Movie Nation

Every few years, Disney likes to remind a new generation of fans that this global entertainment colossus was “all started by a mouse,” as founder Walt Disney used to say.

“Mickey: The Story of a Mouse” is such a reminder, a Disney+ history of Mickey, his visual and psychological evolution over the almost 100 years since his creation. It’s a slicker version of similar works that Disney has produced, mainly for television, as that was Walt’s original vision for how to use the medium — promoting his animated brand.

Filmmaker Jeff Malmberg interviews animators and animation historians, artists and art historians, Walt biographers and Disney archivists and fans young and old, folding that fresh material in with snippets of Walt’s earlier TV, big screen and oral history accounts of how the Mouse that Made Him and his company came to be.

It’s not a deeper than deep dive into Mickiana, even though it does mention the shared credit for creation (with animator Ub Iwerks), Mickey’s racist cartoons in the ’30s, Walt’s increasingly conservative politics and the like. “Mickey” is fittingly built around another reboot of the mouse — a new hand-animated short, “Mickey in a Minute” — a cartoon that takes us through many (not all) of the looks that the mouse has had on screen, from the 1920s to today. That short film — included here — isn’t the whole story, or even that satisfying. But it gives us the general idea, with a few new flourishes, just like the documentary it inspired.

For my money, the entire film could have taken place in the Disney Archives in Burbank. Still drawings from the earliest Mickey cartoons, including the breakout sound film “Steamboat Willy,” flip books illustrating every change in Mickey’s design — “Fantasia” Mickey, “Mickey Mouse Club” Mickey, “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” Mickey even the more recent “Ren & Stimpy” ish Mickey for more anarchic TV appearances — it’s all here.

The studio that owes it all to a mouse has been quite the packrat when it comes to preserving its history and that of its most important intellectual property.

Malmberg & Co. take us to the Disney family farm in Marceline, Missouri and to “Mouse Heaven,” one fan’s collection/shrine in Beacon, New York. Great animators from the late Ward Kimball, one of Disney’s “Nine Old Men,” to Andreas Deja and Mark Henn and Eric Golberg, who animated and coordinated with other animators the “Mickey in a Minute” short film., weigh in on the character, whom we see being drawn, “inked” and animated. They break down the “personality” and character traits that come from the seemingly simple choice of how Disney and others decided he should walk (confident, bouncy, nimble enough to respond to any circumstance), react and interact with the world.

There’s also a lot of talk of the global phenomenon Mickey Mouse quickly became, his iconic status at home and abroad during World War II (fascists banned him), and the seeming simplicity of his design, just “a few circles,” that made him easily identifiable the world over and triggers such a loving response from literally billions of people, young and old.

A joke about what future archeologists might make of our worship of the mouse, an entire civilization’s “shrine to the Great God Mickey,” rings a lot truer that you’d think.

No, “The Story of a Mouse” doesn’t get definitive answers that cut through Walt’s penchant for “tall tales” about the Mouse’s origin, or avoid repeating Disney lore about this and that. It’s still an eye-opener, especially for the casual fan who hasn’t devoured all the many books on Early Disney as a subject and Mickey as a character, a corporate brand and a cultural touchstone.

Rating: G

Cast: Mark Henn, Andreas Deja, Eric Goldberg, Mindy Johnson, Rachel Cline, Carmenita Higgenbotham, Bret Iwan, Floyd Norman and Walt Disney.

Credits: Directed by Jeff Malmberg. A Disney+ release.

Runing time: 1:30

We love Will Ferrell, Ryan Reynolds and Octavia Spencer. We all do, and I know I’m not speaking out of turn when I say “we” here.

And that’s a big help when diving into the musical “Spirited,” a musical “Christmas Carol” updating that uses “Scrooged” as its guiding star.

When Ferrell turns to the camera in the middle of singing “That Christmas Morning Feeling,” and flips us all the bird, that’s what they were going for here — juvenile, PG-13 “naughty” with an Oscar winner and two bromantic comedians not known for singing and dancing joining in on the singing and dancing.

So it’s a sort-of “family” musical with very dark and up to date undertones and a little edge, augmented by a smattering of profanity. Any thoughts of this being Ferrell’s follow-up to the sweeter-than-sweet modern holiday classic “Elf” go right out the door long before he’s flipped us all off.

The tunes have “Dear Evan Hansen,” “La La Land” and “Greatest Showman” composer/lyricist authorship. But the director, Sean Anders, who co-wrote it, did Ferrell’s “Daddy’s Home” buddy comedies with Mark Wahlberg. So no, he’s not known for musicals either.

