Movie Nation

A good cast and the best of intentions cannot save the 1970s Boston school busing melodrama “The Walk” from its excesses. Funereal pacing, characters that are simplistic “types” and dialogue that recycles cliches and bromides pretty much overwhelm it.

But as we’re still staring a spittle-spitting screaming bigots on TV and doom-scrolling the latest racist mass shooting on Twitter, maybe it’s worth taking a look at how this skirmish from the end of America’s “civil rights era” played out.

“Why do you hate us?” and “What is WRONG with these people?” may be screenplay cliches. But the questions still beg for answers.

Director and co-writer Daniel Adams has been around since the start of Sandra Bullock’s career (“A Fool and His Money”), churning out B-movies of the sentimental and aged (“The Golden Boys,””The Lightkeepers”) or Mel Gibson after-the-fall actioners (“Panama”). He may have had the ambition to take a shot a saying something about race in America through its troubled recent history, but not the chops.

Here’s the movie in a single corny line. “Liberal Massachusetts ain’t no better than Confederate Alabama.”

Terrence Howard, playing a widowed paramedic and father of a teen (Lovie Simone) about to be bussed to a “white” school in “Southie” (South Boston) utters it, a thesis statement at the beginning of a story set the summer leading up to the 1974 court-ordered busing to achieve desegregation of Boston’s urban (“poor”) schools.

The film follows this Black father and daughter, a white “Southie” cop (Justin Chatwin), his immigrant wife (Anastasiya Mitrunen) and Southie High daughter Kate (Katie Douglas) and peripherally, the goings on inside the Southie gang led by McLoughlin (Malcolm McDowell) whose lieutenant (Jeremy Piven in prison tats and Fu Manchu) just got out of the penitentiary.

The mob underling has a rough and hotheaded son (Matthew Blade) who has taken an interest in the cop’s daughter. The officer and his wife may have grown up rough, but they preach tolerance. That doesn’t keep their pretty 17 year-old from dropping the N-word and worse in their house. Her “rebellion” is the worst kind.

Adams sketches in characters that he’s set up as “types” and tropes. Whatever modern expectations dictate in terms of a balanced script, with every character painted in shades of gray, gives way to dated and simplistic archetypes. The white father has to stand up to the ugliness that shaped him and the gang that threatens him. The Black father has to keep his cool in the face of grim provocations, “stay in control when white people are out of control.”

That’s a good line and righteous sentiment to play up. But it contributes to a film that feels predigested, a movie that’s so over-familiar that it’s made up its mind and our minds for us as well.

On-the-nose casting contributes to this. Close your eyes, and you can imagine everything about Howard’s character, every action, every bullet-point sermon, even the moment when he breaks into tears.

Chatwin, best known for TV work in “Shameless,” “Orphan Black” and “American Gothic,” gets more attention and screen time playing a “good cop” who has rejected his upbringing. Officer Coughlin may embrace the “We gotta integrate, but this ain’t the way to do it” mentality, but who treats the job as a higher calling when “This whole city is angry.”

McDowell oozes aged menace, and Piven — cast against type — is a convincing older goon.

The younger players are good enough that you kind of wish they’d been the whole focus, but that indie film would be impossible to finance.

The gold standard for racial tolerance prevailing through racial strife movies is 2019’s “The Best of Enemies,” and as controversial and roiled as Boston’s citywide 1970s meltdown was, you can’t tell me a really good movie couldn’t come out of that.

But from its opening scenes, with each set of kids walking to school, stopping to chat with neighborhood characters — the mob boss, the mother of the mobster in prison, or for the Black kids, a pimp who wants to talk “business” with teenaged Wendy — “The Walk” opts for “really earnest” but “really dated and tired” instead.

Rating:  R for language throughout including racial slurs, and some violence

Cast: Justin Chatwin, Terrence Howard, Lovie Simone, Katie Douglas, Anastasiya Mitrunen, Matthew Blade, Jeremy Piven and Malcolm McDowell

Credits: Directed by Daniel Adams, scripted by George Powell and Daniel Adams. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:44

A “Predator” prequel…set waaaaay before Arnold and Jesse & Co. ran into the alien hunter.

