Movie Nation

We don’t need to hear the voice of William Shatner as narrator to know where the screenwriters of “To the Last Death” got their plot.

It’s an animated “Saw” movie built on the bones of “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” an episode of “Star Trek” TOS.

The animation is lurid and limited — sort of a digital bunraku (jerky motion character action in front of static backdrops — and the action is bloody in the extreme in this story of a busty animatrix voiced by Dani Lennon who becomes a pawn in a “game” some aliens are running.

It’s kind of cool, for a movie whose script is more pithy punchline-oriented than clever. And truthfully, there was no reason this story was animated in the first place, but that’s the main reason anybody would think it’s “cool.” Think of “Death” as an “Adult Swim” in a pool of gore and you’re on the right track.

Miriam (Lennon) directs a non-profit acronymed “PANAC” — Peace and Nonviolence Action Committee. You have to wonder if that isn’t because her daddy Cyrus DeKalb (Ray Wise) is a billionaire time arms manufacturer and onetime candidate for vice president.

But Miriam and her siblings rebelled against the old man and torpedoed his candidacy. No hard feelings though, right? Daddy’s invited Miriam, Ethan (Damien C. Haas), Kelsey (Florence Hartigan) and Collin (Benjamin Siemon) to his weapons-bedecked office building for a “reunion.”

Daddy’s a real piece of work, Mr. “Avarice is strength” and full of withering, profane criticism for each and every one of his offspring. Ethan? He was “far busier doing your eight grade math teacher than doing eighth grade math.” And so one.

Daddy doesn’t want hugs over his newly-announced medical condition. He wants “payback.” He has henchmen standing by to help him mete out punishment. “Death!”

Only Miriam escapes. But on her hospital bed, as she tries to recall the events of the night before for a suspicious cop, an alien entity (Morena Baccarin) materializes and offers her “a rematch.” She “warp back” 24 hours, go back into the “reunion” with new information and new purpose and foil her father and save her siblings.

The “gamemaster’s” rules? “You must and will provide amusement” as she fights her way through this predicament. Those entities gambling on the game “can stop” and “demand a replay” if things aren’t entertaining enough.

Thus Miriam must relive, “Edge of Tomorrow” style, the slaughter of the night before — figure out how to best this henchman or warn and rescue that sibling.

And here’s where this “Didn’t need to be animated” spatter film goes wrong. The gambits, “gags” in Old Hollywood terminology that allow her to get the drop on this bad guy or face imminent butchery from that one, are lame.

There’s suspense as hulking thug is about to dispatch this way or that. Yes, a chainsaw is involved at one point. But the resolutions to those predicaments fizzle and disappoint. Every. Damned. Time.

Animation should let the writers’ “reason/fight her way out of this” imaginations run wild. It does nothing of the sort. The “Do Over” moments dictated by the gamblers are just as limp.

So as “cool” as it is to have Wise doing another diabolical villain, as pointless as Shatner’s occasional plummy voice over about “The vast void between stars” is, as buxom as the assorted assertive women in this horror comic book of a movie might be, “To Your Last Death” is a gory gimmick without a decent movie behind it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic bloody violence and animated nudity, profanity

Cast: The voices of Dani Lennon, Morena Baccarin, Ray Wise and William Shatner.

Credits: Directed by Jason Axinn, script by Jim Cirile, Tanya C. Klein. A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:31

SOMEbody had the very clever idea of re-imagining the compelling drama about parents worried their kid is a psychopath, “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” as a horror film.

So good on you, writer-director Tucia Lyman.

The kid’s name is “Jacob,” not Kevin. The film is still from the mother’s point of view, but this time, it’s told in “found footage” — a mom (Melinda Page Hamilton) who is “spying on” her son documents his tirades, cruelty and increasingly disturbing and dangerous anti-social behavior.

We worry for her safety as she narrates the video files she creates from assorted “spy” cameras. And maybe we wonder, just a bit, if she isn’t part of the problem.

This debut feature film from a veteran reality TV “showrunner” is called “M.O.M. Mothers of Monsters.” So at least in that sense, BAD on you Tucia Lyman for that flippant, stupid, if not quite misleading title.

Abbey (Hamilton) has been hanging on to video footage of Jeremy since he was small. We see her grilling him about something he killed — an “accident,” or “Did you mean to kill it?” Another clip has the child smirking as we hear a younger kid bawling off camera.

Now, Jacob (Bailey Edwards) is 16, still acting out, throwing tantrums. And he’s big enough to threaten his mother.

“You want to monster out,” she complains, recording his rage. Go right ahead. “I’m keeping track. I’m RECORDING it!”

