Movie Nation

Whoa, did NOT see that coming.

I mean, it only took 75 minutes for something, ANYthing to happen in this 93 minute picture. And when it did, boy oh boy.

Just kidding. That was a letdown, too.

“Stalker” is a ridiculously-chatty bore of a thriller, a stunning waste of viewing time about an actress and a second unit photographer stuck in an elevator.

Did I mention the title is “Stalker?” So, one of them’s “stalked” the other? You think? Maybe?

Any way you pose that question feels like a spoiler. But when you give that title to your “claustrophobic” “two-hander,” you’ve given the game away anyway.

It’s a British film set in the States — or maybe Canada, seeing as how wrestler Bret Hart has a bit part as a movie director — about a weary starlet (Sophie Skelton) who has finished another day’s shoot on a horror film, now trapped in a “three star” dump of a hotel whose elevator might have transported Rudolph Valentino, back in the day.

It’s that old. And screenwriter Chris Watt needs to sit down with a Michelin guide and LEARN what a “three star hotel” is.

This one doesn’t have a desk clerk on duty. So when Skelton’s character, Rose Hepburn (clever) calls for help via her in-and-out cellphone (naturally), nobody answers.

This bespectacled, headphoned dweeb (Stuart Brennan, like Skelton, British) who jumps into the lift pre-liftoff looks familiar. To her. He works on the set, too. Turns out he’s there to get B-roll, just a guy and his digital camera, making horror the cheapest way they can in this digital era.

“Daniel” gives off a creepy vibe. Rose seems more depressed than alarmed. But she grills him “to keep my mind off” her claustrophobia. They talk and talk and talk.

He uh, “knows” her.

“I’ve seen you,” he says, tamping down the pervy. “I mean I followed you…followed your career.”

He struggles to come up with solutions to their dilemma. As does she.

The “problem solving” is a joke, as if concieved by somebody whose only experience with elevators is in old movies they’ve watched. Sorry, I’m picking on the screenwriter too much. The direction is as airless as a popped balloon.

No, nobody seems all that manic about what’s happening. There’s zero sense of ugency, fatal all by itself in your typical thriller.

But “Stalker” has too many pre-existing pathologies to ever have a prayer of life. And nothing that happens, even in that livelier (as opposed to comatose) third act, could possibly change that prognosis.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Sophie Skelton, Stuart Brennan and Bret Hart.

Credits: Diretected by Steven Johnson, scripted by Chris Watt. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:33

This May 16 release from Magnolia adds another credit to Schrader’s starling third act “comeback” of a career.

Sigourney Weaver also stars. We also hear there’s an anti-vaxxer in the supporting cast. Just judging from that person’s tweets.

Boris Becker — Wimbledon Champion at 17, retired tennis idol at 29, broke and tossed in a British prison at 54.

That’s the story the world’s greatest investigative documentarian, Alex Gibney, sets out to tell and the subject he tries to psychoanalyze in “Boom Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker.”

You can see some of the possibilities Gibney saw, just in that cursory summary of “Boom Boom” Becker, who dominated tennis in the late ’80s into the early ’90s. Gibney won an Oscar for his Afghan expose “Taxi to the Dark Side,”is famous for “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and other “big fish” investigative films on subjects from Scientolgy to Big Pharma. And he’s no stranger to controversial sports figures, having done a series for ESPN and filmed the definitive Lance Armstrong takedown (“The Armstrong Lie”).

But it’s pretty obvious pretty early on that “The World vs. Boris Becker” isn’t anything like that level of deep dive into an athlete’s misbehavior, that Becker’s not remotely the tortured soul or nefarious figure Armstrong turned out to be.

Becker’s sins? He’s been a philanderer. He’s been careless with money, and made stupid decisions. He chased away the coach that made him and the manager that made him rich, and canned the financial planner that made his entitled “retired” life work, so far as he could tell.

