Movie Nation

A lightly fiesty performance by Leslie Uggams in the title role and a general feel-good vibe are the chief recommendations of “Dotty & Soul,” a plucky but corny comedy from actor turned writer, director and star Adam Saunders.

The movie’s got some clever plot ideas and the odd moment of amusing sass from Uggams, a veteran of 1960s TV who’s had a career renaissance thanks to a killer recurring character in “Deadpool” and TV’s “Empire.” The reliably vile David Koechner makes an amusing fat cat villain. But the script doesn’t have much spark, and Saunders, writing himself a co-starrring role, never rises above “bland” as a screen presence and comic foil.

Saunders plays Ethan Cox, a hotshot Dallas tech entrepreneur whose Big Idea is a self-driving luxury car non-sharing ride-share company. Private Car will pick you up and deliver you in style in a Ferrari, a high end Beemer or in Ethan’s case, a vintage self-driving Bentley.

Now a big ride-share operator wants to buy him and his venture capital backer Brannigan (Koechner) out.

Uggams is Dotty, a 71 year-old vending machine franchisee and general fixer for her wide circle of mostly elderly, working class friends, including the residents of Creekside Nursing Home, where Ethan’s mom (dementia) lives and old Mr. Eichelbaum (M. Emmet Walsh) pushes her wheelchair and nurses his diabetes between Dotty’s snack-machine replenishings.

The great coup that makes Private Car so valuable and a company for “the future” is a local ordinance Ethan and Brannigan pushed through in a tony Dallas suburb, banning “public transportation.”

His high-end ride share service just might be the only game in town, thanks to that. And if that ordinance isn’t the most Texas thing ever, I don’t know what is. And like other legislation from that bad idea incubator state, it could catch on.

Dotty can’t get around without buses, and nobody in her income bracket could afford Private Car or any other pricy ride share alternative. She and her aspiring clothier daughter (Margot Bingham) are already way behind on the rent.

Not Ethan’s problem. He’s too busy wearing bedazzled cowboy pimpwear in the company of his influencer and “future trophy wife” (Alexis Ren), hitting the clubs, dropping the Benjamins.

Until, that is, a private party that he shows up for in Hammer pants sees him tempted to don blackface to complete the M.C. Hammer impersonation. He goes viral in a bad way, and could lose it all if he can’t find a “person of color” to be his “stooge” to front the company so that it can sell.

Hey Dotty, ol’ buddy, ol’pal!

She’s down to cover for his “tired ass white boy ignorance.” But it’s going to cost him.

And being a savvy businesswoman from an era when Black women didn’t get the same opportunities as Jewish frat-bros who change their name to “pass,” she’s got ideas and she’s not shy about shaking things up.

The banter here goes down easily — too easily.

“You’re faker’n a Chinatown handbag” is kind of “racist,” and worse, it’s as edgy as this thing gets. Even Koechner can’t kick things up to the notch they need to reach for “Dotty & Soul” (pun titles are almost always a mistake) to come off.

Saunders is never as colorful as his costumes and never lifts his performance to the height of his hairdo, making him the dead weight at the heart of a movie he wrote and directed as a stardom-making vehicle.

Which is a shame, because the movie has an earnest, class-divide/transportation “future” message. The packaging that message comes in is so watered-down it lands like a raindrop, not a comically cold ice bucket challenge shock.

Rating: unrated, PG-ish

Cast: Leslie Uggams, Adam Saunders, David Koechner, Margot Bingham, Alexis Ren and M. Emmet Walsh.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Adam Saunders. A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:28

Yeah. “Inspired by a true story.”

Djimon Hounsou and Archie Madekwe co-star.

August.

A Bollywood-length comic satire, “¡Que viva México!” is not a film for those wholly unfamiliar with Mexico and its political schisms and their history, or for the faint of bladder.

Director and co-writer Luis Estrada gives us an immersion in the internal fissures in Mexican society wrapped in a sloppy, insanely-slow film that leans into almost every Mexican stereotype in the book.

