Movie Nation

Veteran character actor Louis Mandylor and a bunch of similarly-seasoned friends took off for Thailand to play at war in “3 Days in Malay,” an almost comically ahistorical, geographically-and-everything else inept version of the epic Guadalcanal Campaign.

A hellish struggle to the death in superheated, bug-infested jungle where a mere tent could be considered a luxury is depicted as a tedious string of leisurely reunion scenes between guys too old to be mere grunts, too facially-groomed to be “GI” “squared away” in accomodations too elaborate and modern to pass for Quonset hut barracks back in the day.

The Army is integrated years before Harry Truman got around to doing that. There are nurses and WACs present in the perilous, under-supplied early weeks of this first Allied offensive against the Japanese. The uniforms often don’t look right, and the same can be said for a lot of the ordnance.

So “suspending disbelief” becomes a bit of a challenge. And I say “almost comically” because I don’t want to encourage any “catch the anachronisms” drinking games among viewers.

Mandylor, a familiar face since “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” directed and stars as John Caputo, an ex-boxer, ex-Marine brought in with reinforcements for the campaign, which began in August of 1942 and raged on for six months. The “3 Days” depicted here take place in October.

There’s a love-hate reunion with a guy from “the old neighborhood” (Cowboy Cerrone), a nurse and a WAC to flirt with, and a bearded “West Point’s finest” Sgt. (?) played by Peter Dobson doing a lot of yelling at superior officers, including a general, demanding that he let him “do what we do” because “This is what we do!”

There are just enough scenes from the Japanese point of view to allow the viewer to ponder the uniforms and enjoy the phonetically-parsed Japanese by Thai extras.

Well, everybody knows “BANZAI!”

All those depicted look scrubbed, dry-cleaned and pressed and generally unhurried and not all that worried about another attempt to overrun the unnamed (Henderson Field) and unseen airstrip the enemy covets.

The combat scenes have some exciting bladework and martial arts action, to go along with digitally-augmented prop machine guns and the like. Strafing by digitally-animated aircraft is included.

But it all looks…wrong.

Hollywood rushed out “Guadalcanal Diary” in the middle of the war, and couldn’t be expected to get the flora, fauna and hellish nature of the struggle to look right. Terrence Malick went to Guadalcanal itself to film James Jone’s account of the campaign for “The Thin Red Line” in ’98.

“3 Days in Malay” is so disconnected from “realism” that I cannot find any reference to anything “Malay” in the Solomon Islands or WWII related, any more than I confirm that there’s any way WACs would have been on an island the Navy was repeatedly cut-off from supplying and reinforcing, especially in the fraught earliest weeks of the battle.

There’s nothing wrong with taking a stab at making a B-movie combat film set on Saipan or Guadalcanal. But the fact that almost that entire generation of survivors has died out is no excuse for being this cavalier and sloppy with historical basics and simple military fundamentals. Hiring an advisor to help you miss the obvious blunders, and tell your 40-to-50something cast members to “shave that elaborate beard/mustache,” would seem a must, not an inulgence.

If you can’t afford a few tents and your cast can’t be bothered to leave the golf club locker room (what the primary set looks like) setting to trek into real damp and leafy jungles, why bother?

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

Cast: Louis Mandylor, Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone, Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, Peter Dobson, Kelly Lynn Reiter, Kelly B. Jones, Randall J. Bacon and Bear Jackson

Credits: Directed by Louis Mandylor, scripted by Brandon Slagle. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:39

A wistful Japanese drama from Kôji Fukada touches on the fragile nature of relationships and the struggle to do right by people.

Something like that.

An Aug. 11 release from our hip friends at Oscilloscope Laboratories, so you know I’m down for it and you should be, too.

Another HUGE Friday ($17 million) means that it’s another Pretty in Pink weekend at the box office.

Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster satire “Barbie” will clear $54 million by Sunday night, and tally a north American total of over $457 million by midnight Sunday, according to Deadline.com.

