Movie Nation

It’s hard to recall any movie that rings as hollow and false as “This is the Night.” But then, my memory isn’t what it once was.

That’s not to say that this growing up Italian on Staten Island, “Coming of Age as ‘Rocky III’ comes out” tale couldn’t be based on some sort of reality. I attended an opening night showing of “Goodfellas” in Manhattan, so there’s plenty of evidence the paisanos turn out to see some version of themselves on the screen. I’ve seen how worked up they get. Fuggedaboutit.

But this eye-roller of a “comedy” from the fellow who gave us “The Purge” franchise just reeks of contrivance and corniness. If there’s truth to it, writer-director James DeMonaco is too clumsy to let that truth feel true.

It’s closing in on Memorial Day on “The Island” in 1982. But all Anthony Dedea (Lucius Hoyos) and anybody he knows or is related to cares about is that’s right before opening night of “Rocky III,” the “end of the trilogy,” “the last ‘Rocky’ movie evuh!” As if.

His older brother Christian (Jonah Hauer-King) is busting what Italian guys bust on their brothers about it, “Everybody’s goin’ wantin’ to see who DIES.” But Anthony is a true believer.

He and his 16 year-old pals (River Alexander, Chase Vacnin) have a mantra about the revered franchise and the threat of what a future generation would call “spoilers.”

“Respect the film!”

“This is the Night” isn’t just about getting matinee tickets to their local two screen cineplex. It’s about all sorts of things that happen afterward — to Anthony, who crushes on Sophia (Madelyn Cline) but is incompetently bullied by her boyfriend, to Anthony’s Dad (Frank Grillo), desperate to keep the family catering business/rental hall open and needing money from Sophia’s Made Man Dad (Bobby Cannavale). And it’s about Christian’s not-remotely-secret “secret” and what their Mom (Naomi Watts) does about it.

The three amigos with be threatened and chased, tempted by tube-topped tarts in a Trans Am and face a Rocky-like reckoning, as will most everybody else.

All the while, one and all — the Italian Americans, anyway — will bellow and backslap, threaten and talk, talk, talk with their hands as they do.

“I KNOW you’re excited, but shaddup when you talk, awright?”

The grown up performers are OK, the kids pretty much all soon-to-be-ex-child-actor pretty boys, and more uninteresting than unskilled, forced to play mere sketches of characters.

The bully wouldn’t scare a six year-old girl.

The situations are stock — “our first time in a bar,” “tell her how I really feel” — and worse.

The picture wears its contrivances like gold stars affixed to a first-time screenwriter’s “memoir” movie attempt in film school. DeMonaco has experience and skill, if not in this genre. What the hell happened?

Watching “This is the Night” is like sitting through replays of a moment The Big Game goes all wrong. We see the mistakes and missteps in real “reel” time, and are helpless to shout suggestions.

Rating: R for language, some drug use and teen drinking

Cast: Lucius Hoyos, Chase Vacnin, Madelyn Cline, River Alexander, Frank Grillo, Bobby Cannavale and Naomi Watts

Credits: Scripted and directed by James DeMonaco. A Universal release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:47

A tip of the hat and a hearty “Nice try” to writer-director Sean Nichols Lynch for his vampire comedy, “Red Snow.”

It’s a straight-up B-movie all the way, with decent makeup and blood-sucker contact lenses and a few cute holidays-and-vampires jokes — “Season’s BLEEDings!”

No, the acting is more competent than compelling, and the plot and action sequences leave a lot to be desired.

But the tone is spot-on, and once it’s flipped into “vampire comedy” and camp, it passes the time in sometimes amusing ways.

Olivia (Dennice Crispola) is a solitary writer, tucked away in a Lake Tahoe cabin, typing away at vampire novels nobody wants to publish. But one night a bat bashes into her window. She tucks it into a shoebox, gives it a bottle capful of water and administers a teeny-tiny bandaid.

Next thing she knows, a naked vampire (Nico Bellamy) awakens in her garage.

She has little time to process this, as this mysterious “private investigator” (Vernon Wells) knocks at her door, drinks her tea and, noticing the books she has lying about, and the vampire Christmas decorations, turns snappish.

