Movie Nation

The best sports movie director of recent times, Ron Shelton, who gave us “Tin Cup,” “Bull Durham” and 1992’s “White Men Can’t Jump,” developed one rule for casting such films after the efforts it took to make a certain future Oscar winner look like an actual major league pitching prospect in his breakout film, “Bull Durham.”

“They’ve got to be able to ‘play.'”

That doesn’t seem to have tripped-up the director who goes by “Calmatic” and the stars of the remake of “White Men Can’t Jump.” Sinqua Walls was a convincing footballer on TV’s “Friday Night Lights,” and singer and composer Jack Harlow has a credible jump shot.

A lot of rehearsal and some sympathetic editing and they’re perfectly credible as a new version of a salt-and-pepper LA street-hoops hustling duo.

But lacking real chemistry — Harlow’s never acted in a movie before — and with little of the witty way with banter and amusing showmanship of the original film, this re-imagining of Shelton’s work — which had Wesley Snipes at his flamboyant, mouthiest best and Woody Harrelson as his slow-talking lesser half of a hoops dream team — is flat-footed, pretty much start to finish.

And lest we let the players take all the heat, the Grammy winning music video director Calmatic also remade a “House Party” that no one wanted to see, especially critics.

The story’s been changed, giving one baller, Kamal (Walls) a troubled back-story to explain hy he’s pushing 30 and “never made it,” and a now-sickly Dad (the late Lance Reddick) who pushed him. The “white man” half is a Gonzaga alum who still has NBA dreams, a bum knee and a juice-cleanse/meditator shtick that’s almost funny.

But the stakes seem both lower and more serious. There’s no Rosie Perez, training for “Jeopardy” glory and raising her voice to a pitch only dogs can hear when her man messes up. The hustlers hustling each other bits are lacking and the supporting “players” (Myles Bullock, Vince Staples) have less amusing characters and less amusing lines to play.

There’s no delusional Kadeem Hardison, no hardball-roundball hustler akin to the original film’s Cylk Cozart.

Here, the broke white guy is a would-be influencer nerd named Jeremy who drives his dancer-choreographer girlfriend’s (Laura Harrier) Porsche. Kamal and wife Imani (Teyani Taylor) have a family and dreams, and he has a delivery truck driving job and anger management issues, on and off the court.

Outdoor court locations from the original film are recycled, but the lean, clean “This could be our big payday” tournament is diluted with multiple tourneys. A white NBA star is set up as a “meh” villain.

The insults include “I don’t wanna take your money, gentrifier” and “Hope you can shoot, Sherman Oaks.”

Wake me when you’re done, kids.

Here’s what works. Harlow is very good at playing the passive aggressive trash-talker who zeroes in on other player’s on-and-off-court insecurities in semi-subtle ways.

“I’m like the P.T. Anderson (“There Will be Blood”) of basketball psychological warfare.”

And there’s no sense in countering that with “Spike” is a better filmmaker.

“Spike isn’t even a good KNICKS fan!”

But take away the point-by-point comparison, even accepting the jump shots and backdoor cuts on the court, this remake still never gets off the ground.

Harlow may be funnier in other (smaller) roles, and Walls may have other chances to play the straight man. But there is no “Woody and Wesley” four-films-together future for these two.

And if Calmatic wants a movie making career, maybe it’s time to turn down remakes.

Rating: R for profanity, and some drug content

Cast: Sinqua Walls, Jack Harlow, Laura Harrier, Teyana Taylor and Lance Reddick.

Credits: Directed by Calmatic, scripted by Kenya Barris and Doug Hall, based on the Ron Shelton script for the movie “White Men Can’t Jump.”

A 20th Century/Hulu release.

Running time:

“Crazy Rich Asians” meets “Joy Luck Club” and “Girls Trip/Bridesmaids?”

Day-em, girrrrrlls.

Lovely to see these blokes again, Tom Wilkinson, Robert Carlyle (I thought he was dead.) and Mark Addy star in an FX series picking up the Sheffield Steel (strippers) story 25 years later.

Jason Momoa IS “The Greatest Showman!”

Who knew?

With his every peacocking gesture, every grand spreading of his epic arms and epic smile, every flounce, prance, steely-eyed threat — “You want to control the world, I just want to punish it!” –and every darker-than-dark joke, Momoa becomes the villain’s villain in “Fast X,” the tenth film in the never-ending franchise that began waaaay back in 2001.

“Hey dorks, what’re we blowing up? WHAT? The Vatican? Ok, but you’re going to HELL.”

