Movie Nation

Screenwriter Yuri Baranovsky and director Mark Meir don’t go to any trouble at all in hiding their appreciation for, homage to and theft from Jordan Peele’s blockbuster, “Get Out.”

So it’d be remiss of me to not talk about the tribute that “The Summoned” is. It’s obvious in its borrowings and it’s a polished-enough horror thriller that it’s not an embarrassment to its antecedent, so there’s nothing “spoiler” about mentioning its similarities. It’s “Get Out” without a big studio behind it, without so much as a single “name” in the cast and without the potent racial messaging of Peele’s break-out film.

An attractive young couple (J. Quinton Johnson and Emma Fitzpatrick) make their way to a remote mansion for a self-help couples/therapy weekend with the hottest self-made guru going.

Their host, we’re assured, is “eccentric…He has changed people’s lives.“

Lyn (Fitzpatrick, of “The Social Network” and “Take Back the Night”) is a pop star who goes by Joplin Rose and is shallow enough to be thrilled to be in the exclusive care of the West Coast’s most idolized guru. Elijah (Johnson of “In the Heights”) is an aspiring musician but full-time mechanic who came along for this “white people s—” just to advance their relationship.

On arrival, the florid Dr. Justus Frost (Frederick Stuart of TV’s “Empty Space”) sells them on taking the chance to “alter what is possible in your and your lives,” as everybody realizes just how “exclusive” this place is. Only movie star Tara (Angela Gulner) and, unbeknownst to her, her rich and famous author/ex-husband (Salvador Chacon) are staying there as well.

Everybody’s “just trying to be less broken,” or “working on our couples’ ‘stuff'” or “If I could marry cocaine, I WOULD,” so you’d think they’d be too busy for any intrigues.

But we’ve already noticed that the place has no staff, that efforts to separate the one couple that’s currently “together” are part of the “cure.” Elijah keeps seeing this scary looking local (director Meir) who responded to their stopping to see if his truck had broken down by stealing Elijah’s necklace.

All is not as it seems.

The cast is pretty good, I have to say, with Gulner nicely vamping up the “sexy and I know it” bit. Stuart affects courtly, Old World or Old South “charm” which any horror fan knows is a cover for “sinister.”

The plot is entirely too predictable, so much in the thrall of “Get Out” that we don’t need to see anything other than the fact that there’s a lone Black man in the cast to sense what’s coming.

No, they’re not identical films and the differences are big enough and the twists different enough that it’s not a spoiler to compare the two. But come on.

Still, major style points to bit player turned first-time director Meir for managing a spooky tone and great atmosphere on a shoestring. He cast well, considering his budget. The plot? Hollywood pro forma, so much so that the homage gives itself away in the damned trailer. That’s no reason to not get another shot, though.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: J. Quinton Johnson, Emma Fitzpatrick, Angela Gulner, Salvador Chacon, Mark Meir and Frederick Stuart.

Credits: Directed by Mark Meir, scripted by Yuri Baranovsky. An XYZ release.

Running time: 1:27

The 16th Century was littered with naval battles that shaped the future.

Lepanto stopped the Muslim Ottomans from overrunning the Mediterranean and then Europe, England saved itself from the Spanish Armada and Korea fended off, if only for a while, Japanese depredations visited upon the peninsula.

This is one of the biggest blockbusters in Korean History. Probably not that much of a hit in Japan. They tend to ban movies that make them look bad.

Well Go USA has “Hansan” for North American release, set for July 29. Wow.

All I ever want out of a movie is a short trip to someplace I’ve never been, or never really “seen,” to get a look inside lives I’ve never lived. The thrills of action films, frights of horror and delights of romantic comedy are just icing on the cake. It’s that immersion in another world and other lives that counts.

“Queen of Glory” is a light indie dramedy that fills the bill on all counts. Set in an immigrant-rich corner of the Bronx, it’s about a Ghanaian-American grad student coming to grips with herself, her culture, her needs, her future and her body type after the loss of her mother.

It amuses, raises the occasional eyebrow and leaves you with the warm comfort of hope that at least somebody might get it together, find a more promising life path to follow…eventually.

Actress Nena Mensah of Netflix’s academic dramedy “The Chair” stars as Sarah, a grad student finishing up her dissertation in molecular neuro-oncology at Columbia U. She’s busy as a teaching assistant, planning a big move to Ohio State and having an affair with a married professor (Adam Leon) who just might be her supervisor and mentor.

And that move? She’s following him as he takes a better job.