Becker’s careless. At least some of his problems — the German ones, anyway — have a whiff of “schadenfreude” about them. And while Gibney suggests this masterful “story teller” — something many a great athlete evolves into — lies, kids himself or dissembles about this or that detail of his rise and fall. Maybe Becker is as lacking in self-awareness as the rest of us.

As a film, “Boom Boom” has a hard time justifying the exhaustive three and a half hours, in two parts, that the irons-in-many-fires Gibney delivered to Apple TV+. In sports metaphor terms, Gibney didn’t lay a glove on him. But it’s still a worthwhile film, simply in a sporting sense.

Gibney, serving as narrator and interrogator, tells us that he landed two stretches of time to chat up his subject — 2019 and 2022, just as Becker was facing sentencing. That may explain the film’s surface gloss feel, something Gibney tries to compensate for in his narration. But given three and a half hours of our time, we have a right to expect something a lot deeper.

In part one, “Triumph,” Becker briefly skims over his childhood — winning his first tennis tourney at 6, his dropping out of school to turn professional and his meteoric rise — coached by Germany’s best and managed by the inscrutable Romanian, Ion Tiriac, who becomes the “star” of this documentary.

In part two, “Disaster,” we get a cursory glance at the ways Becker got himself into trouble, abandoning some trusted advisors, losing his dad just when he was entering retirement and needed him the most.

“Boom Boom” is at its best as a tennis doc. The “downfall” material is wide and broad enough to be interesting, but seems lower stakes and more referenced than deeply explored.

As Becker leads us on a behind-the-scenes locker tour at the All England Tennis Club in Wimbledon, hear him embrace the famed Rudyard Kipling “triumph” and “disaster” quote that is the last thing players see before entering the stadium, and tells tales of what was going on in this or that match and the pre-courtside-mike trash talk and gamesmanship that was going on, “Boom Boom” really hits its stride.

The man retired having won 64 titles, and matches and moments with the great (Sampras, Agassi, Lendl, McEnroe) and the forgotten are memorably recalled and recreated here.

Becker was as temperamental as the American “brats,” Conners and McEnroe — but also a gloriously demonstrative winner. That’s probably why he was revered in his German homeland and became “Britain’s favorite German” in his adoptive one, the place that felt like “home” — Wimbledon.

His willingness to dive for shots, “to go where it hurts a little bit to win the point” became his trademark. His dominant serve-and-volley game made him intimidating, but those dives had to unnerve everybody who came up against him in those early years.

Using archival footage from matches and decades of interviews, including lovely bloom-of-youth “Boris returns to Wimbledon” material, Gibney paints a portrait of the athlete’s storied professional life.

But much of what we really learn about him from back then comes from Tiriac, an unforgettable figure who haunted tournaments starring his famous client, supposedly secretly “coaching” from the stands — a bear of a man with a fu manchu mustache, omnipresent shades, a suit and a cigarette always on his lips.

Tiriac may be less imposing in his dotage, but his refreshing bluntness and sharp memory make him stand out. He became Becker’s business manager and quasi-life coach, having enjoyed a bit of notoriety as a player himself in the ’70s.

His advice after that first Wimbledon win?

“When you walk off the court, you’re a wanted man.”

Like Borg before him, Becker became a matinee idol. Unlike Borg, he tried to work “having a good time” and living his life into the training, focus and constant public attention. Another lesson of the film is that nobody is really ready for that, and yet there’s no excuse for not taking care with who you surround yourself with.

The director of “Wendy & Lucy,” which starred Michelle Williams and a missing dog, now has this small stakes art world dramedy slated for April 7 in LA, NYC, wider later in the month.

Michelle Williams, Hong Chau and Judd Hirsch star. I posted a trailer for this last year, but now it has an opening date.

“A Good Person,” which earned a token, desultory release from MGM, is more than its novelty of being a film that Florence Pugh made for her then writer-director beau, Zach Braff, prior to breaking up.

It’s a see-saw of emotions, tones, dull tropes mixed with novel twists, and carried along for much of its excessive run time by a couple of great performances.

