Movie Nation

Odd timing for this indie tale of peril and priests.

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It’s an iconic set up, a “Show us what you’ve got” moment common to a whole lot of movies about “wheelmen,” the guys who drive the getaway car.

The hoods have shown up in a little old lady Mercedes, an orange 1970 280 S. They flinch at the getaway driver’s asking price.

“How do we know you’re that good?”

“The Driver” barely gives the orange import a second glance and snaps “Get in.”

The “audition” comes after we’ve seen “The Driver,” played by Ryan O’Neal, run a string of police cruisers into walls in an opening chase. Plainly, the would-be robbers missed that. So he proceeds to terrorize them by dismantling that Merc, bumper by bumper, door-by-snapped-off-door, deftly screeching down the lanes of a parking garage, popping the stems off fire hose valves on each pillar as he power slides, drifts and rams walls for their benefit.

It’s a representative of the genre now, but writer-director Walter Hill’s minimalist jewel wasn’t appreciated by critics or audiences when it came out. Over forty years later, we can see it for the Urtext that it was. O’Neal’s tightlipped, unflappable wheelman inspired “Transporter” movies, a whole Clive Owen ad campaign (“The Hire”) featuring famous filmmakers, Ryan Gosling’s “Drive,” “Wheelman,” “Baby Driver” and a few Quentin Tarantino movies and car movie moments to boot.

Nobody has a name, everybody’s a “type” or archetype. There’s The Driver (O’Neal), the Detective (Bruce Dern, funny and hateful) hunting the handsome, country-music loving wheel he nicknames “Cowboy,” the Fed’s combative underling (Matt Clark), The Connection (a “go between” played by Ronee Blakley, a Robert Altman favorite), The Player, aka an alibi and woman of mystery played by Isabelle Adjani, and assorted mugs, thugs and trigger men who find themselves in need of our anti-hero, who could have coined the phrase, “Drive it like you stole it.”

This isn’t “Bullitt,” with its signature race through Greater San Francisco. It’s not as deft and delicate as the spectacular Euro car getaways of the films of Luc Besson & others — “Transporter” or “Ronin” — often stunt-directed by Rémy Julienne.

No, these are overpowered Yank Tanks from Detroit’s Golden Age of Gas Waste and Planned Obsolescence. LTDs etc. stolen (all you needed was a screwdriver) and put through heedless abuse of automatic transmissions, worm-gear steering, drum brakes and leaf spring suspensions as he ignores LA red lights and barrels down every downtown street, alley or parking garage. Stunt coordinator Everett Creach and a dozen drivers put anything Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham did with “Smoke and the Bandit” Trans Ams (and a Firebird here) to shame.

O’Neal, a light comedian and pretty boy romantic lead, was never as cool or as tough as he is here, a man of mad skills and few words.

His performance and this film became the model of how these guys are portrayed on the screen — quiet, focused, mistrusting and mysterious professionals.

The plot is paper thin, the action explosive — double crosses and set ups, chases and shoot outs. A favorite moment, our Driver gets the drop on a double-crosser by shooting him through the rolled up car window of the open door he’s standing behind.

He stole it. He’s not worried about replacing the glass, and Hill’s not going to need a retake.

Hill, fresh off his first sleeper hit, “Hard Times,” backed by two future heavyweight producers (Lawrence Gordon of LARGO, Frank Marshall of Team Spielberg), could weather a film that didn’t draw crowds and didn’t have the sort of enthusiastic reviews of his even brawnier “Hard Times.” He would go from this to make “The Warriors,” a cult film that has grown in stature and is pretty much considered the quintessential Walter Hill Film — tough guys, tougher broads and two-fisted action.

But “The Driver” has also grown in stature. Hill was never more bankable than when he leaped from “The Warriors” and “Long Riders” and peaked with the blockbuster action buddy comedy “48 Hrs.” Hill’s lean, archetypal style, translated to Vietnam allegories (“Southern Comfort”) and Westerns or crime pictures (“Johnny Handsome”), became something everybody growing up watching those films wanted to copy when they got to make their own movies.

