Movie Nation

You get a ways into “John Waite: The Hard Way,” and the inescapable feeling sweeps over you that this is a make-work project for a not-retired-yet pop star going a little stir crazy during COVID lockdown.

As a film, it’s very much a surface gloss, not really all that polished, not particularly thorough, mostly just the former lead singer of The Babys and Bad English, Mr. “Isn’t It Time” and “Missing You” himself being interviewed. There’s little of his personal life here, and no big rock star health, tragedy or addiction revelations ensue.

Then you pick up on one such addiction that has him in withdrawal. Then-pushing 70, Waite couldn’t can’t stand being idle, not singing. Longtime partner Joni Allen talks about how “He is very out of sorts when he’s not touring,” traveling with the band, singing and performing, his “bromance time” on the road disrupted for the better part of two years.

Shortcomings as a musical biography aside, “The Hard Way” is still interesting as we hear how this power ballad singing New Romantics era Brit rocker got his start, his early passion for all things cowboy, including cowboy crooner Marty Robbins. Even after Tommy Steele (a Tommy Steele branded ukulele was his first instrument) and later The Beatles came along, turning him towards the music that would make him, you sense the special thrill the mop-topped Waite got playing on a daytime American chat show where his first idol, Robbins, once performed — “The Dinah Shore Show.”

He can seem surly off-stage, only truly lighting up when performing. But when you’re recalling assorted deals with “those bastards” at this or that record label, listing the stunning successes of your first band, hit records and “American Bandstand” etc. showcases as “$6,000 for six years” and five albums worth of work, a little bile and bitterness is bound to come up.

Oddly, he signed a solo deal with the same label afterwards. That contradiction isn’t addressed by any follow-up question, nor is anything else particularly challenging introduced.

The narrow focus — just a few collaborators were interviewed, with footage of his assorted bands, touring with Ringo and playing and singing with Richard Marx and Alison Krauss — means we don’t get what one could call an intimate portrait of the man and what makes him tick.

For instance, music and gossip websites have him still in a relationship with bluegrass singer and player Krauss, but she only appears in their “Tonight Show” duet during the Jay Leno era. And the man has just enough of a “difficult” reputation that you wish that was a lot more about that in “The Hard Way.” Where are the bandmates, producers other than a flattering Neil Giraldo and the respectful but contradictory Ron Nevison, who would have made this doc something resembling authoritative? Which it most certainly isn’t?

But the stories of how he started out a bassist and had to be cajoled into singing, then had to “develop the ego” and swagger to be a singer/frontman, of how The Babys cut their first LP in Toronto in which a producer put “echo” all the way it, and “we all HATED it,” only to have it turn them into stars on both sides of the Atlantic, can be fun.

A little socially-distanced pushback in the interviews might have gotten deeper, set off more sparks and given us a less-guarded and self-mythologizing portrait of the man. If you’re not asking something he doesn’t want to answer, you’re basically making a promotional film. Even if he has a temper, if you want a compelling film, you can’t be scared of annoying your subject.

Still, I came away with a better appreciation of the voice, the talent and how his career was shaped around that, and how one perfect or perfectly performed song coming at the perfect time can change somebody’s destiny, and how much the women and men still hitting the road 40 years after their biggest hit feed on the routine, affirmation and paydays of life on the road.

Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: John Waite, Diane Warren, Neil Giraldo, Ron Nevison, Joni Allen, Richard Marx, Ringo Starr

Credits: Directed by Mike J. Nichols, scripted by Mike J. Nichols and Scott Wright. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:31

Hugh Jackman’s a dad dealing with the damage he left behind from his first marriage, a son who’s become a train wreck.

The cast includes Oscar winners Laura Dern and Anthony Hopkins and Vanessa Kirby.

Florian Zeller and Christopher Hampton adapted their stage play, with Zeller directing.

There is no reason — none — why the rest of Hollywood should cede the Teen Rom Com genre to the hormonal hits factory at Netflix.