Machete-wielding banditos who rob anybody foolish enough to get off the paved road and whose only excuse for not muttering “Badges, we ain’t got to show you no es-stinkin’ badges!” is the fact that they don’t hablo ingles.

A cop waiting for that next bribe, a judgementally unsavory Catholic priest, a rural province relative who “made it” by becoming a corrupt elected official, the callous and contemptous big city rich, the leeching, clinging, begging poor — they’re all here.

And always, the local mariachis, ready to enliven and render “authentic” every celebration or solemn ceremony with the second biggest musical cliche in Mexico — the song that comes AFTER a norteamericano thinks of “La Cucurcha.”

I gave serious consideration to just posting this much-repeated (in the film) brassy cliche of a video as my review of “¡Que viva México!” It gets the point of the movie across — repeatedly.

STEREOTYPES.

I mean, I watched it to brush up on my espanol. What’s your excuse, if you don’t live “South of the Border” and north of Nicaragua?

The story concerns a ruthlessly ambitious Mexico City factory manager (Alfonso Herrera) who is badgered by his aged father (Damián Alcázar) to come “home” to the mid-desert village of Prosperidad because his miner-grandfather (Joaquín Cosio) has died.

Pancho Francisco won’t go…until he’s shamed and shamed again…until he learns of an inheritance.

So, in the middle of eagerly carrying out layoffs at work, he begs for time off from his sexist, fat cat boss (José Sefami), packs the kids and upper class spendthrift wife Mari (Ana de la Reguera) into the Mercedes and sets off cross country, to a simpler place and simpler people.

And once there, as Pancho is welcomed and criticized for not visiting for 20 years and tapped for this or that funeral expense, as his father continues with the guilting and his salty grandmother (Angelina Peláez, the funniest character and performance) insults him and his “fifi” (old leftist slang for bourgeois conservative shill) lifestyle and politics, and curses her late husband — along with the rest of the family — at the reading of the dead miner’s will, maybe Pancho gets a clue.

After delays, as legal problems, vandalism and shootings add up and his hot sister-in-law Gloria (Mayra Hermosillo) takes shot after shot at getting her some of that and the financial stakes rise and competing agendas clash, Pancho and we get the idea that maybe this is all a peasant trap.

Fine. All well and good. But did we need almost 200 minutes of movie to get to that point? No. Estrada (“The Perfect Dictatorship” was his) is muy desdeñoso of the viewer’s time.

Is this some sort of leftist or rightest revenge on us for plunging into his latest “comedy?”

“¡Que viva México!” is a movie mired in controversy and burdened by wildly differing “takes” passing for “reviews.”

The director and Netflix had a falling out. That’s a fact. The film is an indulgent assault on the viewer’s patience. That’s my opinion of it.

The online troll-wars for the film have each extreme staking out turf.

The film is a parody of the shift in the battle lines of class warfare, finding “the poor” a rapacious, indolent lot who are holding the rest of the country back. Or is Estrada condemning the intolerant rich elite who have forgotten the poor majority, whom they have preyed upon for generations?

He’s skewering Eternal Mexico and its ever-insoluable class differences with a suggestion the country grapple with that which it seems to never come to grips with. Or is our intrepid filmmaker seeing his homeland as a basket case that cannot be saved?

He’s ridiculing “progressive” government and its naivete about the “lazy” rural poor! He’s eviscerating the corruption that has dogged the place since Montezuma tried to buy off the carnivorous Spanish!

“Luckily, in this country, there’s no problem that can’t be solved with a lot of money.”

It seems like such a simple story, but as actors play multiple characters and the number of characters continues to grow with the complications of this “trap” Pancho & familia are in, Estrada seems hellbent on ensuring it isn’t as simple as it seems.

But what he’s really doing is cluttering his narrative, watering down his message and billing Netflix by the minute, the best possible explanation for the wretched excess of it all.

Estrada is sticking it to “El hombre,” and in this case, “The Man” is Netflix. After sitting through “¡Que viva México!” the viewer is entitled to think she or he is “The Man” he’s sticking it to as well.

