Movie Nation

An onscreen brawl takes over the movie just before the halfway point and lasts for almost an hour in “Walid,” a Malaysian thriller about child trafficking and the burly teacher who decides to beat his way through all manner of villains to free a little girl he just met.

The Malay martial art Silat is put on great display, although you’d have to be an aficionado to discern a “style” through all these beat-downs, clubbings, stabbings and shootings. Still, an hour-long fight is something to brag about and the chief selling point in this confused, confusing and clumsily-slow-until-the-big-fight action picture.

Megat Sharizal has the title role. This much is clear. He is a teacher of small children in an open air school somewhere in the provinces. He takes an interest. And when he sees a threat, he takes the time to take off his glasses before he takes care of business.

Putri Qaseh plays Aisha, “an immigrant,” the locals call her, someone discriminated against, unwanted and thus vulnerable in this corner of Asia, where child trafficking — as depicted here — is a going concern.

Director and co-writer Areel Abu Bakar packs a lot of villains on the screen, leaving most of them unidentified — creep with the cowboy bat, perve with the lollipop, hothead with the ever-present illegal cigarette and middle men in service of some cocky older operator, also in a hat.

There are also unnamed — at least as far as the film’s inept subtitling tells us — cops fighting the kidnappers and not shy about mixing it up with them when they think they’ve got this or that trafficker cornered.

But the film’s first fight, the one that gives you hope this could be exciting, violently satisfying or at least a bit different, is instigated by Aisha’s mom, played by veteran Malay star Feiyna Tajudin. She’s doing laundry by hand, a Muslim woman barking at the creepy men she sees hanging around the school and her kid, when next thing we know, she’s beating the hell out of three of them with just the soggy clothes she has in her basket.

The epic throw down that consumes most of the film has nothing as furious and funny as this bit of business. As the first act is mostly bits of brooding, teaching kids to read and to recite the country’s oath, and scenes of price-haggling/child-trafficking bad guys, it takes patience to get to that second, third and never-seems-to-end final brawl.

The acting isn’t bad, but like the fight choreography, it’s of uneven quality.

There’s an odd voice-over of a speech or something by a figure Malay viewers may recognize laying out the stakes for their country and its problems, and it’s “make sure we don’t lose our country” (in Malay with subtitles) messaging suggests it could be xenophobic immigrant bashing, too, something the film takes a stand against.

On the whole, “Walid” is messy in a conventional sense and alien to a Western viewer in its storytelling style. I’ve seen a number of Malaysian films on Netflix in recent years, and I guess the streaming service makes it a point to order or acquire movies with a more Westernized storytelling style.

The fights, at least, need no explaining or translating.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, child trafficking, smoking

Cast: Megat Sharizal, Putri Qaseh, Namron, Yusran Hashim, Sham Putra and Feiyna Tajudin

Credits: Directed by Areel Abu Bakar, scripted by Areel Abu Bakar and Hafiz Derani. An Outsider release.

Running time: 1:50

The third act, home to the show’s resolution and finale, saves “Theater Camp,” a show that’s lacked anything resembling a “show stopper” up to its last scenes. The script is cleverly conceived to conceal the plot’s “big original musical” from the viewer, and the true depth of the talent of this Camp Adirondacks summer camp for kids ages 8-13 (or so) before that Big Finish.

There are laughs in the first two acts, giggles at the spotlight-hogging tyke “types,” the self-serious teachers, the theatricality of one and all. But that finale loses the “camp” and remembers the “show” in a “Let’s put on a show” musical. That’s what allows a marginal comedy to let you leave the theater with a smile and an affirmation that yes, these kids have found their tribe, have found their passion and have figured out that they have “it.”

Based on a cheerfully cheesy and spot-on spoofy viral short film of a few years back, this Molly Gordon, Nick Lieberman and Noah Galvin project is about a struggling camp named “AdirondACTS” located in the you-know-where mountains. Somehow, founder Joan (Amy Sedaris) and manager Rita (Caroline Aaron) & Co. have kept it funded and afloat, welcoming kids “who don’t fit in anywhere else” — thespians.

But a recruiting/fund-raising trip leads to Joan having a seizure in the middle of a middle school’s musical. Those darned strobing lights resulted in “The first ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ related injury in Passaic County history,” Joan’s coma, an inter-title drolly informs us.

Yes, this is a mockumentary. And yes, the filmmakers inform us in another title, their “star” is incapacitated before the summer’s even started. But the show, and the mockumentary, must go on.