So why not a teen rom-com built around “I see dead people?” And why not on Hulu?

“Darby and the Dead” has that Major Studio sheen and tiny hint of edge — a Mean Girl dies, on camera, and the script features the odd s-bomb and “molly” joke.

It’s got a winsome starlet (Riele Downs, a voice acting star of “Henry Danger”) paired-up with a proper Mean Girl (Auli’i Cravalho of “All Together Now”), that Sneakerella” lad (Chosen Jacobs) as a love interest, and a couple of “names” in the adult supporting cast (Derek Luke, Tony Danza and Wayne Knight).

It doesn’t quite come off. But when you’re trying to channel “Ghost Town” and not “Ghost,” finding enough laughs and striking the right tone was always going to be tricky.

The kids are alright. It’s mainly screenwriter Becca Green — quite green, this is her first produced script — and director Silas Howard (“A Kid Like Jake,” “Transparent”) who can’t quite get us there.

Downs is our droll, narrating-to-the-camera heroine, the 17 year-old her her classmates nickname “Freak Show” because she keeps to herself and often talks to herself.

Well, not really. It seems that after “My mom and I died on the same day” in a swimming accident — with Darby the only one revived — the kid’s been able to see and communicate with the dead, those who haven’t “passed on,” the ones with unresolved issues. That’s who she’s talking to when she’s chatting by herself on the bleachers.

She’s taken up “counseling local spirits” on “the purgatory circuit,” passing on messages, etc., to the living left behind by the folks she calls “dead-o’s.”

All that exposition is handled in the opening credits of the film, which gives the picture a promising start. Yes, it’s Ricky Gervais’ “Ghost Town.” No sense mucking about with “origin story” nonsense.

It’s when that head cheerleader “named after pants,” Capri (Cravalho) starts feuding with her that the perpetual outsider finds herself forced inside. Capri dies in a locker room accident and proceeds to haunt Darby until she agrees to manipulate Capri’s cheer squad posse into throwing a “Coachella inspired sweet 17 party” for the cheerleaderly departed that Capri died too soon to enjoy.

The movie is about Darby having to reach out to people she loathes but doesn’t know, reaching beyond herself to become a cheerleader like dead Capri and Darby’s dead mom. The “learning” comes from getting drunk on the status that comes from being popular, neglecting the “dead-o’s” who have come to depend on her (Danza and Knight) and brushing off the cute nerdy new boy (Jacobs) who becomes the “Fighting Donuts” mascot at Frederick Douglas High.

A lot of tried and true elements of the genre are trotted out in this script, and promptly neglected or botched. Capri’s bullying includes instructions on How to Be Popular, which the script tosses at the screen in slangy graphics but fails to make cute and funny.

“Don’t brag. Always ‘humblebrag.’” “Be woke. Don’t be a ‘woke fisher.'” “DON’T be thirsty!”

The warm and fuzzy stuff, playing chess with dead pal Gary (Danza), mourning Mom with Dad (Derek Luke) isn’t warm and fuzzy.

Scenes with Capri moving objects — and Darby — with her psychic energy aren’t remotely as funny as you’d hope. I mean, how can you blow the frog-manipulation and flog-flinging gag on dissecting day in biology class?

Greene gets the high school tropes right, and makes the banter flip and funny at times and the universal truths universal.

“Being popular is an illusion…like a magic trick, or cryptocurrency.”

Not every plot element fits, not every bit of casting pays off. But the germ of the idea isn’t awful and the attempt is worth the effort. A director with proven teen comedy chops might’ve made this work. Howard displays no feel for this material. At all.

As it is, we’re looking at the outline for a funny teen rom-com, not one that feels finished or that pays off.