Rating: R, violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Alfonso Herrera, Damián Alcázar, Ana de la Reguera, Angelina Peláez, Mayra Hermosillo, Joaquín Cosio and Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez and many others

Credits: Directed by Luis Estrada, scripted by Luis Estrada and Jaime Sampietro. A Netflix release.

Running time: 3:12

The truly revolutionary films hit you with how ordinary they can seem on first glance. But that’s just how much they changed the cinema that followed. What they did transformed the way people watched, considered and made movies, rendering all that followed some sort of imitation of what they accomplished.

“The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” is a drab looking artifact of 1962 Britain, a black and white film of shades of grey telling a penny-plain story of one working class lad’s limited life and the release that running gives him in the Borstal school where “troubled” youth heading towards lives in the criminal classes were kept in line and “reformed.”

It’s got the conventions of “prison” and reform school films — fights, a rigid heirarchy, a mess hall riot and an idealistic psychotherapist who hopes to “help” these boys and the warden (“guvner”) who sees sport as a way out for a “promising” young runner.

The cinematography is stark, with bits of pre-Steadicam hand-held footage — on the run — that call attention to themselves thanks to their gritty shakiness. It’s only shaken out of its ordinariness in its extraordinary, still jolting third act and climax.

But it was a groundbreaking film about the post-war “decline” of Britain and the prospects of working class life in a hidebound, class-organized society, and the generation coming up that wasn’t going to take that, or so they hoped.

Now it’s seen as “angry young men” British film of the French New Wave style, flirting with the fringes of “kitchen sink realism” of British theater and cinema.

But back then it was a looking glass for the United Kingdom, kids growing up in a Cold War that Britain wouldn’t be a chief protatogonist in, no matter what Mr. Bond’s exploits might suggest, a society where money and prospects were limited for everyone but those who’ve always enjoyed them.

Director Tony Richardson and young star Tom Courtenay came over from the English theater to tell this story of a teen, delivered in chains to Ruxton Towers prison-“trade school,” who shows extraordinary talent in sports, especially running.

Michael Redgrave plays “The Govenor,” the warden who sees that talent and envisions reform school “Chariots of Fire” Olympic glory for this model of the English reform school way. Colin lets us see and hear the impertinence that underclass kids like him and The Beatles would make famous.

 “Running’s always been a big thing in our family, especially running away from the police.”

The film shows us the drudgery of his fenced-in existence, the freedom he experiences while running to train for their big “sports day” meet with the poshes of Ranley School, a so-called “public school” open only to the wealthy and the elite, kids quite unlike young Colin Smith.

But running also gives Colin the escape of remembering the life he was living and the events that brought him here.

However useless his session with the new school counselor (Alec McCowen) went, we and that psychotherapist picked up on the fact and Colin just lost his father. As the flashbacks make clear, it isn’t grief for lost affection that Colin took from that experience. It’s rage.

His factory laborer Dad, barely glimpsed, fought against “hospitals” and treatment, bedridden at the end. His mother (Avis Brundage) barely cared and had a man lined-up for when the breadwinner and father of three passed.

Colin sullenly accompanies her to collect the death benefit from the factory, and he and his younger siblings go with her as she sees how much of this 500£ windfall she can blow through at once. That new man shows up with the TV she’s bought.

Colin burns the banknote she gives him in silent protest.

In between fights at Ruxton Towers he remembers taking up with his mate Mike (James Bolam), stealing a car for a joyride, double-dating (Topsy Jane, Julia Foster) at a Nottingham pub, taking an excursion to the sea shore, which was at good as it got for kids in his circumstances.

A Tory politician lectures the plebes on the telly, urging them to keep the “faith” in their unjust system. Colin’s brief flash of cash hasn’t blinded him to the inequities that hem him in.

And we see, bit by bit over several flashbacks, the crime Colin and Mike committed and the way they are hassled and targeted by the cops until evidence turns up that jails them.

