Movie Nation

Patrick Wilson has become something of the poster boy for “When Good Actors Do Horror.”

One thing you can be sure of, when Wilson does an “Annabelle,” “Insidious” or “Conjuring” movie, when something that can’t be happening starts happening, he’s going to give you an award-worthy interpretation of puzzlement, alarm and freaking the f-out.

Wilson co-stars in, steps behind the camera to direct and even sings in the closing credits song in his latest, “Insidious: The Red Door.” The movie’s a near triumph of murky tone and general spookiness. And the acting is sharp, up and down the line, another testament to actors turning director. They know what their players need.

The plot? It’s a muddle, especially if all these titles run together and the through-line of this “Poltergeist” derived saga of a family being sucked into “The Further” isn’t fresh in your memory.

Wilson doesn’t help matters in this regard by showing up in three horror franchises concurrently. They can’t help but get mixed up in the memory. “Insidious” is the one co-starring Rose Byrne. Vera Farmiga plays his better half in the “Conjuring” and “Annabelle” films about the “Amityville” investigators, the Warrens.

In “The Red Door,” the Lamberts have broken up. Josh (Wilson) has just lost his mother (Barbara Hershey, remembered in a photo), and that trauma may be triggering things in him that Renai (Byrne) had just as soon not have around.

A prologue tells us that after the last “Insidious” visitation from “The Further,” Josh and tween son Dalton were hypnotized and told to erase “the past year.”

Now Dalton (Ty Simpkins) is an aspiring artist headed off to college, and Josh is having recovered-memory flashbacks. Father and son aren’t communicating, which is a pity. Because if Josh remembers anything, it might be the “astral projection” that goes on when one dozes off under the right conditions.

Mom, who didn’t go under hypnosis, might have clearer answers, but she’s busy raising their other two kids and she’s not talking.

Josh is visited and haunted at his mother’s house. Nightmare-tormented Dalton has only his accidental college roomie Chris’s (Sinclair Daniel) Black Girl Magic, empathy and facility with Google Search to lean on.

The movie features the requisite jolts, few of which have much punch. But the first truly creepy thing in it is a lulu. Josh is texting in his parked SUV, unaware of the unfocused, grunge-attired figure behind his car which is barely discernable as human. Ish.

The film’s depiction of college life is an amusing mix of cliches — the frat “baby” party (wearing diapers, eating “diaper pudding” out of other diapers) — and a bracing college art class built around two bravura scenes with Hiam Abbass (“Blade Runner: 2049,” “The Visitor” and “Munich”). She plays the demanding professor whose “dredge up your darkest, innermost thoughts” is what triggers Dalton to start having nightmares and “astral projection” strolls and forces him to recover memories he was hypnotized out of at age 10.

Wilson doesn’t utterly lose the thread, but “The Red Door” tends to meander, over-decorating the monstrous “Entity” scenes, reaching for “explanations” that explain nothing other than “This franchise will go on” and serving up a little Tiny Tim to set the mood.

One sure way to gauge a horror film’s success is whether it shocks and shakes you, makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. That never happened for me, here. For all the interesting performances and promising characters in this one, I think the actor/director and actor’s director lets us off the hook entirely too easily.

Well at least he gets to sing again, if only over the properly creepy rocker playing under the closing credits.

Rating: PG-13 for violence, terror, frightening images, strong language and suggestive references

Cast: Ty Simpkins, Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Sinclair Daniel, Hiam Abbass and Lin Shaye..

Credits: Directed by Patrick Wilson, scripted by Scott Teems, based on Leigh Whannell’s characters and story. A Sony/Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:47

The cognescenti burn a lot of electrons typing out odes to the adored, enduring superhero of science fiction, Philip K. Dick. But the ongoing appeal of a writer who arrived on the scene right after the author of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” had his moment is just as fascinating.

Michael Crichton was a to-the-manner-born Harvard educated doctor who decided medicine wasn’t for him, so he wrote “Jurassic Park” and wrote and directed “Westworld,” some of the most enduring franchises in cinematic science fiction.

