Movie Nation

“Wakanda Forever” took a steep dive on its second weekend, but still racked up another $67 million and change. No it won’t match “Black Panther” numbers, not by quite a bit. But a blockbuster is a blockbuster, post pandemic. Disney and Marvel will take it.

The new foodie-skewering satire “The Menu” had a harder time finding an audience. But $9 million for a film that insults its target market and stars Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Fiennes,John Leguizamo and…Nicholas Hoult, isn’t bad.

Fathom Events, a theater-booking one-night or one-weekend operation is making bank on Biblical fare with “The Chosen: Season 3,” which they parked in theaters. They earned over $8 million. Not bad.

“She Said” will need some awards season buzz to put more butts in the seats. An Oscar contender starring Carey Mulligan, Zoe Kazan, Jennifer Ehle, Andre Brauer, Samantha Morton and Patricia Clarkson, it did well — $2.25 million — all things considered. The Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo aren’t big selling points, on their own. Give these women and Brauer a little Oscar buzz and that’ll change.

“Till” fell below $1 million and out of the top ten. “The Banshees of Inishirin” fell off quite a bit, and didn’t.

The cannibalism thriller “Bones & All” hit five screens, and opens wider Thanksgiving (That’s kinda sick.) and did $120K.

We’ve seen decades of boot camp movies over the decades, most taking their cue from 1957’s “The D.I.,” with Jack Webb playing the titular Marine Corps drill instructor. More recently, the bar was set by R. Lee Ermey in “Full Metal Jacket,” another D.I. charged with changing recruits into soldiers, no matter what their background, disposition or fitness for the job.

But we’ve never seen a version of this coming-of-age/making-of-a-soldier tale as seen through the eyes of a not-wholly-closeted gay man. Writer-director Elegance Bratton makes his semi-autobiographical drama “The Inspection” both a classic underdog-in-boot-camp story, and a blunt and unblinking look at a gay man’s experience in the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” era, which ended in 2011.

Bratton and his alter ego, Newark recruit Ellis French (Jeremy Pope) lean into ugly tropes that opponents of gay enlistment trot out every time their bigotry gets the better of them. A just-effeminate-enough gay man putting himself in an all-male environment, living with and showering with his comrades in arms?

Let’s just say Bratton dares to put the “phobia” back in homophobia by some of what his protagonist experiences, does and dreams of doing in this world of testosterone and muscles.

Ellis is homeless when we meet him. He may have his gay “fam” as a support system, but they aren’t feeding, housing and caring for him or giving him options for taking care of himself.

At 25, he has to beg his estranged, disapproving prison guard mom (Gabrielle Union, wearing her mileage and her ferocity) for the paperwork that’ll let him join the military.

It’s 2005, near the post-9/11 peak of military activity, and lipstick-wearing Ellis wants to be a Marine.

Mom’s an embittered mess and cruelly-skeptical of how his “life style” will fit in the Corps.

“Come back” as “the son I gave BIRTH to,” she snaps, and that’s that.

Sure enough, the bullying starts on the bus ride to basic training. But Ellis shows his first hint of mettle when he sits next to a targeted recruit.

His on-base greeting (Parris Island is never named) is the cliched litany of yelling, spittle and intimidation from the two assistant drill instructors. Chief Gunnery Sgt. Laws (Bokeem Woodbine) is sparing in his shouting, but not in his threats.

“I will break you,” he promises one and all. “I HATE recruits. But I LOVE Marines.” He’s duty-bound and old school enough to do whatever it takes, above or below board, to weed out the weak from his Beloved Corps.

Woodbine gives Laws a temper that he controls, a cunning that he rarely gives away and a gaydar that is a little slow on the uptake. He praises the faintly fey “French” and his commitment, before finding his ready-made excuse for cutting him.

“The Inspection” thus sets up as the standard war-of-wills story, but with a generic boot camp “system” vs a culture willing to bend and modernize that system twist on that.

It’s fascinating, if perhaps a tad triggering for some old soldiers who can’t see how “this sort of thing” could happen, when of course it’s been happening all along.

