Movie Nation

If there’s an actor working today with more of a born “poker face” than Oscar Isaac, I’d be terrified playing cards against him. The sleepy, hooded eyes give him a resting blank-face – serious, impassive and never giving anything away.

So he’s well-cast as “The Card Counter,” a dour and guilt-ridden on-the-road-with-a-gambler tale from Paul Schrader. Schrader (“Affliction,” “Auto Focus” and the recent “First Reformed”) is the cinema’s poster boy for the expression, “An artist is someone who pounds the same nail, over and over again.” Here, his favorite themes of guilt, penance and possible redemption play out not at the card tables, but in who our hero chooses to take on the road with him.

No, it’s not about “card counting,” a trick to help a player even the odds in blackjack. It’s not even about the card game that ate America, Texas Hold’em, which dominates the card playing scenes. It’s about how the gambler who goes by William Tell found the time to master card counting, and the psychic cost of the crime that put him in jail, learning to memorize and properly value the cards remaining in a dealer’s shoe at the blackjack table.

Schrader turns this ex-con’s odyssey through his past with “the kid” (Tye Sheridan) who may have “awakened” his shot at redemption into an ungainly parable with abrupt, impulsive decisions and twists, banal, repetitive dialogue and lots of beautifully hard-boiled voice-over narration.

Tell got out of prison and hit the road, playing to win “with modest goals,” card-counting but never so that he takes big pots from any of the scores of casinos he passes through. He’s doing something they frown on, but never takes them to the cleaners. They let it slide.

He explains card-counting in some detail, breaks down the house advantage (odds) that he’s battling against, preaches his ethos of “bet small, win small” and reveals that “the safest bet for the novice gambler” is betting red or black in roulette.

He dresses simply, keeps his socializing to a minimum — “I’ve met enough people.” — and doesn’t give up his secrets to anybody, especially the vivacious fellow gambler LaLinda (Tiffany Haddish) who wants to get friendly. Card counter?

“I’m not that smart.”

But what happens at casinos attached to resorts? Conventions. That’s where Will ducks into a law enforcement convention’s presentation by an interrogation software huckster (Willem Dafoe). That’s where he meets the kid, who recognizes him. That’s where we figure out how the card counter ended up in prison with years of spare time to master his trade.

He was at Abu Ghraib, the infamous Iraqi prison where soldiers like him posed for photos while torturing Arab prisoners. He ended up in a military prison, while the “civilian contractors” (Dafoe) in charge went on to their next “enhanced interrogation” hustle.

“The Card Counter” finds himself compelled to accept the standing offer of having investors, arranged by LaLinda, “stake” him. He feels the need to give some guidance to the kid, who was collateral damage in what happened over there. Maybe it’s time he took his shot at “celebrity gambling,” with The World Series of Poker Tour as his goal.

Schrader dispenses with a lot of niceties to zero in on his major themes here. Script requirements trump realism — characters making decisions in character — time and again.

While Isaac and Haddish have decent, flirty rapport, there’s little between Sheridan and Isaac that feels real or organic. The Big Fat Metaphor — the player has taken the poker name “William Tell” and this kid could be the son whose head William Tell’s to shoot an apple off of — is supposed to account for that, I suppose.

The voice-over narration does the heavy lifting here. “There’s a weight a man can accrue. The weight created by his past actions. It’s a weight which can never be removed.”

But as Schrader wrestles with that weight and ponders “Is there an end to punishment?” the viewer can wonder if he had the answer before rolling camera, and if not, that might explain the clumsy third act.

“The Card Counter” is a drama in which you can appreciate the ambition and effort — tying the purgatory of gambling to past crimes against humanity — without ignoring the fact that it doesn’t come off.

There’s one great detail — Tell’s ritual uncluttering and cloth-wrapping his cheap motel rooms. And we can’t help but notice he brings two suitcases with him everywhere.

But the other characters are barely so much as sketched in, and Sheridan’s flat performance has only the faintest hint of “rescue me, Mr. Gambler” in it.

The clever deployment of distorting fish-eye lens effects to take us into Will’s nightmares is the flashiest effect Schrader has used since “Cat People.”

Schrader’s made a long meditation on something that’s right up his alley, and it still feels incomplete while it’s in progress, and even in the final reckoning.