So she doesn’t have time for all the family/Ghanaian drama her Dad-back-in-Ghana adds to her life, or that her mother’s always wrapped up in — gossipy, judgy relatives who notice “You’ve been eating,” and “those hips. You OUGHT to be putting them to good use!”

Then Mom dies, and Sarah’s Ohio apartment-hunting and sexual assignations and dissertation and everything else are put on hold. It doesn’t matter that her mother wanted to be cremated. There’s still a Ghanaian version of a wake, food and drink and condolences with lots of “Where’s your mother? Where’s the BODY?” questions. And that’s the tactful question. Most people want to know about Mom’s will.

And the wake is just a “white funeral” prelude for something more elaborate and more traditional to come, something that Sarah’s forced to plan and mount.

Then there’s her Mom’s roomy townhouse, which needs to be sold, and the small business Mom ran for years, the King of Glory bookstore. The added complication of an employee, a scary-looking ex-con her mother gave a second start to (Meeko Gattuso of TV’s “Euphoria”), who has to be told what’s coming, preferably in the gentlest way possible.

Sarah finds herself sucked back into the world she grew up in after they emigrated from Ghana, entangled in the lives of the gregarious Russian-Americans next door, especially very-pregnant mother of two Kaitlyn (Madeline Weinstein). Their noisy, quarrelsome, culture-clashing lives create just the right comic friction with old-friend Sarah.

“Such a big FAMILY,” the white Russians marvel at the wake.

No, “Everybody’s just Black.”

Mensah makes Sarah smart and cute and competent but riddled with insecurities. No, she won’t “get on the scale” to help an auntie weigh a piece of luggage. No, she won’t share that pizza with you, either. Something other than a lifestyle choice has given her a nauseated aversion to raw meat.

And that guy she’s been seeing? She’s waited on him to leave his wife and kids for three years.

So don’t expect her to tidy everything up quickly, because deflecting, aversion and backing away from decisions is her way.

“Queen of Glory” is a movie of vignettes, street scenes, shots of abandoned sneakers, the homeless man pushing a convoy of shopping carts holding all his possessions, the bootleg DVD-seller hawking his wares from a table in front of the closed “African Movies and Music” shop he might have owned at one time. At least he’s still able to make use of the sign.

Mensah fills her film with local color, African percussion groups provide the beat in this immersion in the New York melting pot. She adds other complications to Sarah’s trials. When her Dad (Oberon K.A. Adjepong) flies over for the funeral of his not-quite-ex wife, Sarah can either confront her issues with him or bend to his every patriarchal, sexist and “traditional” demand.

And that ex-con, Pit? He’s complicated the whole store matter not just by being a trifle scary, but by baking “Bible bar” cookies that make the place a lot more popular than your average trinket/CD/bumper sticker and T-shirt filled “book store.”

“Queen of Glory” isn’t some deep, complex interior journey. It’s a take-stock dramedy that bubbles over with sometimes funny, fractious life. I love the way Mensah stages one chat with Kaitlyn in her doorway, pregnant and hellbent on being a good neighbor and hostess to Sarah while in the foreground, upstairs in their townhouse looking down, we’re seeing and hearing bedlam as sisters shriek and quarrel and granny tries to keep the peace.

Not every actor should take that advice, “If you’re not getting the sort of roles you want, write a role you want to play and get it filmed.” Mensah should and did and let’s hope she does it again. And soon.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Nena Mensah, Meeko Gattuso, Adam Leon, Madeleine Weinstein and Oberon K.A. Adjepong

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nana Mensah. A Film Movement+ release

Running time: 1:18

As an ex-radio guy, I’m a sucker for most anything set in that milieu — be it a TV show, play or movie.

When your thriller’s titled “Final Caller,” sure I’ll take a look. It could be the next “Talk Radio,” “Feedback (also titled “Hostage Radio)” or “The Night Listener.”

Look at the sampling of photos I posted above and guess the error of my ways.

“Final Caller” is a gory, shlocky, ineptly-designed, poorly-cast, badly-acted and sloppily-directed splatter film. There’s not one thing to recommend it.

As it is by the director of “Clownado,” I probably shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.

Set in a radio studio that looks like cut-rate podcasting set-up — which is entirely plausible, thanks to today’s technology, but utterly robs the film of atmosphere — starring people who don’t have even the faintest whiff of “screen actor” about them, and shot in ugly close-ups with seemingly every “first take” (blown lines, clunky line readings) making it onto the screen, “Final Caller” is excruciating, first scene to last.