And you just knew from the amusing, snappy trailers, promotional gags and the like that Reynolds and Ferrell have plunged intot o promote this that the movie wasn’t going to be as funny or as much fun as they promised. It isn’t.

But it starts giddy and finds a few moments to shine. The dancing and production numbers are close to dazzling. Reynolds, Ferrell and especially Spencer sing well enough that one listens for autotune touches and is tempted to look-up if they actually did their own singing. Yes. Yes they did.

And again, we LOVE those guys. So there’ll be no incineration of “Spirited” here. Everybody involved took a lot of Apple’s money and took career risks and they kind of, sort of pull it off.

Ferrell plays the Ghost of Christmas Present, a veteran in service of a sort of Santa’s Workshop as Silicon Valley cloud tech start-up that sets out to give one HOA Nazi/neighbor from Hell (Rose Byrne) or “rat bastard hotel manager” or other stinker that one Christmas night of “visits” that change them for the better each year.

Just like Mr. Scrooge.

Patrick Page is Jacob Marley, director of this operation, where they save-one-soul-at a-time and create “ripples” of kindness and righteousness through the culture. And yes, two screenwriters spent time on the clock coming up with all this logistical, expositional claptrap.

Reynolds plays Clint, a nasty, negative-ad mastering media consultant deemed “unredeemable” by the higher ups. But Mr. Christmas Present insists they try, joined by Christmas Past (Sunita Mani) who can’t keep her tongue in her mouth while lapping up all there is to see of the handsome, flippant and shallow Clint.

Christmas Future? He’s voiced by Tracy Morgan and is as tall and scary as the Specter of Death Itself. He scares the hell out of Karen (Byrne) anyway. Great effect.

Can Clint, who introduces himself by singing to a Christmas Tree Growers’ convention that they’re doomed, but that he can negative advertise them back to glory, be saved?

“Every Facebook loving Boomer wants to fight a culture war,” he croons. “So tell your core consumer what the hell they’re fighting for!”

Clint even wants to help his neglected eighth grade niece (Marlowe Barkley) win her school election by “going negative.” He puts his ace executive vice president (Spencer) on the case doing the oppo research that will destroy young Josh’s candidacy.

Past, Present and Future set out to change Clint, who is so snide and cynical that he makes them question why they even bother. “People are selfish and awful and never change” is what has made him rich, after all.

“Is mankind getting any mankinder” thanks to their efforts?

He’s got a point.

“Spirited” wanders hither and yon, with clever effect/set changes to show Clint flashbacks to his troubled childhood, and early career success. He even persuades his “Present” guide to go back to Dickensian English where the guide-ghost was last alive himself, producing an “Oliver!” styled number in an English eatery and pub that is the musical, costume and dancing highlight of the film. Of course they reference “Oliver!” in it. They know what they’re mocking as well as we do.

Spencer sings a soul-searching ballad or two and Ferrell and Reynolds share some song and dance duets that are delightful, if you give yourself over to them as musicals demand that you do. I got a “Dear Evan Hansen” instantly forgettable vibe from most of them.

When pondering why this wasn’t taking flight more often, I settled on how produced, rehearsed and directed a musical has to be, and how warm and loose and adorable those online bits that Reynolds and Ferrell come off. They’re played as throw-away gags, and no matter how scripted and rehearsed his fake feud with Hugh Jackman might be, Reynolds and Jackman make it seem like effortless comical antipathy.

“Spirited” it too long, self-serious and tidy to feel that spontaneous and goofy.

But it’s novel and kind of cute cute, and when it isn’t you just grit your teeth and recall how morbid “A Christmas Carol” really is, and if the screenplay is going to modernize that, death and the unpleasant facts of modern life are fair game, Jimmy Fallon cameo included.

The best idea here is but a single sequence, those singing and dancing Dickensians insulting each other with a phrase the movie insists we’ve twisted away from the profane put-down it was 200 years ago.

“Good afternoon!”

So there’s just enough novelty and fun to recommend “Spirited” — something I’ve never done for the sour “Scrooged” — with Reynolds and Ferrell hoofing and singing like this is what they’ve wanted to do all their professional lives.

And it’s just off-color enough to encourage 12 year-old boys to laugh at hearing their playground profanity thrown back at them, sending them back to school with fresh insults that this time, at least, won’t make their teachers blush.

“Good afternooon!”