Rating: R for some disturbing violence, graphic nudity, language and brief sexuality.

Cast: Oscar Isaac, Tiffany Haddish, Tye Sheridan and Willem Dafoe.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Paul Schrader. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:51

All it takes is one good, melting look. That’s the way it works in the movies anyway, especially teen romances. Hollywood or Bollywood, Seoul or Sweden, the locale doesn’t matter that much. It’s all about the eyeballs.

“JJ+E,” titled “Vinterviken (Winter Cove)” in Swedish, is a scattered, not particularly focused melodrama from Stockholm. It’s on its surest footing when it zeroes in on our young couple. Everything that gets in the way of their love is strictly Swedish cinematic cheese.

JJ is short for John-John, a child of immigrant single mom (Loreen) growing up in Stockholm’s version of “The Projects.” That’s the one true novelty about this Around the World with Netflix outing — its depiction of Sweden’s multicultural underclass.

JJ (Mustapha Aarab) looks Arabic, and hangs with kids from Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. His best bud lives just downstairs and goes by Sluggo (Jonay Pineda Skallak), for obvious reasons.

They’re a mixed crowd, but Sluggo’s corner of it is generally up to no good. JJ’s mother may not say so, but her security guard beau (Albin Grenholm) lays it out for the kid.

“They’ll all end up behind bars,” he warns (in Swedish with English subtitles, or dubbed).

JJ? He’s a good kid. Sort of. The day we meet him he and Sluggo steal a boat for a joyride, and JJ becomes a hero when he rescues a tween who almost drowns. Her dad, Frank (Magnus Krepper) is grateful. Her older sister (Elsa Öhrn) almost gasps when she casts her eyes on him. On seeing her, JJ’s jaw just drops.

Nothing will ever come of it, of course. He’s from The Projects, she’s living in a seaside villa with a pool.

But JJ has this notion of changing his life. He gets into Stockholm’s answer to the School of Performing Arts. He wants to be an actor. Shockingly, “E,” short for Elisabeth, is accepted there as well.

The best scenes in this Alexis Almström (“Top Dog”) film, adopted from a YA novel by Mats Wahl, are of the slow-motion, low-heat courtship that sets up this romance. A little checking each other out on social media, ask a mutual acquaintance about “her story.” She is withdrawn, sarcastic and sad. He is young and tactless, and also living his life in a minefield, a kid facing limited expectations and options and patronizing racism even from those whoseem sympathetic.

He tries to fit in with some of her people, and she joins him for a night of hanging out with his extensive entourage of multi-cultural friends.

The melodrama swirling around these two increasingly lovesick kids is a grab bag of cliches. Sluggo’s various criminal activities include breaking into E’s house. JJ+E can’t even go to luridly-lit mid-forest rave without getting mugged on the way home.

The leads generate enough heat to seem plausible as a couple, but her daddy’s disapproval and the boy’s pleading in the rain scene aren’t played with enough pathos to come off.

But the worst thing about “JJ+E” might be acting school. This isn’t “Fame,” in any way, shape or form. Not only do the characters seem indifferent to the “call to perform,” the actors playing them don’t show much that would get them admitted into a competitive acting conservatory.

A crying-on-cue demonstration from E for JJ’s skeptical friends is a lovely moment, but there aren’t many of those.

It’s not another “Romeo & Juliet” variation, even if the title suggests that. The stakes are low, the tropes too familiar and while the leads may get across the intensity of their crush with just their eyes, they don’t bring much else to this formulaic, tepid teen romance.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual situations, smoking, profanity

Cast: Elsa Öhrn, Mustapha Aarab, Magnus Krepper, Loreen and Jonay Pineda Skallak

Credits: Directed by Alexis Almström, scripted by Dunja Vujovic, based on the book by Mats Wahl. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

As the white stretch limo rolls through the highway on the edge of the Joshua Tree National Monument, the driver rolls down the privacy screen and hits the immaculately put-together star in the back with the question she’s come to dread.

“So, you’re a singer?”

She knows where this is going, as do we. “Never heard of you” is coming, because in movies about rock singers, the limo drivers have never heard of anybody and are downright rude about it. And if there’s anything the lady in the limo knows well, it’s how rock stars come off in movies about rock stars.