Douglas Epps plays the rage-aholic host of “On Through the Night,” a Western U.S. based late-night call-in show inexplicably “syndicated in 129 markets.”

Epps, as Roland Bennett, doesn’t have a radio voice. Shooting him in full-screen/mouth close-up doesn’t change that. It only makes the white-walled, non soundproofed studio look more like a rented office cubicle.

Roland is shrill, and Epps makes his on-air insults and off-air rages at his producer/call screener (Alexander Brotherton) and “the current but soon to be ex wife” Claire (Jane Plumberg) sound like tirades being read right off the page.

Nobody here has the gift of making dialogue sound fresh, invented in the moment. Even the callers, who have nothing to concentrate on but the vocal performance and the lines they don’t even have to memorize, read their lines by metallic rote.

And then there’s that one particular caller, “let’s just call me ‘The Outsider (Jack McCord),’ a creepy, mansplaining 60ish incel who starts lecturing on Druid rituals and his connection to them as we hear a woman’s stifled screams in the background.

It takes a couple of tries for him to make clear that yes, he’s kidnapping, torturing and murdering women. It takes a couple of calls for the producer, the continuity director (Rachel Lagen) and Roland’s in-studio “guest,” his “soon to be ex,” to convince raging Roland to take The Outsider seriously, and figure out that keeping him on the line is the only way they’ll have a chance to get the cops to track him down.

There’s no sin in a no-budget movie. But it is a sin if you’re not competent enough to hide that fact. This is an ugly looking film, and I haven’t even gotten to the gory power-tool torture and cannibalism yet.

Badly-designed and incompetently-lit, it’s painful to look at, much less sit through.

Most of the cast makes one wonder if writer-director Todd Sheets cruised biker bars looking for the greasy, the 50something, the tattooed and the nose-ringed with an affinity for carny-tart makeup.

Not one of them has the screen actor’s gift. The camera hates them all. Epps can’t pull off the added pressure of playing a “performing” radio personality. I wouldn’t listen to this screeching voice-bot if he was a caller to a talk show, much less the host.

The lines Sheets gives him to shout have a “Google searched” inauthenticity, and were probably as bad on the page as they are coming out of Epps’ mouth.

“Sounds like you logged a few too many hours of World of Warcraft online” in “your mama’s basement,” he cliche-fumes at The Outsider, who has eight victims to sacrifice according to his Druid calling.

I dare say anybody not in the cast or an investor backing “Final Caller” could watch five minutes of this and see exactly why it’s self-distributed. No self-respecting film studio would touch anything this amateurish and ugly with a ten foot power tool.

Rating: unrated, gruesome, explicit splatter movie violence

Cast: Douglas Epps, Jane Plumberg, Jack McCord, Alexander Brotherton and Rachel Lagen

Credits: Scripted and directed by Todd Sheets. An Extreme Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:31

“Kissing Booth” queen Joey King turns avenging angel in her latest, a movie about the Medieval mayhem unleashed when “The Princess” is hellbent on NOT becoming “The Princess Bride.”

Vietnamese action filmmaker Le-Van Kiet and his “Furie” fight choreographer Kefi Abrikh turn the former child star into a short, fiery harpy who slashes, stabs and pummels her way through the family castle to free her parents and little sister from the prince and his mercenaries who have taken them prisoner.

Even if you’ve figured out that the diminutive King will take on anything, from TV’s “Fargo” to “The Act,” from big screen teen sex comedies like “Summer ’03” to the historical tragedy “Radium Girls” and even the horror of “Slender Man,” it’s a shock to see her put through her swordfight paces here.

It’s also a hoot.

Kiet matches her up against mountainous, armor-plated fighting men in duals, three, four or five on one fights, and the character only known as The Princess tumbles, spins, dodges and slices them down to size, just the way you’d expect someone with a height disadvantage to manage it. She starts with the foot, the thigh and the Achilles heel. She cuts them down to her level and they drop like flies.

The Princess wakes up, in her wedding gown, visions of being drugged and shackled her most recent memories. There’s this ignoble noble (Dominic Cooper, perfectly vile) who strong-armed her “pacifist, placator” father (Ed Stoppard, son of playwright Tom) and reluctant mother (Alex Reid) into a kingdom-saving arranged marriage.

When The Princess bristles at this, Julius goes all Brutus on her and her family, unleashing a company of armed thugs on their palace, shackling her and consigning her parents and little sister (Katelyn Rose Downey) to the dungeon. His sidekick/side-piece (Olga Kurylenko), all leather and studded gloves and lethal bullwhip, is there to back him up every evil step of the way.

