Movie Nation

The characters are self-decribed “archetypal cliches” fated to die “long, drawn out deaths.”

And as they’re horror fans often commenting on the conventions of the genre, it’s safe to label “Killer Book Club” what it is — a Spanish “Scream” without the laughs.

It’s a slick, university-set thriller with a sexy young cast and grisly deaths that the viewer works her or his way through to figure out whodunit. But from the archetypal characters to the standard-issue murder settings and modes of death, there isn’t much here to hold the interest of anybody who’s ever seen a horror movie.

“Scream” was packed with jokes for a reason, amigos.

Veki Velilla plays Angela, “the heroine,” a leader among the lit students who gather in the boiler room they’re allowed to meet in and decorate. She’s a published writer struggling through horror-block to finish a second book.

The other “types” include “the brat” (Priscilla Delgado), “The Babe” (Ane Rot), “The Librarian” (María Cerezuela), “The Wild Man” (Carlos Alcaide), “The Simp”(Álvaro Mel ) “The Influencer”(Hamza Zaidi) and “The Emo” (Iván Pellicer).

A prologue apparently shows us the fiery end of Angela’s debut novel and now, six years later, she’d love guidance from her sympathetic lit professor (Daniel Grao). But he’s a “going through a divorce” sexual assaulter cliche.

No worries. Angela’s posse, obsessed with “killer clown” narratives (Let’s learn what coulrophobia means, kids!), gathers and plots — with her — revenge. But donning clown suits and scaring Prof. Cruzado leads to bloodying Professor Cruzado and that leads to him falling over a railing, impaled upon the lance of Don Quixote, a statue that probably graces the entrance to many a Spanish Lit Universidad.

They think they’ve gotten away with it when the text messages start — chapters of a new novel, “The Mad Clowns,” “Chapter One, The Death of the Professor.”

Someone saw them. Or maybe it was someone in their group of eight who taunts, threatens and promises to kill them “one by one,” just like in every horror story/movie since “The Masque of the Red Death.“

Carlos García Miranda’s humorless script is strictly formula, with the murders taking place at a foggy bus stop, a crimson-red (lighting) morgue and the like.

The problem-solving, led by the librarian, is simple but as with other elements of the narrative, our writer isn’t playing fair — this victim just “passed out,” that new character is half-expected. The sex is as foreshadowed as the murders. Even the book club members turning on each other (“You got us into this mess!” in Spanish with subtitles, or dubbed.) is more tedious than entertaining.

Good looking film, but if you aren’t going to mock the horror book/movie conventions you’re sending up, I really don’t see the point.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Veki Velilla, Álvaro Mel, Priscilla Delgado, Iván Pellicer, Hamza Zaidi, Carlos Alcaide, María Cerezuela, Ane Rot and Daniel Grao

Credits: Directed by Carlos Alonso Ojea, scripted by Carlos García Miranda. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:29

This September 15 release is based on the true story of a Luchador “exotico,” a “heel” (designated villain, usually, in US wrestling terms) who performs in drag, and becomes wildly popular in a macho and by reputation homophobic culture.

The trailer has a fabulously uplifting vibe, and Bernal always always siempre delivers.

Not every B-movie getaway thriller has the ambition to aim for something existentialist/absurdist in its plot, so a deep bow and a tip of the hat to filmmaker Isaac H. Eaton — using a story idea of Daniel Devoto — for making the attempt.

“Welcome to Redville” is about a murderous jewelry robbery couple (Jake Manley and Highdee Kuan) who find themselves stuck in a quaint little desert southwest town that’s “not on the map.” They think they’ve made their getaway, but getting away from that getaway could be tricky.

You can see echoes of Ambrose Bierce, or Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” which Rod Serling satirized in “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” on “The Twilight Zone.” But the best analogy is the unfortunate farce “Trapped in Paradise,” a 1994 “Groundhog Day” riff with robbers Nic Cage, Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey stuck in a winter wonderland town they cannot escape.

“Redville” is a deathly-slow, emotionally empty exericise in “Is this Purgatory?” But even though everything existential and cinematic can’t be “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” I hand it to them for trying.

