Movie Nation

Post apocalyptic child rearing, getting your baby “home” after an environmental catastrophe?

Coming soon.

While one can appreciate the idea that a talented filmmaker with style and edge would turn his attention to children’s films, and the Texas-based studio he founded to shoot them in, a new Robert Rodriguez “Spy Kids” installment always gives me a case of, “Awww, dude.”

As in “Aww, dude, ‘Hypnotic’ wasn’t all that bad, and there are all those cool credits you accumulated before it — ‘Sin City,’ ‘Once Upon a Time in Mexico,’ going back to ‘Desperado’ and ‘El Mariachi.’ But another movie with kiddie spies and spy gadgets?”

This latest reboot gets made-for-Netflix money, so many Troublemaker Studios gets a little more in the black. But even though the messaging is upbeat, the video game villain has Muskian overtones and it finishes well, it lacks the Spanglish spark that made the original films so much fun.

Gina Rodriguez isn’t a bad swap for Carla Gugino as the new “mom” who is a spy. But Zachary Levi is nobody’s idea of Antonio Banderas. He isn’t even his usual jovial self, here, thanks to a script so PG it’s like the “P” was washed right out of it.

And all the colorful villains and actors playing them from the past films hang over Billy Magnussen’s turn as Rey “The King” Kingston, the video game mogul who wants to cheat-code, hack and reboot The World.

Everly Carganilla is Patty and and Conor Esterson is Tony, the two “kids” who have no clue Mom and Dad work for the OSS. No, not THAT OSS.

The parents, Nora Torrez and Terrence Tango, are ordered to fend off whoever is trying to steal this “Armageddon Code.” They find themselves battling villainous figures based on Aztec warriors and Spanish conquistadors, with some Heck Knight as the ultimate foe. They don’t figure out they’re straight out of a video until they’re already hostages.

Their kids, meanwhile, have escaped to the “Safe House” lair where they finally put the “Ah, they’re SPIES” thing together. This digitally-advanced lair offers Spy Training lessons via tutorials rendered by their digitized parents.

When they figure out that the game Hyskor and its creator Rey Kingston are the villains, game-master Tony figures it’s his turn to shine.

These movies are always more humorous than this. Not only is the flippant Levi wasted in it, few other jokes land either.

Here’s one that did. Villainois minions raid the “safe house.” One of them is cautious.

“Careful! They could have…gadgets.”

A souped-up trike and deco-design boat-jet, a robotic crab drone and weapon-stashing bracelets are among the blase tech trotted out.

I also laughed at the pass code the kids have to recite to enter the lair. Aw, man, NOBODY in the Spanish speaking world wants to give their ENTIRE name to anyone.

“Patricia Angelita Sorrow Feliz Rhiannon Tango-Torrez!”

There’s novelty in their “find another way” around violence conflict resolution messsaging, the effects are excellent, if not quite at a Marvel level at the moment and it finishes well.

But bland leads, a story that feels similar to many other “Spy Kids” adventures and the paucity of colorful supporting players kind of washes the Spanish/Spanglish fun right out of this most Tex-Mex of kids’ franchises.

Rating: PG

Cast: Conor Esterson, Everly Carganilla, Gina Rodriguez, Zachary Levi and Billy Magnussen.

Credits: Directed by Robert Rodriguez, scripted by Robert Rodriguez and Racer Max. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

“And Then Come the Nightjars” is a droll and poignant tale of male bonding and how a traumatic event scars such a relationship and sounds a death knell for a way of life.

It’s distinctly British elegy, a two-handed piece scripted by Bea Roberts, based on her award-winning play and given a verdant, wistful treatment by first-time feature director Paul Roberts. With original stage stars David Fielder and Nigel Hastings recreating the characters for this “opened up” production, “Nightjars” makes for a funereal film with flashes of wit, drama and fire.

A solitary white-bearded farmer (Fielder) works on his gates, grates and his outbuildings, fastidiously scrubbing down surfaces left and right, dipping and splashing disenfectant everywhere as snippets of the news play out on the radio.

It’s 2001 in Devon, and he’s doing his due dillegence as what is shaping up to be one of Britain’s worst foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks ever is crawling from Essex into other Home Counties.

That fellow who shows up in a pink cowboy hat “I won at the fete?” He’s Jeffrey (Hastings), the local veterinarian.

Don’t let the pink hat and crusty Michael’s “Christ and f—–g baby Moses in a basket” reaction to it throw you. And Michael doesn’t let Jeff’s hours-long “stop by” chat as they keep vigil over Dolly, who is about to calf, distract him. With disease about and a vet in his calfing barn, he senses what Jeff won’t tell him.