She shows us, when he’s not around, exhibit A — Jacob’s gun magazines and the pellet rifle he rigged with a “bump stock.”

Abbey has the time to stalk Jacob to school, get hints of “Fake Jacob,” a socialized front he puts on to his “friends” and teachers. But he can’t maintain the facade forever. She’s sure of that.

She follows him to a local business.

“It’s not like he can GET a gun, right?” She’s putting more trust in a gun shop owner than most reasonable people would.

Hamilton makes Abbey paranoid enough to flip out herself when a shrink she Skypes (Ed Asner) doesn’t buy her version of events and her sense of her psychic state. But we’ve seen too much to have much doubt.

“Pathological liar,” she says. “N.P.D. — narcissistic personality disorder,” chronic conspiracy thoughts.” “Signs” she says.

Then we see the first swastika.

This boy is a menace and will do bad things if he gets off his meds and doesn’t merit more than an attempted “diversion” from authorities.

“M.O.M.” loses some steam in its third act as Lyman struggles to cook up an ending that comes anywhere near the suspense she’s been building. Edwards fights a not-quite-losing battle with going “over-the-top” crazy as Jacob.

And ideally, there’d be more doubt about Abbey’s sanity than what the script generates.

But Lyman, knowing her way around cutting home movies, cell phone video and closed circuit “surveillance” footage into a narrative, makes a debut thriller feature well worth checking out once you get past the title.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast:  Melinda Page Hamilton, Bailey Edwards and Ed Asner

Credits: Written and directed by Tucia Lyman. An Indie Rights release.

Running time: 1:35

With studios rushing to pull everything they have a prayer of making a buck off of from their release slate, it’s the perfect time to catch up on movies that remain in theaters because…they have nothing else to show and lure filmgoers with until that day when the cinemas themselves are closed.

I’ve never paused more than a few minutes whenever I’ve channel surfed by “Impractical Jokers,” the long-running truTV series about four Staten Island pals who play pranks on each other in front of unsuspecting members of the public.

A little too “Jersey Shore” for my taste. And I’ve an irrational dislike of people who laugh too hard at their own jokes — this or that “morning zoo” on the radio, Jimmy Fallon, and dese guys.

So yeah, expectations were low, going in. And while I wouldn’t necessarily suggest you pay first-run prices to see “Impractical Jokers: The Movie” — it’s more Netflixable — the guys did tickle me, against my will, a few times.

The set-up begins in 1994, when the guys — in wigs meant to convey how they looked in high school — crash a Paula Abdul concert using the old “Yellow Jackey with ‘Security’ written on the back” prank. They make pigs of themselves in the green room, and a mockery of the concert.

First laugh in the movie? The real Paula Abdul CLOTHESLINING one of the lads.

Cut to years later, they’re TV famous, and they run into Paula A again — who only knows them from their TV antics. Yeah, it’s in a Red Lobster, so it TOTALLY could happen. She invites them to a party in Miami and they resolve to make good on this debacle from their past (she doesn’t know they were concert-killers) by road-tripping in the car they cruised in, back in the day, the Ford “Crown Vic” that Q (Brian Quinn) has mothballed in his folks’ garage.

Joe Gatto, James “Murr” Murray and Sal Volcano are down. But Paula’s only left them three passes for the party. The guys will compete in pranks all the way from Staten Island to Miami. Loser loses out.

Their MO — they wear earpieces and “force” the “joker” sent out to pretend to need car trouble, give a really bad eulogy or convince fellow passengers on a tour boat to NOT “rescue” a stranded serviceman in a dinghy to say every obnoxious, embarrassing thing that pops into their heads as they stand, backstage as it were — stage-managing the “joke” and howling their heads off with laughter as they do.

It’s hit-or-miss by design, and sometimes the misses — the car trouble stunt devolves into a game of hide and seek with a helpful motorist — can be funny, too.

The script here is pure junk, running gags about balding Murr’s secret hotel “party” life and the like. But there’s geographic whimsy in putting these four on the road, the only Yankees dumb enough to stop at “South of the Border” where they saddle the “always late” Q with alternative transportation by taking off with the car. He has to ride a horse down the roadside to SOBorder dressed as a Roman — “SAD-iator,” one wag calls him.

The DC stop isn’t much (a Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool “eulogy” gag that never works), but just south of there — either at Luray or Dixie Caverns in Virginia (just guessing here) — they dress up Joe as a Mole Man who got separated from his “tour” and stumbles into a new bunch of underground tourists.

“I’ve been down here since 1987,” he whines. “Don’t have a COW, man.”

The guys play up their “mook” image when they hit at Atlanta strip club, and they do no pranks in Florida, damn them anyway.