Rating: PG-13 for (profanity), some suggestive material and thematic elements.

Cast: Will Ferrell, Ryan Reynolds, Octavia Spencer, Sunita Mani, Tracy Morgan, Patrick Page, Joe Tippett, Andrea Anders, Marlowe Barkley and Rose Byrne

Credits: Directed by Sean Anders, scripted by Sean Anders and John Morris. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 2:06

The opening scene of “Wild is the Wind” is a routine traffic stop that is anything but routine.

A sketchy-looking speeder has been pulled overon a lonely road somewhere on the Veldt. Two South African cops — one white, one black — are taking care of this. Money changes hands, and a fervent promise to never speed again is given in exchange.

The black cop pockets his share of the money as the ancient Datsun leaves. When we see the smirking driver, we also see what the cop had to have seen, a bound and gagged black woman in the back seat. Apparently that didn’t matter. Both men in blue have let money get between them and justice, between them and doing the bare minimum in “Protect and Serve” terms.

This could be good, we think. Pointed and timely. Or not.

Writer-director Fabian Medea’s film then proceeds to tell us and teach them the consequences of racism and the corruption it leads to when it infects law enforcement. Because “three years later,” a pretty white teenager disappears. She’s the mayor’s niece, so there’ll be “hell to pay” if the killer isn’t caught.

White South Africa is sure the killer was “some kaffir” from “the township.” But these two dirty cops — well, one of them most certainly — know better.

Mothusi Magano is Vusi, the black sergeant in that duo, married with a baby on the way. Frank Rautenbach is John, his superintendent and expert in the one thing law enforcement the world over is most expert in — knowing what he and they can get away with. That’ll come in handy as he needs money just as badly as Vusi. He’s trying to save the family ranch.

They’ve moved on from petty bribes to carrying out off-the-books drug raids. Local mobster/club owner Mongo (Brendon Daniels) will always take the merchandise off their hands.

But now there’s this murder investigation that could muck everything up. For Vusi, who has nightmares about the killer he is sure he let go for a few South African rand years before, it’s also a reckoning, his moment of truth.

Medea’s police parable benefits from striking locations, solid performances and a built-in ticking clock. Can the two cops serve two masters, and keep their corruption out of the public eye while scrambling to solve or appear to solve this case before racial tensions explode? Are they “brothers” in blue, or does race trump that? They’ll have to visit a bar with Nazi decor, grill and beat this suspect and then than one.

On the sliding “brisk” to “tediously slow” scale of screen pacing, “Wild is the Wind” sits somewhere between “deliberate” and “get ON with it, man.” It’s slow. It dawdles, with the odd dead-end scene mixed in with scripted character back stories and details from what happened “that night” from various suspects’ point of view.

We’ve seen the opening scene. We know who did it. So does Vusi. His nightmares underscore this, and the fact that he’s damned if he does the right thing for once, damned if he doesn’t.

Medea doesn’t do a very good job of running through the calculations the cops have to be making about this case, their financial situation and conflicting loyalties. Medea handles the murderous subject matter glibly at times and can’t reconcile the moral quicksand his characters slow-walk through, no matter how far towards “simple vengeance tale” he takes this.

This was potentially a timely, politically-charged thriller sure to pack a punch. Blows are landed, and characters are triggered. We get a sense of how an integrated police force struggles to deliver justice when haste and bribes and deep-seeded racism convince this black cop or that black coroner that “justice” has never been the way things work there.

As this tame “Wind” meanders towards whatever inevitable conclusion among the three we can see coming long before the finale, all we’re left with is what might have been.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity, drug and alcohol abuse

Cast: Mothusi Magano, Frank Rautenbach, Brendon Daniels and Izel Bezuidenhout

Credits: Scripted and directed by Fabian Medea. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:03

For those keeping score at home, “Wakanda Forever” earned more its opening weekend at the domestic box office than “Black Adam” has made ($145 million) in a month.

“Smile” cleared the $100 million mark, “Ticket to Paradise” cleared the $50 million mark and by next weekend, “Lyle Lyle Crocodile” will have earned over $75 million.

Data from Box Office Mojo and @BoxOfficePro. Illustration from @BoxOfficePro.

“Byzantine” is the word we use to describe insanely-complicated and sometimes murderously murky political situations. But the literal back-stabbers of the Eastern Roman Empire had nothing on the mess that was Korean politics during South Korea’s dictatorships, coups and assassinations era, the late 1970s and early ’80s.

