Movie Nation

A dare stares the viewer dead in the eyes right from the outset of “Champions,” a long and formulaic basketball comedy starring Woody Harrelson and directed by his “Kingpins” partner, Bobby Farrelly.

As the film’s hook is that this team coached all the way into The Big Game is made up of young people on the special needs spectrum — players with brain injuries, Down Syndrome and autism — the dare is this.

Will the director of “Dumb and Dumber” and “Dumb and Dumber To,” the reviver of “The Three Stooges,” the fellow who gave us a one-armed bowler and who scripted Ben Stiller’s special hair styling needs in “There’s Something About Mary” actually go there?

Peter Farrelly (“Green Book”) is the sentimental half of the Farrelly Brothers. Bobby’s brand is more lowbrow, more theoretically dangerous, or at least more likely to lapse into “politically incorrect.”

So we’re all on the edge of our seats, waiting for our hot-headed, hard-drinking and just-fired NBA “J-League” coach (Harrelson) to say exactly the wrong thing when a judge sentences Marcus Marakovich to community service coaching the Des Moines “Friends,” 90 days of working with “adults with intellectual disabilities” and their Special Olympics level hoops team.

Marcus is such a meathead that it takes every word of courtroom finesse for him to talk his way around the “re” word he starts to blurt out, labeling those players a court has ordered him to coach. The “re” word isn’t “rewarding,” which of course is destined to be the moral of our story.

The scene is neither cringe-worthy nor particularly funny, which goes for this two hour trudge through a Mr. Uses-Everyone learns-some-empathy comedy. Marcus is sentenced to discover patience, sobriety, responsibility and understanding through an unruly nonet of sometimes funny but to-a-one thinly-sketched-in players.

It’s as if this half-hearted, ginger-steps comedy is also daring us not to like it, endorse it and praise for the “feels” it is tailor-made to deliver, but which it pretty much never does.

Harrelson comes as close to sleep-walking through this as he did his recent “Saturday Night Live” appearance. The “White Men Can’t Jump” star is a perfectly credible, too-long-in-the-minors assistant coach. But he’s fired for shoving his boss, the Des Moines Stallions’ head coach (Ernie Hudson), which was captured on video and makes “Sports Center,” and not in a good way. That scene seems contrived and half-hearted, and it’s hard for Harrelson to break that spell in a movie that isn’t a great showcase for him or most anybody else.

Marcus tries to work with the assortment of characters — the multi-lingual, autistic walking Wikipedia (Casey Metcalfe), the somewhat catatonic klutz who nicknamed himself “Showtime” (Bradley Edens), who shoots backwards, and rarely hits the backboard. But at least Showtime’s got the showboating “big ba–s” dance down.

Mouthy Miss Cosentino (Madison Tevlin) is all sass and “You do you, I do ME” backtalk. One guy has “two girlfriends” whom he can’t stop bragging about, another player (Joshua Felder) has a single word answer repeated whenever he’s asked whether he’ll play under this new coach.

“NOPE.”

The life of the party might be Johnny (Kevin Iannucci of “Best of Enemies”), “your homie with an extra chromie,” a Down Syndrome lad devoted to the team, his job working in the animal shelter and a fellow who could use some help mastering “the pick and roll.”

It turns out, he’s the younger brother of after-lunch Shakespeare in the Schools actress Alex (Kaitlin Olson of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”). She was a one-night-stand for Marcus before the night it all went sideways for him, somebody who picked up on his Xs and Os obsession at the expense of human interaction way before the courts did.

Pretty much every beat of this three-screenwriter adaptation of a Spanish comedy of a few years back feels pre-ordained — from the Big Obstacles to the Big Secret revealed to The Big Game and even who and what provides the Big Moment in the Big Game.

None of which would matter all that much if this thing ever found its funny bone. It lumbers along, under-edited and paced-to-put-us-to-sleep.

Are these the best takes Farrelly could get with everybody hitting their marks and getting through his or her lines? One wonders, because the games are so dully-shot and edited — few reaction shots and almost no close-ups and inserts of in-game action — it’s as if he’s covering for less skilled actors.

Harrelson is at ease and amusing in scenes with Olson, who gives the picture a little spark. Even Cheech Marin (as the rec center manager) feels wasted, and not in a fun way.

