Movie Nation

“UFO” is a cheerfully cheesy, sometimes sappy and always formulaic teen romance from the “bad boys on bikes” school.

It’s a Turkish drama that immerses us in the two-wheeled stunts and scofflaws culture of an unnamed Turkish city (Adana), brings in a romance between a college-bound singer torn between the rich kid with the fancy bike and the punk with “UFO” painted on his, and folds in underground races, stolen bikes and bike parts, Turkish justice and ways to elude it.

And damned if it doesn’t toe the line just shy of “tolerable” before going completely to hell in the finale.

Ese (Mert Ramazan Demir) has just gotten out of the army and leaps right back into motorcycle daredevilry with his mate Gokhan ( Kerem Alp Kabul) — feet on the handlebars, driving on his belly, all captured for videos celebrating the feats of Kartal Motor, the struggling family bike shop.

Ipek Filiz Yazici plays Deniz, the fetching blonde burying her singing ambition to get into a good college in Istanbul and rescue her mother from an unhappy marriage.

Events conspire to throw them together. The roadblock the Kartal kids sets up for illegal motorcycle street stunting blocks the SUV Deniz is in with her dad. Then Ese and Gokhan crash a graduation party for rich-boy-with-a-pricey-bike Cenk (Mekin Sezer).

A showdown is set-up but barely followed-through on, “the girl” has to choose which guy to give the eye to, and somebody has to observe “It’s the rider, not the bike” (in English, or Turkish with subtitles).

Because those are the rules when you’re making a bike-racing romance.

Ese’s extended family and the friends who help with the shop make a most promising “Fast and Furious” milieu for director Onur Bilgetay‘s film. The grit and grime and too-familiar-with-the-justice-system vibe of the family, which includes the sisters, mothers and fiances of the menfolk who know just who to call the next time the lads get arrested, has a lived-in quality to the banter and relationships.

The bike-racing scene is too-thinly developed, but it has one great piece of slang that biker culture the world over should adapt. A UFO on a bike is an “unidentified forgotten object,” as in the guy you leave behind in the dust when you’re racing him.

The Ese-Deniz romance is all courtship montages, musical interludes and “He’s just a poor boy” and “She’s just a rich girl” strife.

But one early step in the making of a genre piece like this seems mostly skipped-over by our director and his screenwriter, Meryem Gültabak. You should familiarize yourself with other films in the genre just to see what works and what you can’t afford to leave out.

The leads have decent chemistry and one of the chases is pretty well-handled. But the bike-racing stuff is seriously third-rate, decades behind what Hollywood and Europe deliver. The motorcycles are similarly underwhelming, very Vietnamese Third World dirt bike.

Every time the picture loses track of the greasy chain and blown motors milieu of the shop, the racers, their priorities and seat-of-the-pants lives, it stops cold.

Not giving your movie visible, fleshed-out foes to battle — the cops waiting to “catch you in the act,” the bank that wants to repo the shop, the rich kid powerful enough to cause them problems, their racing opponents in the coming “big race” (which isn’t that “big” and SERIOUSLY lame) — makes it fall short long before that bizarre, dopey, “Dead Man’s Curve” finale.

Which is where “UFO,” as I said, goes completely to hell.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Ipek Filiz Yazici, Mert Ramazan Demir, Kerem Alp Kabul

Credits: Directed by Onur Bilgetay, scripted by Meryem Gültabak. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:50

A signature chase in “The Batman” involves the new Caped Crusader and his new hooniganed Batmobile — a Camaro/Mustang mashup — chasing Oswald Cobblepot through the anarchic, gloomy and rain-soaked streets of Gotham City.

As you would expect, that chase does not go well for “Ozzie,” aka “The Penguin.” And one cannot help but note the crashed vehicle the feckless, cagey criminal in peeled out of after attempting his getaway. It’s a Maserati.

The one thing that truly separates the Batman/Dark Knight movies from every other comic book adapted for the big screen is that we always get a Batman of our moment. Actors change and cars evolve and the tone and the nature of the villains shifts more dramatically still, always to suit “the moment.”

And there are no coincidences in movies like this, which are production-designed to death. Today’s villain drives a Maserati, on and off the screen.

The Robert Pattinson Batman era comes in a time of trauma, treachery and treason, with the very Republic at stake. Director and co-writer Matt Reeves (“Cloverfield,” a couple of Planets taken over by Apes) sets us up for a tale of vengeance in a time of great wrongdoing, with leaders murdered and criminals as big as rogue state rulers.

