Movie Nation

“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.

“The Year Between” is an amusing, infuriating and sometimes touching dance around mental illness. It’s a dry, droll dramedy that dares to show the narcissism that comes with a diagnosis that gives a college coed license to suck all of the oxygen out of everyone around her as she offhandedly and carelessly gets treatment, and childishly mucks it up.

“Today is about me,” Clemence announces, as if her family hasn’t figured that out. “EVERY day is about you,” her younger brother reminds her, and not without a truckload of resentment.

Writer, director and star Alex Heller gives this indie film an a memorably obnoxious heroine, a 20 year old who’d probably be a jerk even without the bipolar mania that is what “The German woman” (Waltrudis Buck) says is what ails her the very first time they meet. Clemence (Heller) calls her psychiatrist “the German woman’ to take away some of her power.”

Clemence (Heller) is unfiltered and unmotivated, self-medicating because “I can’t fall asleep at night and everyone hates me,” shoplifting for a cheap thrill and insulting because she can’t be bothered to be otherwise.

We’ve seen her blithely bully and terrorize her college roommate, who finally has had enough and calls Clemence’s Mom (J. Smith-Cameron), who shows up in an ancient minivan in a fury. She, too, has had enough.

Thus “the German woman.” Followed by “Lithium.” And a therapist. When you’re riding around your home town (Oak Brook, Illinois) and saying the demonic part out loud — “Somebody should BOMB this place,” folks are going to be alarmed.

“The Year Between” is a “true events” inspired account of a mentally ill “gap year.” Clemence needs help and Mom is determined to get it for her, no matter how ruinous it is for the finances of a gift shop owner and her school teacher husband (Steve Buscemi), no matter how disruptive it is for college bound younger sister Carlin (Emily Robinson) or shy, trying to come into his own high school freshman Neil (Wyatt Oleff).

The family moves her into the basement, where if nothing else, her night terrors will be a little harder to hear and her lashing out isn’t likely to break anything valuable.

Her siblings are forced out of the family’s focus as the “mentally ill burnout” takes all the attention and effort. Clemence takes the dog for a walk at down, and doesn’t come back until the wee hours of the following morning. Clemence entertains the attentions of stoner ex-classmate Ashik (Rajeev Jacob).

But she eventually gets a job down at Big Deals, the discount store.

“I don’t have any previous experience, references or emergency contacts.” Her qualifications? “I have a name, an address and a dream!”

There aren’t any real “wake-up calls” with mental illness. If there were, younger Black colleague Beth (Kyanna Simone) would be Clemence’s. Beth is much more adult, organizing and planning her future because if she goes off the rails “nobody’s taking me in to live in their basement.”

Heller is the embodiment of narcissistic deadpan in this role she has scripted and built her movie around. She tests us as the rude and rash Clemence tests her family, daring us to not like her, not root for her, to not wish her away.

Every character is generously fleshed-in, letting us see the problems dogging her neglected siblings, her mother’s determination to do right by a kid who is wrecking their family and Clemence’s dad’s upbeat nature, sorely tested by a child so ill everybody else’s issues take a back seat.

“After a point, chaos sucks.”

Heller details the pitfalls of psychotherapy — it’s expensive and not every shrink graduated in the top half of his or her class — and the side effects of prescription drugs.

And for all of that, she manages to find room for the slightest glimmer of hope.

This indie outing won’t find a large audience, but that sliver of optimism makes it a must-see movie for anybody dealing with someone on the Clemence spectrum in their life. By giving us a solid if snarky take on the what living with ADHD in its ugliest forms is like, both for the sufferer and those who suffer with her, our first-time writer-director has made a movie that can’t help but be a public service.

Rating: unrated, adult subject matter, drug abuse, sex, profanity

Cast: Alex Heller, Kyanna Simone, J Smith-Cameron, Emily Robinson, Wyatt Oleff, Rajeev Jacob, Waltrudis Buck and Steve Buscemi

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alex Heller. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:34

The voice that giggles off the page in her new memoir is unmistakably Geena Davis — funny, frank, and self-effacing, a tall woman and towering talent with a lifelong girlish streak. She is Thelma without the hellion’s drawl, Dottie Hinson, blocking home plate, daring you to run on her, Barbara in “Beetlejuice” adjusting to her newfound, dead state, with a little Valerie — coy and apple-cheeked cute making one wonder if indeed, “Earth Girls are Easy” — thrown in for sex appeal.

But this just-revealing-enough memoir is designed to make one reconsider her glamorous screen persona, and the offscreen focus that allowed Oscar winning actress, activist and accomplished archer (in her ’40s) to be a success in spite of the self-conscious-about-her-height, self-doubt and enforced humility of her upbringing.

An early anecdote recalls how Davis’ Massachusetts family was so “polite” they’d almost let a distracted, careless-driving relative plunge them into oncoming traffic and fiery deaths rather than speak out and risk being thought of as “impolite.”

The modest, chipper, upbeat image that she trots out for chat shows, book tours and speeches on behalf of her Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media is a lifelong construct, and makes her standout in a business bent on rewarding “chutzpah.” Not that she doesn’t have that, too. She arm-twisted her friend Lawrence Kasdan for the role that made her and earned her an Oscar, “The Accidental Tourist.” And Madonna probably never got over her nudging her aside to star in “Angie,” a hot, working class New York script making the rounds as “Angie, I Says.”

