Movie Nation

“Petit Mal” is the ever-so-precious title of a minor Spanish melodrama about three twentysomething women who try a “throuple,” a lesbian menage a trois, on for size.

Director, writer and co-star Ruth Caudeli has crafted an intimate, quiet, self-consciously arty and petit prétentieux/petit terne (dull) film about what happens when that peaceful, work-in-progress relationship is tested by a long separation.

Marti, short for Martina (Silvia Varón), Anto (Ana María Otálora) and Laia (Caudeli) share a house, a pack of five dogs and their lives together in a kind of “unequal” romantic/domestic relationship.

They may lightly tease about which two aren’t allowed to speak Catalan instead of Castilian Spanish in front of the other and who “always burns the vegetables” when they’re cooking paella. But they eat off the same paella pan and seem to love and support one another in an almost conventionally unconventional way.

And when Laia talks about how penguins “mate for life,” we are allowed to guess where the fissures will open, because plainly she is the glue that holds the trio together.

Laia has some undefined job in film production which calls her to LA. Is she supporting them? Marti is editing a documentary about their lives together. And emotional Anto is a musician who sits at the piano at one weepy point and composes a lament, “One of three, and I’m alooooone” (in Spanish with English subtitles).

Laia’s leaving leads to tearful “Miss you” Facetime and creates quite the strain at home, where Marti and Anto apparently never would have gotten together were it not for Laia’s butch dyed-blonde allure. Something has to give. What will it be?

Caudeli doesn’t give us a movie of shouting matches, but of subtle, almost silent longing and loneliness. The women back in Spain take some time to get into sync, and find that one thing they might bond over is mutual suspicions of what that female tomcat Laia is up to it LA.

Even that isn’t debated out loud.

Caudeli leaves out back story altogether and takes a very long time to identify every character by name, which is naturalistic (most intimates don’t feel the need to call those their lover anything other than “Amor.” The writer-director never quite reveals exactly how these three keep home and hearth together, although we see one person stuck doing the dishes, another trusted with most of the cooking.

Instead of “how does this work” logistics, Caudeli lets us figure that out without all the information we need. We just observe.

She does that irritating, self-conscious filmmaker thing of serving up this scanty story in titled “chapters,” including “2: We convulsed.” That’s what “Petit Mal” means, a “tiny seizure.” Here, that’s the shock of separation and what it produces.

Every shot, including the right-on-cue sex scene, is beautifully-composed, with the middle acts filmed in black and white to show the color that’s drained out of the relationship that Laia appears to have masterminded.

It’s not a badly-crafted film, just a shallow gloss on these characters and a relationship that they don’t explain, don’t dissect and analyze, but simply live.

That’s not enough.

Rating: unrated, sex and nudity

Cast: Silvia Varón, Ana María Otálora, and Ruth Caudeli

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ruth Caudeli. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:29

One can abide many things from a screen comedy, but “pointlessness” is a real hard sell for me.

That’s a major gripe about the Italian farce “The Price of Family,” titled “Natale a tutti i costi” in the mother tongue.

A movie filled with characters irritating enough to get under your skin, with almost no one likable enough to root for or empathize with, it ruins even that “hate watching” quality by the time the credits roll. In the end, it’s just a dull, mirth-starved muddle that barely gets up on its feet long enough to fall flat.

It’s about bratty, self-absorbed adult kids and their needy, annoying empty-nest parents.

We meet Alessandra (Dharma Mangia Woods) and Emilio (Claudio Colica) on the day they’re leaving home. Both are moving from suburbia to “the city,” out of college and ready to strike out on their own. But at least they’ll come home for holidays, birthdays, funerals and the like, right? Family is everything in Italy, after all.

Nothing doing. A skipped holiday here, a missed funeral there. Next thing you know, Mom (Angela Finocchiaro) is cooking a big dinner, baking a cake — the works — and birthday girl Alessandra is a no show. Put-upon workaholic Emilio doesn’t come, either. They won’t even pick up the phone when Dad (Christian de Sica) wants to know what gives?