“Maybe, sing one’a your songs?”

“The Nowhere Inn” is what happens when a rock star — St. Vincent in this case — sets out to NOT make a concert/”behind the music” documentary about herself. It’s presented as a slice of her fantasized life packaged in a “Why was (your) your movie never completed?” docu-comedy.

The pitch? St. Vincent gets her friend Carrie Brownstein from TV’s “Portlandia” to make a film about the Grammy darling born Annie Erin Clark, reinvented as a Klimt-perfect, guitar-rocking sex symbol/art rock goddess.

If you don’t follow the Grammys, it’s easy not to have heard of her. She’s not a stadium rocker. Some of us got hip to her act when she collaborated with art rocker David Byrne of The Talking Heads for an LP and a joyously offbeat small venue tour with a brass section that accompanied them in new songs and delightful covers of The Talking Heads’ greatest hits.

To pigeon hole her, she’s a Polyphonic Spree alumna, a Laurie Anderson/David Byrne/Kate Bush-influenced rocker in vinyl minidresses playing color-coordinated guitars, a star who has the striking looks (she resembles the actress Jamie Gertz) and futuristic, multi-media stage presentation and wardrobe to be something of a phenomenon.

“New York isn’t New York without you, love,” she sings. “If I last-strawed you on 8th Avenue, well, you’re the only mother—–r in the city who can stand me.”

That gets your attention. But the running gag of “The Nowhere Inn” is she’s too damned dull, “nerdy normal” offstage, to make an interesting subject for a movie. Brownstein’s mock befuddlement is how to pair the arresting stage presence St. Vincent is in concert with The Banality of Annie.

“I know who I am,” St. Vincent snaps. “What does it matter if anybody else does?”

She plays Scrabble after shows, keeps a quiet and contemplative tour bus. She likes food where “I can taste the dirt…I don’t even like to dress salads!”

“Maybe a little after show dance party on the bus” would liven things up, Brownstein suggests.

“We’ve never done that.”

Maybe check in on her dad, who’s in jail? Maybe not. Let’s visit her Texas family, get a load of who she is via where she came from. There are guns involved, including hers.

We see a few (tiny) snippets of concert footage, St. Vincent’s band (actors play them offstage) lined up horizontally, cross-stage, with big “True Stories” video screen behind them, rather than the conventional singer-guitarist/bassist/keyboards backed by a drummer set up.

But as the costume changes pile up, our filmmaker grows frustrated and our star rebels by deciding to give the gimmick-and-glitz addicted public what they crave. She invites Carrie into her hotel room where she and Dakota Johnson (“50 Shades of…”) are in their underwear and ready to announce their coupling to the world.

St. Vincent is a gorgeous and gay rock star ready to play the PR game. She’s got the whole thing mapped out, even the expiration date of this “stunt.”

“I love you baby, but I’m married to the road.”

Johnson, quite convincing here, is not amused.

It all fakery, the affair with Johnson, the wig St. Vincent wants to sell as her only concert tour “merch,” the “playing a bigger version of myself” in this movie because “this is how actors play rock stars.”

Rock movie cliches include an arrogant, over-familiar magazine journalist who “didn’t listen to a word I said” but came to the in-print conclusion that she’s “impenetrable and aloof,” a “snob.” There’s even a weepy “Your music saved my life” fan encounter, generating fake tears from the fake version of Annie Erin Clark.

Brownstein acts out in growing desperation to make this “movie” work, to reinvent herself as a “success” and a filmmaker for her (fake) dad, who is sick and in chemo.

As Annie lets St. Vincent take over, “the star” distances herself from “my best friend,” the one who is making the film that St. Vincent is sure she’ll be able to control her image with. She even hires Carrie an assistant.

“I just thought you needed someone you could hang out with and talk about your dad.”

Ouch. What are “friends” for?

“Nowhere Inn” never quite crawls out from under the David Byrne influence as a movie or a film conceit. It’s more droll than funny, and only novel in the sense that she’s mocking the conventions of such movies and they’re beyond mockery at this point.

Including more of her music might have made for a more revealing portrait. But not “revealing” is pretty much the point in this daft but dry goof on The Rock Star Documentary.