If all Braff had gotten out of it was another shot at recapturing his elusive “Garden State” sensitive indie character-study-in-Jersey mojo, this might be a write-off. But writing a wonderful part for Pugh, an addict lost in pills and lost in West Orange thanks to the crippling guilt of surviving a car accident that killed her prospective in-laws, and giving the great Morgan Freeman a role that — while “cuddly,” his late career brand — has enough edge to be worthy of him makes “Scrubs” icon Braff worthy of our thanks.

Pugh plays Allison, a lively pharmaceutical saleswoman whom we meet at a gathering celebrating her engagement to Nathan (Chinaza Uche). Pounding away at the piano and singing along, she is the tipsy life of that party. Later, there’s a little something extra to take the edge off the evening.

The next day, she’s driving her future sister-and-brother-in-law (Nichelle Hines, Toby Onwumere) into “the city” to shop for wedding dresses and catch a TKTS discounted play and there’s an accident.

One year later, Allison’s unemployed, hooked on Oxy and living with her co-dependent Mom (Molly Shannon, superb). It gets so bad that she finds herself quasi-blackmailing a fellow pharma rep and broke and hitting up a couple of lowlifes from her high school days for a fix.

“I didn’t think I was better than you,” she explains to the deadenders/street-dealers. “I knew it.”

Her self-medicating mom tries to push her in the same direction as a stickler pharmacist. “Rehab” might be off the table for the uninsured. But 12 steps? That could be her lifeline.

Wouldn’t you know it, it’s the same AA group that her embittered, estranged, almost father-in-law (Freeman) is in. He’s been driven back towards the bottle thanks to having to raise the granddaughter (Celeste O’Connor) orphaned in Allison’s accident.

Braff has always leaned towards music he described as “sensie” pop — a tad too hip to be maudlin — and is at his best writing and telling a story about characters who fit that description in a film scored by the likes of Odessa, Cary Brothers and Angelo de Augustine tunes.

Pugh and Freeman have terrific chemistry. His sweet-spot, almost lost in years of sentimental pap, was emotional but with a scary edge. Ex-cop Daniel may philosophize and voice-over narrate this tale in model train metaphors, but we can figure out he knows the truth about the wreck and he’s never really going to forgive it.

Braff’s tendency to undercut emotion with easy laughs — a hallmark of the TV series that formed him as an actor and writer-director — works for and against “A Good Person.” The terrible cost this accident has had on granddaughter Ryan is never dismissed, but it is given its cute put-downs.

“I need a dog crate the size of a teenager,” Daniel quips. Oxy? “It’s heroin in a pretty little dress.”

There’s an entirely too abrupt “Let’s be friends” turn in the Allison/Ryan relationship. The kid knows how her parents died and who did it, after all.

And the film shows evidence of Netflix editing — that slack tendency to leave in scenes and characters who don’t advance to plot and make the pace plodding, tailor made for streaming over the course of a long, rainy afternoon.

But Pugh has never been better than she is here, utterly immersed in the character’s accent and world-shrinking despair. And Freeman lends some flint and fire and sparkle to this simple redemption tale that touches, amuses, overreaches and overstays its welcome.

Rating: R for drug abuse, language throughout and some sexual references.

Cast: Florence Pugh, Morgan Freeman, Celeste O’Connor, Chinaza Uche, Zoe Lister-Jones and Molly Shannon.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Zach Braff. An MGM release.

Running time: 2:08

“Air” is a beautifully featherweight triumph of “on-the-nose” casting.

Need a guy to play a folksy spinner of anecdotes, a gambler and maker of speeches who converts the Non-Believers? Matt Damon, who has spent his career (“Good Will Hunting,” “Rounders,” “Ford v. Ferrari,” “Oceans Eleven”) playing variations of dogged, emotional “bet-the-wad” Nike shoe basketball guru Sonny Vacarro, seems perfect.

