Movie Nation

“Lesbian phys-ed teacher” feels like a stereotype that’s outlived its days as “that first gay woman I ever knew” and “rite of passage” trope.

Back in the modern American dark ages, there was even a queer folk song about it, “Ode to a Gym Teacher,” a classic of its time, a tad cringy now.

But writer-director Georgia Oakley embraces and upends that “type” in her sensitive, compassionate and very smart period piece “Blue Jean,” about a closeted gym teacher in the Newcastle of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

Oakley’s made a depressingly timely film about an earlier “push back” against gay rights and equality, but a movie shot through with hope, the sure knowledge that history isn’t a river, it’s a tide that ebbs and flows.

News reports on TV and the radio underscore teacher Jean Newman’s daily life, accounts of Britain’s version of “family values” conservatives pushing the grim Section 28 law through, and the noisy and inventive gay rights protests that accompanied that.

It’s 1988, and Jean (Rosy McEwen of TV’s “The Alienist”) dyes her short blonde bob, keeps order in her classes, the peace on her school’s netball team, the horseplay to a minumum in the locker room and keeps her personal life separate from her school and her fellow teachers.

She’s paranoid, and no matter what her brassy, out-and-proud motorbiker girlfriend Viv (Kerrie Hayes) may think and say, Jean knows she needs to be careful. Parliament, local councils and her own colleagues could end her career on the flimsiest pretext, were they to find her out.

Viv can joke “I’ll bet there’s loads of les’s on your team” in front of their friends at the pub. But callowly assessing Jean’s gaydar is off the table and out of the question, even if “You can just tell.”

New girl Lois puts all of Jean’s instincts — fear for herself, and an urge to confide and comfort — to their severest test. Lois, played by screen newcomer Lucy Halliday, is tough and brawny enough to play soccer with the lads. That’s going to get her teased and taunted in all-girl gym class and on the netball team.

She’s flinty enough to manage that. But when 15 year-old Lois shows up at the Jean’s gay bar of choice, the perils pile up thanks to a heedless, clueless child who can’t read the room, the country or the state of school districts all across Britain.

Lois may have a crush, but she’s a naive bull in the china shop on the court, in the locker room and in the pub. And Jean’s warnings and threats fall on deaf ears.

Jean’s “Just ignore them” advice about bullies earns a testy “Is that what YOU did?”

Oakley sets up a sort of dread expectation with this story, and wisely rises above the cliches as she does.

Hayes transforms herself into a weary stereotype, right down to the tattoos, buzzcut and motorcycle. But her performance as Viv has a sensitivity that surprises beyond the bravado.

Newcomer Halliday gives Lois layers, letting us glimpse the child bullied and socially and governmentally shunned underneath the bluff, can’t-hurt-me teen exterior.

And McEwen takes us into this world and this woman struggling with it and lets us know a flesh and blood victim of a ground roots backlash that threatened her right to exist, something being cynically exploited by the last gasps of Britain’s most butch prime minister, a woman who took pride in her meanness even as her grasp on power was slipping.

Oakley’s ability to find a hopeful spin to put on this bleak time is a history lesson for us all. As Alan Moore, he smartest guy ever to write for comic books put it, we can react and fight back but never despair at outbursts of hate from officialdom.

“Our leaders do not control the tides of history — they are just surfing them.”

And like the tides, this wave too shall pass. The vigilant’s job is to keep the brief squall at bay until it does.

Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, under-age drinking, profanity

Cast: Rosy McEwen, Kerrie Hayes, Lucy Halliday and Lydia Page

Credits: Scripted and directed by Georgia Oakley. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:37

Honestly, I didn’t know what to make of “Joe Versus the Volcano” when it came out. And if I’m remembering correctly, I’m not sure anybody reviewing way back then did either.

But if Hollywood was ever going to indulge anybody with “writer” attached to his name, John Patrick Shanley after the Oscar-winning glories of “Moonstruck” was that guy. Just a couple of years before this 1990 indulgence, he’d given one of the most quotable Oscar acceptance speeches ever, after all.

“I’d like to thank everybody who ever punched or kissed me in my life and everybody who I ever punched or kissed.”

And if a major studio’s going to give a talent like Shanley — he went on to write and direct “Doubt,” which introduced Viola Davis to stardom — a blank check, you had to expect he’d make something akin to “Brazil,” “Toys” and “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” a semi-pretentious fable about finding the meaning of life, or at least a little of the joy that’s supposed to come with it.

