Movie Nation

That Gerard Butler has more movie career lives than a damned cat.

Every time you figure “It’s time to pack your bags for the C-movie express,” Gerry B. shows up in a dumb thriller that somehow “plays.” He buys in, and we buy in — up to a point. And somehow, the thrilling edges out the silly and Paisley, Scotland’s finest brings that clumsy beast home.

“Plane” is almost as plain as its title. It has ludicrous plot points, comically-contrived back story elements, Milan runway-ready womenfolk and villains who are just “The Other” — Filipino separatists who don’t really have a point of view save for “Let’s take some hostages, and shoot as many as we don’t need.”

Directed by the Frenchman who gave us the criminal career of “Mesrine” on the screen, “Plane” is the quintessence of “a really dumb movie that plays.”

Butler’s Capt. Brodie Torrance, a TrailBlazer Airlines pilot for a nearly empty and “old” (per the college girl passengers) 727 to fly from Singapore to Tokyo and on to Honolulu just in time for New Year’s.

Widowed, with a college student daughter (Haleigh Hekking) waiting for him in Hawaii, he’s rushed — no time to shave — and ready to get this show on the road.

A storm changes all that, and in the film’s harrowing first act, we see a more or less by-the-book response to a lightning strike forced landing from high altitude. Capt. Torrance and Hong Kong native co-pilot Dele (Yoson An) somehow get the plane low enough to spy an island, stumble across a road, and land that rear-engined beast by the stubble of Torrance’s chinny chin chin.

That’s when the trouble really begins. They don’t know where they are. Their airline back in New York doesn’t either. This corner of the vast Philippine Archipelago is under the control of “gangsters, thugs, separatists.” And the guard escorting a murder suspect (Mike Colter) to Toronto for trial was one of those killed in their encounter with the storm.

There’s nothing for it but for the captain to take the guard’s gun, and the walking-muscle of a suspect, and hike out to look for help.

I know, right?

Of course our pilot has some “background” that will pay dividends in this scenario. Of course our suspect has “special skills.” And no, the script does damned little to create suspicion and wariness between the two men. They’re chummy, almost straight off.

Because “Plane’s” got bigger fish to fry.

The violence in “Plane” is sudden, shocking and damned personal, as director Jean-François Richet keeps his camera tight and hand-held on the hand-to-hand combat sequences, and he stages the shootouts on a “unruly mob vs. professionals” level.

Butler has perhaps his best onscreen brawl-to-the-death since “300.” Colter (TV’s “Luke Cage”)? Look at him. What goon with a gun would have a prayer against him?

The “professionals” here are the “private assets” (mercenaries) commissioned by the airline’s freelance crisis manager (Tony Goldwyn) to extract these stranded travelers from the clutches of Southwest the separatists.

That’s a whole different point of view in the film, “crisis managing” a lost airplane, with the airline’s chief (Paul Ben-Victor) at odds with fellow who manages — in a PR and search and rescue sense — such disasters for a living. Not making Goldwyn’s character a cynical heavy in all this is a bit surprising.

“Plane” is, in many ways, a classic January or August film, a movie destined for a low-attendance dumping-ground month on the movie release calendar. But every January or August produces an overperformer or two, dumb genre movies that defy lowered-expectations and connect with audiences.

And even though we already have one of those this January — “M3GAN” — and even though Butler’s fanbase has aged into its nickname (“GerryAtrics”), he’s got another visceral, involving action pic that’s not great, but works well enough to make us forget “Last Seen Alive” and his last few flops, if only for the month of January.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Gerard Butler, Mike Colter, Daniella Pineda, Yoson An, Evan Dane Taylor, Remi Adeleke, Paul Ben-Victor and Tony Goldwyn

Credits: Directed by Jean-François Richet, scripted by Charles Cumming and J.P. Davis. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:47

I had to catch a preview of “Plane” last night, which is a handy excuse for not watching something I gave up on years ago.

The best way to experience the Golden Globes is like the best way to watch most sports these days — via highlights collected on Youtube. I switched on Mike White’s tearful “White Lotus” speech when I got home, saw that Regina King — perhaps tipsy — went off on Kevin Costner for not being there, and that Eddie Murphy brought it all home at the end.

That’s enough. The long-corrupt, racist and doddering Hollywood Foreign Press Association isn’t worth any more of my time, and doesn’t get a “pass” just because the desperate network that gave us Matt Lauer, Chuck Todd, Andrea Mitchell and Trump says they’ve “cleaned up their act.”

The Globes’ role as Oscar predictor has faded quite a bit in recent decades, thanks to the Academy’s moves to minimize these clowns’ ability to rig the Oscars.

