) better than anyone else” by their father. He even takes that so far as to throw a household staff and nobility mixer, a “tea,” whish aside from making more work and lots of awkwardness for the servants who have to make it work and make small talk with their “betters,” it will almost certainly wreck oldest daughter Lady Mary’s plans to announce her engagement to the stiff Earl of Brocklehurst (the English actor Peter Graves).

But as in the later “Downton Abbey,” this Lady Mary has a confidante on the household staff. Crichton is just as apalled at this “equality” exercise.

“I’m ashamed to be seen speaking to you, my lady”

He may get an ironic “You’ll do what you’re TOLD” from his lordhsip, but he does what he can to insulate Mary from the disapproval of her fiance’s very conservative mother (Martita Hunt).

But he’s not there to intervene when a more headstrong younger daughter Agatha (Connell) is arrested in a suffragette dustup in London. There’s nothing for it but to suggest a sojourn at sea for the family, “yachting” away from the scandal in the South Seas in their steamboat Bluebelle.

Crichton is dragged along, with his affectionate special project, cockney maid Eliza, played by Diane Cilento. They’ll ensure the lord and his ladies are kept in comfort as they weather the storm of “scandal.”

The ship sinking in a real storm is another matter. And when they’re cast ashore, the intrepid Crichton simply cannot protect Lord Loam, his daughters, the Reverand Treherne (Jack Walting) and Agatha’s snobby suitor Ernest (Gerald Harper) from the slow realization that they can’t “order” and “class” their way out of this, and in point of fact, that they’re lazy and useless drains on society to a one.

The film, an expansion of the play in terms of settings and added characters, is memorable for its gently-underscored radical politics — when Italian filmmaker Lina Wertmüller used the story as inspiration for her 1974 classic “Swept Away,” she made the protagonist a communist who exercises sexual dominance over an overwhelmed upper class woman — and its wit.

Crichton gets one and all off the yacht in the storm, awakening his lordship, who is nothing if not irked.

“This is a FINE time of night to be shipwrecked!”

Crichton saves Eliza from the sinking yacht and gets her and himself on board, only to be told that he should be on the “staff” lifeboat.

“Shall I withdraw, sir?”

On sighting land, he is informed that this isn’t necessarily good news.

“But we can’t go ASHORE like this!” the under-dressed ladies huff.

The story’s so familiar — even “Gilligan’s Island” leaned on it — that you can guess the rest. Crichton, born to “service” and appreciated at home by his betters as a man who “knows everything,” sets about keeping them alive and reluctantly establishing a new “natural” order — competence and enterprise and usefulness over “class.”

And he finds himself pursed by Eliza and Mary and even others as “the Guv’nor,” the boss of this situation, builder of huts, maker of fire, provider of wild boar and deer dinners.

The film provides a template for all the “Upstairs/Downstairs””Gosford Park/Downton Abbey” tales to follow. The class system is exposed not only for its upward-mobility-inhibiting nobles. The servants themselves mimic this via their own “valet” vs. “coachman” and “cook” heirarchy.

“Crichton” is a film of soundstages — some very fine storm-at-sea “tank” work — and Bermuda locations that serve up a few too many freshly-planted palm trees, if we’re honest.

And the film’s 1950s British context gives it a muzzled feeling, with a finale that has a whiff of “lost our nerve, Guv’nor” about it. It’s a tad dated, but the performances, the dialogue and the Technicolor production values — freshly-planted-palms aside — make it timeless.

This is the gold standard of a story that’s been filmed four times, a movie that still lands its droll laughs well over 100 years after the play was written, still finds the fun in the idea that the people who think themselves superior simply aren’t.

“Crichton’s” very British title was changed to “Paradise Lagoon” when it played in the U.S. It was so popular in the U.K. that More was summoned to star in a West End musical version that flopped in 1964.