This is a real “world is her oyster” moment for Gerwig. Let’s hope she makes the most of it. Curious about her “take” on “The Chronicles of Narnia” franchise, but it’s not like we saw anything of the possibilities she found in a Mattel toy project that became “Barbie.” So, judgment withheld.

BUT WAIT…“The Meg 2: The Trench” is doing a robust $30 million+ opening, not bad for a bad movie on a VERY crowded weekend with blockbusters all around it.

That’s enough to edge the third weekend of the three hour epic “Oppenheimer,” but maybe not. It’s also marching towards $28.7 million.

The latest iteration of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” a noisy, edgy and animated version based on a Seth Rogen (co-written) script opened Wed. and has cleared over $40 million over 5 days, $27.9 million over three days. “Mutant Mayhem” indeed.

“Haunted Mansion” will fall just short of $10 million ($9 according to Deadline) on its second weekend, probably landing it in fifth place. It’s over $42, and kind of a bomb.

“Sound of Freedom” is fading, losing over 400 screens this weekend, and exited the top five despite fans buy more tickets for showings nobody is attending. It earned less than $1.5 Friday, trailing “Haunted Mansion,” and will cash in under $8, but is still over $164 million by Sunday, all “found money,” as they say.

As always, I’ll be updating this all weekend as more data from Box Office Pro, Box Office Mojo and Deadline.com become available.

Maybe the most famous apology Mel Gibson ever made — “famous” because he’s not known for apologizing — was for a film he produced and starred in directed by the legendary Wim Wenders, of “Wings of Desire” and “Paris, Texas,” of “Submergence” and such documentaries as “Buena Vista Social Club” and “Pope Francis: A Man of His Word.”

Sayeth Mel, speaking of 2000’s “The Million Dollar Hotel,” “I thought it was as boring as a dog’s ass.” 

It’s a pity he apologized. Because he wasn’t wrong, at least in this instance.

“Hotel” began life as basically a location, a milieu stumbled-into by the Irish rocker Bono when his band, U2, were at their peak and filming the music video to the anthemic “Where the Streets Have No Name.”

As imagined by Wenders and collaborating screenwriter Nicholas Klein, it’s a mad, dull hodgepodge of characters — just a couple of them interesting — in a not-nearly-seedy-enough LA flophouse hotel, vagrants spinning yarns and anecdotes as they’re interviewed and then interrogated by a dogged FBI agent in a neckbrace played by Gibson.

It’s all in service of a murder mystery that for all intents and purposes looks like a rich, depressed junky-kid’s suicide. His daddy (Harris Yulin) is politically connected. So the FBI is here to make a Federal case out of something that happens all the time at The Million Dollar Hotel.

Gibson is the star, but the film focuses on prattling voice-over narrator Tom Tom, so-named because of his tendency to repeat himself. He’s played by Jeremy Davies in a performance as self-conscious as his gelled-into-giant ears hair.

Agent Skinner sizes the kid as up “an idiot” in instant.

“Why would you say I was an idiot?”

“Wild guess.”

Tom Tom was best friends with Izzy, the dead man. Tom Tom is easily distracted. Tom Tom is most distracted by the beautiful, flighty Eloise, played by Milla Jovovich in her last pic before the “Resident Evil” movies set her and her offspring up for life.

Agent Skinner intimidates the desk clerk (Richard Edson), and other residents played by the likes of Amanda Plummer, Gloria Stuart (“Titanic”), Bud Cort and Jimmy Smits.

But Tom Tom he has to wine and dine, because Tom Tom might actually know something, if it can be coaxed out of that fragile, damaged psyche.

The film is about as interested in this “case” as we the viewers are. So instead you focus on the cast and wonder with each, in turn, what it was that attracted them to this disaster-in-the-making.