It’s too long, and maybe there’s a little too much concern about the way Pattinson’s hair flops over one eye. But from first frame to last, Reeves matches the master, Christopher Nolan in two important regards. As in the last Nolan “Dark Knight,” this Batman is embattled and almost overwhelmed by a city and its institutions coming apart at the seams.

And like Nolan’s “Knights,” this beast of a movie looks, sounds and plays as epic.

In that signature first act chase, it’s not just the howling, drifting Batmobile bearing down on an almost unrecognizable Colin Farrell as The Penguin. Michael Giacchino’s thunderous score makes us feel it is justice itself — vengeance — closing the gap to take out this version of a “Teflon Don.”

Pattinson — armored in a Batsuit meant to bulk him up and make the character’s many unsurvivable blasts, plunges and bullet blows seem survivable — grows into the persona this Bruce Wayne is projecting, a callow young man fighting crime, his past and the demons he carries, known and unknown. He’s good in the part.

In cowl and combat boots, BatPatts looms over Jeffrey Wright‘s returning (future) commissioner James Gordon, whose role has been beefed up to take the “carry the picture” burden off the “Twilight” hearthrob. And in casting the willowy and petite Zoë Kravitz, Reeves and Warner Brothers give us the tiniest Catwoman ever, shorter even than the feline Eartha Kitt. Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne in a Batsuit towers over her, even as the guy behind the mask is intimidated by the tiny tyro pursuing her own agenda.

Reeves and co-writer Peter Craig set this just-after-origin story in a time of rampant corruption — dirty cops and phony “law and order” politicians — and crime, with one unseen criminal murdering “hypocrites” in public life in a very public way, leaving the few uncorrupted cops and The Batman ciphers and riddles to figure out.

This Riddler isn’t cute and funny. He’s The Joker’s Just-as-Evil-Twin. But finding him is going to take teasing out his riddle/clues and tricking or entrapping the city’s crime boss (John Turturro, playing an unexcitable monster who’s comfortable in his own skin), this Penguin fellow (Colin Farrell), Catwoman and a DA (Peter Sarsgaard) whose motives seem as sketchy as a certain real-life “Gotham” DA.

Ok, maybe THAT’s actually a coincidence.

Pattinson gives us a Batman laboring under too much voice-over narration, but oh-so-right in one all-important regard. He’s fighting crime, dealing with nightly summons from the already-established Batsignal. He’s troubled, grasping for clarity and dealing with the police from a position of mutual distrust. They’re corrupt, he’s a “freak” overstepping his authority, thanks to his new friend and protector, Gordon.

With his trusty manservant Alfred (Andy Serkis) bearing the scars of an ex “Circus” (British intelligence) spy whose bodyguard work kept the kid alive, this Bruce Wayne started this “crusade” thing young, as an almost masochistic duty. He never questions that impulse, just doggedly goes about his business as the bodies pile up.

“Maybe it’s beyond saving, but we have to try.”

Kravitz makes a fine Catwoman, although the physics of somebody 5’2″ and model-thin kicking ass seems more a stretch than usual. Serkis has too little to do and our Riddler’s revelation is anti-climactic, despite the accomplished actor playing him.

Farrell’s transformation is Jared Leto “Gucci” level, so extreme as to make one wonder why he and they went this far.

Turturro and Wright are so good that Pattinson holding his own with them tells you all you need to know about him in the role. All those years of indie thrillers and quirky dramas after “Twilight” paid off. It’s not just about the eyebrows and hair any more.

The lack of supernatural aliens and alien gods has always made this comic book universe a favorite of mine, and I’m hard pressed to mention any “Batman,” even the Joel Schumacher ones, that didn’t connect to its era and try to say something about our times and the state of the nation in some way.

“The Batman” isn’t light, with just a couple of lines landing laughs, one of them detailing the orphaned son of murdered parents’ “No guns” ethos, which Gordon isn’t having.

“Yeah man, that’s your thing.”

Reeves, who did a good job of making the “Apes” movies topical enough to chew on, positions his comic book movie not just as a worthy successor to Nolan’s trilogy, but as a gritty, real-stunts/real-gravitas counterpoint to the digital effects heavy Marvel films and DC’s own “Wonder Woman/Justice League/Aquaman” efforts.