We meet Toni (Kuan) and Leo (Manley) as they’re being chased on a desert highway where the Joshua Trees grow.

The police are reluctant to pull the trigger, even though a flashback shows up the jewelry store robbery that went and awry and ended up with a security guard killed.

The couple — Toni was wounded in the shootout — take a Thelme & Louise gamble in their Dodge Charger, and win. The cops won’t follow and, gut-wounded girlfriend or not, Leo’s relieved to find this “not on the map” village where they can get the car fixed, Toni can recuparate (the wound is forgotten in time for “We got away with it” sex.) and they can lay low.

It’s a squirrely little berg — tumbleweed dirt roads lead in, but the designer downtown (California City, CA) has paved streets, shops and diners and lots of customers — some of them literal clowns. Sheriff Brooks (Chris Elliott) is prone to “You’re not from around here” threats, urging the newcomers to “stay humble” and stay out of trouble. And Sabrina Haskett plays his temptress daughter/bartender/jewelry store clerk who pretty much ensures that Leo, at least, follows neither piece of advice.

Radio personality and sometime actor Phil Hendrie plays the local jeweler with a tempting treasure on hand and a temptress (Haskett’s Lili) on staff to see that the visiting bad guys try and take the bait.

Kuan’s Toni resigns herself to what she thinks might be going on. Manley overacts-the-heck out of Leo as he rages — and raids the gunshop/Army Navy store — against whoever or whatever is holding him back.

Scene after scene lacks pop or urgency, and goes on past any expected payoff.

It’s a film of digitally-added gunshots, digitally-generated fire and digitally-composited steam coming out of the Charger’s radiator, something Dodge usually arranges for you.

The acting is uneven, the dialogue never quotable and the surprises unsurprising on most every level.

But at least they tried something outside of the ordinary in their otherwise instantly-forgotten thriller.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Jake Manley, Highdee Kuan, Sabrina Haskett, Hendrie and Chris Elliott.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Isaac H. Eaton. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:28

Whatever its perceived shortcomings upon its 1958 release (1960 in the U.S.), “The Man Inside” offers plenty of delights for the classic film buff of today.

It’s got veteran screen heavy Jack Palance, cast against type as a drawling, wisecracking film noir detective. He’d win an Oscar for being even funnier than this in “City Slickers.”

There’s gorgeous Swedish starlet Anita Ekberg as a femme fatale, joking about her “concealed weapons” and giving Palance’s character a running gag he just wouldn’t let go of.

Future James Bond producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli signed the checks of not one but TWO future Bond villains — Donald Pleasense and Walter Gotell — for this pre-Bond bounce around Europe.

And here’s future Grammy winner Anthony Newley, slinging a not-wholly passable accent as a Spanish cabbie and singing a Spanish patter song. Well, the song is looped, but that may have been him singing.

“The Man Inside,” based on a novel by M.E.Chaber, is a pre-“Pink Panther,” pre “Topkapi” diamond heist thriller. A solitary, man-of-few-words Brit (Nigel Patrick, terrific) and New York diamond-trade insider walks in on a colleague of 15 years, locks the man in his safe and steals the coveted Tyrana Blue from a display case in his office.

Silent Sam Carter shoots the elevator operator to make his escape.

He’s become entranced, “obsessed” with the jewel, the colleague tells the police, who summon their Man in Dallas (Palance), Mr. “heart of asbestos,” to chase this Sam Carter down and retrieve the treasure.

Milo March marches in on Carter’s dumpy old New York apartment to find Trudie (Ekberg), dressed to the nines, has rented it. She can’t be mixed up in this, or can she?

Milo realizes she is when his car, parked outside, blows up, killing the guy he’d given the keys to move it. And he figures out someone ELSE, someone serious, is tracking Carter and covets the diamond as well.

The story takes us to the alleys of Lisbon and the parks and backstreets of Madrid, where Milo’s cabbie/guide to the city (Newley) is his driver on a car chase in an attempt to get away from goons led by Lomer, the man with the scar (Bonar Colleano, in his final film).

Paris comes next, then a train ride to London, as March gets close to Carter, they compete for Trudie and we pick up hints about the murderous robber’s personality. He’s a classic loner, but he does magic tricks for the children of Madrid, who steal the object he has the diamond hidden in and lead him on a merry chase through the Plaza de Espana of Franco-era Spain.