There’s a funny lump of trivia that connects this film to the James Bond franchise. Not only did writer-director Lewis Gilbert go on to direct classics such as “Alfie” and “Educating Rita,” he was behind the camera for “You Only Live Twice” with Sean Connery as Bond, the best of the Roger Moore Bond pics “The Spy Who Loved Me” and the ruinously-expensive “Moonraker.”

John Glen, a sound editor on “Crichton,” was Gilbert’s successor as James Bond’s “house” director, helming “For Your Eyes Only” and “The Living Daylights” — lesser Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton titles in the long-running series.

And Cilento, the Aussie actress who had major roles in “The Wicker Man” and “Tom Jones” and who does such a fine job of being Cockney and “vulgar” in “Crichton,” was Sean Connery’s first wife.

More, a World War II veteran (Royal Navy) was already well on his way to embodying that World War II “keep calm and carry on” droll British unflappability on the screen. He’d bring it to such WWII films as “Sink the Bismarck!” and “The Longest Day.” And he was named a Commander of the British Empire for his long career on stage and screen.

Looking back on it all, one can consider More’s near perfect turn as the witty and “admirable” Crichton his finest hour.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Kenneth More, Diane Cilento, Cecil Parker, Sally Ann Howes, Jack Watling, Gerald Harper, Miranda Connell, Mercy Haystead and Martita Hunt

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lewis Gilbert, based on the J.M. Barrie play. A Columbia release on Tubi, Amazon and Youtube, etc.

Running time: 1:33

The Spanish thriller “Viejos,” aka “The Elderly,” is a creepy, doom-laden sci-fi parable that doesn’t quite close the deal, a film of slow-building suspense whose climax lacks the clarity of intent and the level of terror in the performances to pay off.

But filmmakers Raúl Cerezo and Fernando González Gómez give us something to chew on, even if they haven’t wholly digested their ideas themselves.

Heat waves are always tragedies for the elderly, especially in the under-air-conditioned corners of a climate-changed planet.

Such a Spanish heat wave is the backdrop to this story of old people seemingly going crazy and dying, with the young, “who never listen” to them, missing the signs that something grimmer and less explicable is in play.

The thermometer is just under 110 (42 degrees Celsius) when Rosa (Ángela López Gamonal) hears the forecast, takes the measure of her past, her present and the future and leaps to her death in front of silent witness neighbors and her husband, Manuel (Zorion Eguileor), staring in sweat-stained but understanding shock at her action.

She got tired of “hearing” (in Spanish with English subtitles) one surmises. What? Her grief-stricken son Mario (Gustavo Salmerón) doesn’t get it.

“It’s the static noise, the magnetic waves,” his father tries to explain.

The audience’s surrogate in this story might be Mario’s rebel teen daughter Naia (Paula Gallego). She gripes to her boyfriend Jota (Juan Acedo) how “gross” old people’s lives are. “Nobody listens to you” when you’re old.

Jota may have a clue, too. “Old people know what’s coming,” he reassures her. They aren’t scared, or at least Jota insists he won’t be.

But there’s something not right about the seniors of the city right now, and Manuel could be a case study in what it might be. He’s not grieving, not really in shock and yet not “right.” Not at all.

He obsesses over transistor radio parts, resists moving in with Mario and his disapproving second wife Lena (Irene Anula). And as much as he “relates” to his granddaughter, his query about Naia’s dead mother is telling, or would be if the curious teen was on the same wavelength.

“Does she talk to you at night?” grandpa wants to know. Because he’s sure “Rosa,” his late wife, is still around and “coming back.”

The sanest character in the lot might be pragmatic Lena — pregnant, dealing with a teen who likes reminding her she’s “not my mother” and a husband who insists on taking his scary dad in at this moment of crisis.

All will be tested as the temperature steadily rises into the 120s, grandpa’s behavior grows more dangerous and nobody seems to grasp the gravity save for Lena.

I put a lot of stock in actors getting across the meaning of a scene, the level of threat or simple misery (heat-caused, in this case) their characters must feel. And that hits you as “off” early on in “The Elderly.”