The U2 connection? The chance to dress down, vamp “almost homeless?” Or was it the same thing that made me stop scrolling by titles and watch it — “directed by Wim Wenders.” That must’ve been what hooked Mel, who is a solid, stern presence at the heart of a lot of actors going all improvisational flakey-flighty-indulgent.

The only thing that promises to stick with me from this otherwise instantly-forgettable fiasco is Peter Stormore’s hilarious turn as a delusional guitarist who thinks he was kicked out of The Beatles and thus sings, strums and speaks just like John Lennon.

I mean JUST like John Lennon. It’s astounding to hear that voice coming out of that “Fargo” killer’s face.

Wenders’ name isn’t sullied by “The Million Dollar Hotel,” even though he’s had a lot of flops in recent decades.

But sheer strangeness is no substitute for the authority of his many documentaries on cinema and filmmakers or the magic of “Wings of Desire,” a film of singular poetry and magic.

Best not to waste the two hours of this one to appreciate the odd Mel, Smits, Plummer, Julian Sands or Stormare moment from it. Literally every other film Wenders made is better than this one — certainly the many I’ve seen, even the dogs, back that up.

Mel’s “dog’s ass” review remains the last word on the subject.

Rating: R for (profanity) and some sexual content

Cast: Mel Gibson, Jeremy Davies, Milla Jovovich, Amanda Plummer, Jimmy Smits, Richard Edson, Gloria Stuart, Julian Sands, Charlayne Woodard, Donal Logue, Ellen Cleghorne, Harris Yulin, Bud Cort and Peter Stormare

Credits: Directed by Wim Wenders, scripted by Nicholas Klein. A Lionsgate release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 2:02

The bar’s pretty high on zombie movies these days. Show us something fresh, maybe with a bit of subtext, and surprise us. Or don’t bother.

“Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead” is a Japanese multi-media franchise riff on a genre Americans invented and expanded on, Brits did well by and Koreans utterly-mastered with those alarming “Last Train to Busan” pictures — both of them.

This cutesie Japanese tale began life as a manga, migrated to TV and is now TWO films — one anime, the other live action, which I’m reviewing here.

The effects are as good as any zombie movie of recent vintage. But it’s not scary on a par with any of the “Living Dead” movies, much less “28 Days Later” or “World War Z.”

There are jokes, but it’s not “Zombieland” or its sequel, not by any means. “Cute” is about all it can manage. On occasion.

Truth be told, the picture this most resembles just opened in theaters — “The Meg 2.” And that’s not a good thing.

But there is a distinctly Japanese political subtext, albeit one that seems a trifle dated now. It’s about a young “salaryman” who is relieved when the zombie apocalypse arrives because of what it means in relation to his indentured-servitude job in a “toxic” workplace.

“Could this mean — maybe, just maybe — that today I don’t need to come in to work?”

That “loyal-to-the-death” commitment to work and your employer seems to have faded in recent generations, along with the desire to start families.

What Akira Tendo (Eiji Akaso) decides to do, after he’s fleeing the staggering legions of walking dead, is everything he EVER wanted to do, but never had time for — a “bucket list.”

“Clean up my room,” (dubbed, or in Japanese with subtitles) for starters. “Set off a fireworks display.” “Have drinks with a stewardess.” “Tell someone I’m in love with them.”

Pretty mundane stuff. But being a good guy, he tries to help his pregnant neighbors first. He makes up with his college (American-style) football teammate Kenichiro (Shuntarô Yanagi), whom he’s held a grudge against for choking in the Big Game. But before they make up, he’s got to rescue the dude from a “love hotel,” a brothel-like operation full of naked, seething female zombies.

And Akira would really like to add the fetching survivalist with the mad martial arts skills (Mai Shiraishi) to their “team.” But Ms. I Travel Alone won’t even give up her name. At first.

As is the way of such narratives, there’s a “quest” to get to “safe harbor.” The hard-to-get martial artist finds herself “Saved” by the “super hero” delusional lads and drawn into Akira’s cracked “Bucket List” — “surf yoga,” “soak in a hot spring,” etc.