“Squid Games” star Lee Jung-jae has conjured up a seriously over-the-top, byzantine, violent and fictional thriller inspired by those wild and bloody times. He wrote, directed and stars in “Hunt,” a chaotic and engrossing mystery built around that evergreen of the espionage and political intrigue genre, the hunt for a “mole” in Korean intelligence agencies.

Notice I used the plural there. God knows how many entities and their legions of field agents cross paths and cross swords (not literally) in this veritable civil war among competing agendas between rivals with competing suspicions.

Lee stars as Park Pyong-ho, a top level agent with the KCIA when we meet him. It’s not until he’s present at an attempted assassination of his country’s increasingly dictatorial and murderously repressive president during a visit to Washington that he crosses paths with his domestic security counterpart, Major Kim (Jung Woo-sung).

That attempted-hit on the president and assorted other operations that are lethally compromised tell both men, and their higher-ups, that this “mole” they’ve been wondering about is real. They cannot accept this or that fall guy that the thoroughly corrupt government, whose corruption leaks into every agency in it, puts forth.

As each plunges into the arrests, brutal interrogations and spy games with North Korean agents and defectors to find and catch the spy in their ranks, each has plenty of good, solid reasons to suspect the other of being the mole, or helping cover that mole’s activities.

Lee scripts and stages epic shootouts and attempted hits in D.C., Seoul and Tokyo as each agent, moving further up the ladder, engages in tit-for-tat reprisals and provocations in their game of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” with each other.

Lee makes Park the hotter of these two hotheads, the one that bellows the most credible threats and the quickest to resort to violence. But Park is troubled by what all this means to the safety and stability of his country even as he ruthlessly orders this or personally carries out that. Jung plays the more guarded and in some ways, the more frightening character, the one who won’t hesitate to do what he thinks needs to be done.

Go Yoon-Jung plays a college girl caught up in campus protests against the fascist regime, a young woman Park keeps getting out of jail. “Honey trap,” the other spies wonder. And “He’s not my father,” she explains. Another mystery to puzzle out.

One thing I’m often struck by in Korean action cinema is the sheer human scale of the productions. It’s not just the zombie movies that are filled with teeming masses. Lee treats us to huge, crowded protests broken up by legions of savagely motivated riot police, competing armies of agents trying to shove past each other to access this official or that wounded agent with secrets they need, fighting to get into his hospital room.

Chaos and mayhem are all around as the manipulative U.S. CIA section chief (Paul Battle) emphasizes that America’s limited concerns are “stability,” and no so much how South Korea achieves it.

One of Park’s field recruits tells him a joke (in Korean, with English subtitles). What do you call war in space?

“Star Wars.”

What do you call a war that never quite turns hot?

“Cold War.”

And what’s the name for a war without end?

“Korean War!”

It’s so — here’s that word — “Byzantine” that “Hunt” can be a tad hard to follow. But even that adds to its immersive qualities. Hand-held cameras plunging into brawls, tear gas, chasing assassins and North Korean spies from dead drops to booby-trapped hideaways, the viewer is overwhelmed much the way ordinary Koreans must have been back then and to some degree, even now, with an armed if starving neighbor to their north bent on their destruction.

But that’s what life amid Byzantine intrigues is like.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence and lots of it

Cast: Lee Jung-jae, Jung Woo-sung, Jeon Hye-jin and Go Yoon-Jung

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lee Jung-jae. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 2:06

Back in the ’80s, I was helping my “sourdough” housemates set up for a poker game in a place I rented up Kodiak, Alaska way.

And then “Breaking Away” came on the satellite dish TV. As I settled in to watch it, I started talking it up. One by one, the other guys finished what that they were doing and joined in. None of them had seen it.

Other players arrived, wound-up and ready for some poker and a few Kodiak “slammers,” (tequila and 7-Up and don’t get me started on that). But they started watching, too. Whatever this 1979 Peter Yates dramedy holds for women, or members of minority groups unrepresented on the screen in those less diverse times, for blue collar white guys, it was instant nostalgia in its day, cinematic comfort food about paths taken and not taken, the endless possibilities of youth and the limits of small town — even a college town — life.

After the film ended and the drinking and money-losing started, I noticed how everybody’d picked up catch phrases.

Have a snack. ” It’s I-ty food. I don’t want no I-ty food.”

A straight, Jack high. MY pot. “Refund? REFUND!”