Pope, of Ryan Murphy’s “Hollywood” mini series, pays dividends as an actor who is both believably gay and convincingly fit, flinty and tough enough to stand up to grueling training and savage bullying.

Raúl Castillo plays a D.I. who makes an intriguing argument for finding the Marine inside the man, picking up on French’s determination, focus, loyalty to his comrades and intelligence. If Laws is willing to do what it takes to make the “sissy” wash out, French and Sgt. Rosales are willing to call him out about crossed-lines and “psychopath” behavior.

Speaking of bullying out of control, McCaul Lombardi is just as realistic as the anointed squad leader in the class, willing to mete out peer-punishment at the D.I.’s instigation to force French out.

But “The Inspection” is best appreciated as a showcase for Woodbine and Union, each taking her or his best big screen dramatic role in years and bringing it home in scene after scene. She almost quivers with contempt for her own child. Woodbine gives Laws the cocksureness of his own prejudices, certain that this less butch recruit won’t pass his every test.

They make Bratton’s film a metaphor for American ignorance faced-down with first-hand experience. He sets up the character to fail, even taunts us with the obvious traps society long-expected recruits like Ellis French or Elegance Bratton to fall into. He then transforms them into further tests for a homeless, desperate gay man who wants to change his future and serve his country as he does.

Bratton makes it not just believable but acceptable for Ellis to be seen as among “The Few, the Proud.” Because gay men, as this Marine Corps vet realizes, know a little something about “pride,” too.

Rating:  R for language throughout, sexual content, some nudity and violence.
Eman Esfand

Cast: Jeremy Pope, Bokeem Woodbine, Raúl Castillo, McCaul Lombardi.
Eman Esfandi and Gabrielle Union.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Elegance Bratton. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:35

One of the best films ever made about the Armenian Genocide tells the story of one of the first survivors to make it to America. It’s titled “Aurora’s Sunrise,” and it uses different media, bending film genres to relate one of the great tragedies of the 20th century through one woman’s plight.

Arshaluys Mardiginian, renamed “Aurora” when she came to America in 1918, met an American newspaperman who helped publicize her ordeal and the mass murder being carried out by the Ottoman Turks under the cover of World War I. Reporter Henry Gates ghost-wrote a serialized memoir from her accounts, got the interest of Hollywood, and put Mardiginian in a William Selig-produced film epic, “Auction of Souls, (Ravished Armenia)” that traveled America, raising money for Armenian orphans and a hoped-for independent Armenian state.

Here’s what Armenian director Inna Sahakyan and her crew of filmmakers and animators drew from to tell Mardiginian’s tale. Sahakyan includes snippets of the 20 surviving minutes of the 80 minute 1919 biographical thriller sometimes called “Ravished Armenia.” As little of that film survives, a crew went out and recreated silent black and white scenes from it with an actress (Anzehelika Hakobyan) portraying Aurora, who played herself in the movie of her odyssey back in 1919.

There’s also documentary footage of the late Arshaluys Mardiginian, from a long oral history interview she sat for in 1984.

And there’s gorgeous animation — what appears to be rotoscoped actors under-animated in front of lush, water-colorish backgrounds of 1910s Armenia, present day Syria, and America. It is narrated by actress Arpi Petrossian, who speaks in Aurora’s voice in monologues from her memoir about her ordeal.

Take the animated documentary “Waltz with Bashir,” throw in some of the multi-media technique of “Nuts!” and add a few more degrees of difficulty and you have an idea of what Sahakyan and her team have attempted and pulled off.

“Aurora’s Sunrise” is an often gorgeous and always extraordinary film relating one woman’s extraordinary ordeal.

In 1915, from the very start of the Ottoman Empire’s WWI alliance with Germany and Austro-Hungary, 13 year-old Arshaluys notes her family being warned by a Kurdish shepherd that the Turks were rounding up Armenians all over the empire.

Her family — she had seven siblings — lived in a small town (Chmshkadzag), provided for by a father who kept silkworms and made, dyed and sold silk. The kids put on plays and had happy lives, right up to the moment the round-up of conscripts began.