“Oh sure,” he gripes. “You think they’re COOL. Dracula, Nosferatu…TWILIGHT…Sooooo sexy.”

Well, they’re not, he insists as she’s showing him the door.

Vampire Luke just might be heaven sent, as far as Olivia’s concerned. He’s “sooooo sexy,” even when she dresses him in her late mother’s coat and whatnot. He starts to set her straight about vampires and vampire movies.

“‘Nosferatu?’ That’s like our ‘Birth of a Nation!'”

And he critiques her novel, helping her “punch it up a little.” Romania as a setting? Romania SUCKS. And naming her vamp-hero “Vladimir?”

“No self-respecting vampire would call himself ‘Vladimir.’ Y’might as well named him ‘Dildo!'”

But he needs blood, and not the pig’s blood she fetches from the butcher. Not to worry, “I drink people’s blood, I don’t kill them.”

Sure. Why not?

The flippant tone of it all works, and there’s a decent “hunt” when other vampires show up to rescue their blood brother. Calling a vampire hunting “agency” doesn’t help. They’re a bit overwhelmed.

“We’re not exactly Doctors Without Borders over here.”

“Red Snow” isn’t very good, as a package. It opens with a night-filmed, poorly-conceived and acted “first kill,” drops abruptly into the broad daylight banalities of Olivia’s life and never gets up any sort of head of steam.

But I like what they were going for here, as obvious as it seems. Nice try. Now have another go of it.

Rating: unrated, bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Dennice Cisneros, Nico Bellamy, Laura Kennon, Alan Silva and Vernon Wells.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sean Nichols Lynch. A 4Digital Media release.

Running time: 1:20

Antonio Banderas also stars in this high gloss B picture, about pieces of eight and galleons and not about Captain Jack Sparrow coveting such treasure. For once.

Holland and his stunt crew get to do a lot of Peter Parker parkour, narrow escapes and what not.

This Sony release — Screen Gems, maybe? — opens Feb. 18.

One of the epic star vehicles of Ava Gardner‘s career earned a nice restoration a couple of years back. So if nothing else, Ava at her peak in glorious Technicolor should be lure enough to draw one to “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.”

The film pairs her up with James Mason in the other title role, surrounds them with solid British and Spanish supporting players, and became one of the rare films directed by Golden Age studio executive Albert Lewin, most famous for “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and “The Moon and Sixpence.”

It’s a dreamy tale of doomed romance, a scenic fantasy of the “Beauty and the Beast” order anchored in 1920s period piece reality recreated in Spain and coastal Wales. And while there are elements which date it and others which hobble the storytelling, there’s too much to admire to write it off.

“Pandora” is a classic Gardner character, a great beauty who enjoys men mostly as playthings to be toyed with. She’s a former nightclub singer who always seems to decorate the arm of someone wealthy, famous and who lives with risk.

That modus operandi is established when someone jokingly suggests she take an interest in dashing Stephen (Nigel Patrick), a racecar driver who has come to Esperanza in pre-Civil War Spain to set a land speed record on the beach there. Never mind that pretty Janet (Sheila Sim) dotes on him and plainly has her heart set on marrying him.

Pandora, the namesake of his race car, ensures poor Janet doesn’t stand a chance. Whatever Pandora wants, you know. She talks him into an impulsive dash about the countryside in his not-street-legal racer (simpler times) which ends with a cliffside proposal, and a cliffside dare. Will he give up everything, or his race car, for her? By Jove, he will!

Damned if they aren’t engaged to marry, but at her suggestion, a ways off. He has to A) retrieve the wrecked (and sunken) car, restore it and race it down the beach. They’ll marry just after that, giving Pandora an implied out. There won’t be a marriage if his open-wheel/open-topped race car kills him.

But in the distance there’s an anchored sailing ketch that figures to also have a role in this wedding to come. Pandora’s next impulse is to strip and swim out to it. That sort of thing happened a lot in the Jazz Age.

That’s how Pandora meets the Dutchman, played by that beautiful brooder Mason. She is seductive and playful, he is distant and dreamy. One can smell the romance, gardenias, sea spray and doom in the air.