From Tarantino to Besson to Nicolas Winding Refn, Hollywood to Hong Kong, Seoul to the South of France, when the underworld needs to get someplace, they’re calling a version of “The Driver,” someone they don’t dare ask the wrong question.

“How do we know you’re that good?

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Ryan O’Neal, Isabelle Adjani, Bruce Dern, Matt Clark, Felice Orlandi and Ronee Blakley

Credits: Scripted and directed by Walter Hill.

Running time: 1:30

Dave Bautista and Co. test a gay couple and their kid in this “Sophie’s Choice for All Humanity” moral thought experiment.

Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rupert Grint, Abby Quinn, Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge also star.

Shyamalan has gone all in on these cryptic parables. People in a cabin the woods, people on a beach, people in an elevator.

Are we all in with him?

Don’t want to get too carried away about how much this new Brit zombie movie “Alive” sucks, but the “doctor” in a painfully amateurish opening scene gives “bad news” by putting on and taking off his glasses half a dozen times in just under a minute of screen time.

A fire scene early in the viral zombie apocalypse is staged in what is plainly a fire department’s narrow high rise training tower.

Every new sequence its own dose of “What fresh hell is this?”

“Alive” is a sloppy mashup of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Every Zombie Movie Ever Made.

The virus hits a culture that seems resigned to it, I have to say. Keep Calm and Give Up, apparently. Even those fleeing seem dispirited.

The brain-eaters have the good sense to be able to dodge gunfire and the good grace to make that generic monster clicking/gurgling noise common to everything from “Predator” movies to “Jurassic Park” installments.

Makes it harder for them to sneak up on you, you see.

Our writer-director, David Marantz, clumsily establishes multiple characters to follow — a little boy (Daniel May-Gohrey, his 15 year-old sister (Ellen Hillman) and her boyfriend (Kian Pritchard), an armed, crazed “End is Nigh” preacher (Stuart Matthews) and his “Huh, he finally got THAT right” flock, and a lone hunter (Neil Sheffield) holed-up in a cottage in the woods.

I suppose the zombies who stumble into the hunter but refuse to chase him across a creek are meant to reinforce the notion of an “island off the south coast” where these Brits can hide out and hold out and restart civilization. Zombies afraid of water, and all that.

Of course, the island, promoted on desperate radio broadcasts, has a catch attached. They’re really interested in “women (and girls) capable of bearing children.”

The picture puts these disparate groups on the road, and then stops undead in its tracks when the production got hold of what looks like an old school for a location. The bulk of the film is show there, where the action is limited and the kids try to fend off the cult with the help of the hunter and they’re all wondering if they have enough ammo to keep the walking dead at bay.

The acting ranges from poor to middling, with the direction and editing making everybody in it look new to this whole “movie” thing. Cuts begin before the take’s action kicks in, and pause afterwards for a long beat or two before the next shot is edited in.

Amateurish.

It’s a bad zombie movie that staggers to a halt and turns worse.

Rating: PG-13, violence

Cast: Ellen Hillman, Kian Pritchard, Neil Sheffield, Gillian Broderick, Daniel May-Gohrey and Stuart Matthews.

Credits: Scripted and directed by David Marantz. A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:32

Not every actor in his position, once more famous than he is now and a long time between hit films or must-see series, gets the parts that Ryan Phillippe does.

Even the B-movies have possibilities, and if not high-mindedness, at least the nobility of being sturdy installments in time-honored genres. Phillippe seems to get that, and rarely disappoints in such outings, no matter how malnourished some of them seem.

As “The Locksmith” he’s a career criminal whose partner is murdered on a safecracking job by the dirty cop who set it up. The film is about how this bad-man-who-was-wronged carries himself and what he gets mixed-up in when he gets out ten years later.