The messaging is rock solid and uplifting — “These guys are capable of a lot more than you think.” We see players picking up plays, and holding down jobs. And we get a load of “boo boo words” when every now and then, somebody flirts with or comes right out and uses the “r” word and pays a price for it.

This isn’t Farrelly’s first crack at special needs characters/Special Olympics athletes as a subject. Remember “The Ringer,” which the Farrellys produced? It had Johnny Knoxville playing a broke gambler trying to break even by “fixing” the Special Olympics. The controversy and failure of that one may be why “Special Olympics” is only mentioned once or twice in “Champions.”

But in taking a second swing at a comedy where the object is to make special needs characters funny, but not the object of fun, you’d figure that Farrelly might have had the nerve to dance closer to the edge, or at least find some big, warm laughs. And you’d think that Harrelson could have made this funnier in his sleep. Neither is the case.

Rating:  PG-13 for strong language and crude/sexual reference

Cast: Woody Harrelson, Kaitlin Olson, Kevin Iannucci, Madison Tevlin, Joshua Felder, Ashton Gunning, Casey Metcalfe, Bradley Edens, James Day Keith, Alex Hintz, Matthew Von Der Ahe, Ernie Hudson and Cheech Marin.

Credits: Directed by Bobby Farrelly, scripted by Mark Rizzo, Javier Fesser and David Marqués. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:03

“The Lost King” is a featherweight little charmer about a plucky Brit who decides that King Richard III, whom history and Shakespeare have rendered as a murderously psychotic, has gotten a bum rap.

As played by Sally Hawkins, Philippa Langley is woman entitled to that notion, an over 40 marketing exec, passed-over and dismissed at her Edinburgh firm thanks to ageism and perhaps ableism. She sees a ridiculed and reviled figure from the late 15th century as a kindred spirit.

Philippa has “ME,” myalgic encephalomyelitis, also labeled chronic fatigue syndrome. When she watches a production of “Richard III,” she sees someone with a disability whom Shakespeare made a villain simply because of his alleged appearance. His Richard was not just a homely heavy, but a self-aware one, “Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time Into this breathing world.”

In Stephen Frears’ playful, fanciful film, Philippa becomes so obsessed with this possible victim of history that she starts seeing Richard — actually the actor (Harry Lloyd) she saw playing him on the stage — as a robed and crowned royal ghost tormenting her to find his long lost remains and perhaps clear his name.

The complications in a marketing exec undertaking such an undertaking about ancient undertaking — Richard was thought to have been tossed into the River Soar in Leicester, or perhaps buried somewhere else with no real record of it — begin with a skeptical ex-husband, played by producer and co-writer Steve Coogan.

Coogan re-assembles his “Philomena” team (which he also wrote for Frears) for this story, and turns his role into it into a lesson about exes who remain mutually supportive. John and Philippa get on well enough to raise their two sons, and when she starts skipping work and spiraling down the rabbit holes presented by joining the worldwide Richard III Society, he even pitches in to feed and house them all (he’s a construction site supervisor).

The film follows Philippa, whose connection to Richard Plantagenet grows so intense that she develops instincts and “feelings” about where he might be, through this “fan’s” first contacts with real experts. Veteran Brit twinkler James Fleet (“Sense & Sensibility,” “Four Weddings and a Funeral”) is Medievalist John Ashdown-Hill, who encouraged Langley, and had research all set up to verfiy her claim, should she find a candidate corpse.

Others are more dismissive, at least at first. Mark Addy plays a composite character from the University of Leicester, which wanted little to do with this hunt…until Langley secured funding to get their archeology department to dig where she just “knew” they’d find a skeleton with a busted skull and twisted spine.

The film sets up the U. and its hierarchy as villains, heirs to the Tudor propogandists who so smeared the last Plantagenet king’s name after vanquishing him and his army at Bosworth Field. Skepticism and “Why didn’t WE think to do that?” are one thing. If U. of L. indeed tried to steal the credit for her dogged legwork, direction, fundraising and instincts, they should be ashamed.

