Movie Nation

Thrillers beyond number have been built on the “throw a bunch of characters together and ‘test’ them” trope. So why not “Escape the Field?”

Characters wakes up in a tractless/endless corn patch, with a single sinister scarecrow watching over it. Each person has some item — gun with a single bullet, knife, matches, compass, lantern, etc. — that might help them all get out.

And hanging over them all is the knowledge that someone drugged and dropped them here, and someone or some thing is out there amongst the rotting stalks, manipulating and maybe even hunting them.

Jordan Claire Robbins of “Supernatural” is Sam, the nurse, the first victim we meet and the first to blurt out “Where AM I?

Theo Rossi of “Sons of Anarchy” plays Tyler, who seems rational…or sketchy.

Shane West — “Bane” on TV’s “Gotham” — is bossy and butch and tough and twisted and ex-military, a hothead with a guilty conscience and a tendency towards mistrust.

Because as this “team” assembles in the middle of this field, not everybody is totally honest with everybody else. And when they get the notion that others have been out here before them, and people get snatched out of the frame by whatever is imprisoning, hunting and injuring or testing them, “working together” to work-the-problem seems like a goal beyond their reach.

If you’ve watched more than a few movies or binged on “The Twilight Zone,” you’ve probably invested in a version of this — “Maze Runner,” “And Then There Were None,” “In the Tall Grass,” the theater’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” “Twilight Zone’s” “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” the variations are endless.

But in our “Escape Room” era, screenplays have a tendency to emphasize “the puzzle” that all must cooperate to solve side of the story. And forcing logic on this, over-explaining it and the solution that three screenwriters come up with lets the players down.

The more we know, the less mysterious and less interesting “Escape the Field” is. The more that’s revealed, the more obvious the panic amongst those writers becomes.

The players struggle to escape the archetypes they’re playing and the plot they’re selling.

Fear fades and the back-engineered, over-thought and above all else over-explained problem and solution take over the movie As the terror of the unknown is vanishes, we shrug off the characters and their predicaments.

Any worries about them shaking in their boots take a back seat to us shaking our damned heads.

Rating: R for violence and language

Cast: Jordan Claire Robbins, Theo Rossi, Shane West, Tahirah Sharif, Elena Juatco, Julian Feder, Niki Kerro

Credits: Directed by Emerson Moore, scripted by Emerson Moore, Sean Wathen and Joshua Dobkin. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:29

A Frenchwoman of a certain age considers the question from the US Customs officer at LAX, and speaks her mind.

“I want to start a new life.”

And so she sort of does, 50 and “putting herself out back there” with the guidance of that Everywoman’s LA accessory, the gay BFF. And as she’s dating again, she’s writing (in voice over) an autobiographical screenplay about her neglectful, self-absorbed “diva” mother who left her in a small boarding school as a child, deliberately letting the child Lisa think it was something she did that caused this first of many abandonments.

“I Love America” makes a decent 50something showcase for the almost-ageless Sophie Marceau (“Braveheart,” “The World is Not Enough”) and pretty much nothing else. It’s a dry, somewhat vapid “French sophisticate in LA” dramedy about parenting, love, age and finding closure as the heroine of your own story.

And if writer-director Lisa Azuelos, who teamed with Marceau for the equally empty “LOL” 15 years ago, doesn’t utterly waste our time and Marceau’s, that’s only because Marceau doesn’t let her.

Lisa arrives in LA just as her mother (Sophie Verbeeck) takes a terminal turn for the worse back in France, “pissing me off to the end,” the daughter grumps (in French, with English subtitles).

But getting past that, her already-in-LA gay bartender pal Luka (Djanis Bouzyan) puts her on dating apps, drops her age from 50 to “43” and invites direct messages by the hundreds, most of them on the sliding scale of lascivious to crude.

The dates begin, a middling string of older-men-pretending-to-be-young and one dedicated cougar hunter (Colin Woodell) who insists a dating app can lead to something permanent and meaningful.

These outings, often connecting to the discos and disco of her youth, prompt flashbacks to the wounds of childhood — her “playboy” and out of his depth (not married to Mom) dad, Julien (Hubert Benhamdine), whom she nicknames “Judas,” her mother’s “new life” and new family pushing Lisa further into the background.

The running theme of these memories as they work their way into the screenplay within the screenplay is a life of longing for unfulfilled needs, scars Lisa made a decision to not pass on to her own kids, whom “I created to make sure someone loves me on this planet,” with much of what she encounters in LaLa Land being a potential trigger — “reunions,” etc.