A prologue has told us all we need to know of the legend of the Flying Dutchman, a condemned man doomed to roam the seas, coming ashore every seven years to see if there’s one woman who will love him enough to die for him and put him out of his eternal-life agony.

“The measure of love is what one is willing to give up for it,” we hear from our English academic observer Geoffrey Fielding (Harold Warrender), who also narrates the tale. This Henrik van der Zee, Fielding observes straight away, “is not like other men.”

Geoffrey sees Pandora’s effect on men, watches the broken Reggie (Marius Goring) drink himself to death right in front of the unattainable Pandora and takes in her capture of Stephen.

“Why do you make yourself out so bad?” he rhetorically asks the man-eater.

“I don’t have to. I leave that to others.”

But this Dutchman is a wild card Geoffrey can’t readily size up. As Pandora acknowledges her token of troth to Stephen, she can’t help but carry on — in generally genteel, if a tad “open-minded” ways — with Hendrik. Because the brooding mystery of the man is irresistible, he’s got a seriously posh yacht and there’s a Byronic doom hanging on his every pronouncement.

“Faith is a lie and heaven is a deception.”

As if things aren’t romantically-tangled enough, “the most famous matador (Mario Cabré) in all of Spain” returns to his hometown, to his fretful fortune telling Gypsy mother and to the singing temptress who got away, Pandora. A man who uses daggers and swords and makes his living killing bulls isn’t to be trifled with.

It is Geoffrey the archeologist and collector of folklore who starts to piece all this together, narrating as he does from some presumed point in the future. There is this legend, and an ancient sailor’s journal Geoffrey has found, written in Dutch, that’s a tad too familiar to the mysterious yachtsman.

Will Geoffrey figure it out? Is Pandora up to sacrificing herself for this mysterious man? Should she be? Will Geoffrey warn her? Or will he stand back and watch the racing driver risk his neck, the matador put on an alarming bullfight to a command audience of Pandora and Geoffrey, preferring not to interfere with the affairs of “you rich people?”

Lewin, who based the script on the writings of Omar Khayyam and 18th century writer and “transported” to Australia hustler George Barrington, conjures up a spell in this soundstages-and-Costa Brava fantasy. He makes great use of Spanish and Welsh locations and cinematographer Jack Cardiff serves up arresting and inventive screen compositions, including an artfully/whimsically-shot Jazz Age/jazz band party on the beach.

Gardner has an icy allure here, beguiling in a less overtly-sexual sense than her signature roles. The attraction to The Dutchman is more scripted and “fated” than anything we sense in the way of on-screen chemistry or “heat.” But we believe it because the fantasy never lets go of the sense that all this simply “must be,” as the story has repeated itself every seven years for hundreds of years.

Yet all that appreciation runs up against a fatal flaw that not so much dates “Pandora” as violates cinema’s first order of business, –telling the story with images.

The gorgeous “Pandora” is marred by an incessant and generally superfluous voice-over narration by Geoffrey — not merely shoveling out exposition, first scene to last — or filling in back-story — but stating the too-obvious in scene after scene. We’ve already witnessed a great screen actor getting across precisely the whirl of emotions a screen moment requires. Why tell us “He seemed rapt. Transported to another world. I sensed an almost desperate ecstasy in his enjoyment?”

This goes on and on to a maddening degree, passing beyond any “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again” sense of “Let me tell you a tale” and beating the viewer about the ears with the always mesmerizing, too-often inane or at least redundant musings read by Warrender.

That sea of purple prose and poesy somewhat dulls the poignancy of the Dutchman, doomed to search the world for a faithful woman, and of the bittersweet fate of “Pandora Reynolds – the secret goddess whom all men in their hearts desire.” It doesn’t spoil this classic, but it does turn an epic love story to a film that the viewer can too-easily keep at arm’s length, never wholly embracing or falling under its spell.

Rating: “approved,” TV-PG, violence

Cast: Ava Gardner, James Mason, Harold Warrender, Sheila Sim, Nigel Patrick, Mario Cabré and Marius Goring.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Albert Lewin. An International Film Distributors release on Tubi, Amazon and other platforms.

