Movie Nation

Since I consider “Rogue One” to be the best iteration of “Star Wars” since the original trilogy, naturally I’m interested in the prequel to that prequel.

The top-of-his-class screenwriter Tony Gilroy wrote that film, and “Michael Clayton,” and he created “Andor,” the story of how Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) became radicalized enough to get involved with the rebellion and risk his life to steal those Death Star plans “A long time ago, in a galaxy far away.”

Punching through four episodes of the new series — which has already been green-lit for a second season of 12 episodes after this first 12 — I got glimpses of what I so loved about “Rogue One.”

The stakes are terminal. Killing and deaths have consequences. That’s what puts a price on Cassian’s head, murdering two guards at a corporate mining/salvage operation run by Pre-Mor. Monolithic corporations are but an extension of the Imperial megalopoly, and an officious, fanatical Javert figure Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) is the villain of the early episodes, a corporate police commander determined to find this scrapper, thief and smuggler who killed his two corporate guards.

Another “Rogue One” virtue was its tactile sense of place. The “world creation” of most “Star Wars” films and series is vivid, although there’s been a tendency to set as much of this derring-do as possible in deserts. Here, we’re in a damp world of brick structures, rusting, ruined spaceships and breaking yards as well as glossy corporate and “imperial” settings, a stunning new bar and a more verdant planet where primitive, blowgun-armed natives fill in the backstory to this backstory of a backstory.

Gilroy and his brother Dan wrote most of the scripts for the first season, so we’re assuming they can keep all that straight. More or less.

And the third great selling point of “Rogue One” was its best-in-series cast. Felicity Jones and Luna, Donnie Yen and Forest Whitaker, Mads Mikkelson, Riz Ahmed, Jimmy Smits, Genevieve O’Reilly and Ben Mendelssohn were featured, with veteran character players surrounding this stellar ensemble. Luna, O’Reilly and Whitaker return for this series (in later episodes) with Stellan Skarsgård, Fiona Shaw and Adria Arjona (“Father of the Bride,””Morbius”) adding new luster.

The narrative begins, as “Rogue One” did, in media res, as Cassian has already stolen something that leads to him having to kill to keep his secret and his liberty. His mechanic-pal Bix (Arjona) isn’t really privy to what he’s up to, nor is his mother (Shaw). But his cute, stammering rusty robot, B2EMO, can keep a secret.

“I can lie. I hu-hu-have adequate power reserves!”

Cassian is scrambling, right from the start, to lie low and make his sale (Skarsgård plays a “buyer”), dodge Syril Karn and his minions and just get a little breathing room.

As in “Rogue One,” the story starts with urgency and the pacing at least gives the illusion of brisk. Streaming storytelling is a drip drip drip affair, and this series doesn’t escape that with opening episodes that have brief bursts of action and a desire to slow revelations and plot twists to a crawl.

The dialogue touches on the “arrogance” of the Empire and its corporate stooges, the motivations of the opposing parties and the stakes each sees in the struggle. It’s “When the risk of doing nothing (about lawbreaking) becomes the greatest risk of all” and “The best way to keep the blade sharp is to USE it” vs. “Don’t you want to fight these bastards for real?”

Not all the threads of the story are introduced in the first four episodes, and even so, one wonders how they’re going to get more than one season out this “rogue” hero’s journey. The back story to the back story business doesn’t have any obvious point — yet.

But with this cast and these writers, we can be sure they’ll think of something sinister and exciting and hopefully engrossing enough to carry us along the way, even without Baby Yoda around.

Rating: TV-14 (violence)

Cast: Diego Luna, Adria Arjona, Fiona Shaw, Kyle Stoller, Genevieve O’Reilly, Kyle Soller, Forest Whitaker and Stellan Skarsgård

Credits: Created by Tony Gilroy. A Disney+ release.

Running time: 12 episodes @34-40 minutes each.

The problem solving, the “gags” used to put characters in jeopardy and extract them from this or that life-threatening jam, is pretty sloppy in “Dig,” a grimy desert Southwest kidnapping thriller starring Thomas Jane, Emile Hirsch and Jane’s daughter, Harlow Jane.

Some situations seem as corny as the drawl Hirsch slings as a bad hombre in a black cowboy hat who takes a subcontractor dad and his daughter hostage on a work site.

