Movie Nation

“The Four of Us” is an icily clinical German dramedy about what happens when committed but unmarried couples swap partners for a month, with “no sex” as the only rule they agree to follow.

When it throws them back together for a beach weekend, secrets come out — and then more secrets. Sparks fly, wine is tossed into somebody’s face and somebody else projectile vomits either because of the stress or maybe related to that EPT test we’ve glimpsed.

Yes, the “rule” was broken. Yes, let’s get “everything out in the open” (in German, or dubbed into English). Let the chips fall and the recriminations and fists fly. “

“You really enjoy this, don’t you?” “Yeah, kinda.”

The entire enterprise plays as workshopped, checkboxed and algorithm-assisted. But let’s not lean into German stereotypes, even if the filmmakers do.

Janina (Nilam Farooq) is a magazine journalist angling for a promotion, with one of those “If you don’t come in Saturday, don’t bother coming in Sunday” jobs with an axe hanging over her head. For the past month, she’s lived with Nils (Jonas Nay) a sarcastic workaholic real estate agent.

They’re meeting teacher Maria (Paula Kalenberg) and struggling actor Ben (Louis Nitsche) at Nils’ family beach house on the Baltic Sea. As we’ve seen Maria all kissy-face with Ben, we have a clue as to what’s up even if the film’s opening scenes present Nils and Janina as a tetchy, uncommunicative couple with “control” issues.

Janina running to Ben’s arms at the beach, when we’ve just seen him sneaking one last smooch with the blonde teacher, confirms it.

For whatever reason, they were trying “an experiment.” And it backfired. SOMEbody broke the rules. If that pregnancy stick is any indication, somebody REALLY broke the rules.

The script, co-written by director Florian Gottschick and Florian von Bornstädt, contrives all these “twists” and added complications, starting with who knows what and when. Some of them have more information than others. Every “I’m the last to know?” revelation results in a tantrum.

Nils is insufferably smug and condescending. Janina is self-righteous and vegan. Maria wants what she wants and is tired of her mother’s nagging about settling down and raising a family, and Ben is a “failed” actor with all the confidence issues that entails.

The dynamics of this quartet are tepidly interesting, at best. Scenes that almost could be comical aren’t quite. And the payoff is entirely too easy and pat for any viewer to not see it coming an hour before the closing credits.

Farooq and Nay have the most interesting characters and give the only performances that stick.

I’d say “aside from that” except there is no “aside from that.” This isn’t a compelling take on coupleshood — not quirky, not touching, not much of anything at all except disappointing.

Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Nilam Farooq, Jonas Nay, Paula Kalenberg and Louis Nitsche

Credits: Directed by Florian Gottschick, scripted by Florian Gottschick and Florian von Bornstädt. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:28

This Brazilian drama played at the last Sundance pre pandemic and finally earns release Jan. 14.

Looks good, but maybe a little late to the “lockdown” marketplace at this point.

Longtime girlfriends can giggle and banter “You remember ‘How Stella Got Her Groove Back?'”

“You remember how it ENDED?”

But when it comes to “Maya and Her Lover,” we’re already thinking “She’s Gotta Have It Before She Turns 40.”

The latest from writer-director Nicole Sylvester (“Layla’s Girl”) leans more to the melodramatic former than the laughs-and-lust of the latter. It’s a generally frank and sober-minded essay on Black female sexuality, body image issues and the perils of dating not just somebody younger, but someone from another class.

That’s what hits Maya (Ashanti J’Aria) right in the face when she unexpectedly figures out that maybe unsatisfying sex with “potential” relationships — complemented with battery-powered assistance from the selft-service aisle afterwards — isn’t what she needs at this moment.

She’s a 39 year-old college educated Brooklynite with her own brownstone, a couple of successful business ventures — real estate, photography — behind her and nothing in particular on the horizon.

A “Daddy’s girl” whose demanding professional class father passed a year ago, her BFF Tracey (Faiven Feshazion) can’t bring her out of her ennui with tales of “exotic” sex with Europeans and can’t talk her out of Maya’s “old lady” clothes.

Then the distracted, over-familiar and “uncouth” food delivery guy (Shomari Love) comes on. Strong. The fact that he’s dreamy gives him a shot. The fact that he’s 22 suggests she ought to know better.