Running time: 2:03

You read the plot description in that headline, and you see promise in the premise. So you figure “Why not watch one more Christmas movie,” right? What can go wrong with rounding up fractious family and having it out over the holidays at a big, “two pools” beach house?

When it comes to the Mexican comedy, “Grumpy Christmas (Una navidad no tan padre),” a sequel to “The Patriarch (Un Padre No Tan Padre),” that turns out to be the wrong question. “What can go right?” might be more apt.

The vast brood of widowed Don Servando (Héctor Bonilla) piles into a converted school bus for a trip to the coast, to the luxurious beach house of the patriarch’s daughter-in-law Alma (Jacqueline Bracamontes) for the holidays.

Every “couple” in this family — straight or gay, “secret” or public — is in trouble. Nothing like a vacation with an imperious, bossy woman with their imperious, bossy and quarrelsome dad to patch things up. Sadly, there’s barely a chuckle in this contrived, forced “romp.”

Servando has these “traditions” he wants to be sure they all preserve, even if they’re away from home. Aunt Alicia (Angélica María) “would rather not participate in your traditions.”

Her attitude towards the holiday is more remote, “spoiling” Santa for the guy couple’s newly-adopted son, banning the tacky over-decorating that Servando has passed down to his brood.

But with other traditions such as “Argument Night,” a gimmick borrowed from “Seinfeld” as a holiday “airing of grievances,” who can blame her?

And how can this half-hearted brawl between the elders help the workaholic couples resolve their differences, create commitment in the “sneaking around” younger couple who met through the family and started hooking up after (we hope) they realize they weren’t related?

I mean, of course all the quarrels/conflicts get fixed before the closing credits. But the eye-rolling ideas two screenwriters manufactured for generating “resolutions” to the many comic conflicts in this don’t produce many laughs. Or any.

How to make Alicia and Servando mend fences? Casually yank the mooring lines of the schooner she keeps docked out back (Who doesn’t?) so that it drifts out to sea, stranding them and forcing them to reconcile? OK.

Force hot Gala (Renata Noti) to realize hot Renato (Juan Pable de Santiago) is more than just a side-piece.

And so on.

Bonilla and María are veteran performers who can find laughs when there’s a laugh worth looking for in the script. There just aren’t many, aside from senior citizens toking up and doing bong hits by the pool, the posh and snobby aunt who doesn’t realize how tone deaf dressing everybody up in Nativity costumes for a creche family photo is.

Rating: TV-MA, adult situations, profanity

Cast: Héctor Bonilla, Angélica María, Jacqueline Bracamontes, Benny Ibarra, Renata Notni and Juan Pablo de Santiago.

Credits: Directed by Raúl Martínez, scripted by Eduardo Donjuan and Pedro González, based on characters created by Alberto Bremer for “The Patriarch.” A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:27

Follows his “Bill & Ted” sequel, nicely timed to cash in on whatever comes of “Matrix Resurrections,” mixed to negative reviews be damned.

That’s part of the Hollywood agent’s credo. Announce your star’s NEXT film before this one hits…or bombs.

Sinister, stark and shadowy, the new “Macbeth” conjured up by Oscar-winning writer and director Joel Coen, and starring his Oscar-winning wife Frances McDormand with Oscar-winner Denzel Washington in the title role, has the cast and production values to compete with any prestige picture this awards season.

But “The Tragedy of Macbeth” puts almost every other blockbuster and “awards bait” film of this fall and winter to utter shame in one jarring regard. A swift and streamlined tragedy by the greatest playwright in the English language becomes a lean, quick and brutally brisk film in Coen’s hands.

And if Shakespeare and Coen can deliver “The Scottish Play” in a riveting 100 minutes, what excuse do the creators of “House of Gucci,” “Licorice Pizza,” “Matrix Resurrections,” “Spider-Man” or even “The King’s Man” have for not getting to the point in 135-150 or more?