But miss this solid-if-sometimes-lacking B-thriller and you’ll be cheating yourself of a few laughs, some of them in the darkly funny dialogue, and a couple of over-the-top villainy turns by Hirsch (“Into the Wild”) and his mean girl with a sherbet green pistol accomplice, vamped up by Liana Liberato (“The Beach House,” TV’s “Light as a Feather”).

A prologue introduces us to a father with anger management issues trying to rein in an out of control 16 year-old daughter. One furious phone-tracked pursuit of Miss Acting Out ends with Mom dead, daughter deaf and so traumatized she won’t talk anymore. Father and daughter are now survivors but crippled by guilt.

A cochlear implant idea has Dad considering a big bucks house demo offer from the shadiest character ever to drift into his business in dusty Joshua Tree country. He ends up dragging the kid he still calls “Squirrel” — but now in sign language — to a remote work site. And that’s where things go really wrong for the second time in their lives.

It turns out this is a “stash house.” And whatever they’re supposed to knock down and salvage, they have to do it in a hurry, as the land is being redeveloped. One mistake later, blood is spilled and we wonder just what it is that they needed to bring all this gear to “Dig” up, or bury.

Director K. Asher Levin, who did a two for one deal with Jane (“Slayers” opens in Oct., and Jane got his daughter a nice film credit in “Dig”), delivers a brisk, tense shouting match prologue that climaxes with a shooting. The thriller that follows doesn’t live up to that opening.

But the players have their fun, with Hirsch trotting out that drawl, referencing kids’ cartoons and ancient mythology in his self-help speak about “net positive” experiences, and insult-the-hostages patter.

“Ain’t you a Cassandra, now?”

Jane Senior always delivers fair value, even in B-movies. And his daughter’s not bad either.

But Liberato, as a tattooed, halter-topped, trigger-happy trollop, practically steals the picture. Yeah, she did time on “Sons of Anarchy” as a young teen. Here’s where that pays off.

“Why’re we MONOLOGUING? Let’s just TAP’em!”

The logic of it all is shaky enough early on, but it breaks down further in the third act. By then the players having us on are the characters who have us hooked. Give this crew a tighter, more logical script and this genre pic could have been something special, or at least a thriller that comes closer to working.

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Thomas Jane, Emile Hirsch, Liana Liberato and Harlow Jane

Credits: Directed by K. Asher Levin, scripted by Banipal Ablakhad and Benhur Ablakhad. A Saban release.

Running time: 1:29

Dainty, dopey and pokey, “223 Wick” is a silly Satanic thriller about a troubled priest and a demonically-associated address.

As short as it is, it’s still an hour of life you don’t want to waste.

Father Jonathan (Alexi Stavrou) is a teacher at St. Vincent Seminary, and a man haunted by voices and dreams. He has “theories.” He’s doing “research.” Not that we see much of that.

Being “troubled,” his dean (Jack Dimich) ships him off to another parish. But on the way, the good father blurts out an address, and his rideshare drops him at 223 Wick, a building the priest has seen in his dreams.

As the guy who opens the door (Greg Pierot) looks a lot like Frank Zappa, Harry Connick-look-alike Father Jon can’t say he wasn’t warned. The owner (Dawn Lafferty) welcomes him, relates the story of her grandfather and how his “secret society” used to meet here, another clue the Good Father ignores.

He starts sprinkling Holy Water around and digs into the demonic goings on at…duh-duh-DUMMMMmmmm, “223 Wick.”

The effects are a disembodied demonic voice, an eye painting that keeps opening and closing and this milky explosion in water visual, with a little dining on human flesh and maskwork eating up the makeup budget.

No frights, tepid acting, a “script” barely worthy of the label, all hallmarks of a very short movie that starts slowly and slows down as it goes.

Rating: unrated, some gruesome horror imagery, profanity

Cast: Alexi Stavrou, Dawn Lafferty, Jack Dimich, Sergio Myers II, Eric Vaughn and Greg Pierot

Credits: Directed by Sergio Myers, scripted by Jess Byard and Melanie Clark-Penella. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:12

“Swamp Lion” is an overly patient, not-quite-meandering melodrama about a Texas trucker who gets mixed up in smuggling to try and pay for his son’s cancer treatment. This indie film, starring Michael Ray Escamilla, has touching moments and a seriously tense third act that bely its sleepy opening scenes.

It’s a decent showcase for the Texan Escamilla, who was in “A Night in Old Mexico” and TV’s “Snowfall” and “The Big C.” It’s also a bittersweet one, as he died last year, shortly after finishing this and a couple of other projects.