The little rompicoglionis.

Mom, competing with the neighbor whose doting daughter never misses a visit, is beside herself. They aren’t planning on coming Christmas, either?

So Anna and Carlo decide to play a little “joke.” That aunt’s funeral they skipped? Maybe the aunt left Anna and Carlo a big inheritance. Maybe they’ll let that slip and see just how shallow and “too busy” their kids really are. Anna’s mom (Fioretta Mari) tries to warn them.

“Revenge can be a little bit like getting too drunk,” she intones (in Italian, or dubbed into English). “When you need to stop, you’re unable to.”

The parents set up the trick with a bit of ghosting and a little conspicuous consumption — designer clothes for her, a (rented) Ferrari for him. Lo and behold, the prodigal children return, all attentive and affectionate and what not.

Sure, Emilio still gives his mom his laundry. And yes, Alessandra’s kind of adrift, having taken a job as a dentist’s receptionist and live-in lover, with vacation plans for every holiday.

But hey, nothing’s more important than family, right?

Writer-director Giovanni Bognetti (“I, Babysitter”) takes a shot at making this inconsequential comedy come off. First, things blow up on the callow kids. Then the parents are trapped in their web of lies and things blow up on them.

The leads are pretty bland, and the only supporting player to register is Alesssandro Betti, who plays Emilio’s abusive boss who is one of those who hears “money” and changes his tune. A little.

Nobody in this is likable, nothing about this is all that interesting and in the end, that whole “pointlessness” business kind of makes you wonder where where your 90 minutes went.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Christian de Sica, Angela Finocchiaro, Dharma Mangia Woods,
Claudio Colica, Alessandro Betti and Fioretta Mari.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Giovanni Bognetti. A Sony film on Netflix.

Running time: 1:30

Silent cinema isn’t for everyone, because not everyone is curious about the building blocks of modern cinema, how filmmakers from the era before “Babylon,” before the talkies, invented the language and techniques of storytelling with a camera.

But if you’re curious how an oft-filmed tale looked in its original, silent incarnation, if you want to know about erased female film pioneers, if you’ve immersed yourself in the canon of John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock or Chaplin, you might find yourself drawn to their earliest work, before microphones were added to film sets.

The Austrian Fritz Lang made the landmark early sci-fi thriller “Metropolis” and the murderer-hunted-down classic “M” before migrating to Hollywood and making his mark there with many films, “The Big Heat,” “Rancho Notorious” and “The Blue Gardenia” among them.

His influence on the genre defined as “film noir” by French critics could have just as well been labeled “Dunkel Film,” since a German-speaking Austrian filmmaker had such a big role in defining it.

Lang’s themes of crime and punishment, conspiracy and guilt became something like his calling cards over his long career. But when did that get its start? His “Doctor Mabuse” movies? “M?” His early silents?

The one-eyed World War I veteran was just three films into his directing career — he got into movies via scenario writing — when he brought “The Spiders” movies to audiences in 1919 and 1920. They were adventure serials, two one hour films, with two more planned and never made. A treasure-hunting tale built around an American adventurer, Kay Hoog (Carl de Vogt), they pitted him against a nefarious, secretive Chinese-founded crime organization named for its calling card — spiders.

Lang’s lifelong obsession with evil conspiracies and criminal masterminds, the persistent threat of organized criminal malevolence, is all over this lively, action-packed thriller.

Silent cinema in America was wholly primitive pre-“Birth of a Nation,” and still almost unwatchable pre-1920. A few Chaplin comedies are the exception, but by and large, the acting was overdone, presentational mime, the worst habits of the Victorian stage preserved on film well into the Edwardian era.