Not to worry. Joan’s adultish son Troy (Jimmy Tatro, hilarious) will take over and get them through the season. Troy a delusional “financial guru” vlogger and sometime DJ with strong bro-dunce energy. He can’t read the room when he introduces himself to the campers, many of whom have been there before. He can’t win over the staff, many of whom he fired to cut costs. He can’t make the mortgage or power bill payments because he’s uh, not opening the mail.

Ben Platt and co-writer/director Molly Gordon play the heart and soul of AdirondACTS, life-bonded friends who met at camp there many years before and who tied their fates together — professionally (she figured out he’s gay) — and return here every year to teach.

They make a big production out of everything, delivering the season’s line-up of shows — “Damn Yankees” and “Cats” included — in a sort of “Forbidden Broadway” musical vamp. Their speciality? Every summer they whip up an original musical for the best kids in the camp to perform, and previous shows like “A Hannukah Divorce” will be joined by their work-in-progress inspired by their boss and inspiration’s coma, “Still, Joan.”

“Camp” co-writer Noah Galvin plays the lights/sets/electrics guy who keeps everything running — barely — and who harbors a hidden pain. Glenn had Broadway dreams and wanted to be in the spotlight himself at one time.

A rival Camp Lakeside owned by a hedge fund operation would love to buy AdirondACTS, and fetching Barnwell Capital shark and camp director Caroline (Patti Harrison) could be just the one to tempt Troy into some blunder that kills off his mother’s dream.

The kids are a sparkling assortment of little narcisissists, but they’re in the background mostly. This little egomaniac is “an example of a kid who started too early” and that one isn’t interested in the greasepaint and spotlight. He’s eight and hustling himself into a career as an agent.

The adults are center stage here, the preening dance teacher (Nathan Lee Graham) and bitchy costumer (Owen Thiele), and the movement/masks/stage combat newcomer Janet (Ayo Edebiri) who is such a fraud only Troy could have been fooled into hiring her.

The mockumentary format is barely present and half-hearted, at best. And much of the humor will play as terribly inside baseball or off-off-Broadway or community theater to people who have never tiptoed into that world.

The teacher who resents his younger and more talented student, the theatricality of one and all, the self-importance and vanity behind a motto that holds that “summers come and go, but what happens on this stage? That’s eternal!” — it’s worth a giggle, an eye-roll and the occasional spit-take in recognition from anyone who’s ever done “theatre.”

Everybody’s pretty good. But Youtube-famous actor Tatro is amusingly clueless, “Booksmart” veteran Gordon and “Pitch Perfect” and “Dear Evan Hansen” alum Platt pair up beautifully and really get across the low-stakes/life-and-death importance of the work of those who truly LIVE the theater.

Still, it isn’t until the “camp” is shoved upstage and the kids and their Big Theater Show step downstage and into the light that “Theater Camp” finds its heart and hits its best notes.

Cast: Ben Platt, Molly Gordon, Noah Galvin, Jimmy Tatro, Ayo Edebiri, Nathan Lee Graham, Owen Thiele, Patti Harrison, Caroline Aaron, David Rasche and Amy Sedaris.

Rating: PG-13, some profanity, drug jokes

Credits: Directed by Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman, scripted by Noah Galvin, Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman, based on the short film by Nick Lieberman. A Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:33

Sci-fi “pod” raised babies vs. “the old fashioned way.”

Aug. 11, this satire shows us the future. Maybe.

“Mr. Car and the Knights Templar” is a Polish mash-up of “Indiana Jones,” “National Treasure” “DaVinci Code” and “The Goonies,” a treasure hunt mystery with clues and ancient artifacts with “the power to change the course of history.”

It’s a daffy but generally dull and childish adaptation of Zbigniew Nienacki’s novel, a writer who threw in a magical Bond-mobile/”Chitty Chitty Bang-Bang” vehicle for good measure.

The task of pulling these dispirate, franchise-sized plot elements and this populous cast into a coherent narrative with fun action beats proves too much for director and co-writer Antoni Mykowski, who bites off more than he can chew for his feature film debut.

A promising opening, with our hero, the art historican Tomek (Mateusz Janicki) fighting a caped, gaucho-chapeau’d South American knife fighter (Jacek Beler) and others in a lighthouse and through the Baltic Sea in search of the Cross of de Molay, ends rather anti-climactically. Tomek escapes his rivals, drives his gadgetized 1960s SUV across the Baltic only to dive overboard and promptly pick-up the relic.