But let’s not mince words. “Fast X” is a stunningly stupid movie, reviving more “dead” characters than every NBC soap opera ever, “fan servicing” the crap out of a crap script, wrecking more cars (NOT those indestructable Product Placement Dodges) in more digital crashes than one can count, and featuring more scenes demanding the impossible from Vin Diesel — acting.

Yet Momoa makes it fun, all by his Larger than Life self.

Momoa plays the aptly-named walking/talking “inferno” Dante, son of the villain played by Joaquim de Almeida a few movies back.

Dante learned one and only one thing from his dad (de Almeida returns to reenact his death scene, and so that Dante can be inserted into the story).

“Never accept death when SUFFERING is owed!”

So Dante starts setting up “The Family,” which has grown (EGOT winner Rita Moreno comes in as a matriarch) so much it’s “a cult, with cars.”

And stuff starts blowing up — in Rome, in London, in and around Rio.

Characters and cars magically bop from locale to locale. Hey, Dominic Toretto (Diesel) wouldn’t be caught DEAD without his indestructable supercharged vintage Charger.

Brie Larson shows up as an “Agency” connected maniuplator, too Taylor Swift-thin to be convincing in a fight.

Another past rival (Oscar winner Charlize Theron) becomes an ally, but not without an epic girlfight, co-starring “Girlfight” alumna Michelle Rodriguez, still the baddest bad-ass in these films.

Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris carry their characters’ ongoing “family” feud to Rome and London, and Brit-fam member Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) can barely keep the peace. John Cena, playing Dom’s brother, provides more comic relief as the “sensitive” but bulked-up uncle who needs to hide Dom’s kid from Dante’s fury.

Oscar winner Helen Mirren and Jason Statham and Sung Kang are also here. The credits for these movies are eating up half the screen time these days. The collection of cameos or return “appearances” is well beyond “cluttering up the narrative.” “Transporter” director Louis Leterrier and the screenwriters can’t keep it all straight. Why should we?

There’s a high-stakes drag race scene in Rio, rendered ludicrously over-the-top like everything else, but which reminds of us of how this saga began — a simple undercover cop and drag-racing thieves tale that morphed into a “family,” with the only character truly “gone” and not forgotten was played by the late Paul Walker.

Diesel, years past getting that AARP card in the mail, is still in shape but his action beats are mostly limited to changing gears…with authority. He’s the one who uses “family” the most. And Dom is the guy who seems to be “extending” this extended family with every film, every moment Dom turns protector for someone new, generally some old friend’s kid these days.

Impossible digital explosions, scene after scene of digital “fire,” impossible plunges into “Bugs Bunny Physics” time and time again, “Fast X” wraps no storyline up, gives up on NO one (save for Walker) who has ever appeared in this series, and no character receives her or his just deserts.

Again, stunningly stupid, and a lot more digital than one would like.

But every time Man Mountain Momoa gives a pedicure to some dead victim, every time he flips that manly mane, he makes this mess worth all the eye-rolling it takes to sit through it.

“I’m Dante,” he says, by way of introduction. And then he CURTSIES! “Enchante!”

Rating: PG-13 (Intense Sequences of Violence|Action|Language|Some Suggestive Material)

Cast: Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Nathalie Emmanuel, Charlize Theron, Ludacris, Sung Kang, Helen Mirren, Rita Moreno, Brie Larson, John Cena, Jordana Brewster, Scott Eastwood, Alan Ritchson, Joaquim de Almeida and Jason Momoa.

Directed by Louis Leterrier, scripted by  Justin Lin, Zach Dean and Dan Mazeau Universal release.

Running time: 2:21

Boy, talk about dodging a bullet. I almost reviewed “Royalteen: Princess Margrethe” before watching the prequel about a troubled Norwegian girl who moves to a high school that includes members of the Norwegian royal family.

Sure, “Royalteen,” the first film, is choppy, episodic and soap operatic in that Young Adult fiction way. It feels incomplete because it pretty much is.

But as the sequel is about the bitchy meangirl princess twin of Prince Karl Johan, who goes by “Kalle (Mathias Storhøi), I guess you pretty much need to see Margrethe (Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne) at her worst, which lets us judge the dickens out of her as she picks on traumatized Lena (Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne) before whatever secret shame/pain Margrethe reveals about herself in the sequel which is all about her.

Or maybe she just gets what she has coming to her. I can’t wait to find out.

Lena is 17 and starting at a new school which the children of the royal family attend. Dad (Petter Width Kristiansen) grumps about “tax dollars” going to pay for extra security and what not for kids his wife, Lena’s mom (Veslemøy Mørkrid) insist her daughter address as “Your Royal Highness.”