Yeah, it’s too damned long. But cleaning up this big a mess, Reeves and Craig tell us, is going to take a lot of time, and even then, there’s no guarantee evil won’t triumph. The hero our times call for is somebody undaunted by the task, undeterred by the odds, unswayed by negative press. And like the best among us, he’s still wearing a mask.

Rating: PG-13 for strong violent and disturbing content, drug content, strong language, and some suggestive material

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright, Colin Farrell, John Turturro, Andy Serkis, Paul Dano, Alex Ferns and Peter Sarsgaard.

Credits: Directed by Matt Reeves, scripted by Matt Reeves and Peter Craig, based on the Bob Kane comic book. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:55

BOX OFFICE: “Batman” already a big hit.

Ladies and gentlemen, your American tax dollars at work! And you were afraid every GOP tax cut for the rich was just wasted.

Frank DePew, a 60something motorsports enthusiast who made his money off the heavily-subsidized solar farm (for utilities, not sustainable, tree-friendly home and business rooftops) industry, took his trickle-down cash and bought himself an IMSA racing team, aligning himself with two championship-level drivers — Robin Liddell and Andrew Davis.

DePew would share driving duties in the 10 event endurance race season that includes stops for the 24 Hours of Daytona, 12 Hours of Sebring and races at Road Wisconsin and elsewhere. He purchased Rebel Rock Racing, lock stock and uncarbureted, figuring to buy himself glory in a prestigious series well above the club racing where he’d spent his spare time previously.

Oh, and he’d commission a documentary about his “Rookie Season,” with director Adrian Bonvento getting footage and sound inside the cars, on the (often rainy) track, in the pits and with the crew chief in the viewing box.

“Rookie Season” is the quintessential “vanity project,” with decent enough race footage and banal nothings delivered in voice-over by the drivers, with the Scottish champ Liddell taking care to be diplomatic about how he characterizes the rich poseur who wrecks the car in early races as DePew devotes himself to conquering a steep learning curve.

The makings of a comedy are in those early race scenes, with DePew clumsily crashing, “owning” his blame and spinning it with an “ADHD” self-diagnosis, the excuse that replaced “a little dyslexic” among the rich and famous.

Because we all need to take credit for what we’ve “conquered.” Thanks, Oprah.

Sorry if I’m being too subtle here, but I’ve been to several events in this racing series at Sebring and the VIR over the years. And there’s always a new version of this sort of “gashole” competing, many of them celebrities. Some of them even have the gall to document their bought-and-paid-for glory with a film crew.

Here, even the repetitive “put on the slicks (or swap out to “rain” tires)” material that dominates the racing sequences is more interesting than this lot and the fellow who bought his way into something of dubious merit just to feed his ego.

Rating: Unrated, some profanity

Cast: Robin Liddell, Frank DePew, Andrew Davis

Credits: Directed by Adrian Bonvento. An Adventure Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:15

Zellweger and Judy Greer and Josh Duhamel in a DuFro star in this darkly comic NBC miniseries based on a true crime podcast.

March 8. This looks promising enough to actually make me watch something on (shudder) network broadcast TV.

It’s a stereotype, of course — this idea promoted by decades of plays, movies and TV shows that every gay man is acting out his own “Torch Song Trilogy,” suffering (rarely) in silence or with the grand dramatic gestures of a tragic diva — Judy or Callas or Carmen playing out her final scene, dying for love or want of it.

But Jérémie Meyer can’t help it. He’s an actor, after all. “Narcissistic” comes with the job. And he’s going through things, the first of which is losing the role of a lifetime with a writer-producer unloading all HIS problems on a stricken Jérémie in an amusing but oh-so-deflating “It’s not you, it’s ME” break-up/firing the moment we meet him.

Jérémie, whose dad “just died,” is very slow to figure out that his own life of disappointment, professional and personal struggle that includes love life issues, is “My Best Part.”

Director, co-writer and star Nicolas Maury (“Dear Prudence,” “Paris, je t’aime”) serves up a dry comedy that invites us to watch Jérémie suffer and laugh at him as he haplessly copes with everything confronting him over the course of this lightly-amusing film (titled “Garçon chiffon” in French).

That “break-up” firing scene is just the start of it. We join him as he ducks into his first meeting of AJA, a “Jealousy Anonymous” support group whose members count the days since they first figured out (in French with English subtitles) “the world doesn’t revolve around me.”