The consulting-with-a-ghost business sets the tone for “The Lost King” — curious, historical and whimsical. But the great Sally Hawkins makes us feel the weight of discrimination and injustice in a performance as fine and nuanced as any in her career.

Philippa’s physical pain does what such maladies always do in the movies. It comes and goes at the screenwriters’ convenience. But Hawkins never lets us forget that it’s there, this depressing limitation in life that plays havoc with her work, her marriage and her sadly circumscribed future.

“If I can find him, I can give him a voice,” she insists. And maybe give herself one, too.

We’re meant to be ever-so-furious when the university slickers steal TV time and credit for her project. And we bloody well are.

Coogan is effortlessly pleasant in support, Fleet, Addy stand out. And Amanda Abbington, as a city official who gives Philippa counsel about how to be taken seriously in the stuffy, dogmatic man’s world she’s invading, sparkles with a little keep-calm-and-stop-saying-“feeling” advice.

The film gives short shrift to the hunt itself. We see arguments at lectures, rowdy meetings of “Richardians” (Brits and their love for “royals”) and a little simple legwork that suggests intuition and a marketer’s hunch for how this “story” of discovery will be sold and told (she produced TV documentaries about the search, and is a producer here) were paramount.

A lot feels skipped-over and might have been better handled in a “this clue came from here” and “that one turned up there” methodical style.

When this story broke in 2012, much of the Shakespeare-speaking world was simply gobsmacked by the unlikeliness of it all. “The Lost King” gives the impression that Langley was born to do what no one else could be bothered to — narrow the choices to a spot, visiting it and get a “feeling,” and “Voila!” The movie makes that look too easy.

Then again, if the ghost of the dead, possibly murderous monarch is sort of pointing the way, it would be, wouldn’t it?

Rating: PG-13 for some strong language and brief suggestive references

Cast: Sally Hawkins, Steve Coogan, Harry Lloyd, Amanda Abbington and Mark Addy.

Credits: Directed by Stephen Frears, scripted by Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope, based on the book by Philip9a Langley. An IFC (Mar. 31) release.

Running time: 1:48

Hard to believe now, but there was a stretch in the MTV mid-80s when two blues-playing brothers from Dallas were all over the radio, the TV and even tucked into movie soundtracks.

Jimmie Vaughan was the older sibling, the first to dive into Texas music scene — at 14 — out of school and making a living playing guitar shortly thereafter. Stevie Ray Vaughan was his competitive younger brother, an incendiary player who decorated a Bowie hit, reinvented a Stevie Wonder classic and climbed to the status of King of Guitar Gods before dying in a helicopter crash in 1990.

“Brothers in Blues” is a documentary attempt to chart their careers, get at their influences and at least take a stab at recreating their lives and the world they came from and how it shaped them.

It’s OK for what it is, but what it is somewhat less than it should be — slapdash, piecemeal, incomplete. For starters, it’s a re-working/re-issue of writer-director and (apparently) narrator Kirby Warnock‘s film “From Nowhere: The Story of the Vaughan Brothers” from 2019.

Warnock’s also done a video doc about the history of the Dallas music scene, “When Dallas Rocked,” so he knows his subject matter well. Not well enough to narrate his own movie and not bother to identify himself on film or in the credits or explain his connection, as narrator, to the brothers. He just expects us to accept his “authority.” Or maybe he just forgot to give himself a credit.

But Warnock, a fixture in the Dallas and Texas music journalism scene who knew the Vaughans before they were famous, does a good job of recreating the world they grew up in, another Rock History that begins, in essence, on Feb. 9, 1964. That’s when The Beatles hit “The Ed Sullivan Show” and took America by storm.

The first funny bit is Jimmie remembering how the rules for “getting a girl” changed with that appearance. Thanks to Ringo, who “wasn’t good looking,” a Texas lad had a chance of landing a girlfriend without playing football. Sure, Jimmie went out for the team, but making his first-ever catch led to his first-ever tackle and his first busted collarbone.

Dad bought him a guitar to master while he recuperated.

“Millions” of guitars were sold and thousands of bands began, Warnock remembers, dozens of ensembles in Dallas, including the first to let too-young-to-drive Jimmie Vaughan up their game with his axe. Warnock talks to survivors of that scene and brings up scores of long-lost clubs and honky tonks.

