Movie Nation

A generation ago, “Amelie,” the cheerful fantasy about a Paris coquette’s charmed life, became quite the five-time Oscar nominated punching bag, hated for its adorable and adorably-optimistic heroine.

Coquettes got a bad name in the cinema after that. Gamines took it on the chin.

Actress turned director Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet has her revenge on Audrey Tatou and the all the gamines, coquettes and Parisian pixies the cinema has produced with “Anaïs in Love,” an amusing/maddening little exercise in pixie-puncturing.

Bourgeois-Tacquet’s star and titular muse is Anaïs Demoustier, far enough over 30 to not seem a natural fit for this childish, impulsive, cute and quirky college coed who sets hearts aflutter and creditors, lovers and landlords’ teeth on edge.

Anaïs bolts, late, into her flat, insisting to her landlady that “I HATE being late” (in French with English subtitles) as she dashes from room to room, checks the time repeatedly and chatters on about the lover who just moved out, how unsuited she is for marriage, how she wants to truly feel and understand passion and love and how she’s “not a thief,” she will catch up on her rent.

She sloppily installs a smoke detector — which falls on the landlord — and voila, she’s gone! Off to a party where she can’t go upstairs until somebody’s willing to ride with her, her bike and the increasingly crumbled flowers she brings for the hostess in an elevator. Because they spook her.

She’s a graduate student, and that elevator mate, 50ish Daniel (Denis Podalydès), is an academic a bit smitten by her “carefree” ways — stretching out a wrenched knee (she climbed the stairs rather than ride the elevator, sticking him with her bicycle) mid party, etc. More on him in a moment.

Because POOF, she’s off to the movies with the sullen ex Raoul (Christophe Montenez), only she’s late and they’ve missed it. Fiddle dee dee. And by the way, I’m pregnant. Do you think I should have the “vacuum treatment” here (in Paris) or back home where I can see my family OB-GYN?

Raoul’s “Wait, WHAT?” is met with an “I’m just unlucky, I guess.” Bad luck, missing a week’s worth of birth control pills.

Everything just washes off Anaïs like that — thesis requirements for her paper on how “passion” was portrayed in 17th century French lit, the unemotional, sexually-flatlining affair she starts with Daniel, even the news that her mother’s cancer has returned.

When she helps her brother, who fears he’s killed his traveling girlfriend’s hyperactive pet lemur by giving him a Xanax, we realize ditziness runs in the family.

But the moment her salmon-like attention turns away from Mom (Anne Canovas), Anaïs focuses her obsessive gaze not on Daniel or her schoolwork or her obligations, but on Daniel’s longtime love, a famous writer, Emilie (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi).

Might that be the solution to our heroine’s lack of focus and passion? An older woman? Or a menage a trois? Like, you know, her possible literary namesake, Anais Nin?

Bourgeois-Tacquet finds droll laughs in Anaïs’ inane over-sharing, questioning and self-absorption. Her “By the way, I’m pregnant” bombshell gets a scolding from a dismayed ex, prompting her to storm off with “You’re too violent in your inertia!”

Daniel’s “I love my life and don’t want to change it” plea prompts her to spit “Bourgeois cliche!” at him.

Emilie is puzzled by all these times she runs into this girlish “fan,” but her “What do you want from me?” doesn’t phase or even interrupt Anaïs in her running list of suggestions, desires and delusional self-analysis that means they should be together.

And every time you turn around, this “stuck” childish woman is doing something else that makes you roll your eyes — lying left and right (“I never lie!”), lighting candles, just as she told her landlord she’d done when she almost set her family’s house on fire as a child, setting off the smoke alarm mid-lovemaking, smashing the smoke alarm rather than figuring out which button to punch and irresponsibly renting out her flat to Korean tourists while she goes home and travels to a symposium to get closer to Emilie.

Yeah, it’ll all work out. Sure.

It’s not a bon bon or a comic delight. But Bourgeois-Tacquet and her muse Demoustier give coquettes, gamines and manic pixie dream girls (a Hollywood staple) the kind of butt-kicking all those people who misguidedly hated poor Amelie for decades ago longed for.

Pretty? Flighty? Sexy? Adorable? Of course. But it takes a lot of work by a lot of stupidly-compliant enablers to let this sort of free spirit run roughshod over every psyche she meets. One gets the feeling that her “gather ye rosebuds” expiration date is here, no matter how things work out for her by the closing credits.

Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Anaïs Demoustier, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Denis Podalydès, Xavier Guelfi and Anne Canovas

Credits:Scripted and directed by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:38

Four Polish filmmakers teamed up for the vengeful and funny “State of Polska” anthology film, “The Land,” a dark episodic comedy about people lashing out, using or abusing the law and punishing each other personally for their unhappiness.

This Around the World with Netflix outing tells six stories with varying degrees of well-acted morbid wit, delivering jokes that find their often-grim punchline and hit it hard, time and again.

A grizzled, seen-enough cop (Krzysztof Stroinski) hectors his shrugging partner about the stream of reckless speeders passing in front of their cruiser, neither of them wanting to get out in the rain and enforce the law.

“They don’t read books,” the old officer grouses, in Polish with English subtitles. “They have no imaginations.” They can’t imagine, for instance, the consequences of their carelessness.

A crash in front of them forces him to take action, and since it involves a BMW driver, and “I would kill EVERYone in a BMW. I’d kills the drivers of older BMWs TWICE,” has been part of his tirade, just you wait.

A harassed young construction worker (Tomasz Wlosok) took his baby to work that day, and is getting chewed-out on the phone by the baby’s mom as he shops. A careless bump in the aisle — him looking at his phone as another shopper looks at his — leads to one of those just-long-enough lapses, and his baby disappears.

He frantically searches the aisles, runs to the sounds of any crying child, chased and hounded by the store’s security guards. Nobody believes him when he thinks he’s spied the culprit and his infant in the checkout line.

But maybe coming after a frantic dad still wearing his tool belt isn’t the smart play here. Hammer time!

A family schemes to kill or blackmail a tax auditing team that visits their factory, a gauche bullying young bureaucrat takes over a government art gallery run by a young woman (Joana Niemirska) he once deflowered, a couple of neighbors in troubled marriages tit for tat their way into an all-out fireworks war one holiday night and a passive aggressive young nudist (Daria Polasik-Bulka), single mom and squatter faces off — dancing naked — with the owners of the apartment she refuses to pay rent for or vacate.

That old saying “Everybody’s dealing with something” is never spoken, but that’s what we’re into here — a lot of characters blithely unaware of how their taken liberties and transgressions are impacting those around them get them into “situations” with each other.

Tax auditors scare a factory owner into a heart attack and prank the eavesdropping relatives who are planning to poison or otherwise harm them, seemingly justifying their treatment. Simple errors of judgement escalate into a bottle rockets/roman candles shootout on Polish Independence Day. And a belligerent speeder “with no imagination” can’t understand how racing and causing a crash might impact a cop with a personal connection to such a road tragedy years before.

Not every piece in “The Land,” titled “Kraj” in Polish, has what I’d call a neat and tidy moral or object lesson. The nudist is plainly a head case and nobody is willing to deal with her on a mental health level, the factory audit story is on morally shaky ground no matter how it turns out and the gallery tiff doesn’t really add up to much.

But for anybody who doubts the Poles can take a joke, tell a joke and go seriously dark when in search of laughs, “The Land” and filmmakers Veronica Andersson, Filip Hillesland, Mateusz Motyka (who did the best segment, “Supermarket”) and Maciej Slesicki (who did three) clear up that misunderstanding with style, carnage and explosions.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Adam Bobik, Joanna Niemirska, Daria Polasik-Bulka, Bartlomiej Nowosielski, Paulina Masiak and Tomasz Wlosok

Credits: Directed by Veronica Andersson, Filip Hillesland, Mateusz Motyka and Maciej Slesicki, scripted by Maciej Slesicki, Veronica Andersson and Mateusz Motyka. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43

The new art film oddity from Peter Strickland (“The Duke of Burgundy”) enfolds art, performance art, haute cuisine and horror and comes out June 24.

A grabber premise gets solid if not terribly affecting workout in “The Aviary,” a psychological thriller about two women escaping from a cult across the deserts of New Mexico.

On foot, they’re putting distance between themselves and “The Aviary,” a thinly sketched-in science of “self help” retreat where “Skylight” is explored by people with problems. But on the lam, we start to figure out that Jillian (Malin Akerman) and Blair (Lorenza Izzo) carry that cult and its charismatic, manipulative leader Seth (Chris Messina) in their heads with them every precarious step they take.