When a child hands the cabbie Ernesto a rabbit at the conclusion of all this, it’s hard to imagine a better punchline.

It’s all something of a violent lark, with scores of Brits employed in roles of various nationalities (mostly in soundstage interiors) for this Warwick Production, distributed by Columbia. I laughed at quite a few sight gags, pithy noir-speak exchanges and pretty much every time Newley shows up.

The plot’s problem-solving — getting our heroes in and out of jams, parlaying information into being in on the deal, etc .– has a few holes thanks to the production’s overall briskness, probably reflected behind the camera.

The music — composed by Richard Rodney Bennett and conducted by Muir Mathieson — swings. The lighting, camera blocking and cinematography (by early Bond favorite Ted Bennett) are sharp, the action beats are well conceived. Nicolas Roeg is one of the credited assistant directors (IMDb has him as a camera operator).

Pleasence duels Newley for “Scene Stealer” honors. He plays a Portuguese organ grinder “much too GRIEVED” to talk about his dead friend, the document-forger, whom Carter also murders. Insert bribe here.

Patrick, one of the great character players of his era, is all beady-eyed mustachio’d menace here. Carter is someone all involved might underestimate but the classic example of the title’s aphorism, a man with a public face but whose “man inside” we don’t grasp until he acts on his innermost obsession, that “tyrana blue” (it’s a black-and-white Cinemascope film) stone he has coveted for 15 years.

How Ekberg — a great beauty who achieved screen immortality just a couple of years later in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” — never became a Hitchock Blonde is a mystery for the ages. She hits just the right notes in a role that could have just been another skirt for Newley to leer at.

Palance has a light touch in the Ekberg and Newley scenes, a two-fisted one in the fights. It took decades for filmmakers to fully appreciate everything he could play, but he hints at that range in “The Man Inside.”

Whatever expectations this lightweight thriller carried with it in 1958, now it can be appreciated for the tone, the action beats and travelogue narrative template for 60+ years of Bond films, and imitation Bonds, to come. It’s witty, with cool locations, colorful supporting players and a two fisted hero who might get the girl, but always after getting his man.

Rating: “approved,” violence, double entendres

Cast: Jack Palance, Anita Ekberg, Nigel Patrick, Donald Pleasence, Bonar Colleano and Anthony Newley.

Credits: Directed by John Gilling, scripted by David Shaw, based on a novel by M.E. Chaber. A Columbia release on Tubi, etc.

Running time: 1:29

A decent Thursday “preview” and solid Friday points to a $16-17 million opening weekend for the video gamer-turned-racer “true story” “Gran Turismo,” not bad for the next to last weekend of summer, but wholly justifying the release strategy of playing it in IMAX and 4DX (shaky seats) theaters for a couple of weekends before releasing it.

Not everybody thinks that’s cricket. But we’ll see if the bean-counters and “opening weekend” judges allow it.

When your “name” stars are Orlando Bloom and David Harbour and your subject if Euro sports car (LeMans, etc) racing in Nissans, you’ll take what you can get.

A fun movie for any car enthusiast (like moi).

“Barbie” is closing in on the $600 million mark at the North American box office and will clear it by next Friday, I figure, making it the Official Movie of the Summer of ’23. As this feminist satiric farce is slated to max out at $15.8 million, there’s a chance it could reclaim the top spot on Sunday.

One reason? Sunday is the annual NATO (National Theater Owners, also hated by Russia) “National Cinema Day,” with some 3000 screens nationwide offering tickets to see the summer’s hits for just $4.

Damn. Go to the movies, people. Get out of the heat. Get your “Barbie/Oppenheimer” et al on.

Deadline.com is saying that a huge fall-off on its second Friday will allow “Blue Beetle” to still clear $10 million on its second weekend. My math and guessing says “maybe not.” A shame, but mixed reviews didn’t help this one, even though it is chock full of representation, uplifting Mexican-American messaging and whatnot. Its target audience fanboys and fangirls and the Latin community — did not show up

The epic “Oppenheimer” will fall just short of $8, as things stand Friday night.