Armenian men, including her father and brother, were forced into the army, en masse. In her telling, that set the stage for the mass evictions, “death march” and mass murders carried out shortly afterward by the Ottoman army. The men were dead or gone. Women and children were easily evicted by the Ottoman Army, which was challenged all over the Middle East by Arabs and the British, crushed by the Russians to the north, an army in which discipline and the chain of command had broken down.

At night, Arshaluys recalled (in Armenian with English subtitles), the soldiers marched these women and children to their deaths and “got drunk and laid hands of the girls” — scenes recreated here with black and white silent footage more graphic than what might have been filmed in 1919.

Arshaluys and her siblings were hounded, robbed and raped by bandits and repeatedly assaulted by Turkish troops, who tossed children overboard as they barge-shipped refugees down the corpse-littered Euphrates River.

Turks kidnapped and sold Arshaluys, and she was exploited even by Kurds who took her in after she escaped a harem. But eventually, she found sanctuary and passage (via revolutionary St. Petersburg) to America to “tell our story.”

She had a brother who had immigrated here earlier. But once in America, in addition to telling her story, she found herself exploited in different ways by that unscrupulous reporter.

It all makes for a moving and utterly fascinating narrative that folds in a war, grim accounts of what one refugee endures to survive it, and American media and early motion picture history into a narrative of a horrific genocide, which the Turks refuse to acknowledge committing to this very day.

It’s a bit difficult to tell what’s archival footage from the recreations here. The mix of media makes “Aurora’s Sunrise” more challenging than your typical Best International Feature Oscar entry. But let’s hope the Academy embraces that challenge and recognizes this brilliant achievement with a nomination.

Rating: unrated, violence, nudity

Cast: Arshaluys Mardiganian, Anzhelika Hakobyan, with the voices of Arpi Petrossian, Ervin Amiryan, Sara Anjargolian and others.

Credits: Directed by Inna Sahakyan, scripted by Peter Liakhov, Kerstin Meyer-Beetz and Inna Sahakyan. A Cineuropa release.

Running time: 1:36

Seems like every time he reminds us of how good he is, Nic Cage goes right back to doing B-or-C pictures.

The wardrobe and (in one shot) fake mustache give this one away. Could be good. Maybe not. We’ll see.

(My review of the film, posted three months after this trailer, is here.)

Apologies to anyone at the roll-your-eyes “Here he goes again” stage of reading my familiar gripe, lament and rant about where too many thrillers come up short — pacing.

But here I go again.

“The Pay Day” is a a caper comedy of little action, low acting energy and almost non-existent wit. And every single one of those cringe-worthy shortcoming is connected to the snail’s pace which this indie outing commits to.

It’s disastrously slow — slow to start, slow to get down to business, with slow scenes, slow transitions to new scenes, slow line readings and indifferent editing that does nothing to correct the director’s timidity on the set.

Sam Bradford, mate, if you’ve never heard the phrase “Once again, but FASTER,” you should have. Pace is everything in a caper comedy. EVERYthing. And every single moment of this failure is like watching a fresco dry.

Kyla Frye and Sam Benjamin co-star and co-wrote this story of high stakes/zero-drama data theft. They plays characters who’re both after the same accounts from some firm that’s allegedly keeping the secret illegal stashes of Members of Parliament. She shoots him to prevent him from stealing the flash drive she’s just downloaded.

Could love be far behind?

It’s just that stupid, and never for one agonizing-as-it-plays-out minute lets you forget it.

We’ve seen Jennifer sacked from her office data management job because the boss can’t be asked for a raise. An anonymous phone call proposes a meeting with a cryptic “Anne Boleyn’s ruby slippers” recognition phrase.

Mr. Gates, played by the actor’s actor and Welles biographer Simon Callow, has a new gig for her. Her take?

“One percent of $500 million.” Yes, she can do the math. Can you?

She has to don a wig and fake her way past the lax and annoyingly chatty staff of the London office building where this takes place. And then she’s interrupted by a talky, chummy, over-familiar employee who won’t stop flirting and won’t take a hint that she needs “PRIV-acy,” as the Brits say it, to finish her “clean the server” work.