But here’s the gem mixed in with all that cubic zirconia. They take turns coaching (via that earpiece) each other through the most DISASTROUS “job interviews” with assorted members of the security and facilities staff of the Atlanta Hawks hoops team.

“Immediately launch into ‘Why the Earth is flat’ instructions, or “You answer the questions WE ask you, NOT the ones from the job interviewer.”

This is one stunt that resonates. We. Have. All. Been. There. Their improvisations are convincingly daft. And their assorted humiliations, the “roll with it” confusion or dismay of those interviewing them, is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen them do.

Granted, again, I’m not an expert on these “Jokers.” But this one bit makes “Impractical Jokers” worth checking out in movie form — in a “dollar” theater, or on Netflix anyway.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for suggestive content, language, some drug references and brief nudity

Cast: Brian Quinn, Joe Gatto, James Murray, Sal Volcano, Paula Abdul — and watch for a Will Ferrell photo bomb.

Credits: Directed by Chris Henchy, script by Chris Henchy, Brian Quinn, Joe Gatto, James Murray, Sal Volcano.  A Forry or Die, truTV/Warner Media release.

Running time: 1:32

Let’s not make too much of this, but the comic book adaptation “Bloodshot” is basically a new and improved “Universal Soldier” or “Six Million Dollar Man” variation, with a better cast, fresh effects and “upgrades.”

But throw in the fact that Sony gave away the whole damn movie in the trailers, and one is hard-pressed to come up with a reason to brave the “Outbreak” we’re living through to go see it.

Well, people who can’t wait another year for the now-postponed next “Fast/Furious” movie to get their Vin Diesel fix have their reasons. You know who you are.

Visual effects specialist turned director Dave Wilson and Diesel & Co. deliver a competently heartless action picture, a superhero movie without the tights, “Transformers” with Battle Bot Vin in the lead role.

Diesel plays a top flight commando who always gets his man, always says the hostage and always, as he tells his wife (Talulah Riley), “comes home.”

But there’s this villain (Toby Kebbell) who gets the drop on our man Ray when he and the Mrs. are on holiday on the Amalfi Coast (Italy). The bad guy tortures our hero in a meat locker, after vamping/dancing in to the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” Then he kills the wife. Ray, too.

Only Ray wakes up under the care of a one-armed scientist (Guy Pearce) with a wicked twinkle in his eye. Ray’s been claimed from the Army morgue. “It was either us…or Arlington!”

Ray’s been brought back, new and augmented — super strong, nanotech in his bloodstream fixing every injury in a flash. And there’s just enough memory for Ray to want his revenge, which his RST (Rising Spirit Technology) minder cannot prevent.

But something about the casting of Pearce summons up memories of everything the trailers to “Bloodshot” give away. This Dr. Harting (Pearce) isn’t who he seems. Ray isn’t the righteous avenger he might be, something comrades who have gone through this program (Eiza González , Sam Heughan, Alex Hernandez) hint at. We know this long before Harting’s pitiless nature comes out in a single line.

“He’s a dead soldier. America makes new ones every day.”

Like all comic book movies, there’s a whiff of “Hey, we could get a FRANCHISE out of this” here. But just a whiff. The script spends a lot of time explaining the tech, showing off some dazzling effects. It’s not just the epic fights, shootouts and blood corpuscle–sized robots that require Hollywood’s finest’s attention. We have “Matrix/Inception” styled modeling and “simulations” to illustrate.

One of those, breaking down one of the most scenic places on Earth into its component shapes, colors and textures like a computerized Leonardo DaVinci, is singularly impressive and should be taught in special effects schools.

Diesel doesn’t sleepwalk through movies like this, but neither the script nor the performance give us a sense of a compelling interior life, pathos or humanity. That’s kind of built-into the character, and it hamstrings the movie.

Pearce is similarly colorless. The movie is self-aware enough to know that the dancing, torturing Kebbell scene is over-the-top and “Hollywood.” But hell, the movie NEEDS a little of that — a lot more of it, to be honest. That’s why Brit actor Lamorne Morris, as a wiseass techie, steals the movie when he shows up in the third act.

Eiza González of “Hobbs & Shaw” and “Baby Driver” is a stunning beauty who handles what action choreography they entrust to her. She knows how to suck in her cheeks as she’s about to set off grenades in the computer room like an action bombshell badass. Very Olivia Wilde.

But “Bloodshot” is a movie filled with “Yeah, and?” moments, scenes and plot points. Covering ground this familiar in an origin story puts extra pressure on character, relationships and empathetic acting. All are somewhat less than they need to be to make this one worth the price of admission.

