Movie Nation

A kiddie comedy about that special pair of sneakers who carry a young baller’s dream, separated by “The Collector,” with one Sneaker seeking his mate…

You’d expect to hear the voice of Martin Lawrence in it, but Anthony Mackie and Lawrence Fishburne?

I may not review it because it isn’t all that. (OK, I did review it.)

But with a “Sneaker Culture” consultant/tour guide listed in the credits, it’s the nuttiest idea to turn into a kiddie cartoon. Or one of the nuttiest.

“Squad 36” is a ponderous Parisian police procedural that never seems to get out of its own way. Staggering from cliche to contrivance, there’s little doubt what climax the stock characters who inhabit it are headed to, and that there’ll be an anti-climax after that.

Dirty cops, dangerous gangs, intrasquad romance and police who take care of their own, it’s a French variation of that tried and true hook of American cop pictures since “Colors.” That truism “The police are just another gang” bears repeating as much of the world seems indoctrinated to the “Law & Order/Bluebloods” myth of those who “protect and serve.”

It’s a milieu where French actor turned writer-director Olivier Marchal (“Rogue City”) has found a home. Perhaps he’s too comfortable in that home for his own good.

We meet the titular six-member Anti-Crime Ssquad as Sami (Tefix Jallab), Vinny (Guillaume Pottier), Walid (Youssef Ramal), biker Hanna (Juliette Dol), Richard (Soufiane Guerrab) and Antoine (Victor Belmondo) chase canny and tough-looking mob figure Karim (Jean-Michel Correia) all over the rainy streets of Paris.

A couple of things leap to mind in this opening sequence. Why are they pursuing this armed gangster, when they won’t arrest him? Why have Hanna — the lone woman on the team — lose control of her bike so that star Belmondo (the grandson of you-know-who) can take over?

And aren’t ALL police squads “anti-crime?”

Sami is the on-task boss of them all, answering to an impatient, CYA/C-his-A higher up (Yvan Attal). But Antoine is meant to be the “colorful” one. He’s seeing Hanna on the sly. And he takes out his over-the-top aggression on foes in underground, no-holds-barred brawling for bucks.

That’s what gets Antoine kicked out to the suburbs to “a department with less confrontation.” His colleagues may insist he got a raw deal, but we know better.

Months later, when members of the squad turn up dead and one goes missing, Antoine is lured back into this lurid world of nightclubs, overlapping jurisdictions, suspect cops and suspect mobsters. Because come what may, cops take care of their own.

Adapting a novel by Michel Tourscher, Marchal fills the screen with assorting police units with varying agendas with Antonoine running afoul of some and secretly supported by others.

The violence can be sudden and random and visceral. But once we get past the “cop in fight club” first act, the narrative settles into duller shoe-leather police work, following this tip, making that contact, working outside the law because the insiders don’t want him messing around in all this.

“You mind your own business and there won’t be any repercussions” is as menacing in French (with subtitles) as it is dubbed into English.

I like the suggestions of and open displays of corruption — stealing cash from an evidence locker, higher-ups shuffling wayward cops from job to job like pedophile priests.

At least in French cop movie funerals they don’t trot out bagpipes.

But when a picture bogs down into talky, relationshippy middle-acts like this one, the viewer gets ahead of it. The big mystery is easily guessed, and early. Characters don’t have motives or relationships that aren’t contrived, simply ordained by screenwriterly convenience.

Belmondo is convincingly tough and flinty, but has a generic screen presence that suggests “supporting player with a famous last name.”

Correia, as the 50ish mobster, brings weight and charisma and layers to his role. Everybody else here is just a cog in the clumsy collective presented here, cops and killers doing what they do the way they’ve done it in hundreds of pictures just like this, many of them better than the sedentary “Squad 36.”