Warnock takes pains to set the “pre Internet,” pre-MTV context, when having a band and trying to make it big from Texas was damned near impossible. It was, Warnock narrates, like “living on an island, a very big island.”

Influences are cited — Freddy King, The Night Caps, T-Bone Walker. And bonds forged. Billy Gibbons over in Houston crossed paths with Jimmie before Billy formed ZZ Top and Jimmie moved to Austin and formed The Fabulous Thunderbirds.

But coming up behind Jimmie was this little boy who’d cry when big brother went out gigging, and who vowed — the legend goes — to follow him and eventually surpass him.

One day, somebody’d go up to blues legend Albert King and suggest he let this kid not yet old enough to grow a soul patch sit in with him and his band.

Needless to say, little Stevie Ray did NOT suck.

Stevie Ray knocked at stardom’s door, and befriended Jackson Browne, who invited the guitarist and Double Trouble, his band, to record in his studio, only to have them take him up on it over Thanksgiving. A star was (finally) born.

The film captures recent events in the siblings’ hometown honoring their legacy — a museum exhibit and a park statue near the house where they grew up.

But it has no archival interviews with Stevie Ray. Jimmie’s longtime bandmate, singer and songwriter Kim Wilson, is nowhere to be found. Very little of their music is sampled, always a hang-up with music docs.

There’s a cute bit with character actor Stephen Tobolowsky (“Groundhog Day”), who was in a Dallas band with Stevie Ray circa 1970. But that’s recycled from “When Dallas Rocked.” And the cleverest piece of film craft is interviewing Jimmie as he drives his three-on-the-tree 1940 Ford flathead hot rod.

Truthfully, the best one can say for this is that it’s footage that will be better served when it’s put to use in a better financed, music rights-included and more thorough film about these two guitar heroes who grew up under the same roof.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Jimmie Vaughan, Eric Clapton, Connie Trent, Nile Rodgers, Billy Gibbons and Jackson Browne.

Credits: Scripted, directed and (apparently) narrated by Kirby Warnock. A Freestyle Media release.

Running time: 1:46

March 28. Oscilloscope begins rolling out this lush and upbeat tale of theater and dance and folks who make it and have their horizons broadened by it and a transgender dancer in Lahore, Pakistan.

“The Ritual Killer” trots out Morgan Freeman as yet another expert involved in a serial killer case. And for his benefit, the screenwriters discovered a grabby hook to hang this thriller on, an arcane subject for his character’s expertise.

The murders, traced from Rome to Clinton, Mississippi, are connected to a dark corner of traditional South African folk medicine, “Muti.” It can involve “ritual” cutting and use of body parts in witchcraft. That was actually the working title of the film, “Muti.”

That star and that hook have promise. But promising or not, the result is a straight-up B-movie with two main locations and six credited screenwriters struggling to make sense of a story that has Cole Hauser as a guilt-ridden, trigger-happy cop on the case when the villain jets in to BFE Mississippi to continue his spree.

The lesser players — most of the young actors playing tween and teen victims — are wincingly amateurish.

Murielle Hilaire sports a hard-to-trace accent as Detective Luke Boyd’s (Hauser) partner. The “captain” he’s always storming out on is that Swedish marvel Peter Stormare. So, Clinton must be in the cosmopolitan corner of Mississippi.

As you might guess, flicking pointlessly between Italy (Giuseppe Zeno plays the Italian cop on the case) and Mississippi with young people getting kidnapped and hacked up and cops getting slashed and stabbed makes for a somewhat disorienting movie.

Thankfully, Freeman doesn’t bother with a Lesotho accent. One can only guess what sort of language he used between takes of scenes showing his exchanges with the few students who take his class (not “natural” actors). And Hauser plays a somewhat recognizable “type,” the loner cop who lost everything and isn’t shy about being detective, judge and executioner when he storms in on a child abductor/molester.

“Do you think anybody misses Ted Bundy?” is his excuse.

The villain is a Seal-scarred African named Randoku (Vernon Davis, better than his makeup). There’s a rich white guy (Brian Kurlander, who gives the kid-actors here a run for their “acting school refund” money) backing our ritual killer.