There are lapses in logic that far-too-often let it down. But with a good cast and an eminently hissable villain (Jeff Nordling), it gets the job done, and Phillippe has another solid, value-added turn on his resume.

He plays Miller Graham, a small-time crook in a small city in the desert southwest. We meet him just as that burglary arranged by Det. Zwick (Nordling) goes south and Zwick covers his ass by killing Graham’s partner.

There’re no on-the-scene heroics as this goes down. Graham has a wife and baby girl. His partner had a kid sister. There’s nothing for it but to keep his mouth shut, take the arrest and do his time.

Ten years later, he tries to reconcile with his ex (Kate Bosworth) and get to know his kid (Madeleine Guilbot). His old partner and mentor Frank (Ving Rhames) gives him “handy man” work as a locksmith’s assistant, so “staying clean” is within reach.

The dirty cop may be retiring, but his makes sure his corrupt unit roughs Graham up for old time’s sake. And the sister (Gabriela Quezada) of Grahams late partner-in-crime has grown up to have problems of her own, and demands his help.

His past won’t let him go.

Some actions our hero takes seem illogical, and some situations have him as the last guy in the room who gets a clue about what’s really going on.

When a bad guy says “Kill ANYbody!” to a subordinate, we logically expect that to be carried out, not leaving this or that loose end to fend for himself or herself and plot the criminals’ undoing.

But Nordling makes a terrific heavy, Rhames oozes credibility as the wizened small-time crook turned small business owner, Bosworth holds her own and Phillippe hits just the right notes — crooked to the core, wary of everybody except for “family,” naive enough to think his instincts are enough.

“The Locksmith’s” not bad, unless you’re inclined to — you know — pick at it.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Ryan Phillippe, Kate Bosworth, Ving Rhames, Jeff Nordling, Gabriela Quezada, Madeleine Guilbot, Charlie Webber and Tom Wright.

Credits: Nicolas Harvard, scripted by John Glosser and Ben Kabialis. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:32

An Indian wedding, a kidnapped maharajah and Mark Strong as “a real detective” feature in this March 31 action comedy that is the third teaming of Sand Man and “Jenn.”

Could be fun. Probably not, but let’s see what we see.

Lily Collins plays a wealthy, powerful family’s daughter who learns about their skeleton in the attic — actually hidden in a bunker in the woods of the family estate — in “Inheritance,” a lumbering thriller from the director of the Margot Robbie bomb titled “Terminal.”

Putting the ballerina-dainty Collins in any movie where physical throw-weight matters is always problematic. Here, she’s a Manhattan district attorney facing down corrupt billionaires and their high-priced lawyers in court by day, a manic daughter trying to keep the upper hand on a bigger, more motivated hermit her father enslaved in an underground lair decades before.

Put aside any issues with the film’s pacing, the public servant’s reluctance to do what seems like the obvious “right” and “legal” thing, and it’s just hard to buy Collins in many situations this movie puts her in. She’s easy to underestimate, to perceive as a lightweight, figuratively and literally.

It all comes to pieces for Lauren Monroe when her stern, high-expectations banker/father (Patrick Warburton) dies in the middle of her biggest case.

Daddy shafting her in the will, favoring her embattled Congressman younger brother (Chace Crawford), assorted charities and her mother (Connie Nielsen), doesn’t help.

But Daddy left Lauren a flash drive and a key. He won’t tell her, on his video message from the grave, his “secret.” But the key, and the location of the lock it fits will. It’s the source of “a secret you must carry to your grave.”

That’s where the bearded, soiled and miserable hostage who eventually tells her his name is “Morgan” is kept. Played by a barely-recognizable (FLAWless accent, mate!) Simon Pegg, this reluctant hermit locked away where even sunlight can’t find him has a tale to tell. And he takes his sweet time telling it.

Lauren, even with pressures closing in around her (court, media attention, her in-the-dark husband played by Marque Richardson and their little girl), can’t let herself panic or even feel any urgency about getting to the bottom of this crime and scandal-above-all-scandals.