His office confidante, wide-eyed glad-hander quick with a quip — he’s the one who tells the condemned man origins of the Nike slogan, “Just do it!” — and quickest-of-all to play the “Black” card? Chris Tucker, of course.

Their bitchy, doubting, hard-to-convince boss? Jason Bateman lives and breathes Nike exec Rob Strasser.

Who on Earth could play future NBA GOAT Michael Jordan’s mother? Oscar winner Viola Davis makes us “Believe” Earth mother/canny businesswoman Deloris Jordan in our bones.

Nike’s zen hustler, self-mythologizer and not-as-ditzy as he might come-off founder and CEO, Phil Knight? If you think that’s a stretch for Ben Affleck, you haven’t seen him in ginger curls.

Affleck steps back behind the camera for a feel-good movie that takes us back to the mid-80s, back when athletic shoe behemoth and future sweatshop scandal Nike could be considered an underdog, a Beaverton, Oregon running shoe/track suit operation that had no prayer against the big dogs who shoed the then-dying NBA’s all-stars.

“Basketball’s the future,” the seemingly listless lump Vacarro, “the Mister Miyagi of high school hoops” sermonizes the Big Boss.

“The NBA finals are on tape delay (broadcast),” Porsche-driving, sloganeering runner Knight fires back. “It’s literally ‘the past.'”

“Air” is about Vaccaro’s vision, how he breaks down that last NCAA championship-winning shot from the skinny, “too small” kid from Wilmington, N.C., how he sees what is special about that year’s number three draft pick and convinces his colleagues and the viewer to see “the future” with him.

To do that, he’ll need a Hail Mary. He’ll need a Carroll Shelby/”Ford. v Ferrari” speech or two to Bateman’s Strasser, to Knight, to the Real Power in the Jordan family, his mother Deloris.

He’ll need to outfox staid Converse and Teutonic terror Adidas, to placate or at least neutralize Jordan’s high-rolling, dismissive agent David Falk, played to the very hilt by Chris Messina at his most abrasively unctuous.

And he’ll need to convince Nike’s shoe-design-and-marketing guru Peter Moore, played by Matthew Maher as the final perfectly-cast-piece of the “Air” bubble, to scramble and turn out a shoe for the ages, one that would change the game, the athletic shoe industry and the pro athlete-“owner” dynamic forever.

Think Mister “How’d ya like THEM apples” is up to it?

Affleck practically drowns the viewer in montages of mid-80s figures — Reagan to Magic, Bruce Jenner to Arthur Ashe, whose Head tennis racket TV pitch inspire Vaccaro’s Hail Mary, “Make Mike the Brand.”

We hear a tsunami of ’80s pop, sample the hairstyles and tracksuits, the pagers and Coleco video games and ugly Towncars and grape Porsche that was Knight’s pride-and-joy.

It’s almost like the director of “Argo” and “The Town” feels the need to try-too-hard. And when Sonny launches into a spiel (complete with sports/news footage montage) of what ugly downside “the future” holds for young Jordan (seen only from behind, like Jesus and Muhammad), it really does try too hard.

Yes, playing “All I Need is a Miracle” is so on-the-nose it’s grating.

But every time “Air” strays, this great cast brings it back. Messina flirts with caricature as everybody’s idea of the threatening, loud, barely-principled agent and for all Affleck/Knight’s zen koans about “Our business is ‘change,'” “Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never-ending commitment,” Affleck’s gutsiest call is to make Knight the object of fun.

It’s hard to maintain a myth after we’ve seen that hair, that car, those legs in track leggings and that “smartest guy in the room” almost blunder the deal that made Knight and upended athletics and how financial athletic success is measured.

My favorite scenes were the little grace notes that arrive when Vaccaro and Strasser decide “It’s time to see Pete.” Maher, practically an Affleck discovery (“Gone Baby Gone” and he’s even in the donuts commercials Affleck is doing) makes Pete the real zen master of this operation, a midlife-crisis on a skateboard who engineered the engineering part of the Great Shoe Coup, an artist who turned Air Jordan into an image of superhuman basketball flight.