The cluttered, disjointed story makes one certain that a magazine story/oral history about the making of “Muti/The Ritual Killer” would be more entertaining than the movie they finished and are releasing. What sort of nutty compromises were reached to get financing here, there and everywhere, and round up this cast? Did it start life as an Italian thriller, or Mississippi tax incentive project, or both?

At least Freeman has a few moments, and Hauser has aged into a fine dad-bodied man-of-action. It’s a pity they’re stuck in messes like this, without even an on-location Roman vacation to show for it.

Rating: unrated, bloody violence

Cast: Cole Hauser, Morgan Freeman, Murielle Hilaire, Giuseppe Zeno, Brian Kurlander, Peter Stormare and Vernon Davis

Credits: Directed by George Gallo, scripted by Bob Bowersox, Francesco Cinquemani, Giorgia Iannone, Luca Giliberto, Jennifer Lemmon, Ferdinando Dell’Omo. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:31

Now here’s a proper gore and splatter fest, and from Ireland no less.

“Unwelcome” is a murderous mashup of “Straw Dogs” and...wait for it…”Leprechaun!” It’s visceral (literally) and pulse-pounding on occasion. And as we see the wee creatures making all this mayhem, it’s also laugh-out-loud funny.

Hannah John-Kamen and Douglas Booth play a young couple whom we meet on the day she pees on a stick and delivers the good news. They’re EXPECTING.

But living in a high-rise/low-rent London housing estate, Jamie can’t even pop down to the shop for a bottle of celebratory non-alcoholic prosecco without being hassled by goons. They follow him home and brutally assault the couple.

Jamie was never the most butch lad in the lot, but while both of them are traumatized, he’s haunted by the experience on a primal masculinity-questioning level.

We know the minute he promises “I am never going to let that happen to you again,” he’ll have trouble keeping that promise, even if he does buy a punching bag to work out his frustrations on.

Lucky for Jamie his aunt back in rural Ireland died. They’ve inherited a Place in the Country, where the locals seem welcoming, if a tad superstitious. Maya’s just got to remember to leave a “blood offering” every night at the entrance to their gated forest.

“For the far darrig, the ‘redcaps,'” the helpful local Maeve (Niamh Cusack) says, as if she’s making a lick of sense. But she makes Maya promise promise PROMISE to leave a little raw liver out.

Meanwhile, the house has fallen into “fixer upper” status. Finding a local contractor seems futile until they stumble into the Whelans, an unsavory crew whom the locals raise an eyebrow over.

“Just don’t leave your missus alone with the lads,” the village drunk advises.

So we’ve got “rules” just made for breaking, and the scariest, least-hospitable locals invading their space and bringing to mind every nightmare anybody had engaging the Contractors from Hell.

The Whelans (Kristian Nairn, Jamie-Lee O’Donnell, Chris Walley) are “English” bashing sociopaths, the lot of them.

But as least their patriarch insists everybody call him “Daddy.” He’s played by Colm Meaney, as if this Mark Stay/Jon Wright (who also directed) screenplay wasn’t menacing enough.

Much of what you expect comes to pass, but there is just enough misdirection thrown in to maintain a little novelty in the mashing up.

The threats are unnerving, the violence brutal and the Red Caps wee and scary cute and plentiful in this horrific lark of a thriller.

Our leads are believable as a couple, convincingly over-matched and just as convincing when they fight back.

And then there’s our Irish MVP, the durable character actor Meaney, who has been Irishing-up TV (“Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”) and movies (“The Snapper,” “Con Air,” “Intermission,” “Layer Cake,” “Marlowe,” “Pixie,”“Seberg” ) for half a century, “fer feck’s sake.”

Meaney instantly amps up the threat level as this bluff, bullying patriarch, the kind who wants everybody to call him “Daddy” because that’s how this relationship is going to be — a “My word is law” thing.

“Unwelcome” may outstay its welcome, reaching its climax with the filmmakers unable to resist going for an anti-climax. One can only take the wee menaces so seriously, looking like “Harry Potter” extras without the budget for “Dobby” CGI.

But it’s fun, the kind of thriller tailor-made for crowd-sourced jolts and laughs. Miss it and there’ll be hell to pay, just you wait.