“Andromeda Strain,” TV’s “ER,” “Runaway,” he was prolific, an Emmy winning writer and show-creator, a writer-director of films as disparate as the classic “original” caper tale, “The Great Train Robbery” and “Coma,” a paranoid thriller set in the mysterious world of Big Medicine, a subject ripe for conspiracy theorizing.

Critchton had his finger on the pulse of the culture and its connection to science for most of his life. Movies based on his books (“Looker,” about cosmetic surgery’s end game) and “Rising Sun” (about “The Japanese Century,” which lasted about 8 years) weren’t all hits.

But the man did his research and did a pretty good job of convincing us that dinosaurs could be brought back to life, that theme park animatronics could reach a dangerous level of sophistication and sentience and that a first encounter with alien “life” would probably be a virus.

“Coma” was based on a Robin Cook novel that was right in Crichton’s wheelhouse. A hospital and its corrupt leadership conspire to knock people into comas for organ harvesting to the highest bidder. Be honest. That sounds a LOT less far-fetched today than it did 45 years ago.

It’s a Geneviève Bujold star vehicle, allowing this acclaimed Canadian actress primacy in beating Sigourney Weaver (“Alien”) to the punch in playing a heroine fronting a major sci-fi thriller.

“Coma” is a movie made memorable by that one iconic image — naked coma victims, dangling from wires on life support, their lives “preserved” ostensibly until something could be done for them, or even to them when “society” changed its minds about them.

The medical profession? We’re just taking “care of the vegetables,” one cynically notes.

Dr. Susan Wheeler (Bujold) is a surgeon-in-training at Boston Memorial, where her doctor boyfriend (Michael Douglas) is in line to be head internist. When Susan’s friend (“Bond girl” Lois Chiles) comes in for an abortion, Dr. Wheeler is there to comfort her. Imagine her shock when this “routine” surgery goes awry and Nancy is left in a coma.

When Susan starts asking questions, the hospital’s usual CYA deflection reaches a whole new level. She’s constantly called into the office of the chief of medicine (Richard Widmark, a real villain’s villain) .

“I certainly don’t want to lose a good surgeon,” he growls, with a menacing smile.

Every place Susan goes, she gets either a run-around or vague, noncommittal answers. Even when she learns something, whoever she’s asking flips-out and squeals on her. A terrific scene has her question the cynical, kind of callous pathologists, one of whom is played by a very young Ed Harris.

“Suppose you wanted to put people into a coma,” she asks. “What would you do?”

And where do those patients end up after “our lousy luck” at Boston Memorial has rendered them unrevivable? The Jefferson Institute, where a real rival to Nurse Ratched (Elizabeth Ashley) presides.

“Coma” is about Susan’s empathetic curiosity and dogged determination to find out what’s going on, her lover’s blindness to what’s increasingly obvious to her, and how far people will go to keep the surgeon with the sexy accent from finding them out.

Critchton was a competent director whose greatest contributions here might have been recognizing the hook in Cook’s novel, the plausibility of it all, and in making sure he cast well and hired the right production designer (Albert Brenner, art director or production designer on “Bullitt, “Backdraft,” “2010”).

That image of dangling “vegetables” is just as haunting today as it ever was. Now, it’s iconic.

The film is enough of a watershed moment in cinema to deserve “classic” status, even if it’s a tad mild-mannered (PG rated) and convoluted.

Watching it now, we can see Critchton’s attention to medical detail, which found its fullest flower on TV in his series “ER.”

The suspense is well-handled, here and there, but the shocks and surprises are few. The minute we see that Susan drives an MGB convertible we know there’ll be a moment when it won’t start and she’ll be A) kicking it and B) put in peril.

One of the coma patients is a monobrowed smart aleck who would go on to hustle “reverse mortgages” — Tom Selleck.

Critchton’s best directing job remains the Brit film about two 19th century thieves — Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland — out to stage the first “Great Train Robbery.”