Casting great actors pays dividends as Washington gives Macbeth a guile and agency sometimes lost in productions that play up the femme fatale, Lady Macbeth. McDormand’s take on Mrs. “Out damn-ed spot!” is a revelation, a cunning woman reeling at the way her husband takes over “their” plot, fuming and cracking under the strain of his blunders and improvisations to her plan to kill their way to the Scottish throne.

Washington’s ultra-naturalistic and confident line-readings remind us that this poetry has its greatest impact when it sounds like improvised dialogue, and McDormand’s “madness” adds new colors the theater’s greatest conniver-who-cracks-up.

Many a character player (Brendan Gleeson is King Duncan, Stephen Root is the verbose and comical Porter, Moses Ingram the fierce and tragic Lady Macduff) sparkles in a single scene or three, although there are a couple who seem o’er-matched, if not miscast.

The story — that of a brave, brutish and honored Scottish thane who lets a battlefield promotion go to his head, pushed into plotting against those who stand between him and ultimate power by his wife — is simple enough and rendered in greys and whites and bloody strokes by Coen. The dialogue, which has provided the English language with as many pithy quotes as any play Shakespeare wrote, is given room to sing.

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

This is a bold, wholly recognizable “Macbeth,” if not precisely as you might remember it if you’ve ever seen it before.

There’s nothing that original about bathing the story in Scottish fog and shadows, or filming it in black and white. Orson Welles did both in an equally brisk, more equine-friendly budget-studio rendition of “Macbeth” in 1948. The bloodier moments echo Roman Polanski’s 1971 film.

But here are four clever touches that remind us that Joel Coen has four Oscars and a “Buster Scruggs” to his credit.

Coen taps into Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Telltale Heart” for the thumping, pounding sound that Macbeth guiltily hears for much of the film after he’s killed King Duncan.

The three witches, the “weird sisters” who foretell Macbeth’s ascension and later his fate, are performed by actress Kathryn Hunter, contorting her voice and (literally) her body to embody the three, sometimes simply seen as one.

Coen promotes the messenger Ross (Alex Hassell) into a full-fledged, priest-cloaked Greek chorus, relating not just messages that advance the plot with tales of far off battles and intrigues, but a close and sometimes silent observer to and possible manipulator of Macbeth’s murderous machinations as the bloodbath begins.

Polanski did something similar with the character, and that fact, and the Wellesian production design, suggests Coen consulted both films before directing his.

And although there are many ways to interpret the play, Coen’s adaptation, in casting the 60something Washington, leans into Macbeth as frustrated by the limits to his advancement and impatient — thanks to his graying, childless advancing age — to seize that which others would deny to him. He is high-handed and tyrannical and impulsive.

What this production team — which includes digital black and white cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, costumer Mary Zophres, production designer Stefan Dechant and art director Jason T. Clark — and stellar cast give us isn’t just a robust rendition that renews The Scottish Play in our memory, but a terrific thriller, a bold, unblinking plunge into murder and madness set against nearly unlimited power.

That has to be what Coen saw in it, an amoral, utterly unethical tyrant who doesn’t “murder somebody on Fifth Avenue,” but acts with equal impunity, fearless of the consequences because “somebody told” him he has nothing to fear. With provisos.

Rating: R for violence

Cast: Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand, Brendan Gleeson, Alex Hassell, Corey Hawkins, Bertie Carvel, Moses Ingram, Matt Helm, Stephen Root, James Udom and Kathryn Hunter

Credits: Scripted and directed by Joel Coen, based on William Shakespeare’s “The Tragedie of Macbeth.” An Apple Films release of an A24 production.

Running time: 1:45

This may be the last thing I see in a theater this year.

It’s not just that I’ve gotten around to everything and I do mean EVERYthing else. There is a title missing here and there I wouldn’t mind reviewing. Perhaps a few of them will present themselves over the holidays.

But even though MovieNation never sleeps — and there are films popping out the last weekend of the year that I have lined up to screen via streaming — 2021 is about to go “out OUT damned spot” with a bang, Joel Coen’s take on Shakespeare’s “The Tragedie of Macbeth” (how Will spelled it), “The Tragedy of Macbeth.”