People tuned in to this minor hit’s magic right from the start. I remember Midwesterner Roger Ebert raving up this tale of Bloomington, Indiana on his TV show when “Breaking Away” came out. And as the years passed the nostalgia for a nostalgic-when-it-was-new movie endured. Entertainment Weekly did a cute cover story with the four young actors it helped launch — Dennis Christopher, Daniel Stern, Jackie Earle Haley and Dennis Quaid — 35 years later posing for a shot in their “Cutters” shirts.

Looking at it now, it’s obvious that even what it was selling back then was a sort of romantic, idealized and alcohol-free vision of white male post-high school youth, and perhaps it was set in still-seriously-segregated Indiana for a reason. Because that helped sell it.

But four sons of stone-cutting quarry workers, men who’d given their kids some piece of the middle class life with their labor, struggling to figure out what to do with the extra choices their parents passed on to them, that story still resonates as it always did. It’s still magical.

Christopher plays Dave Stohler, 19ish and utterly obsessed with cycling. This was pre-Greg LeMond, pre-US TV coverage of the Tour de France. A few different-drum kids of that era got into bicycle racing (including me), but Dave has gone off the deep end. He’s so into “The Italians” who battled the French and Belgians for dominance of the sport back then that he’s learning Italian, speaking Italian to his indulgent mother (Barbara Barrie) and utterly dismayed Dad, played by the great Paul Dooley.

Buon giorno, papa!

“I’m not “papa.” I’m your god-damned father. She’s your god-damned mother…That’s MY cat! His name’s Jake, not Fellini! I won’t have any “eenie” in this house!”

Dave’s only got room for one obsession at a time, so his life is as aimless as his running mates. Mike (Quaid, in his break-out performance) used to be a jock and is facing 20 with the growing knowledge that his best years and most of his possibilities are behind him. Cyril (Stern) is a quizzical wit who might not be witty enough to compete with the real wits at college, should he try to get in. And Moocher (Haley) is short, short-tempered and barely keeping it together, living on his own in a house his father’s trying to sell from Chicago, where the old man is job hunting. Moocher may have to settle down to get even the tiniest taste of security. He’s touchy about that, too

Over the course of this late summer/early school year, they’ll tangle with snobby Indiana U. college kids, who look down their noses at “cutters.” They’ll swim in an abandoned quarry, goof around and hang as “the four musketeers” as long as they can. They’ll support Dave’s cycling dream. Dave will fall in love with a coed (Robyn Douglas at her most winsome) and trick her into thinking he’s an Italian exchange student.

Eyes will open, idealism will fade or change course and dialects. And they’ll race as a team at the Indiana University Little 500, a fraternity system relay race with bicycles sprinting around a running track.

Great films burn themselves into the memory selectively. It’s scenes and sketches of characters we remember. Director Yates — who also did “Bullitt,” for Pete’s sake — scores Dave’s cycling moments to Felix Mendelsohn’s “Italian Symphony,” including one thrilling bit where the kid is drafting behind a highway trucker. Dave serenades Kathy, aka “Katerina,” with an aria, “M’appari Tutt’s Amor” from Flotow’s opera “Martha.” Cyril hilariously accompanies Dave on guitar, but that doesn’t break the spell this scene casts.

A generation of guys learned the value of the Big Romantic Gesture from that moment.

In the years since first seeing the film, on a single screen at the Lyric Theatre in Blacksburg, Va. (another college town, a lot like Bloomington), I’ve never turned down the opportunity to interview any of its principals.

Stern expanded on his comical/quizzical turn to become the voice of “The Wonder Years” and a menace on “Home Alone.” The last time I interviewed Quaid was for “The Rookie,” as he traveled full circle back to being the convincing jock he’d been on screen just starting out.

Haley, a scene-stealer as the All World tween jock of “The Bad News Bears,” became a generational icon of a different stripe, a fanboy and fangirl favorite thanks to “Watchmen” (the movie, which he also stole) and a turn as Freddy Krueger in “A Nightmare on Elm Street” reboot. We joked about how, of all the guys in “Breaking Away,” he was the most natural looking on a bike, even if it was over-sized for him. Yeah, the shortest guy in the film was the real jock. And a badass.

One thing that collectively stands out about this crew is how well Yates cast them. You can see Christopher getting the hang of the bike as the film progresses, never quite mastering “form.” But they mesh and make us believe they’ve been friends forever, and that their time together is destined to end.