But the reassurances that “you’ve be fine,” that this disease isn’t close, that his herd — Michael names every cow — is healthy, seem enough.

“You’re the only one I trust with my girls.”

And maybe Jeff’s just killing time here because things aren’t great at home. Michael guesses that, too.

But that bird Michael hears but never sees? It’s a nightjar, “the bird of death…bad luck.”

Days later Jeff comes back in his haz-mat coat to talk Michael down from a shotgun stand-off with government officials there to “dispose” of the herd. Everything’s gotten worse, from Jeffrey’s marriage to Michael’s denial of the foot and mouth disease almost at his door. No, his cows aren’t sick, but no, Jeff can’t “go talk some sense” into those who have a government mandate, which he’s hear to oversee and perform.

He’s going to have to kill Michael’s cows. And his pleas work their way around to what can go wrong when this sort of this is rushed because of delays like Michael’s attempting here. “Humane” goes out the door.

Their easy, joking and over-familiar relationship — Jeff doesn’t hesitate to take nips off his ever-present flask, but never offers it to the farmer — bends from friendly/tetchy to testy and panicked. Jeff is haunted by what he must do. Michael is lashing out, even at his friend. They need each other to get through this. They just need to figure that out.

Roberts scripts lovely exchanges that show how entwined in each other’s lives these two have become. This isn’t just a customer/businessman connection, not just a vet who makes his living off these folks’ livelihoods. It’s a whole way of life tied together in family, the rhythms of the farm work year, the changing of the seasons and the unchanging nature of their community, an ecosystem that needs every farm to work and pay off, every animal cared for, every institution and every person there to survive and their farm to make it to another generation.

The story jumps forward in time a few more instances, showing how events of 2001 impacted that delicate interconnection and changed the two men’s relationship.

The simplest way to describe “And Then Come the Nightjars” is as a “kitchen sink” play that’s escaped “to the Country.” It’s beautiful to look at, from the working interiors of a 200 year-old cattle farm to the tree canopy-tunneled backcountry roads.

Fleshed out with a farm country wedding as well as a more directly sinister “they’re coming to get my herd” stand-off, it’s a lovely film with a somber, sad undertone, a country life “dying of the light” that makes the journey from stage to screen with its heart still broken, but intact.

Rating: unrated, profanity, disturbing images

Cast: David Fielder, Nigel Hastings

Credits: Directed by Paul Robinson, scripted by Bea Roberts, based on her play. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:20

Casting Olga Kurylenko is interesting, in that she’s got the action film bonafides.

And the timing of the trailer, just as people are pondering why North American men spend so much time pondering the Roman Empire, couldn’t be better.

Every British schoolchild knows the name of the queen who fought the Italian imperialists. Now, maybe the rest of us will dive into her story.

Clive Standen, Peter Franzen and Rita Tushingham are in the cast.

A fourth go-round for the “Expendables,” with most of the all-star buzz/all-star cast of aging action star lineup checked out since the last film in that opening trilogy, is turning out to be have been a bad idea.

Inflation-jacked ticket prices or not, a poor Thursday night (I saw it with maybe 5 people in the theater) and feeble Friday of $3.3 point to a $9 million opening weekend, tops, which Deadline.com notes is the worst ever for the franchise.

Terrible reviews, far worse than the original film and pretty much bad across the board, didn’t help.

Stallone doesn’t have anything else going on, to speak of, but Jason Statham has better things to do than ride this dead horse until he’s Sly’s age. No Terry Crews, newer, lower wattage co-stars gave fans no excuse to turn up just to see the Lionsgate spectacle.

“Nun II” will clear $7 million, a bad movie that keeps making money.

“A Haunting in Venice” deserved better than a half-decent opening and 60% drop second weekend. The lack of a more star-studded supporting cast may give its older audience an excuse to not bother — it might make $6. Then again, it traditionally takes older audiences longer to get around to movies aimed at them. It’s good. Maybe they’ll get the word. We’ll see.

The final Denzel turn as “The Equalizer” isn’t having that problem, clearing $4.5, $81 all-in by midnight Sunday. It probably won’t reach $100, but it’ll end up close.

And “Barbie” is getting a lot of IMAX screens and its $3.5 million take will be enough to shove the worst “Big Fat Greek Wedding” movie out of the top five.

I’ll update this as more data comes in. The released and abandoned “Dumb Money” and other more titles have my interest as well.

Because man doth not live by cinema alone.

Svetlana Smolina at The Prizery, South Boston, VA

I can’t remember a comedy that caused me more anxiety than “Quicksand,” a scruffy little “film festival indie” that leaves that sheltered environment to try its luck competing in the real world.