“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” will add almost $6 million and fall just shy of $100 million, domestically. A big National Cinema Day and maybe that spikes.

Liam Neeson’s half-decent thriller “Retribution” may clear $3-3.3 million. It’s not terrible, but not all that, and his demo is older and whiter and not hitting the cinemas in great numbers as they age. Except for “Sound of Freedom.”

The middling Dennis Quaid baseball drama “The Hill” won’t clear much more than $2.5 million, “Golda” is coming in at $1.7 or so, says @TheNumbers

“Bottoms” from MGM, which is in very limited release (a platformed roll-out) is winning the per screen average sweepstakes at $48k.

Will any or all of those latter titles surpass the last days “The Voyage of the Demeter,” “Haunted Mansion” or “Sound of Freedom?”

“Before, Now & Then” is a dreamy Indonesian drama about changing expectations and ideas of “freedom” that pass through the life of a Muslim woman through twenty years of her life.

This Berlin Film Festival award winner is a period piece based on the true story of the life of a Javanese woman from the WWII 1940s into the Indonesia of the 1960s, but taken from a chapter of a novel dealing with her life.

We meet Nana (Happy Salma) on the run with her older sister Ningsi (Rieke Diah Pitaloka).

They are fleeing “these men who took your husband” (in Indonesian with English subtitles). Nana is carrying her baby, anxious to know what will become of her. The men pursuing them (imagined by Nana) “are not Japanese or Dutch.” They are Indonesian rebels fond of behading their foes, and “They want to marry you to their leader.”

Nana sees visions of her man, and still sees him in her dreams 15 years later. She has been remarried, we figure, to that “leader,” Mr. Darga (Arswendy Bening Swara). She has a baby, two daughters and a little boy and a life of a West Java plantation with him. And she still cannot forget the husband she lost.

Over a decade into her marriage, her dreams are one problem, her wandering second husband another. Her doted-on little girl Dais (Chempa Puteri) is often taken along on Daddy’s trips from their plantation to town. There’s another woman, Miss Oni (Laura Basuki). “She has cows,” the innocent child tells her.

Nana has life lessons for little Dais. “A woman must keep her secrets.” And she has advice for herself in coping with this new mistress situation. “I must be like water, adapt to the environment.”

But when the mistress moves in, their chilly relationship warms as each notes the nature of women in their world at this period in time, just when Indonesia was losing one government, with whispers of “communists” all around, and the dictator Suharto replaced the revolutionary, democratic but eventually dictatorial Sukarno.

The only “joke” in this quiet and moody picture has townsfolk remarking on the simularity of their Dear Leaders’ names, a shrug about how nothing changes for people like them.

“Before, Now & Then” — which has the “triangle structure and dynamic of “The Color Purple” without the violence or same sex relationship — has the two discuss their fates and relative helplessness to change them, women in a patriarchal culture ruled by military dictatorships.

One longs for not living under the female “pressure to be perfect,” to have a chance at “running a business without men.” Nana makes suggestions on how to improve the plantation’s (unnamed) business, which the quite but hardly passive Mr. Darga ignores. Ino longs for a day when women like them aren’t “unestimated” and “judged” by men and their female peers.

Writer-director Kamila Andin has surprises to serve up, but keeps everything quiet and even-tempered. That “need to be perfect” has Nana tying up Dais to keep the pre-tween from interrupting a party she’s throwing for The Boss, her husband. Nobody seems shocked when the child rolls into the living room in an attempt to free herself.

And when Nana’s first husband re-enters the picture, years later, there’s no shouting, no recriminations about “cheating” from her already-cheating second husband. Just a mild-mannered negotiation and family debate over her “freedom,” the children of the marriage, etc.

Andin uses dreams to give away Nana’s real state of mind and music to underscore the slow pace of change for these women — a forlorn fiddle in early scenes, tinny pop on the radio or 78rpm records later, a string quartet with singer in the latter acts.

There isn’t a lot on the surface here, and the chaste nature of the romance (perfumed notes) and refusal of anybody to lose their cool over anything — Ino’s simple “I’m sorry” to Nana is all that’s said about this “arrangement.”– keeps the drama on a low simmer throughout.

