Movie Nation

“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

“Crater” is a slick, cutesie kids’ action melodrama that makes the point that no matter where we transport them, human kids will be kids. And left to their own reckless devices, they’ll go all “Goonies” on you, even on the Moon.

It’s a Disney production, so don’t go in expecting much of an edge. But there is just enough of one to give this tale of life and death and growing up off-Earth to make this interesting.

It’s 2257, and the Moon has been settled for a couple of centuries now. But rather that developing into an off-Earth oasis, it’s still a mining colony, where miners and their families and corporate infrastructure live under a domed largely sub-surface complex.

They’re mining for helium, which is needed to power cryo-sleep starships that transport humans to Omega, an earthlike planet 75 years away.

Caleb, played by Isaiah Russell-Bailey, has just been given the tiny tube with the cremated of his miner-father. His dad’s “death benefits” include a paid-for transport to Omega, which means the young teen will be leaving his friends behind, and in just a couple of days.

When we meet them, Caleb, mop-topped Dylan (Billy Barratt), Little Mr. Insecurity Borney (Orson Hong) and Marcus (Thomas Boyce) are in the process of swiping a huge, six-wheeled rover to drive them to “The Crater.” Flashbacks tell us that Caleb’s Dad (Scott Mescudi) made him promise “if anything ever happens to me” to go there.

Now, with the help of the cute “spoiled little Earth girl Addison (Mckenna Grace from “The Handmaid’s Tail”), who can gett hem through through the airlock, they’re fulfilling Caleb’s dad’s last wish.

An impending meteor shower “lockdown” has given them the cover to carry out the theft. Heedless of the danger, they head out across the surface for a twelve hour one-way journey.

“Are you sure this is safe?” is worth asking, more than once, especially any time some teen blurts out “You guys ready for some REAL fun?”

The “edge” here comes from the jaded attitudes of the kids, their mistrust of The Company in charge. Every one of them, it seems, has some horror story of the “Sold My Soul to the Company Store” contracts their miner parents wound up trapped in. A “debt” that can’t easily be worked off, deaths, no real prospect of returning to Earth, little interest in the expensive journey into the unknown, without their friends, the only parent we see is Caleb’s, and he’s only here in flashbacks.

There’s enough of this that an adult viewer might be wondering if this corporation is telling people the truth about anything. A meteor shower means a time-consuming “lockdown?” You’re shipping me off to Omega? Sure.

So, a little joyride, a little “baseball” lesson from the Earth girl, a few hinjinx with their precious oxygen supply, some “Who could have seen THAT coming?” perils, and checking out the ruins of space ventures past on their way to a crater with something mysterious in it, an idea swiped from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Being a film for kids, there’s no point in parsing the science, the lax dome security and the mysterious living conditions that have children growing up with so little adult interaction it really is as if “The Goonies,” or their VERY mild-mannered descendents, have moved to the Moon.

“Crater” is a good-looking movie, with decent effects. It’s about as logical as any version of “Lost in Space” or “Space Camp.” The bland script gives every kid “issues” — trauma, despair over a limited future, an enlarged heart from living in limited gravity too long — and a couple of actions scenes that could leave them breathless and dead in the cold near vacuum of space.

But the sentimental moments don’t really play, and the comedy — NO horseplay in the ROVER, you GUYS! — leaves a lot to be desired.

Kids may get a little something out of it thanks to its various “Young Adult Fiction” types and tropes. Maybe they’ll enjoy pondering if low gravity could be the thing that “saves” baseball.

Anybody old enough to drive will be bored.

Rating: PG

Cast: Isaiah Russell-Bailey, Mckenna Grace, Billy Barratt, Thomas Boyce, Orson Hong and Scott Mescudi

Credits: Directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, scripted by John Griffin. A Disney+ release.

Running time: 1:44

“The Favorite.” “The Lobster.” Now, Sept. 8, oddness incarnate, “Poor Things.”

Charlie Day made his bones as a funnyman as the guy with the fingersnails-on-a-chalkboard voice.