Rating: PG-13 (Some Language|Suggestive Material|Some Teen Partying)

Cast: Riele Downs, Auli’i Cravalho, Chosen Jacobs, Asher Angel, Derek Luke, Wayne Knight and Tony Danza

Credits: Directed by Silas Howard, scripted by Becca Greene. A 20th Century film streaming on Hulu.

Running time: 1:40

Might be an overreach, but considering the state of the field this year, maybe not.

“The Whale” is not a great, artful or innovative film, and it goes to some pains to never let us forget that.

It’s overtly theatrical, never remotely shedding its stage-play origins. It’s a one-set show, with just five characters with actors often acting in that “playing to the balcony” vehemence and volume, sometimes conversing but more often monologuing blocks of exposition, back-story, grievances and clues about secret pain.

The protagonist is trapped, afraid and yet brave, flawed and yet somehow ennobled, gay and martyred and fatalistic because he is living out what might be his last days in Matthew Shepard country, that reddest of states, Idaho.

It’s practically a “State of Broadway Drama” address in subject and style.

But none of those limitations, labels and theatrical tropes matter when we’re watching Brendan Fraser, in the performance of a lifetime, humanize and put a face, heart and soul on Charlie, a man who has lived his last years eating himself to death out of grief and regret.

And none of its stage-bound theatricality matters by the time the film’s touching, transcendent finale unfolds. Darren Aronofsky’s film of this Drama Desk Award-winning play by Idaho-born playwright Samuel D. Hunter, who touched on similar themes in his sad and comically eccentric TV series “Baskets,” the one with Zach Galafianakis and the late comic Louis Anderson, captures its pathos and pathology and arrives on the screen with its beating heart intact.

“The Whale” reminds us how we knowingly or thoughtlessly judge the morbidly obese. It makes us wince with every night’s two-pizza delivery, the slices devoured two at a time by the reclusive Charlie. We note the appearance that we think invites this judgement, the face and neck deformed into folds of fat fleshiness, barely functioning legs shaped like hams, the gut butt of out-of-control obesity.

We see the keg-sized re-usable Big Gulp tankard, the endless stashes of candy, chips and litre bottles of Pepsi and in our first flashes of empathy, wonder how any of us escape this fate in this sedentary culture and its NRA-all-powerful weaponized fast food industry.

But we meet Charlie by voice, his screen blacked-out in the Zoom online college writing class because “my camera isn’t working,” his students listening to his patient encouragement, his emphatic insistence that they find a way to write true and write their truth, imparting with every word his belief in their value.

And then we see him at his ugliest, beached on a battered sofa, covered in sweat and a tent-sized T-shirt decorated with food stains, masturbating to gay porn.

That’s how the door-to-door “missionary” (Ty Simpkins of “Jurassic World”) finds him, coming in as Charlie wheezes and gasps for breath, leaving his door unlocked because getting up to lock it is an ordeal he has all but given up.

The kid’s from the locally famous New Life Church and he quickly comes to believe “God sent me here today for a reason.” A simple laugh sends Charlie into wheezing fits and chest pains that assure him that this is it, he’s about to die. The missionary isn’t likely to save Charlie’s soul. Charlie won’t even let him call an ambulance to save his life. He’s uninsured.

The fat man just begs the kid to read this essay Charlie himself was reading aloud, a calming exercise based on a high school kid’s interpretation of “Moby Dick,” of all things.

The film’s first act lays out the parameters of Charlie’s existence, the one-obese-man logistics it takes to sleep, shower, work and simply get out of a chair when you’re carrying around this enormous burden. He pays for his pizzas by leaving money in the mailbox because he can’t stand the look he’d get if anybody he didn’t know was to see him.

We meet Charlie’s off-the-books caregiver, the spitfire nurse Liz (Hong Chau of “The Menu” and TV’s “Watchmen”) who curses him, pulls out the stethoscope and pronounces “congestive heart failure” and hits him with another pleading and profane tirade to let her get him to the hospital.