But the acting is startlingly natural in “The Spiders,” the fights and shootouts chaotic and perilous and the variety of settings, “researched” and envisioned by a German university’s ethnography department, an opening credit tells us, quite striking for a film from just-defeated post-war Germany.

Fay Hoog finds a literal message in a bottle, a location of an Inca treasure scrawled by a doomed adventurer we see toss the bottle into the sea just as he’s murdered in Peru. Fay puts on his tux and tells the others swells at his San Francisco club that he’s dropping whatever he’s doing to go and find it.

Oddly, he will do this alone. No “expedition” for him.

But “The Spiders,” a well-heeled organization of the entitled rich and their Chinese underworld partners, are determined to steal the directions to this treasure and get there before Fay. Their best agent, Lio Sha (Ressel Orla) organizes an expedition with Dr. Telphas (Georg John). Because unlike the pistol-packing Fay, she has an idea of how hard this will be.

Their cat and mouse chase begins on the long train ride south, continues as Fay makes escapes by horse and even hot air balloon, which Fay parachutes out of, with many assorted complications on their way to their meeting with destiny and the Last of the Incas.

Over the course of the two films — titled “The Golden Sea” and “The Diamond Ship” — the quest will change, from Inca gold to a Buddha-shaped diamond. But the rivals will remain the same. Bodies will turn up with spider dolls on their chest. And Fay will take sailing barquentines, motorcars and biplanes in his efforts to save this or that damsel, find treasure and take down The Spiders, or as they and these films about them were called in German, “Die Spinnen.”

Silent films were much easier to export than talking movies, so a film like this would have played far and wide, anywhere a projector could be had and the audience could be relied on to ignore recent history and its enemy combatant (German) origins.

That played a hand in this “lost” film’s recovery. If you become as famous as Fritz Lang, film historians are going to look for that earliest work. And if its only available in pieces from prints or negatives scattered all over the world, they’ll make the effort.

That explains the different shades of monochrome in this 1970s restoration. Lang was still living when that process started, and reminded the restorers that sequences were tinted into something resembling color here and there, and helped with the continuity, which is still choppy and not the easiest “simple” story to follow.

The acting impresses, as do the stunts, no matter how they faked them. An early scene, showing assorted spiders passing the word, via phone calls, features five talking figured matted (part of the film frame left unexposed) into the same shot, an impressive effect for the day.

Looking back on it from 100 years later, simple things like how train travel looked in the day, and a couple of still-used-for-commerce tall sailing ships are employed as sets might be the most impressive images. Whatever Hollywood and modern cinema do to recreate such vessels, the real thing is a striking image — towering masts of wood and vast arrays of rope rigging, sails and crew who knew how to work them.

Seen today, “The Spiders” can seem a pretty primitive affair. Racial attitudes and racial depictions flirt with being cringeworthy, and the narrative — with those German university ethnographers not pointing out that “Incas” as an organizing culture were 350 years dead by the time this movie was made — leaves something to be desired.

Lang’s ongoing obsession with crime is hinted at, but the guilt and punishment that became signature subjects and subtexts of his films would come later, after the suspicious death of his first wife in 1921. When you’re cheating on her and she dies with your military service pistol, either by suicide or perhaps even murdered by the filmmaker who would become famous, lifelong “guilt” is a given.

It’s still fascinating to any film buff to see the sort of ambitious work Lang was attempting in his 20s, just as his career was beginning, just as the image language of the cinema was being codified for all time.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Carl de Vogt, Ressel Orla, Lil Dagover, Georg John and Bruno Lettinger

Credits: Scripted and directed by Fritz Lang, a Declar-Bioscop AG film on Kino Lorber, Tubi, Amazon etc.

Running time: two films, shown together, 2:10

A couple of things keep me from reviewing more TV series, short or long form.

They’re a big investment in time if you want to do a show justice. Watching three, four or five episodes is kind of a must, and for someone who takes notes, jots down snippets of dialogue to illustrate punchy writing, or its opposite (dull hackwork), that’s a whole day.