The performances reflect that, with Salma an exemplar in suggesting a fiery interior life that must be hidden, like Nana’s “secrets,” from view.

But “Before, Now & Then” is still a lovely meditation on patience, the glacial pace of true cultural change and a woman’s lot in much of the world, with many never daring to think of their happiness and freedom as anything more than a dream.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Happy Salma, Laura Basuki, Arswendy Bening Swara, Chempa Puteri and Rieke Diah Pitaloka

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kamila Andin, based on a novel by Ahda Imran. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:43

Boy, it takes more than a few minutes to get one’s mind around the idea that Adam Sandler’s produced and co-stars in a comedy which you simply must use the word “endearing” to describe. “Charming” works its way in, “kind of adorable” also fits “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah.”

Sure, he employs half his family in this Happy Madison production, a coming-of-age comedy adapted from Fiona Rosenbloom’s Judy Blume-ish novel. He’s no longer employing old comic cronies and sportscaster Dan Patrick. But it’s not like he’s turned over a new leaf.

First-time director Sammi Cohen and her production team give us further proof that Netflix owns the glossy teen movie market with this sparkling snapshot of a traditional rite of passage in an age of aspirational, attention-economy affluence.

Sunny Sandler stars as Stacy Friedman, our teen practicing her “portion” of the Torah, struggling to come up with a Bat Mitzah project and over-planning her “New York” themed coming-out party while indulgent parents Bree (Idina Menzel) and Danny (Adam Sandler) smile and shake their heads.

No, she can’t book a yacht or an Olivia Rodrigo drive-by on a jetski. But at least she has her bestie Lydia (Samantha Lorraine) to help plan and choreograph it, with Stacy producing Lydia’s introduction (life summary) video for Lydia’s “Candyland” bat mitzvah, which precedes hers.

Lydia’s parents (Jackie Sandler and Luis Guzman) are splitting up and “Mom wants to spend all of Dad’s money before the next court date.” But she’s got her bestie to lean on and play their watch-a-sad-video to “see who can cry first” game. And they’ve got Hebrew School.

That’s where “You Are So Not Invited” really sets itself apart. You might as well call this tony academy Borscht Belt Prep, thanks to the all the shticky staff and the “cool rabbi” presiding over all these “cutie-pops.”

“Saturday Night Live’s” Sarah Sherman flat-out steals the movie as Rabbi Rebecca, urging her charges to “do something menschy for your community, for society at large,” with their mitzvah projects, to “practice (chanting) your haftarah” and prep themselves for adulthood, when you “have to take responsibility for your actions” and own your own mistakes.

Rabbi Rebecca sings her lessons as she deflects the big questions from her tween and teen students.

“If God exists, why is there climate change?” “”Why can’t straight people get on gay TikTok?”

“God is so random,” she sings, and the kids sing along. “God is so random!“

Stacy prays “Dear God, it’s Stacy” prayers and tries to get her parents on board her idea for an adult, talked-about and “legendary” party. No bouncy houses or ball pits.

“Oh my GOD, that’s so for kids! I’ve been having my period for over SEVEN months now!”

Dad is all memories of “MY bar mitzvah” in “your grandparents’ basement” — no renting a hall, no hiring that hyped-up “idiot” DJ Schmuley (Ido Mosseri, funny).

“THAT’s why we fought the Nazis? So YOU could have a (virgin) mojito bar?”

But there’s a cute boy, Andy Goldfarb (Dylan Hoffman) in the picture. And the richest, shallowesst mean girls might be mean enough to include one bestie and one bestie only in their mean girl games.

There’s trouble on the horizon among these Chosen Children.

The school is so cool and the houses so high end that when Cohen & Co. treat us to a “Breaking Away” riff, kids gathering at “The Ledge” of the local quarry for their most dangerous entertainment, it’s jarring. Too working class.

The snapshot of this world is richly-detailed, with a year-long parade of bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs, all DJ’d by Schumley, each a more expensive “theme” than the one before, with Stacy stuck at the grandma’s table for one and soaking up a little wisdom, and her bored older sister (Sadie Sandler, of course) and her bestie (Zaara Kuttemperoor) watching “It!” and “Shawshank” on their iPhone rather than joining in the “fun” with the “kids.”