Rating: R for strong violence and gore, pervasive language, some drug use and sexual material

Cast: Hannah John-Kamen, Douglas Booth, Kristian Nairn, Jamie-Lee O’Donnell, Chris Walley and Colm Meaney.

Credits: Directed by Jon Wright, scripted by Mark Stay and Jon Wright. A Well Go USA release in AMC cinemas, coming to Shudder.

Running time: 1:43

August 4, is it?

When see we Kate DiCamillo’s name on children’s film, we sit up take notice, and keep an eye and an ear out for themes, “life lessons” and the like.

One of the most popular writers of kid-lit in English, she’s been a popular author to adapt for the screen. Books from “Because of Winn-Dixie” to” “The Tale of Despereaux,” “Flora and Ulysses and “The Tiger Rising” have been made into movies. And the latest adaptation, “The Magician’s Elephant,” was turned into London stage musical before Netflix Animation and Animal Logic took a crack at an animated, non-musical version.

It’s a 2009 book that’s about how limiting life is without imagination, how one should never underestimate human possibilities and how you shouldn’t let skeptics and naysayers limit what you try to do with your life. It has a timely and timeless feel, and visual effects artist turned director Wendy Rogers — she worked in Gotham City, Narnia and “Waterworld” — taps into the most famous trait of DiCamillo’s wordy, illustrated novels. They’re meant to be read aloud, parent to child.

So there’s a fortune-teller/narrator (Natasia Demetriou) to set the story up and explain things every so often along the way.

It’s a gorgeous looking film, and adds more weight to the argument that Netflix isn’t letting Disney, Pixar, Sony or Dreamworks set the animation standard. Del Toro’s “Pinocchio” proved that they’re raising the bar for everybody else.

But I have to say, it’s a somewhat muted film, almost humorless. Like most of DiCamillo’s works translated to the screen, it has her characters and themes and a little charm, but little else going for it.

Peter, voiced by Noah Jupe of “A Quiet Place,” is a teen growing up in the once-enchanted town of Baltese, which lost its sense of magic thanks to sending troops off to “the great foreign war” long ago. It’s a town that’s “stuck,” with no magic or imagination. Even the clouds, “strange” as they are, are the same — day after day.

Peter’s being raised by an old soldier (Mandy Patinkin) who is training him to be a young soldier — discipline, hardship (he’s only allowed to buy old “hard” bread from the baker) and marching are his life.

“What is the world?” old Vilna drills him. “HARD.” Any idea that it isn’t is just “a fairy tale.”

“Where there is comfort, there is innocence. Where there is innocence, there can never be a soldier.”

So, no comfort for you!

But when Peter takes the day’s coin to go out and buy the day’s hard bread and “tiniest fish” for dinner, he gives way to his imagination by paying our narrating fortune teller, who seems to know a lot about him, to answer just one question. He wants to know about this sister he was sure he had. How can he find her?

“Follow the elephant,” she says. The elephant “will lead you to her!”

But elephants are just another item on old Vilna’s list of “impossible” things. “False hope” that there are such things will serve no purpose. But when a clumsy magician (Benedict Wong, kind of funny) conjures one up in the middle of his flailing act in town, it makes the newspaper. Old Vilna’s “False hope!” starts to sound like “Fake News!” The kid wonders if the old man, who assured him that his sister is long dead, ever “lied to me.”

In any event, Peter seeks out the elephant (the magician was jailed for his stunt as the town fears that which it does not know or understand). And with the aid of his palace guard neighbor (Oscar nominee Brian Tyree Henry), he prevents the never-laughs Countess (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) and her advisors from “getting rid of it.” The good time Charlie king (Aasif Mandvi, flip and funny and all alone in his comic efforts) is notified, shows up and takes charge.

But Peter needs the elephant to find his sister. Sure, the joker with the crown says. Do “Three impossible tasks” and you can have it. The tasks are set up and poor Peter must do what no one thinks is possible three times in order to fulfill “my destiny.”

Miranda Richardson voices an older woman “crushed” by the elephant, and determined to make the magician pay with a daily in-jail harangue. Dawn French voices the nun/nurse who, it turns out, took in Peter’s sister long ago.