The screeching star of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” “Horrible Bosses” and “Fist Fight” takes his shot at mime with “Fool’s Paradise,” a making-movies comedy with Day joining the Keaton, Chaplin and Jaques Tati tradition.

In his writing, directing and starring debut, he leaves the screech behind for silent shtick, a version of Peter Sellers in the Blake Edwards’ Hollywood riff, “The Party” or Richard Mulligan in Blake Edwards’ other Hollywood spoof, “S.O.B.”

It’s a bit of a “Fool’s Errand,” alas, grasp exceeding one’s reach and all that. But Day has to be pleased he got this shot. And if he’s a John Lennon fan, he can take comfort in “Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears.” Because look at all the funny people who checked=-n to help ol’Charlie out.

He plays a difficult film star, breaking down so badly in the middle of an expensive “Billy the Kid” movie being filmed on Hollywood soundstages that the ill-tempered producer (Ray Liotta), spying an escaped mental patient peddling oranges on a street corner (Day, again), decides “THIS” is how they’ll “make our day” on the production schedule.

The look-alike stands-in, takes over and despite being mute, confused and overwhelmed by the violence of film production — from the awful hours to the makeup chair ordeal and being manhandled for take after take by the likes of Oscar winner Adrien Brody — becomes a star.

Ken Jeong pulls out all the stops in a way we haven’t seen since his “Hangover/Role Models” days playing an impoverished, incompetent publicist willing to do ANYthing to land a client. Kate Beckinsale, buried under makeup and an accent, then buried under attitude, is the “Kid” co-star (a Calamity Jane type) named “Christiana Diorr” who instantly beds and weds our rising star, who wins the name “Latte Pronto” for reasons that are soooo L.A.

Jason Bateman plays a deadpan on-set effects guy. Jason Sudeikis is the vain, delusional action director Lex Tanner of the “Fast Racer” movies, hired to turn Latte Pronto into comic book hero “Mosquito Boy.”

Edie Falco kills it as the agent who heads up the new star’s “team” of eight — manager, business manager, lawyer, publicist, stylist, personal assistant and intern.

Veteran big screen/little screen bully Dean Norris is the blowhard studio chief who has assistants whisper how he’s supposed to chew this mishaps-prone new talent out, and whisper who he really is when the chief chews out the wrong pipsqueak.

And Jillian Bell is the new wife’s overpriced “shaman.”

The funniest scenes are the manic, noisy early ones, as our undiagnosable head-case is worked-over by Brody’s “half-Method, now” co-star. “Used to go full Method. But people got hurt. Not me.”

Brody ALWAYS gives good gonzo in comedies. Here he channels every story we ever heard about Dennis Hopper as a character actor on the make and recklessly behind the wheel of a vintage Mach I, drinking and driving and shooting out a street light that hosted the first dance between Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. Welcome to “La La Land,” indeed.

“James Dean died RIGHT OVER THERE” he drunkenly shouts from the lurching Mustang at one point.

Liotta, in one of his last roles, gives Day’s “Latte” his name by accident and a serious cussing-out on purpose. Ray Liotta chewing out Charlie Day, doing the Lord’s Work, right to the End.

The messaging here is that silence in show business is “a choice” that could earn you extra credit just for “Being There,” to mention another Sellers classic. Show folk love the sounds of their own voices so very much that they barely notice “Latte” never speaks.

That’s not deep, novel or particularly astute, as far as Hollywood observations go and not really enough to hang your screen comedy on.

But it’s a relief when the talking/screeching version of Day has an accident and the silent version takes over. He manages the pratfalls and double-takes well enough.

He’s no Keaton, Chaplin, Begnini, Sellers or David Hyde Pierce, to name some of the great physical comics of ancient and recent vintage. There’s no shame in that. Neither was Steve Martin, even though he took more shots and came a lot closer.

What Day tried to do was replicate those all-star farces that generations like his grew up with, but in an R-rated form. He failed.

But look at all these often funny friends who gave their all at trying to help him succeed.

Rating: R for language, some drug use and sexual content.