Rating: unrated, some profanity, a little lingerie vamping

Cast: St. Vincent (Annie Erin Clark), Carrie Brownstein, Dakota Johnson

Credits: Directed by Bill Benz, script by Carrie Brownstein and St. Vincent. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:31

You kind of know you’re in a Joe Carnahan movie when somebody on camera states the obvious.

“What say we cut through the bulls–t?”

It always comes too deep into the bulls–t to matter. But that’s what you came for, the profane pronouncements of the denizens of Carnahanland. He may be cut-rate-Quentin to most, but firehouse some testosterone on that cigarette lighter and see what ignites, right?

The hard-boiled dialogue (“Smokin’ Aces,” “The A-Team,” “The Grey”) is self-parody. Otherwise, no viewer would get past the instantly-jaded, already-tough-talking rookie cop weighing in with “You don’t understand how f—–g bored I am.”

Actually, I do. But thanks for piping up.

“Copshop” is a clockwork, claustrophobic cryptogram of cliches. Stagebound, confined mostly to its titular police station setting, it’s about an injured hustler (Frank Grillo) just locked up, and the larger-than-life drunk driver (Gerard Butler) who just got tossed into the clink across from him. If you can’t see the obvious, how do you think Teddy (Grillo) feels?

“I did what I had to do to get in here,” the new guy growls from across the cellblock. “To get to you, Teddy,” he says, for the slow viewers in the audience, and for Teddy, who’s still wearing his hair in a man bun five years past its expiration date.

“Copshop” sets up the Creek City PD pecking order, every cop more jaded than the next, some of them sketchier than others, each one polishing his or her patter, every syllable recycled from a hundred other copshops, a thousand other fictional coppers.

“I’m worried about you, man.” “Grown-ass men don’t worry about other grown-ass men.”

Officer Young (Alexis Louder of “Watchmen” and “The Tomorrow War”) is just trying to fit in. That’s why she lets on how “bored” she is on this overnight shift. Things are about to get a tad more exciting.

The hit-man Viddick (Butler) has a plan for getting out of his cell and into a position to complete his contract on Teddy Murretto. We see just enough of how Teddy got in here to develop an appreciation for his survival-on-his-feet skills.

The mayhem begins. The bullets fly. The blood spurts. And pithy putdowns rain down upon this beleaguered boondocks outpost where one guy is out to silence another. And in this case, the cops — the clueless, the corrupt and the rookie — are the ones caught in the crossfire.

“Copshop” is never much more than a bullet-and-joke-riddled exploitation picture, blandly, bloodily predictable in the formulae it follows, and the police protocols it ignores just to keep things confined to that station house.

Teddy shows up with a bullet wound? Let’s…treat him HERE. Etc.

Laughable moments like that litter this screenplay. But remember, we’re not dealing with realism. We’re in Carnahanland.

Butler vamps his way around this hardened killer, but we’ve seen this Butler before. Grillo is never bad in B-movies, big budget or otherwise, like this. But the character doesn’t seem like the best fit.

For me, things didn’t take a turn towards “fun” until the SECOND hitman shows up, played by “Seinfeld’s” version of “The Wiz,” Toby Huss. He comes carrying balloons, and what could be an . And he’s not mincing words with Teddy or his coiffure “fashion faux pas.”

“You look like Tom Cruise in that samurai movie nobody watched.”

I found this more irritating than I probably should have, but when a movie shows so much effort at serving up machismo, tough talk and violence and so little at generating suspense, twists and logical surprises, I lose patience with it.

This one just never seems to end, and when the illogical end arrives, a laughably dumb coda is layered on top of it.

Maybe I’ve let my visa to Carnahanland lapse, and “Copshop” reminds me of why I did.

Rating: R for strong/bloody violence, and pervasive language.

Cast: Frank Grillo, Gerard Butler, Alexis Louder and Toby Huss

Credits: Directed by Joe Carnahan, scripted by Kurt McLeod and Joe Carnahan. An Open Road release.

Running time: 1:48

The thing about James Wan’s “Malignant” is that it’s utter nonsense, until that moment it isn’t. All becomes clear. Ish.

And the damned monstrosity that it was up until now abruptly becomes even worse.

Who knows what Wan, who finally graduated from his lucrative and critically-honored horror ghetto to direct “Aquaman” into blockbuster status, was thinking in flinging this crap against the wall? Kids heading to very expensive colleges, maybe?