A fellow member advises Jérémie to not “open every closet. You don’t know what’s in there.” That is advice Jeremy ignores. He’s given to storming in on his hunky veterinary surgeon lover (Arnaud Valois) and accusing him of treating his intern as a side piece. The couple’s brittle back and forth makes one wonder what Albert could possibly see in this clingy, self-absorbed drama queen. Jérémie even goes so far as to purchase spy camera gear for their apartment to check up on him.

Jérémie unloads his “What’s wrong with me?” insecurities on his agent (Laurent Capelluto), commiserates with his close friend, the volatile actress Sylvie (Laure Calamy), whose heated argument with her husband morphs into an over-the-top rehearsal moment with her giving bad-luck- Jérémie a black eye.

It’s only through a long visit to his mother (Nathalie Baye) that we get a handle on what’s really bothering the actor, whom mom has given assorted cute nicknames (“Napkin”) and who refers to him as “autistic,” when really he’s just another seriously self-absorbed actor/drama queen going through a rough patch.

Maury, sporting a dark metallic-rust bowl cut and a hangdog Will Forte pout, flirts with letting us pity Jérémie — but only flirts. He’s processing grief about his father, his career, his love life, and we’re pretty sure he’s put those in the most selfish order in his mind.

“Sometimes I feel like an apple on compost, waiting to bio-degrade.”

But flashbacks to his bullied childhood, when all he wanted to do was be alone, dress as a gamine and lip-sync to French girl pop, and third act revelations about his father’s death soften the character just enough for us to identify with him.

“My Best Part” is a bit of a stroll as a movie, never hurrying through anything, never forcing a laugh, taking long pauses and wandering off on tangents such as Jérémie’s ineffectual lust for his mother’s young helper (Théo Christine).

My favorite part is when we get a glimpse of what might be his “cure” for thinking “the world revolves around me.” He’s given a dog. Nothing takes you out of your self-concern quicker than caring for a dependent, affectionate pet who turns your “needy” into his “needy” in a flash.

And as Maury probably figured out when he first screened the film, nobody pays any attention to the whiny bowl-cut actor when he’s sharing scenes with the most adorable husky ever.

Rating: unrated, nudity, discussions of suicide. profanity

Cast: Nicolas Maury, Nathalie Bay, Arnaud Valois, Laure Calamy and Théo Christine

Credits: Directed by Nicolas Maury, scripted by Maud Ameline, Sophie Fillières and Nicolas Maury. An Altered Innocence.

Running time: 1:48

Film Movement+ is streaming a retrospective of the deadpan Dutch satirist Alex van Warmerdam beginning in March. So if you were intrigued by any film of his you might have stumbled into in North America — 2013’s “Borgman” was the most famous — here’s a chance to dip into a world of this award winning, film festival favorite.

Film Movement is offering six films surveying his career, and while I’ll get to others, I’m going to come right out and say that maybe the cryptic and drier-than-dry “The Northerners (De noorderlingen) ” shouldn’t be your entre into the mind of this ironist.

Set in a an unfinished/never-will-be-finished Dutch planned community in the early ’60s, it plays up the clash of provincialism with modernity as we grimly grin at lives of not-so-quiet desperation.

They have lovely new flats, a shiny new school and an antiseptic tree farm (planned) forest. But small town nosiness, gossip, sexual frustrations, religious superstition and values have followed them there. Nobody can meet his or her own needs. Nobody is happy.

Jacob (Jack Wouterse) is the randy, pot-bellied butcher, a man whose never-ending “needs” aren’t being met by his Catholic wife Martha (Annet Malherbe). He is jumping her, she is fending him off and looking to her “living” statue of St. Francis for relief.

Their son (Leonard Lucieer) finds escape in dressing up in his vision of what his hero, Congolese founding father and future martyr Patrice Lumumba. A little Dutch boy riding around in leopard-spotted cape, cap and blackface is quite the hoot, right?

Forest ranger Jager (Rudolf Lucieer) is keeping the secret that he’s sterile, which has frustrates his frisky wife Elisabeth (Loes Wouterson) no end. He takes out his frustrations on anyone intruding in “my forest” which he oversees, with a bolt-action rifle, according to “my rules.”