But at some point we’ve got to underscore that metaphor, that “salarymen” are zombies in their own way, as Akira’s bullying boss (veteran character actor Kazuki Kitamura, superb) re-enters his life.

The story is simple to the point of simplistic. And once it’s made its big satiric point, it goes off the rails into goofiness that isn’t goofy enough and a desperate struggle to survive one last big challenge that isn’t all that scary or interesting.

One twist to this Japanese zombie movie that differs from the British, Korean, Malaysian and especially the American films in this genre is a reluctance to kill the legions of the walking dead who crave your flesh.

Sometimes, that post-war Japanese pacifism makes it into a movie. Not a yakuza movie, mind you.

Cultural novelty aside, I found “Zom 100” to be pretty tame and tepid going, start to finish. Some decent chases, adorably doable but DULL bucket list items, and cute leads are about all there is to it.

It’s not enough.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Eiji Akaso, Mai Shiraishi, Shuntarô Yanagi, Yui Ichikawa and Kazuki Kitamura

Credits: Directed by Yusuke Ishida scripted by Tatsuro Mishima. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:08

Insights and blunt psychological and sociological truths thumb-wrestle with “twee” all the way through actor Randall Park’s directing debut, “Shortcomings,” an Asian American rom-com that comments on Asian-American rom-coms.

Equal measures witty, bittersweet and trite, it lands laughs and body-blows and prompts the occasional eye-roll, but thanks to a superb cast, it comes off more often than not.

Based on Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel, “Shortcomings” is about a film school grad turned arthouse cinema manager and dyed in the wool film snob, and the women in his life. And if the material feels familiar, it should. There’s a hint of every movie about a movie lover — told from a male point of view — ever made in it.

But there’s little sugar coating this Woody Allen character of Japanese descent. Ben, played by Justin H. Min, is insufferable. When we meet him and longtime love Miko (Ally Maki), he’s staring, slack-jawed, at the vapid wish-fulfillment rom-com that she and everybody at the Asian Film Fest she works for are crying and applauding.

“It’s going to be a MASSIVE hit, and that makes it GREAT!” is Miko’s rationale.

“I felt like I was at a BTS concert,” he harrumphs.

Sure, it’s “glossy,” the fest director apologizes. “But it’s OURS.” Inclusion and “representation” matter. Just not to Ben, who can’t help but judge this “Crazy Rich Asians” riff as unrealistic junk.

I have to say, at that moment I muttered “I feel seen.“

But Ben is like that about everything — argumentative, self-absorbed, lost in routine and obsessed with black and white French films, Eric Rohmer and John Cassavetes. Miko, whose rich dad owns the apartment they’re renting, is neglected, to say the least.

Ben’s gay BFF, Korean-American Alice (Sherry Cola of “Joy Ride”) is the one who “gets” him, and her assessments aren’t pretty. He is blind to the role of “race” in his status as “the outsider.” And he’s practically a stereotype, the Asian guy into the blonde shiksa goddess. His eye wanders every time a leggy Bay Area blonde crosses his field of view.

When performance artist Autumn (Tavi Gevinson) interviews for a job at his Berkeley Art Cinema, we see the storm clouds form. When Miko announces an internship “in New York” that “I told you about,” we hear the thunder.

All we need is for the gay best friend, his “unreliable moral compass” to decamp for New York for Ben to find himself abandoned, lonely and prone to stumble in exactly the ways we expect in such rom-coms.

But Tomine and Park — a very funny actor (“Always Be My Maybe,” “The Interview”) who has a cameo here — trip up expectations and find giggles and laughs as they do.

Ben is sometimes Alice’s “beard,” but her fake “boyfriend” has to change his last name so that her older Korean relatives don’t know he’s Japanese because “World War II” and “colonization” of Korea and such. He says “I often pass” for Korean.