Netflix, maybe?

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence, some suggestive material and language

Cast: Vin Diesel, Guy Pearce,Eiza González, Talulah Riley and Toby Kebbell.

Credits: Directed by Dave Wilson, script by Jeff Wadlow and Eric Heisserer, based on the comic book. A Sony release.

Running time: 1:49

You don’t have to be drunk to appreciate the no-budget charms of “Jurassic Thunder.”

Strike that. Being drunk is pretty much a prerequisite for watching this models and DIY effects student film, streaming now.

Not a “student film?” My bad, Milko Davis and Thomas Martwick. I’ve seen a LOT of student films. Just assumed you co-directors were matriculating. Somewhere. Maybe Texas.

Anyway, “Jurassic T” — not to be confused with anything else titled “Jurassis” (characters make lame jokes about that) is based on “the Holy Grail of comic books,” or so we’re told in the almost-not-inept scene that frames the movie. That introduction is set in a comic book/cosplay gear shop, where the owner opens his “mint” copy of this comic book for a “gather round, nerds, and lemme tellya a story” opening.

This was the comic that “has it all — weaponized dinos, warlords, zombies, commandos, nukes.” Animated interstitials take us into this “world,” where African warlords are battled by a US/Russia coalition at the direction of a Donald Trump (Heath C. Heine) hologram.

He’s in “my sixteenth year in office” and he’s still insisting his people defer to the Russians.

Rather than “nuke” southern Africa, Trumpogram lets the Russians talk him into deploying “biologics” — T-Rex’s equipped with cameras and Gatling guns. But the “cosmic hair gel” serum that allows dinosaurs to romp among us is viral, and it makes zombies.

Whoopsie! Another Trumpodemic is on the loose!

The effects are gloriously cheesy — model planes and T-Rex containment crates blend with stock footage of C-130 transport planes, superimposed parachute jumps and jungle “chases” that look like “Saturday Night Live” footage of soldiers fleeing on a treadmill while mismatched footage flashes behind them.

Firefights are many, with the gun muzzle flashes added later, and on the cheap. Blood spatters are similarly drawn in after the fact.

The characters include a Col. Sanders (Jon Cotton) — Trump: “How did a guy who sells fried chicken end up running the show?”

Heine’s Trump is an impersonation of Alec Baldwin’s impersonation of Donald Trump.

And the dialogue is of the “Smooth move, Ex-Lax” caliber — juvenile and dated and almost never close to funny.

It’s terrible on every level, pretty much from comic book store to Trump-and-cast dance video finale.

But if you’ve had a few, this could be fun. Make up your own drinking games for “Jurassic Thunder” because I’m above that.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, dino poop

Cast: Heath C. Heine, Rick Haak, Jon Cotton, Aga Kistler, Leon Mayfield

Credits: Directed by Milko Davis and Thomas Martwick, script by Milko Davis. A High Octane release.

Running time: 1:24

There’s an opinion, common in certain film fan communities on the Internet, that carries the belief that kids’ movies are too treacly, inoffensive and mild-mannered for the little darlings’ own good.

I don’t necessarily think they’re wrong. Children are exposed to a lot of words, action tropes and screen violence — via every screen in their lives — before they hit second grade. Maybe they’re more sophisticated consumers of what we used to call “adult content” than we give them credit for.

For those folks, who figure “Goonies” and kids-mixed-up-in-foul-mouthed mayhem is a touchstone, we give you “My Spy.” It’s about a child who stumbles into a C.I.A. stakeout, blackmails an embarrassed agent into befriending her and courting her mom, and is exposed to the odd shootout, killing and curse word in the process.

I can’t say it’s very good, because it isn’t. But the magnificent walking, talking, pratfall-taking sight gag that is Dave Bautista? Well cast.

Bautista is an ex-Army Ranger turned C.I.A. spy who blows his big undercover plutonium purchase in Putin-land by slinging the worst “Russian arms dealer” accent in the history of the Cold War.
“Take an ACTING class, for God’s sake!” a villain hisses, in an equally bad accent.

That’s when man-mountain J.J. does what he knows how to do — “Kick ass.”

Those bothered by such things can start the movie’s body count here. Maybe a dozen villains bite the dust. No blood, but explosions can separate one’s head from one’s body.

J.J.’s boss (Dr. Ken Jeong, not given a single funny thing to do.) isn’t happy with this outcome. He sentences J.J. to surveillance duty in Chicago, paired up with tech nerd Bobbie (Kristen Schaal). They’re watching the widow (Parisa Fitz-Henley) of a guy whose brother (Greg Bryk) is mixed up in this bomb building/buying/selling scheme.