She wakes up fearing “This is all my fault,” for turning down a perfectly power-mad offer from a charmer whose love language is “I always get what I want.”

There’s nothing for it but to dislocate her wrists to lose the shackles, head-butt her captors and grab swords, ropes, crossbows and whatever else is handy and kill her way downstairs from the tower to that dungeon.

That’s all there is to the plot — fight, bind this or that wound, catch her breath, hide for a moment, and fight again, with flashbacks establishing that her parents, who really wanted and needed a son as successor, let her Vietnamese nanny-companion (the terrific Veronia Ngo of “Furie”) train her in the martial arts she will unleash to turn the Middle Ages into the Dark Ages in a single, savage day.

There’s no sense in working out the weight differential and simple physics of somebody Joey K’s size taking down blokes two or three times her throw-weight. Kiet makes sure there’s no time for that sort of reasoning.

And King and her stunt team do a damned fine job of tumbling, stumbling, strangling and impaling this Fury’s way from one fight to the next. It’s not nearly as frenetic and furious as “Furie,” but it’ll do.

The combat is personal, visceral and vicious — none of this “just knock them out and move on.” On no. One last through slash, brutal bash of the skull or stab in the sternum is in order, to make sure she doesn’t have to repeat herself. The body count is staggering, and can’t help but become a comical running gag here.

The screenplay’s simple point A to point B structure means that the writers, director, fight choreographer and star spent their time working out “gags,” ways to get The Princess out of this fix — yank off those pearls to trip up that mob coming her way — and into the next one.

The dialogue, with King affecting a period posh Brit accent, is strictly of the “Someone needs to teach you your PLACE,” “I’ve heard THAT before” variety.

It’s all eye-rolling, laugh-out-loud action nonsense, and often damned entertaining, another highlight of King’s ever-lengthening highlight reel of a career.

And Kiet turns his American movie making debut into a lean, silly and action-packed showcase. Not to oversell this, but he makes a sort of John Woo statement, with “The Princess” as his version of “Hard Target,” proof that he can take any Hollywood star, any simplistic script, unleash all hell around her and have her come out looking like a badass.

The world’s leading ladies should be licking their lips over the possibilities “The Princess” unleashes.

Rating: R for strong/bloody violence and some profanity

Cast: Joey King, Dominic Cooper, Olga Kurylenko, Veronica Ngo, Alex Reid, Ed Stoppard.

Credits: Directed by Le-Van Kiet scripted by Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton. A 20th Century release on Hulu.

Running time: 1:36

Don’t know if this 20th Century release was ever slated to go theatrical. As Joey King is the queen of streaming, Hulu is a smart place to park our perky pouty badass, star of many a teen romance/sex comedy in these past few years.

It’s fun to see the choices she makes with their newfound clout. “Radium Girls,” and a sort of “Knight’s Tale” riff on the “Princess Bride.”

One thing for certain. Dominic Cooper had been waiting for a foil/leading lady of her simpatico stature for years.

Premieres on Hulu tomorrow. Review shortly.

At the age of 74, Canadian poet and troubadour Leonard Cohen started a world tour — his band in matching fedora, with backup singers, many of whom had been with him for years and with a seemingly endless and boundless itinerary.

And “years” were how long this venture went on, five years of performing his ornate, soulful, introspective ballads and laments on a valedictory tour, a victory lap, revered everywhere he played, every show building to that one transcendent moment, that one song with every night’s crowd singing along to what a fellow singer calls “a modern prayer,” “a church moment” at the end of every single concert.

Cohen gave this tune everything he had, night after night — leaning into it one night, laying back on it the next — honoring a singular composition that he recognized had given him everything, and delivered that “everything” late in life, when the “elder” that he’d longed to become could appreciate it.

“Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song” isn’t really a new Leonard Cohen bio-documentary, although it has plenty of footage of his early career, prefiguring his transition from privileged Montreal poet to self-taught singer-songwriter. Folk songbird Judy Collins was among his mentors in making that leap. And we hear other bits of his personal history and track his entire career through this Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine film.

But what they focus on is the thing that made him, not his Tom-Waits-without-the-gravel baritone or his Anthony Bourdain-the-prototype dash and good looks. It’s that one song.

“Hallelujah” took him seven years to write and re-write, tinkering and expanding and contracting the scale of this magnum opus as he saw fit over the decades after its 1984 introduction on an album his U.S. record label refused to release here. His friend and favorite journalist, Larry “Ratso” Sloman of “Rolling Stone” and other publications, recalls Cohen turning out “150-180” verses of “Hallelujah,” notebook after notebook filled with variations of Cohen’s blending of “the holy with the horny,” an epic song deconstructing how that song was built.