But they picked “The Fabelmans” and “The Banshees of Inisherin” as their drama and musical-or-comedy best pictures.

Cate Blanchett, Michelle Yeoh, Colin Farrell and Austin Butler won the big movie acting prizes, “Black Panther’s” queen Angela Bassett (Oh, is that considered an Oscar worthy Best Supporting turn?) and “Everything Everywhere All At Once’s” Ke Huy Quan, another sentimental favorite, took the supporting prizes.

Is anything figuring Spielberg’s a leading contender for the best director Oscar for “The Fabelmans?” That “Fabelmans” is at the top of the best picture conversation?

It could be so, but I’m scratching my head at that, and at a bit too much of the rest of the Globes to care.

Oscar nominations are due out Jan. 24. That’s when we’ll see what really was deemed memorable in a year that saw the Globes dumped on a weeknight and perhaps nobody watched (5.4 million, smallest audience in 30 years) and those who did mostly shrugged. Apparently.

Feb. 21, we see if these Grimsby wankers score, right?

Oy!

If you think of the fascist conditions in Brazil at the time this was made, you have to appreciate the guts it took to get “The First Fallen” made.

Seems tougher minded than most Hollywood looks back at that epidemic.

Feb. 10 this opens in theaters, streaming later in Feb.

Feel good movies are a universal language, a cinema lover’s comfort food whose formula crosses borders and language barriers.

I dare say “Kitchen Brigade” would amuse, tickle and touch in most any language. But the year’s first winner in this all-important genre is French. So of course, as the title promises, it’s about food and set in a restaurant.

But this bon bon from director and co-writer Louis-Julien Petit (“The Invisibles”) dips into competitive cooking reality TV, soccer, and multiculturalism, with migrant kids awaiting news on whether they’ll be accepted as immigrants or summarily deported back to Bangladesh, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Ethiopia, Congo or all points in between.

It’s smart and topical, touching and touchy. And it is, as the French would put it, un putain de délice — delightful, with an expletive added for emphasis.

Audrey Lamey, a regular on French TV, plays a frustrated and stubborn sous chef who opens our story by quitting her job with the arrogant but popular and ever-so-telegenic Chef Lyna (Chloé Astor), who should know better than to mess with Cathy Marie’s famed “beet organ” appetizer. That’s a dish of tube-shaped tuber slices, arranged like a pipe organ and served with just the right salad dressing.

Cathy Marie is proud, a woman with a reputation, which gets her offers to audition for “The Cook,” a cook-off challenge reality show. But she dismisses that. She will cook! She will save up for her own restaurant! Somebody give her a job!

Alas, the one place that makes an offer “embellished” their ad, just a mite. Lorenzo, played by that dashing EveryGaul François Cluzet, sheepishly admits this “charming” eatery with a “demanding clientele,” La Roptiere, is actually not a restaurant at all. It’s a youth hostel for migrants waiting to see if they qualify to get into French schools so that they can remain in France.

Cathy Marie’s struggling-actress pal (Fatou Kaba) nags her into taking the gig. But there’s this “nightmare” of a kitchen (mostly microwaves) and everything she’s to serve is canned.

“They love ravioli and soccer,” headmaster Lorenzo shrugs. We’ll soon see about that, starting with Cathy Marie opening the ravioli cans, dumping the canned sauce, washing and baking the individual raviolis and plating her dishes with a sauce she makes herself.

Voila!

It only takes a couple of extra hours to manage that, which will never do.

What she wants are “fresh ingredients,” and Lorenzo dismisses her with an “eight Euros a head” budget, he doesn’t care what she serves with that. What she needs is “commis,” kitchen assistants — help. And that’s how a dozen of the eager-to-assimilate newcomers, teenage boys, come to join her in the kitchen and learn at the feed of a queen a cuisine.

One of the reasons “feel good” movies are comfort food is the reassuring familiarity of their formula. The obstacles begin with the food, the nuisance matronly fangirl teacher (Chantal Neuwirth) and the working conditions and spread to that one African Muslim boy who won’t be bossed around, especially by a woman.

“No religion, and no misogyny” in my kitchen, Cathy Marie decrees.

There’s a bit of education for the non-restaurateur viewer and the migrant kids as our chef compares her kitchen “brigade” to a soccer team, from front-of-house (“Defense!”) to garnish (“Striker!”) to dishwasher, who is, of course, in goal.

The story arc has our haughty chef take an interest in others, for once, and the not-quite-as-desperate-as-is-warranted kids warming to her, to French cooking and the culture they fled conflict and poverty to escape to.