Maybe the bad guy will turn up. Or maybe the widow’s curly-haired 9-year-old will figure out their apartment’s bugged and who did the bugging. And maybe Sophie, whose nurse-mom can’t take her to that school ice-skating party, will keep her yap shut and her video of their stakeout apartment off “the cloud” is Agent Shrek will provide “adult supervision.

And maybe the kid will push her luck, blackmailing J.J. into all sorts of kiddie activities.

Here’s what made me laugh — every time the Incredible Hulk-ista considers the ruthless, risk-free option for dealing with this three and a half foot tall threat.

“Kill her,” he suggests to google-eyed Bobbie. “Make it look like an accident. The stairs, maybe?”

Other versions of this, told to the kid’s face, end with “and they never find the body.”

J.J.’s other sure-fire laugh elements are his size — no suit fits him — and the violent line of work that’s made him tactless and unfiltered in”war stories” dinner conversation.

“By that time we were drinking our own urine…”

The kid is cute and has a light touch, by insufferable child actor standards.

The gay neighbors, played by Devere Rogers and Noah Dalton Danby? Kids are never too young to learn gay stereotypes.

“Oh my Lord & Taylor!”

But scenes where J.J. gives her spy training and lessons in how to walk slowly away from an explosion like all the cool spies do “in the movies” did nothing for me. Giving all of those away in the TV commercials and trailers doesn’t help.

So, not much here for adults. And if you’re the least bit squeamish about how old your child should be before she or he is ready for an action comedy with a body count, well you’ve been warned.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for action/violence and language.

Cast: Dave Bautista, Chloe Coleman, Parisa Fitz-Henley, Kristen Schaal, Greg Byrk and Ken Jeong

Credits: Directed by Peter Segal, script by Erich Hoeber, Jon Hoeber. An STX release.

Running time: 1:39

There’s something inherently tone-deaf in a gory satire cooked up by Hollywood “elites” mocking liberal “elites” hunting “deplorables” for sport.

Maybe the film schooled screenwriters of “The Hunt” have a firm grasp of liberal tropes — the ones Fox News mocks morning, noon and night. There’s the PC speech.

“Don’t joke about AIDS!”

“Don’t joke about ‘CHOICE!'”

There’s the mincing “foodie” identifiers, group chatting about the “Rat-f—-r-in-chief” and “education-impaired rednecks,” looking down their “liberal Deep State elite” sculpted noses at everybody who ever wore a name tag to work.

Because they’re all about fashion.

“Is that a KIMONO? APPROPRIATION, Richard!”

So sure, “nailed it.” But “THOSE people” walk into a minefield and lose all their nerve when trying to depict those “salt of the Earth” plumbers, hairdressers, waitresses and “gun-clutching homophobes” who provide the heroes — or heroine — of their botched flipping of the “deplorable/elites” script.

The group of super-rich, super-PC “hunters” whose ranks include Amy Madigan, Jennifer Garner, Steve Coulter and Glenn Howerton are sketched in. The assorted bubbas, a veteran, a “big game hunter” and others they’re hunting aren’t so much as outlined.

The joke here is that every paranoid “Q-Anon” Alex Jones/Hannity conspiracy trotted out by the Loony Right smacks of truth when eleven victims are drugged, tossed on a plane and taken off to “The Manor” for a sport-hunt where they are “The Most Dangerous Game.”

“Manorgate” they and their kind have been calling it (“Google it !”) the replacement for “Pizzagate” and assorted other “what’s REALLY going on” schemes that Internet age gullibles buy into.

That’s why podcasting gun-nut Gary (Ethan Suplee) and “Airborne” vet Don (Wayne Duvall) blurt out “I know EXACTLY what’s going on” more than once when they throw in with our heroine “with very particular skills.” That would be Crystal, played by Betty Gilpin of TV’s “GLOW” and “A Dog’s Journey” and “Isn’t It Romantic?”

Crystal’s the one who wakes up, lock-gagged and in the woods but knowing how to make a compass out of her name-tag pin, a little friction and a leaf floating in a pond. (Shown in “The Edge,” and no — it doesn’t work, film school boys).

Most of this “deplorable” group is gruesomely shot, pierced or blown-up before they can get their bearings and figure out they’re being hunted. A couple of famous (ish) faces are in those ranks.

But Crystal is the one defies the odds, and Gilpin has a lot of fun deadpanning this smartest-prey-in-the-woods Amazon. She listens to the “I KNOW what’s happening” trigger-happy dunces like she’s been doing it her whole life. Growing up in Mississippi, that seems like a fair bet.