Thanks, AppleTV, for putting this bad boy up on an Orlando screen where one can truly be immersed in the gloom, the witches, the Lady and the victims of Denzel’s interpretation of an ambitious man and his more murderously ambitious wife.

You can have your zombie pictures — real zombies or Rob Zombie splatterfests. Spare me your “Saw” sequels and “Halloween” abattoirs.

Entirely too neat and “pat” for my tastes.

For film violence to mean anything, it’s got to be personal, the stakes life-or-death from the start, the injuries and deaths grim and gurgling and difficult, because rarely does real life allow the simple “kill shot,” knock-out punch or single fatal slash of a knife.

“For the Sake of Vicious” is in the “Hostel” “High Tension” league — a simple, compact thriller about the struggles of three people to survive Halloween night, trapped in the same house, shedding blood and spilling it to draw a few more breaths.

It’s nobody’s idea of a great thriller. There are clunky moments and leaps in the plot that made me wonder if details had been left out. But it’s intimate, savage and grueling to sit through. Imagine what the poor actors endured.

A single mom nurse (Lora Burke of “Poor Agnes”) comes home from her shift to find a bloodied man on her floor and an armed intruder who cuts off all her avenues of escape. Exhausted or not, this broad’s seen it all and not going quietly, whatever this creep has in mind.

The creep? Of course he assures her “I’m not going to hurt you.” He (Nick Smyth of “Covenant”) even offers his name — “Chris.”

“F— YOU!”

But with a couple of words we and she figure out who he is. His daughter was raped. She was the nurse on duty that night. And this bloodied fellow unconscious on the floor? He (Colin Parradine of “Defective”) happens to be the suspect who “got off,” the guy Chris has evidence was the rapist. He also happens to be Romina’s landlord.

Over the course of this evening, the guys will debate and re-hash the case, Romina will behave with suspicious unconcerned calm.

And then things turn bloody and bloodier and more and more complex. The bodies pile up on a kitchen floor already slippery with blood and littered with damage from earlier fights, and weapons.

There are several moments when the characters’ reactions to this or that — standing staring at a door lock that’s being picked from the other side, with the person doing the picking an eminent threat, for instance — are just…off. We can read ulterior motives into it or wonder what information we haven’t been given, which is sometimes the case. But such moments play as sloppy and dramatically inert.

“Vicious” is at its best at its most vicious. Everything and anything might be a weapon. Injuries are grievous, but don’t stop characters from gasping and grasping and struggling and pummeling as if their very lives depended on it. Because they plainly do.

The stabbings, slashings, bludgeonings and beatings go on and on, and what co-directors Gabriel Carrer and Reese Eveneshen are determined to show us makes you forget they’re Canadian, or forget the Canadian rep for “Ryan Reynolds nice.” No, this is “Deadpool” deathly.

“For the Sake of Vicious” doesn’t blink and rarely lets up, so much so that I found myself mouthing “Wow wow wow” at the carnage and in-your-face staging and photographing of the brawls and butchery.

The fights leave the characters straining for breath, the actors playing them panting and the viewer breathless, at times. That’s how violence is supposed to be in the movies — messy, personal, relentless and unsportsmanlike. If nothing else, these Canadians do a very good job of reminding us of that.

Rating: Unrated, savage, gory and extremely personal violence

Cast: Lora Burke, Nick Smyth, Colin Paradine and James Fler.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Gabriel Carrer and Reese Eveneshen. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:21

It returns to life as a lark, a self-aware send-up of “The Matrix” as the pop culture-devouring entity it once was. “The Matrix Resurrections” opens at a video gameworks where employees, led by a master designer, are “going to make a sequel to our beloved Trilogy.“

Damned if that designer isn’t named Thomas Anderson, and damned if he isn’t played by the ageless Keanu Reeves.

As premises go, this “meta” twist on the green neon universe of “modals” and “sentients,” that they’re all the mad fantasy of a master video game craftsman, is daring, and in the first act of “Resurrections,” it plays as downright whimsical.

There’s deadline pressure. There are semi-comical tech nerds who idolize our “hero” and bosses who badger him for results. Got to get this “sequel” to the marketplace, come what may. Christina Ricci sparkles (in a single scene) as the marketing director talking up how to sell it.