But as we glimpse these lives lived on one unpaved street, with flats and shops and forest and school all in a neat, Dutch row, we figure out that the reason we know all this is the postman Plagge (van Warmerdam himself), a busybody who delivers mail on his own schedule. That’s because he keeps a tea kettle hidden in a pond in the forest. Every day, he stops, lights a fire, boils water and steams open everybody’s letters. The bills? He uses them to light the fires.

That’s pretty much an open secret, but the sniveling smart-ass greets every accusation with mock outrage.

“Imagine, a postman going through everybody’s mail!” (in Dutch, with English subtitles). The very idea!

The most serious shortcoming of “The Northerners” is how little van Warmerdam does with these characters. The situations — Jager chasing and hoping to catch Plagge in the act of lighting his inquisitive little fires, pointing his rifle at everybody, Jakob’s boorish efforts to get around his wife’s sexual reluctance with more willing partners, the women of the town visiting Martha as if she’s the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary — quickly become repetitive.

Jager’s seething rage, Jakob’s simmering fury, Martha’s hunger strike, the postman’s one-step-too-far reckoning, Elisabeth’s unrequited affection, a sexual initiation, the buzzard sitting on the edge of a marital bed, none of it takes us anywhere we want or need to go.

The unending irony and myopia mean the entire film has pretty much the same pitch, beginning to end. No incident or situation raises or lowers that pitch, no emotion arises from tragedy, no realization that everybody might learn everybody else’s secret and new character (an actual African or “escaped Negro” showing up) or crime changes anything.

The odd cute moment is rare enough to seem out of place. Whatever van Warmerdam is winking at, nothing much here passes for entertainment, enlightenment or edification. And “unpleasant” at every turn is hardly a substitute for anything this heartless film seems to lack.

Rating: unrated: violence, sexual situations

Cast: Jack Wouterse, Annet Malherbe, Loes Wouterson, Rudolf Lucieer, Leonard Lucieer and Alex Van Warmerdam.

Credits: Directed by Alex van Warmerdam, scripted by Ale van Warmerdam and Aat Ceelen. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:45

The French film about Charlotte Gainsbourg’s mother, Jane Birkin, comes out March 18.

Oy, Ryan Andrew Hooper and Matt Redd. We’re on to you, lads.

The director and writer of “Tollbooth” have conjured up a modern day Welsh Western in the style of “The Guard,” with the whole enterprise basically an homage to the writer-directors Martin McDonagh and his brother John Michael McDonagh.

It lacks the Catholic subtexts, the operatic violence and the showy McDonagh style. The setting and characters are Welsh and not Irish. But there’s enough spark in the dialogue, novelty in the twists and foreboding in the way the characters eyeball their fate to make the connection clear and the tribute to the masters an affectionate and entertaining one.

If it’s not on a par with the works of the McDonagh Brotherss, it’s still a droll, dark homage that works.

Veteran character actor Michael Smiley (“Rogue One” to “The Nun,” “Free Fire” and “The Lobster”) is the title character. That’s what everybody calls the 60ish loner who takes tolls on a remote, narrow and dangerous Welsh backroad.

He sits and reads (“Stoner”), eats his lunch and deals with so few drivers that the job seems like a make-work project.

Don’t ask him which ferry you should take or what time they run.

“I’m not a timetable.”

And for the love of Pete, don’t you dare rob him. This guy has a past. This guy has friends.

“I’ll expect recompense, if not retribution,” he mutters into the phone. He has minions (Iwan Rheon and Paul Kaye) at his beck and call.

But the anarchic “triplets” (Gwyneth Keyworth) who threatened him and held him up at gunpoint, local characters bopping about in a 1961 Morris Minor convertible with a novelty horn that plays “Dixie,” pay that no heed. Everybody knows who they are and they have no notion of “consequences.”

And they’re not the only ones who have brought the threat of violence to this man “in the middle of nowhere, but really in the middle of everything.”

“Tollbooth” is framed in “a long story” told to the local constable (Annes Elwy of the Welsh thriller “The Feast”) in search of answers from the bloke even she only knows as “Tollbooth,” a fellow with a lot of explaining to do.

The plot is a “You understand who you’re dealing with” tale of actions, recriminations and an ancient grudge of the “I done a terrible thing a long time ago” school. It’s told out of order, with some scenes repeated as we see a convertible driving toff (Gary Beadle) show up, watch a farmer extorted and start to understand the “operation” being run through this remote tollbooth.