He convinced Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, just hitting their peaks, and Nathan Lane and Abe Vidoga and Lloyd Bridges and Ossie Davis and Robert Stack and Amanda Plummer and Carol Kane to sign on, an “Airplane!” load of comic talent. That’s the sort of juice Shanley had.

The story? The titular Joe Banks (Hanks) is an office drone in job that is drudgery itself. He’s a hypochondriac who has failed to get anything out of life and failed to even figure out what it is he’s supposed to have gotten out of life.

He can’t even see the cute swan at work, DeDe (Ryan, for the first time) who masquerades as an ugly duckling.

When he gets a mysterious diagnosis for what ails him — “brain fog” — by a sketchy doctor lent all the authority Robert Stack can give him, he first realizes his time on Earth is short.

But then a sketchier tycoon (Lloyd Bridges, a giggle) confronts him with an offer — lots of money to do something with the rest of his life. He’d like for Joe to volunteer to make a sacrificial jump into a South Pacific island’s volcano, to keep the native Waponi — a peculiar tribe with Vaudeville, Little Italy and Borsht Belt origins — placated so that the rich man can continue to extract a valuable minerals from the island.

Joe is doomed, but a big shopping spree, being chauffeured around New York by Ossie Davis, and an “adventure” in the bargain should be suitable compensation for his sacrifice.

Ossie’s a highlight of this “See New York for the first time” sequence. So is Barry McGovern, playing the ultimate unctuous “gentleman’s” salesman, selling Cadillac-priced steamer-trunks to the well-traveled.

“Have you thought much about luggage, Mr. Banks?”

“No.”

“It’s the central preoccupation of my life.”

A blousy Angelino named Angelina, and then a seagaring gal named Patricia (Ryan and Ryan one more time) will guide Joe from the West Coast southward into the Pacific.

And then he’ll meet his date with destiny among “natives” straight out of “Gilligan’s Island,” with a healthy dose of shtick, thanks to a witchdoctor played by Nathan Lane and a bored-with-it-all chief ( Abe Vigoda).

Patricia, being the sailor who stands to inherit the schooner Tweedle Dee that’s taking them into the South Seas after delivering Joe, is the Message of the Movie, a message embodied by Meg Ryan at her most approachably radiant.

“My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement.”

Joe and Patricia are destined to fall in love, come what may. And that fate? It will be faced as a couple.

“Joe, nobody knows anything. We’ll take this leap and we’ll see. We’ll jump and we’ll see. That’s life!“

Ryan had a knack for making us buy into almost every leading-man pairing of her career. And her future “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail” co-star must have seen that and made damned sure they were repaired in better films over the next decade.

One could imagine that Kevin Kline, Matthew Broderick, Val Kilmer, Tim Robbins, Hugh Jackman and Andy Garcia figured out what Billy Crystal beat them all to the punch about. The real challenge in acting opposite Ryan from the late ’80s into the early 2000s was in not falling in love with her the way your character did, the way audiences did.

Perhaps a tell-all book or two will break that spell, but all I could think of watching her interactions in different guises with Hanks is “They don’t give Oscars for that, and they should.”

“Joe” bombed when it came out, arriving to middling-to-bad reviews. And this was AFTER the studio got Shanley to reshoot and re-cut the ending. But seeing it and forgetting it over the ensuing decades allows one the luxury of relishing the dark early moments, gives a finer appreciation of the “Brewster’s Millions” shopping spree and makeover, allows a renewed kick in seeing Ryan in three guises and the unalloyed slap-in-the-face-with-a-mackeral that is that tropical hoot of a finale.

The corniest stuff still plays, the sight gags — Joe and Patricia shipwrecked, using his super-expensive steamer trunks as a raft — still amuse and the stars still let the sparkle simmer on low heat.

Most of the people involved with “Joe” would go on to bigger or at least better things. And the movie’s Big Theme kept coming back. You could see it in Ben Stiller’s glorious “Start living life” vanity project, “Walter Mitty,” in the Simon Pegg bomb “Hector and the Search for Happiness.”

Truth be told, the male existential crisis plot has rarely worked, from “The Razor’s Edge” onward. But “Lost in Translation” and “About Schmidt” got by. And the female version rarely played, unless it’s Julia Roberts who craves the chance to “Eat, Pray Love” or Reese Witherspoon is the one willing to wander into the “Wild.”