Many of these memories come up in the reveries of running, all in prep for that coveted race against the rich boys (future star James Fox is their tall, well-bred ideal).

Screenwriter Alan Sillitoe, adapting his own short story, has Colin give voice to generational, economic and existential angst in a few symbolic moments, and just a few flashes of dialogue.

“Do you know what I’d do if I had the whip hand? I’d get all the coppers, governers, posh whores, army officers and members of parliament and I’d stick them up against this wall and let them have it ’cause that’s what they’d like to do to blokes like us.”

Courtenay, in his break-out role, broods and gives-as-good-as-he-gets in brawls, and doesn’t let us see the wheels turning in this despairing, possibly even enraged young man trying to decide whether to fit into the role society has assigned to him (menial work, low pay, patriotic obedience to queen and country, even in sport) or rebel.

Courtenay would go on to a long career that produced a couple of Oscar nominations in films as beloved as “Doctor Zhivago” and “The Dresser,” and delightful turns in the most fun versions of “Nicholas Nickleby” and “Little Dorrit.” He was just in “The Railway Children Return.”

Cinematographer Walter Lassally had a kind of era-defining style that he took to his black and white filming of “Zorba the Greek,” and enjoyed a career that carried him into the Golden Age of posh color period pieces (“The Bostonians”).

And director Tony Richardson had already made “A Taste of Honey” in this “kitchen sink” style. He collected Oscars for producing and directing the bawdy period piece “Tom Jones” and was making layered dramas (“The Border,” “Blue Sky”) and dramedies (“The Hotel New Hampshire”) all the way to the end of his career. His daughter with his then-wife Vanessa Redgrave, the late Natasha Richardson, was a great actress tragically killed in a skiing accident, leaving her husband Liam Neeson widowed.

But the movie that truly put Richardson and Courtenay on the map lives on, especially in the British cinema. Every working class screen tale that followed, every realistic depiction of those on the losing side of the ongoing class war, owes something to “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” a classic that only truly found its audience when critics and scholars realized just how different it was from almost everything that had come before, and how much it impacted so much of the cinema that came after it.

Rating: unrated, violence, smoking

Cast: Tom Courtenay, Avis Bunnage, James Bolam, Alec McCowan, Topsy Jane, Julia Foster, Dervis Ward, James Fox and Michael Redgrave

Credits: Directed by Tony Richardson, scripted by Alan Sillitoe, based on his short story. A on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:44

There have been two Nia Vardalos movies based on this family, that wedding, and the love that blossomed under the dolmades and retsina.

There was a TV series.

Nia V. did a movie playing a tour guide in Greece, “My Life in Ruins.”

And yet let’s take the Big Fat Greek family– minus Michael Constantine, because he was an adorable and very old geezer in the FIRST “Big Fat Greek” movie, which premiered 20 YEARS AGO and he’s since died — to Greece?

I’ve interviewed Nia, who seemed delighted at the kick the original films gave her career, and Tom, who loved cashing those checks for producing her movies. But that “Greek” ship, Nia V’s One Big Idea, sailed before Obama’s second term.

Realizing that just because somebody’s done all this before is no disqualifier in the movie biz, this still seems a somewhat pointless enterprise.

Does Nia “have something” on Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson (friends and producers of these movies). Because this trailer makes me wonder.

Sept. 8.

Our performative “Attention Culture” didn’t begin with Youtube. Actually, it pretty much did.

Winter did great explainer docs about Blockchain and The Panama Papers.

This looks like another winner from the Bill to Keanu’s Ted.

“Road Rally Racers” is an Anglo-Welsh production of an Anglo-American animated film set in China, and released by U.S. based distributor Viva Kids.

I think I have all that straight — Vanguard Animation, Riverstone Pictures, Viva Kids. Right.

It’s an animated reminder that everything old is new again — a not-all-that-pleasant reminder.

Any kid growing up in the late ’60s or early ’70s would have been exposed to a sort of pan cultural obsession with “racing” narratives, many of them comic. These were all over the big screen — “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines,” “The Great Race” — and they were on Saturday AM TV.