And the reviews, once you’ve written them, have no shelf life. Viewers/consumers tend to flock to a show when it’s new, with a few obsessing about “Ozark,” “Bosch” or “The Walking Dead” or that Taika Waititi gay pirates thing, doing blogs, podcasts and the like as the series continues, while the rest of the culture has moved on.

With every streaming service coming up with marquee shows — “Handmaid’s Tale,” “Only Murders in the Building,” “Ted Lasso” — subscribing to them all just to keep up isn’t cost effective. Getting every single streamer/cable operation to provide critics with previews of their next big thing is exhausting, because most aren’t as efficient as most film studios, Netflix, Paramount and Apple TV+, at telling you what they have coming up and setting you up with site access to review it.

Follow Disney’s lead, kids. They have this figured out.

So I’m not reviewing “Poker Face,” despite its very promising pilot. And great cast. And the fact that Rian Johnson has taken his Netflix movie proof-of-concept handling of mysteries to its logical conclusion, long-form series.

A Natasha Lyonne star vehicle — long may she reign — it’s got elements of TV classics like “Columbo,” “The Fugitive” and “The Immortal” in it, as regular TV critics have pointed out. But its setting, starting in the sordid world of Nevada gambling and wandering off from there, has “The Cooler” and “Hard Eight” wired in.

Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, a high-mileage, high-functioning alcoholic who when we meet her is just another short-skirt cocktail waitress at Frost Casino in somewhere-other-than-Vegas Nevada. She’s “doing all right,” living in a tiny, battered travel trailer, keeping her ’70s Plymouth Barracuda running, with enough money for beer and whatever it is we don’t see her eating.

Charlie wound up in Gambling Country thanks to her “gift.” She’s got an uncanny knack for sensing when somebody is lying. Lying is called “bluffing” in poker, so you get the connection. Not that she can gamble there.

The pilot is about a friend from that casino hotel who sees something illegal and tries to report it and to reach Charlie, but is murdered in the opening scenes. As in “Colombo” and other tales of this type, the show is about how each week’s crime and criminal are unraveled by persistent, annoying Charlie, her gift and her slightly askew, somewhat half-assed sense of moral justice.

Johnson immerses us in each week’s corner of the world Charlie inhabits, makes his case for why crimes in this milieu are the sort that cops — in gambling towns, they’re pretty much all on the take — don’t sweat. These are “little people” whom “nobody’ll miss.” And he does his damnedest to scripturally and cinematically make Charlie’s case using just her tricky way of questioning (“The Closer,” with a near-supernatural bent), her booze-addled “Monk” powers of observation, her survival instincts and her common sense. Her vague goal, made up on the fly, is to crack the case and acquire some sort of rough justice by the open-ended (she’s on the lam) closing credits.

Lyonne, a former teen star who made a comeback with “Orange is the New Black,” is at her scruffy, sassy, blowsy best here. She makes most every time she says “BullSHIT” at a lie she’s willing to call someone on to their face, fresh.

Johnson signed up a SAG directory of co-stars to populate Charlie’s traveling panorama of victims and suspects — Oscar winner Adrien Brody and the steely Benjamin Bratt in the pilot, with Ron PERLMAN, Judith Light, the estimable Tim Blake Nelson, Megan Suri, Chloe Sevigny, Ellen Barkin, Nick Nolte, Simon Helberg (“Big Bang Theory”), Tim Meadows of “SNL,” Lil Rel Howery and the unseen, menacing voice of a Mr. Big casino owner matching wits and learning the parameters of Charlie’s “gift” the hard way throughout the run.

I like Johnson’s problem-solving, the situations he gets his characters into and ways he comes up with for Charlie to escape her latest fix. But I do wonder how long he can keep this up. “Glass Onion” proved that he’s got a limited number of tricks up his sleeve for Benoit Blanc to employ, and even in the pilot to “Poker Face” we see Charlie, and him, flailing a bit, missing the Best Way to Get Out of a Crowded Hotel When You’re Being Chased gambit.