But every thriller that uses science and makes informed, somewhat plausible (NOT “Timeline”) fictional speculations about where science might take us owes something to Michael Critchton, the guy who started worrying about AI ahead of the curve, and who will deserve at least some of the credit when we bring a wooly mammoth, a passenger pigeon, a Tasmanian tiger or dodo bird back to life.

Rating: PG, violence

Cast: Geneviève Bujold, Michael Douglas, Rip Torn, Elizabeth Ashley, Hari Rhodes and Richard Widmark.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Critchton, based on the novel by Robin Cook. An MGM release now on Amazon, Youtube, Movies! etc.

Running time: 1:53

Based on Thursday night and Friday’s take, “Insidious: The Red Door” could dethrone “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” after just one week at the top of the box office sweepstakes.

Deadline.com sees the race as pretty close, with both pictures — one ballyhoo’d to death, the other smuggled into theaters right after July 4th, a horror franchise with a lot of fans. “Insidious the Third” is heading over $32 million.

“Indiana” fanboys, probably the same folks complaining about the “Dial of Destiny” being too “woke,” have been blaming the one woman exec/filmmaker involved with that aged underperformer and calling for LucasFilm’s Kathleen Kennedy to be fired. Is Disney thinking the same thing? It could earn $27 million this weekend. Not terrible, but not good enough

“Insidious,” nor previewed for critics, has the edge. I can’t recall seeing a trailer, TV ad or what have you for this one. Invisible, except to the genre fans. “Screen Gems.” I caught it this afternoon.

The second weekend of “Sound of Freedom” won’t be as reliant on pre-sales to boost its numbers. It is still heading towards an $18 million take, basically money made from the “pedophiles are running a pizza parlour” crowd, judging from the hate mail I got for my review.

There’s money in those gullible Q-Anons, and Angel Films has no problem taking it from them.

“Elemental” is heading towards another $8 million.

“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” will pull in another $7-7.5 and is finally, slowly running out of gas.

The other wide release this weekend is the raunchy and rude “Joy Ride,” a Crazy Funny Asians comedy that’s been marketed for months and should have opened bigger than it is. It may make $6 million this weekend, maybe $5.5.

I’m not sure why this isn’t finding its audience. Perhaps years of China bashing have scared off both the wider audience and the Asian one.

The final “estimates” from Box Office Pro.

A Dark Fantasy for the Dog Days of Movie-Going’s summer, Aug. 4.

This looks twisted.

The distributor has this trailer — not the Latin market subtitles — attached to showings of “Sound of Freedom.” They haven’t bothered to post their US market trailer on Youtube.

Clever.

Oscar winner Mirren goes a tad grittier than Ingrid Bergman did for a very fine 1980s TV movie, “A Woman Called Golda,” co-starring Leonard Nimoy.

Liev Schreiber is positively chilling as the monstrous Henry Kissinger in this trailer.

The reason we mention the credits of actors, writers and directors in reviews of their films is that “past is prologue” and “What you’ve done is what film producers will let you do again.”

“The Out-Laws” is from Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison production company, part of his deal with Netflix. Hey, anything to keep him out of cinemas, amIright?

It stars Adam Devine, sort of the less talented photo-copy of Jack Black. Never been a fan. Ever. No, I’m not kidding.

Actor turned director Tyler Spindel is another Sandler protege. And as grateful as we are that The Sandman moved on from trying to prop up Nick Swardson, Rob Schneider, David Spade and Colin Quinn, this Spindel dude is nobody’s idea of the next Penny Marshall. Oy.

But “The Out-Laws” has Pierce Brosnan — making Bond jokes as he channels Billy Connolly — playing a broad, rogue-with-a-brogue bank robber married to the force that is Ellen Barkin.

Yeah, she looks as at home with a gun as he does, and both of them can handle a one-liner.

They have their moments as the secret-robber in-laws who show up to see their yoga insctuctor daughter (Nina Dobrev) tie the knot with a nerdy bank manager who’s into arts and crafts and Jack Blackisms — presents as “prezzies,” etc.

Yeah, she’s totally out of Owen’s league. But at least his insanely annoying parents — Julia Haggerty, still getting a ditzy job done, Richard Kind, still saying “I’m just saying” — are coming to their wedding.