“Comanche vs. Predator” would have been a catchier title.

August 5 on Hulu.

We can’t quit “Peter Pan.”

A simple children’s play with themes of mortality, vanishing youth, feminine teenaged longing for Peter and boys-who-don’t-grow-into-men (“Peter Pan Syndrome”) and death and dying, aka the ultimate “awfully big adventure,” have proven irresistible to novelists and filmmakers looking for new takes on the original or new truths plumbed from it.

“The Lost Girls” is based on a Laurie Fox novel about generations of Darling girls haunted, tormented, lusting after and abandoned by Peter Pan. The film is something of an unemotional muddle, never quite finding the heart of mother-daughter love it so seems to want to test in this story.

Peter visits Wendy, her daughter, granddaughter, great and then great great granddaughter in turn. Perhaps the original “Wendy” is the only one who left Neverland unscathed. One Darling girl is enchanted. One runs off to be with him. And one tries to turn the Darling female “storytelling” gene towards something constructive, publishing, and spare her own daughter the trauma of outgrowing the boy who never grows up.

Italian writer, director and actress Livia De Paolis cast Vanessa Redgrave and her daughter Joely Richardson as two of the Darling generations. Siobhan Hewlett is “the original” Wendy, predating those two, and Emily Carey and Amelia Minto play the young, modern Wendy who grows up to be played De Paolis herself, a Wendy whose not-bad life seems haunted by the trauma of that first love, Peter, played by Louis Partridge.

Confusing? Somewhat.

Modern Wendy’s beef with Peter spins from the fact that she grew up, raised by her abandoned dad (Julian Ovenden). Her mom, Jane (Richardson) was never in the picture, and we can guess where she got off to, and so can Wendy.

But that doesn’t keep Wendy from practically drooling over boy-band-ready Peter on the night her grandmother’s smiling, affectionate “warnings” about Peter come true.

“You will meet a boy” who will show up in a jerkin, weeping, at the foot of your bed. You’ll fall for him and follow him to “a place where you’re never, ever bored.”

When that happens to this Wendy, she never gets over it. Even after she’s met a musician (Parker Sawyers), fallen in love and they’ve gotten pregnant. Wendy has her pangs of doubt, very pregnant, right there at the altar.

“He promised to come back for me! The NEXT summer!”

I can’t vouch for Fox’s adult fantasy novel, but the movie leaves some interesting things about women in love and picking the wrong guy for us to unpack.

I was reminded of that line from “The Counselor,” the lurid mob lawyer thriller starring Michael Fassbender as that lawyer, Javier Bardem as that mobster and infamously, Cameron Diaz as a mob moll who has sex with a car. Bardem’s mob man of the world utters one of the great truisms of male/female relations in Cormac McCarthy’s script.

“The truth about women is you can do anything to them except bore them.”

Every Wendy (or Jane) in “The Lost Girls” is bored by what they came back to, thrilled and tested by a world and a life which Jane seemed most reluctant to leave. It doesn’t matter if “the boy” doesn’t grow up. They still miss him and Neverland. I couldn’t decide if the movie was “judging” this predisposition, or not. It’s unclear.

What’s crystal clear is that the director cast herself as the lead, a woman who looks a bit like “teen Wendy” all grown up, but who now speaks with an unmistakable, unexplainable Italian accent.

In a film with British acting royalty in two roles, with Redgrave at her luminous best, and the highly regarded Carey (“Wonder Woman”) and impressively-experienced Ella Rae Smith (as Wendy’s adult daughter) in support, De Paolis is utterly out of her league — an inexperienced, dull and delusional (in casting herself) lead.

One can mull over what themes stand out and which ones feel underdeveloped, and argue the merits of sexualizing Wendy and Peter Pan, with Captain Hook (Iaian Glenn, another acting heavyweight) giving off pervy, creeper coming-on-to-teen-Wendy vibes.

But in a story that’s slackly-paced and drawn-out, a psychological exercise in literary (theatrical) criticism, having your leading lady stand out simply because she doesn’t “fit” is a deal breaker. De Paolis can’t make Wendy’s mercurial mood swings sympathetic or her angst interesting.