In an opening that plays as a straight-up prologue, we meet Jimmy and his younger brother Stan (Luis Bordonada) after a night where alcohol was consumed and somehow, Jimmy ended up with a fat lip. His sometime girlfriend Bre (Bre Blair) shows up, pulls him aside, and announces she’s pregnant.

“We’ve gotta change,” she tells him. “I’m gonna take care of you,” he promises. The movie’s about how the first assertion might not come true, but perhaps the second one could.

Because years later, he’s keeping them afloat with a truck driving gig and she’s got a waitress job or some such.

But nothing that they have coming in pays for enough insurance to cover the brain tumor that’s revealed when their tweenage son (Jack Elliot Ybarra) has a seizure in the middle of a game of catch. “Experimental” treatment in Boston costs $250,000. They aren’t related to anyone nor do they know anyone who can round up that much cash. After a bout of panic and heated arguments with relatives, trucker Jimmy talks to the sketchy brother Bre doesn’t let come around any more.

“I know some people,” Stan says. “They’re not nice people.”

Danish writer-director Torben Bech (“Nuummioq”) wanders through plenty of early scenes that help set up the rhythms of the family and the slow pace of the picture, but could probably stand some trimming. He compensates for that dawdling by barely sketching in the details of this tense across-the-border smuggling operation.

The logistics of the crime, like a long argument scene with Bre’s parents, isn’t essential to understanding the story or making it work.

Suffice it to say that Jimmy makes dirty money, payments are made for the treatment, and he gets careless. And when it all starts to come undone, we — like the quiet, unhurried Jimmy — are jolted by what’s happening. The camera follows him at shoulder height as he springs into urgent action, not-quite-panicked, but in a hurry for the first time in the movie.

Escamilla gives Jimmy an unflappable air that almost nothing can shake, letting us underestimate him. Blair is the one allowed to get worked up, get loud and get mad. Whatever made Jimmy the way he is, her character’s back story is more fraught, and we get it.

“Swamp Lion” takes its title from a story Jimmy tells to his son each night, and the fairytale and its title convey little more than the fact that this father dotes on his son. It also captures the sleepy-time air the picture opens with and doesn’t lose until over an hour has passed.

Leaden pacing hampers the movie, but as Bech is attempting to cast some sort of spell over the proceedings, I get why he tried it. But there’s not enough here to justify this run-time. He’s got a tight 95 minute thriller buried in a 110 minute melodrama.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Michael Ray Escamilla, Bre Blair, Jack Elliot Ybarra and Luis Bordonada

Credits: Scripted and directed by Torben Bech. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:50

“The Enforcer” is filmed-proof that the difference between a C-movie and a straight-up, watchable B-picture is Antonio Banderas. Ask first-time director Richard Hughes. He’ll tell you.

The Aussie Hughes was behind the camera for this tale of finding a single virtue in Miami’s vice, a moral ex-con who makes it his business to save a street kid kidnapped into the sex trade.

It captures the lurid underbelly of M-town — the movie version of it, anyway — and promotes it in a mentor-mentee story of “collecting” work and the hard men who do it. The saving grace of this latest spin on “The Debt Collector” trope is that this time, Banderas is the star, not the C-movie king who made two tales with that title.

Banderas is “Cuda,” nicknamed that thanks to the ’68 Plymouth Barracuda he cruises South Beach in. He’s tougher than tough, but he’s over 50, fresh out of the joint, and the boss (Kate Bosworth, expanding her repertoire and getting away with it) has him train a new recruit whom he also uses as “muscle.”

Stray (Mohean Aria, not bad) is a yard fighter who picks up cash in bareknuckle brawls in the toughest part of town. He goes for a ride, does his part, and finds himself at a driving range in the middle of the night.

“Goooolf,” Banderas/Cuda purrs between swings, “is about patience, timing, keeping your COOoooool. Obviously, you lack all of these qualities.”

That’s about it as far as “training day” goes. Because Cuda has this teen daughter who isn’t interested in reconnecting after his prison stint. So he takes on another “stray,” 15 year-old Billie (Zolee Griggs) from Atlanta.

When his protection doesn’t save her from trafficking, Cuda must track her down and have his moment of truth with boss Estelle and a drugs-and-sex-trafficking underling played gangsta-to-the-hilt by the rapper 2 Chainz.