Yugoslav immigrant Steve Tesich, who scripted “Eyewitness” and “The World According to Garp,” as well as the cycling drama “American Flyer,” tapped into a lot of Americana and Midwestern land grant university truisms here. But his European point of view brought cycling into the story and to America’s heartland, destined to become home to the first U.S. riders to gain glory in the sport in the ’80s and ’90s — LeMond from Wisconsin, Andrew Hampstead from North Dakota, where I took classes in grad school from his mother.

The label “classic film” can be a consensus view, as “Breaking Away” is, or a wholly personal one. It’s easy to imagine whole generations not tuning in to its wavelength, not relating to its white, Midwestern college/townie nostalgia. But the bones it is built on are universal — post-high school ennui, confusion, seeing the limits of your life for the first time, losing yourself in “escape” and self-delusion, dating over your head.

Transplant “Breaking Away” to the Latino southwest or Asian Northwest or an urban African American environment, find some obsession to take the place of bicycle racing, and the themes, teen angst and comradery would still resonate. The generational “I want you to do better than me” messaging translates into any culture. We see a bit of “Breaking Away” in the derivative recent coming-of-age drama “Armageddon Time,” about growing up working class Jewish in New York, for instance.

That’s what makes a classic.

The lifelong passions it engendered for some of us — bicycles, Mendelssohn and movies with Big Romantic Gestures? Those are just a bonus.

Rating: PG, a fistfight, profanity and smoking

Cast: Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid, Robyn Douglas, Daniel Stern, Barbara Barrie, Jackie Earle Haley and Paul Dooley.

Credits: Directed by Peter Yates, scripted by Steve Tesich. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:41

One takes on mind-reading duties when confronted by a moody but confused and generally chills-and-thrills-free horror film like “The Friendship Game.” However it came out, it’s often helpful to consider what they had in mind and what the filmmakers were going for.

This has “Ouija/Hellraiser” overtones as a mysterious dodecahedron is pitched by a little old lady at a “church flea market.” You play the game to find out who “your true friends are.” The horror formula this derives from dictates that a group of pals — four here — are tested by the demonic puzzle, one by one, and come up short.

Make the deaths creative, make the mystery something one person figures out before the others. So yeah, “Ouija,” “Hellraiser,” “Jumanji” without the fun, etc.

Somehow, director Scooter Corkle fails to find the frights in this. And it’s not like Damien Ober’s script sets anybody involved up for success.

Kaitlyn Santa Juana plays Cotton, the pink-haired teen relishing her last summer with her pals, tempted by the “true friends” test pitch of the helpful horror movie crone. She even offers a word of warning with a smile.

“If your friendship doesn’t survive it, neither will you!“

So gather round Souze (Peyton List), Courtney (Kelcey Mawema) and Robbie (Brendan Meyer). Put your fingers on the weird magic ball, and when asked, confess “your true desire.”

What happens when you lie to the magic 12 (sided) ball? Just you wait.

The story shifts back and forth in time, telling us each player’s experience and point of view. We get variations of the same story four times.

These two are hooking up. Those two might have in the past. This one loves her drugs. That one and this one want to flee this flea market town for the big city together.

But Cotton’s gone missing. What can be done?

The script doesn’t play by any hard and fast horror “rules.” The fates never seem deserved, no matter what sins against one’s friends one has committed.

And there’s this loner younger teen (Dylan Schombing) who seems to be watching or privy to what’s going on with them via webcams, video files and — I don’t know, magic?

Even the simplest plot can seem complicated when those filming it have their own difficulties figuring out what goes where and when and why they’re doing it.

The big knock about “Friendship Game” is the most basic one. Despite a shadow version of a character launching an attack from a car’s back seat, despite others being sucked into video screens, or seeing the horrors of the future through a funhouse mirror, nothing here manages a fright or a laugh.

The cast may be game, and a scene here or there benefits from List’s professional skills. She’s a “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” alumna and veteran of TV’s “Cobra Kai.” With 60 credits to her name, she knew more about what she was doing than anybody else on set.

But a performance that’s a bit better than the script was never going to save this “game.”

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, drugs

Cast: Peyton List, Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Kelcey Mawema, Dylan Schombing and Brendan Meyer

Credits: Directed by Scooter Corkle, scripted by Damien Ober. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:27

A big opening night and burly holiday Friday numbers are pointing to another Marvel blockbuster, this one good enough to make cinema owners remember pre COVID bottom lines.

Huge HUGE opening. Deadline.com is saying $190 million in North America is within reach.

Nothing else in the top ten matters, no overseas market where this is opening expects it to underperform –$300 million worldwide by midnight Sunday.