Anderson, whose alter ego Neo is a part of the “game,” is kind of on task. But he’s noticing things. And he’s in therapy (Neil Patrick Harris plays a shrink who adds to the comic-ironic feel).

 “Thomas. You seem particularly triggered, can you tell me what happened?”

Anderson is off-balance, troubled. “I saw this pattern, and it was EVERYwhere…I know this story. Is this how we began?”

And then there’s this overwhelmingly familiar stranger, a married mother of two with haunted eyes whom Anderson bumps into in a coffee shop. Whatever name she (Carrie-Anne Moss) goes by now, if there’s a “Neo” inside of Anderson, he’s going to recognize “Trinity” in or out of The Matrix, with or without the appearance of a triggering kitty cat.

“Have we…met?”

Eighteen years after the last “Matrix,” years only partly-filled by the addition of video games in that universe, director Lana Wachoswki returns to the franchise that made The Wachowskis sci-fi film cinema legends. But the movie she delivers shows not just indifference to the material. It’s like she’s pissed to be back here again.

Those set-up scenes — more coherent and straightforward than any “Matrix” movie that came before –promise something that’s both sequel and prequel, with more modernish red and blue pills, more existential angst over the choice between seeing things as they “really” are, and self-narcotized delusion.

The object of “the game” that these movies have always been is simpler here. Reconnect with Trinity, take the right pill and either “fight” to figure out what is really going on, or look for “happiness” with her.

No, Laurence Fishburne isn’t back. But a younger Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is, still here to hector Neo to act.

“The only thing that matters to you is still here. I know it’s why you’re still fighting, and why you will never give up!”

Hugo Weaving’s Smith is now played by Jonathan Groff, and isn’t the sunglassed menace we remember.

And as “Resurrections” stumbles into the second act, we figure out all-too-quickly that this “reluctance to make a sequel” joke might be expressing how Wachowski really feels about this dubious enterprise. Almost everything about the last 100 minutes of this movie feels like an assault punishing the audience, “the fans,” for daring to beg for another film and Warner Brothers for demanding it be made.

If that sounds extreme, it is. The middle acts shift from the gloomy, familiarly paranoid dark shadows and green color palette of “The Matrix” and into over-saturated yellows and bright-bright whites. You’re sitting in a dark movie theater watching slightly-upgraded versions of the famous effects — “Bullet time” is a punchline here — hurled at you in light so bright it’s designed to strain your eyes, to make you close them.

Does Wachowski want to hurt or seriously discomfort the viewer? It sure as hell feels like it.

I was reminded of Lou Reed’s infamous “contractual obligations” LP, “Metal Machine Music,” the most notorious “let me make something so atonal and jarring and assaultive and unpopular that they’ll let me out of my contract” act ever committed by a commercial artist. Is that what Wachowski was shooting for here? Killing this thing off?

I love the fact that Moss was brought back, that no recasting of the two leads was attempted to make this “younger.” But that just makes the absence of Weaving and Fishburne, the ways they grounded these movies with their performances, their gravitas and their function as “icons” within this world, more jarring.

The story turns simpler and yet so convoluted as to be even harder to follow. Incidents have a randomness that seems dictated by “We need a chase/fight/shootout here” action film story structure rather than anything organic.

New characters stand around the periphery and aren’t developed beyond their “function” in Neo’s renewed quest.

I was never a huge fan of the original trilogy, but the films were novel, innovative and pulse-pounding and the effects eye-popping. Once you “got it” they pretty much held your interest between action sequences.

That isn’t true here. I was delighted at the beginning, and steadily more appalled at most everything that followed. There’s no sugarcoating the fact that I look forward to never seeing this “Resurrection” again.

Rating: R for violence and some language

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Carrie Anne Moss, Neil Patrick Harris, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jonathan Groff, Christina Ricci, Jada Pinkett Smith and Priyanka Chopra Jonas.

Credits: Directed by Lana Wachowski, scripted by Aleksander Hemon and David Mitchell, based on characters created by Lana Wachowski. Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:25