Then she gives Charlie another massive meatball sub for him to almost choke-to-death on, and steps outside to smoke so that she almost doesn’t see that. That bucket of chicken? That’s the next binge.

“The Whale” is destined to slowly, incrementally and sympathetically, explain who Liz is to Charlie and how he got this way. And it will bring his past back into his present as his long-estranged daughter (Sophie Sink of “Stranger Things”) is summoned, a 17 year-old who rages at him and lashes out at the world, someone contemptuous of any hope he has of belatedly becoming a part of her life.

Aronofsky (“Mother!,” “Black Swan,” “Requiem for a Dream”) and his production designer masterfully take us into this myopic world of Charlie’s own creation, his life-style work-arounds, the mementoes mixed with clutter that’s reached the “debris” level of decor, and his working class poverty.

His lifeline to the world is his Acer laptop, the cheapest one Walmart sells.

Aronofsky’s not the first to tackle material with these physical limitations and these emotional confines. Truth be told, “The Whale” doesn’t escape the one-set-and-morbid stage-play-turned-film genre that “‘night, Mother” and “Whose Life is it Anyway?” pioneered.

The filmmaker leans into the source material’s inherent staginess, and lets some of the players overdo it in their long, perfectly-thought-out-and-delivered blurts of rage, contempt and pleading pity. That’s defensible because that’s how society has conditioned us to respond to this “Biggest Loser” world and its inhabitants, but it grates and colors how we judge the people around Charlie.

Is Liz his caregiver and helper, or merely his co-dependent? Is teenaged Ellie punishing the father who was never around, or has she just curdled into utter cruelty? Is Thomas the missionary a sincere, open-hearted Christian or just a kid projecting his fears and desires on someone who has it worse than him?

Ellie’s eager interactions with Charlie are mercenary and abusive. For Thomas, Sink transforms Ellie into a manic bitchy dream date who bowls over, intimidates, judges and threatens.

Even the great Samantha Morton, in a single scene as Charlie’s ex, can’t escape the stage-bound nature and stage-performance-pitched trap that “The Whale” demands of her. As in “She Said,” she shows up, electrifies us with her reality-based intensity and hidden pain, and makes her blocking problem exit.

But it is Fraser, who has emerged from Hollywood exile to remind us of the sweet-natured soulfulness he brought to his best work, who carries this film and makes “The Whale” a figure of pity and nobility. Of course he’s superb in scenes where Charlie makes light of his predicament and physical state. I can’t stress enough how his casting makes Charlie work as a character and “The Whale” play as a movie of enormous sympathy, sadness and hope.

Buried in a “fat suit,” his physical acting limited to the life of immobility Charlie has sentenced himself to, Fraser will break your heart playing the character’s pain and compassion. When anybody refers to “The Whale” as “transcendent,” it is Fraser that we’re talking about and Fraser whom we’re rooting for, a beloved Hollywood “nice guy” who takes his much-deserved shot at a comeback, and makes us thrilled that he got it.

Rating: R for language, some drug use and sexual content.

Cast: Brendan Fraser, Sadie Sink, Hong Chau, Ty Simpkins and Samantha Morton

Credits: Directed by Darren Aronofsky, scripted by Samuel D. Hunter, based on his play. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:57

Inspired by a true story, because in the 80s, even bears got into the nose candy.

In “Corsage,” the unhappy Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary impulsively grasps at all sorts of privileged distractions in 1877 Vienna and environs, a supposedly all-powerful woman hemmed in by her circumstances and position.

She horseback rides, diets and flips-out quietly over turning 40 and thus becoming “old,” something most of the men in her life, including the Emperor Franz Joseph, her husband, never tire of cattily remarking upon. She sits for a portrait and he remarks on how young it makes her look.

“It will remind me of you when you’re gone,” he sighs, and we wonder why she wasn’t able to get this chap canceled, or at least kicked to the curb for his tactlessness.