The lead characters are a couple goofballs who do the wrong thing, fail to ask the right question and refuse simply to “take a win” or cut-their-losses and run in every situation they face.

Every “misunderstanding” that piles up along the way is escalated, every injustice and humiliation is left un-redressed, every wrong left-unrighted.

The first two acts are so frustrating my stomach was in knots. I couldn’t decide if the characters Ray (Tanner Presswood, channeling “Napoleon Dynamite”) and thick-accented-Paul (Simón Elias) were worth rooting for, pitying or loathing.

But energy and quick pacing carry us through the leaky, ulcer-inducing early acts and get us to a “get me to the church on time” finale that mocks “Thin Blue Line” cop solidarity and Michigan “types,” the gun-nuttierr, the funnier.

I can’t say it all works or that I “highly” recommend it. But it kind of plays, and it pays off.

Ray is 23 and unemployed — he fears he’s unemployable. His bestie Paul may talk-up his first “grownup job,” but he’s about to discover it’s an unpaid internship.

And these two idiots are co-best men for their pal Josh’s upcoming wedding, which sets up the story’s two initial problems. Ray hopes to make time with the fair Claire, his “super crush,” at the wedding. That means Paul’s got to coach him about how to break up with long term girlfriend Maggie (Mia Hagerty), which he does, from UNDER the TABLE in the booth where Ray meets her.

Ray’s too slow to recognize HER breaking up with him, or to take seriously her statement of the obvious? “Paul controls you!”

These two losers also have Josh’s Norwegian granny’s valuable wedding ring to guard, which Ray manages to leave on a sofa he sells to a pawn shop because they’re that broke.

The film’s first maddening scene is their meeting with that pawn broker, never pointing out that the ring wasn’t his to steal and sell or coming over the counter to threaten this blithe jerk (AJ Guertin, infuriating). Ray even has to bribe him for the address of the receiving-stolen-property creep “400 miles away” who bought it.

They have to borrow a tent, pile into Paul’s Jeep XJ for a road trip and get the ring back BEFORE the wedding. Misunderstandings, mishaps, mayhem, run-ins with murderers, a corrupt sheriff (Tom Czarny), car chases with the stolen ring-buyer, a stand-off with an archer, oh and QUICKSAND — just another day or so’s “adventures” in Kid Rock’s Northern Michigan.

The leads have a dopey chemistry that is somewhat wasted on jokes that aren’t quite B-picture. They find a cell “with real buttons,” which might get them out of a jam.

“It’s like...a phone, where you can only use the PHONE app!”

Their predicaments are dopey and generic — quicksand here, tied-up by the bad guys there. But every now and then the “get them out of the jam” scripted problem-solving is clever enough.

And the “big finish” kind of/sort of works, in that pull-your-hair-out over more ANXIETY over what obvious steps are untaken, what obvious explanations left unspoken way.

But if you crave a comedy that’ll have you shouting at the screen — a LOT — friend I just one word for you — “QUICKSAND.”

Rating: unrated, violence, bloody but sometimes comical

Cast: Tanner Presswood, Simón Elias and Tom Czarny

Credits: Directed by JohnPaul Morris, scripted by JohnPaul Morris, Jake Burgess and Broderick Steele. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time:

“The Saint of Second Chances” is the “baseball” documentary you never knew you wanted.

Heartwarming, amusing, apalling and sad, this story of flawed baseball team owner, promoter/cheerleader Mike Veeck takes us through the ups and downs of a third generation “baseball guy,” and manages to be damned entertaining pretty much start to finish.

It’s a delighful bon bon to throw our way just as the Major League playoffs are about to begin.

Two great documentary filmmakers — Jeff Malmberg of “Won’t You Be By Neighbor,” and Morgan Neville (“Twenty Feet from Stardom”) — team up to tell an intimate, self-effacing story of baseball promotions, “hustling” up attendance through the triumph and tragedy of Mike Veeck, whose cinematic biography is in the best “Everybody loves a comeback” tradition.

Two different “Bill” Veecks — grandfather William and peg-legged pirate of promotions father Bill — owned teams in Chicago over the decades. Bill, the younger, became one of baseball’s great innovators, changing the game during the years he owned Cleveland and St. Louis franchises, and the two times he took over the Chicago White Sox.

Mike Veeck was Bill’s rebellious, perhaps a tad overlooked son who came on board with his father when Bill bought the Sox back in 1975. The film, a docu-drama that has Mike interviewed on camera and agree on camera to “play” his dad in the story, casts Charlie Day as the young Mike, a garage band rocker who gives up that dream and shows up at “the office” in a ironic (symbolic) “Owner’s Son” t-shirt.