Lena seems self-possessed enough not to be bowled over by their celebrity. Kalle, who has class with her, has a social media rep as a party animal and “f—boy.” And friendly school influencer Tess (Ina Dajanna Ervik) is persona non grata to the snooty Margrethe.

Lena should be hearing alarm bells.

But the charming, easygoing Kalle starts flirting and “paranoid” Margrethe starts fuming. What’s Lena getting herself into? Aside from social media celebrity, hedonistic pool parties or rides on the very expensive royal motorboat?

Not a euphemism, BTW.

Lena finds herself sabotaged (we suspect) by Margrethe in one instance, and cruelly set up by her in another.

The behavior of one and all in this teen dramedy seems a tad off. Perhaps they’ve read the script to the sequel and know better than to get too worked-up over an assault, a big revelation, a royal threat that would, in a democratic country’s public school, invite an ass-whipping.

The Around the World with Netflix culture clash here is how relaxed Lena’s parents are about her motoring off for a sleepover weekend with the Future King and how her Dad is concerned but cool when she comes home blitzed and vomiting. He gets an inventory on what she’s imbibed.

“Are you on anything else?” he asks, matter of factly, in Norwegian with subtitles, or dubbed into English.

The players are pretty and rather blase, I have to say — adults and children — save for Margrethe, who is a real rhymes-with-rich-and-witch.

Serious subjects like anxiety, birth control and teen pregnancy are discussed but not actually addressed.

And then, despite all the threats and ill-use and cruelty, everything is painted-over for an abrupt finale that leaves nothing resolved, no lessons learned and more questions than answers about the sequel to come.

As I said, and as you can see from the star rating below, I can hardly wait for that. No. Seriously.

Rating: TV-MA, teen sex, teen drug and alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Ines Høysæter Asserson, Mathias Storhøi, Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne, Ina Dajanna Ervik, Veslemøy Mørkrid, Frode Winther and Petter Width Kristiansen

Credits: Directed by Per-Olav Sørensen and Emilie Beck, scripted by Ester Schartum-Hansen and Per-Olav Sørensen, based on the novel by Randi Fuglehaug and Anne Gunn Halvorsen. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

A Sundance Film Fest darling comes out July 7, from A24.

Reason #19 you don’t want to sit next to Rodg at the movies. There’s always the chance I’m going to mutter the movie critic’s “quiet part out loud” judgement despite my best efforts not to.

“Boy, this has absolutely nothing that holds my interest” I found myself grumping very early in “Assassin Club,” an opinion that the remaining 100 minutes did not change.

It’s another star vehicle for hunky leading man Henry Golding, a “Crazy Rich Asian” with a seriously uneven post-“Crazy” track record in movies. “Snake Eyes?” “The Gentlemen?” “Last Christmas?” “Persuasion?”

Here, he’s a hired-killer who finds himself hunting and hunted by his fellow assassins as someone is putting out contracts on everybody who keeps a roof over her or his head via murdering people for money.

Sam Neill plays the glib, posh, harpsichord-playing epicurean who chatters away on the phone as “Morgan” (Golding) lines up his next shot.

“You love the sound of your own voice, don’t you, old man?”

When Morgan himself takes a bullet, handler Caldwell barely interrupts his latest pricy glass of wine to quip “little flesh wound, here and there, part of the job” before bringing up the next assignment.

It’s a multi-hit, multi-million dollar contract, a sort of “game,” really. But Morgan wants out of what Caldwell insists is still “good, necessary work,” taking out arms dealers, human traffickers and the like.

As Caldwell knows there are but “three reasons” people like his “gold standard” killer end their careers — “They find God, they find a woman” or they “die.” — we guess it’s the Italian school teacher Sophie (Daniella Melchior), who knows nothing of her lover’s injurious and deadly line of work, who motivates Morgan’s desire to be done with killing.

Noomi Rapace plays an Interpol-ish exec trying to track down the killers and those who are killing them.

Because whoever paid that big contract apparently offered it to others. Every hired killer in Europe (lots of second unit footage takes us from Prague to Paris to Portugal) is killing off every other hired killer.

It’s kill or be killed, with Caldwell giving the cell phone delivered resume of each target.

“Yuko is a martial arts master most feared for her bladework, with perhaps some lingering ‘Daddy’ issues.”

The fights are OK, the shootouts nothing to remember, the chases are passable and the killings themselves perfunctory.

In the pre-TV era mediocrities like “Assassin Club” were labeled programmers. Get a few stars featured in a generic plot and it might look like an “A-picture” but the studios, which then owned their own theater chains, knew better. It was just to keep lower-cost fresh content on their screens so that they didn’t lose their shirts between hits.