And Affleck, cunning devil of a director that he is, gives the damned shoe its own “star entrance.”

Sure, it gets to be a bit much and kind of misses its drop-the-mike/”Be Like Mike” moment. But “Air” has everything we want in a feel-good sports movie — plucky underdogs, big speeches that deliver heart and a cast that, once you’ve seen it, you can’t imagine anybody else in that paunchy dad-bod or those never-really-in-style red curls.

Rating: R for language throughout.

Cast: Matt Damon, Viola Davis, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Chris Tucker, Matthew Maher, Marlon Wayans, Julius Tennon, Jay Mohr and Chris Messina.

Credits: Directed by Ben Affleck, scripted by Alex Convery. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:52

UFOs and aliens and A Bomb tests in the 1950s desert make up the weekends of Anderson’s latest, opening June 16.

All star cast, not a lot of laughs in this first trailer, but you get the idea. “Twee” as ever.

Perhaps you’re not of a mind that a short-lived record label run by an all-in music biz gambler of the ’70s is a subject worthy of a two hour and seventeen minute musical bio-pic.

But that just means you’re not the son of Neil Bogart, the Brooklyn born knaker, trombenik and whatever other Yiddish word or phrase denotes “showboating show biz hustler.” Because that’s who the music exec Neil Scott Bogatz was.

As “Spinning Gold,” the film by son Timothy Bogart points out, his dad went by many names and tore through many careers before finally founding his own record label — Casablanca (Get it?) — and gambling everything that he could make a bunch of New York Jewish rockers dressed in leather and painted-up like Kabuki theatre actors into record-selling rock stars, a singular-voiced American soul chanteuse a disco diva and get everyone to vote George Clinton and Parliament onto the charts.

Chutzpah? This Bogatz/Bogart fellow had enough for everybody.

His son’s film about him is part musical. Neil’s first stab at stardom was as a pop singer, after all. And his first breakout single as a record exec was stumbling into the ’60s choir that turned “Oh Happy Day” into one of the great one-off novelty hits of all time.

The movie and the story it tells are kind of all over the place.”Oh Happy Day” jumps off as an actual production number with our singing Bogart (Jeremy Jordan) pitching in with the Edwin Hawkins Singers and having a heavenly epiphany as he does.

There’s also begging money off the mob (Vincent Pastore, of course), blundering with his first big Casablanca gamble (a comedy LP by…Johnny Carson?), the debacle of the label’s “launch” of KISS, the wife named Beth (Michelle Monaghan) who believes in him and sticks with him until he starts stepping out with the manager of KISS (Lindsy Foncesca), all of it filtered through Bogart doing his own narration as scripted by his adoring son.

“Gold” can be a fascinating snapshot of early ’60s Brill Building pop, late ’60s hustle to sign R&B stars The Isley Brothers (depicted as “scary” here), the many missteps it took before KISS blew up and the effort it took to convince the churchly LaDonna Adrian Gaines to become Donna Summer.

Neil sits at the piano with Gladys Knight (Ledisi) and helps her turn “Midnight Train to Houston” into one bound for “Georgia” and career-making stardom. Sure.

The KISS chronology served up here and Bogart’s alleged reaction to the Peter Criss ballad “Beth” wouldn’t hold up in court.

What we’re seeing can be frothy fun or stilted and seriously self-serving — at least as far as Bogart’s legacy is concerned.

“Every single bit of it was true,” Bogart charms, “even the parts of it that weren’t.”

Jordan is properly charismatic as the lead, with the two great loves of Bogart’s life well cast with polished performers. Jay Pharaoh and Dan Fogler play the partners, the studio-or-record-promotion-savvy teammates whom Bogart brought with him from previous jobs to form “the biggest independent record label” of them all.

“How long have you been planning this?” “Since I was eight.”