“It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing ‘Hallelujah’…”

The Jewish Cohen was singing about Old Testament King David struggling to compose a song built around that ancient word of praise in that opening verse. But it’s easy to see himself — seven years struggling, never gaining commercial success and notoriety until his 60s and 70s — as an equally baffled “king.”

The bafflement extends to the song’s journey to glory. An unreleased album, a 1984 music video (glimpsed here) that did nothing for it, a gorgeous melody with glorious lyrics destined for the dustbin.

But Bob Dylan started playing it in concert. Velvet Underground alumnus John Cale took hold of it and performed it in a spare, solo piano and voice version. Jeff Buckley found it and gave it a bracing blast of sexualized youth. “Shrek” came along and Dreamworks got Rufus Wainright to record a streamlined version of it. “American Idol” and other singing competition shows had singers take it on. Eric Church covered it. Kate McKinnon performed it as a funeral dirge on “Saturday Night Live” the week the disgraced ex-president took the White House.

The song itself may be over-performed and indeed over-exposed, something Cohen fretted about late in life. But how can any singer resist a melody that prompts an almost Pavlovian response in tens of millions of listeners, the tears starting long before the chorus?

“It’s become it’s own thing,” Brandi Carlile marvels. “Universal.”

Geller and Goldfine’s film breezes through that history and attaches the tune — Cohen’s friend John Lissauer wrote the moving, funereal arrangement — to Cohen’s life as a “spiritual seeker,” a Zen student who spoke Hebrew and absorbed “the charged speech” and song “I heard in the synagogue growing up.”

We hear from Cohen’s rabbi and get a handle on how the song fits within Cohen’s faith, and where it sits in his life-long discography, “a mature man chronicling his life” via his musical “conversations with eternity,” struggling with love and spiritual meaning to the very end.

And through it all, we see the many guises of Cohen on camera, Canadian TV in the ’60s, struggling to find his place as a folk bard in the pop singer-songwriting of the ’70s, clinging to a career as he aged into the ’80s and ’90s, warm and playful interviews, recollections of mistakes (working with Phil Spector and his “Wall of Sound”), hints at heartbreak.

“Hallelujah” may not get as deep into Cohen’s life story as the earlier Cohen doc “I’m Your Man.” It doesn’t dig deep into the song itself, with the filmmakers content to show scores upon scores of performances of the tune, never having anyone parse the lyrics and break down its construction.

But narrowing the focus to this song elevates the film and its subject, and makes a fascinating window into one creative life, lived in curiosity, looking for answers and groping — for seven years — just to come up with a song that explains it all.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Leonard Cohen, Judy Collins, John Cale, Sharon Robinson, John Lissauer, Brandi Carlile, Adrienne Clarkson, Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainright, Vicky Jenson, Glen Hansard, Eric Church, Clive Davis and Larry “Ratso” Sloman.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine. A Sony Pictures Classics

Running time: 1:55

So many things go awry or are just never quite right with the film adaptation of “Attack on Finland” that one scarcely knows where to begin. But begin one must, so here goes.

“Good villains make good thrillers,” Hitchcock said. The filmmakers cast a colorful one, Estonian actor Juhan Ulfsak, for this story of murderous high-stakes Russian interference in Finland’s democracy. But they left him offscreen for almost the entire film.

The surrogate bad gal-and-guy (Nika Savolainen, Sverrir Gudnason) who fulfill those duties for most of the movie are neither colorful nor menacing enough to pull it off.

The shootouts, fights and other action beats play like walk-through rehearsals before filming the real thing. Slow. Unconvincing.

The story — which includes kidnapping Finnish and international dignitaries on Finland’s Independence Day, struggles to incorporate sequences and plot points in Estonia, Finland, Sweden and Belarus — is literally all over the place.

Different security forces are named, a “dark side of the EU” team breaks into people’s houses and accidentally shoots a child. Perhaps they were distracted. There’s this bloodless low heat love affair between a Finn (Jasper Pääkkönen) and a married-with-kids Swede (Nanna Blondell).

The NATO thing makes this film, based on an Ilkka Remes novel, either instantly topical or instantly-dated. The kidnappers demanding payment in Bitcoin is kind of hilarious as I type this.