It may not turn out to be the culture shifting phenomenon that “Black Panther” was, but business is business. No time to mourn while there’s money to be made, and all that.

That kind of BO could underwrite a lot of real Chadwick Boseman murals, all over.

I’ll update this Sunday as more data is released.

Re-edited for a “director’s cut” or not, 1997’s “Going all the Way” is best appreciated as an all-star-from-before-they-were-big-stars artifact of ’90s cinema. It’s a post-Korean War period piece with a couple of future Oscar winners — Ben Affleck and Rachel Weisz — rising starlet Rose McGowan and damned if that isn’t baby-faced Nick Offerman there as one of the jocks that Affleck’s character hung out with back in the day.

It’s fun seeing one and all in the bloom of youth, and catching a couple of Oscar nominees — Lesley Anne Warren and the late Jill Clayburgh — going at it as mothers of returning soldiers with competing ideas of who they should be and who should be their friends in the only film these two would make together.

Based on a seminal novel by Dan Wakefield, who wrote the screenplay, “Going All the Way” is a little “Catcher in the Rye,” a bit of “Breaking Away” (also set in Indiana, with a swimmin’ at the quarry scene) and a whole lot of Deep Thoughts and homoerotic subtext mixed in with a kind of “Best Years of Our Lives” disillusionment with coming home “a changed man.”

The film came out to indifferent reviews in 1997, and I can’t recall ever seeing it or whether it had the insipid/meant to be ironic voice-over narration hanging over its 103 minutes.

“Sonny felt weirdly removed from what was going on,” we can plainly see and and yet an unnamed narrator adds redundantly.

If that was added for this “50 minutes of never-seen footage” re-edit by director Mark Pellington (“Arlington Road,” “The Last Word,” “The Mothman Prophecies”), that uh, didn’t help.

And judging from this trudging, indulgent exercise in navel-gazing, I’d say the last thing it needed to be was 20+ minutes longer. There is no pace at all to this re-edit. Artful montages, fever dreams of our hero (Jeremy Davies, the kid GI “translator” of “Saving Private Ryan”) imagining this or that direction his life might take after serving his country, lots of establishing shots of 1950s Midwestern life cluttered with random images of traffic lights, borrowing tropes from better films and a stultifying self-seriousness burden a movie whose 1970 source novel had lots of ironic laughs.

Well, there is a fight/ that plays as a half speed rehearsal version and not a final take. I laughed at the incompetence of that.

Davies and Affleck play two GIs who connect on the train home to Indianapolis. “Gunner” (Affleck), the handsome, popular ex-jock is the one who recognizes “Sonny,” the classmate nobody knew who used to photograph all Gunner’s big games. Gunner reaches out, makes grand assumptions about how smart, philosophical and sage Sonny must have been to “stand back and observe” all the nonsense all the popular kids were obsessed with back then.

Sonny, whose Korean War was spent in military PR in Kansas, doesn’t correct Gunner, but we can guess that the popular jock is WAY overstating the depth of the nebbish opposite him. Gunner’s life was changed by visits to Japan, including one spent recovering from a war wound. His horizons expanded. Sonny? That hasn’t happened to him, yet. But he does feel a certain unease at his future.

And now that they’re “Back Home Again in Indiana,” Gunner makes Sonny his new drinking buddy and wingman.

As Sonny struggles to work up anything enthusiasm for his beautiful and adoring high school girlfriend (Amy Locane), skirt-chasing Gunner drags him out to museums, bars and and dances and fills his ears with the sounds of zen — “riddles” delivered in boorish monologues about Japan.

The jocks may want to bask in Gunner’s company once more, but he’s higher-minded than that. And all Sonny can do is fend off the babying his church lady mother (Clayburgh) still insists on and fret over just how much Gunner likes him for himself, or if Gunner’s figuring out the empty shell Sonny’s always been.

The one actually funny episode of their bromance is when Gunner grows a beard, and even his flirty floozy of a mom (Warren, as another “Victor/Victoria” vamp) wonders if he’s become a “communist” and if this nerdy photographer is the reason that happened.

Offerman plays one of the jocks who insists this “unclean” bearded weirdo he used to know should not be allowed in the country club pool. It’s a masterful condensation of 1950s conformity, bigotry and hysteria and it plays.

You can’t say that about much of the rest of the film. Longer does not mean “clearer” or more concise, more immersive or more of anything except scenes that reveal how much Affleck has grown as an actor since then and why Davies — last seen in “The Black Phone” — never became much of a star.