The picture begins with the young Stray’s story, and doesn’t totally lose track of him throughout, but he’s the sideshow here. There are cliches, continuity issues and the odd attempted grace note — the ex-con in the classic muscle car staring, in disbelief, at the drifting car culture that blew up while he was in prison.

Mostly “Enforcer” is content to be just a somewhat efficient march through a formula. So I’m not saying it’s all that good.

What I am saying is that Banderas, filmed and showcased like the great leading man and simmering man of action he still embodies, makes “The Enforcer” worth watching all by himself. Again, ask director Hughes. He knows where the money is and he never strays far from it, or him, in this just-lean-enough debt collector thriller.

Rating:  R for strong/bloody violence, language throughout, sexual content, nudity and drug use.

Cast: Antonio Banderas Mohean Aria, Zolee Griggs, 2 Chainz, Alexis Ren and Kate Bosworth

Credits: Directed by Richard Hughes, scripted by W. Peter Iliff. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:31

His movies aren’t even distributed in the US, not in ways most of the country hears about or sees.

He lost his fastball years ago and his breaking stuff hasn’t gotten by of late.

And then there’s the whole matter of the child molestation allegations that will have a prominent place in Woody Allen’s obituary.

Now, in Spain, he’s announced that his next planned film, “Wasp 22,” will be his last.

And just a little while ago, he tried to walk this “end with my 50th film” declaration back. He needs to get a hint. I’ll be shocked if he actually gets this one done.

Eighty-six is a little late getting the memo, Wood man. “Writing,” will be your focus now? No doubt there are still publishers who will put out whatever you write. As to whether anyone will read it…

There’s a moment in a car chase in the third act of the idiotic action thriller “Section 8” when we see Dermot Mulroney, as one of the heavies, push his SUV to the limit to the sounds of Bach’s Cello Suite in G. And I’m so tuned-out of this convoluted, over-cast nonsense that I think, “Wait, is that Dermot Mulroney PLAYING the cello there? Bach, in the middle of a car chase?”

The mind does these things to distract itself from such an affront to the senses, and common sense.

If it was Mr. Mulroney sawing away with the bow, let me just say “Well done!” As for the movie, well…

“Section 8” begins in Afghanistan, where an Special Forces Col. (Dolph Lundren) saves one of his men (Ryan Kwanten) in an ambush, and loses part of a leg in the process.

It jumps to “five years later” when that combat survivor, Jake, is scraping by working at Earl’s garage in working class Riverside, California. Jake interrupts a Latino gang attempting a shakedown of Earl one day, and Earl has barely finished his borderline racist “in their culture” defense of the hooligans when Jake’s family is massacred.

Jake massacres back, finds himself in prison, resigned to spend the rest of his life there for wiping out five gangsters. A visit from his old Col. doesn’t help. An approach from a mysterious “not the CIA” special “team” leader (Mulroney) falls on deaf ears, too.

Next thing Jake knows, he’s being beaten in his cell, drugged and kidnapped and enrolled in “Section 8,” an acquisition and assassination squad that kills people on American soil.

After his hazing induction, Jake “hesitates” one time too many — this time from killing a fascist-leaning state senator — he becomes the target himself. Teammates Liza (Tracy Perez) and Ajax (Justin Furstenfeld) won’t help. The boss, Ramsey (Mulroney) might even call in the killer’s killer, the Brit Locke (Brit martial arts action star Scott Adkins).

“He isn’t burdened by weaknesses like remorse and guilt.”

Who can Jake trust? Who can he best in a fight or a shoot out? Where can he run to?

The movie loses track of its most charismatic man-of-action, Adkins, for much of its length. We’re treated to chatty scenes with Lundgren, Rourke and Mulroney, and the occasional shoot-out set-piece that usually devolves into a fist and foot and knife fight.

It doesn’t hang together very well pretty much from the start. But by the third act, this messy mayhem goes right off the rails, as if there were rails it was following in the first place.

The acting is better than the script, but that’s not saying much. The picture’s politics are sketchy and kind of fascist-friendly, in that these guys are members of an extrajudicial murder squad that goes after a blatant “Senator Graham” MAGA type.

There’s one good fight. And one terrible chase. And there’s a grand little piece of cello music backing a seriously that chase. Otherwise, this is pretty much an embarrassment for most involved.