“Speed Racer,” “Wacky Races,” “The Perils of Penelope Pitstop,” you couldn’t miss this “content” in the East (“Speed Racer” was a Japanese franchise) or West fifty years ago. In the American versions, screwball characters, often in the form of critters, would race bizarre cartoon cars across all manner of terrain — usually in rallies.

That’s exactly what “Road Rally Racers” is, a cross-China “Silk Road Ralley” race featuring a tycoon “cane toad” villain (John Cleese, of course) competing with everything from an Italian seahorse (he’s pregnant) to Indian Gibbons (apes), Tigers, British weasels, a racing team that looks like pangolins, with an Aussie kangaroo (Sharon Horgan) delivering broadcast commentary.

The plucky underdog is actually a Slow Loris, a primate native to China.

Why the producers chose this little known, panda-cute creature may have had something to do with its name. A Slow Loris named Zhi (Jimmy O. Yang) whose “tao” is out of whack is determined to become a famous race car driver. Funny. Because he’s “slow” by species, you see.

Another feature of lorises is that some species have a seriously venomous bite, so maybe there’s a message in that, too.

Zhi was raised by his Granny (Lisa Lu), who never can get him to stop painting soup pots and wearing them as helmets. His tao is never going to be in sync with his destiny if he keeps racing and crashing the way he always has.

When Archie Vaingloriuous (Cleese) and his Vainglorious Industries roll into to take over the village of Muddy Meadows, bulldoze and flood it, Zhi must race to save Granny Bai, the village, all of them.

J.K. Simmons sports a Russian accent voicing a goat and retired veteran racer who chomps down on pieces of metal that he then spits out of something useful — a piston or a grappling hook). He’s here to help Zhi. But he speaks in bumper-sticker slogans, because that’s now his business.

“The heart of a champion beats in all of us.” “Winners are always winning, even when they’re losing.”

Cleese’s “Vainglorious” villain keeps a ready supply of yes-men toads he calls “echoes,” ejecting one after another from his car all through the race. A new one always pops out of the trunk and into the passenger seat as he does.

The toothy toad Vainglorious sizes up the kid and mutters “SUPER nice guy. Looking forward to annihilating him!”

No, there is nothing here for adults, even the grandparents who might recall the shows this movie borrows from. Barely a laugh, even though Cleese gives it that old Cambridge try.

The animation’s not bad, even if it won’t be giving Pixar (“Cars”) or Disney (“Wreck it Ralph/Ralph Breaks the Internet” had a similar car race game sequence) any sleepless nights. The one clever bit has the action switching to sketched black and white in an homage to the music video to a-ha’s “Take on Me.”

Still, parents looking for anything that isn’t “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” in their local cineplex might be fooled into ducking into this. I wouldn’t count on it to distract your average five year old for 90 minutes.

Rating: PG, the odd rude bit

Cast: The voices of Jimmy O. Yang, Chloe Bennet, Lisa Lu, Sharon Horgan, J.K. Simmons and John Cleese.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ross Venokur. A Viva Kids release of a Riverstone Pictures production.

Running time: 1:31

This June 9 French language romance is from Pietro Marcello, director of the Italian drama based on a Jack London novel, “Martin Eden.”

A real-life “Juliette,” Juliette Jouan, stars, with Ralph Thierry and that Louis Garrel fellow, most recently seen in that Woody Allen bomb, “Rifkin’s Festival.”

In action pictures, “over the top” is rarely a bad thing. A little “ludicrous” is a given.

But even by those grade-on-the-curve standards, “The Mother,” the new Jennifer Lopez thriller about an assassin trying to protect the daughter she never knew, is a bit much.

Screenwriters Misha Green, Andrea Berloff and Peter Craig mash up the George Clooney assassin-laying-low tale “The American” with the Saoirse Ronan “girl trained to be an assassin” blood on the snow epic “Hanna,” because “Hey — one came out in 2010, the other in 2011, who’ll remember them?”

Bring in the live-action “Mulan” director Niki Caro, her favorite editor and a bunch of stunt-folk and stylists and makeup specialists and we’ll make J Lo the new Jason Bourne.

But even though Lopez is in fighting trim and can certainly handle fight choreography, even though the editing covers up some of the stunt-doubling, and covering her in a motorcycle helmet helps at other times, it’s hard to buy into all the half-speed haymakers her character throws at the legions of villains she dispatches here.

And the “ludicrous” doesn’t stop there.

We meet the unnamed “Mother” in a safe house, which she insists is “NOT safe,” right up to the moment her chief FBI protector (Omari Hardwick) has to admit she’s right.

She’s been undercover, working both sides of an arms deal, sleeping with both villains she’s tied to. When the slaughter begins, she has the presence of mind to duck, the “particular skills” to DIY triage Agent Cruise’s (HAH!) wounds, and build a bomb out of what she finds under the bathroom sink.

“Curses,” the murderous operator Adrian (Joseph Fiennes) almost mutters, stabbing her in the gut. “BOOM!” Foiled again!

And look at that. The reason they named the movie “The Mother” is because our undercover agent/sharp-shooter is very pregnant.

No, she can’t keep the baby, because two different mass murderers are after her. No, she can’t go underground in the Lower 48. Let’s ship this dish off to Alaska where she won’t stand out — oh no — and her old comrade (Paul Raci) can help her keep her secret.

But 12 years later, it all comes back. Adrian returns to haunt her. Hector the Cuban gun runner (Gael García Bernal) grabs the now tweenage girl (Lucy Paez). Now “The Mother” without any real mothering experience has to do what she does best to free her child and rid the human race of a lot of bad hombres and master villain minions in the process.

The first idiotic thing in the movie is the girl-napping. Cruise brings The Mother to Cincinatti to watch over her child, sets her up with a sniper rifle, just so she can witness a kidnapping she can’t shoot her way into preventing?

Yeah.

She’s off to Havana, to confront her old lover/nemesis Hector in a half-ruined mansion stuffed with more candles than “Interview with the Vampire.”

Freeing the girl isn’t the whole “mission,” not in The Mother’s mind. She’s got to prepare her for her endangered future. Back to Alaska we go, because it’s “Hanna” time, a chance to learn the cold-hearted laws of nature and the cold-blooded nature of sniping and knife fighting. In the snow.

“You’re driving!”

“I’m 12!“

Lopez is a good enough actress to make her character interesting and somewhat plausible. Not “barbed wire wrapped around a fist” plausible. But when she makes a threat, you believe it.

“They can have a nice long look at me while I kill them every last one of them.”

The action beats — chases through Cuba (Gran Canaria, The Canary Islands), on snowmobiles in Alaska (British Columbia) — are expertly handled.

But this script couldn’t surprise a newborn babe watching her first action pic. Ham-handed foreshadowing, retrofitted with a lot of “I won’t shoot wolves” sensitivities, Mother bickering with Daughter over the “violence” that puts every morsel of food you eat on the table — even “tofu” and “cashews.”

No, she didn’t “murder” Bambi. The deer “was a stag. Bambi’s father.” And no, his carcas is hanging up for dressing. This is rabbit we’re eating.

“Thumper.”

Yeah, that’s kind of funny, but that’s pretty much it for wit in this cut-and-paste collection of cliches, action pic tropes and recycled Bond beats.

Yes, Hollywood writers are on strike. No, let’s not base the outcome of that labor stoppage on a mediocre mess mashed-up from others’ scripts like this.

“The Mother” is watchable, here and there. Decently acted. Over-the-top, but not far enough over it to make it fun. And “ludricrous?” Maybe half the situations that put the daughter in screaming jeopardy or that keep The Mother alive until the next scene have nothing logical backing them up.

Much like the lightweight punches our fit-and-50something movie star throws in scene after silly scene.

Rating: R, violence

Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Omari Hardwick, Gael García Bernal, Paul Raci, Lucy Paez and Joseph Fiennes.

Credits: Directed by Niki Caro, scripted by Misha Green, Andrea Berloff and Peter Craig. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55

Texas filmmaker Robert Rodriguez never became a “brand,” which seems kind of a shame when you’re wondering how to sell his latest, a thriller titled “Hypnotic.”

“From the fevered mind of Robert Rodriguez” seems to sum it up, and would fit on a movie poster, too.

But what’s been on the “El Mariachi,””Spy Kids” and “From Dusk Till Dawn” filmmaker’s mind? Judging from the short but not snappy picture he’s put on the screen, I’d say Brian DePalma’s “The Fury,” Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” and “Memento,” filmmakers who give him an “out” for this problem the picture presents.

How do you make a zombie movie without zombies? You make those coming for you slowly and deliberately psychically hypnotized, not the walking dead.

Ben Affleck stars as Danny Rourke, an Austin, Texas police detective in therapy since he saw his daughter snatched from him at a local park. Cleared to return to work, he joins his partner, Nicks (JD Pardo) on a call. Could this anonymous tip be leading them to the next in a series of bank robberies?

But this guy they eyeball as he speaks to a couple of folks before strolling into the Bank of Austin sets off Rourke’s spidey sense. He’s played by the oft-sketchy William Fichtner, so those suspicions are warranted.

Our stranger talks to a lady on a park bench, mentioning how “hot” it is. He walks away, and she strips and strolls into traffic. Quite the…distraction.

A word of two in passing the armored car guards, and next thing Rourke knows, they’ve stormed into the bank and assisted in the robbery.

And that safe deposit box that apparently was our villain’s target? It has a Polaroid shot of Rourke’s daughter Minnie and a name that offers a clue.

That sends our confused, scrambling cop on a surreal odyssey into “hypnotic constructs” and those who construct them. Apparently, this supernatural villain is able to implant thoughts in his prey’s mind to get them to do his bidding — rob a bank, chase and attack Det. Rourke and the “dime store psychic” (Alice Braga) he interviews for making that “anonymous tip,” someone who knows all about “hypnotics” and a secret program to make them into weapons for Uncle Sam.

All Fichtner’s character needs to do is give somebody or a bunch of somebodies a word or a look, and they turn into a zombie army coming for Rourke and now palm-reader Diana.

A “hack into their main frame” paranoid (Dayo Okeniyi) must be enlisted, and a former insider in that hypno-influencers unit (Jackie Earle Haley) must be consulted.

No one is who they seem, only in a movie this derivative, this reliant on formula, they are.

Affleck seems unengaged here, which was an acting choice, given that he’s the one fellow immune to the psychic assaults. He should be dazed. It might be “true” to the character, but it’s our best excuse to check out of the movie.

As a longtime fan of Rodriguez, Affleck, Fichtner and Braga (“City of God”), I kept waiting for some combination of them to rescue this three-wheeled shopping cart of a thriller.

The plot is “Memento” here, “Inception” (complete with street-and-architecture-bending hallucinations) there, with a healthy dose of DePalma’s “The Fury” driving the narrative.

It’s easy enough to follow, but annoying in that we know we’re wasting brainpower piecing this pointless jumble together.

The script is littered with nonsensical exposition that lays out the parameters and particulars of this new “universe” of psychic warfare. It never quite transcends “hackneyed,” as in borrowing most everything from other movies and even recycling expressions that have no meaning — “Dime store psychic?” — even if a lot of lazy screenwriters have used and re-used them over the decades.

“It just makes no sense,” Affleck is forced to mutter at one point, perhaps the most hackneyed line of all, and yet somehow, the truest.

Rating: R for violence

Cast: Ben Affleck, Alice Braga, William Fichtner, JD Pardo, Jackie Earle Haley, Sandy Avila and Jeff Fahey

Credits: Directed by Robert Rodriguez, scripted by Robert Rodriguez and Max Borenstein.. A Kethup Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:33