She’s doing this in a purloined office-maid’s vest, which he notes but doesn’t question. That’s because he wants that data, too. That’s how he gets shot.

Scene after lead-footed scene, with cops coming into the building after the shot is fired, an evacuation, etc., lacks any sense of urgency at all. Then there’s the woman who has never fired a gun barely registering shock at what she’s done, and a guy who acts as if a bleeding (barely) shoulder wound is no big deal continuing their struggles over a flash drive, flirting and passing out for “sex dreams” of the other.

It’s stunningly dumb. The acting is weak, another failing that the hapless editor fails to hide. And every sequence, every scene and every line is so flat and plays out so slowly that the stupid just stands out more.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Kyla Frye, Sam Benjamin and Simon Callow.

Credits: Directed by Sam Bradford, scripted by Sam Benjamin and Kyla Frye. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:33

This is a very gay-tolerant cinematic fall for Gabrielle Union.

She plays a mother who has to come around — a little — on her gay son, who wants to become a Marine in this drama.

And in Disney’s animated “Strange World” she voices a mother of a gay teen. Good on her.

Here are three things that aren’t explained in the movie that might help you get more out of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “oneiric,” Fellini-esqe, quasi-autobiographical magnum opus “Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths.”

“Oneiric,” a label applied by the filmmaker and/or the studio to the film, means “dream poem.”

“Bardo” is a Buddhist term for a “transitional” state between death and life, “purgatory” without the Catholic guilt. So our hero is either dreaming, or near death.

And the giant salamanders that show show up in a handful of scenes of this film about a Mexican journalist who gained fame after he relocated to the United States and turned to “docufiction” documentaries, are axolotls, named by the Aztecs — unique to Mexico City and thus a symbol of the city and the Mexican Republic.

In the film, they can be interpreted as the fragile pull of the hero’s heritage when deep down, he knows moving north expanded his possibilities and gave his children the chance to excel in ways that hierarchical, hidebound and constrained Mexico would not.

It’s a movie — pardon, film, as in “A film is a movie we don’t quite understand.” — of dreams and narrative shifts in time and the order of events, a tapestry of modern and ancient Mexico. Its money-scene is a debate between Silvario Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho, an Iñárritu look-alike) and infamous conquistador Hernán Cortés (Ivan Massagué) at the top of a mountain of Native corpses in a Mexico City littered with the “disappeared” dead of the country’s recent history.

Not to worry, the “dead,” whom our protagonist, returned to the city from the U.S. to be feted before flying “home” to LA to receive a prestigious journalism honor, are but “extras” on a film shoot — his own.

Silvario as a character has seen them drop dead symbolically everywhere he turns his eyes to show the carnage of the drug wars, murderous corruption and the sea of humanity that has been fleeing north to the Rio Grande for 100 years, many of them dying along the way.

But before I go any further into this challenging satiric parable in an “8 1/2/All That Jazz” vein, what do we say about movies that don’t give us everything we need to interpret them between the opening and closing credits? That force us to look up obscure esoterica? We call such films cheats, the product of a pretentious, indulgent filmmaker who might actually be making this for a Mexican audience, not that you’d get a lot of traction with obscure Buddhist titling and 40 peso words for “dream narrative” in Ciudad Mexico either.

At some point, watching “Bardo,” I had to close up my notebook, give up on writing down the sometimes profound “handful of truths” in the hero’s conversations with his wife (Griselda Siciliani), kids (Ximena Lamadrid, Iker Sancho), long-dead father (Luis Couturier), mother (Luz Jiménez) and Cortez.

At some point, there’s nothing for it but to lean forward, rest your head on your heads and try to figure out what this Oscar-winning (“Birdman,” “The Revenant”) pendejo is trying to say in two and a half hours of out time thanks to a big blank indulgent check from Netflix.

Silvario is determined to get an interview with a race-baiting/Mexican-hating US president. The news is filled with Amazon.com’s plans to buy “the Mexican state of Baja, California.”