Rating: unrated, lots and lots of violence

Cast: Ryan Kwanten, Dolph Lundgren, Tracy Perez, Mickey Rourke and Scott Adkins

Credits: Directed by Christian Sesma, scripted by Chad Law and Josh Ridgway. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:38

Most every cinema culture has produced movies guaranteed to make you cry — films about untimely death, a life that shrinks in old age, small tragedies and ones as great as the Holocaust.

But for sheer sadness, the deflating gloom of doom, you couldn’t beat “On the Beach” in 1959 and I dare say it’s never been topped since.

Whatever jauntiness enveloped the admittedly grim (when you think about it) Australian lament “Waltzing Matilda” pretty much vanishes for life once you’ve heard it as a funereal “dirge/waltz” in Stanley Kramer’s anti-nuclear war epic.

Whatever romance your inner survivalist sees in “last woman/man on Earth” fantasies withers into resignation.

Whatever parties Prince later suggested we throw in “1999” seem like gaiety through gritted teeth in this depiction of The End is Nigh.

Kramer, a socially-conscious filmmaker who pointed his camera at racism (“The Defiant Ones”), liberals forced to walk the walk after talking the talk (“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”), fundamentalist backwardness (“Inherit the Wind”) and staring down fascism and holding Nazis accountable (“Judgement at Nuremberg”) didn’t set out to depict nuclear war during the era it seemed closest to happening. He told a story set after the apocalypse, as civilization winds down and death from radiation faces the last survivors.

Gregory Peck plays an American submarine commander, Dwight Towers, who brought his U.S.S. Sawfish to Australia after life in the northern hemisphere was wiped out. American expats and Aussies collaborate professionally and socialize after hours in a mostly-joyless “Keep calm and carry on” tradition.

Towers isn’t in denial over losing his entire family in the war. But he’s not over it, no matter how he carries on with the Live-for-Today free spirit ex-pat Moira (Ava Gardner).

Lt. Holmes (Anthony Perkins) has no break from hard decisions when he’s ashore. He’s married, and his wife (Donna Anderson) and daughter are with him. Any mission could be his last, but he and his boat could return and re-surface on an Australia that has succumbed to the radiation cloud that is slowly making its way Down Under. He’s on the market for suicide pills, not for himself, but to leave with his wife.

The nuclear-powered Sawfish — actually an Australian submarine, as the U.S. Navy wanted no part of a movie that depicts a world ended by military miscalculation — sets out on a fool’s errand, tracing a mysterious radio signal from the U.S. west coast. If nothing else, at least the crew will get to say goodbye to their home country.

One of the best scenes in the film is man after man in the crew peering through the periscope eyepiece, snapping its training handles shut after gazing on what empty, depopulated San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge look like.

One sailor resolves to go AWOL and die “at home,” and the viewer, the crew and even the captain come to accept that decision, and in that order.

Fred Astaire, playing a scientist determined to do himself in on an auto racing track on land, is on board to study and measure what they find, and explain to the crew how this could have happened.

“The war started when people accepted the idiotic principle that peace could be maintained – – by arranging to defend themselves with weapons they couldn’t possibly use – – without committing suicide.”

Kramer was never considered a top tier filmmaker, but his conscientious treatment of the hot button subjects of his day set him apart, and damned if his visually conservative, well-cast but somewhat stodgy civics lessons don’t hold up today. Most of them, anyway.

Casting is the key to “On the Beach.” Actors are who make us sad and cause us to cry. Peck was all stiff upper lip by this stage of his career and God help him when he tried to soften that into a man wracked by grief. Astaire toned down the debonair devil-may-care persona he had aged out of, and Perkins was plausibly emotional, but in a most military, reserved way.

And that’s all by design. These aren’t just mortal men, they’re professionals and nobody on that boat of that era is going to let down his mates by breaking down. Even the guy who goes AWOL does it on the sly.

Ashore should be another matter. But anybody expecting big, moving breakdowns, even from Perkins, is expecting in vain.

It is Gardner who makes the picture and who breaks your heart. Pushing 40 when the film came out, a brassy, world-weary beauty playing a childless party girl in a world with no prospects for survival, much less a more adult and well-rounded life, her resignation becomes our resignation.

 “There isn’t time. No time to love… nothing to remember… nothing worth remembering.”

And hers is the iconic image of a movie that wasn’t the greatest film of its era or even its year, but one that went on to become one of the most influential movies ever made, and the saddest. Every nuclear apocalypse tale that followed owes everything to “On the Beach.” Every filmmaker attempting to tell such a story sets out in search of the crippling, all-consuming grief contained in a single image, a solitary woman staring out to sea as her man and his submarine sets off on one final futile mission from which there will be no return.