We pick up on the dynamics of a whole village — or at least its pub — “protecting” Tollbooth’s real identity, and start to learn about secrets and meet the Elvis impersonator/gang-leader Dixie (Evelyn Mok), a tough broad with a psychopathic henchman (Darren Evans) whose mumble is so pronounced only she understands him.

And yes, every single character and wrinkle laid out above could have come from this McDonagh (“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”) or that one (“Calvary”).

I’m not pointing that out to jab the filmmakers. After all, if you’re going to imitate others, imitate the best, right? And the bottom line is, “Tollbooth” works, even if it plays as more of a surface skim of guilt, grudges, revenge and remorse.

Smiley plays Tollbooth with an understated patience and calm, even when others seem to have the drop on him. Elwy gives us a bead on young but not exactly “green” member of Heddlu, not as pissed as she should be about being out of the loop about Tollbooth, but with other issues on her mind.

Rheon (“Game of Thrones”) does what he can with a character that’s like a Welsh survey of every punk Colin Farrell played back in the day.

And watch for a tasty turn by ex-Bond and Indiana Jones villain Julian Glover in the finale.

It’s not a dazzling debut feature. But Hooper and Redd ensure that it’s a tidy, tough and entertaining one, and that any reminders of the films its borrowing from just add to the fun.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Michael Smiley, Annes Elwy, Iwan Rheon, Evelyn Mok, Gary Beadle, Gwyneth Keyworth and Julian Glover.

Credits: Directed by Ryan Andrew Hooper, scripted by Matt Redd. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:23

It’s a crying shame Netflix doesn’t have the 2014 Korean thriller “A Hard Day” loaded up and ready for a compare-and-contrast take on “Restless,” the new French film based on it.

From the looks of “Restless,” that’s entirely by design. This comically-absurd but never quite comical tale of a corrupt cop covering his tracks in an investigation that should point straight at him could only suffer in that comparison.

The dirty cop (Franck Gastambide) has hit somebody with his car, stuffed the body in the trunk and used his jacket to cover the corpse. Where’s his ID when he runs into a National Guard roadblock? In the jacket. How’s he talk his way out of this “Step out of the car. We’re going to need to look in the trunk” (dubbed, or in French with English subtitles) trap?

I’d say “Don’t ask,” but this early first act stumble sets the tone. Lt. Blin starts a brawl and gets maced. And they still don’t look in the trunk of the BMW with the busted headlight and windshield, still don’t see the ID of the cop who just assaulted them.

The whole damned movie is like this.

Det. Blin is getting warnings from his precinct (in the provinces) that Internal Affairs is raiding the station. His mother’s dead in the hospital. His little girl is in the care of his sister. And now he’s just run over some dude in the middle of nowhere.

Why not stuff the body into his mother’s coffin? All that’ll take is disabling hospital CCTV cameras, fishing his mother’s corpse out of the morgue via ventilation shafts with the help of a crawling, occasionally-stopping to “shoot,” mechanical soldier toy, opening a coffin, resealing it with the accident victim in it and forgetting to search the dead dude for his phone.

If you thought the toy making a racket in an air duct was noisy, wait’ll you hear the dead guy’s ring tone from inside a coffin.

“Restless,” titled “Sans répit”in French, is one ridonculous situation like that after another. There was a “witness” to the accident who keeps calling. A much older cop (Simon Abkarian) storms into the police station and beats the hell out of muscular young-buck Blin, in front of witnesses. And there are zero consequences.

Gastambide is right on the cusp of adequate in playing a corrupt cop on the verge of panicking. Abkarian is menacing enough to suggest he can still hold his own in a fight. But the performances are generally on a par with the screenplay — perfunctory.

No stand-off, trap or showdown is so simple that it can’t be rendered idiotically over-complicated and insanely illogical by the screenwriters.

Director and co-writer Régis Blondeau turned in a version of “A Hard Day” that’s 15 minutes shorter than the Korean original, by Seong-hun Kim. Blondeau must have left all the parts that helped it make sense.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Franck Gastambide, Simon Abkarian, Michaël Abiteboul and Tracy Gotoas

Credits: Directed by Régis Blondeau, scripted by Régis Blondeau and Julien Colombani. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

The director of “Crank” did this?

Reduced to working with the “canceled” Mel (not really), with Mel reduced to second billing, after Cole Hauser?

Some of Mel’s “fallen star in the movie wilderness” genre pictures haven’t been bad. This. Looks. Dreadful.