That sets the tone for this late-’60s period piece — big build-ups, blandly-disappointing pay-offs. And often, even the “build-up” gets lost in exposition, infighting and “National Treasure/DaVinci” style over-explaining “history” lessons.

Tomek’s a treasure hunter for the Polish National Museum, and recovering that cross — with clues embedded in its gold casting — is supposed to be merely the beginning. It’s not even that.

There’s another cross. There’s a “contest” to find it sponsored by a treasure collector (Anna Dymna), a reporter (Sandra Drzymalska) who thinks “Why do people hunt for treasure?” (dubbed, or in Polish with subtitles) would be a great idea for a story, the martial-artist daughter (Maria Debska) of a rival treasure hunter and three kids from a coed anti-Russian/anti-“Red” scout camp, kids who go by the “code names” of Squirrel (Kalina Kowalczuk), Mentor (Piotr Sega) and Eagle Eye (Olgierd Blecharz)

Kids, treasure hunters and the expert relate bits of Knights Templar and Medieval European history and factoids that help them get into or out of messes, as this ungainly and unlikely sextet team up for their quest.

“According to American scientists, one out of every ten drivers could be a serial killer” really ruins one’s hitchhiking experience.

The guy they code-name “Mr. Car” because of obvious reasons has a moment or two of decent derring do, including a cutesy sexual-position “escape” masterminded by the sexy martial artist in a Twiggy bob (Debska). But the kids are cute and nothing more, the reporter is set decoration and the “car” features lame gadgets, even for a tale set in the ’60s.

And the payoff is allegorically obvious.

One can appreciate the effort and expense here and still say it’s rubbish because sometimes effort is simply wasted.

Rating: TV-14, violence, sexual situation

Cast: Mateusz Janicki, Sandra Drzymalska, Maria Debska, Jacek Beler, Anna Dymna, Kalina Kowalczuk, Piotr Sega and Olgierd Blecharz

Credits: Directed by Antoni Nykowski, scripted by Bartosz Sztybor, and Antoni Nykowski, based on a novel by Zbigniew Nienacki. A Netflix release.

Running time:

This looks a little edgier than the family-friendly Eddie Murphy movies of yore.

Rosario Dawson, Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis, Oscar winner Jared Leto, Lakeith Stanfield, Winona, Tiffany, Owen, DeVito’s having another moment.

This comes out July 28.

Gemma Chan, Oscar winner Allison Janney, Ken Watanabe and Veronica Ngo star in this Sept. 29 release, which has a much more international feel than the “Terminator” franchise ever did.

Gareth Edwards, who did the best of the post-original trilogy “Star Wars” movies, “Rogue One,” directed it.

Dazzling visuals, an intriguing concept. Another shot at an A-picture hit for John David Washington.

Greene plans the daughter who gets in trouble, Perlman and Jackie Earle Haley are bad guys embodying that trouble, Cage plays a dad with “periocular skills,” and Ernie Hudson’s the guy who knows Dad’s past.

Yes, this looks a LOT like Perlman’s “The Baker.*

“The Retirement Plan” opens Aug. 23..

Original projections for Paramount’s latest “Mission: Impossible” figured on this breathlessly-hyped, adoringly-reviewed blockbuster rolling in the cash in North America and abroad. But the $90 million guess for its Wed-Sun. opening turned out to be a bit generous.

Deadline.com is projecting, based on Tuesday night “previews,” Wed., Thursday and Friday takes, that “MI: Dead Reckoning P. 1” will clear $80 million, besting this franchise’s all-time record of $78.8 over five days.

With raptorous reviews across the board, a wildly popular franchise, a long delay in release due to COVID and a star audiences have shown nothing but love for in recent years, they had reasons to expect better than $56 million over three days $80 over five.

As we’ve just seen another timeworn blockbuster franchise installment, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” underwhelm, maybe we’re looking at simple demographics here. With Harrison Ford over 80 and Cruise north of 60, fresh faces — even in recycled stories — are worth something.

As I noted in my review, Cruise is showing the years if not the miles, and the picture is a cluttered grab bag of leading ladies/femme fatales and recycled action beats from Bond movies. But I dare say these projections will nudge up a bit thanks to Saturday and that the picture will have legs. Not “Top Gun: Maverick” “save-the-cinema” legs, but it’ll do fine.

It’s already looking at a global opening of $240 million, so that first billion will be in the bank in weeks, not months.