One still gets the feeling, after all these years, that the “Volcano” got the best of Joe and John Patrick Shanley. But removed from its time, disconnected from the need to draw an audience and earn back its budget, it’s still something to see. Expensive folly or charming stab at the Hollywood version of the “Meaning of Life” — meet and let yourself fall in love with Meg Ryan — I’d call this one of a “classic” of its type.

That “type” is something you’ll have to decide for yourself.

Rating: PG, thematic material

Cast: Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Ossie Davis, Lloyd Bridges, Amanda Plummer, Robert Stack, Nathan Lane, Carol Kane and Abe Vigoda.

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Patrick Shanley. A Warner Bros. release on Amazon, Tubi, etc.

Running time: 1:42

Oh, “Kiss, Kiss!,” you impish little Polish rom-com, how do I hate thee? Let me ennumate the ways.

I hate your stupid story, your loopy sitcom logic, your repellent lead, your idiotically-compliant leading lady and her inexplicable soft spot for lying, shallow womanizing boors.

Your “meet cute” made me want to puke, your secondary love story was downright gory.

I hate you from your random, “contract that’s going to make me” interrupted for skirt-chasing opening to your attempted “Graduate” finale.

That’s a lot of hate-hate for an innocuous nothing titled “Gorzko, gorzko!” in its original Polish. But 107 minutes of this is one long night at the opera, waiting around for the fat lady to sing or one damned thing about “Kiss, Kiss!” to charm, amuse or delight.

Mateusz Kosciukiewicz plays Tomek, our obnoxious, smarmy, inexplicably-cocky lead. We meet him as he recklessly drives his colleague/girlfriend to their Big Meeting at work, the contract with “The Japanese” that will get him promoted, maybe to New York, preferably to California.

But he brushes-off the lover/co-worker who propped him him and got him here. And when he spies a pretty blonde leaving the office just as he’s arriving, he forgets everything else to chase her onto a bus and him right out of a job, a company Maserati, a live-in arrangment, the works.

Tomek imposes on his Ed Sheeran look-alike estranged brother (Rafal Zawierucha), who inexplicably takes the jerk in. Next thing we know, the womanizer is giving the kid brother romantic pointers so that he can close the deal with shy, skittish florist Klara (Agnieska Wiedlocha) who sells the allergic sibling cacti.

And then they get a job photographing the “behind the scenes/making of” footage of “the biggest wedding this country’s ever seen.” A justice department minister (Marcin Perchuc) who wants to be president and his failed-film-actress wife (Edyta Olszówka) are marrying off their son just before election day.

No expense will be spared, no lack of pomp will be seen. The son will be home from Abu Dhabi shortly. So the film crew brothers will follow mother Patsy as she finishes up plans, and the imposed-upon and the bride-to-be.

Ola (Zofia Domalik) is the face that ended Tomek’s previous career, the skirt that he chased onto that bus. She’s about to marry into money and power and this stalker with the creepy come-ons will be underfoot, pressing his case with a camera in her face right up to “I do.”

The script’s most irksome quality is how she’s resigned to that, how the grandmother who raised her encourages this “rascal” who is prone to grabbing women and “stealing a kiss” like it’s 1925 or the end of World War II.

Meanwhile, Tomek is staging dangerous stunts that will throw Janek and the demure Klara together, stunts that get the police involved.

And then there’s this infamous imprisoned mobster (Tomasz Sapryk) who has a stake in this whole wedding thing and is having Tomek watched.

There wasn’t a single scene in this I found believable, and I’m hard-pressed to think of a character who came off as relatable.

A cute moment, the minister shows up in the middle of his wife’s grandiose plans, rejects “foreign” chamber music and insists on Polish tunes, especially for the planned game of musical chairs.

But that “cute” piece of a scene dies of loneliness in this tone-deaf, fingersnails-on-a-chalkboard farce.

The leads don’t click, with neither “couple” serving up anything worth rooting for. The criminal melodramatics add nothing and the mad sprint to the altar stumbles along to a payoff that is nothing that will make film fans forget Katharine Ross and Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate.”

Netflix wasted a lot of Polish Zlotys on a terrible movie that had apparently no one in the U.S. company bothered to read and approve, or even have translated so that they could see and hear how bad it was doomed to be.

Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Mateusz Kosciukiewicz, Zofia Domalik, Rafal Zawierucha, Agnieszka Wiedlocha, Edyta Olszówka, Marcin Perchuc and Tomasz Sapryk

Credits: Directed by Tomasz Konecki scripted by Andrzej Golda and Martyna Skibinska. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48

Disquieting, discomfitting and disturbing almost on a molecular level, “Soft & Quiet” is a horror movie all but ripped from today’s headlines, or would be if anyone still read newspapers.

It’s not about monsters, it’s about your neighbors. And while there are crimes in it, it’s what precedes those crimes that earn writer-director Beth de Araújo’s debut feature the label “horror.”

As Emily, the smiling, helpful kindergarten teacher who has gathered like-minded friends together in a meeting room at the local Catholic church close to the school where she teaches puts it, it’s the folks who organize and show a “soft on the outside” exterior to the world who are societal change’s “secret weapon.” People who “tread quietly” get results.

And then Emily — played with a brittle chill by Stefanie Estes — takes the cover off the fruity pie she baked for this kaffeeklatsch and we see the swastika she carved onto it.

“What, can NO one take a JOKE anymore?”

“Soft & Quiet” is a chilling account, depicted in real time and in what looks like one long, suspense-building take, of Emily’s efforts to organize a white supremacist group. The film lets us see what happens when their racist rhetoric, dog whistles and outright slurs delivered with Betty White smiles, their white grievance and aggressive, confrontational “victimhoom,” is put into practice.

It is jaw-droppingly creepy and cringeable ugly, with their complaints spreading across the spectrum, from “Jew bankers” and “brown” this or that to the N-word and harsh judgements that enfold every nasty thing everyone has ever said about a minority in this country — racial, ethnic, religious or sexual.

The viewer finds her or himself picking out which extremist group — the racist, wantonly belligerent and backward “Moms for Liberty” or the openly fascist and violent Proud Boys — these women resemble at this or that stage of the narrative.

Writer-director de Araújo and her cast — Olivia Lucardi, Dana Millican, Eleanore Pienta, Rebekah Wiggins, Cissy Ly and Melissa Paulo among them — capture “mob mentality” as it forms, mild-mannered women growing more emboldened, radicalized and “triggered” with every minute that passes without the social pushback decent human beings face such goons, even the distaff ones, with.

We’re seeing a 90 minute version of what we’ve watched over the past six years in our country modeled and boiled down to a simple, increasingly-tense and escalatingly more fraught story.

The script sets Emily up as a concerned teacher who comforts a boy whose mother is late picking him up, only to let us pick up on her worldview by the way she insists the child go and order the Latina custodian at school to not mop until after he’s left.

“Grooming,” I believe that’s called.

The impact of this movie is akin to “doom scrolling” on the crippled social media platform Twitter, seeing your worst fears about the worst among us reflected in the news, Congressional race-baiters and their citizen minions and wingnut media amplifiers.

As stressful as that sounds, it’s still a recommendation. A tight, minimalist thriller this smart, rhetoric-based turning towards violence and its repercussions, is too good and too important to ignore.

Rating: R for disturbing racial violence including rape and pervasive language including offensive slurs

Cast: Stefanie Estes, Olivia Lucardi, Dana Millican, Eleanore Pienta, Rebekah Wiggins, Cissy Ly, Melissa Paulo.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Beth de Araújo. An eOne/Blumhouse release on Netflix

Running time: 1:31

The story has turned up in so many forms, in every media imaginable — yes, even a “graphic novel” — that it’s a piece of our universal narrative heritage now.

“Carmen” was the classic femme fatale, the perfect temptress to build an opera, a ballet, plays or movies around. Now the smoking and smoking hot Spanish Gypsy who is handy with a knife becomes a dancer, on the run from trouble in Mexico, fleeing straight into more trouble when she slips across the border and into the United States.

Choreographer and dancer Benjamin Millipied (“Black Swan”) turns the opera and ballet into an impressionanistic portrait in dance for his feature directing and co-writing debut. It’s a sometimes gorgeous saga, more of a riff on “Carmen” and a comment on cultures clashing today than an “adaptation.”

Featuring new music woven into the story, it is built around impressive acting and dancing performances by Melissa Barrera in the title role and Paul Pescal as Aidan, an American Marine who becomes Carmen’s hot-tempered, soldierly lover in this outing.