The four credited screenwriters cook up a seriously moving Big Obstacle, right on cue to start the third act. And they deliver a finale that involves something you might expect — reality TV — but that still manages to deliver a delightful twist that will touch your heart.

Lamey makes Cathy Marie’s journey almost as moving as those of her young charges, who again as you might expect, share their homeland cuisine with our jaded chef. Cluzet’s presence is a sturdy comfort, and among the kids, the youngest (Yannick Kalombo), the most talented cook (Amadou Bah) and the hardest nut to crack (Mamadou Koita) make the sharpest impressions.

They ensure that this is one feel good movie that won’t make you mind reading subtitles, and that will almost certainly whet your appetite for a little haute cuisine when you’re done.

Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Audrey Lamey, François Cluzet, Fatou Kaba, Chantal Neuwirth, Yannick Kalombo, Amadou Bah and Mamadou Koita

Credits: Directed by Louis-Julien Petit, scripted by Louis-Julien Petit, Liza Benguigui, Sophie Bensadoun and Thomas Pujol. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:37

David Arquette, Amy Smart, Irene Bedard, Frances Fisher, Mariel Hemingway, and Tom Cruise’s actor/screenwriter brother William Mapother are the stars.

This politically-environmentally charged drama, scripted by Mapother, comes out Friday (Jan. 13).

“Beautiful Beings” is a rough and harrowing coming-of-age drama in the tradition of “Kids,” “Thirteen” and “My Own Private Idaho.”

Any hint of “Stand by Me” romanticized boy bonding is smothered where we fear these unparented, impulsive 13-year-olds will end up, face down in a “Trainspotting” gutter on an island — Iceland — which has no trains, but lots of drugs, addicts, bad parents and Scandinavian depression.

Iceland’s submission for Best International Feature (foreign language film) has teen violence, teen smoking, teen drinking, sex and rape, and a bizarre touch of magical realism that gives the entire tale a dream quality.

It’s about three free range Reykjavik lads — played by Birgir Dagur Bjarkason, Viktor Benóný Benediktsson and Snorri Rafn Frímannsson — who hang together and find themselves dragged into the constant conflicts stirred up by the hulking, hotheaded Konni (Benediktsson). Addi (Bjarkason), the most “normal” and middle class of the lot, takes karate lessons, which is why he’s not shy about joining in whatever feud Konni has instigated.

But Addi is sensitive enough to show compassion for the mercilessly-bullied Baldur, or Balli (Áskell Einar Pálmason). Whatever the others’ living situation, Balli, picked on because he “smells,” downcast every step he takes through every miserable day of his life, has it worse.

His junky mother (Ísgerður Elfa Gunnarsdóttir) stopped cleaning the house when her abusive brute of a second husband was tossed in jail. His teen addict sister (Kristín Ísold Jóhannesdóttir) took that “anything to get out of this house” route and hooked up with the first guy with access to an apartment.

Addi takes pity on Balli after seeing him on TV after Balli’s latest beating put him in the hospital. And eventually Konni and Siggi (Frímannsson) accept the timid “gimp” into their smoking, trespassing and vandalizing “gang.”

Even not-quite-well-adjusted Addi has his issues at home. His alcoholic dad ditched him, and his mother is sure she’s clairvoyant, which infuriates him. But maybe he “senses” things, too.

As the opening scene is the boys, hooded up and armed headed to some sort of fateful confrontation, we can only wonder what Addi or his talks-to-herself-mother didn’t see.

“Beautiful Beings,” titled “Berdreymi” in Icelandic, is superb at capturing the universal problem of idle, unsupervised boys making bad choices, creating “Lord of the Flies” pecking orders and lashing out in violence because nobody’s taught them otherwise.

The second feature of writer-director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson has, like his debut feature “Heartstone,” homoerotic strains in the affection among the boys, as well as a murky view of what is legally, pretty much any where on Earth, a rape scene.

There’s a clumsy shift in point-of-view in the film’s in media res opening, from our dreaming unidentified narrator to the bullied Balli. It wrong-foots the film, which takes a while to settle into being mostly from Addi’s point of view.

But Guðmundsson is quickly establishing himself as a talented, unblinking chronicler of his island homeland. “Beautiful Beings” is a most worthy film for the country’s film community to submit to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and I could certainly see it landing a nomination.

Rating: unrated, violence including rape, drug abuse, teen smoking, profanity

Cast: Birgir Dagur Bjarkason, Áskell Einar Pálmason, Viktor Benóný Benediktsson, Snorri Rafn Frímannsson, Ísgerður Elfa Gunnarsdóttir, Kristín Ísold Jóhannesdóttir and Anita Briem

Credits: Scripted and directed by Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson. An Altered Innocence release.