In a flash, Maya goes from “You couldn’t PAY me to day a younger man” to melting at Kassim’s touch.

The red flags are everywhere, and yet she persists. He’s Muslim, with the judgmental fervor of a new convert. He’s uneducated, not well-spoken and yet outspoken about all the issues, problems and self-destructiveness he sees in “Black people.” He’s callow and young and defensive about the age difference thing, entirely too quick to refer to himself as “a man” when she points out his youth.

He thinks she’s “thick,” which considering she’s touchy about her zaftig figure, isn’t a plus. He’s tactless, blurting out “You think you’re fat” and going off on sermons about Black people seeing themselves through judgmental white eyes, the racism of Tinder and the like.

“Your rhetoric is skewed and capricious,” she points out, and his swagger doesn’t let him keep “What’s that even MEAN?” to himself.

And yet, there they go. Even though she’s not exactly proud of this fling with a guy about half her age.

Sylvester doesn’t say much new in this “Stella” variation. She’s content to let her cast do the lifting and let the situations play out according to formula.

Love, a veteran bit player, makes this Nation of Islamist mouthy and faintly obnoxious, but tuned-in and woke enough to be worth Maya’s company. Barely. His boorishness gives their relationship an expiration date everyone sees but him.

J’Aria, in her first leading lady turn, internalizes much of what we’re supposed to buy into about Maya, the “Daddy’s girl” who forgets “What would your father think?” long enough to break out of her rut.

The leads could use a little more of the sass and sparkle of Feshazion, who plays “pretty and I know it” like she’s been self-aware that way her entire life.

With TV covering all of this ground via the series version of Spike Lee’s “She’s Gotta Have It” and the “Insecure” misadventures of Issa Rae, “Maya” needed a little more on the plate to play like a complete meal. Aside from that? Not bad. More of a “film festival” dramedy than anything you’d make an effort to catch in a cinema, but not bad.

Rating: Unrated, sex, nudity, marijuana use

Cast: Ashanti J’Aria, Faiven Feshazion and
Shomari Love

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nicole Sylvester. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:46

Here’s a screenwriter who’s a bit defensive about his work. At one point in “The Only One,” a picturesque romance set in the south of France, our antagonist turns on her would-be lover with this rejoinder.

“I’m your Pixie Dream Girl or something,” she complains. “I’m exactly zero of those things.”

The only thing “Tom” (Caitlin Stasey) truly isn’t is the part of that label she left out — “manic.” A laid-back 30-year-old “wanderer” who travels on the cheap as a lifestyle, she is that “free spirit” virtually none of us are at that age. And if David (Jon Beavers) sees her as a “pixie dream girl” without the “manic,” he has cause. To him she was the one who got away.

“The Only One” started life titled “Horse Latitudes” and is a tipsy, impulsive and “romantic” without being particularly romantic romance set in wine country where two former lovers reconnect after a long separation. It’s lovely to look at and quite likeable, if more than a tad predictable.

You can’t get much more “on the nose” in your story than have one character introduce the other to Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”

Natalie just shows up at a small, remote vineyard, wanders into the kitchen, lights a smoke and waits. David comes downstairs and can’t manage so much as a double take. He hasn’t seen her in six years, since “Dublin,” where they met, connected and he gave her a nickname inspired by a bottle of gin.

“I wasn’t sure you’d be happy to see me,” says the beautiful brunette in that impertinent false modesty of her kind. And to be honest, there’s no indication he is — no smile, no hug, just a wary distance as she gets the espresso machine he hasn’t figured out working. “Tom” was a “barista in Auckland last year,” so he’s in good hands.

As she left without so much as a goodbye, he’s not sold. As his sister (Blake Lindsley) and online marketing guru brother-in-law (Hugo Armstrong) are already staying there, he expects complications. Which there are. Rob practically seethes at the sight of her.

“Pixie dream girls” “borrow” things like bikes and motorcycles, the hearts of would-be lovers, and don’t return them, just an “I thought you would get it” is all she can manage as an apology.

But Tom stays to “help,” as the organic winery has just lost its horse. Her impulses gently pull David towards something less settled, and we and Rob can see it, even if he cannot.