Mandvi, always good for a few chuckles (he was Uncle Morty on TV’s version of “A Series of Unfortunate Events”), breathes life into his scenes. But one of his king character’s impossible quests for Peter is, of course, to make the Countess who never laughs laugh. The fact that even that scene is a stiff, even by kid-oriented slapstick standards, points at the principal failing of Martin Hynes’ screenplay.

He’s nailed down the messaging. But he’s trapped in the same somber self-serious fairytale that Camillo ordained. A touching moment plays, here and there. The elephant, trapped in this situation and far from its own kind, deserves better than this, Peter comes to realize.

But as that and the other themes and subtexts here aren’t all that serious or profound, a lighter hearted touch was called for and is sorely missed, scene after static, beautifully-animated scene.

Rating: TV-G

Cast: The voices of Noah Jupe, Brian Tyree Henry, Mandy Patinkin, Aasif Mandvi, Natasia Demetriou, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Miranda Richardson and Benedict Wong

Credits: Directed by Wendy Rogers, scripted by Martin Hynes, based on the novel by Kate DiCamillo. A Mar. 17 Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43`

“Daisy Jones & the Six” is a buzzed-about show that’s been on everybody’s radar for a few months for the following reasons. Elvis’s granddaughter, Riley Keough stars as a singer-songwriter in a Stevie Nicks/Laura Nero early ’70s mold.

It’s based on a popular novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

And entertainment editors and most TV and film reviewers are mostly old enough to have a nostalgia for “Almost Famous,” and have a passing interest in “The Laurel Canyon Sound” of the ’70s. Are the kids listening to this music? TBD.

So it’s dated because we’re dated, and if I had to guess, I’d say the people who pushed the soundtrack of this series to the top of iTunes are some of the same folks familiar with the novel — old enough to get an AARP invitation in the mail.

To use another antiquated reference, that line Wayne used to Garth in a “Wayne’s World” sketch to describe Fleetwood Mac — “Classic ‘older brother’s band.” — still stings, and in this case, fits.

The series? Three episodes in, after The Dunne Brothers Band from Pittsburgh has renamed itself as The Six, taken its shot and been tripped up by drugs, sex and misbehavior on the road, lead singer/songwriter Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin) sums up the story thus far, and pretty much going forward as well.

“Same old rock’n roll tale.”

It’s the story of a band with multiple singers and a British keyboards player (Suki Waterhouse). So we’re invited to believe we’re seeing a version of the “Rumors” of Fleetwood Mac. But there’s a hint of Linda Ronstadt and The Eagles and Jackson Browne and maybe CSNY in the sound and the scene.

That “Fleetwood” connection is tenuous. And that rock singer fronting a dreamy, ’60s band that sonically resembles The Jefferson Airplane? The one who date-rapes rich girl/groupie/aspiring singer Daisy at a rock star party when she’s just 15? It’s just a coincidence that he’s a taller, dark-haired version of Marty Balin.

Well, he’s dead so he won’t sue over this dead ringer.

The 10 episode series follows the rise, stumble and rise again and abrupt break-up after a sold-out Soldier Field (Chicago) show in ’77, framed in a 1997 mockumentary, complete with surviving figures from their glory days answering off-camera (and off-mike, to make it “authentic”) questions about their history.

If this series is connecting with a younger audience, that may be because they have a passing familiarity with classic rock (The Dunne Brothers do Credence and Animals covers at prom and graduation parties), vintage California pop and rock and perhaps utter ignorance of the many films this show “borrows” from.

“Eddie and the Cruisers” and “Almost Famous” for starters, a bit of “The Rose” here, a touch of this or that there.

It’s broad enough to fold in a studio scene soul backup singer (Nabiyah Be) who will turn disco diva with a secret later in the series. She’s gay.

Here’s what we look and listen for in such enterprises, that spine-tingling moment when Queen figures out the chorus to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the first time we hear “The Dark Side” thrown together in rehearsal by Eddie and his Cruisers, Brian Wilson fanatically tapping into family and friends harmonies, and the theremin to create “Good Vibrations,” Aretha putting her special touch on “RESPECT” on screen, Carole pounding the piano because she feels “the Earth move under my feet” on stage.