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Victor Belmondo,
Tewfik Jallab, Yvan Attal, Juliette Dol,
Soufiane Guerrab,
Jean-Michel Correia,
Lydia Andrei, Guillaume Pottier and Youssef Ramal

Credits: Directed by Olivier Marchal, scripted by and Olivier Dujois and Olivier Marchal, based on a novel by Michel Tourscher. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:08

There’s ambition and a dollop of intellectual heft to the indie dramedy “Daddy.” Even if it misplaces characters, shortchanges its goals and fails to deliver much in the way of a satisfying conclusion, you can appreciate the attempt and the effort involved.

Arch, dry and dark, it’s an alt-future version of “testing” a quartet of candidates in their suitability for fatherhood. Toxic masculinity, religious dogmatism, hapless, hope-for-the-best slacking and daddy dilettantism come into play in co-writers/co-directors/co-stars’ Neal Kelley and Jono Sherman‘s not-quite-funny satire.

Jeremy (Sherman) sits for an AI interview with FRANN, the Fatherhood Research Aptitude Neural Network, who gives him a word association test to determine his fitness for fathering. Somehow, he hems and haws and insists “I’m ready, I’m TOTALLY ready” his way past this first quiz.

That means he gets to go on a Dept. of Procreating’s fatherhood retreat, where his final fitness will be determined.

Hapless, “fatherhood is a feeling” Jeremy is parked in a remote, mountain valley house with guitar playing cynic and possible INCEL Mo (Pomme Koch), piously religious and married Andrew (Kelley), and paranoid, pushy biz bro Sebastian (Yuriy Sardorov of “Argo” and TV’s “Chicago P.D.”).

They’re deprived of their cellular devices and dropped off. They meet and wait for their “monitor” to show up and evaluate them. They wait some more. And then they start to wonder if they’re simply being “watched” to decide if they’re fit to be fathers.

A couple of guys have a touchy edge, one uses his religion as comfort and rationalization for how he behaves and Jeremy just sort of steps into it and wings it as they prep meals, play cards, chat and make up their own DIY exercises (save your baby from a mugger and/or an earthquake) using a baby doll they figure was left there for that purpose.

They’re starting to fray, tensions are flaring and Sebastian’s bossy paranoia has put them all on edge. And then a “lost” woman (Jacqueline Toboni) shows up.

The performances work even if the deadpan “jokes” never quite land.

“I’m a runner.”

“Oh. I used to run track.” Pause. “800 meters.” Pause.

“OK.”

The dumbest Battle of Waterloo discussion/allegory ever is passed over for a debate about whether they should stay, try to hike out or whether indeed they’re being “watched.”

The players make their assorted character “types” somewhat distinct caricatures. But the choices the script has characters abruptly make or nonsensically dismiss doesn’t give the narrative manuevering room to settle someplace interesting.

The payoff is kind of predictable, and not in a good way.

But it’s worth dipping into the many “Daddy” issues here just to figure out what our first-time writer-directors were trying to say, even if they never actually say it.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Yuriy Sardorov, Neal Kelley, Jono Sherman, Pomme Koch and Jacqueline Toboni.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Neal Kelley and Jono Sherman. An Anchor Bay release (streaming)

Running time: 1:38

Maybe you’ve got to be a car guy-or-pronoun-of-your-choice to notice it.

But Thursday afternoon, I couldn’t help but notice that the first-date/widowed mom under threat who’s got to make a dash home to save her kid and her babysitting kid sister in “Drop” and Rami Malek’s cryptanalayist in “The Amateur”‘s choice of late film getaway vehicle were one and the same.

The “safety” pioneers, a cool ride famous for engineering survivable crashes, Saabs were the car of the screenwriters/director’s choice in both films.

For years, Saabs were what real college professors, and that academics in the movies drove. It was the quintessential “car with character,” a “you are what you drive” indicator that said a lot about movie character when you saw them driving one.

Hip, go-your-own-way quirky, quick and sporty, “safe” but not entirely practical.

They were expensive to maintain, and the moment Saab went out of business, you ceased seeing them on the roads — almost instantly. I see one or two a year, now. Tops.

I test drove Saabs a couple of times, and regretted not buying them both times, “torque steer” be damned.

Dead and gone but not forgotten, the “tenured professsor” car of choice for decades of movies has another moment.