Every so often, Lisa talks about Los Angeles, the movies and the cinematic landmarks of her life that live on there — “The Way We Were” to “The Big Lebowski.”

Azuelos renders all this in sweeping strokes of randomness — Lisa breaking her “no sex on the first date” rule, Luka living out some sort of ’80s gay cliche — hookups that can’t recall ever meeting him — mixed with modern LA gay stereotypes (Luka’s ex has married and has a child with his new partner).

The entire affair seems researched by watching lesser Hollywood films and sitcoms. Luka’s high-end apartment and cherry condition 1966 Mustang convertible make one wonder about bartender salaries in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

Marceau remains an arresting screen presence, but that’s severely tested by Azuelos’ inane, meandering and trite tale of love, loss and closure, wrapped in a female wish fulfillment fantasy.

Rating: unrated, nudity and sex, profanity

Cast: Sophie Marceau, Sophie Verbeeck, Colin Woodell and Djanis Bouzyani

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lisa Azuelos. An Amazon release.

Running time: 1:43

Leave it to Sam Raimi to sidetrack the efficient but creatively flatlining Marvel money train of Avengers idolatry.

Granted, the director of the sparkling, soulful original “Spider-Man” trilogy spends the first two acts of “Doctor Strange in the Universe of Madness” performing fan service, stuffing the screen with talismans, gimmicks and characters just like every recent Russo & Co. Marvel outing.

There are more gimmicks/characters/magical agents in “Doctor Strange 2” that have no real impact on the plot’s outcome than you can count. It’s the whole “Is Indiana Jones necessary for finding/saving the Lost Ark?”” argument writ even larger.

The Multiverse idea gets further beaten to death — with more cool effects — and a few beloved characters are trotted out and treated like fodder, and not just Bruce Campbell and Raimi’s infamous Olds Delta 88, either.

There’s a character symbolically-named “America” so that others can fret over America’s fate, wonder if “America is lost” or “America’s isn’t lost after all.” A little on the nose, symbolism-wise.

But then Raimi does Raimi, and “Drag Me to Hell” becomes more than one of his most fun horror outings, it’s a guiding principle for this Multiverse’s third act. It’s scary, harrowing fun, with a body count and a shift in direction that may rattle the “play it safe” suits at the Mouse’s prized nameplate.

We’re still in a post-Thanos Earth, half-ruined and periodically assaulted by monstrous enemies of humanity. Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is still regarded as a hero, but one and all — himself included — wonder at what price.

He’s still not the Sorcerer Supreme, still not as respectful as his friend with that title (Benedict Wong) would like. And indignity of indignities, he’s got to keep it together at his best gal’s wedding. She is of the “It would have never worked” persuasion, and Rachel McAdams playing Christine Palmer makes that whole relationship credible and worth mourning.

But these “dreams” the good doctor is having, with a young person with powers whom he doesn’t know (Xochitl Gómez) seem to be heading towards another “sacrifice for the greater good” situation. And the girl named America isn’t keen on dying nobly by his hand.

When Stephen Strange finally meets her in his world, it turns out she’s a multiverse traveler being pursued by demons at the direction of — you guessed it — another disaffected Avenger whom the script expects us to believe has gone totally, and almost justifiably rogue.

Thus this is the movie where casting a terrific actress, Elizabeth Olsen, as Wanda The Scarlet Witch, pays dividends.

Because if there’s one great novelty in all the multiverse mayhem, it’s the sight of the petite Olsen staggering, like a wounded and enraged Igor or Hunchback of Notre Dame, in a violent and nerve tingling chase, where she’s the monster doing the chasing.

The third act, which one can’t go into any detail about for fear of “spoilers,” is the corker here — full of candles and dark spells and demons and dead people and dead people summoned back to help.

The preceding multiverses? Go see “Everything Everywhere All At Once” to get a more thrilling, amusing and scientifically intriguing take on that. For that matter, the last “Spider Man” movie was better, start to finish, than this.

But Raimi gives his actors lots of close-ups, and they deliver in spades, making this one of the better-acted Marvel movies. Regret, grief, pathos and fury all register and hit you right in the face at times.

The messaging starts with this grand, simple line — “Just because someone loses their way doesn’t mean they’re lost forever.” But it is centered mostly on one newcomer — America.

Her character is focus-grouped virtue signaling in the flesh — Hispanic, with Puerto Rican decor on her jacket and a rainbow-colored Puerto Rican flag pin denoting her two moms. The intolerant corners of the Islamic world — the Gulf States — are banning the movie over that. But that’s ok. When she’s old enough America will be driving a plug-in hybrid.

America is here to represent conscience and hope, and Gómez adequately embodies that as well as the script — which has her imprisoned or almost helplessly in jeopardy for much of the time — allows.