Don in particular is blown away by her ruthlessness, her mad killing skills and her disinterest in “theories” about what they’re in the middle of. After all, she got the drop of folks with all the weapons and the element of surprise, hunters who’d been told “Just have a little fun with her.”

“Why didn’t they just KILL you?”

“Don’t care.”

Let the others giggle about “blowing the lid off” this “conspiracy” by being “on Hannity, like them two Jew boys who got Nixon!”

Crystal is into figuring out where they are, how to arm herself and using those arms to get out. But none of the escaping “victims” had reckoned on these soft Lindsey Graham-voiced sissies having such a blood lust.

“I thought they were all vegan?”

Director Craig Zobel (“Compliance,” TV’s “One Dollar”) has things skipping past us for about 45 minutes when the script pauses for a long, stupid faux Southern anecdote. The film stops cold while we consider Gilpin’s feeble Mississippi accent, the urgency that just left their “escape” attempt and why the movie only uses “Jew boys” that once, when — thanks to the writers and the director — more “leaning into” that blind spot was in order.

Why have the “liberal elites” mince around “those people” using “the N-word.” Have a hypocrite USE it, right after “Ooo, Ava DuVernay liked my tweet!”

Mocking people who believe in “Crisis actors” is fine. Why pussyfoot around Islamophobia and xenophobia?

Why not say what conservative dog whistlers mean when they say “Hollywood elites” and “liberal elites?” #Hollywood2Jewish.

A whole “those people” debate about African Americans, based on current “NPR” usage is punctuated with a lame, “And WHO’S on NPR?” rejoinder. “WHITE people.”

“Jews” would’ve been funnier and more accurate. In Bubbaland, we’ve been known to call NPR “B’Nai Brith Broadcasting,” where you shouldn’t hold your “Brith” waiting for a non Jewish host or hostess to interview assorted experts named Cohen, Levy or Stein.

Go ahead, Blumhouse Boys — touch the third rail of Hollywood “identity politics.”

But that would’ve given this limp “satire” bite and guts, something it lacks, start to finish. The contempt is supposed to cut both ways/SEVERAL ways. And it never does. Toothless.

Sorry, did I offend? That’s kind of the point of satire. This movie has an echo chamber feel and tone and offends no one.

Pulling this gruesomely violent picture from release after one of many NRA-sponsored mass shootings just gave it a notoriety it doesn’t warrant.

And tipping its plot just gave Fox News and its ilk something to be outraged about so that they don’t have to talk about open corruption, impeachment or the “fake” pandemic.

Gilpin revels in playing tough, smart, cool and pitiless. She doesn’t register pain, fear or worry, but that’s quibbling. And knowing that “Million Dollar Baby” Oscar winner Hilary Swank is in it just sets up a “girl fight” for the ages.

Aside from that, “The Hunt” is like sitting in a deer blind (Look it up, Hollywoodies) on the wrong corner of the pasture. Pointless.

MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, and language throughout.

Cast: Betty Gilpin, Hilary Swank, Ike Barinholtz, Ethan Suplee, Emma Roberts, Amy Madigan

Credits: Directed by Craig Zobel, script by Nick Cuse, Damon Lindelof. A Blumhouse/Universal release.

Running time: 1:29

Juno Temple delivers a dazzling turn as an aspiring singer/songwriter struggling to protect and look out for the schizophrenic producer who “discovered” her in “Lost Transmissions.”

As Hannah, she turns manic with fear over what could become of Theo (Simon Pegg), a Brit trapped in his head and lost in America’s byzantine health care system and bizarre mental health Catch-22s. Hannah’s mania spins out of her intimate knowledge of Theo’s predicament. She’s among the medicated mentally ill herself. She understands what he’s going through and what he’s up against.

And like Theo, she is off her meds.

Katharine O’Brien’s “inspired by a true story” debut feature begins with a musical connection that cements a friendship and partnership, and then sets up its fundamental dilemma with just a line, delivered by one of Theo’s circle of friends.

“Don’t let him take you down the rabbit hole with him, Hannah.”

Theo is the life of parties within that circle. A successful record producer who used to belong to a band himself, he lures shy Hannah into a duet with him at the piano. He flirts with talk of initiating her into “a secret society.” He tempts the cubicle-drone Hannah with a trip to his recording studio, filled with instruments, some of which used to belong to legendary producer Phil Spector and Chaka Khan.

In a flash, he’s turned a song or two of hers, “written when I was a kid,” into dreamy synth-pop. In another flash, she’s set up to write tunes for a bleached dance pop bombshell (Alexandra Daddario) based on just that demo.

And then she makes the mistake of giving Theo a lift. He’s antic, and absorbed with the station between stations on her radio. “If you listen really carefully, you can hear the transmissions!”