Sending your heroine on the lam in a beater of a 50 year-old conspicuous muscle “car with character,” is cool but not the subtlest/cleverest touch.

But I plan to get back to “Poker Face” when Peacock parks it on their free site down the road. If you’re curious, Peacock will let you set up an account, credit card free, to see that pilot and some of their older content, so even if you don’t subscribe — $29 and change for a whole year right now seems like a bargain — you can at least see what all the fuss is about.

In the case of “Poker Face,” that fuss seems justified.

Emma Mackey plays the “Wuthering Heights” author in this early 19th century period piece from director Frances O’Connor.

Bleecker Street is distributing “Emily” in the US, late Feb. at an art cinema near you.

It’s not cricket to talk about a film’s third act and finale in a review, because that could lead to “spoilers” and one mustn’t reveal those. One just mustn’t.

But as I’m breaking format here and using the poster to “Condor’s Nest” as there is no art out there on the Interwebs that truly does justice to the feast of character actors this C-movie serves up, here’s a taste.

The climax begins as “The Boys from Brazil,” finding high and low ranking Nazis holed up in postwar Nazi-friendly Bolivia, a “Condor’s Nest” ruled over by no less than former SS chief Heinrich Himmler, whom history reminds us died in Allied custody. Or DID he?

In a couple of campy scenes acted-out in full Nazi regalia, nerdy-quirky character actor James Urbaniak (“Henry Fool,” “Fay Grim” and “The Girl from Monday” came long before “The Fabelmans”) as Himmler and Bruce Davison (“Ben,” “The X-Men”) as his Nazi subordinate bicker and banter in “Cabaret” German about ancient Atlanteans in South America and their “big Aryan” skulls.

And then for its last trick, the movie leaps from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” to “The Wild Bunch.”

It’s nuts, not quite funny enough, but as daft as writer-director Phil Blattenberger could make it. With this movie and his disastrous stab at Vietnam (“Point Man”), Blattenberger’s ambitions become clear. “Daft” in this case is an accident. He wants to be the Uwe Boll of combat cinema.

The film starts out as a post World War II vengeance tale. A long opening sequence reveals how our hero witnessed the rest of his downed B-17 crew murdered, as prisoners, by a sneering, luger-lugging SS officer played by veteran heavy Arnold Visloo. Corporal-not-Captain Spaulding (Jacob Keohane) will go to the ends of the Earth — South America — to track that bastard down in the decade after the war.

Spalding reminds us all how simple politics can be.

“You sit at a table with Nazis, that makes you a Nazi!”

That logic is how he winds up in Argentina, kidnapping, torturing and murdering Nazis left and right, hunting down his quarry. That’s how he crosses paths with the Nazi A-bomb expert Vogel (Al Pagano) who promises to lead him to this Col. Bach. That’s also where he crosses swords and pistols with Israeli agent Leyna (Corinne Britti) who wants to kidnap Vogel back to Israel to stand trial.

There’s no point in complaining how bad Bach is, and invoking Himmler doesn’t move her. But this American pretending to be Swiss (don’t ask) is more determined than she is, which is how they all end up in the foothills of the Andes.

God, I have MISSED this version of Jonah Hill — the riffing, slanging, offending, hip-hop-quoting, “best joke in the room wins” Jonah.

“You People” is a comic throwback, an all-star Jonah and Lauren and Nia, Julia and Eddie, Mike Epps and David Duchovny singing John Legend off-key at the piano farce that begins with a sprint, gets gassed far too often and yet still produces a lot of laughs, all of them packed into its funniest stretches.

It starts with a clever conceit, a flip, hip and seriously funny podcast where Mo (“SNL” writer/performer Sam Jay) and E-Z (Hill) riff on pop culture and the intersection of the races, often hilariously, always crossing boundaries.