Morgan? He’s desperate but apparently patient, a man who has held on, clinging to a memorized recipe for key lime pie, making petty demands when he realizes she’s not going to let him go on sight.

“My survival would be my revenge” on her father, he tells her.

Director Vaughn Stein takes forever to get this movie on its feet, and the slower he goes, the more Collins stands out as inadequate as his lead. We need to have lots of doubts about her actions and motivations, sense an inner resolve and toughness, see her doing the instant calculus of what she’s confronted with.

A faster-paced film might have given us at least the illusion of those, papered over with the urgency of “This will all blow up in my face any second now” that we never, ever feel in a movie about a situation that should throw our heroine into a rash, blind panic.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Lily Collins, Simon Pegg, Connie Nielsen, Michael Beach, Chace Crawford, Marque Richardson and Patrick Warburton

Credits: Directed by Vaughn Stein, scripted by Matthew Kennedy. A Vertical release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:51

The horror writer and his son are having quite the big bounce in Hollywood paydays, and this June 2 release adds to that and yet barely scratches the surface in the back catalog of Stephen King writing that could be filmed, streamed or podcast.

The run of hits has been dazzling, with even assorted streaming adaptations drawing big names and attention.

Those of us who lived through earlier waves of Steven King adaptations are entitled to wonder if and when this one will crest and ebb.

With horror held in such high regards these days it’s not likely he’ll be perceived as box office poison. But he’s had his in and out years.

This looks fairly conventional.

Maybe it’s better than the trailer.

“Mixtape” is a word loaded with meaning to generations, a form of musical shorthand with one person curating a collection of songs to express their feelings for someone else, to make a statement about who they are through their musical tastes, or just provide appropriate jams to accompany a road trip.

So titling your documentary “Mixtape Trilogy” builds in certain expectations.

But the film Kathleen Ermitage presents under that label, “Mixtape Trilogy: Stories of the Power of Music” has literally nothing to do with such expectations. It’s a tuneful three musicians/three “fans” film groping around for a theme, with a title that seems an overreach as well.

There’s a somewhat touching opening story of how Indigo Girls fanatic Dylan Yellowlees — who has attended over 350 of their shows over the decades — found comfort, identity and her “tribe” when she caught their first hit, “Closer to Fine” on the radio.

Neither the “Girls” — Amy Ray and Emily Saliers — nor Yellowlees had come out in the late ’80s when they first hit and Yellowlees discovered her favorite band. But a life-bond was made, and they’ve actually gotten to know each other over the years. Remembering how closeted most of gay America was at that time, Yellowlees paints an interesting picture of that first Indigo Girls concert, where “I wasn’t the only lesbian” in the room, for the first time in perhaps her life.

Garnette Cardogan is a Charlottesville essayist and academic, a native of Jamaica and jazz fan who lived in New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina sent him to New York, where he found Indian-American jazz pianist Vijay Iyer, and they bonded over Iyer’s “political” techno-tinged tunes.

And Michael Ford is a Detroit native with a design school background who bills himself as “The Hip Hop Architect,” someone who dissects and deconstructs tunes by the likes of Talib Kweli, and uses that to inspire designs and urban planning and teaches kids to analyze musical messaging and structure via his Hop Hop Architecture Camps.

The three “stories” here don’t really connect. The music is good, but the stories are so different, with each falling on different spots on the “Is there a point to all this?” spectrum that ,the film doesn’t measure up to the tunes.

And damned if I can figure this hip architecture thing that finishes it, other than to guess SOMEbody must be quite good at grant writing to turn a notion that vague and nebulous into a kids’ camp.

Honestly, that goes for the filmmaker as well. Breaking down this “Mixtape” all I can see and hear is three indifferent short films formatted to fit together, but not really making a point.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Amy Ray, Emily Saliers, Dylan Yellowlees, Vijay Iyer, Garnette Cardogan, Michael Ford and Talib Kweli

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kathleen Ermitage. A 1091 release

Running time: 1:34