Co-scripted with a “Birdman” screenwriter and a French soap opera scribe, “Carmen” looks and feels experimental, a movie of action and violence, plot occasionally carried by song but with emotions conveyed through the dance. It’s sprawling and yet simple and rarely stumbles across a trope it doesn’t embrace.

Often as not, “Carmen” is an experiment that works.

We meet Carmen as she’s fleeing some unnamed trouble — perhaps romantic. Her mother (Marina Tamayo) stalls for time, rehearsing flamenco in a gunpoint standoff on a makeshift stage under a tarp behind their house in the desert borderlands of Mexico (but filmed in Australia). Her mother is murdered, but she advised Carmen to flee to L.A., to her “like a sister” friend Masilda. She will help.

First, though, she’s got to cross the border. That’s how Carmen runs into Aidan. He’s an aimless, traumatized combat veteran nagged into taking up volunteer work with other semi-automatic rifle toting veterans, “Huntin’ Mexicans” with the full cooperation of the Border Patrol.

Paired up with a trigger-happy goon with a gun, Aidan defends Carmen and kills the killer. That pairs them up — reluctantly — and puts them on the lam, making their way to “The City of Angels” and stumbling into dancers along the road.

And once there, aging diva and impressario Masilda, played by Almodovar darling Rossy de Palma, could indeed be their salvation. Unless you remember how the opera, ballet etc. turned out.

The dance sequences — indoors and outdoors at sunset or by firelight — are just lovely. Barrera, a veteran of the “Scream” franchise and the musical “In the Heights,” is impressive and utterly credible as the beauty who tempts men beyond reason.

Irish actor Pescal of “Aftersun” and “The Lost Daughter” is similarly credible as a lost soul who stumbles into action, purpose and love when the chips are down.

“Carmen” is more a movie of tableaux and emotions than a story with a clean linear narrative that leads us along moment by moment. It’s so far from being a literal “Carmen” that one can barely call it an adapation.

But those moments and heightened emotions, delivered via dance, tell us a story with more than words. And sometimes the words — in Spanish or in Englihs — are just right, too.

“Remember that the thing you’re running from is almost always the thing you’re running towards.”

Rating: R for violence and nudity and profanity

Cast: Melissa Barrera, Paul Pescal, Marina Tamayo and Rossy de Palma

Credits: Directed by Benjamin Millepied, scripted by Alexander Dinelaris, Loïc Barrere and Benjamin Millepied, based on the novel by Prosper Mérimée and the opera and ballet it inspired. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:57

Looks the way you remember, plays like the novel made cinematic and rabble rousing.

The hook’s in the title, the title tells the tale and if you’re reading this review, you too must have been lured by the bait of “Plus One at an Amish Wedding.”

This sunny, PG rom-com is free streamer Tubi’s answer to a Hallmark romance, a mild-mannered fish-out-of-water story set in Pennsylvania Amish country.

The budget’s modest, so there’s no barn raising scene. We’ll leave that to “Witness.” There’s a hint of Rumspringa, a young Amish person’s late teens “break-the-rules, test-the-waters” taste of life as “The English” live it to decide if the devout, unmechanized, Luddite lifestyle they grew up in is for their them. But this isn’t a sensationalized ratings-bait TV documentary about Amish Kids Gone Wild, or Netflix’s “Rumpspringa.”

And yes, it’s got an Amish wedding — which isn’t really shown. That’s kind of a hallmark of this Hallmark-lite comedy. A lot isn’t shown, the conflicts are minimal and predictable and there’s little that would pass for particularly romantic or comedic in these 86 minutes.

But it’s sweet. There’s a fresh-out-of-med-school New York doctor (Galadriel Stineman) whose trademark is her unhurried, listen-to-the-patient bedside manner — not popular with her “work flow” boss. She falls for a handsome, considerate veterinarian (Kevin Joy). And Dr. April is about to find out Dr. Jesse’s secret, just as he’s about to pop the question.

“He could be hiding a lot worse,” counsels her sister May (Mary McElree) when she tells her.

Can this relationship among “You Englishers” survive a trip back in time amongst The Amish, where Jesse’s brother (Travis James) is about to marry and grow one of those Biblical beards?