Jillian was high up the chain of command at the Aviary, and she’s trying to keep her sense of humor as she leads them across unpopulated miles of wasteland on their way to Gallup.

“Would you call the Girl Scouts a cult?” What with the uniforms, the indoctrination, the cookie coercion…

“Be kinda ironic if my first cult saved me from my second!”

Jillian is navigating by the sun, telling younger Blair which berries are poisonous nightshade and probably concocted their escape plan, stashing water and portable snacks for the two or three day trek.

She’s a bit too giddy about escaping from the “trust fund babies” like Blair suckered into the cult. Malibu-born Blair is, she hastens to add, an exception to that label. Blair was willing to flee, and Blair is the one who tamps down Jillian’s premature celebrations of their “escape,” screaming into the night, lighting a fire, because Blair knows they’re not out of the desert yet.

They will be tested as things go wrong and the short, vigorous hike becomes a grueling one through a land of ghost towns and no water. Hallucinations of their leader, accidents, guilty dreams of what transpired at the thinly-veiled Scientology knock-off (video-taped “Barrier Therapy” sessions that can be used for blackmail) set the two women against each other.

“I didn’t join a CULT!” “I didn’t EITHER!” “I thought Skylight WORKED!” “I guess we’re both f—-ng IDIOTS, then!”

The performances are competent if not particularly compelling. There’s not enough of a bond built between the two for us to despair them tearing apart.

Messina (“The Mindy Project”) makes an interesting casting choice as the mesmerizing leader suggesting just enough menace beneath the “I just want to help” exterior.

But with “The Aviary,” co-writers/directors Chris Cullari and Jennifer Raite have essentially delivered a proof-of-concept project. Here’s a picture you can film in a pandemic with a skeletal cast and crew and low-cost locations and limited effects.

The things that should make it work are here, most of them anyway. The fact that it doesn’t draw you in or deliver an ending with impact doesn’t mean it couldn’t have. They needed more incidents and to impress upon their players that sense of urgency that a story about “We’ve escaped, they might be looking for us, and we’re in the desert without enough water or food to survive long” should convey.

Sure, he’s “in our heads,” but that should heighten the panic, not increase the resignation. Whatever the psychology of that, giving in to it makes for lukewarm drama and weak cinema.

Rating: R for language and some violent content

Cast: Malin Akerman, Lorenza Izzo, Chris Messina

Credits: Scripted and directed by Chris Cullari and Jennifer Raite. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:35

The Limey prat piles on Disney. Way to buck up Dictator DeSantis, pal.

Telling its story out of order does nothing for the undercover cop investigating the Birmingham drug trade thriller “Bluff.”

This indifferent cop-embeds-with-junkies-and-drug dealers tale is already saddled with colorless performances, banal dialogue, low energy villains and an overfamiliar story arc.

Forcing one to figure out why this character’s hairstyle keeps shifting and that junkie seems to have “outed” the “suspended from the force” London copper in the first act is pointless, waters down any hope of suspense and needlessly slows down an unthrilling thriller to a funereal crawl.

It wasn’t working on set (coffee might have awakened the narcoleptic cast), and shuffling scenes about doesn’t fix anything.

Gurj Gill plays our droning-on voice-over narrating hero, Det. Sgt. Daniel Miller, whom we see cashiered out of uniform, and then met by the lone superior (James Jaysen Bryhan) who will be his contact as he moves out of town to “become one of the invisible addicts that people walk past every day.”

How does one do that? Look around for somebody with the right, semi-staggered gait of a heroin/crack (speedball) addict trying to pass for “straight.” sit on a park bench and offer him a smoke. Ask about gear, offer to “pay for yours, too.”

Just like that, Danny is in with “Cooks” (Jason Adam), on his way to Shots, the dealer and set to work his way up to local kingpin Imran (Nisaro Karim) and maybe beyond.

The officer in charge tries to halt the investigation because of what it’s doing to his undercover man, but we have no sense that drug abuse and doing the drug trafficker’s bidding is giving Danny anything over than a more groomed (shorter haired) look the longer he’s in.

Danny’s declaration that he’s not letting the operation end, “not after everything I’ve been through, all I’ve sacrificed” breaks protocol and has zero conviction, the way it’s played here.

First-time feature director Sheikh Shahnawaz properly populates his seedy underworld and deglamorizes the lifestyle. Cooks is homeless, curled up in what looks like an abandoned parking garage.

Shahnawaz underpopulates his picture, and leaves women out of it almost completely.