There was a stretch “in the Multiverses of Madness” that I wondered if corporate Marvel hadn’t muzzled the life, independence and fun out of Sam Raimi, as the film’s early and middle acts are just generic — big, dull action beats, limp, recycled Strange and Wong jokes, tedious “I’ve put the magic behind me” declarations that no one believes and “fan service.”

But as someone who’s hard on Marvel “content” in general, I found “Multiverse’s” third act bracing and eye-opening, reminding us what can happen when you put a filmmaker with style and a talent for something other than Make the Avengers/Wizarding World etc. Trains Run on Time “management” in charge.

This isn’t one of the best movies of this genre. But when at its best, “Madness” takes Marvel places it’s been entirely too timid to go before. And no, I’m NOT talking about this endlessly-flogged “multiverse” fantasy of physics and comic book movies.

Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, frightening images and some language.

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Elizabeth Olsen, Benedict Wong, Rachel McAdams, Michael Stuhlbarg, Xochitl Gómez, Patrick Stewart, Bruce Campbell and Chiwitel Ejiofor.

Credits: Directed by Sam Raimi, Scripted by Michael Waldron. A Marvel Studios/Walt Disney release.

Running time: 2:06

Not sure when this Vertical release with Holly Earl, Catherine Hannay, Malachi Pullar-Latchman and Thomas Flynn comes our way.

So I’ll just flesh out this post with my favorite “Jetski” jokes. That was the working title of this sharks-eat-jetskiers thriller.

What’s the difference between a Jetski and a vacuum cleaner? The location of the dirt bag.

What’s the difference between a Jetski and a cactus? On a cactus, the little pricks are pretty sharp.

You hear’em in every marina I tellya, and Jetskier jokes never get old.

Yes, we’re finally getting those “Avatar” sequels James Cameron was coerced, bribed and arm twisted into creating and releasing.

Disney/20th Century is attaching these to the “Doctor Strange” sequel and asked critics to come to tonight’s “Multiverse of Madness” preview extra early so they could show this off as well.

This is the only theatrical preview of the “Avatar” teaser for critics in Florida. So we’re special, seeing it in Orlando’s finest multiplex, Regal’s Winter Park location.

I’m seeing it in 3D. I’ll update this if it makes my eyes pop out of my head. Damned impressive 3D, and it’s a lot longer than the teaser of the teaser posted below.

The trailer doesn’t give away much, just reminds us what Sam Worthington’s voice sounds like and what the animated versions of him and Zoe Saldana look like. “Family” and pregnancy and more conflict with the off world Earth-born exploiters.

If you want to make a movie feel like a movie “event” again, put it in a theater in 3D, I tell you what.

It’s “Avatar” all right. The movie demands to be seen in a cinema, the bigger the screen the better. The teaser? Get to “Strange” early enough to check it out.

You can make the argument that Richard Pryor was the greatest, and I’ll hear you out.

Some will toss Lenny Bruce in there to stir it up.

But once you’ve said your piece, we’ll look at the evidence, the influence, the evolution, the final acts with their unadulterated rage and endlessly quotable wisdom, and we’ll agree that George Carlin was the greatest stand up of them all.

I daresay any number of bits he did in the ’90s would get him “canceled” now. I recall one long riff on eating disorders that almost got him picketed, even back then.

Interviewed him once, by phone. The fire alarm went off at the newspaper where I was working. He heard it, paused a beat, and said “TWO MINUTES. Get your SHIT together.”

The best there ever was, “The Natural,” the real Hardest Working Man in Show Business.

And funny, from beginning to end.

HBO brought him back from the dead a couple of times. It’s only fitting that this appreciation comes from HBO Max.

A doc in two parts, May 20, HBO Max.

Harry Styles and Florence Pugh star in this Sept. 23 release, directed by and co-starring Wilde, Chris Pine, Gemma Chan.

A 1960-ish romantic mystery-thriller with a whiff of sci-fi about it?

“Mishan Impossible” is a picaresque tale of clueless but cute kids hunting “India’s most wanted criminal” to score some cash, set against the ultra-violence of India’s child trafficking epidemic.

It takes forEVER to get started — a 30 minute prologue doesn’t quite kick things off. And writer-director Swaroop Rsj tosses every coincidence, impossible gadget and unlikely piece of police procedure at this teetering, tottering interminable blend of the cutesy and the cruel. It’s a rough ride.