He’s lost his car — literally misplaced it. He’s twitchy, jumpy and “off.”
“Are you ON something?” No. He’s “OFF” something.

Unlike Hannah, who “keeps everything level” with meds, Theo fears it muffles his brilliance and mutes his gifts.

He shouts “Listen, listen LISTEN” to her over the radio. A call to his friends earns a “Oh God, not AGAIN.” And in spite of all that, Hannah takes responsibility for her mentor and is even tempted to try life without medication as a jolt for her “inspiration.”

O’Brien gives Pegg scenes to show Theo’s laser focus at the mixing board as he works his mixing magic with a band. Theo is stone-faced and in-the-zone. But we can feel what’s coming. We’ve seen the hair-trigger temper, heard the unfiltered “truth” he can blurt out, giving away the crazy.

Temple, a screen veteran (“Atonement,” “Black Mass,” “Wonder Wheel”) who too-rarely lands a lead, is heartbreaking when Hannah is frantically trying to keep Theo out of harm’s way — involuntarily institutionalized for “observation,” confronting police, acting-out on a drive to the mental hospital.

She’s funny when Hannah drops her meds and starts acting out — Theo style — in her “sellout” scenes with Daddario, who is spot on as the gorgeous, nail-biting egomaniac who needs Hannah’s talent to pretend she has some of her own.

Pegg is the very picture of schizophrenia — funny and charming, here and there, lucid when he can get it together to lie to a doctor, bug-eyed and furious when Theo’s independence is threatened and his view that “time” is being controlled…by somebody — isn’t taken seriously.

O’Brien even gives us a homeless “prophet” tirade to show how common this temporal mania is among the mentally ill. Theo wears watches all over his arms and ankles.

O’Brien and her players take a common creative community belief — that “maybe the insanity makes (unusual) neuro-connections in his brain” that renders the brilliantly unbalanced brilliant — and have made a superficial but grimly realistic and thoroughly engrossing movie gloss of that theory.

And Temple has reminded us that she’s better than all those bit parts as tarts, “broads” and the like, a leading lady of formidable empathy and range. Hell, she even sings.

MPAA rating: unrated, drug abuse, profanity, violence.

Cast: Juno Temple, Simon Pegg, Alexandra Daddario

Credits: Written and directed by Katharine O’Brien. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:45

The image is stark and iconic — a lone house, fenced, construction site devastation all around it — a single man resisting the march of  “progress.”

But there’s no vast supply of balloons to lift Stacey Ryan’s trailer “Up” and away from this Louisiana industrial Hell. And his hold-out status, surrounded by 14 petrochemical plants in one of the most polluted places in America has us fearing for his health and his life more than the tiny, ruined town of Mossville, which he represents.

“Mossville: When Great Trees Fall” is an infuriating film that captures “environmental racism” at its most obvious, a film shot at a little known but infamous ground zero example in the American South.

Stacey Ryan, a mechanic and lifelong resident of Mossville, is our tour guide and main historian for a town “founded by free slaves” after the Civil War devastated — you could say “targeted” — by a power structure and industries who decide that “not in my backyard” doesn’t apply to working class places populated by mostly powerless Black people.

The few hold outs  there, when we meet them, are religious people who remember a “safe” place village, founded by seven families, covered in fruit trees.

They thrived by not being noticed, not living on land the powers that be coveted. But they were invisible, unable to stop the vast processing concerns that Louisiana allowed to buy their way in and make the place unlivable for those who remained.

Ryan shows filmmaker Alexander Glustrom old TV interview footage of his parents, his mother protesting that “The color of my skin doesn’t make a dog — a guinea pig!” But that’s how firms like Axiall and those that preceded and followed it treated them.

Fires and explosions, “shelter in place” accidents, leaks into the water supply, dioxin in the blood. Mossville residents started dying of cancer.

Here’s footage of then-Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal singing the praises of a South African biochemical and energy concern, SASOL, moving in — thanks to state incentives.

Glustrom then takes us to Secundo, the company’s Apartheid era plant built next to Zamdela Township, “the biggest source of carbon dioxide on the planet.” South African activists speak of companies like SASOL treating poor people as “disposable others,” the ones governments and companies decide “can live in the pollution.”

Because nobody with money or influence would stand for it.

An environmental lawyer laments the uphill battle the few survivors in Mossville are fighting, and the film’s third act lets us see how all this is winding up. Big Petrochemical’s predations and pollution won’t stop at Mossville. More affluent towns are within the reach of wind and water runoff from there.

No wonder nobody talks about Bobby Jindal any more.