The seniors are suffering, but Mario — an unemployed AC installer who has no work because “the country’s broke” — just escapes to the bar downstairs, Lena sweats and frets and Naia just changes outfits and takes grandpa’s side in all things, especially when the phrase “nursing home” is trotted out.

That blunts the narrative’s effectiveness, and seriously undercuts the climax. Character reactions are either amusingly unrealistic or simply passive and frustrating.

The climate change heat allegory would have been enough to drive the plot, but the script reaches for something more cryptic that the “You never listen to me” elders are responding to. That doesn’t need to be explained, but the way the third act unfolds, a little something to grab hold of that’s “realistic” would’ve helped.

The violence is jolting enough, if zombie-movie slow in most cases.

And while the gloom never lifts and the suspense finds a foothold just often enough to maintain interest, the climax is a serious stumble and makes one wish the ending had been worth all that slowly unraveled before it.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex, nudity, profanity, smoking

Cast: Zorion Eguileor, Paula Gallego, Gustavo Salmerón, Juan Acedo, Ángela López Gamonal and Irene Anula

Credits: Directed by Raúl Cerezo and Fernando González Gómez, scripted by Javier Trigales, Raúl Cerezo and Rubén Sánchez Trigos. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:33

Foul-mouthed Olivia and fouler-mouthed Jessie.

A period piece about profane postal espistles that piss off…scandalize a quaint corner of Britannia.

Looks nasty, and funny.

“Pain Hustlers” is a “true story” inspired drama whose tone and story arc match that of the real “triumph of medicine” to “tragedy invented by Big Pharma” saga of opioids, the “pain” drug that many maintain “broke America.”

The film opens jaunty as it takes us to a strip club recruiting session where pharmaceutical hustler Pete (Chris Evans) recruits single-mom/failed pole dancer Liza (Emily Blunt) to push this new relief med meant for stage four cancer patients suffering “cancer breakthrough pain.” We get lessons in how pharmaceuticals are “pitched” to doctors, the not-so-secret gimmick of having ex beauty queens, working on commission, do the pitching and the pecking order of Big Pharma.

Purdue Pharma earns another much-deserved backhanded slap.

And then we’re taken inside Zanna, a sketchy Florida-based Little Pharma firm with a pain drug it wants to ride to riches, if only these plucky pill pirates can talk doctors into “writing our scripts.”

We meet that stripper, see her real-life struggles and get competing views on just how good or at least “effective” she was at her hustle as the movie sets up with an “interviews after the fact” framework that slips into voice-overs as Liza and Peter — with others pitching in — describe each other as the villains or bigger villains in an epidemic that we know, by the third act, will be killing people.

A money moment in this somewhat flat David Yates (he made the most boring of the “Harry Potter” pictures) saga comes when it’s all going wrong, Liza checks on a doctor only to arrive after he’s been arrested and his parking lot is full of desperate, addicted patients who close in around her Mercedes convertible like zombies in the comeuppance scenes in a horror flick.

This true story — transported from Arizona to Florida with the names changed to force us to look up the real criminals — keeps most of the victims faceless, and most of the corruption a slow drift from rust to outright rot as shortcuts are taken, doctors are won over with bribes and a lot of people get rich as the sick get addicted.

Liza and Peter give their big discoveries — “Doctors are just as greedy and horny as everybody else.” — via voice-over. But Evans’ patter never slacks off as Pete hard-sells Liza, instructs her that “Commissions get you into heaven” and even raps his enthusiasm for their relief-for-the-cancerous-and-possibly-dying drug at one point.

Evans’ upbeat and hyper Amoral Pete is our Everyman, easily corrupted if the money’s right. Liza is meant to be the conscience of the piece and Blunt sells that “everybody’s got their reasons for cheating and preying on the vulnerable” sob story like a true believer.

But we see her as an incompetent single mother (Chloe Coleman plays her out-of-control and seizure-prone tween) and a slacker, but one with great people-reading skills and a dab of compassion that most everyone else depicted lacks.