Rating: approved

Cast: Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Tony Perkins, Fred Astaire, Donna Anderson, John Tate and Harper McGuire

Credits: Directed by Stanley Kramer, scripted by John Paxton and Nevil Shute. A

Running time: 2:14

I stopped to take a photo of this 1990s Jeep Cherokee because it appears to be the doorless afterlife of one of the two I owned in the ’90s and early 2000s.

Then I remembered that a dark blue version of this SUV had a co starring role in Thandiwe Newton’s latest, “God’s Country,” which I reviewed yesterday.

Any guy watching a movie will recognize a former car he’s owned in a film. This one is so iconic that a week literally doesn’t go by when I don’t see one in a movie. And that’s been the case since they were in production and only picked up in the decades since, beginning with the white 88 Cherokee Liam Neeson drove the hell out of in an epic chase in “Taken” back in 2008.

Cars are “cast” in films the way actors are. You are what you drive, and filmmakers are quick to put academics, Californians or enlightened family folk in Priuses.

Academics used to always drive Saabs in the movies because that reflected a large share of the real life owners of the quirky/sporty Swedish ride.

Detectives in the movies and on TV always drive a “car with character” — from Steve McQueen’s iconic ’68 Mustang to Columbo’s ancient Volvo, Rockford’s Firebird to Magnum’s Ferrari, on down the line.

Any time you see a new Audi in a movie, however, that’s just “product placement.” They spend a lot of advertising money placing Audis in “Mission: Impossible” or “Confess, Fletch” and any movie where an upscale mechanic’s-best-friendmobile is called for.

Jeep XJs have an enduring Hollywood appeal thanks to the sense of security-against-the-terrain-and-the elements reputation they embody. Sure, we’re headed off to grandad’s cabin in the middle of nowhere. We’ve got Dad’s old Jeep! What could go wrong? “Jeep hubris.” Any Jeep owner knows what that is, and no, no SUV handles all that well on black ice.

Ski trips? Urban dweller who wants to look offroad capable? Working class woman or man, down on her or his luck and still needing old, reliable transport to the job site or diner?

There’s one used as a straight up MomWagon (Sport Maternity Vehicle) in the kiddie horror pic “Spirit Halloween: The Movie.” A broke family that hasn’t been able to trade cars in 25 years moves into a house and next thing you know,”We Have a Ghost.”

In “Gods Country,” when college professor Cassandra (Newton), a Black woman in white rural America (British Columbia subbing for Montana, which is less filmable) wants to blend in and not have to rely on outside help getting around in winter or up mountainsides, naturally she buys an old XJ.

When locals take liberties on her property, she even uses the Jeep to tow the offending good’ol boy old Ford pickup that her antagonists drive off her property.

Hell, here’s an ancient mid 90s XJ used as a getaway SUV in the futuristic German sci Fi thriller “Paradise.” A) We know the surviving XJ’s will still be around. And B), “There is only one Jeep,” after all. The Germans know this better than most.

Want proof that this is the most filmed ride of the last 20 years? Look at the Internet Movie Car Database. There it is –– 111 pages of Jeep Cherokees, from “Buckaroo Banzai” to “Bob’s Burgers,” “U.S. Marshalls” to “Eli Stone,” “Kill the Messenger,” “Mercy,” “The Goldbergs,” “Parks & Rec.” (Surely Nick Offerman drove a Jeep?) on down to “God’s Country.”

And the reason we keep seeing them is that they’re too valuable to let fall to complete rust, and they ran forever in their ’80s-early 2000s incarnation — especially the straight six cylinder version. I drove two of them for over 200,000 miles, hauling a two ton sailboat on a trailer a good part of the time, toting skis, dogs or bikes the rest of the time.

Every time I think Hollywood will have to move on, find something newer to send the same casting message that XJs have when you see them in movies, here come five more films that put this old Jeep in the spotlight.

When it comes to movies, it turns out there really “is only one Jeep.”

“God’s Country” is a the most interesting fall drama that you will never let yourself love. “Adult” in the grownup sense, thought-provoking, hot button-hitting and unpredictably predictable, it makes a fascinating showcase for Thandiwe Newton and invites more than one spirited debate about its characters, themes and issues on the ride home.