Running time: 2:03

Mr. “Midsommar/Hereditary” Ari Aster has a paranoid new comedy opening April 24.

Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Patti Lupone and Parker Posey star in this hallucinogenic hostage farce.

It looks nuts.

Once upon a time, at the tale end of the Golden Age of the Spaghetti Western, a couple of canny Italian producers and directors figured out that at home and abroad, a big chunk of the audience for those oddball sagebrush sagas was boys, and men who never grew out of “The Three Stooges.”

It wasn’t the iconic themes, the soaring score and the Italian take on (Spanish) Western vistas these folks showed up for. It was the fancy gunplay, the over-the-top brawls, silly characters and the nonsensical stories slapped together between “the cool parts.”

Slapstick was more important, and you can see traces of this even in Sergio Leone’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” But other pictures such as “Aces High,” “Boot Hill” and the “Trinity” films — “They Call Me Trinity,” “Trinity is Still My Name,” etc –went all in on the laughs. They were throwbacks to an earlier era in screen comedy, when “slap” fights were a big part of slapstick.

The stars of these films were often a Laurel and Hardy pair of Italian actors given English names, Terrence Hill and Bud Spencer — a thin, handsome chap teamed with the burly, ever-grumpy Big Man. They even made action comedies without horses. One of them was this goofy farce about a road race and a prize these two clowns could not decide how to fairly split up — a red dune buggy.

“Altrimenti ci arrabbiamo” this 1974 film was titled, “Watch Out, We’re Mad.” And in the world’s frantic search for that next pitch those content-craving suckers at Netflix will buy, it’s been revived for a new slap-happy slapstick farce, a reboot/sequel that’s as dated as a dune buggy, with only occasional flashes of the “Stooges” silliness that marked the original.

Edoardo Pesce and Alessandro Roja are the new Spencer and Hill, mercifully not given “Hollywood” names, cast as the sons of the two oafs back in ’74, who as kids took the dune buggy out and promptly lost it to a couple of bikers.

Now, “some years later” (Don’t do the math.), the former 13 year-olds are lured into a new “Road Rally” involving matched Beemer beaters on an offroad course, a race in which they finish in a tie. And damned if that 1974 dune buggy doesn’t become the bone of contention for a new generation and a pawn in a new game involving a rich, scummy developer (Christian De Sica), his dense, no-good-at-racing son (Francesco Bruni), the developer’s on-payroll motorcycle gang led by the a biker (Massimiliano Rossi) and a circus parked on land that the developer covets.

Torsillo is the man who orders his son to steal the dune buggy, which the rich man put up as a prize for a “rally” race that no one came to watch.

“It’s more fun to get something when you don’t deserve it.”

The endangered circus features a fetching tiger-tamer (Alessandra Mastronardi), and assorted clowns, sideshow characters (dwarves, et al) and a not-that-sharp strong man (Michael Schermi).

It took five credited screenwriters to back engineer this tale of the town or Tortuga into a new movie, and that aptly-named director Younuts of the teen comedy “Under the Riccione Sun” was parked behind the camera.

What works is what always worked, the slap contests and slap fights. Any fan of action cinema will spot how funny the stage punches all are when they’re open-hand slaps and obviously fake “stage punches” turned into “stage slaps.

There are a couple of decent brawls that precede a grand finale which is kind of funny. But even in that bust-up-the-developers’ big “launch party” scene, even bigger laughs are missed or simply blown because five screenwriters and Younuts notwithstanding, none of these pasta di giornos is an undiscovered comic genius.

The leads are passable, with Pesce summoning up memories of the late Bud Spencer and his fellow Italian slapstick “Big Man,” Israeli-born Paul L. Smith, who played Bluto in Robert Altman’s “Popeye.”

But even when you’re remaking junk, you’ve got to bring more to the table than look-alikes and faded memories of a movie that you’re remaking.

Rating: TV-14, constant fisticuffs

Cast: Edoardo Pesce, Alessandro Roja, Alessandra Mastronardi, Christian De Sica, Francesco Bruni, Michael Schermi and Massimiliano Rossi

Credits: Directed by Younuts, scripted by Vincenzo Alfieri, Giancarlo Fontana, Tommaso Renzoni, Guiseppe Stasi and Andrea Sperandio, based on the 1974 film. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

This thriller, opening Friday, looks better than we took it to be on first blush.

I mean, the lack of effort on the title isn’t encouraging.

Unless…it’s a PUN. Get that “Plane” on a plane and let it ride the waves like a catamaran.

A fugitive in custody on board, hijackers, a million islands to get lost in in the area around the Philippines.

Interesting set of screenplay problems to solve.