But whatever his motives, the director of “Saw,” “Insidious” and “The Conjuring” takes a big’ol swing and a miss with this misguided tale of a woman whose childhood “invisible friend” acts and sounds an awful lot like Venom.

Genre veteran Annabelle Wallis (“The Mummy,” “Annabelle”) stars as Madison, a very pregnant nurse with an abusive husband (Jake Abel) and a history of miscarriages.

All it takes is one shove against the wall and we figure “There goes another one,” but this time, she wakes up to a dead husband and only a vague notion of what happened to relate to the two cops (Michole Briana Whit and George Young) who investigate.

When people start dying and she starts getting phone calls from some hairy, reverse-jointed “Ring” entity, we think back to the opening scene of “Malignant,” at a research hospital where somebody named “Gabriel” is going through staff like a serial killer through hot butter. We get a glimpse of him. And maybe we remember what the title “Malignant” infers.

Maddie Hasson and her wonderbangs play Cindy, the sister who tries to help Madison piece together her past and how it relates to her present, and dashes in and out of Greater Seattle in her Prius, looking for answers.

But everything she and her sister relate to the detectives gets Wanda Sykes-style sass from Det. Moss (White).

As in “You mean to tell me your IMAGINARY childhood friend did this?” And after Madison and then the other detective see this monster of the night in the flesh and get a police artist to sketch “it” — “So, I’m putting out a BOLO (Be on the LookOut) on ‘Sloth’ from ‘The Goonies?'”

And before you say “So, it’s having a laugh?” No. Those are the only two jokes in it.

So, not funny. Not scary. Aside from dull, what else’ve you got?

The effects, which include an impressive room-morphing-into-a-different-room effect and a horror filmmaker’s wet dream of a chase through the long-abandoned bowels of Seattle, are the standout feature of the film, what Warners was really paying for when they hired the director of a lot of Lionsgate and then Universal horror movies (and “Furious 7″) to be their DC/”Aquaman” guy.

The violence is of a bashing/stabbing/slashing variety, and spills an awful lot of fake blood.

But this, for want of a better word “script,” based on a “story” Wan collaborated on? Yuck. For a minute or three, after we’ve seen the very-pregnant Madison and after we’ve gotten that flashback of “Gabriel,” who looked an awful lot like a fetus back in 1993, I thought this might be a horror film riff on abortion, at least in an allegorical sense.

Nah.

It’s the sort of enterprise where a character dashes off to that now-abandoned, cliffside NYC Dakota-looking high-rise research hospital, reads the dust-covered wall directory and sees only two floors and the basement listed. The other 10 stories? They’re just on the OUTside.

If you stick around long enough — and I don’t advise that — you can see legendary stuntwoman and Tarantino favorite Zoë E. Bell in the inevitable police holding cell (with slaughter to follow) scene.

Performances? Nobody in this will be topping their resume with it. Neither will the director. Let’s hope it’s just a blip, a disaster soon to be forgotten by him and the studio that wrote the checks for it. I’m pretty sure he already has.

Rating: R for strong horror violence and gruesome images, and for language (profanity)

Cast: Annabelle Wallis, Maddie Hasson, Michole Briana Whit and George Young.

Credits: Directed by James Wan, scripted by Akela Cooper. A Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 1:50

A Hollywood landmark, emptied by COVID, stir crazy newlyweds and some strange disappearances from the hotel’s register are nightmare fuel for “Shelter in Place,” a seriously slow psychological horror tale bathed in blood…eventually.

Sarah and John, played by Tatjana Marjanovic of “TV’s “Purgatory” and Brendan Hines (“MacGuyver”) are the “only guests” at the historic Roosevelt Hotel, trapped there as the airlines, then the state and finally the country go into lockdown.

John may wax poetic about the original home for the Academy Awards and busy himself with swimming and drinks by the pool, bowling and drinks by the alley, drinks in the bar and a bottle in their room. And Sarah may go on and on about “gratitude” as a vlogger and online social influencer, fielding lucrative offers to “video my feet” among other deals-in-the-making. But yes, this sheltering-in-place is getting to them.

“Life inside is for HERMITS!”