Her parents only agree to come at the last minute. Mom’s all brass and bullet casings. Dad’s goateed Irish-accented menace.

“He’s AWESOME. He smells like sandlewood…and DANGER!”

But the folks have “history” and “unfinished” business in town, money they owe the Russian murderess Rehan, played by “Never Have I Ever” alumna Poorna Jagannathan, who steals the movie.

Thanks to crude masturbation jokes that don’t play, zingers that don’t land, Lil Rel Howery‘s act wearing thin, Michael Rooker playing the least convincing FBI agent ever and a lot of obvious sight gags and random F-bombs for (failed) comic effect, “stealing” “The Out-Laws” amounts to petty theft.

A bit of action mayhem at the midway mark plays. Brosnan and Barkin are as amusing as the script allows them to be and Devine works himself up to “maybe I don’t need to gouge my eyes/ears out every time he appears.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement. But the Adam Sandler/Happy Madison comic universe needs to think younger, and a better HR department as they’re plainly not finding fresh B or even C-list talent, in front of or behind the camera, these days.

Rating: R, violence, crude humor, profanity

Credits: Adam Devine, Nina Dobrev, Pierce Brosnan, Ellen Barkin, Lil Rel Howrey, Julie Haggerty, Richard Kind, and Michael Rooker.

Credits: Directed by Tyler Spindel, scripted by Evan Turner and Ben Zazove. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

So who WILL they get to be the next James Bond, eh?

Who CARES? Not while we’ve got Tom Cruise, in the saddle and laying it all on the line in the franchise that out-Bonds James Bond a little more every time there’s an “impossible mission,”
should Ethan Hunt “choose to accept it.”

“Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” may have an ungainly title and a star “getting on up there,” occasionally showing the miles, if not always the years. The story is derivative, lurching along its excessive run-time in fits and starts. But this frothy, breathless and over-long popcorn extravaganza completes the job of co-opting Bond, James Bond.

Cruise, director Christopher McQuarrie & Co. remember what the Daniel Craig-as-Bond years let us forget. This espionage action thing can be fun, over-the-top bits need a proper double-take and yeah, the very idea of this guy doing all that, with help, is inherently laugh-out-loud amusing. And when you think about it, even the theme music for the franchise is Bond-only-better, an Americanized classic.

The script lines up a palpable threat — AI run amok, threatening to end “truth” and dominate human civilization — and a deliciously credible villain in Esai Morales.

And no matter how convuluted and contrived the situations, motivations and conflicts within might seem, no matter how obvious the need to jam in other exotic, tourist-brochure locations, no matter how many female leads Cruise interacts-but-never-quite-“clicks” with, the entertainment value remains right on the edge of off-the-charts.

A Russian sub sinks in the “opening gambit,” with both the situation and the idea of that pre-credits/pre-theme song “gambit” borrowed from Bond. There was this “key” on board. Somehow, that ties into this digital Internet, CCTV, GPS and everything-in-digital-life manipulating “Entity” that has made itself known to the world’s intelligence agencies and its most notorious villains.

Mr. Hunt is needed to fetch that key, with his boss (Henry Czerny) particularly adamant that Hunt’s “habitual rogue behavior will not be tolerated.” His team (Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg) will back him up. And wouldn’t you know it? His old rival/flame Isla (Rebecca Ferguson) figures in all this, and must be pursued to an inexplicable Arabian Desert ruin of a hideout before “bounty hunters” get her…in hte middle of a sandstorm.

Another woman-from-his-past, The White Widow (Vanessa Kirby) must be foiled. And Hunt’s fellow agent Briggs (Shea Whigham) is hellbent on chasing him down and bringing him to heel, or shooting him if he goes “rogue” with that key.

Then there’s this key-hand-off that’s interrupted by The World’s Sexiest Pickpocket, played to the hilt by Hayley Atwell. She will be in the way, in the mix and on the lam as our story takes us from Amsterdam and Abu Dhabi to Rome and — wouldn’t you know it — The Orient Express!