Long convoluted plot made simple — a hustling entrepreneur Vasa (Gudnason) is coerced into helping this mysterious team led by a lawyer (Savolainen) stage a terror attack whose aim is to free Vasa’s war-criminal, “My son is DEAD” father (Miodrag Stojanovic).

So, Daddy issues lead to a raid on a celebratory ball, where Finland’s president and some NATO (I think) higher-up are nabbed.

“Free Dad and gimme $100 million in Bitcoin!”

That assault is dully-staged and filmed by director Aku Louhimies, as is every counter-assault and border crossing that follows. This or that moment plays well enough. But this ungainly beast is hard to follow. It’s even harder to invest in any character in it.

The dialogue — in snatches of English, and Finnish and Russian with English subtitles — is unquotably dull.

Sure, all is forgiven and “Welcome to NATO,” Finland and Sweden. But honestly, check out how the Swedes and Norwegians are making thrillers these days and learn from “Attack on Finland’s” many stumbles and miscalculations.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Jasper Pääkkönen, Nanna Blondell, Sverrir Gudnason, Nika Savolainen, Juhan Ulfsak and Miodrag Stojanovic

Credits: Directed by Aku Louhimies, scripted by Jari Olavi Rantala, based on a novel by Ilkka Remes. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:59

The mad-bomber thriller “Hot Seat” gives you a moment — here and there — where you’re allowed at least the hope that this will amount to something — an action beat that works, a plot twist you don’t expect, a clever clue.

It’s got Mel Gibson and Kevin Dillon in it, so maybe it’ll get off the C-list and manage to achieve B-movie status.

But those moments are fleeting in a movie that is instantly awful even if it never quite crosses over into hatefully bad.

It’s about a bomber/blackmailer/robber on the loose at Christmas season somewhere in the urban sprawl of New Mexico. And here’s what we see in the opening scene of the latest by James Cullen Bressack, a filmmaker who finally takes a break from his helping Bruce Willis (“Fortress,” “Surviving the Game”) destroy his legacy.

A character blows on his hands in the winter cold, when it’s plainly not the least bit cold, as others — not Canadians, we assume — walk around in shirt sleeves. We see an old fashioned LED timer counting down, and then see the bomb actually triggered by a key fob instead.

Well, which was it? I’m so confused.

“Hot Seat” is “Speed” in an office chai, “Speed” without any sense of “speed” or urgency whatsoever.

An “I’m not in the game anymore” hacker (Dillon), his marriage on the rocks and stuck in a computer repair call center, learns his chair is wired to explode if he gets up before carrying out an online hack/heist for a mysterious, voice-synthesized villain in a hoodie.

Stuff blows up, which shows everybody this guy means business. Gibson and Eddie Steeples play the geezer and the newbie from the bomb squad who have to figure out what’s going on, as the police chief (Shannen Doherty, worse than ever) is ready to let SWAT shoot this ogre in an office chair and be done with it.

Younger bomb squad guy bickers with old bomb squad guy.

“Listen, Ol’ Yeller…” “Listen, ‘Action Jackson.'”

Old guy taunts other cops about where to stand, the advantages of “the debris zone,” because they’re standing in the “vapor zone.”

Young guy snarks to old guy that “Chief wanted me to remind yo to stop leaving your Cialis out.”

And Dillon, a lifetime of playing third banana mugs behind him, is supposed to be “Mr. Ivy League” whom the the mostly-unseen villain keeps yelling “TICK TOCK TICK TOCK” into his ear as he scrambles to hack his way into wherever the money or what-not is kept.

The situation has suspense built into it, but there is none. The premise is predicated on urgency. We never feel it.

And the viewer never gets further into the thought that “This might not be all…” than that, before the next eye-rolling, dumb or absurdly illogical thing pops on screen to break the “might be almost competent” spell.

Rating: R for violence and profanity

Cast: Kevin Dillon, Shannen Doherty, Lydia Hull, Eddie Steeples, Kate Katzman and Mel Gibson

Credits: Directed by James Cullen Bressack, scripted by Leon Langford and Collin Watts. . A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:39

Cameron Diaz made her last film — “Annie” — in 2014, and officially said she was retired && married, new child, etc. — in 2018.

Now Jamie Foxx and Netflix have lured her back in front of the cameras. She hadn’t been in anything good in a while, but she was a gifted comedienne and decent in dramatic parts. The work dries up for screen beauties over 40.

The name of the next feature, co starring Oscar winner Foxx? “Back in Action.”

She turns 50 in Sept.

It used to be network TV and cable that gave actresses a second wind in their 40s-60s. Now it’s Netflix.