It’s not that they feel guilty about trapping two staff — forced to stay there and stay on duty with them. Manager, concierge and bartender Ty (Kevin Daniels) keeps his public face friendly, and maid-and-by-necessity-cook Adela (Ola Kaminska) is a model of flirtatious efficiency, if no great shakes as a chef.

But Sarah has just run out of her stress pills. And John is getting entirely too used to a “What, me worry?” life of indolence and alcohol.

And they didn’t see the film’s first scene, in which a creepy poolside entrepreneur-bro was lured into a room with blinding light, only to crawl out, tattered and bloody, facing a future of death or handcuffs, we can’t figure out which will be worse.

Former “Saturday Night Live” crew-members turned writer-directors Chris Beyrooty and Connor Martin stumble through their first feature, shifting points of view, giving the audience more information than our protagonists but never really making us fear for their safety.

Because John is a drunk, and when he’s polished off a bottle of Jack Daniels truth serum, his description of pretty poseur Sarah is savagely on the mark.

“Little Princess f—–g HAPPY pants” is the “queen of curated narcissism.”

He is tactless, boorish and not-that-clued-in to their surroundings. Nosey Sarah is the one who starts to perceive a threat — reading through the hotel’s register, seeing names crossed out and one, aside from her and John, that isn’t, and spying on Polish Adela.

“I get it. I’m the creepy maid.“

The empty hallways, nearly-empty bar scene and big, echoing lobby give off the faintest whiff of “The Shining,” a notion that lasts, alas, but an instant. The pacing doesn’t build dread, the characters don’t build empathy.

In a movie in which Ty reminds us of mid-lockdown boredom, when “time doesn’t seem to matter any more,” “Shelter in Place” makes one keenly aware of the time it’s taking to get to its point, to pick up the pulse if not the pace.

We know something awful’s coming. Martin and Beyrooty may eventually get to their bloody denouement. But they do a very poor job of holding the viewer’s interest, of convincing us that “What’s out there is scarier than what’s in here.”

Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Tatjana Marjanovic, Brendan Hines, Kevin Daniels and Ola Kaminska

Credits: Scripted and directed by Chris Beyrooty and Connor Martin. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:29

Dropping in to knock out a review before checking out James Wan’s unpromoted Warner Brothers release “Malignant” here in New Smyrna (pronounced “SuhMYRNa” by the locals),so let’s leave this odd but fun Chinese parable which I reviewed some months back as a gift.

Yes, I am Roger DVDseed, dropping off free discs to public libraries up and down the East coast in my travels.

Libraries have been life savers during the pandemic and they’re a great place to donate your discs. Who has a hankering to “collect” these films in disc form any more? Not me.

Anyway, thanks to Film Movement for sending “Dead Pigs.” Hope the New Smyrnans dig it.

Even allowing for the minimalism of its formula, the German “hunted in the woods” thriller “Prey” offers slim pickings for those who enjoy watching and reasoning one’s way out of the pre-ordained predicament it puts its victims and the viewer in.

The set-up is so familiar your average 12 year-old could script it. Five friends set off on a kayaking/camping hike into the mid-European forest. Somebody starts shooting at them. They don’t know who, and even after they do, they have no idea “why.”

As they’re picked off and avenues for escape, “plans” to get out of this come to nothing, who will show himself capable of learning, scheming and figuring out how to fight back before they’re all dead?

Such thrillers, even the most unsurvivably supernatural among them, have the hunted and the viewer experience a learning curve. That’s who wins these Darwinian Hunter Games, those who adapt.

But there’s no learning here, no scheming. The most important figure to go into this kind of clueless and come out the same way is writer-director Thomas Sieben. If you ever wondered how boring and frustrating it might be to watch the young, athletic and helpless stagger to their deaths, with little agency in their fate, Sieben’s made a movie for you.

No. That’s not giving away the ending. But when Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David vowed they’d make an American sitcom whose characters lived by a “NO LEARNING” ethos, they had no idea they’d inspire some German with a Netflix deal to try it in a thriller.

Sieben (“Kidnapping Stella”) serves up a bachelor party of five, guys with little woodlore among them, riding inflatable kayaks, hiking and perhaps camping in a national park in early winter.

Roman (David Kross) is about to get married. Albert (Hanno Koffler) is the start-up entrepreneur some of them work for. Vincent (Yung Ngo) is the one most out of his depth, the one given to throwing up under stress and whimpering and crying when things get real.