We see the kid do every menial job the shoestring operation demands and watch his father hold forth from his “office,” the Bard’s Room Bar inside old Comiskey Park, the home of the White Sox.

Former players like Tony LaRussa remember the legendary, larger than life Bill, who cast a giant shadow son Mike spent much of his life trying to escape.

Bill had “changed” baseball. Mike would, too. From his father, he picked up the principle that their games would be “street theater wrapped around a ball game.” And he’d excel at it.

But as a budding “hustler” and promoter, he’d preside over one of the most infamous “promotions” in baseball history — “Disco Demolition Night” — and spend decades living that down. The guy who invented The Luxury Box viewing experience as a means of raising fast cash to re-sign a free agent they were about to lose couldn’t get hired anywhere.

Malmberg and Neville got Jeff Daniels to deliver a droll, playful narration of the ups and downs of Veck the Younger’s life. After that that ugly “disco” night (a racist, homophobic crowd, brought their by a race-and-gay-baiting DJ, got out of control), we see the trials, the years-long drunk that the love of a good woman ended, the “comeback” that takes us in directions we never expect and the tragedies we don’t see coming.

Sentimental highs include Mike’s St. Paul, Minnesota minor-league team give recovering addict Darryl Strawberry the last of his many “last chances,” one that saw him flower thanks to a teammate/gimmick Mike introduced into the Darryl year with the St. Paul Saints.

The lows include Mike’s last blundered big league gimmick (indoor fireworks at Tampa Bay’s Tropicana Field) and personal losses we don’t see coming.

Neville and Malmberg use their Netflix budget to buy song rights to turn many a sequence into a musical montage, which, along with Mike Veeck’s big laugh, gives “The Saint of Second Chances” a jaunty pace and tone to go with an adorably warm feeling.

Purists may sniff at the “Veeck as in ‘Wreck'” blasphemies committed in the name of jazzing/sexing up the game and the ballpark experience. And the film’s point of view is seriously one-sided, so those purists don’t really have a voice here.

But this “Saint” earns this “Second Chance” thanks to a film sure to warm all but the most horsehide-thick basefaull buff’s heart.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Mike Veeck, Charlie Day, Libby Veeck, Night Train Veeck, Darryl Strawberry, Tony LaRussa, narrated by Jeff Daniels.

Credits: Written and directed by Jeff Malmberg and Morgan Neville. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33

“Dark Asset” is another “chip in his brain” supersoldier/super-agent “gone rogue” thriller — yeah, that’s pretty much a genre now — a movie that goes from bad to exponentially worse by giving itself over to what is passed-off as an all back-story, over-sharing bar-pickup conversation.

“So when I was escaping the doctor and his faciliity, but before I made it to the basement mainframe, I stumbled across something,” our anti-hero (Byron Mann) tells the vivacious blonde (Helena Mattsson) he’s hitting on. She is…all ears?

Yeah, some guys need to lead with “I have a Lamborghini in the parking lot.”

Much of this thriller, which opens with a generic “demonstration” of this “ex special forces” “guinea pig” that goes wrong (also “generic”), is back-filling back-story around that dull and perfunctory first act shoot-out.

Writer-director Michael Winnick stuffs all the back-story, back-filling and “twists” he can into the movie via the a momentum-killing monologue.

Such anecdotes can sparkle, sizzle, amuse and enthrall. Think of the “Your father’s watch” monologue from Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction.” Here, it’s just lazy, inert, a flat way of shoving a lot of faux complexity into a crap, formula thriller.

Casting Robert Patrick as the evil scientist behind this “microc chip super spy” program doesn’t show much effort. Naming his character Dr. Cain is downright lazy.

Mann an be an interesting actor (“The Big Short”) and is competent in the combat moments. He’s just monotonous background noise in this role.

The fact that “Dark Asset” is unsurprising and bad is itself unsurprising. With stinkers like “Deuces,” Malicious” and a Steven Seagal atrocity titled “Code of Honor” on his resume, “unsurprising” and “bad” are pretty much Michael Winnick’s brand.

Rating: R, violence

Cast: Byron Mann, Helena Mattsson, Shani Rigsbee, Sabina Gadecki, Marc Winnick and Robert Patrick.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Winnick. A Saban release.

Running time: 1:31

The Glimmer Twins — Mick and Keith — were the faces of the band, the ones who became songwriters and who made them stars.

Charlie Watts was the little old grownup in the room, quiet, unassuming.

Bill Wyman, whom you’ll hear in this clip, was the archivist, the historian, the packrat.

And Brian Jones? He was the founder, the soul that gave them their start.

Magnolia has its hands on a BBC doc about “The Stones and Brian Jones,” coming out in November. Here’s a taste.