At some point, she starts to carry on with her English riding instructor, who dances with her as his house fiddler strums his instrument and sings, in Austrian-accented English, “Take the Ribbon from your hair.” Later, a harpist plucks away and covers “As Tears Go By,” by The Rolling Stones.

And then there’s the member of the court who wants her to perform for him — walking or jogging — as he sets out to test and demonstrate “making pictures that move,” inventing the film camera over a decade before Thomas Edison got the first working model patented.

Writer-director Marie Kreutzer of “The Ground Beneath My Feet” goes all-in on anachronisms in this faintly fantastical and satiric period piece about gender roles, then and now, imagining a mercurial woman, one of the most famous of the Hapsburgs, as perhaps forced into the behavior she adapts by her dismay, heartbreak and fury at “a woman’s place.”

Vicky Krieps of “The Girl in the Spider’s Web” and “The Last Vermeer” is luminous and lost as one of Europe’s most famous beauties hits “a certain age.”

“At the age of 40,” she muses in voice-over (in German with English subtitles), life begins “darkening like a cloud.”

She obsesses about her weight and her waist line, and has been the object of gossip for fainting in public, something she might be faking or could simply be the result of her diets and impossibly tight corsets.

She all but grimaces through a court birthday party, impulsively wakens her little girl for a chilly evening ride that makes the child sick and deals with an emperor (Florian Teichtmeister) who seems to like her…when she’s in her place.

Her duties as empress were to produce heirs — which she did — and “represent” the newish dual monarchy. That’s trickier, as the emperor won’t talk about strife in Serbia and elsewhere as the newly-merged Austria -ungary bides its time before leading Europe heedlessly into World War I.

She spends too much time with her riding “friend” (Colin Morgan) and is chastised by her teen son, the crown prince (Aaron Friesz) for that. She backs away from that relationship only to spy her husband stepping out with another woman for her troubles. The woman cannot get a break.

It’s no wonder she solemnly rises from one of the many state dinners she must soldier through, leaving as she flips the bird at all those gathered there.

“Her soul is like a chaotic museum,” one lady in waiting writes in her diary.

Krieps keeps this “chaotic” woman’s state of mind just buttoned-down enough to suggest it is merely her deviance from the social “norm” that made her seem so highly strung and impulsive. She’d lost an earlier daughter young, we are reminded. Her morbid curiosity about mental illness suggests her own state of mind as she repeatedly visits a mental hospital to supposedly console the patients.

It’s a layered performance lacking much in the way of histrionics. The film is set well after much of “Sisi’s” public reputation had been established, supposedly smeared by a conniving mother-in-law who labeled her sickly and “a silly young mother,” and that gives Krieps less to play, but a more focused and narrower set of circumstances explaining Sisi’s victimhood.

The anachronisms Kreutzer includes are neither here nor there, underscoring a sort of proto-feminist connection to women coming out from under men’s thumbs in the ’60s. But it is Krieps’ performance that carries “Corsage,” a woman in all her many moods, shadings, fears and desires, treated as abnormal and gossiped about and controlled by insults from pretty much every male in her life. And more than a little annoyed about it.

Rating: unrated, nudity, sex, smoking

Cast: Vicky Krieps, Florian Teichtmeister, Aaron Friesz and Colin Morgan.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Marie Kreutzer. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:54

You could poll critics and entertainment writers to confirm this, but if there’s a sweeter spirit in Hollywood, somebody that most folks in the know could agree on deserves a comeback, it’s Brendan Fraser.

He’s Keanu without the cool cachet, just a pleasant, decent human being who may have never taken himself any more seriously than he did in “George of the Jungle” or those goofy “Mummy” movies he did with future Oscar winner Rachel Weisz.

Give this man his victory lap!

Been dying to see this.

We’d made up our minds about Anne Heche long before her sad death in an accident last August. Controversy dogged her in life, and mental health issues — and the presence of cocaine in her system — were prominent in coverage of her disturbing final hours.