“Mossville: When Great Trees Fall” is earning limited release before airing on PBS later this year.

MPAA Rating: unrated.

Cast: Stacey Ryan, Erica Jackson, Van Jackson

Credits: Directed by Alexander Glustrom. A Fire River Films release.

Running time: 1:15

An inspirational Christian music romance runs into the limitations common to the faith-based genre in “I Still Believe,” a bland tear-jerker that lacks the drama or commitment to wholly come off.

This true story of singer-songwriter Jeremy Camp’s “love of my life” ill-fated romance has warmth and moments of charm. It’s more “I Can Only Imagine” than “God’s Not Dead,” a concerted effort at presenting a positive message without anger or political victimhood. All that’s missing are the basics of good drama — conflict — and commitment and chemistry from its stars.

K.J. Apa from TV’s “Riverdale” plays young Camp, an Indiana lad who is smitten on sight when he spies pretty Melissa (Britt Robertson of TV’s “Girlboss” and “For the People”) at a concert when he arrives at Calvary Chapel Bible College in California.

How we get to that “meet cute” — which isn’t “cute” — sets the tone for the movie. It’s 1999 and Jeremy has to calm his special needs brother (Reuben Dodd) who is distraught at his leaving home. His struggling pastor dad (Gary Sinise) keeps a pizza joint delivery sign on top of the family’s ’80s AMC Eagle station wagon, but the parents (Shania Twain plays his mom) have managed to buy the kid a new guitar before he heads off.

That’s Jeremy’s ambition, “making it.” His “struggle” to achieve that consists of talking his way backstage at a concert The Kry are giving on campus, asking for advice from songwriter Jean-Luc (Nathan Parsons), and becoming a roadie for the night.

That gives him instant entre to a musical sounding board, songwriting feedback, recording studio and…fame.

And it’s in between delivering guitars (“guitar tec:”) to Jean-Luc in mid-show that he spies the prettiest girl on campus, beaming in rapture at the music The Kry perform. As Jean-Luc says, “I write love songs to God.” With maybe a girl in mind as he does, he jokes.

Here’s where the conflict is dodged. Hunky Jean-Luc’s “girl in mind” is Melissa. This being a Bible college and Melissa being chaste, that makes for a slow attempted-wooing. And even though Jeremy doesn’t know that attraction when he flirts, he keeps after Melissa after he learns that news, continuing to take Jean-Luc’s advice and help as he goes after his girl. Cold.

The filmmaking Erwin Brothers (“I Can Only Imagine,” “Moms’ Night Out”) make little of this potential friction. The conflict is snuffed out with nary a spark or raised voice.

Seriously?

There’s no struggle for the hero “make it” either.

That leaves the only spark in the movie the tepid romance between the leads, and the only conflict in the movie the cancer that hits Melissa shortly after their almost-cute “date/NOT a date” dating life debate has been settled.

Kapa does his own singing in “I Still Believe,” a big plus as he covers both Camp’s songs and others from the Christian pop canon, such as a beach campfire rendition of “Find Me in the River.”

His acting is a bit soap-opera-ish — constantly running his fingers through his hair in anguish, flirtation or whatever. He and Robertson have an onscreen attraction that is wholly dictated by the script and never believable. It’s more a “non-repulsion” than attraction.

Robertson’s commitment to the part doesn’t include ever, for one second, looking the least bit sick. A bandana covers the scalp she chose not to shave for the part, and fools no one. Still, she is credible as a true believer, sharing her passion for the cosmos in a planetarium scene – “God is so infinitely vast…and he knows MY NAME!”

The message here is soft-peddled, with only “Hasten the day” — Jean-Luc’s devotional motto, an ethos of “hastening Jesus’ return” — and debates of what Melissa meeting Jeremy and later developing cancer means for “our destiny.”

Jeremy is smooth. He works God into his come-on.

“God wants us to run for it, not away from it!”

The title tune has a potent message — maintaining faith when “proof” it pays off isn’t there — and a dull arrangement. The picture itself runs on past its climax, moist-eyed but never quite wrenching, no matter how long this is dragged out.

As with the Erwins’ “I Can Only Imagine,” there’s something to be said for a faith-based film that is soft-hearted and apolitical. But “I Still Believe” the Erwin Brothers aren’t growing as filmmakers, and won’t until they learn how to generate conflict, which is what it takes to create good drama.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic material

Cast: K. J. Apa, Britt Robertson, Nathan Parsons, Shania Twain and Gary Sinise

Credits: Directed by Andrew Erwin and Jon Erwin, script by Jon Erwin and Jon Gunn. A Lionsgate release.

Running time:1:55