How one wishes for the telltale tics of Tic Tock Croc, anything to goose this and give our story urgency amidst all this brooding angst, a welcome distraction from an uninteresting central character rendered in flat strokes.

Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Livia De Paolis, Louis Partridge, Parker Sawyers, Emily Carey, Julian Ovenden, Ella Rae Smith, Joely Richardson, Iain Glenn and Vanessa Redgrave

Credits: Directed by Livia De Paolis, scripted by and Livia De Paolis, based on a novel by Laurie Fox. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:46

An IFC creepout, headed our way in July. Are you scared yet?

Post partum depression triggers something in this house a couple moves into.

“Abandoned” opens June 17.

Cam Gigandet, Louis Mandylor and Randy Couture star this B-movie about a bank heist, a valuable “briefcase” and what the guy shot and left for dead decides to do about that.

June 17.

Amazon Prime Video has this July 15 release.

Cho was easily tabbed as the “most likely to have success playing dads” among the stars of “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.” Glad to see he’s living up to that promise.

Considering its subject matter and the insistence that this “inspired by a true story” is actually “fiction” in the closing credits, it’s no wonder the version of “I’m Charlie Walker” that makes it to the screen is nearly a dozen minutes shorter than an earlier cut.

As they’ve had to change the names of characters and a major oil company, it’s likely there were legal issues that led to the later cuts in this story of a contractor who battled racism at every turn in an effort to get a piece of a “money is no object” effort to clean up a massive oil spill in San Francisco Bay in the 1970s.

Late edits might also explain the sassy but somewhat perfunctory and “just-the-facts” nature of the finished film, when the trailers for this period piece suggest something more “stick it to the man” empowering, Blacksploitation in style.

That’s not to say “Walker” isn’t watchable and kind of fun. But the lack of style suggests a better movie might have been trimmed right out of it.

Mike Colter (TV’s “Luke Cage”) plays Walker, a dump truck owner-operator getting nowhere in San Francisco’s racist construction scene in the early ’70s. But the collision of two (Standard Oil) tankers becomes an instant all-hands-on-deck emergency for the area’s truckers. Charlie is reluctantly given one oil soaked beach nobody else can get to.

And once there, this born hustler hustles up unconventional solutions to an environmental disaster, charming the press and the “hippy volunteers” already pitching in as “The Mayor of Hunter’s Point,” “the contractor who’s going to clean up this mess.”

Along the way, he faces racist obstructionism, skepticism and blowback for his unconventional methods and “on the side” bookkeeping.

“We don’t use words like ‘on the side,'” the Tower Oil suit-in-charge (Dylan Baker) complains. But as Walker runs roughshod over Dept. of Labor, environmental and licensing issues, responding to an emergency and solving problems with “petty cash,” the viewer wonders if maybe they should.

A lot of details and points of conflict take place off camera, leading one to wonder what’s been edited out and who threatened to sue if it wasn’t. The film has a kind of jerky, truncated quality, with just a few scenes set on the actual worksite. Closing a beach while tractor scrapers scoop up oil-soaked sand would be hard for a modest budget film to permit, much less stage and film.

The script pays little attention to the environmental disaster unfolding — a news clip here and there — to focus on the “old boys’ network” Walker crashes into, the “open-ended contracts” and “blank invoices” that have local dump truckers cheering because they, like Charlie, see a situation ripe for abuse.

Walker comes off as a “get my foot in the door” and “get the job done” without fretting over legalities and the like kind of guy — sketchy, and made just amusing enough by Colter’s performance.

Safiya Fredericks plays the wife he leaves behind to hurl himself into this day-and-night job, a stand-by-your-man woman who narrates the story and copes with underhanded (and underexplained) efforts to frame and arrest Charlie and take away his contracts.

“I’m Charlie Walker” has just enough “feel good” and “that’ll show them” elements to get by. But I dare say a better film was hacked out of it, at some point. The evidence of that easy enough to see.

Rating: unrated, drug abuse, fisticuffs, nudity, profanity

Cast: Mike Colter, Dylan Baker, Safiya Fredericks, Mark Leslie Ford, Steven Wiig and Travis Johns.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Patrick Gilles. A Shout! Studios release.