Director Julian Higgins and co-writer Shaye Ogbonna — TV veterans — introduce issues of race, class and the American ideal challenged in a story of an escalating conflict enfolding privacy and property rights, tribalism and white entitlement. It’s got a lot to digest and frustrate, and a bit to excuse.

Newton plays Cassandra, a woman we meet as she says good-bye to a loved-one at the funeral home’s crematorium. She is gutted, guarded and solitary.. Newton and the filmmakers reveal her backstory in layers that they peel away one patient layer at a time.

Cassandra teaches at a college in Big Sky country — remote Montana — and we get the feeling that her public speaking students get something more meaningful than the simple skills needed to not panic while preparing and delivering a speech. But the New Orleans native is the only Black face in her department. And she and another woman on the faculty are fighting an uphill battle in trying to get the hidebound tenured white males to shake “the same old way of doing things.”

At home, she’s got the company of an old Labrador and the great views her hillside chateau affords. She seems isolated, but her old colleague and new department chair (Kai Lennox) lives a few acres over.

But that’s of little comfort when she has to deal with camo-clad pickup-trucking locals who figure her property is just a parking lot and entryway to their hunting grounds. She leaves them a note, and finds a spattered bird and the note torn up. She tells them (Joris Jarsky, Jefferson White) in polite but firm terms, “before you park on someone’s property have to come and ask.”

We don’t need a translator to know what there “I heard about you,” comeback means.

Lines have been drawn, and as anybody who’s ever lived away from the cities knows, the offending beer-swilling hunters are the ones to take the quickest offense. Next thing we know she’s giving evidence and filing a complaint with a reluctant sheriff’s deputy (Jeremy Bobb). Next thing the deputy knows, she’s following him to make sure he goes and warns these two off.

Naturally, he knows them. Naturally, they know him. And no, she’s not interested in his “out here, things are a little different,” his suggestion that she talk and “work things out” herself with two burly, armed men, and his warning that “contacting the authorities just makes things worse.”

Cassandra may be a little on edge and may have a chip on her shoulder. But she’s speaking for a lot of people when she snaps “We’ve all got to play by the same rules if this thing is gonna work.”

What she’s talking about is America. What’s she’s is broaching is unequal justice. And what she’s saying to biased, never-touch-my-pickup-truck-paisanos rural law enforcement is loud and clear before she puts Deputy Gus on blast.

“What are you even here for” if it’s not to enforce the law? Because letting those who would do whatever the hell they want as long as they’re willing to intimidate those who aren’t burly and armed and the law does nothing is unacceptable, even if it is commonplace.

In rural America, where the law enforcement is scarce, where everyone knows everyone else and a whole lot of people are trapped in generational bubbles of relationships, grievances and denial, a lot of encounters have a built-in might-makes-me-right “What’re you gonna do about it?”

“God’s Country” is a modern Western working around the “confront those who would take from you” code of the Old West. But where Higgins and Ogbonna take us on this never-less-than-tense journey is startling in its connections, bracing in its grace notes.

Cassandra jogs by herself, sometimes in the dark. Her house has a lot of windows. She enjoys the presence of the deer on her property. She has a dog. We fear for her, first scene to last.

Nobody is all that laudable or even pleasant, but the one character most of us can identify with is Cassandra, who shows a cool head and moments of compassion that rattle even the quickest-to-anger honkytonk loving hunter. No slur is ever uttered, but we feel them in the characters’ chin-jutting posture and testy tone.

And whatever she’s up against isn’t just white hunters avoiding the “n” word, it’s faculty thinking but trying to avoid saying the “token” word instead of “diversity out loud in her presence. She’s got to fight the urge to scream “REDNECKS” as well.

In the end, what “God’s Country” is wrestling with is too big for the movie or the filmmakers’ ambitions. It’s about the reasonable trying to reason with the unreasonable, about race and relative deprivation and the ignorant, angry and armed refusal to accept change. And it’s about neither side recognizing the blind spots in their logic, the biases they’re giving in to and the ugliness they lash out with.

I don’t have to identify who says “Why are you like this?” for you to know who said it, or that any number of characters could also say it with just as much conviction, just as certain they’re on the moral high ground.

Rating: R, for language (profanity)

Cast: Thandiwe Newton, Joris Jarsky, Jefferson White,

Credits: Directed by Julian Higgins, scripted by Julian Higgins and Shaye Ogbonna.

Running time: 1:42