With the exception of The Isleys (Jason Derulo and Doron Bell) and Wiz Khalifa’s impish-stoner turn as funkmaster Clinton, the music and musicians’ side of things come up short. Virtually no one looks like or sings on a par with the pop legends they’re playing. While that isn’t an issue with the painted-up lads of KISS, it’s a bit tooth-grinding hearing bland versions of the distinct stylings of Donna Summer and others.

If Bogart had little to nothing to do with the career of singer Bill Withers, why even bring somebody who neither looks like him nor sounds like him? Yes, fact-checking this performer-packed picture proves to be a pain.

Suffice it to say there’s a hint of “Rocket Man” to Bogart-the-younger’s approach here, a whiff of every other recent musical bio-pic in style and story and presentation. But in this cluttered jumble of a film, he manages to do everything just a little bit worse than “Respect,” “Get on Up,” “I Wanna Dance iwth Somebody” and everybody else, the odd goosebumps “moment of creation” scene mixed in with the whisky, cigarettes and cocaine notwithstanding.

Rating: R for pervasive language, drug use, some sexual material and nudity.

Cast: Jeremy Jordan, Michelle Monaghan, Ledisi, Lindsy Fonseca, Jay Pharaoh, Wiz Khalifa, Casey Likes, Pink Sweat$, Dan Fogler, Tayla Parx and Jason Isaacs.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Timothy Scott Bogart. A Hero Partners release.

Running time: 2:17

In life, it happens gradually. But in the movies, one day a character wakes up and realizes she or he isn’t in sync with or even aware of “what the kids are into these days.”

That’s the subtext of actor turned writer-director Todd Flaherty‘s feature directing debut, “Chrissy Judy.” It’s an old fashioned romance in a queer setting, and is about reaching that moment when cruising, casual sex and narcissism aren’t enough — and are ending, anyway, because at least in terms of your “crowd,” you’re getting “old.”

Flaherty stars as the “Judy” of the title — aka “Judy Blew’em” — half of a drag act with closer-than-close friend Chrissy (Wyatt Fenner), Manhattan besties who join long-coupled friends for a Fire Island weekend in the film’s opening scenes.

They’re well into their 30s, which means “40” is the new “old.” They’re out of step, with their “Golden Girls” references and “Murder She Wrote” mania, their fondest wish to get away to “P-town.“

Their stage act reflects their age. They’re the hangers-on of the last generation to obsess over Judy and Barbra and torch songs and Broadway/American Songbook classics like “Ain’t We Got Fun” and “What’ll I Do?”

We’ve just gotten into the “bitch,” “bitch-please” “Carrie and Big,” “Steve and Miranda” rhythms of their banter and their relationship when Chrissy delivers his news. This new guy he’s been seeing? He’s moving in with him. In Philadelphia.

It’s a take-stock moment for both of them, but especially Judy. The endless waiter gigs, the “I’m going to be FAMOUS” delusions, sharing an apartment which he still can’t afford despite the two women roommates he’s renting from, random bar pick-ups — that’s not very adult.

Adults — not all of them — typically outgrow all that. Not our Judy, who underscores the redundancy in the phrase gay narcissist.

It may be time to knock off the blond dye jobs, the Grindr photos, the live-for-today lack of planning…anything. It’s time to notice how “the act” was going over even before Judy turns solo.

That’s your grandad’s drag, dear.

Flaherty shot “Chrissy Judy” in black and white to underscore how old fashioned all this feels. This is a throwback, a melodramatic rom-com that could be from an earlier era in queer cinema. It’s a little raunchier, but not really any more sexually explicit than the tentative gay romances and melodramas of the early ’90s.

That gives it a predictable air and makes one wish for more bitchy laughs.

But Flaherty writes plenty of crisp, crackling advance-the-plot/character arc scenes. When Judy is invited down to weekend with Chrissy and new-love Shawn (Kiyon Spencer) he finds himself amongst the nesting gays of Philadelphia, the settled and second-house set, “people we used to make fun of.”