A disease that’s gotten too “popular?”

“ALS made more money than LEBRON that year!”

Southern white racists?

“I didn’t like that they took Confederate flags outta NASCAR. I was like. ‘Nah, let’em have that.’ You take too much too fast, they out lookin’ for MEAT.”

But “The Mo (Jay) and E-Z Show” is just a tone-setter for the romantic comedy to come. E-Z is actually Ezra Cohen, a stock broker who dreams of the day when that podcast can be his only “thing.” He’s a 35 year-old with game and wit who doesn’t seem to click with the Jewish ladies from temple his mother (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, in rare form) sets him up with.

Then comes the “meet cute.” He gets into what he thinks is a Mini Uber. Amira (Lauren London of TV’s “Games People Play”) freaks out. A misunderstanding leads to a date.

Things are all romantic-comedy-montage-sweet right up to that moment, six months later, when he’s ready to get serious and neither has met the other’s family.

His mom tries ever-so-hard to be current in fashion and slang, but is a classic “tone-deaf” and tolerant liberal who’d consider herself “woke” if it weren’t for the grammar issues. Dad (Duchovny) is one of those “You ever meet?” guys who will ask any Black person if they know Xzibit. Or Magic Johnson.

Amira’s folks are Nation of Islam Muslims. Dad (Eddie Murphy) once got to spend quality with the anti-Semitic “Brother Minister Louis Farrakhan,” and Mom (Nia Long) isn’t having ANY comparison between The Holocaust and slavery.

As feelings are hurt, arguments begun and abandoned, “get to know” afternoons are sabotaged and comic cameos (Anthony Anderson, Richard Benjamin, Elliott Gould, Dean Cole, Rhea Perlman and Omar Epps) roll by, a few of them scoring laughs, you think “This is about to get GOOD.”

Let us now praise screen legends, ladies of a certain age still donning the greasepaint, still saving their best for their closeups.

“80 for Brady” packs an entire generation of screen queens into the same movie for a comedy about little old ladies who are crazy for footballer Tom Brady.

But hell’s bells, Hollywood couldn’t find a better excuse, or at least a funnier script to showcase Oscar winners Jane Fonda and Sally Field, Oscar nominee and multiple Emmy winner Lily Tomlin and the Greatest Living EGOT Rita Moreno?

You don’t have to be a Tom Brady hater to pan this. But you are obligated to separate this wan script and feebly-fictionalized laugher from its stars, who have legendary comic chops that this movie treats like oversized false teeth.

This Million Dollar Quartet play longtime New England pals who accidentally bonded over an NFL game the day then-young Brady took over as quarterback for the Patriots. It’s now 2017, and they’ve been meeting on Gamedays ever since.

They’re just there to “enjoy men the way the Romans did, sweaty and piled on top of one another in tight PANTS,” Lou (Tomlin) crows. And so they do.

Widowed Maura (Moreno), retired college professor Betty (Field) and onetime TV-model turned “erotic fan fiction” novelist Trish (Fonda) gather, gab, don jersey and repeat their rituals (knocking over the chips) to “help” their team and their Tom win, week after week.

It must be working. The Patriots are going to another Super Bowl. Maybe, Lou suggests, its time they actually went to see their pushing-40 hero, “almost 80 in people years.” He won’t be under center that much longer for these “ladies over 80 who love Tom Brady.”

Most have their doubts, and some have obligations — Bob Balaban plays Betty’s hapless, nerdy professor husband, Sara Gilbert is Lou’s worried daughter and Glynn Turman is a nursing home gent with an eye for Maura. But there’s this Patriot fan radio contest (Rob Corddry and Kyle Mooney play the “chowdahead” hosts) offering four tickets, and Lou and the crew resolve to win it.