Andy Garcia, as “Pharma’s fuzziest billionaire,” could have been the mercurial, eccentric scene stealer in another director’s hands. Here, he gives us a villain’s journey from eccentric to demented and demanding (more cash).

Catherine O’Hara plays Liza’s screwy, short-attention-span mother, “the only one who believed in you” who finds her way onto this gravy train at one point.

There have been movies and TV series that peeled back layers of this under-the-table practices in this world, and Netflix had its own widely-seen documentary series on this world, its practices and amorality (“Painkiller”). But the new wrinkles this “zero market share” to market-dominating firm’s story throws out there are amusing — ways to counter the competition’s bombshell saleswomen, finding downmarket doctors willing to take lucrative shortcuts in the face of the the lone contrary voice in every company (Jay Duplass) who cashes the checks but who lazily whines about “compliance.”

“Pain Hustlers” has a buzz, here and there. But the story and these characters never really get their hooks in us as Yates leans on the sentimental, takes us to an indifferent climax, and then throws in a couple of anti-climaxes to boot.

The moving scenes land flat because the movie isn’t really about victims. Blunt is good, although her Southern stripper’s accent isn’t really obvious until Liza has a court date. A canny play for sympathy from the jury?

And Evans does so many variations of his patented fast-talking spiel that it loses its effectiveness by the second act.

As the folks in this rise and fall of Pharma Frauds saga could tell you, it’s the third act where all the consequences show up and the piper must be paid. That’s where this story’s make-or-break moments are parked, and there are too few of them to let it get off the screen with as much promise as it opened with.

Rating: R for language throughout, some sexual content, nudity and drug use

Cast: Emily Blunt, Chris Evans, Catherine O’Hara, Chloe Coleman, Brian d’Arcy James, Amit Shah, Jay Duplass and Andy Garcia

Credits: Directed by David Yates, scripted by Wells Towers, based on the reporting and book by Evan Hughes. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:05

Almost all the reviews of the video game adaptation “Five Nights at Freddy’s” have been bad. Awful. Or in one case, calling it just the worst.

But Universal/Blumhouse had a killer premise, good trailers and when I left the theater after seeing it, the lobby was jammed, and not just with “Swifties” either.

It’s a PG-13 kiddie (ish) horror show, and they’re lining up to see it. Too young to care about reviews.

Apparenty how many “Youtubers” are in the bit player cast is what matters more, parents of tweens I know tell me. There are seven in this, bless their hearts. Not “playing” anything that anybody other than their online fans would notice.

Deadline.com is calling this the Halloween weekend record as it rolls up some $78 million. It had a big Thursday night ($10 million+) and a huge Friday.

Word of mouth at how bad it is, how poorly scripted, directed and acted (Josh Hutcherson’s quote will soar, no matter what, thanks to this hit), didn’t stem the tide. If you have tweens or grand-tweens, they were all about “Freddy’s,” and many went twice, if their promises are to be believed.

I ducked into the “Eras Tour” Taylor Swift doc for about half an hour while waiting for “Freelance” to start. Epic production, not the most flattering display of her singing and (quite limited) “movement” talents. It’s still making buckets of cash and has turn Tay Tay into a billionaire, according to the financial mags that aren’t owned by Russians. It’s falling off steeply, but the film’s pulling in another $14 million and change this weekend, and will have cleared the $150 million mark by midday Monday. I’ll bet she’s glad she rolled this out before Beyonce’s similar venture “coming soon.”

“Killers of the Flower Moon” is doing very well for a draggy three and a half hour long epic about poisoning and shooting Native Americans in 1920s Oklahoma — another $9 million this weekend. The fall-off this weekend was a LOT steeper than expected (it was predicted to pull in $12+). It might clear the $50 million mark by next Friday.

“After Death,” from Angel Studios, is a doc that managed some $5 million comforting the faithful about the hereafter.