There isn’t a tune here that provides that. Keough (“Zola,” “The Devil All the Time) and Claflin (“Peaky Blinders”) are pleasantly listenable under-trained singers, with him convincing enough as a tries-too-hard front man (in the early scenes) and Keough a natural born “go my own way” spitfire. The music and the band’s performances of it don’t provide the show with any sort of life.

The first few episodes jump right into forming the band, running away to LA where local lass Margaret is evolving into Daisy, a groupie with a notebook she writes songs in. So little of interest happens that when Timothy Olyphant shows up as a jaded road manager who might help them out, you get your hopes up.

Tom Wright, who’s been around since “Seinfeld” and “Barbershop,” plays a seen-it-all producer desperate to stay relevant by finding The Next Big Thing. He’s got the best lines, delivered with a jaded wisdom on an archived (faked) “Merv Griffin Show” appearance, telling the story of “discovering” Daisy, who didn’t want to be discovered or “shaped” by a producer, and thus stomps off.

“Sometimes the back of someone is the best way to see who they are,” producer Teddy Price intones, a line not given any sexual innuendo at all.

When the wary Daisy, facing the same sexism and outright harassment other early women of rock face in “Daisy & the Six,” rebuffs his strictly-professional entreaties again, he drops a quarter in the jukebox, Dusty Springfield launches into “Son of a Preacher Man,” and he tells the impertinent brat, “By the way, THIS is a song.”

He also drives the coolest car — a Maserati Sebring.

There’s enough musical archeology to all of this, the LA “Sunset Strip” scene with The Troubadour, recording studios and the like, the band’s first “stick together” vows after we’ve heard them stumble through “House of the Rising Sun,” to keep some folks interested.

But what this series, with several episodes directed by the gifted writer (not here) and director James Ponsoldt (“The Spectacular Now”), immerses us in is the soap opera, the photographer/lover/wife (Camilla Morrone) Billy falls for, bassist Dunne brother Graham (Will Harrison) falling for the sexy, sophisticated Brit keyboardist.

And that, friends and music fans, isn’t all that and isn’t remotely as sexy or sordid as the “real” Fleetwood Mac saga. Nor is the soundtrack, I might add. Want to hear a great recreation of that general era, just after Janis? Spotify “The Rose” or buy it on iTunes. That Bette Midler could bring it, break you up with a laugh or break your heart.

There’s little that passes for any of that in “Daisy Jones & The Six.

Rating: TV-MA, drugs, sex, etc.

Cast: Riley Keough, Sam Clalfin, Camilla Morrone, Suki Waterhouse, Will Harrison, Nabiyah Be, John Whitehouse, Sebastian Chacon, Timothy Olyphant and Tom Wright.

Credits: Created by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber based on the novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid. An Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 10 episodes, @44-50 minutes each.  

A $7 million Thursday folded into a $22 million Friday ensures that the third film in the (alleged) “Creed” trilogy will have the biggest opening in that “Rocky” spinoff franchise.

Deadline.com is projecting $51 for “Creed III,” as of Sat AM, so figure $55-60 ($58 and change is the Sunday AM estimate). Not a very good script, but some good fights and wonderful acting make it safe bet for fans of the fight, the genre and the series.

“Avatar: The Way of Water” is losing screens and has finally faded from the top five. Not a bad run for a Christmas release.

“Ant-Man/The Wasp/Quantumania” is fading a lot faster than that, but $12 million or so will give it a second place showing.

That’s barely more than the second weekend of “Cocaine Bear,” which is in selling tickets at a $10-11 million pace.

“Jesus Revolution” is holding audience and sticking around, another $7-8 million this weekend, which could put it over $30 by Sunday, Monday at the latest. That’s a faith-based hit.

The Crunchyroll anime action epic, “Demon Slayer into the Swordsmith Village” is on a $4 million path.

That’s better than Guy Ritchie’s final Jason Statham reunion. “Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre” will clear $3, but not much more than that. It deserves better.

“Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” is winding down its run ($2.3) and looks to hit the $180-185 line before losing its screens.

“80 for Brady” will bow out of the top ten next weekend, having earned just over $40, all in .

“Magic Mike: The Last Dance” will be out of the top ten by next weekend as well. Good riddance.