But the real issue with it is that everything about this robs it of pace. The way the scenes are written — little or long anecdotes that begin with “You see Danny, I was an only child” and don’t improve the longer they go on — actors who take their sweet time working up to the point of a scene — editing that captures dead time between words, reactions and a narrative with little urgency and almost no forward motion make “Bluff” an almost interminable movie to sit through.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Gurj Gill, Jason Adam, Nisaro Karim, James Jaysen Bryhan and Joe Egan

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sheikh Shahnawaz. An Indie Rights release.

Running time: 1:54

“The Bad Guys” is a children’s version of a caper comedy, an “Ocean’s Eleven” featuring CUTE critters as criminals.

It’s got cartoonish car chases and “Impossible” heist missions. And thanks to droll, cool crook voice work by Oscar winner Sam Rockwell, Marc Maron, Craig Robinson, Richard Ayoade , Awkwafina and Anthony Ramos, it’s kind of a stitch.

Lots of animated films go for big name actors to provide voices. But few figure out what this Dreamworks action comedy’s team did. Landing the right “funny” famous voice is all important.

That rule is underscored in the opening scene, just a couple of criminal lowlifes, the sharp-dressing, laid-back Wolf (Rockwell) and the grumpy, grousing Mr. Snake (Maron, the only actor to disguise his voice) banter, bicker and over Snake’s “taste for guinea pig”T and Wolf’s eye for the next reputation-making score.

“Big Bad” Wolf’s the mastermind, Snake is a “serpentine safe cracking machine,” Tarantula (Awkwafina) is their hacker/tech support, Shark (Robinson) is a “master of disguise” (Hah!), “apex predator of a thousand faces,” and Piranha (Ramos) is the gonzo wild card, the muscle.

Their motto?

“Go bad or go home.”

Wolf has a custom getaway car and they keep their loot in a subterranean lair. And there’s this Golden Dolphin with an emerald eye that’s the big prize for the best do-gooder in town. They aim to snatch that right from under the nose of foxy Mayor Foxington (Zazie Beetz) as she gives it to popular, wholesome, saintly guinea pig Professor Marmalade (Ayoade).

The message here — don’t judge a book by its cover, don’t let yourself be defined by stereotypes others impose on you. The villains of the animal kingdom maybe aren’t such “Bad Guys” after all.

All it takes is a “Who’s a good boy?” for Big Bad “Wolf” to wag his tail. But is their rehabilitation genuine?

“The Bad Guys become the Good Guys so we can stay Bad Guys!”

Rockwell’s way of playing every word on the backbeat makes even limp lines land. And veteran British funnyman Ayoade, who’s done lots of animation since breaking out in the sitcoms “The Mighty Boosh” and “The IT Guys,” induces giggles with every plummy, pedantic witticism to come out of his mouth.

The animation has a Tex Avery elasticity — exaggerated gestures, eyes bugging out, “Bugs Bunny Physics” and all that as a visual reinforcement of the bad guy banter laid over it.

Based on the children’s books by Aaron Blabey, the plot isn’t all that, but “The Bad Guys” sparkles to life when it’s at its most antic — frantic chases, capers going wrong or just heated, animated debates in the gang.

And Rockwell’s Big, ever-so-Bad Wolf? “WHO’S a good boy?”

Rating: PG, rude humor (fart jokes)

Cast: The voices of Sam Rockwell, Awkwafina, Zazie Beetz, Craig Robinson, Anthony Ramos and Marc Maron.

Credits: Directed by Pierre Perifel, scripted by Etan Cohen and Yani Brenner, based on the books by Aaron Blabey. A Dreamworks Animation film released by Universal.

Running time: 1:40

The premise is so crazy that it’s a wonder nobody’s attempted a “Weekend at Bernie’s” take on “Operation Mincemeat,” one of the cleverest bits of spycraft pulled off by the Brits during World War II. Morbid as the story might be, there’s something jaunty about this real moment in history, John Bull having a bit of sport with Gerry, eh wot?

But the new film by John Madden (“Shakespeare in Love,” “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”) would rather show us the logistics, the nuts and bolts of procuring a dead soldier’s body, planting believable fake invasion plans on him, all to fool the Germans about target of the next Allied counter-offensive.