“Exorcist: Believer” enjoys one last weekend in the top five at $3.1 million

John Cena’s bloody “Freelance” action comedy underwhelmed in the worst way. He’s not a huge draw, nor is Allison Brie or anybody else in the cast (Christian Slater is the biggest supporting name, with Juan Pablo Raba and Marton Csokas also on board. It’s pretty bad, violent and not the least bit serious and only rarely funny.

It didn’t crack the top 5. It cleared $2, just behind the $2.15 million another weekend’s take of the “Paw Patrol” sequel.

Here’s the final Sunday afternoon “Estimate” from @BoxOfficePro.

Colombian-born Spanish actor Juan Pablo Raba vamps, flashes his teeth, sings a bit and wears the icecream-colored suit of a Central American dictator with panache in “Freelance,” a very dumb John Cena action comedy that Raba pretty much steals.

“You must STROKE the head you are going to cut off,” he purrs.

New Zealander Marton Csokas shows real commitment by slinging a mean South African accent as a mercenary in the employ of unseen mineral oligarchs out to depose that corrupt but debonair dictator to give them easier access to the natural resources of fictional Palodonia.

The director of “District B-13” is on board, so the effects are first rate, the fights tight and the stunts are pretty good — a few jarring moments when the action is sped up to make fights “believable” excepted.

But “very dumb” barely covers how silly and violent this half-assed Banana Republic riff turns out to be.

Cena plays an ex Special Forces trooper who loses his “purpose” when he has to quit, become a lawyer and support his wife (Alice Eve) and little girl. Then his old comrade in arms (Christian Slater), founder of a “Contracted Defense Initiatives” (mercenary) company offers him a big paycheck for escorting a scandalized reporter looking for a comeback via her college roommate’s friend, President Venegas (Raba).

She will interview this interview-shy tyrant in the land where Mason Pettit’s special ops team was almost wiped out on a years-before mission to assassinate President Venegas. Lawyer Pettit will gear up and ensure Claire Wellington (Brie) survives. But he’s not happy about it, and now he’s newlycseparated from his wife.

Only when they get there, the charming Venegas barely has a chance to sweet-talk arrogant reporter Claire and make assorted “petite” jokes about Pettit when there’s a coup attempt, which Pettit foils with a combination of bravado, muscle memory and blind luck.

Now he’s trying to get this reporter and her “scoop” out of the country, with the smarmy dictator in tow and all sorts of folks wanting them all dead.

“You’ve gotta be alive to have the scoop of a lifetime,” Pettit reasons.

Cena , a funnyman/muscleman, plays this guy as physically as well as emotionally vulnerable. Old injuries have him moaning and groaning. He’s conflicted about saving the dictator and rattled by the way the reporter’s attentions turn from contemptuous to flirtatious.

And he’s trying real hard to impress her — shooting down helicopters and the like. “Pretty cool, huh?”

At times, the script has the guy show off his education to the uppity journalist, most recently reduced to MTV-style “celebrity cribs” stories and the like. Is she desperate enough for a comeback that she’ll sugar coat a tyrant?

“Please read Hannah Arendt,” who coined the phrase “The Banality of Evil,” Pettit blurts at one point, a reference over the heads of the target audience this movie was going for.

It’s as if the screenwriter is trying to convince us or somebody that this isn’t as stupid and childishly violent (gun fetishizing) as we can plainly see it is.

But Raba is a hoot, and even if Csokas isn’t in the bloom of brawling, villainous youth, he gives fair value and he and Brie and Raba and even Cena show commitment to their parts in all this far beyond what this nonsense deserved.

They’re kind of fun to watch even if “Freelance” isn’t.

Rating: R, for violence, nudity and profanity

Cast: John Cena, Allison Brie, Juan Pablo Raba, Christian Slater, Alice Eve and Marton Csokas.

Credits: Directed by Pierre Morel, scripted by Jacob Lentz. A Relativity release.

Running time: