Movie Nation

For a horror movie, “Night’s End” comes up awfully short in frights. Even the manufactured quick-cut “jolts” couldn’t alarm a toddler, even if the SHRIEK accompanying them would wake anybody.

For a film bathed in gloom, there’s little suspense or building dread about how things are and how bad they’re about to be.

As a pandemic lock-down filmmaking “exercise,” it’s only moderately effective, making use ofshut-in vlogger’s living quarters, giving us a peek at his life and the lives of others, meeting him online, chatting from their carefully Zoom curated “backdrops.”

But maybe that’s looking at Jennifer Reeder’s picture all wrong. Just over an hour into this short and slow slog, there’s “evidence” of a ghost (yawn) that gives everybody listed on the credits a chance to show us their scared-witless face — framed on a computer screen. And damned if it isn’t hilarious.

The fact that one of those faces belongs to the great Michael Shannon, sharing scenes with his real-life wife Kate Arrington, just adds to the amusement. You want to see how hard it is to pull off that look and justifiable reaction in a 15.6 inch diagonal-measure laptop screen? Watch these pros of varying talents take their best shot.

Geno Walker plays Ken Barber, a new-to-Agoraphobia guy who lost his job, his family and maybe his mind some months ago. He lives in a dark apartment in a mostly-empty older building, with rooms separated by plastic sheet doorways and the windows meticulously covered with custom-cut clips of newspapers.

He strips the labels off every food can, every one of the many Pepto bottles he keeps to mix with his morning coffee. Ken exercises, counts backward at bedtime and judges each challenge he faces as “forward progress.”

Ken does vlogs, running multiple channels in hopes of making this his unemployed supplemental income gig — “Ken Barber’s Management Tips,””Ken Barber’s Divorced Dad Tips,” “Ken Barber’s Long Life Tips.”

But he doesn’t notice when one of the stuffed birds he decorates his refuge with tumbles off a shelf behind him while making a video. Shockingly, he has an audience, and some of them notice. So does his BFF Terry (Felonious Munk).

“Maybe it’s a ghost.”

His re-married ex-wife (Arrington), on good terms despite Ken’s “breakdown,” suggests he “do some research” on the place. “Did somebody die there?”

And the next thing you know, Ken is doing that digging, reading this online weirdo’s (the ironically-named Lawrence Grimm) “ghost” book, taking suggestions and gaining attention as his videos become a cult hit.

It’s just that whatever’s there is drawing blood, hurling him off his chair, knocking on his door and reaching through the crack as he opens it. And every single incident is accompanied by a blood-curdling scream.

No, not Ken’s.

Director Reeder (“Knives and Skin”) has a movie framed in mostly close-ups — a must for maximum frights — cloaked in shadows and built around ghosts and “evidence” of their presence. But she and her editor cannot manufacture suspense in post-production and blow every single “gotcha” with cuts that don’t reveal enough to be frightening and that never build towards anything.

The cast is adequate, although Walker isn’t the most compelling lead, even taking into account the myopic conditions this was filmed under. Only Grimm seems to get the camp this could be, a supernatural “expert” who looks like Steve Buscemi and tries on his best Alan Rickman vamp while parked in front of shelves covered in lit candles for his Zoom shot.

Whatever “Night’s End” didn’t do for me, that one big unintentional cast-wide-gasp laugh at about an hour in was the best I’ve had in months, so thanks for that.

Rating: unrated, violet imagery, profanity

Cast: Geno Walker, Felonious Munk, Kate Arrington, Lawrence Grimm, Daniel Kyri and Michael Shannon.

Credits: Directed by Jennifer Reeder, scripted by Brett Neveu. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:22

“Well,” you say to yourself, “one reason we travel ‘Around the World with Netflix’ is to sample other cultures, see the world from a different culture’s point of view.”

So you write off piffle like “All Hail (Granizo)” as an aberration. Because surely Argentina doesn’t obsess over weather forecasts like this. Surely Argentina has its own Weather Channel. And surely Argentines wouldn’t think a 1970s style variety show built around a Big Weather Forecast on a set that could have come from the 1970s Hollywood TV satire “Network” is “destination television.”

A national cinema that’s produced a string of top drawer murder mysteries and thrillers in recent years is entitled to stumble in trying to produce a dramedy about the weather, a “hero” weather man, an enraged stalker fan and family. Director Marcos Carnevale (“No soy tu mami”) and two screenwriters — one of whom won an Oscar for co-writing Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Birdman” — don’t manage anything new, fresh or the least big interesting with those assorted elements in their two hour movie.

When we meet him, Miguel Flores (Guillermo Francella) is living the life in Buenos Aires — 50something, housed in a swank apartment, a car service that picks him up each day, a steady date with a fetching “friend with benefits” after work. He’s stopped on the street for selfies, plastered all over the sides of buses. He is “Miguel the Infallible,” a TV weather forecaster with a self-described “twenty years without a mistake” forecasting record.

He’s so popular that his station has bought his pitch for a nightly show about the weather, complete with a salsa band, so he can dance his way onstage each night. Sure, they saddle him with “an assistant,” the leggy, giggly blonde Mery (Laura Fernández), who is young and a social media darling. But no worries, right? Just a hook for a younger audience.

All that comes to pieces with Miguel’s first fallible forecast. It’s a hailstorm that wrecks cars not in garages, smashes windows not covered and kills dogs left outside, and Miguel, who “guaranteed” mild conditions (in dubbed English, or in Spanish with subtitles) slept through it. The entire city is enraged.

In an instant, he is “sent on a break,” Mery takes over the show and Miguel is a hounded, hunted man in the media. Now would be a good time to dash off to Córdoba, visit his pediatrician daughter Carla (Romina Fernandes) whose messages he’s been dodging forever.

There are hints of “Network,” “The Weather Man” and even a little “LA Story” magical realism in the building blocks of this movie. But everything planted in this story is allowed to wither on the vine.

Carla’s unusual lifestyle — she might be a swinger — is hinted at and abandoned. The father-daughter-weather issues date back to the film’s opening image, the mystery of how he was widowed and Carla grew up without a mom. Tossed out there and left hanging. Even the furious cabbie who vows revenge is a non-starter.

The story’s shallow lack of ambition can be explained in one last idea brought into play, an old coot of the mountains who seems to know exactly when it will rain or shower “hailstones as big as soccer balls.” So Miguel’s “redemption” has nothing to do with being a better person, less self-absorbed, a better father, someone who finally deals with his wife’s death.

Director Carnevale and screenwriters Fernando Balmayor and Nicolás Giacobone (“Birdman”) completely and utterly lose the thread in the “message” and “moral of the story” department. And most annoying of all, their puzzlingly, infuriatingly vapid movie takes two hours doing it.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Guillermo Francella, Romina Fernandes and Laura Fernández

Credits: Directed by Marcos Carnevale, scripted by Fernando Balmayor and Nicolás Giacobone. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:58

I’ve interviewed, at various times, all three people directly involved in Sunday night’s debacle. That doesn’t mean I “know” them, but it did give me a take on what happened, and how and what its awful implications are.

But Twitter debate is one thing, and the opinionating on this incident has broken down on gender lines, racial lines and those who listen to Jada’s podcast and those who had no idea it existed.

I’d rather defer to what I regard as the definitive view on this, one delivered by NBA legend and voice of reason and conscience columnist Kareem Abdul Jabbar.

“With a single petulant blow, he advocated violence, diminished women, insulted the entertainment industry, and perpetuated stereotypes about the Black community.”

I’m just shocked at how many people don’t get that.

An intimate piece of romantic folklore with breathtaking geographical ambition, “The Tale of the King Crab” comes to theaters feeling familiar, but startling in what it shows us and where it takes us.

Its first half is an immersive Italian period piece, the story of a love that cannot be in an exquisitely detailed recreation of a 19th century Italian village. The second half is where our damned, lovelorn hero exiles himself to “the a–h–e of the world,” Tierra del Fuego, and finds himself hunting for Spanish treasure with the help of a king crab.

Documentarians Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis, who gave us “Il solengo,” the non-fiction account of a hermit in the woods near Rome, make their feature debut another story of a loner of legend, this one a dissolute doctor’s son who moves back home and crawls into a bottle as he becomes smitten with a peasant lass.

Our story is told by storytellers, a group of older modern day Italian hunters eating, drinking and regaling each other with the passed-down account of Luciano (documentary director turned actor Gabrielle Silli). The yarn-spinners acknowledge how such tales are exaggerated in the retelling, but carry on nevertheless, painting a portrait of village life surrounding this town drunk.

His father once sent him to Rome to be cured, but that plainly didn’t take. Locals either put up with Luciano or mutter under their breath about him, sitting alone, drinking in the inn or taking a bottle out into the fields or forests.

As he walks with shepherd Severino (Severino Sperandio) and his herd of goats, they encounter a locked gate on their way to another pasture. The local prince’s aged castle has long been a short cut, through the outer walls and across the filled-in moat, that shepherds have used. Tipsy Luciano won’t stand for it. He kicks the gate open.

That sets events in motion involving the prince, the two local thugs in soiled police uniforms and Severino’s daughter (Maria Alexandra Lungu), whom Luciano has started courting in secret. He even gives her an amulet of “Etruscan gold” he happened upon in a nearby stream. But her father fears he’ll “ruin her reputation,” and plots against him.

We can hope all we want, but we just know that isn’t going to end well. That’s how Luciano finds himself “extradited” to Argentina, to Tierra del Fuego, the storytelling hunters say. That’s how he winds up in a priest’s vestments leading, pretty much at gunpoint, sailors infected with “gold fever” looking for buried Spanish treasure with the aid of a king crab that he totes in a bucket of salt water.

Perhaps only documentary filmmakers would have the daring to take their crew to one of the most remote and under-filmed places on Earth for their third act. They recreate the (wooden) shipwreck-littered coast, sample the striking topography and capture glimpses of the exotic wildlife. And when the chips are down, they stage an Old West shoot-out on the rocky moonscape every bit as shorn of vegetation as any desert setting in the American Southwest.

I love the way this leisurely, 19th-century-paced film moves from sunny, verdant Tuscany to overcast and forbidding Tierra del Fuego, taking Luciano from heaven to Hell, or at least Purgatory, exiled between the Strait of Magellan and Cape Horn.

The tale itself is a sort of parable of drunkenness, “gold fever” and its bloody-mindedness. And if our hero isn’t exactly doing penance, he is at least on his way to something like romantic closure, led by a crab he takes out of the water to periodically show him the way.

Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse, smoking

Cast: Gabriele Silli, Maria Alexandra Lungu, Severino Sperandio and Jorge Prado

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:45

Well, I’m fresh out of new ways to say “derivative,” “recycled,” “cut-and-pasted” and for old schoolers, “photocopied” or “carbon copy” about a movie without an original thought or image in its makeup.

Looking for suggestions, as “The Long Night” pretty much runs one through the more common possibilities in the first act.

Where’ve we see a city couple menaced by monstrous cultish figures in black cowls with deer, ram, etc. skulls as their head-covering? Where HAVEN’T we seen that?

“Antlers” was merely the one with the big name cast. But I feel as if I see some version of this sort of primeval, nature-worshipping of flesh-craving menace at least once a month.

There’s very little to recommend this Scout Taylor-Compton (“Runaways” is the best rated credit on her resume) and Nolan Gerard Funk (“Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare”) as the New Yorkers who trek “down South” where the Spanish moss hangs off the live oaks and those “redneck art” thingies on the side of the road are “totems” to what they quickly figure out is “some kind of a cult, skinhead or Klan gang.”

Try “snakes.” Because there are a lot of those. Not in the costumes of the cult, mind you. But that’s nitpicking.

Grace has come South to “find out who my family is.” She was a foster child, and there’s a local who claims to have dug up some history. Businessman/Princeton alumnus Jack figures he owes her because he didn’t “stick up for me” when he introduced her to his rich family.

Their phones go staticky, the night turns gloomy and all these dudes wearing animal heads show up with their torches, their pentagrams, their animal mutilation and their supernatural hold over the couple and the one local (veteran character actor Jeff Fahey) who might intervene on their behalf.

There’s one good joke, the punchline to a guys-meet-and-have-a-“Quien es mas macho?” moment.

Deborah Kara Unger shows up, face-painted to hide the embarrassment .

And there are a couple of effective moments, a chill here and there, a canted camera that captures Grace’s possession by whatever “snake” this cult worships.

For those looking for cheaper thrills, there’s a slo-mo pandering moment of nudity later on. Kudos to the star or her body double, there, I guess.

Taylor-Compton also manages the bellow guttural screams at every threat, every exertion, every moment of fear or vengeance Grace experiences. No. Mean. Feat.

The movie before and after that signature nude scene isn’t titillating or the least bit entertaining. But when you’re seemingly reusing costumes from a dozen other animist cult pictures, that was always going to be too much to hope for.

Rating: R (Violence|Language|Some Disturbing Images|Nudity)

Cast: Scout Taylor-Compton, Nolan Gerard Funk, Jeff Fahey and Deborah Kara Unger.

Credits: Directed by Rich Ragsdale, scripted by Robert Sheppe and Mark Young. A Well Go USA film on Shudder.

Running time: 1:30

“In this game, there’s what you know, an’ what you DON’T know,” grizzled ex-con and OAP (Old Age Pensioner) Terry fumes in “King of Thieves.” And in a line that can be applied to all those too young to appreciate or “get” this old school heist picture, aka the callow critics who panned it, he ads “And if you don’t even know what you don’t know, you know f— all!“

If the very idea of Oscar winner Jim Broadbent, playing a rare late-career tough guy, chewing through those lines in the presence of still-a-little-scary Oscar-winner Michael Caine, doesn’t thrill or at least tickle you, well this isn’t the film for you.

Maybe you have to be older to appreciate the diabetes/UTI/deaf/napping and insulin-injecting with a slap-on-the-bum afterward charms of “Thieves,” which stars those two, and Oscar-nominee Tom Courtenay, Charlie Cox (“Daredevil”), Paul Whitehouse (British TV and “Death of Stalin” veteran) and hell’s bells DUMBLEDORE himself, Michael Gambon.

But I dare say even those who panned this perfectly engaging, reasonably suspenseful, nostalgic and even whimsical geriatric burglar’s tale when it had its limited theatrical release would agree with me on one salient point.

It’s the very definition of “Netflixable.”

“Thieves” is based on the true story of Britain’s Hatton Garden Safe Deposit heist of 2015.

Caine plays Brian, a bored, comfortably-retired and just-widowed ringleader (of course) who promised his wife (Francesca Annis) he’d “stay out of mischief” just before she died. That changes basically at her funeral.

There’s Terry (Broadbent) and nervous, “stone-deaf” Kenny (Courtenay). And putting on a show by doing a handstand in the middle of the solemn occasion is “the young one,” Danny (Ray Winstone).

The first thing we notice about this informal “mob” is that they’re elderly, inclined to be a bit loud because of hearing issues, and indiscrete. They start chatting up possible “jobs” just to make small talk into shop talk.

A former protege of Brian’s, the on-the-spectrum shy “Basil” (Cox) overhears this, and mentions to Brian that he has a friend who has a key into one of the most-challenging-“jobs” the lads were discussing. Basil may not like to be in crowds or be touched, but he has access to that diamond distrct key, and he just might be “the best ‘sparks’ man (electronics/security systems) in London.”

All they need to do is get in, pry open this or that, use a disused elevator shaft, drift a hole big enough for “the most undernourished thief we can find” — so they recruit Carl (Whitehouse) — to get through and ransack a safe deposit-box filled vault with diamonds, cash and gold, all while avoiding London’s omnipresent CCTV cameras.

Before the Cockney heir to Caine’s perfect Cockney Winstone can say, “‘ello me old son,” that’s just what they do.

For a movie that’s basically a true-to-life “Going in Style,” “King of Thieves” never crosses the line from “cute” to “cutesy.” Caine gives us a taste of his still-hard-as-nails edge, Broadbent and Winstone match him and the picture’s inevitable “no honor among thieves” story arc clings to credibility, first to last.

The casing-the-joint/assembling-the-team/planning the heist scenes are handled with brisk montages set to period pop by Tom Jones or Shirley Bassey, or a crackling jazz score by Benjamin Wallfisch. He sets the actual break-in sequence — it doesn’t go easily or go off like clockwork, BTW — to an energetic jazz version of “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies.”

The cute stuff has to do with this guy’s “incontinence,” that one’s need for naps, mid-heist and bonding over “Type 2? Diabetes?”

Gambon shows up as an out-of-his depth fishmonger/fence, Billy the Fish. Gambon dresses in worn, oversized pants and sportscoat with the belt cinched up entirely too far…just like grandpa.

Sure, we can figure out the weak links, guess the “alliances” and schisms within the gang before they show up. That’s what a “formulaic” genre picture is. We can figure out where this is going without being native Brits who remember the news stories.

But Oscar-winning director James Marsh (“Man on Wire,” “The Theory of Everything”), working from a Joe Penhall script, wisely limits the police point of view to nameless coppers doggedly burrowing through CCTV footage, hunting for clues.

This high-mileage/hard-mileage cast crackles and sells the conceit, that aged Brits — whom no one would suspect because Britain’s native-born criminal element long ago lost its initiative and its edge to “Albanians” and foreign imports — could pull this off.

And if only Winstone could Cockney his way through a proper mocking of somebody’s disguise — “That’s a proper ‘Uncle Fester, Send-in-the-Clowns’ whoopsie-daisy ‘ave an AWAY day, that is!” — only Caine could serve up the immensely quotable dialogue’s best summation.

“Crooks are like boxers. They lose their legs, first. Then they lose their reflexes. Then they lose their friends.”

Rating: R, for language (profanity)

Credits: Directed by James Marsh, scripted by Joe Penhall. A Lionsgate/Saban films release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:48

“Donbass,” writer-director Sergey Loznitsa’s send up of the farcical Russian-backed “separatists” civil war of Eastern Ukraine, is framed by having its first and last scenes in a film production makeup trailer.

“Actors” or “crisis actors,” we wonder as we ponder the theatricality of it all. This is “civil war” as performance, a big, broad lie pushed by Putin, pushed-back-against by the legitimate Ukrainian government, where it’s not so much ground taken and public support implied as how everything “appears.”

You want a Sudetenland/Cyprus excuse to arm, aid and eventually invade to “support” the ethnic Russian minority, part of the “Russification” of the region begun by Stalin? Trot out the word that conjures up ancient hatreds of the sworn enemy of the People — “fascists.” Everybody you think you oppose, everyone you eyeball as you check their “papers” is “Look, we’ve caught a fascist!”

You’re determined to continue the “cleansing” begun in World War II? Prop a captured Ukrainian soldier up against a city lamppost with the label “extermination squad” on a placard around his neck. Because if you’re running extermination squads, you’d best accuse the other side of doing it.

“Projection” we call it over here, with a former projector-in-chief still waddling around calling other people traitors and crooks even though we know he’s talking about himself.

Want to show how “corrupt” the “failed government” was at running a local maternity hospital? Stuff it with food and supplies, bring in a bluff, bragging party boss (Boris Kamorzin) to parade the staff through kitchens and offices of the “doctor who is stealing from you” to show off cases of bottled water and fridge after fridge stuffed with sausages.

“What a great actor you are, Mikhalyich” the doctor (Evgeny Chepurnyak) compliments him after the tour is over and they’re chumming around in (what one guesses) is the accused “thief” doctor’s office.

Loznitsa, a Ukrainian filmmaker mostly-known for documentaries (“Babi Yar. Context”), gives us a skewering “Slacker” style satire in which the “story” is told in a sort of relay race. We follow this character from that hospital into his Mercedes where he goes through that checkpoint, only to follow another character onto a bus that is then stopped at the next checkpoint where the men on board are berated and shamed by a female separatist commander, strip-searched before she’ll let these men — every one with an excuse for not joining her Russian-backed (or native Ukrainian) cause — move on.

A city hall meeting is interrupted by a protester who dumps “dirt” (not “dirt”) all over the mayor and declares, “If the police and the courts have failed, I will defend my honor myself!”

We duck into a city bomb shelter where a furious cultural non-profit executive chews out her mother for taking shelter with hundreds of others — “Nobody’s bombing it!” — only to then visit this or that break-off region’s leader, “People’s Republic of” of whatever, with its own flag — to explain this charity show she and others have conceived to bring the people together in “this awful event,” a nice euphemism for the years-long invasion that preceded the invasion the world is finally focused on now.

The premier carelessly punches his intercom to his secretary, and for the entire charity event committee to hear as they leave and demands to know “What was THAT circus all about?”

People burst into this or that anthem about the proud “Cossack nation” or the virtues of buying into Putin’s “Novorossiya,” a new “Russian Empire” remade before the botoxed runt dies the early death that Russians in general, and Russian leaders in particular, are fated for.

Through it all, hulking, bear-sized soldiers in Russian Ushanka fur hats guard this check point, harass that foreign journalist (Thorsten Merten) and run a simple extortion scheme in which they “expropriate” (steal) expensive cars, summon the owners to “return” them only to shove a piece of paper on that owner demanding that he sign it over to “them,” and then demand huge sums of money to release their new hostage, all based on how much they know this SUV or that person (access to tax records) is worth.

It takes a while to settle into Loznitsa’s storytelling style and get a handle on the points he’s making. Non-natives aren’t going to pick up on every allusion, the nuances of accent or even the differences between the Russian and Ukrainian being spoken (with subtitles).

But as we watch the brutish way media brainwashed and sometimes vodka-tipsy “Make Russian Great Again” types abuse a battered 50something man labeled “extermination squad” by men with guns, the way other soldiers cane AWOL conscripts in gauntlet that almost kills them, the random rocket-artillery barrages that slaughter civilians at a checkpoint and the work-arounds every civilian faces in an artificially-militarized authoritarian mess that Vladimir Putin has wrought, we get the point.

There is no real “us vs them,” only an outsider’s theatrical production of that. And unfortunately all involved are trapped in that teleplay, mere extras to be abused, enslaved, robbed and shot by the uniformed Men With Guns, no matter which colorful flag they claim to represent.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Tamara Yatsenko, Boris Kamorzin, Thorsten Merten, Svetlana Kolesova, Sergey Kolesov

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sergey Loznitsa. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 2:02

I made a joke over on Facebook about not watching the Oscars at all. Well, half joke.

I don’t care about the awards or the show, and only tune in to get a feel for the evening. I caught the open, then watched a movie.

When “Top Gun” ended, I turned the telecast back on, and within three minutes was asking friends via Twitter and Facebook, “Wait, did that just happen?”

OK.

“But aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how’d you like the play?

“CODA” won best picture, “Dune” won the most Oscars, Kenneth Branagh and Jessica Chastain and Will Smith finally won Oscars. Jane Campion won her second, after 1994’s “The Piano.”

Will Smith didn’t manage a full apology.

Lovely sign language acceptance speech from Troy, moving speeches from Ariana, Jessica and Ken.

And this…

A man of violence who throws in his lot to protect the defenseless was a movie trope long before Brandon de Wilde yelled “SHANE! Come back!”

So let’s see how it fares in “Boon,” with veteran heavy Neal McDonough (“Walking Tall,” TV’s “Van Helsing”) playing Mr. “A History of Violence,” a hit-man on the lam who helps those once who helped him.

McDonough co-scripted this contrived star vehicle, a thriller that lets you see all the wheels arbitrarily set in motion and hear every gear that grinds along the way.

“Nick” is a wanted man, making his way to the border between Washington state and Canada. A Fed named Redd (Demetrius Grosse) is on his tail. But he’s playing catchup. There’s already somebody trying to silence this hired killer. But this guy (“Dragon” star Jason Scott Lee in a single scene) doesn’t even have time to fit his silencer on his pistol before Nick has the drop on him.

Wounded in the shootout, Nick stumbles through the woods and wakes up in the care of a widowed preacher (Christiane Seidel of TV’s “The Queen’s Gambit” and “Godless”) and her teen son (Jake Melrose).

She shares a bit of her story, but Nick is cagey and silent, which won’t fly with her.

“I think it’s only right that you tell me how you were shot” and ended up on her land.

Nick gets well enough to head off to a rental and extract the bullet himself (sure), but Catherine the pastor has other issues, which Nick figures out soon enough. She’s obligated to some seriously lethal scumbags who are “doing some work on our land.” Nick figures out what that might be, the “blind eye” she’s turning, and what her and her son’s fate will be once Fitzgerald (Tommy Flanagan) and his crew have no more use for them.

“Boon” does a terrible job of saying why the Baptist preacher is going along with these goons’ plans. It introduces her as a Good Samaritan owed a favor and mentions Nick’s Catholicism, as if any Catholic not “In Bruges” would be confessing his sins in BFE, Washington.

But all this script is concerned with is facilitating the characters moving from one violent encounter to another. Nick is handy with any firearm you can name, and when the chips are down and the odds are at their highest, he might just improvise.

Hey Nick, whatcha gonna do with that SPOON you just plucked out the kid’s cereal?

There are goonish henchmen and Fitzgerald’s vengeful Olivia Wilde-look-alike daughter-in-law (Spanish actress Christina Ochoa) also to contend with. And let’s not forget our lone Fed, on the clock and inexplicably by himself.

There’s more care put into bodies being yanked backward by a shotgun blast, and in McDonough’s fedora and turtle-neck hitman attire, than in any scene or exchange of dialogue in the script, co-written by director Derek Presley, McDonough’s co-conspirator for the little-seen 2021 Neal-as-hitman thriller “Red Stone.”

The big shootout is big enough, but is there enough leading up to it to make us suspend disbelief, invest in characters and care? I think not.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Neal McDonough, Christiane Seidel, Demetrius Grosse, Christina Ochoa, Jake Melrose, Jason Scott Lee and Tommy Flanagan.

Credits: Directed by Derek Presley, scripted by Neal McDonough and Derek Presley. A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 1:35

It’s been jarring to see the Walt Disney Company’s tepid, tone-deaf under-reaction to Florida’s “Don’t say ‘gay’ bill in light of everything that America’s greatest entertainment entertainment company has done that sends just the opposite message.

Many have been shocked at that in light of the corporate culture that seemed inspired by gay lyricist and eventual AIDS victim Howard Ashman’s reinvention of the screen musical, in animated form (“The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast), which led to a more openly gay-friendly company. Disney, after all, not only tolerated but embraced the gay community’s creating “Gay Days” at Disney World.

And with all that, Disney has been reluctant to take a stand against hate-mongering legislation not designed to “protect kids/spare parents,” but to single out a minority group for increasingly authoritarian Republicans to attack and “erase.”