It’s funny and flippant and a tad vulgar when it isn’t being cute. The life lesson and messaging is upbeat and sentimental. Maybe Mr. Middle School Right isn’t even Jewish, he’s just enrolled there. And the little asides have a bit of adult bite to them.

“Don’t worry,” the mean girls — my favorite is named Kym Chang Cohen — purr. “Some of us are straight, too.” Sounds like a suggestion that had Rolling Stone trying to cancel Alice Cooper.

The cast is about as diverse as is possible considering the world depicted here. But you don’t have to be Jewish to “get” most of what’s going on and be on board with the lesson that “adulthood” isn’t just about sexuality, getting and spending money and “looking hot,” and all that. It’s about not hiding behind your youth, making more responsible decisions and owning the irresponsible ones.

And if we’re lucky, there are teachers who will guide us on that path, and parents there to make corrections, even if they aren’t trying to nepo-baby you into the family business.

Rating: PG-13, some profanity, scatalogical humor

Cast: Sunny Sandler, Samantha Lorraine, Idina Menzel, Sarah Sherman, Jackie Sandler, Dylan Hoffman, Luis Guzman and Adam Sandler

Credits: Directed by Sammi Cohen, scripted by Alison Peck, based on a novel by Fiona Rosenbloom. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43

The stakes are higher, the cast has lost any pandemic-paunch/puffiness and everybody tries harder in “Vacation Friends 2,” which is something, I guess.

And having John Cena reveal to the world, via a scripted character’s little admission, what we’ve all been thinking is a plus.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but everybody likes me.”

But even with a Caribbean get-away and the addition of a baby, drug-dealers and Steve Buscemi at his sketchiest, this sequel is a watered-down umbrella drink of a comedy. The set-ups – casino to first-time-surfing to escaping a cartel — are tired and the jokes are limp and random recyclings of the 2021 original film.

Still, here goes. Two years after meeting and becoming “Vacation Friends” with the unhinged, uninhibited vulgarians Ron and Kyla (Cena and Meredith Hagner), we and they remember that Marcus and Emily (Lil Rel Howery and Yvonne Orji) found some redeeming qualities in those two reprobates.

That’s why they’ve invited the couple and their new baby to a Caribbean resort, with Marcus slated to make a pitch to build a Chicago hotel to the same Korean hotel/resort ownership group that runs it.

They’ve hired and brought along their favorite amusingly-unctuous hotel manager (Carlos Santos) from the coastal Mexican resort where they met to babysit.

A little patronizing, but OK.

Emily and Marcus are in baby-making mode themselves, and figure a little romance and hanging with two gonzos who have a better idea of how to “just have fun” is a good plan.

As you’ve guessed, the “meeting” and pitch is moved up, and the exec running that presentation (the amusing Ronnie Chieng) is not a Marcus Parker fan.

Kyla and Ron waste no time in embarrassing Marcus, and to add to that, her dad (Buscemi) shows up, fresh out of prison for “money laundering,” or so he says. He’s talking “crypto” and sneaking off to meet shady locals and a trigger-happy drug dealer (Jamie Hector).

What could go wrong? That doesn’t involve being tricked into snorkeling in Cuba, getting shot at on multiple occasions and trying to figure out how to escape a sinking shipping container?

The awkward interactions with Koreans — getting into old-fashioned Asian drinking games “to bond” — are probably the most promising thing here, and those scenes are few.

Cena’s cockeyed optimism in character is a little less funny than it was the first time, and Howery is at a loss in how to wring gigggles out of this script.

But there are moments. Buscemi does that weasely, snarky, sketchy thing he does, Santos channels Ricardo Montalban in his big moments and Hector carries himself the way movie drug dealers do, with a pistol-in-the-belt swagger.

Lil Rel has his (played out) go-to moves, and Cena, as his character points out, is “liked” by pretty much “everybody.

If it weren’t for the overwhelming feeling of “winded and exhausted” that the picture wears in every scene, they might have gotten something funnier out of this.

