Movie Nation

“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.

One can think one has a handle on all every cheese-making nook and cranny of Europe, and then something like “Operation Napoleon” rolls in and makes you realize “Iceland can be cheesy, too!”

“Operation Napoleon” a lumbering B-movie about a lost Nazi transport plane, Americans hellbent on finding it and the plucky, dogged Icelandic loan officer who gets ensnared in their murderous search.

It’s more or less watchable, especially as it takes a turn towards the daffy in the third act. But filmmaker Óskar Thór Axelsson (“I Remember You”) cooks up a classic ninety minute thriller wrapped in an ungainly 110 minute package.

Vivian Ólafsdóttir plays Kristin, the last person you want going over the financials if you haven’t sorted your loan plan properly, crossed all the “t’s” and dotted all the umlauts. She’s pretty much all business, with her brother (Atli Óskar Fjalarsson), a snow-machine rescue patrol member, the only one allowed to prank her.

That’s what she thinks he’s up to when he suddenly goes radio (cell-phone) silent while on Vatnajokull Glacier. But then he hastily dumps video and pictures to her.

Elias and a couple of friends stumbled across a plane in the melting glacier, one with a big’ol Swastika on the tail. It’s a JU-52, and no way is it supposed to be there. They were just poking around in the emerging fuselage when some American “scientists” show up, grinning and gushing about the “climate change” research they’re doing.

Then the “scientist” with the biggest grin (Adesuwa Oni, she played Njinga in Netflix’s “African Queens” series) stabs one of them in the neck with her pencil and Elli’s on the run on his snow machine. SOMEbody wants whatever’s in that plane, and wants to silence anybody else who finds it.

As Kristin has video and images of it, they send an assassin into Reykjavik to get her and her phone. She sees someone murdered and flees into the snowy Icelandic night with neither coat nor shoes nor cops (she “can’t” go to them) for comfort.

She’ll need the help of her boss, a British historian (Jack Fox) she sort of dated and a burly and a goofy Icelandic farmer (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) to help her survive, get to the bottom of the mystery and free her brother.

But that American military man (Ian Glen, because Brits make the best villainous Americans) is so relentless in his pursuit of her and the contents of aircraft that we know better than to get too attached to any character.

The film, based on a novel by Arnaldur Indriðason, has a whiff of “Smilla’s Sense of Snow” about it, as our mystery “that could change the course of history” is a classic MacGuffin, a plot device that drives the action and yet, in this case, is too pedestrian to ever explain.

Remember that briefcase in “Ronin?” We never found out what was in it, did we? That might have helped this plot, because once things really get cracking in the third act, we’re treated to a lengthy dissertation on what was on the plane, and why it’s worth adding a dead-weight epilogue to a picture that already has pacing problems.

Ólafsdóttir, a bi-lingual (at least) Icelandic actress, makes a very pretty and engaging lead, although the injuries her character sustains make her fight scenes even less believable than the usual model-gorgeous/runway-thin actress throwing haymakers heroine.

The script and direction let Kristin lose track of her objective — that urgent need to save her brother — as she pokes around and dodges death and assumes, all along, that the bad guys haven’t killed him on the spot.

Fox is a bit bland as the bookish love interest. Man-mountain Ólafsson is a walking, joking sight gag. But Glen is as scary as ever as the fanatic hellbent on getting what he wants, even if he has to threaten the U.S. Ambassador and kill a few locals along the way.

The picture’s third act peaks almost make it worth recommending. And then the climax is chased with a corny anti-climax and even that momentary buzz vanishes.

Still, as hot as this summer has been, seeing a bunch of chases and shoot-outs in the Icelandic snow is almost the only definition of “escape” at the movies that matters.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Vivian Ólafsdóttir, Ian Glen, Jack Fox, Atli Óskar Fjalarsson, Adesuwa Oni, Annette Badland and Ólafur Darri Ólafsson

Credits: Directed by Óskar Thór Axelsson, scripted by Marteinn Thorisson, based on a novel Arnaldur Indriðason. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:53

This looks real-world gritty, a side of French life not often captured on film. August 11, we sample what it’s like to live “Between Two Worlds.”

There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of “true events” that this B-movie was “inspired” by. An integrated Marine unit fighting the Japanese in 1942?

The heck you say?

August 11.