But she had one last film in the can at the time of her death. And even if her tragedy tends to overshadow “What Remains,” it’s worth recognizing the pathos, professionalism and charisma this final role showcases.

Heche plays a sheriff who rolls up to crime scenes in unkempt hair, cheap Aviator knock-offs and a worn 1970s Cutlass. Maureen is sort of a Texas version of Frances McDormand’s Marge in “Fargo.” She’s sharper than any of her male subordinates. She takes in the burned-out truck where a body was found and does what her Deputy Do Nothings didn’t. She looks at tire tracks. In a flash, she’s changed the nature of what this was.

“This isn’t where it happened.”

It’s the most economical and effective scene in this well-acted but slow and downbeat melodrama of murder, faith and attempted redemption.

Cress Williams of TV’s “Black Lightning” stars as Marshall, a small town preacher who opens the film washing blood off his hands at a convenience store. “What Remains” is mostly about what led to that moment, the murder — five years before — of the preacher’s wife, his ability and willingness to sermonize “Forgive your enemy” from the pulpit of Hope International Baptist Church, and the bitterness of his teen son (Marcus Gladney Jr.) over Dad’s ultimate “turn the other cheek” gesture.

The white murderer (Kellan Lutz) gets out of prison five years later, insists on coming “home,” apologizes to the preacher and ends up taking a part time job with him. Whatever each man is looking for from the other is mostly left-unsaid.

But from that set up, we can guess pretty much how we get to Sheriff Maureen determining somebody died as a product of bad blood, and thanks to the give-away in the opening scene, we know the bloody-handed preacher was involved.

Writer-director Nathan Scoggins is most interested in the father-son dynamic here. The friction over Dad’s forgiveness of Mom’s murderer, with an undercurrent of unequal “Texas” justice (the white killer got five years for murdering a Black preacher’s wife), creates real tension in that relationship, some of it oddly underplayed, some of it pitched more understandably over-the-top.

Truth be told, there isn’t enough here to recommend “What Remains.” The dialogue and faith-being-tested voice-over narration tends towards the trite and cant.

The performances are too subdued for too long to make us invest in the film right away, and you need that in a movie in which this little happens.

But Heche makes her curtain call memorable, not wasting one second of her screen time, a compact performance of canniness and compassion that nicely complements the leads and makes this worth watching, if not really worth “endorsing.”

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Cress Williams, Marcus Gladney Jr., Kellan Lutz and Anne Heche.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nathan Scoggins. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:41

Writer-director Rian Johnson returns to the scene of the triumph with “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” and finds the going a bit slower, the supporting cast less colorful, less venomous and less star-studded and the mystery quite a bit duller than the last time around.

The effortlessness of “Knives Out” is replaced by a sense of trying too hard and leaning into the goofiness, even as Johnson scores points about today’s nouveau riche tycoon “disruptors.”

Daniel Craig still adorably drawls his way through solving a crime that’s happened and fighting off crimes to come.

But Johnson goes much more conventionally Agatha Christie with this outing. Come sir, “twins” as a plot device? The ancient Greeks and almost as ancient Shakespeare would like a word. Another villain who owns “the real” Mona Lisa? Digs at “influencers” and celebrity “products” (Jeremy Renner hot sauce, Jared Leto “Hard Kombucha”)?

I mean, “cute and clever” still apply. But there’s quite a bit of desperate grasping here. The man peppers the picture with famous cameos, partly as an illustration of great wealth and fame as “another culture, another country,” but mostly to jazz up a cast that doesn’t include Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Christopher Plummer, Toni Collette, Don Johnson, Ana de Armas or Chris Evans.

So if you want to see the last screen appearances by Angela Lansbury and Stephen Sondheim, along with Serena Williams, Ethan Hawke, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Hugh Grant and Natasha Lyonne, jump right in.