Next thing we know, they’re on the lam to Houston, with encounters with “Gronk,” the subject of Trish’s “fantasy” fiction, and other footballers, Mayor of Flavortown Guy Fieri and flirty ex-jock Harry Hamlin to speed them along, and daffy obstacles to get in the way of this wish fulfillment fantasy coming true.

Rob “Gronk” Gronkowski is an amusing sight gag here, as is Fieri, whom the stoned Maura hallucinates as every face at a Super Bowl Party poker game. All part of “the fan experience” of “The Big Game.”

Brady, a credited producer, is featured in the third act, a Super Bowl which, if you don’t remember, I won’t spoil it for you. If there was a subtext here, it might come from that and it doesn’t really apply.

The further we get away from a war, the more vital it is that there be SOMEbody on a set who can keep the cast and crew from making fools of themselves when you’re making a combat film.

“Military consultant,” “technical advisor,” call them whatever you want. It doesn’t have to be R. Lee Ermey, but you put ex-military on your payroll so that your movie looks and sounds authentic, and not like Spike Lee’s combat movies. Or like Aaron Eckhart in “Ambush.”

It’s a movie set early (ish) in the Vietnam War, 1966. Eckhart plays a commander who sends his Special Forces subordinates to a new base in “Quang TRY province.” Ordering men into harm’s way, and he doesn’t know how to pronounce “Quaug Tri Province?” Like “TREE?”

Maybe it’s early enough in the war that he wouldn’t have heard it. Sure. But considering most everything that follows…

“Ambush” is a B-movie (maybe C) about a lost “secret dossier” that a rageaholic Green Beret (Gregory Sims) and others are sent to recover. Sims goes full R. Lee Ermey “Full Metal Jacket” in the middle of an undersized, remote outpost behind enemy lines, screaming at a subordinate so loud Uncle Ho could hear him in Hanoi.

“What the actual F— does that CHILD need with a gun?”

So, nobody trained the lads in the “This is my rifle, this is my ‘gun'” (penis) rhyme of boot camp?

The answer to that comes when the film’s ostensible star, Jonathan Rhys Myers shows up. He’s a “hunter,” with a tracking dog and a pistol grip pump shotgun. At least the chopper he lands in seems regulation and period correct.

Considering the opening scene is plainly a Jeep-drive through a military aircraft graveyard (a B-58, mixed in with 1980s vintage mothballed jets) meant to be Vietnam era airfield, that’s more than the movie leads us to expect.

“LEFTtenant Col. Mills, sir,” Rhys Myers drawls as he salutes CAPTAIN Mora. Hey, we’re in the jungle. No standing on ceremony. Or British pronunciations of “Lieutenant” from a Southerner.

He’s wearing shiny “Bird Col.” insignia. In the bush, for starters. Shiny target. And he should be wearing the oak cluster of a Lt. Col., right? Entirely too high up the chain of command and too old to be a jungle-savvy LRP (“lurp”). Whatever.

It’s all pretty much downhill from there. The shootouts are noisy and manic but non-military, starting with the “ambush” that opens the action. There’s no rhyme or reason to who we follow and what point of view is dominant.

The party of soldiers sent into the jungle to retrieve the “secret” stuff keeps breaking up into smaller and smaller units — one or two groups sniffing around above ground, another party that splits up when they discover that the Vietnamese dig tunnels and can pop up here, there, seemingly everywhere.

“We’re fah-tin a new enemy,” JRM drawls. “They don’t come from the sky. They don’t come across the sea. They don’t come from the land. They come from the EARTH!”

There’s a lot of tunnel tracking and tunnel fighting, with firearms, knives and a flamethrower. The booby traps show SOMEbody Googled “Vietnam War” to find “punji pits,” and a cute scorpion dump.

He was son of one of the great character actors, a member of John Ford’s repertory company.

He was brother of a TV icon, and brother to an original “Nerd.”

And the siblings worked on a favorite Western of mine, “The Long Riders.”

Here’s his big moment.

And here’s the “Nashville” movie moment that led to it.