Running time: 1:19

In a world where home computers co-exist with The Golden Age of Cassettes, where “hate mail” is still on the printed page and ’70s fashions, architecture and furniture are frozen in time, where kids’ sexual development is monitored by electronic collars and everybody gets a good Ted Bundy put-down, a boy named “Wyrm” comes of age.

Writer-director Christopher Winterbauer’s “Wyrm” wears its weirdness like a museum special exhibit — “Mid-century Mod Meets The Absurd.” His loopy debut feature, developed from his earlier short film of the same title, takes on grief and loss and adolescence, coming at every Big Theme and minor subtext just a little off center.

It’s cinematic proof that sometimes you have to look at things askew, wander through the odd or absurd, just to see the obvious.

Wyrm (Theo Taplitz) is about to start high school, joining his older sister Myrcella (Azure Brandi), who figures this next step on the road to adulthood means he should, you know, stop sharing a bedroom with her.

Things are seriously “off” at their house. Quirky Uncle Chet (Tommy Dewey) is raising them, alongside his new Spanish speaking girlfriend Flor (Natalia Abelleyra). The screwball parents who named their kids Wyrm and Myrcella aren’t around — not dead, just not around. Dad appears to be close by, but is keeping his distance. Mom is on “a trek,” some lengthy hike which she sometimes interrupts to call home.

Not that Myrcella takes those calls. Only Wyrm seems to care. He’s a cassette-recorder-obsessed kid, gathering sound and interviews for a planned tribute to their brother, the normally-named Dylan. Dylan, we gather, is dead.

But Wyrm’s more immediate problem is getting rid of this collar in which the state monitors his sexual development.

I know what you’re thinking, but as nobody drawls and there are no ten gallon hats or palm trees, this isn’t Texas. Or Florida.

A tween or teen’s first kiss is all it takes to “pop your collar” and clear “Level One Sexuality.” Wyrm doesn’t want to be the last kid in his new school with one, even if he’s cleverly hiding it behind a seasonally-inappropriate scarf.

The teens are the usual array of tactless, rude, mean and hormonal “types.”

“You shouldn’t make fun of him. His brother died.”

The administrators and even his pediatrician are worried about Wyrm’s “progress,” and the extreme steps he starts to take to improve on it. He takes note that “cousins don’t count,” any more than mothers or sisters (Myrcellaa hates him, and ridicules his “Oedipus complex” fixation on their absent mother). He takes shot at same-sex smooching, and even decides that physical injuries might win him a pity liplock. He breaks his own arm, something Myrcella has heard of another young man doing to get closer to the opposite sex.

“You and Ted Bundy have the same ideas.”

But even though the winsome, wine stain birthmarked Izzy (Lulu Wilson) seems half-interested, that first-kiss/romance thing is but a subtext. What “Wyrm” is really about is how people process grief. The parents ran away. Wyrm tape records “tributes” to his brother. And Myrcella lashes out by sending anonymous, abusive, secrets-spilling hate mail — by letter — to classmates and acquaintances.

She just wants them to hurt like she does.

All of this unfolds in a downbeat and deadpan film that finds humor in the inappropriate over-sharing of kids that age, in the dial-up “miracle” of the Internet, and of the formalized, codified nature of human development supervised by the state.

Yes, you need to “kiss” to “pop your collar.” The vice principal prefers the word “osculation,” as indeed would the state.

Taplitz, of “Gringo” and “Little Men,” makes an amusingly hapless leading boy-man, Brandi a perfectly cutting older sibling and Wilson (“Modern Love,” “The Glorias”) a disarmingly aloof but kinder than she acts (we think) new acquaintance.

Nobody on screen is a “star,” and the story is so odd and told in such an offbeat way that “Wyrm” — even the title’s kind of a turnoff — might be the quintessential “film festival film,” one more at home in the rarefied world of film fans who gather to see movies just like this.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check it out.

Rating: unrated, sexual subject matter, innuendo

Cast: Theo Taplitz, Azure Brandi, Tommy Dewey, Natalia Abelleyra, Lulu Wilson and Alanna Ubach

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christopher Winterbauer. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:37

Adam Sandler never makes it look easy. He’s never mastered the art of “selling” his various screen characters’ emotions or verbal explosions as actual changes in mood. The inexpressive — now middle-aged — face never quite matches the bellowing he’s always used for comic effect and now trots out for dramatic shocks.