Disney has bought influence in the Florida legislature for decades, giving them free rein to develop Disney World, Celebration and everything about that happened “on property” from the start. Now, those same “Let Disney and its Reedy Creek Improvement District do whatever they want” legislators and their reactionary governor have passed a flagrant assault on free speech, gay rights and academic freedoms, one which carries “gay isn’t OK” messaging that many parents and students feel is dangerous and downright threatening.

What a time for “Better Nate Than Ever” to come to Disney+. But here it is, Tim Federle’s screen musical adaptation of his best-selling book about a 13 year-old Broadway baby and his “matter of life and death” dreams of singing and dancing on The Great White Way.

Our hero, Nate (Rueby Wood) has a classmate/confidante (Aria Brooks) who crushes on him — hard. But Nate, who is “just trying to survive the seventh grade,” struggles to find the words to let her down easily.

We know what he knows, and that “gotta dance” gotta sing call-to-the-stage, which comes with a fondness for glitter lip gloss, may “embarrass” his jock brother (Joshua Bassett). But Nate’s got a dream, got a purpose and has a tribe, and “theater kids” can isn’t just a euphemism for kids like him.

Because nobody in this movie says “gay” either. So maybe this corporate temerity is a bit more prevalent in the culture than we figured.

The film itself is an innocuous but pleasant “Junior High School Musical” from the writer/creator of that Disney blockbuster — Federle — with Gabriel Mann (“A Million Little Things”) serving up pleasantly forgettable songs.

Nate is short and earnest and tries his best, but he never gets cast in school plays. Yes, he’s only 13, but like gymnasts, ballerinas and mayflies, Broadway babies figure their window for “making it” closes a little bit every day.

Then he hears of a chance to jump past the drama teacher (Underdeveloped and underexplained –WHY won’t she cast him?) and straight onto Broadway. What is Disney’s next big movie-to-musical Broadway project? Only “the greatest animated film ever,” “Lilo & Stitch.”

Nate has the pluck to scheme his way, behind his struggling, working-class parents’ and his “babysitting” older brother’s’ back,s to get to New York. Can he pull that off, avoid getting mugged or just New York cheated out of his ready cash, ace the audition and realize his dream? Just guess.

The cute stuff Federle crams into this story include under-age fish-out-of-water gags about the kids — BFF Lily has to pitch in — bussing their way to New York, which Nate has “Guys and Dolls” era delusions about, “Billy Elliot” references, busking for bucks to survive the city, insufferable stage parents and their Broadway brats at auditions, and the movie’s ace in the hole.

That would be Lisa Kudrow as Nate’s semi-estranged aunt, a Broadway actress still acting and hoofing and hustling for a living decades after her “matter of life and death” dream came true. Sort of. Kudrow’s off-tempo way with a one-liner, her deadpan double-takes at this kid about to storm Broadway, who can use more than just her advice right now, kicks the comedy up a notch.

Nate’s irrepressible “THIS is where I’m supposed to be” renews Aunt Heidi’s enthusiasm for the cattle calls, the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd. She lives a vicariously — just a little — through Nate’s sudden stroke of luck (a “callback”).

The premise is so adorable as to give you a toothache. The production numbers have a “Guys and Dolls” era artifice that’s just as cute. And the dialogue has its share of zingers.

“Where in the name of Stephen Joshua Sondheim ARE you?”

Our lead, a veteran of the stage tour of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” has enough charm and musical theater chops to hold our interest even if the movie is aimed at more of a tween or young teen audience.

But even though you’d expect a movie looking for that demographic to not have much in the way of edge, you have to wonder if Federle lost an argument with corporate about mentioning the word “gay.” Is he kicking himself for not pushing back harder on that as “Nate” makes its way to TVs all over America, including the Banana Republic of Florida? I’ll bet he is.

Rating: PG for thematic elements, a suggestive reference and mild language

Cast: Rueby Wood, Aria Brooks, Joshua Bassett and Lisa Kudrow

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tim Federle, based on his novel. A Disney+ release.

Running time: 1:31