The script leans HARD on hoary thriller tropes (that steam-powered train) and that Alfred Hitchcock “MacGuffin,” that gimmick that drives the plot.

“There’s this key...Where’s the key…Do you HAVE the key…GET the key…How’d He/SHE get the key?”

Movie pickpockets have almost supernatural powers, and when you throw in tech-guy Benji’s 3D “perfect disguise mask” one more time you have a good idea of the magical thinking that is supposed to make these slightly-possible, wholly-implausible plots “believable.”

The action beats are grand fun, but in addition to “the money shot” — that motorcycle jump we’ve all seen TC take in the previews — they cleverly recycle car gags from not one but multiple James Bond outings, courtesy of one vintage Fiat 500.

The car and motorcycle chases, by the way? Next level thrilling, visceral and downright comical.

Morales makes a marvelously malevolent old-foe/new-villain. The exotic Pom Klementieff of “Guardians of the Galaxy” announces her presence with authority, a suicide blonde henchwoman with blood in her eye and Hunt in her sights.

Atwell, Rhames, Kirby and Whigham hit exactly the right notes, with Atwell’s jaw-dropping reactions to the mayhem she’s stumbled into and Rhames nicely rewarded with take-stock, accept the stakes with fatalism and explain-the-“mission” and its perception/reality dilemma monologues to Hunt and the audience.

“You’re playing four-dimesional chess with an algorithm!”

But these movies hang on Hunt and Cruise, the character somehow motivated to serve “the greater good,” no matter what and the actor that makes this spy game palpably real, no matter how over-the-top or under-motivated this gets.

“We live and die in the shadows, for those we hold close and those we never met.”

Cruise will finish this “mission” soon enough, with “Part Two” currently slated for next June and sure to cement his place as “The Greatest Action Star Ever” and “The Guy who Saved The Cinema.”

At least by that time, we might have some notion of the Next James Bond. But we and whoever joins His Majesty’s Secret Service will know, that shaken-not-stirred martinis aside, Bond is now a spy playing catchup to the world’s favorte “rogue agent.” And this one does his own stunts.

Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some language and suggestive material.

Cast: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Esai Morales, Vanessa Kirby, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Henry Czerny, Carey Elwes and Rebecca Ferguson

Credits: Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, scripted by Erik Jendresen and Christopher McQuarrie, based on the Bruce Geller TV series. A Paramount release.

Running time: 2:43

A compelling hot-button subject and engrossing “true story” runs up against a ponderous script, pedestrian direction and the limited range of star Jim Caviezel in “Sound of Freedom,” a lumbering thriller about international child sex trafficking that flatlines when it’s meant to be moving, uplifting and inspiring.

If you can’t make a weeper out of a helpless, mostly Third World kids being lured away from their parents and snatched for online porn and prostitution to an audience that lines up to see every movie from the star of “The Passion of the Christ,” maybe you should watch some of the other films on this subject and see what you’re getting wrong.

Director Alejandro Montverde, who broke out in the faith-based corner of filmdom with his anti-abortion drama “Bella,” and Caviezel tell us the story of Homeland Security agent turned abducted child rescuer Tim Ballard, a veteran hunter of online “pedos” who has an abrupt, emotionally-lacking and dramatically-flat “conversion” from a guy who catches the “customers” in this heinous trade to a man who wants to save kids because “God’s children are not for sale.”

A colleague only has to mention how their work is seeing what a “sick world” this is a couple of times for Ballard to suddenly get up from his work computer, saunter (not storm) down to the most understaffed Homeland Security jail in America and cozy up to his latest bust, an ideologue who writes books about perverts’ insatiable lust for children, convince him he’s “one of us” and use the prisoner’s expertise to break into a Colombian child kidnapping ring.

Just like that, and with a single tear, shot in close-up, all that we get out of man-manikin Caviezel.

Tim makes his way to Colombia, working his way towards the “model” (Yessica Borroto Perryman) who recruits kids by convincing their Honduran (etc.) parents that “They should be in the entertainment business” (some scenes are in Spanish with subtitles) and the high roller Jeffrey Epstein types (unseen) who back this soulless recruiter.