Our documentarian is defensive about his homeland to anyone who bad-mouths the “Third World” basket-case state overrun with migrants fleeing north from Central and South America, narco-lords, corrupt cops and the corrupt politicians who enable them. But Silvario sees the classism that is so shocking to his kids, the affluence he has lived in and raised them in contrasted with the poverty that sends hundreds of thousands north when the crops fails and the struggle overwhelms them. He feels the resentment for leaving.

He drifts into encounters with ghosts, and truthfully, we aren’t sure in any given scene just what the reality of the moment is, if he’s really making love to his wife or sitting — mute — while an old comrade, now an embittered click-bait ambush chat show host (Francisco Rubio) who attacks him, smiling, on a live TV.

“Exposure at any price,” Silvario complains when the friend Luis complains about his silent evasions.
That’s what attention culture demands. Here he is, like every over-achiever who ever had to mix with the entitled, “seeking approval from people who despite me.”

Reality in “Bardo” is subjective, and capricious. Which is why we mutter Mexican profanities at the great Iñárritu. The pendejo isn’t playing fair.

There are magical moments, and brilliant sequences tossed into this ensalada of a movie — long tracking shots through a big rental hall concert/dance party, through his spacious Mexico City house, over the desert as we see Silvario’s acclaimed and controversial migrant profile film recreated.

He lectures the American ambassador (Jay O. Sanders) about a mythic moment in the disastrous (for Mexico) Mexican-American war, and it is recreated right in front of them, with Mexican actors in cheap blond wigs portraying the American troops.

Funny.

Silvario sees stigmata on his feet, more than once and watches them nailed to the floor at one point, and muses on the state of things and his state of mind in voice over-narration, which more than one character complains about. “Move your LIPS” when you talk (in Spanish, with English subtitles).

Some of the profundities I jotted down before giving up and simply trying to decode what I was seeing — “A documentarian should not believe, or not believe. He only must know where to point the camera.” Old age isn’t summoned or expected, but when it arrives “It becomes a full time job.”

There’s a lot of that in the third act, which goes on forever and drags and drags, despite having the odd pithy observation about life and living it, guilt over “home” and the like.

I didn’t hate “Bardo,” something I can’t say about Iñárritu’s pal Alfonso Cuaron’s even more indulgent and hilariously over-rated “Roma.” But he’s made a film that challenges and infuriates and in equal measure.

And if the worst thing that comes from it is a few critic-fans calling him a “pendejo” for it, he’ll have gotten off lightly.

Rating: R for language throughout, strong sexual content and graphic nudity.

Cast: Daniel Giménez Cacho, Griselda Siciliani, Ximena Lamadrid, Iker Sancho, Francisco Rubio and Jay O. Sanders.

Credits: Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, scripted by Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Nicolás Giacobone. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:39

There’s something about Alaska that welcomes the quirky and celebrates the extreme.

It’s where The Iditarod was born, after all. But I used to live on remote Kodiak Island, where the locals would invent drunken DIY river raft races, bizarre footraces and no-holds-barred golfing challenges — there is no golf course — up the mountain overlooking the town of Kodiak. Every corner of Alaska is overrun with such oddities. Screwballs congregate there.

And sometimes, they invent a new race to lure more of them north.

“The Race to Alaska” is a goofy, lighthearted documentary about the R2AK, The Race to Alaska — scores and scores of boats without engines — racing sloops, catamarans and trimarans to dinghies, beach cats and the occasional paddle board — dash and endure the 750 miles from Port Townsend, Washington to Ketchikan, Alaska via “The Inside Strait,” a quest that can take from 3-13 days.

“Sounds like a good way to die!” one participant laughs. And he’s not wrong.

When you’re pedaling, paddling, or sailing through some of the most stunning seaside scenery on Earth, the Johnstone Straight, Seymour Narrows and “Cape Caution, which was NOT named by somebody who hadn’t been there,” are trying to kill you.

Giant waves, sudden changes in weather, vast tidal rapids, huge whirlpools, rocks, loose logs and shipping traffic — the occasional giant cruise ship looms up behind you — break gear, swamp boats and test experienced sailors and novices alike, every year since 2015.