“Yeah, right.”

The ditzy Autumn is a goofy, “creative” cliche, with her tone-deaf punk band, exhibitionist-dancer roommate and big plans for an exhibition of her many Polaroids of the toilet filled with her morning bladder-emptying.

“E-PISS-tomology,” she’ll call it. “URINE insane” he offers, unhelpfully.

Debby Ryan plays another exemplar of Ben’s “type,” only more binary. Somehow, he figures the racial difference will be their biggest challenge.

I like the way the script avoids a full swan dive into sentiment even as that expectation is set up by Ben’s movie-based ideas of a Grand Romantic Gesture.

And “Umbrella Academy” alum Min and the script never soften our hero. He’s a bit of a jerk at times, a lot more of a jerk at others.

Cola, Gevinson and Jacob Batalon (a “Spider-Man” alum who plays a “Marvel” obsessed art cinema employee) are playing “types,” but make them funny and human even in limited screen time.

“Shortcomings” isn’t great. It’s never more twee than when the screenwriter insists on using cutesie “chapter” intertitles — “Structurally Unsound,” “Ongoing Charades.” STOP doing that, kids!

But it’s funny, packing in the inclusion while sending up a guy who rejects that as a cinematic be-all and end-all.

Want to know what a “fencer,” a “rice king” and about the minefield of dating in the gender sensitive “consent granted” era is like in America’s most “woke” city? You need to see Park and Tomine’s clever handiwork to find out.

Rating: R for language throughout, sexual material and brief nudity

Cast: Justin H. Min, Sherry Cola, Ally Maki, Debby Ryan, Sonoya Mizuno, Jacob Batalon, Timothy Simmons, Tavi Gevinson and Randall Park.

Credits: Directed by Randall Park, scripted by Adrian Tomine, based on his graphic novel. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:32

“The Meg 2: The Trench” loses the benefit of being an off-the-wall big-budget B-movie surprise, and it loses most of the laughs served up by the monster movie that took the summer of 2018 by surprise.

It’s still built around a wholly-committed Jason Statham, who never for one second lets on that he’s not all-in on a thriller about digital prehistoric, gigantic megadolon sharks.

Watch the set of his jaw in the close-ups, the commitment to some pretty impressive Jet-ski stunts and the fury of his fights with assorted villains — chiefly “Montes,” played by Sergio Peris-Mencheta. All this talk about Tom Cruise and his “do my own stunts” work ethic. Has he ever faced down a 70 foot long shark?

The effects are impressive, and not limited to “Megs” this time around.

That hope, expressed aloud in one of the repetitive scenes mixed in with a few novel settings — a deep DEEP “trench” sea-floor station among them — “I hope it goes better than the first time” is kind of futile in this polished but listless sequel.

The survivors of the first misadventure remember their dead and wear their scars. Jonas Taylor (Statham) is now a widowed eco-warrior, busting heads on freighters dumping radioactive waste into the Philippine Sea. Now motherless daughter Meiying (Shuya Sophia Cai) is 14, and taking stupid risks.

She’s got an uncle, her mother’s brother (Jing Wu) given to reckless efforts to test their new exo-skeleton suits as he “trains” and tames the Meg he’s raised from a “pup.”

And grumpy Mac (Cliff Curtis) and grumpier DJ (Page Kennedy) are still doing their part in this multi-national deep sea research business.

But there isn’t much fun in their esprit de corps as they face new threats — human and Cretaceous Period — way down below, and on the isles and beaches on the surface.

Good effects, good Statham, slapdash script, nonsensical science, poor character motivation and just a couple of decent laughs accompany this sequel into theaters. A favorite? Uncle Jiuming tests out his “training” on the “pet” shark they keep in a pen. It comes for him, and everybody averts her or his eyes.

“Did she get’im?” DJ wants to know when they look back through the viewing window?