April must hear how the Amish don’t “put much stock in English medicine.” And she’s got to hear it from Jesse’s myopic, widowed Mom (Pamela Daly, a stand-out in the cast). She must find out that Jesse is not-quite-shunned for having left, gone to vet school and moved to New York instead of sticking around and marrying Naomi as his mother wished.

Naomi’s (Summer Mastain) newly widowed herself. She gives April a taste of what an Amish mean-girl is like.

And then there’s Jesse’s spirited little sister Rachel (Mercedes Marcial, fun), of Rumspringa age, curious about the big wide world and what life among The English, as the (movie) Amish refer to the modern world.

The situations hold promise, albeit of a limited and low-hanging comic fruit variety. And the players are pleasant enough.

But the three credited screenwriters figure it’s enough just to mention (not really show) the assorted eccentricies of the lifestyle, as if we haven’t seen the buggies, heard about the volleyball, the passion for baked goods and that the traditional wedding “creamed celery” delicacy.

OK, I hadn’t gotten wind of the celery thing in any documentary or news report about the traditional farmers and their traditional, primitive religous sect. But “German cooking,” come on.

It’s not the mere mention of things about this culture that make a movie set in it promising. It’s what you do with those differences. A little modern medicine intervenes in medical crises allows April to shine. I was waiting for a Jesse-the-modern-vet moment, but no. He’s kind of left in the background (VERY Hallmark). And we get a bit of contrived soul-searching about whether these judgmental folks will ever “accept” her.

That’s all she wrote for “conflict” here, and for novelty in the story. It’s just not enough.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Galadriel Stineman, Kevin Joy, Pamela Daly, Mary McElree, Summer Mastain, Travis James and Mercedes Marcial

Credits: Directed by Richard L. Ramsey, scripted by D.F.W. Buckingham, Miralee Ferrell and Kimberly Rose Johnson A Tubi release.

Running time: 1:26

I’m watching it for the Mike Lindell cameo.

I got a few laughs out of “Double Life,” a Canadian thriller about a two-timing man who gets murdered and the widow and his chick-on-the-side who team up to solve the crime.

Whatever grieving widow Sharon (Pascale Hutton) doesn’t suspect of this pretty barmaid Jo (Javicia Leslie) who just happens to drop by her husband’s grave is nothing to what we don’t expect from the lovely-sexy Jo the first time they’re in a jam.

Jo kicks ass. Jo takes names. Jo, in the parlance of the post-“Taken” thriller genre, has “particular skills.”

Sharon’s husband (Niall Matter) was a prosecutor living a “double life” — wife and steady after-the-bar-closes hook-up. His big case involved a big polluter, so when he gets himself dead on the drive home, you’d think the cops would be in a tizzy.

Well, there is a detective (Carmen Moore) on the case. But when Sharon and Jo get threatened by a veteran local “fixer” in the employ of somebody sketchy, attacked at the scene of a SECOND homicide, making Mr. Strand (John Cassini) and his minion the TOP SUSPECTS in two murders — positive ID, as in “I NEVER forget a face I punched! — this is all Det. Traxler can tell her.

“Now, you’re both on his RADAR!”

No, “We’re ON it” or “We’ll have them in custody” or anything. What, they don’t have “All Points Bulletins” or citywide manhunts north of the border?

Perhaps Traxler senses what the viewer does, that as far as heavies go, these guys are about as scary as Ryan Reynolds. I mean, they ARE Canadian, and not every Canadian is as frightening as Michael Ironside or Kim Coates.

Our intrepid duo bond as they stumble towards The Real Killer and tumble into the Big Secret each is keeping from the other. No, other than that first time Jo charges into danger and drop-kicks some Murphy down some stairs, there aren’t any real surprises.

“Double Life” — scripted by Michael Hurst and Chris Siverston — is so generic that the moment Jo senses danger which she passes on to victim-to-be Mark, we know what he’s going to say and know precisely how wrong he is, right down to the number of minutes that will pass before his demise.

“You don’t need to worry about me. I’m a big boy.”

At least she got in a good, cheap shot as the last words she says to her paramour.

“Not THAT big.”

Rating: PG-13 for violence, language and some sexual content.

Cast: Javicia Leslie, Pascale Hutton, Niall Matter, John Cassini, Vincent Gale and Carmen Moore.

Credits: Directed by Martin Wood, scripted by Michael Hurst and Chris Siverston. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:31

For the Floyd completist in your life a documentary that opens May 15 in his native UK and comes to North America in June.