You would be, too, if you were the first one shot. They hear what they assume to be hunters’ rifle fire, here and there. But it’s only when they try to get in their SUV and leave that the “accident” that winged Vincent stops looking like a mistake. They’re being hunted.

They flee into the forest without their gear, with no cell signal and little to fight back with save for a single knife and their wits.

In Sieben’s screenwriterly mind, that’s game over. These guys have “issues.” Little is done to develop the group dynamic, just this guy needing a job, that one needing investors, Vincent just wanting it all to end and Roman wishing he was with his fiance.

There’s talk of “every man for himself,” which sounds even uglier in German. The shots keep coming, even as they halfheartedly attempt to reason their way out of this jam, or plead from afar with the motiveless, murderous shooter.

“Why are you DOING this?”

Flashbacks show the “tests” Roman has faced in the relationship he’s about to consummate with marriage. Yawn.

When your Around the World with Netflix film puts more effort into explaining “motivations” than it does on five educated, healthy men incapable of teaming up, brainstorming or spitballing until they find an escape or counter-attack that works, that “explanation” had better justify all this.

It does not.

Perhaps our writer-director was making satiric fun of male bonding, the myth of primal male woodland prowess and the like. Probably not, and seriously, that’s all I’ve got on “Prey.” Alas, Sieben has to admit the same.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: David Kross, Hanno Koffler, Robert Finster, Yung Ngo, Klaus Steinbacher and Nellie Thalbach

Credits: Scripted and directed by Thomas Sieben. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:27

There’s one thing you can say for a melodrama that gives you whiplash. It must be quite a ride.

Actor (“This is Us”) turned writer-director John Pollono brings his off-Broadway slow boil of a thriller “Small Engine Repair” to the screen in an immersive, Big Twisty and somewhat uneven star vehicle that still delivers the goods. A great supporting cast will do that for you.

It’s a slice of Flyover America male bonding built around a trio of friends played by top dog character actors Jon Bernthal and Shea Whigham, with Pollono holding his own with two of the best. “Engine” starts clumsily — no, we don’t need to to have the nickname “Manch Vegas” that locals pin on Manchester, New Hampshire explained — and meanders ever onward establishing the characters, revealing their flaws and flashing back to explore their lifelong history.

And then it turns dark on a dime. And turns darker. And still, in all that lethal seriousness, it finds a laugh or two with these mugs, how they talk and what they find funny.

Pollono is Frankie, owner of said “Small Engine Repair” shop, a guy we meet as he gets out of jail, his arm in a cast. It was a short stay for this single dad. Fortunately, he’s got his childhood pals Swaino (Bernthal) and Packie (Whigham) to look after little Crystal.

Swaino’s an unfiltered blowhard who brags about sex and “makes one too many gay jokes” to not take a ribbing about that. Frankie’s jail stint was where he put down the bottle and what made him give up bar brawling. And while he might have raised Crystal (Ciara Bravo) to have his filthy vocabulary and coarse sense of humor, a few years later she’s headed for college.

Packie seems on-the-spectrum and off-center, the sort of talker who knows everybody’s buttons and clumsily pushes them at just the wrong times. But he’s smarter than he looks.

“Small Engine Repair” spends its first hour just hanging with these three, reveling in their “one-legged duck swims in a circle” witticisms, sex life anecdotes and red letter days and nights from their collective past.

It’s New England. Yeah, they have a “Game Six” story.

But one bar fight too many means they have a big falling out. We’re left wondering what it would take to bring them back together.

No matter where the story goes, I laughed a lot at the weather-and-whisky-worn rapport of our power trio. Whigham’s way with Packie’s many layers of tetchiness is a delight. Don’t use this word or make light of that subject. He’s thin-skinned about it. ALL of it.

“As an Irish American, I f—–g offense at that!”

Bernthal has a lot of fun with a brawny, butch and over-compensating lug whose friends don’t know he still does group facials with his sisters.

Bravo (“Cherry,” TV’s “Wayne”) throws her weight around in this bantering bucket of testosterone.

Jordana Spiro sinks her teeth into Karen, the blowsy, high-mileage tart who rarely sees her daughter Crystal, or the guy who fathered her.