But put him in the right milieu, “sports,” without trying to make us believe he’s a jock or dad-bodied ex-jock, and pair him up with Queen Latifah, his most-perfectly-matched leading lady, and the Sandman isn’t half bad.

“Hustle” is blandly predictable “feel good” sports drama in the tradition of “The Scout,” “Trouble with the Curve,” “The Air Up There” and yes, “Jerry Maguire.” Sandler plays an NBA scout who goes all in on a long shot, with bad to mixed results until things take that predictable turn towards “a Hollywood ending” that middling screenplays always deliver.

But it’s a pleasant peek inside the search for talent ready for the NBA, even in its more far-fetched moments. And if the one-liners feel more stale than usual here, at least it’s on purpose this time. The jokes go with the (dad) bod.

Stanley Sugerman labors behind the scenes for the Philadelphia 76ers, checking out overseas prospects, less known European and Asian talent, always with an eye for “that missing piece” for the franchise that his longtime mentor (Robert Duvall) owns.

That means he clashes with the old man’s son (Ben Foster), often as not. But Stanley has to keep his cool if he ever wants to finish that long journey from onetime Tempe U. hoopster to having a coaching seat on the bench next to Doc Rivers.

He’s oh-so-close to landing that gig, and thus getting to spend more time at home with wife Teresa (Latifah) and aspiring filmmaker daughter Alex (Jordan Elizabeth Hull) when the old man dies, and son Vincent (Foster, not his best work) hands down the new edict.

“You’re valuable as a coach,” the new owner declares, “you’re indispensable as a scout.”

Another bag packed, another trip to Europe, only to discover that a top Spanish prospect is sitting out the game Stanley came to see. No worries. There’s a pick-up game on a neighborhood court where this construction worker/hustler (Juancho Hernangomez of the Utah Jazz) is clomping around in boots, blocking shots like a Spanish Sultan of Swat.

Has Stanley found “the one?” Is his Spanglish good enough to tell the kid what he does for a living, and what he sees in him…without Bo Cruz getting the wrong idea?

“You’re a fantasy for a guy like me!”

Yes, it’s a Happy Madison Production, with flattery confused for homoerotic come-ons, “titty” jokes about his daughter and the similar vulgarity.

When the home office doesn’t buy Stanley’s “The New Freak” and “unicorn” labels for “The Cruz Missile,” the fading scout with a troubled past takes the big gamble on his own with this gigantic kid with tattoos, a daughter and a past of his own.

So we’ve got a redemption story set in The Association, underscored with old school hip hop and littered with NBA figures, past and present.

Credit screenwriters Will Fetters (“A Star is Born,” “The Lucky One”) and (first screenwriting credit) Taylor Materene for at least trying to take a few detours on the well-worn path this tale travels.

But you know the sports movie drill. It includes drills. A character gets knocked down, and launches into the training montage, with “Rocky” references and “He’s in your head” coaching to get this short-tempered Spaniard ready for “The Combine” where he can showcase his talent.

Sandler’s riffing may be half-hearted, but is much in evidence, because even if he’s lost his fastball, this script’s banter needs a little juicing. The kid needs to steel himself for NBA level trash talk.

“You know what’s crazy? A grown man hurting another grown man’s feelings…” The kid’s nemesis “said some mean words to you and you wanted to take your ball and go home.”

The actual production figured a cavalcade of cameos — Barkley and Shaq and Trae Young and Dirk and Dan — would cover a sea of scripted and acted shortcomings.

They don’t. Sandler’s in a role tailor made for him, and he still lets us see the wheels turning and the effort it takes to make this guy feel real. And for all its half-hearted twists, there’s rarely a minute’s doubt as to where this “Hustle” will end up.

Rating: R, profanity

Cast: Adam Sandler, Juancho Hernangomez, Queen Latifah, Ben Foster, Julius Erving, Doc Rivers, Dirk Nowitzi, Dan Patrick and Robert Duvall

Directed by Jeremiah Zagar, scripted by Taylor Materne and Will Fetters. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:58