Weisz shimmers off the screen as an exotic Jewish classmate whom Gunner’s mom and the local anti-Semites don’t approve of, and McGowan sizzles, probably the last time one could see her in this bombshell light before a sexual assault unleashed personal demons that dog her and shape her psyche and reputation to this day.

Pellington? This was his debut film, after getting his start in music videos. Judging by his mostly colorless (I liked “Arlington Road,” didn’t hate “The Last Word”) subsequent output, this isn’t a movie “ruined” by a studio or a writer with final cut or anything of the sort. He made it as good as he could manage in 1997. And taking another shot at it 25 years later doesn’t improve it.

But see it for the glories of young stars about to take over Hollywood. Because it’s hard to figure out another reason to get all the way through this version of “Going All the Way.”

Rating: R, sex, nudity, alcohol abuse, some violence, profanity

Cast: Jeremy Davies, Ben Affleck, Amy Locane, Jill Clayburgh, Rachel Weisz, Rose McGowan, Nick Offerman and Lesley Anne Warren

Credits: Directed by Mark Pellington, scripted by Dan Wakefield, based on his novel. An Oscilloscope Labs re-release.

Running time: 2:06

Long before there was “mumblecore,” the sudden discovery that movies could be about conversation and almost nothing else, there was the theatrical “two hander.”

Plays like “Night, Mother” and “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” and “True West” and “Waiting for Godot” and “Same Time Next Year” are the true antecedents of a film like “Dylan & Zoey,” a talking, downbeat two-hander about two childhood friends reuniting, discussing their lives and confessing their “issues.”

It’s not bad, as any film grappling with adult subjects and trauma automatically has a certain license and indulgence from the viewer. There’s an acting highlight or two.

If it fails — and it does– that falls on the depressing familiarity of those “issues” and performances that don’t elevate the tragic material often enough to wholly engage us. The pathos is subdued. The humor, what attempts there are at it, barely merits a smile. The whole plays as flat, never quite hitting a high, never remotely touching bottom.

Dylan, played by co-writer Blake Scott Lewis, is a writer and cartoonist working in LA. Zoey (Claudia Doumit) is the old friend who keeps photos of their good times together and long history on her phone, but has a hard time calling him up to let her know she’s in town.

They haven’t quite achieved “‘Happy birthday’ text message” separation, he notes. But their connection is long dormant. We wonder if her “here for a wedding” story is true. We wonder what the nature of their relationship was. We wonder what old wounds are about to be opened.

But we don’t wonder long. As their chat turns to chatter we pick up on his “28 year old virgin” status, which eliminates the thought they might have been a couple. And the moment he says “I’m no longer Catholic” we guess why that might be. That turns out to be one of the film’s few attempted dark jokes.

“I was an altar boy for six years. Why not me?”

No, he wasn’t molested in church. That happened closer to home.

And lest we think the sexy, sexual and sexually blunt Zoey is just here for the empathy, we learn about her rape, which of course Dylan knows all about.

Lewis, co-writing with director Matt Sauer, puts the two friends in a day and night-long conversation, sends the two out to a club and comes to conclusions that any sentient viewer will see coming a mile off.

The shared trauma wasn’t what connected them, which might have been interesting. As hers came much later, that moves that subtext into the realm of scripted “hook” or “gimmick.”

Doumit — of TV’s “The Boys” — has an exotic Lake Bell vibe about her, and scores when Zoey picks up Dylan’s ukulele and sings an adorable self-analytical tune that uses the styles of famous painters to describe her self-criticism, self-worth and state of mind. She doesn’t have enough to play to make this character interesting. A bit coarse, a little vulgar, maybe over-compensating due to her trauma, but maybe not.

Lewis, an actor, writer and director with TV credits for series I’ve never heard of (“In the Moment” aired or streamed where?) has written himself a character with a big trauma scarring his psyche, but plays the guy so blandly it’s hard to make the jump from sympathy to empathy.

Two-handers became popular “Let’s create work for ourselves” film projects during the pandemic, and some of those (“7 Days” for instance) turned out great. This has that a couple of bar/nightclub scenes, which suggest it could have been made late in the lockdown.

It’s sensitive enough. But with or without those lockdown confines, there just isn’t enough of a story arc to engage us, not enough going on and going wrong to make their stories 80 minutes worth of compelling.

Rating: unrated, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Blake Scott Lewis, Claudia Doumit

Credits: Directed by Matt Sauter, scripted by Matt Sauter and Blake Scott Lewis. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:22