“How do I avoid icy death?” becomes everyone’s motto.

But it’s also treated as something of a joke, even by the participants. They begin with a “LeMans start” (racers racing on foot onto their boats) accompanied by the Red Army Chorus’s booming rendition of the old Soviet National Anthem. Yes, in formerly Russian Alaska and environs, that’s still funny.

Filmmaker Zach Carver uses interviews and on-board video diaries from solo sailors and crews ranging from privileged bros to “blue collar” sailors, feminists, sourdoughs, eccentrics and adventure athletes to paint a fun picture of a character-building boat race peopled by genuine characters.

They are “someone who has the ability to push themselves beyond” their abilities, and beyond the expectations of others,” organizer Jack Beattie waxes lyrically.

“We have about 70 miles to smoke all the weed,” one crew decides as they hit the home stretch.

The boats can be customized to suit the conditions, or disposable yard sale purchases, with names like Sail Like a Girl, Freeburd, Fashionably Late, Grace B, Ptarmigan, Soggy Beavers and Jungle Kitty.

Crews rough it with DIY toilets, catching sleep where they can –on board in the rain and spraw, or in tents or homemade shelters along the undeveloped shore, where the Alaskan brown bears roam.

All are tested, some have to quit and some find themselves beaten down by the grind and exhilarated by the awe-inspiring views, joyous porpoise encounters and the thrill of the chase.

“We intentionally made a really frustrating race” with that in mind, Beattie admits with a cackle.

It’s a playful movie, very much in the spirit of the engine-free race it documents, with the various boat crews producing the memorable moments — knockdowns (when wind or wave slaps a boat onto its side, or worse — brilliant bits of ingenuity, sight-seeing ashore, meeting locals and Native Americans, and um, bonding as a crew.

“We’re brothers, working on being enemies. It’s a small boat.”

Sure, bragging rights enter the picture, but just getting to the finish line is achievement enough for most. Of course, somebody turned her race into a TED Talk. That’s how the attention economy works.

But what’s striking about these folks is the ingenuity mixed with idealistic naivete that so many bring to this bucket list adventure. As an experienced sailor who lives aboard a sailboat in Florida, I was amazed at some of the gadgets people invented to move even big boats when the wind or the tide are against them. Take away the easy “engine” answer to everything and people get creative.

“Gas is what we use now in place of intelligence,” one old salt opines. And he’s not wrong, at least in this case.

Beattie gets the last word on all this, a chamber of commerce/town promoter type who knew “the best bad idea” he and race coordinator Daniel Evans had ever heard, and ran with it. He should put this on a T-shirt as the motto of this good time/hard time once a year regatta.

“Be safe, be bold, do something incredible. And get over yourself.”

Rating: unrated, profanity, drug references

Cast: Jack Beattie, Daniel Evans, many others

Credits: Directed by Zach Carver, scripted by Zach Carver and Greg King. A Freestyle Release.

Running time: 1:37

Of all the things you’d never expect to find on the resume of Mauna Loa-sized Jason Momoa under “special skills,” “plays nice with kids” has to be pretty far from predictable.

He’s the best thing, almost the only entertaining thing, in the dazzling eye-candy kiddie fantasy “Slumberland,” which suggests Netflix suits pondering the question, “What would a children’s movie from the director of ‘Constantine’ look like?” It’s just the sort of thing those gambling-with-house-money goofballs would sign off on.

I don’t see the comic strip “Little Nemo in Slumberland” credited on this, unlike the dazzling but little seen animated film from the late ’80s “Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland.” The new film isn’t wholly unrelated to that source material, or even that earlier film. But it’s even more “out there,” if that’s possible.

The fantasies of Terry Gilliam (“Time Bandits,””Brazil”), the Harry Potter universe, “Inception” and “The Never Ending Story” are sampled in this grab bag script that’s here mainly to provide Momoa a stage to show off over-the-top kid-friendly comic chops we never knew he possessed.