The controversial “Sound of Freedom” added thousands of screens and will rack up over $27 million this weekend. People love stories about battling child traffickers and pedophiles. Hollywood is taking note, and I’ll bet Disney is regretting not keeping this Fox production for itself, no matter how dubious its story, “hero” and the leading man. It’s earned over $83 million and will clear $100 million.

“Insidious: The Red Door” is managing a $13 million second weekend.

“Dial of Destiny” may not be a world beater, but it’s closing in on $150 million, domestic, with another $12 million or so coming in by Sunday midnight.

And “Elemental” may be the weakest Pixar offering in ages, but it’s still the only animated game in town, earning another $8.7 million and change.

Box Office Pro’s final “estimated” take.

Her unseen interviewer asks questions that bring Lokita to tears.

It’s not that what the Belgian immigration counselor asks the teenaged girl from Benin about is painful or troubling. Lokita (Joely Mbundu) is lying, and keeping her story straight — about her life, her school and how she found her “persecuted” “sorcerer child” brother and helped him escape with her to Europe — is damned near impossible.

Every wrong answer moves her further away from getting her papers and a fighting chance to start a new life in Europe.

“Tori and Lokita” is a compact, plaintive thriller about the tragic trials of immigrants after they’ve completed the harrowing journey across Africa, after they’ve braved the desperate crossing of the Mediterranean at the hands of mercenary, cutthroat traffickers.

When we meet tweenaged Tori (Pablo Schils), it takes a few minutes to grasp that they aren’t real siblings, but that the Belgian insistence that a simple DNA test will settle the matter won’t settle anything.

Whatever they went through, they are bonded for life.

Sibling Beglian filmmakers Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne (“Two Days, One Night”) dole out the clues about this relationship in a glimpse here, a detail revealed there.

Tori and Lokita work at a local cafe, singing karaoke to the diners, occasionally dueting “an Italian song we learned when we landed in Sicily.” But after the singing, they’re out making deliveries, and it’s not pizza they’re taking to the club bouncer, the hipsters, college kids and the self-medicating. It’s drugs.

Tori and Lokita live in a halfway house for immigrants, going over their “story” so that they’ll pass that next interrogation, scraping together cash to “send home to (her) Mom.”

But the ruthless African smuggler (Marc Zinga) and his henchwoman (Nadège Ouedraogo) aren’t concerned with their well-being when they demand to know why “you weren’t in church Sunday” (in French with English subtitles). That’s where Firmin collects his payments for getting them from Sicily to Belgium. He and his partner Justine shake Lokita down every chance they get.

The siblings’ chef-boss Betim (Alban Ukaj) rides them hard to make their drug deliveries and limits their take. They’re stopped by cops because they stand out and look like illegal immigrants. They’re not suspected of drug dealing because they’re young siblings traveling together.

But when Tori’s not around, Betim demands sexual favors of Lokita.

With all that, the fear of a DNA test, pressure from “home,” the cost of getting illegal “papers” and clothing them, it’s no wonder that Lokita takes medicine to ward off panic attacks. Sometimes, the medicine doesn’t help.

Tori, a somewhat reckless and impulsive kid, is having to grow up and man-up awfully fast under these conditions. He tries to take on more of the “work” himself and pleads their case to the immigration counselor after Lokita’s broken down in tears.

“She’s my sister! She saved my life!” At least half of that, we know, must be true.

The Dardennes brothers have made stories of Belgium’s underclasses — orphans and immigrants — a speciality. They know what they’re doing as they take this tale and these two simply-written, compellingly-acted characters into even darker places as they explore the extremes these two will go to in order to remain together.

Every action in this Cannes award-winner is motivated if not wholly rational. Every consequence grimly believable and shorn of artifice and melodrama.

And Mbundu and Schils put human children’s faces on the pitfalls of open borders in an era of exploding, climate-and-conflict-driven human migration, and help us understand the desperation behind it. Leaving a bad situation in search of a better one is as human an instinct as clinging to “family,” however it was formed.

Rating: unrated, violence, sexual abuse, drug content

Cast: Pablo Schils, Joely Mbundu, Alban Ukaj, Nadège Ouedraogo and Marc Zinga

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne. A Janus release on The Criterion Channel.

Running time: 1:29

I drive a lot. A LOT.

I’m totally down with the idea of a road picture capturing the spiritual disconnect between where you left and where you’re going, a journey that changes you as you’re making it.

This looks lovely. They’re describing it as “mesmerizing.” I can see that.

“The Unknown Country” hits theaters July 28, from Music Box Films.