The plot — old chums have received an ornate, electronic wooden puzzle box that they solve — together , over Zoom, as the pandemic is still raging — a puzzle that summons them to a Greek island owned by their richest and most famous friend, “Alpha” internet billionaire Miles Bron.

He’s played by Oscar winner Edward Norton, and when you consider that the gubernatorial candidate is played by Kathryn Hahn, the gun-crazed men’s movement influencer is Dave Bautista, his “arm candy” is “Outer Banks” bombshell Madelyn Cline, that Leslie Odom Jr. plays Bron’s friend-turned-corporate chemist and Kate Hudson (Remember her?) is a former cover girl turned gaffe-prone influencer, you may think you have this entire mystère de meurtre figured out.

The star-power imbalance and star-baggage — sinister roles Norton’s played before — point us towards a conclusion. But not so fast, writer-director Johnson hisses. Janelle Monáe (“Antebellum”) is here, a glaring, hostile, chillingly standoffish former business partner added to Bron’s guest-list.

Gentleman sleuth Benoit Blanc (Craig) is also invited, summoned from his pandemic-long bath, mask in hand and plainly a mite overwhelmed, over-awed and overly solicitous at being included in this exclusive company about to be ensconced in extreme wealth and luxury.

“I lose it between cases,” he confesses, in gratitude.

But if the weekend is to be a “murder mystery” themed affair, with Bron staging his death and having his “disruptors assemble” to solve it, why’d he invite the world’s “pre-definite detective?”

Why indeed? The film’s most hilarious scene is Blanc, after carefully observing, overhearing all and questioning more than one guest or host with “What does that mean?” solves the planned “entertainment” in a flourish that would make Hercule Poirot’s mustache uncurl.

But a “real” death changes everything as intrigues, motives, dangers, rogue actors and backstories come into play to “thicken the plot.”

If “Knives Out” zipped by on the sharply-drawn “motivated” characters given delicious star-turns by the cast, we don’t come in expecting the “mystery” to carry the day, here.

Bron has built this island mansion — renegade artist Banksy designed the transparent (glass) dock — around a literal “Glass Onion,” a giant pleasure dome of glass decorated with art glass within, a puzzle from the outside whose layers must be “peeled away” before the truth emerges.

Only not really. It’s a great set and exists, we assume, for a great set piece which, when it comes, isn’t all that.

The intrigues aren’t terribly intriguing just as the puzzles are more perfunctory than puzzling. It’s also measurably longer and slower.

Johnson scores points deflating F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “the rich are very different from you and me” truism, and skewering the “attention economy” the social media age has invented.

“It’s a dangerous thing to confuse speaking without thought with speaking the truth,” Benoit counsels one influencer — and Ye and Chapelle and Musk and a whole caucus of Congress.

And the movie surrounding that messaging is only sometimes less than amusing, with drunk scenes and name-dropping and genteel (and gay) Benoit losing his cool and his favorite expletive, “FIDDLEsticks,” for the cheaper laugh “S–t balls” as the s–t hits the fan.

But I guess you can only be truly bowled-over once by a brilliant filmmaker offering his updating of the classic Dame Agatha “gather the suspects in the drawing room” murder mystery. Just as I guess Johnson realized he’d have to try and generate more of a genuine mystery this time, seeing as how, player-for-player, he’s substituted less dazzling folk in every role than he managed with “Knives Out.”

Yes, it’s worth Netflixing. But a few lovely exteriors and a James Bond-sized super-rich guy’s lair that looks decorated by Swedish Nazis doesn’t really merit a buy-a-ticket big screen immersion. It’s mostly a movie composed in close-ups, and what is Netflix? Television? And what is television?

“A close-up medium.”

Rating: PG-13 for strong language, some violence, sexual material and drug content

Cast: Daniel Craig, Janelle Monáe, Kate Hudson, Edward Norton, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Madelyn Cline, Leslie Odom Jr., Jessica Henwick and Dave Bautista.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Rian Johnson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:20