Along the way, he links up with a Colombian cop (Javier Godino) who puts him in touch with a “cartel” veteran and ex-con who has experienced some sort of late-life conversion so that he’s saving kids his own way. The great character actor Bill Camp (“Birdman,” “Joker”) makes little attempt to go “Latin” here, feigning an accent for roughly half a scene, letting his Panama hat, Hawaian shirt and omnipresent cigar establish his Colombian cartel bonafides.

Tim, who takes on the name Spanish version of the name, “Timoteo,” will try to hunt down and free two Honduran kids who we see snatched thanks to their gullible father’s compliance in the opening sequence, setting up a Cartegena sting and even plunging into the “rebel” packed jungles to fulfill his personal mission.

We also see Tim’s big family and home life, with Oscar winner Mira Sorvino here to weep or be on the verge of tears in every appearance. Kurt Fuller plays the overly-sympathetic Homeland Security boss who doesn’t do much to corral this agent who’s “going rogue.”

“We’re Homeland Security! We can’t go rescuing Honduran kids in Colombia!”

And we’re treated to Caviezel’s attempts to smile — an unnatural act throughout his career — and show us the motivations, passions and vigilante-level fury this law enforcement office feels about this new mission he’s suddenly taken on.

The villainous characters are caritactures, but I didn’t buy virtually any of the performances. And “Sound of Freedom’s” funereal pacing and struggling manipulations left me cold, when I was expecting big emotional moments that never came. Movies like “Trade,” “The Whistleblower” and even the similar “Trade of Innocents” wrung more emotion out of this subject.

But “Sound of Freedom,” which takes its title from a children’s clapping game and our young victim (Cristal Aparicio) humming the movie’s theme song, relies on closeups of Caviezel’s inexpressive face to carry the story. It’s not enough.

Caviezel made it his business to cynically pander to this conservative religious “QAnon” friendly audience, long before he starred in TV’s “Person of Interest,” which was canceled because he’s just not an interesting, expressive actor person.

When your movie is “presold” by marketing, tagged with an appeal to “buy more tickets” to make it appear more popular than it is, you’re all but ensuring its profitability. Presold, extolling the values of a faith-based film even if this isn’t wholly confined to that genre, maybe you don’t try as hard to give it heart and get it right.

Rating: PG-13, violence, children in sexual jeopardy subject matter, profanity

Cast: Jim Caviezel, Bill Camp, Cristal Aparicio, Javier Godino, Lucás Ávila, Yessica Borroto Perryman, Kurt Fuller and Mira Sorvino.

Credits: Directed by Alejandro Montverde, scripted by Rod Barr and Alejandro Monteverde. An Angel Studios release.

Running time: 2:15

This Paramount release is coming in January, which suggests the studio doesn’t sense “Oscars” in a genre film that has long been an Academy favorite, but that maybe they had some notion it could be a contender.

Usually they advertise a film with Oscar hopes based on limited release “Christmas” or thereabouts.

TV star Kingsley Ben-Adir has the title role, and there’s not a lot of household names in the cast. The director of “King Richard” was behind the camera, so we’re allowed to hope for greatness.

Jan. 12

“Employee of the Month” is a dark comedy about a woman away under a soul crushing patriarchy only to have fellows who won’t promote her or plan on stealing her raise if she’s ever given one.

And then a Black intern shows up and gives her the spine to fight back, and maybe over up injuries and deaths of repressors.

I liked it. It’s harmless enough, pretty mild mannered in a “Nine to Five” sense.

But when I offered to donate it to this suburban Orlando library, located in an old hotel on the Northside of town, the young librarian looked as if I’d offered her a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book.

Fear driven by a nation wide right wing assault on libraries, science, history and truth, no doubt.

I’ve been donating DVDs and books for years and this is the first time this has happened.

Life under a Nazi regime in The Banana Republic of Florida. Nooo, “It can’t happen here ”

O