Rating: PG-13 for action/violence, some bloody images, language and brief suggestive material

Cast: Jason Statham, Jing Wu, Skylar Samuels, Sienna Guillory, Shuya Sophia Cai, Page Kennedy, Sergio Peris-Mencheta and Cliff Curtis.

Credits: Ben Wheatley, scripted by Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber and Dean Georgaris. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:56

Joe Manganiello is the hit man who dabbles with a brush to keep their dirty business “legit.”

Maya Hawke and Debi Mazar join”Pulp Fiction” cast mates Uma Thurman and Samuel L. Jackson in a star&studded ensemble that sounds like “Ozark,” but with lots of shots at modern art, art criticism and a “Batman” who could be the next Basquiat.

Shout! Factory has this dark comedy due out Sept. 29.

The true story of a Korean diplomat kidnapped in civil war-torn Lebanon in the ’80s becomes the most exciting, most entertaining buddy picture in years —“Ransomed” — the best action pic of the summer.

Sorry, Mr. Cruise.

Shoot-outs, car chases, sanctioned and unsanctioned cash transactions, governmental turf wars, sacrifice and near-savagery roll by, with the occasional pause for “You can’t scam a scammer” bickering (in subtitled Korean and some English), a feral dogpack attack, a rock fight and a couple of dangling-from-a-tall-building moments, played for thrills and laughs in Kim Seong-hun’s lightly fictionalized telling of this true story.

In the mid-80s, in the latter third of the Lebanese Civil War, Korea’s ambassador in Beirut is kidnapped. With all the factions fighting there, he gets lost in the Land of Many Militias shuffle, and is all but forgotten.

But a year and a half later, he gets just free enough to reach out, by phone and in code, to his old department. Disgruntled foreign service worker Min-Joon Lee (Ha Jung-woo) is all alone in the office to take that call and figure out who is tapping that departmental code.

Korea’s foreign service springs into action. But “Hold on there,” grumbles the KCIA. With the 1988 Olympics coming up and a national policy of not-paying-ransom, this could be a national embarassment, if not a humiliation if it all goes sideways.

Min-joon Lee volunteers to take the poison-pill gig, be fall-guy if this doesn’t work out. But he’s no fool. He does it on the condition that he be promoted to serve in the Korean embassy in the U.S.

A U.S. CIA intermediary (Burn Gorman, arrogant, dismissive but oozing competence) is consulted. A Swiss art dealer can help move the cash. And there is a network of Lebanese on the ground arranged to facilitate matters.

But the best-laid plans go instantly awry as the cagey and greedy Lebanese police are determined to catch any “hostage negotiator” coming into the country and steal their money.

Min-joon, who exaggerated his service in the Marines to get the gig, finds himself on the lam and almost on his own, save for his accidental connection with the one South Korean taxi driver in all of Beirut, Pan-su (Ju Ji-hoon).

The guy hands out tokens with “Trust Me” and his phone number written on them, telling us straight away that he’s a hustler and not to be trusted.

He dotes on his Mercedes 240, official taxi of the Middle East. And he reluctantly agrees to drive Min-joon around. Even as Pan-su finds himself drawn deeper into the unraveling debacle of this negotiation/hand-off, we have to wonder, can Min-joon trust this guy when the chips are down?

Buttoned-down Ha Jung-woo of “The Handmaiden” and “Tunnel” and mop-topped Ju Ji-hoon of “The Spy Gone North” have classic “buddy” thriller chemistry. Lies and double-crosses burden the relationship, but each guy clings to the other — one because this diplomat might be able to get him to America, the other because he needs a multi-lingual assistant with local knowledge.

When this militia has the hostage and that militia wants him and/or the money, it helps to have someone with the inside dope.

“Christian guys like it when you speak French to them” at Christian militia checkpoints.

The chases and narrow escapes are bullet-riddled and harrowing, in the spirit of “Escape from Mogadishu,” an earlier true story/thriller about a Korean diplomatic crisis in the Middle East.