Those lesser films became “direct to video” in a later era. “Straight to streaming” we call them today.

The screenwriter of the Wes Bentley bomb “The Perfect Witness” plotted this one, and hasn’t improved in the decades since that barely-released “programmer” came and went. The indifferent direction here has neither flare nor signs of rank incompetence.

So the only reason to see it is the cast, right? But in or out of action, Golding isn’t anybody’s idea of a big draw, and pitting him against “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” Rapace, and pairing him up with Neill as the upper class Brit who gives the assassin his assignments doesn’t change that.

Rating: R, lots of violence, some profanity

Cast Henry Golding, Sam Neill, Daniella Melchior, Jimmy Jean-Louis, Anastasia Doaga and Noomi Rapace.

Credits: Directed by Camille Delamarre, scripted by Thomas Dunne. A Paramount+ release.

Running time: 1:51

Halle Bailey, Melissa McCarthy, “Under the Sea.” Mon.

Let’s see what the fuss is about

Every now and then, a film comes along that could pass for the quintessence of what we used to mean when we invented the phrase “indie cinema.”

That label implies personal stories, an intimacy created between characters and the viewer, a talented cast that can be from “Hollywood” but rarely “OF” Hollywood, and locations off the cinematic beaten path.

“Stay Awake” is a soft, sentimental stroll through a “coming of age” story, a film that could have been inspired by “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” for reasons both obvious and more subtle.

Like many a coming-of-age tale, it’s about growing up in a provincial place and resolving to get out even as obstacles to that tug at the heart and soul. Here, the anchor that’s holding back two brothers — one an aspiring actor, the younger an aspiring writer with Ivy League dreams — is their depressed, morbidly obese and overdose-prone mother.

She’s sensitively played by Chrissy Metz of TV’s “This is Us,” cast for the first time as someone whose appearance betrays our baser instincts when we see someone that overweight. She’s got a problem.

They title “Stay Awake” comes from brothers Derek (Wyatt Oleff) and Ethan (Fin Argus). It’s what they shout whenever they’re pleading with their mother, singing songs from movies and begging her to ID “Everybody’s Talking” from “Midnight Cowboy” or “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

“Look at me! Look at me. Stay AWAKE!”

One brother or the other has found Mom Michelle unreponsive. Again. The other brother’s been fetched to help get her in the car for yet another urgent dash to the small Virginia town’s emergency room, where everybody knows their name.

Older brother Derek is the one inclined to be supportive and cut the woman some slack. He works at the bowling alley, and having graduated a couple of years before, goes out on auditions with dreams of landing a big TV commercial — Virginia Tourism in particular. Derek is still dating high school “girls” in his 20s, and that’s not good. Melanie (Cree Cicchino) sees through him.

“Why do you always gave to put a ‘bow’ on everything?”

Ethan is the brother willing to put his foot down, making “rehab” and “psychiatric commitment” threats. He is the more “parentified child,” the audience’s “tough love” surrogate.

“We’re DONE. We’re not searching for you ANY more!”

Ethan’s ready to go to college, has good news from two schools, one of which he never told his “We’ll go to (Virginia) Tech together!” girlfried at the Jolly Cow Drive-in (Quinn McColgan) about.

But here’s another and then another triggering moment for his mother, another trick she’s played to get her couldn’t-care-less doctor to refill her prescription, another controlled-panic race to the hospital.

She isn’t able to control herself enough to stop torturing her sons.

As you’d expect, “Stay Awake” is a soft-spoken film. The rare outburst can be jarring, or comical, as in the tirade Ms. Va. Tech Hokie launches into when she discovers Ethan’s “secret.”

First-time feature writer-director Jamie Sisley, expanding on a earlier short film, keeps the tone quiet and kind of exhausted. Everybody here is spent. And the narrative is given just enough problem-solving to keep the story honest about the limited and limiting choices everyone in this family faces thanks to Mom’s illness.

Yes, it’s sentimental and leans towards the soft side, even in its edgier moments. But “Stay Awake” is more about a situation and a story that will resonate with a lot of people than it is a New Direction in Indie Film.

That’s what intimate cinema like this has always done best — put believable characters in “lived in” places, in real world situations where the stakes are small but terminal and pretty damned important to those affected.

Whatever happens to this family, you can bet your last dollar that one and all who survive will damned sure “come of age.”

Rating: unrated, adult addiction subject matter, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Wyatt Oleff, Fin Argus, Cree Cichino, Quinn McColgan and Chrissy Metz

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jamie Sisley. A Mar Vista release.

Running time: 1:33