Pollono’s Frankie is the alleged grownup in their midst, and even he is quick with the un-PC putdown.

“Who without a vagina actually f—–g SAYS that?”

As a director, Pollono doesn’t do much that doesn’t signal “stagebound” in turning his play into a film. But that “Game Six” anecdote, which starts out nostalgic, turns grim and shocking and finds one helluva punchline to exit, is the film’s great set-piece. Packie tells the story, and Pollono has the adult Whigham place himself back in their collective childhood, watching the World Series with two child actors playing his friends as they were then.

The abrupt shifts in focus and tone are jarring, and the finale feels a lot less satisfying than it should. But “Small Engine Repair” is the sort of slice-of-life, drinking buddies tested melodrama that will resonate with a lot of American men, and the kind of movie that’ll play in Nash-Vegas, O-Vegas, Minni-Vegas or Manch-Vegas without some actor/playwright/filmmaker patronizingly explaining the obvious to us.

Rating: R for pervasive language, crude sexual content, strong violence, a sexual assault, and drug use

Cast: John Pollono, Jon Bernthal, Ciara Bravo, Jordana Spiro and Shea Whigham.

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Pollono, based on his play. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:42

“Kate” is the most laughably predictable thriller since the silent film era. We know where it’s going the instant it starts. We know what the hack screenwriter used for his mashup — “D.O.A./Crank” meets “The Professional.” We know the rancid cheese dialogue by heart before anybody utters a word of it.

The lady assassin (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has “one simple rule, no kids.”

Her handler, the guy who “groomed” her for this work (Woody Harrelson), has his cliches memorized — “Not your first rodeo…collateral damage” yadda yadda yadda.

She wants “a life, a real regular life.” She wants to “finish the job, and then I’m out.”

His jokes — “picket fences…suburbs” are older than he is.

And it’s all downhill from that opening scene.

Visual effects artist turned director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan — he did VFX for “Snow White and the Huntsman” and got to direct the “Huntsman” sequel nobody saw — and screentypist Umair Aleem (“The Extraction”) make the most of the movie’s most arresting element, its Japanese setting.

We see Noh theater performed (to no audience), yakuza and geishas and J-pop and lurid blacklit nightclubs and neon-drenched streets and a tall, willowy American hit-woman who doesn’t stand out. Oh no, not at all.

In one glorious moment, after Kate has botched an assignment because she’s got the shakes from the Putin-approved poison somebody slipped her, she makes her escape in the most conspicuous getaway car this side of the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile.

See above.

The whole movie’s like this. She’s an assassin captured by the cops and hospitalized after wrecking that garishly painted and lit tuner/hoonigan getaway car. And she wakes up with no cops present.

She has just enough time to get her “24 hours to live” diagnosis, make a plan and start her escape before the first J-cops show up. It’s pretty much the last we see of them.

Kate must chase and catch and threaten and kill her way to whoever ordered the hit on her.

Granted, she has no right to be offended. Because she MURDERS people for a living. But hey, we’re all a little self-righteous these days.

There’s a fouled-mouthy kid (Miku Patricia Martineau) and a lot of about-to-be-dead mobsters, a laundry list of them Kate must shoot, punch, stab, kick and head-butt her way through to get to whoever wanted this “revenge.”

She sickens every step of the way, and the kid — whom she kidnaps — speaks her mind in Janglish and American-accented curses.

“F— you, cancer b–ch!”

Winstead and/or her stuntperson handle a little parkour and a whole lot of fight choreography with a modicum of ease. No, the supermodel physics of such movies never computes. It hasn’t since “La Femme Nikita” or its Hollywood cover, “Point of No Return.” But Winstead rarely lets us see enough to say “No WAY SkinnyKiller could manage that.”

But the movie? It’s not much fun, and not particularly gripping. The opening scene tells us pretty much everything to come — the kill, the “kid,” the fatal misstep — all of it.

That just leaves Tokyo at night. And as luridly arresting as that can be, it’s just not enough, “Kate” or no “Kate.”

Rating: R, for strong violence and language (profanity) throughout

Cast: Elizabeth Winstead, Miku Patricia Martineau, Jun Kunimura, Miyavi and Woody Harrelson

Credits: Directed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, scripted by
Umair Aleem. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48