It is written in the Good Book of Screen Comedy — introduced in the chapters on St. Charlie Chaplin and St. Harold Lloyd, most pithily practiced by St. Buster of Keaton — that whenever a character grabs a rusty gutter drain pipe on the side of an aged apartment building, she or he must have it break off the wall and dangle over the street on it. It’s always funny.

The players handle the light stuff beautifully, but director Kim Seon-hun (“Tunnel”) never loses track of the gravitas, the life at stake, the cruel way Mr. Secretary Oh is mistreated by his captors.

“Duty,” patriotic or otherwise, plays into the actions of some more than others, giving the action comedy a sober, sentimental edge.

But the jaunty action beats, the clever problem solving — inventing which corners to back our hero or heroes into and how they escape each jam — are what sell “Ransomed.”

The villains are under-developed — even the jerk who runs the KCIA. And the finale has a touch of the over-explained and over-played.

But “Ransomed” is still a pulse-pounding ride, a piece of history unburdened by the literal facts and a lean, high-stakes action picture that could give any “Mission: Impossible” outing a run for its money.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Ha Jung-woo, Ju Ji-hoon, Fehd Benchemsi and Burn Gorman

Credits: Directed by Kim Seong-hun, scripted by Kim Jung-yeon, and Yeo Jung-mi A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:12

“Soulcatcher” is a solid if somewhat flatly-directed shoot-em-up thriller from Poland, a movie interesting to fans of the “special skills” commando “extraction” genre chiefly due to the ways it differs from such slam-bang action features in The West.

There’s this gadget that beams immobilizing, maddening rays at foes and it was invented in Poland. It’s been spirited away to Romania, apparently by way of Chechnya.

So a Polish Iraq War vet (Piotr Witkowski) who now leases his services to the government as a mercenary is sent to get it, and bring back the Polish scientist (Jacek Pondiedzialek) who invented it and maybe his easy-on-the-eys daughter Eliza (Aleksandra Adamska).

Romanian warlords and Chechen generals stand in his way. And Interpol could be...a problem. But no worries, he’s got his team, and government backing from a favorite cabinet minister (Jacek Koman). What could go wrong?

The conventions of the genre dictate that at least one member of his “team” has to be named “Bull” and live in a house full of dogs, one’s got to be a pilot who can fly anything — including drones (Sebastian Stankiewicz). And that sniper (Michalina Olszanska)? Check out her haircut. Every team needs a lethally efficient lesbian shooter.

Much of the energy expended on the screenplay was spent on wrong-footing the viewer, not letting us know exactly where were are in the opening gambit (a very primitive Romania) — that bit of action that sets up action pictures, from James Bond and “Mission: Impossible” installments to lesser. fare — this rescue that goes wrong, that one that goes right…with a twist.

A “brother” will die, as well as comrades in arms. And our hero, “Code-name: Fang (LOL),” will finish one part of the job only to see new foes rise up to be dealt with.

“This was Mission: Impossible!” the government minister enthuses (in Polish with subtitles, or dubbed), at one point.

No. No it wasn’t.

The firefights and brawls are perfunctorily staged and shot. The pacing is limp and the coherence of the plot — just what the hell DOES this Soulcatcher thingy do? It seems selective in how it impacts victims — isn’t up to par.

Still, I’m always interested in seeing how another culture and another national cinema approaches a genre. With Hollywood refusing to pay its writers and having revenue-sharing issues with writers and actors, I predict we’ll be seeing a lot more Polish, Malaysian, Indian, et al movies on our favorite streaming services in the near future.

Let’s hope most of them are better than “Soulcatcher.”

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Piotr Witkowski, Aleksandra Adamska, Jacek Koman, Jacek Poniedzialek, Michalina Olszanska and Sebastian Stankiewicz

Credits: Directed by Daniel Markowicz, scripted by
Dawid Kowalewicz and Daniel Markowicz. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40