Rating: R, Drug use, some sexual references, pervasive profanity

Cast: Lil Rel Howery, John Cena, Yvonne Orji, Meredith Hagner, Carlos Santos, Ronnie Chieng, Jamie Hector and Steve Buscemi

Credits: Scripted and directed by Clay Tarver, based on characters created by John Francis Daley, Jonathan M. Goldstein, Tim Mullen, Tom Mullen and Clay Tarver. A 20th Century release on Hulu.

Running time: 1:46

You think you know what you’re going to get from a Liam Neeson thriller titled “Retribution.”

But his latest, the third remake of a “There’s a bomb in your car and you can’t get out” Spanish thriller (“El Desconocido”), has a few deviations from formula.

And the Big Irishman, often framed in beads-of-sweat-tight closeups, gives a fine, strung-out and fraught performance as a long-hustling hedge fund manager whose financial shortcuts may have screwed-over the wrong somebody somewhere along the way.

Matt Turner is a closer with his partnership, the guy the head of the firm (Matthew Modine) calls in to buck up clients who get cold feet on this sale or that investment in a volatile market.

He’s a barely-attentive parent, due to miss yet another soccer match of Emily the tween (Lilly Aspell), dealing with a teen son Zach (Jack Champion) in open rebellion.

But his ever-disappointed wife (Embeth Davidtz) holds him to that one promise, to take the kids to their respective Berlin schools on yet another busy weekday. The daughter happily complies, but the son he has to chase down and beg to get in his pricey Mercedes SUV.

Matt didn’t make much of all the system-alerts that came on when he buckled his seatbelt and punched on the ignition. This failed, that requires service, another system turns up error messages.

But director Nimród Antal (“The Whiskey Bandit,” “Control”) lets us zero in on the bucket snapping, the circuits activating and that thing beneath Matt’s seat. When the disguised voice comes on a cell phone tucked into the center console, we’re hardly surprised.

Don’t get out. Your seat has a weight-sensitive trigger. Don’t call the cops. Oh, your kids are here? Too bad. Do what this fellow says or “You’ll be pulling your guts from the trees from here to Vienna!”

“Who IS this?” gets no answer. “WHY?”

“There IS no why.”

Matt and his kids are trapped in this car, sent hither and yon in something like “real time, from straße to straße, witnessing other cars blowing up and Matt’s friends and business associates meeting grisly ends after having just enough time to freak out and panic.

Matt almost does, despite his pleas to “Stay calm” and “everything will be fine” to his kids and others.

Neeson is damned good in this part, a business man with none of those “Taken” “particular skills,” just a guy who works out on the heavy bag and keeps his temper in check — more or less.

The adults in the cast respond to this extraordinary danger in ways you’d expect, with Modine, Davidtz and especially Arian Moayed, as a manager trying to stop his freaking-out-wife from fleeing their car, standing out for serving up a realistic reaction to this terror.

The kids don’t quite shrug it off, but they’re far more blase than you’d expect. Noma Dumezweni, as an Interpol cop, has her moments, but delivers little flinty flair in the part.

The narrative spins its wheels in the middle acts as the picture loses much of its opening momentum, only to recover much of that for a talkative, over-explained and somewhat predictable finale.

But Antal and Neeson gives us an opening act that leaves the metallic taste of dread in one’s mouth, a dilemma in which neither Matt nor we see a solution, a “problem” we can’t work out any more than trapped and doomed Matt can.

And Neeson gives us a bit more to chew on here than his standard hunt-for-his-daughter/avenge-his-son fare, an actor who lets us see the panic, see the wheels frantically turning and who never shies away from letting us see him sweat.

Rating: R, violence, some profanity

Cast: Liam Neeson, Embeth Davidtz, Noma Dumezweni, Jack Champion, Lilly Aspell and Matthew Modine.

Credits: Directed by Nimród Antal, scripted by Christopher Salmanpour, based on a Spanish thriller screenplay by Alberto Marini. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:31

Hey, I’m talking about the MOVIE. Not the crook getting more of his just deserts.

Yeah, I could’ve gotten a Lionsgate screener link for this title.

But a friend loves Liam Neeson, and really The Big Irishman should ooooonly be experienced on the Big Screen.

7pm, GTC Stadium 12 in Danville, VA.

My review? Right here.