Cast: Charlie Day, Ken Jeoung, Kate Beckinsale, Edie Falco, Ray Liotta, Jillian Bell, Jason Sudeikis, Jason Bateman, Dean Norris, Adrien Brody and John Malkovich.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Charlie Day. A Roadside Attractions/Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:37

I didn’t much care for “Giving Birth to a Butterfly,” although I can appreciate the attempt to meld elements of the Theatre of the Absurd, memory plays and magical realism into something odd, obscurant and quite out of the ordinary.

A modern story of childish, delusional adults, a pregnant teen and a “big hearted” pet store kid who wants to help her raise her baby, the script folds in local theater, identity theft and dreams that have taken over the lives of some characters, at least one of whom becomes a surrogate for the audience just often enough for us to appreciate the “speaking out in protest” effort, if not its impact on the narrative.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” she says, “but you don’t make much sense.“

It matters a little who she is, but it doesn’t matter who she says this to, because while “tragedy is all around us,” it’s the dreamy flakes, veering from upbeat to harshly critical, depending on how you react to their delusions, who take up most of the oxygen here.

Daryl (Paul Sparks) is a father of two trying out restaurant names — “Beautiful and Real Food,” he offers. “Daryl’s Cafe?” “Karma? If was a drive-up place you could call it ‘Carma.'” The whole house is saving up to fulfill this dream.

Wife Diana (Annie Parisse) listens indulgently, daughter Rachel (Rachel Resheff) humors him in between rehearsals of the play she’s lighting.

Son Andrew or “Drew” (Owen Campbell) is expected to go to college until that moment that he walks in with a pregnant peer, Marlene (Guy Birney) on his arm. But the baby’s not his. He’s just stepping up and leaping into adulthood as he does.

A scene or two later, we see Daryl in his chef’s jacket, passing on a burger and fries order to his boss, whom he addresses as “Chef.”

“DARYL! Stop using up all the aprons (to make a fake chef jacket)! You’re not a real chef!”

Rachel dreams of a life in the theater, hearing out the young actors as they try out “stage names.” A light that drops from the ceiling is another clue that maybe we should be taking “Giving Birth to a Butterfly” as a comedy. She’s a little sloppy in living her dream.

Another point-of-view change takes us into Marlene’s home life. Her aged, single mother has gone full “Sunset Boulevard.” She’s ready for another imaginary interview.

“I just need them to see me, Marlene,” she says, swanning about and asking Marlene to “zip me up” into dresses from decades before. She devours supermarket tabloids, looking for references to Brigitte something-or-other, her stage name. “You’ve got to read between the LINES, Marlene. They’re good at hiding what they’re REALLY saying.”

And then Diana hits the wall. She finds herself relying on this strange, pregnant teen she’s just met to travel with her to right a wrong in her life.

Yes, these are the two most rational characters, and yes, their destination and the two people they will meet there will prove just as odd and bizarre as much of what’s preceded this road trip.

The dialogue is mostly a series of confessional musings and memories masquerading as conversations.

The early scenes have a random, “What or who could be next?” curiosity. And they do lead to something like a conclusion.

But the entire enterprise feels like a piece of experimental theater that needs further workshopping before it’s ready for the stage. We all have a higher tolerance for this sort of intentionally opaque drama/dark comedy decorated with the odd lovely turn of phrase on the stage and the actors are right in front of us and thus too vulnerable to catcalls.

I mean, “I don’t mean to be rude. But you don’t make much sense.”

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Annie Parisse, Gus Birney, Paul Sparks, Rachel Resheff, Judith Roberts and Owen Campbell

Credits: Directed by Theodore Schaefer, scripted by Patrick Lawler and Theodore Schaefer. A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 1:18

Eva Longoria’s directing debut is about the “legend” of the real-life janitor who invents a popular snack food grabbed Dennis Haysbert and Tony Shaloub and Matt Walsh in support of Jesse Garcia and Annie Gonzalez for this June 9 Disney+/Hulu release.

It looks…humorless.

But the effects look rock solid and Paramount is hurling this bad boy against the cinema wall, and it will stream May 30.

“I know a big-ass shark when I see one!”