It loses itself in the layers of details, the in-house intrigues and a possible love triangle at the heart of the plot and sinks or swims in being more thorough than previous tellings of the tale (1956’s “The Man Who Never Was”). A grand cast, great period detail and a tense, generally somber tone help one and all pull it off.

In the spring of 1943, the Western Allies routed Rommel and chased the Germans out of North Africa. Churchill’s “soft underbelly of Europe” strategy, meant to placate the Russians and divide German strength, dictated they’d jump from North Africa to…where?

Sicily seemed obvious. Corsica and Sardinia easier pickings. Maybe Greece?

To shake the German confidence in bulking up the defenses of Sicily, a couple outside-the-box thinkers, accomplished lawyer turned Naval Intelligence officer Ewen Montagu (Colin Firth) and — “eccentric” flight officer and Operation Trojan Horse progenitor Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen) pushed a “crazy” scheme.

Cholmondeley is the one who first thought up the idea of dropping a body with papers on it where the Germans would find it to confuse the enemy. When Lt. Commander Montagu got on board the idea, they renamed it to the less obvious “Mincemeat” and struggled to get it past a superior (Jason Isaacs) and onto Churchill’s desk.

“The Old Man” had gambler’s taste for long shots.

The dashing spy Ian Fleming (Johnny Flynn), future creator of James Bond, would be a good bloke to have in their corner. A joke is made about all the Whitehall (government) military men enjoying being far away from the front lines by taking on book projects. Fleming is seen typing away at this and narrating (although Montagu is the one who actually wrote a book about it).

The script then invites us into the sometimes testy discussions and problem-solving that involved “tossing a letter-laden corpse into the sea.” What body? How do you “create a real fake man out of a real dead man?” How should they pick a common-enough name for him? How many military higher-ups should contribute to those letters without giving away the game? How do you keep the ink dunked in sea water from blurring? And where, and under whose purview, do you toss this “letter-laden corpse” so that the paranoid, third-rate thinker Fuhrer has it brought to his attention?

Hester Leggett (Penelope Wilton) is the ranking woman on this staff, the one who’d give a woman’s touch to love letters mixed in with the others. And a new recruit, the widowed Jean Leslie (Kelly Macdonald) would help with that, and provide a photo from her youth to add authenticity to the package.

“Was he happy?” “The girl I was at 20 was his muse.”

With so much to fret over and so many moving parts, the last thing this operation needs is a possible Soviet spy in a family tree, mistrust in the chain of command, leaks, a failing marriage and the shared interest of our two top men in the Scots lass who’s asked to be assigned to their office.

Keep in mind that the two actors playing these men both portrayed Jane Austen’s male ideal Mr. Darcy in competing versions of “Pride and Prejudice” and you get a sense of how tough a choice it must have been for Mrs. Leslie.

Firth and Macfadyen provide most of the acting fireworks here, wrangling over specifics, over who doesn’t trust whom, over the subordinate they pine for and her “reputation,” seeing as one of those interested in her is a married man.

The arguments get so heated that one wonders if the Dueling Darcys had to be separated between takes.

As the great historian David McCullough always says about figures from history, “Nobody back then knew how this would turn out,” something one senses in every performance and in every “Mincemeat” scene.

We may get glimpses of where Fleming got his “M” and “Q” characters from, but the stakes are high and the sober seriousness of how one treats a dead body is never regarded as a “joke.”

If a movie about fighting fascists by tricking them has anything to say to audiences today, that might be it. Sacrifice, even unknowing sacrifice, is honored. Duty to country comes before petty personal concerns, something some of the participants in that Operation have a hard time remembering.

Yes, the Nazis hired “only the best people” for a lot of their espionage, and many were fops and gullible fools. But thousands of lives in a war that was already bleeding Britain dry were at stake.

In British history, “their finest hour” films were their version of America’s Westerns. This cast lifts “Operation Mincemeat” above the genre programmers of the past, but that’s where you’d find its readiest comparisons, in movies like “The Dam Busters” and “The Man Who Never Was.”

Madden, screenwriter Michelle Ashford and the cast perform their greatest service in reminding us that real history, unadorned, can make the best drama.

Rating: PG-13 for strong language, some sexual content, brief war violence, disturbing images, and smoking

Cast: Colin Firth, Kelly MacDonald, Matthew Macfadyen, Jason Isaacs, Johnny Flynn and Penelope Wilton.

Credits: Directed by John Madden, scripted by Michelle Ashford. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:08

It’s not a vintage DreamWorks opening, but “The Bad Guys” own the Omicron 3 weekend with a $25 million+. I think Sat. and Sunday could push it closer to $27.