“Mishan” opens with an apparent police-sanctioned/arranged political assassination. Is Shailaja (Taapsee Pannu) — who smirks and strolls away from a murder in the middle of a corrupt candidate’s victory celebration — an undercover cop or “investigative journalist,” as some press releases for the film suggest? Either way, she helped arrange this on-camera murder, and that’s uh, not ethical.

Shaijala and her team of two are taking down or taking out India’s worst of the worst. As she’s able to arrange raids, it’s obvious that she’s a police investigator. But I don’t blame anyone — on or off the subcontinent, in the press or writing up press releases for this hash — for being confused.

It took me over an hour to figure out the lead character’s name.

Because the boys who find themselves mixed up in Shailjala’s sting are three village kids named Raghupathi (Harsh Roshan), Raghava (Bhannu Prakshan) and Rajaram (Jay Jayateertha Molugu). They’re just three dreamers from tiny Vadalamapeta, a village in the middle of nowhere.

Raghu is a school-skipping film fanatic who wants to make movies someday. Ragha is a delusional dunce who longs to make it on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” He gets Raghu to film his audition for the show on his cell phone, with Raghu “directing” the kid’s father and mother about when to cry. And Raja dreams of becoming a famous cricket player, even though he can’t bowl worth a damn.

To fulfill their dreams, they need cash. Maybe hunting down India’s Most Wanted terrorist in Bombay is the solution. They’ll train and scrounge up a little travel money and go there, nab their most-wanted prey and collect the reward.

There’s some confusion about who this fellow is. Raghu figures this photo of a film star he has on his wall looks like him, so that’s what they go on.

The jokes come from their cutesy/clueless “training” (with fireworks) and mission planning. They have no idea where Bombay is. They can’t read a map. They don’t speak Hindi (the film’s mostly in Tegulu, with English subtitles).

“Can you teach us Hindi in three days?” they beseech one educator.

And they keep turning to Ragha, whose “low IQ parents” figure he’s a genius — a lie that’s spread all over town — for answers, answers that are always wrong.

They arrive in Bangalore and Ragha tells them that’s the “old name for Bombay.” Stuff like that. You want to name your plan “Mission: Impossible,” he’s the last one you should turn to for spelling tips.

Meanwhile, the cops are plotting their big score against “industrialist,” politician and child-trafficking mobster Ram Shetty (Hareesh Peradi). Kids are being grabbed left and right. Sooner or later, our intrepid trio will join their ranks.

The director stuffs his picture will details — a child’s mismatched sneakers, kids’ confusion about how to translate centimeters to kilometers off a map, unhappy marriages that produce concerned parents when their child goes missing, careless civil servants and overwhelmed cops.

The tweenage boys elude the police, who are looking for these missing kids. They trick this adult or fool that one. There’s an endless succession of musical montages — village boys plotting, village boys training, village boys traveling without much of an idea of where they’re going.

“I have watched many RGV movies,” Raghu enthuses. “Villains hide in places like this!”

And then they witness a mob murder. We see a little kidnapped girl’s traumatized shock, not even recognizing her father as she’s rescued from sex traffickers.

“Mishan” is an altogether unpleasant blend of tones and stories aimed at wholly different audiences. The picture is all over the place, jumping from locale and point of view (cops, kidnappers, parents, kids) and back and forth in time right up to the closing credits.

Coincidental meetings, the kids transition from clueless dolts into seasoned help-the-cops-by-playing-“bait” operatives and ruthless bad guys turn into total klutzes just when the story needs that.

The kids are pretty good actors, but this clumsy, hacked-together story does nobody any credit.

Call it culture shock if you want, but I was thrown by the “arranged” murder in the first scene and was wrong-footed all the way through it. If you think watching it’s a chore, try watching “Mishan” and taking notes on it — waiting over an hour for the script to identify a character, jotting down the tsunami of syllables that make up even a tiny village’s name.

And I live in Florida, where some people call Thonotosassa, Eucheena, Okahumpka and Wacahoota home.

Let’s just say that I waded through this Swaroop swamp so you don’t have to.

Rating: TV-14, lots of violence

Cast: Harsh Roshan, Bhannu Prakshan, Jay Jayateertha Molugu, Harseeh Peradi and Taapsee Pannu

Credits: Scripted and directed by Swaroop Rsj. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:10

This period piece — @1960 from the looks of the cars — is based on a bit novel about a British housekeeper who dreams of owning a Dior “frock.”

Leslie Manville had the title role, with Isabelle Huppert, Jason Isaacs, Anna Chancellor and Christian Mackay in the supporting cast.

Looks adorbs. July 15 from Focus Features.

This is why we travel “Around the World with Netflix.” We peek into other cultures, weigh their differing values, mores and customs.