When Judy tries to turn a romantic connection (Joey Tarranto) into something more than heated, unsatisfactory sex, he finds himself giving the side-eye to the shallow lifestyle he once embraced, and maybe a little self-acceptance about his lack of common ground with Next Generation vapids who remind him of himself a dozen years before.

“Chrissy Judy,” obviously structured to be a Flaherty star vehicle, is a tad abrupt in “breaking up the act”(that seems to come too early) and loses its momentum as the later acts turn reflective and predictable.

But it won me over with its nostalgia, a pre-“Bros” take on gay life and love and that inarticulate need most everyone feels “to be alone with someone” that Judy, even after giving up that cheeseball drag name, could never describe as “companionship.”

Rating: unrated, sexually explicit, pot use, profanity

Cast: Todd Flaherty, Wyatt Fenner, Joey Taranto and Kiyon Spencer

Credits: Scripted and directed by Todd Flaherty. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:34

“Furies” is a lurid, ultraviolent Vietnamese thriller about a quartet of women assembled to take down a Saigon crime lord by hitting him where it hurts — killing off his henchmen in ones, twos, or big bunches.

Yes, characters refer to what is still officially known as Ho Chi Minh City as Saigon. And no, it probably never occurred to them that an alternate title might occur to anyone watching these female avengers in the U.S.

“Charlie’s Angels,” anyone? I kid.

But there’s no messing around in actress (“The Old Guard,” “Furie,” “Da Five Bloods”), co-writer and director Veronica Ngo‘s blistering underworld bloodbath.

It’s the sort of film that opens with a child’s rape, and serves up enough such scenes that one is inclined to mutter, “How many damned rapes are in this thing?”

Little Bi, who stabs her attacker to death, survives that moment on her sex-worker/mother’s houseboat, but Mom does not. Bi (Dong Anh Quynh) grows up homeless and never far from her next victimization, until she is rescued by Jacqueline, “Aunt Lin” (Ngo), a tough-minded matriarch with an idea for “ending” the rampant sex trafficking and sexual assaults that come with it.

“We have no one to protect us,” Lin intones (in subtitled Vietnamese or dubbed into English). “We’ve all lived and lost. We were like wild daisies, trying to grow out of the darkness.

Bi will join Jacqueline’s petite tyros Hong (Rima Thanh Vy) and Than (Toc Tien), “Wolf Sisters” their foes call them. She will train with them. And they will, together, go after the drug smuggler, human trafficker and crime boss Hai (Thuan Ngyen), a venal predator with many minions and one kryptonite — women.

This formula thriller, not really a sequel to Ngo’s breakout action pic in the West, “Furie,” is packed with punch-above-their-throw-weight brawls and knife-fights, climaxing in a big shootout.

Asian actioners in general and Southeast Asian films of this genre in particular often feature that moment when a huge gang assembles to attack the hero or heroines, and either visit their stash of machetes or grab one each as they steal from the cutlery stall at a street market.

It’s a blunt statement of what’s obviously on the way — machete mayhem.

The plot? Well, it’s predictable, right down to its twists and turns. People on both sides will die. A lot of blood will be spilled. The only cops we meet are in the coda. Twas ever thus in underworld sagas filled with “Furies.”

But one trope that “Furies” tops is a stylized, effects-packed motorbike chase through the narrow alleys and streets of the old city late at night, a furious fight-and-flight without firearms that will pin your ears back. Seriously cool.

And even if “cool” is prioritized over logic or novelty in this bloody battle to the death, it’s still enough to recommend Ngo’s bracing, kinetic and beautifully shot and edited tale of life and death, rape and revenge in Old/New Saigon.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, sexual violence, drug abuse, smoking, profanity

Cast: Veronica Ngo, Rima Thanh Vy, Toc Tien, Dong Anh Quynh and Thuan Nguyen

Credits: Directed by Veronica Ngo, scripted by Nha Uyen Ly Nguyen, Nguyen Ngoc Thach, Nguyen Truong Nhan, Aaron Toronto and Veronica Ngo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47