But the lady who liked being known as “the nicest person on set” in all her movies — save for “A League of Their Own” (“You simply can’t out-nice Tom Hanks.”) let herself get pushed around a lot over the course of her career– bullying power games with directors and co-stars, harassing come-ons in auditions and the like. That compulsion is to “be nice,” polite, “not cause a fuss” or bring attention to herself gave her trouble, but she never grew out of it.

There’s something vaguely enervating about the Spanish romance “Love at First Kiss.”

It never was a romantic comedy, despite having a situation or two and a character or two ripe for it. And the film rarely crosses the line into “sweetly sad.”

But it’s a dispiriting 96 minutes in any event, and perhaps its the plot and the “hero” that make it so.

Álvaro Cervantes stars as Javier, our hunky narrator who tells his tale with a whiff of resignation in his voice-over.

Ever since he was a teen, Javier’s been able to “see” an entire relationship,” its early heat and romantic peaks and promise and eventual dissolution, just in that “first kiss.”

His superpower does him no good. Because whatever the women he “dumps” think of him, he’s playing for keeps and just now getting a grasp of the patterns that flash before his eyes in that “besame mucho moment. We meet him just as he’s about to have another drink dumped on him at his favorite pub.

No woman wants some jerk to tell her “We have no future,” no matter how certain he is that he’s irrefutably right, because he’s seen it.

Lucia (Silvia Alonso), the live-in girlfriend of his pal Roberto (Gorka Otxoa), has had a few chances to size Javier up, and gets downright mean about Mr. “Commitment-phobic.” Still, she’s got this broken-hearted friend she tries to set him up with, just as her “transition f—,” a guy you meet and exploit for uncomplicated sex, just to get over the last boyfriend.

Javier can see where the fix-up will end up, getting vomited on by a night of clubbing. So he does his best to dodge that bullet. That’s how he ends up kissing his “best friend’s girl,” who “hates” him.

And what he sees when he and Luca lock lips is straight out of a classic Levi’s commercial. This is the happy ending he’s been looking for.

The movie then becomes a coy game of avoiding the inevitable, then trying to not hurt Roberto, then surrendering. But is the inevitable as romantic as it sounds?

Suspenseful but contrived, over-the-top and far from the most “logical” thriller, file “Unseen” under “sloppy movie but a good time.”

It’s a sight-impaired person imperiled thriller, borrowing its can’t-see, a stranger on a cell phone can help plot from “See For Me.” This short, brisk and sometimes cute tale a first for Blumhouse) loses its urgency and sense of logic more than once. But it has its edge-of-your-seat moments. And thanks to stars Midori Francis and Jolene Purdy, we root for our heroines, two strangers linked by a misdial and the frantic effort to save one from her murderous ex.

“Grey’s Anatomy” alumna Francis plays Emily, who wakes up tied-up in the Michigan hunting cabin of her psychotic “trust fund baby” ex-boyfriend (Michael Patrick Lane).

Purdy, of “Orange is the New Black,” is Sam, a rural Florida convenience store clerk bracing for another day of hell-on-the-job. It’s her number that blind-without-my-glasses Emily rings when 911 reassures her that they’ll get permission to figure out where she is and save her in “an hour.”

Emily’s overpowered her “talks-too-much villain” captor — “Remember why we were together?” But she breaks her glasses, and the world’s a blur, from her cell screen to the woods she lunges into in attempting her escape.

Sam, a plump, quivering mass of insecurities bullied by her redneck boss (Nicholas X. Parsons) — “You smell like failure!” — is thus given the responsibility of directing this stranger to safety by narrating what she sees on Emily’s phone to her, looking up problem solutions (how to bust out of zip ties) on Youtube and by getting woodlore tips from the least hostile customer to stop into Gators Galore Gas and Convenience.

The cellphone as “work the problem” tool has been a feature of a few films now, including the recent “Missing.” “See for Me” was better and more believable at making the gadget a literal lifeline.

But this script finds a lot of mischief and mayhem to visit on our two linked-by-T-Mobile strangers. Emily’s ex is hunting her, and since he kidnapped her on her morning jog, she’s wearing the least-camouflaged track suit imaginable. Meek Sam, already coping with an abusive absentee boss and a busted squishy/Icee/Slurpy machine, finds herself forced to help Emily, but facing off with the Rich Bitch Customer from Hell.

Tell the truth. You pictured Miss Pyle when you read that.

As Emily’s plight grows more dire, Sam’s situation escalates in the most Missi Pyle way ever.

There are a couple of gonzo moments in that convenience store that could have set the tone for “Unseen.” Pyle typically appears in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” fish-eye lens close-ups, exaggerating her over-the-top menace.

Some of Emily’s confrontations with rich nut job Charlie have an almost comical “couples therapy” edge.

And there’s a bit of bonding between the two women — who cannot KNOW both are Asian-American — over the racism of “Breakfast at Tiffany;s” (Mickey Rooney’s “white guy in ‘yellow face'” stereotype) and the way cruel kids use “Power Rangers” insultingly on Asian classmates.

There’s good stuff here, not all of it lost in a sometimes illogical, often slow-footed 76 minute (with credits) thriller. Engaging leads aside, this never quite “gets there.” But at least the story doesn’t waste a lot of anybody’s time in the attempt.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, pot use

Cast: Midori Francis, Jolene Purdy, Michael Patrick Lane, Nicholas X Parsons and Missi Pyle.

Credits: Directed by Yoko Okumura, scripted by Salvatore Cardoni and Brian Rawlins. A Blumhouse film, a Paramount Home Entertainment/MGM+ release.

Running time: 1:16