It’s got a character named Nemo whose nightly adventures through the vast dreamscape of Slumberland are a quest for her, and this “outlaw” and “pirate” and gonzo goof her dad used to know. She is looking for her father, a lighthouse keeper who home-schooled Nemo up until the day he was lost at sea.

Wacky, beefy Flip (Momoa) has his own quest, showing up at the lighthouse after Nemo’s dad (Kyle Chandler) undertakes one stormy rescue mission too many. Nemo (Marlow Barkley) is heartbroken and just wants to find her father and ditch her bachelor Big City uncle (Chris O’Dowd, stripped of his Irish accent and given little funny to say or do) where she’s been sent to live.

Flip is a horned, fanged, top-hatted dynamo straight out of Wonderland — Slumberland in this case — a nutball and a bull in a china shop when it comes to that lighthouse. He trashes it looking for a map. The kid can’t recall it, but she wouldn’t want to let this guy have it, anyway. He’s looking for these pearls in the vast somnambulant world of Slumberland. He needs the map to track them down and steal them. Because he’s a thief.

“You said ‘thief’ like it’s a BAD thing!”

If Nemo wants to ditch her doorknob-selling uncle, she’ll have to locate that hidden map and tag along with Flip as they navigate through Slumberland, jumping from dream to dream to dream, wildly conceived fantasies, some of them.

They interrupt a Spanish dancer’s reverie, whirling through a dance floor covered with figures who turn out to be butterflies congregating and taking human shape. They bop into a huge dump truck hurtling through city streets with a pre-school dreamer at the wheel.

At one point, they wreck and plunge into the deep, only to fight their near-drowning way out of the truck, stepping out of this dream by climbing through a portal that terminates in a tank on the back of a toilet.

Momoa hoots and hollers. He mugs for the camera. He teaches, threatens and teases. He gets the kid to dance with him.

David Guoin and Michael Handelman are the credited screenwriters. Team “Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb” and “Dinner for Schmucks” script a few funny bits about Canada’s most popular dream and Canadians in general (“Timmies!”) and wrote Flip’s lines about boiling life down to basics.

“Wine, women and WAFFLES! The three dubs!”

The plot is all over the place — literally — a dream cop hunting the sleep thief Flip all through Slumberland, Nemo’s waking hour schemes to slip out of school, find a quiet spot to read her uncle’s “History of Doorknobs” coffee table book and fall to sleep.

There are all these rules to this world, most of which have nothing to do with the quest and the characters on it.

But I laughed at a lot of what Momoa does and says, and cackled at the kid having trouble getting this stunningly dull (you’d think) doorknob book to put her to sleep.

“Why’d you have to be so INTERESTING?”

Pretty as the digital effects are, traipsing or racing through a glass and chrome “Inception” city, plunging beneath the waves, dodging the swirling tentacled clouds that represent nightmares because the kid is “a nightmare MAGNET,” they don’t add up to much of a plot. The film meanders into detours and kills the better part of two hours on a quest that seems close to wrapping up after one.

For all the visuals trotted out here, there isn’t enough to see or enough going on to fill the dead spaces littering this bloated film re-edit waiting to happen.

And man, I have GOT to stop looking up the STUPID money Netflix is shelling out for these high-end spectacles. It’s not like Elon Musk is threatening to take them over or anything. But DAMN. $150 million for this? Sure, “It’s all on the screen.” And?

At least Momoa is fun. Find him a comedy, somebody. He’s got Joe Manganiello’s build, and enough of his comic chops to handle a a movie that doesn’t require him to play a biker, a barbarian or a deep sea beefcake.

Rating: PG, scary images, some profanity

Cast: Jason Momoa, Marlow Barkley, Chris O’Dowd, Weruche Opia, and Kyle Chandler

Credits: A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:57

Hard to pick out Jake Gyllenhaal’s voice, less hard to figure out Dennis Quaid. Lucy Liu and Gabrielle Union?

This lost explorer is found by his son and grandson story is the big animated Thanksgiving release. And most of us have no idea what to expect, as there’s been little advertising, little promotional effort (outside of Disney-owned streaming/cable properties).

Never a good sign.