Sometimes, we puzzle over how different we can be, from culture to culture, continent to continent. And sometimes, we see how much alike we all are, and stumble across a cute comedy in the process.

I didn’t have high expectations for the Malaysian rom-com “Kongsi Raya.” Other romances and comedies from this predominantly Islamic state failed to surmount the stodgy conservatism of the place, something that tends to smother the life out of comedies and play as “backward” or at least “retrograde” to a Westerner, whose movies seem more modern, more tolerant and more hip by comparison.

There’s a whiff of Doris Day’s America to this chaste, cheesy little rom-com that puts “Romeo & Juliet” into the blender with “Iron Chef.” It can feel 60 years out of date, even though it’s (clumsily) framed within a TV interview set in 2029.

But stick with it. It starts to work. And even if it never gets up to door-slamming farce speed, the laughs come and the “finally getting a clue” message comes through loud and clear.

Qasrina Karim and Wilson Lee, a couple of big screen cutie pies, co-star as a couple that’s been married ten years, parents of a young son who interrupts as they’re being interviewed in 2029.

The reason they’re TV worthy? The show’s is titled “Kongsi Raya,” which is a mash-up of the names of Chinese New Year’s and the Islamic holiday Eid al-Fitr. Sharifah (Karim) and Jack (Lee) are an interracial/interreligious couple. And it doesn’t look like they get along all that well.

But the film, which tells the story of their meeting and courtship and struggles to argue, cajole or trick their families into accepting this match, ten years before, just might get them back on the same page.

Sharifah was producing her father Rahim’s (Harith Iskander) Malaysian TV cooking show. Jack was a chef himself, having studied at the elbow of his father (Kin Wah Chew), the third generation of the Long family to preside over their popular restaurant.

Jack and Sharifah meet when they’re the only ones on part of the ride of their daily bus commute. What’s her deal?

“I’ve been waiting for you to speak to me,” she says (in Malay, Chinese and even English at times)!

Malaysian rom-coms tend to depict love-at-first-sight romances because of cultural (and cinematic) strictures on courtship, kiss-free dating and such. It takes some getting used to, because that long chat on the bus means these two are pretty much deciding to get married and bonded for life. Just like that.

His mother (Ai Leng Ong) is pretty hip and easygoing, as is hers (Erra Fazira). But whatever their dads say, when the kids lie and float trial balloons about “a friend” who is going through this sort of romantic “never-the-twain-shall-meet” situation, there are limits to their theoretical “tolerance.”

First-time writer-director Teddy Chin’s picture gets airborne in the silliest way. Jack sneaks into Sharifah’s room, her mother almost barges in, so he dons Sharifah’s clothes and pretends to her Islamic friend Siti, the one with the Chinese beau.

Confusion piles upon confusion, with Jack’s dad bristling with rage at the idea that his son might convert to Islam and abandon their (not Islamic diet friendly) Chinese restaurant and Sharifah’s dad sticking his big clueless foot in the middle of a situation that is about to turn a lot more personal than he suspects.

There’s cross-dressing and lying on the fly, Jack’s adopted brother (played by writer-director Teddy Chin, hilariously) is brought in as a doofus co-conspirator and the two dads vow to settle this nonsense Eastern Hemisphere style.

Nobody shouts “Allez cuisine!” in Japanese-tortured French. But damned if these two cooks don’t throw down, “Iron Chef” style.

Chin’s film takes a while to get going, but by the time the two dads are trading ethnic-stereotype insults about “Malaysians” and Muslims and “Chinese,” and one dad’s son has donned a dress and a hijab, it’s clicking.

Lee vamps-up his cross-dressing turn, the mothers give their voice-of-reason characters (subduing their husbands) funny twists and Karim is befuddled sweetness and light in the middle of it all, wondering how many lies she’s going to have to tell to get this romance from meeting on the bus to walking down the aisle.

Iskander is the stand-out in the cast, loud, broad and borderline bawdy when he talks in hypothetical terms about what can happen in a proper Islamic courtship vs. “anything goes” wink wink once whoever this Siti and Jack he doesn’t know consummate their cross-ethnic union.

“Kongsi Raya” may never fully shake the feeling that we’re watching a Malaysian take on some Doris Day “Virgin Queen” rom-com from the early 1960s. But Chin manages to get G-rated laughs out of this subject in 2022, which is saying something.

And if American comic Albert Brooks is still “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,” I’ve finally got a suggestion for you, pal.

Rating: TV-G

Cast: Qasrina Karim, Wilson Lee, Harith Iskander, Erra Fazira, Ai Leng Ong, Kin Wah Chew.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Teddy Chin. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41