It’s cute. It plays. And parents are grateful that they don’t have take the Little Dickens to “Sing 2” again.

“Sonic 2” is coming in second at just over $15 million. mmm There’s an audience for these films, and when there are no films for that audience, they don’t show up.

Still having a hard time believing “The Northman” cost $70 million. But Vikings overexposure or not, a $13.5 million is a decent opening for a Skarsgard/Anya Taylor-Joy vehicle with blood and gore and nudity and trippy Viking rituals.

“The Secrets of Dumbledore” has fallen off a cliff, $13.5 million on its second weekend.

Fanboy driven hype the “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” might have had you thinking Nicolas Cage was headed for a blockbuster weekend. $7.17 million is nothing to sneeze at, but…

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is showing that you don’t need guys and gals in capes to sell a multiverse story, pulling in another $5.4 million this weekend. It’s earned $27 million+, and didn’t cost $300 million in effects, talent and Marvel licensing fees.

Another movie with a built-in audience is the date-movie/action comedy “The Lost City,” which is on its way to another $4.6 million this weekend.

“Father Stu” managed another $3.2.

“Morbius” is falling right off the charts, down to $2.25 million or so this weekend.

“The Inevitable Death of the Crab” is a low-heat Mexican thriller about the targets of an extortion threat. It builds from a first half of phone calls that grow more menacing every time somebody picks up — and mostly, they don’t pick up — to a finale of deflating resignation that may explain its cryptic title. Or may not.

The ladies of the house — a mansion, in this case — are heading to Vegas to meet the prodigal daughter who has taken up with a norteamericano That leaves patriarch Carlos (Juan Manuel Zacona) and his son Santiago (Ahcitz Azcona, the film’s writer, director, editor, producer and distributor alone for few games of tennis on their backyard clay court, and free time for a father-son get together with the lad’s godfather (Ricardo Niño).

But there are these phone calls, coming in on their land line. Carlos answers the first, which is of “organized crime has you in its sights”…be a shame if anything happened, pay us protection so that it doesn’t variety, in Spanish with English subtitles.

In a country where the class divide is this stark, where the gangsters have grown more brazen by the generation, with a reputation for corruption as old as the Republic itself, Carlos treats this as the fact of life it might be.

His brother was extorted, but it turned out to be a scam run by inmates from prison. That’s his assumption there. He hangs up on the Jabba the Hutt-growling villain, and stops picking up the phone. He advises Santiago to do the same.

Santiago, we learn, has a hard time following instructions. He won’t just talk to “the thug who’s going to kill you.” He’ll taunt him.

“Oh yeah?” he challenges the caller. “You’re so smart, what COLOR is my house?”

That ups the paranoia of both father and son, who see and hear threats everywhere, in every face they don’t recognize or pick-up truck that pulls up in front for no reason.

A refresher course on just how exposed the Internet — and Google maps in particular — leaves us all comes up. As does a little bitching about how Mexicans are Hollywood’s “favorite villains” these days.

But both men are on edge by what might be coming and the limited options in a state where the police are as unreliable as they are corruptible.

We wonder if one of the men has opened them up to this threat, wonder about online porn playing a part and count the hours until the Vegas vacationers return.

“Crab,” which may take its title from the ever-sideways way it moves, much like Mexican “progress” beyond the point where getting rich comes with kidnapping threats. If there’s another explanation for it, I missed it.

Because is one slooooooow 71 minute thriller. It opens with a remedial archival footage montage, showing Mexican history, strife and politics over the last century. That plays into the fact that all this is happening in the middle an election. There are also a number of false alarms in that first act, moments where the viewer or father or son wonder if their confrontation has arrived.

A favorite has a character with a pastry stuffed in his mouth, gag style, making us wonder if this is breakfast or he’s been taken hostage.

“The Inevitable Death” makes good use of the “inevitable” suspense of two guys facing some sort of reckoning, and not communicating well enough to reason their way out of it.

The minor letdown of the finale sees that suspense reach an intriguing, “inevitable” if not exactly action-packed peak.

Rating: unrated, profanity, threats of violence

Cast: Juan Manuel Zacona, Ahcitz Azcona, Ricardo Niño and Jesus Hernandez

Credits: An Azuma release, on Tubi and Amazon.

Running time: 1:11