What would you do with a visit, a seeming expression of lingering interest, from “the one who got away?”

The debut feature of director Noah Gilbert and his screenwriter (I assume) brother Seth is a bit of an amble, if not an actual dawdle.

The story gives us directions it can go and then largely stays in one place. But it’s a gorgeous place.

Old ground is covered, wine is drunk and the charming elderly vintner next door (Niseema Theillaud) is there to offer unsolicited profundities.

The milieu makes this movie, with its traditions and history in opposition to the callow marketing of “organic” wine. That’s laid out as hairsplitting “the ‘lifestyle’ thing versus ‘the style of life’ thing.”

More is made of “secrets” that each has and will casually or drunkenly reveal. A long motorcycle ride down to the coast becomes a charming distraction.

And even if not every change in direction or character revelation is handled all that gracefully, the “conflict” is watered down and the “quest” (replacing the dead horse) abandoned, “The Only One” is never less than pleasant to sit through.

The Australian Stasey, of TV’s “Bridge and Tunnel,” and Beavers (TV’s “Animal Kingdom”) make an agreeable pairing, even if the dynamic of the relationship means “sparks” are a risk that first this one, then that one, wants to avoid.

That keeps the entire enterprise a tad too low key to wholly come off. But as I said, “wine,” “South of France,” attractive “likeable” leads, a summery whisk through a Medieval town or two. Who could do with a wistful, romantic road trip right about now?

Cast: Caitlin Stasey, Jon Beavers, Hugo Armstrong, Blake Lindsley and Niseema Theillaud

Credits: Directed by Noah Gilbert, scripted by Seth Gilbert. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:44

We’ve gotten a bumper crop of beautifully designed, costumed and decorated collection of Christmas tales set in Santa’s world and Santa’s workshop this year. “David and the Elves” is the latest lush entry in this holiday genre, a fantasy about a little Polish boy who really believes, and the vain, showboat elf who comes to visit.

It begins with promise and end with an attempted tugging of the heartstrings. But there are few laughs in between as this one develops a serious case of the “drags” — in Polish, or dubbed into English.

Albert (Jakub Zajac, one of the stars of Poland’s version of “The Office”) is the cocky “five-time elf of the year” in Santaland, always getting profiled by Elf TV, a bit too full of himself thanks to the fact that he’s the guy Santa (Cezary Żak) trusts to drive the sleigh. He even has his own line of figurines, which he can leave under this or that tree for “my fans.”

David (Cyprian Grabowski) is a ten year-old who has to move from the snowy, mountain forest wonderland his family has lived in to the impersonal big city of Warsaw. David’s over-enthusiastic father Patrick (Michael Czernecki) has long filled his head with tales of Santa and his elves. David’s mother (Anna Smolowik) hopes this move is what makes “him finally grow up.”

David? He’s just 10.

“I mean PATRICK.”

Dad’s imagination has him point to Santa’s invisible sleigh in the night sky, “with Albert at the reins,” out to David is why Albert picks David’s life to drop in on when he has an existential crisis amidst the year-round toy work and toy delivery operations with Santa.

“What’s all this for?”

Thus we have the Polish version of “Elf,” with an actual magic-wielding pixie mixed up among the humans, and not Will Ferrell.

The bulk of the movie is a wan version of the culture clash that a real live elf has when interacting with people who tell him their fondest Christmas wish, only to have him grant it, with unforeseen problems when those wishes come true.

Turning a Christmas tree into Dad’s wished-for drum kit is no big deal. Sending a stranger who longs be in quiet solitude on a remote lake — without giving the guy winter clothes or taking into account he might have preferred a more tropical climate — is a bother.

David struggles to explain away Albert’s actions to his parents, who somehow always miss seeing the guy in the green suit and red-striped hosiery.

The picture drifts into the happy but sometimes touchy marriage of Santa to his “private dancer” Mrs. Claus (Monika Krzywkowska) and the odd reindeer “smell” joke amid the elaborately conceived workshop complex, which has elves of all sizes and races, from all over the world.

Yes, even Poland’s figured out “inclusion.”

There are a couple of grown-up giggles in this, maybe a few more moments that kids will find funny.

It’s no edgier than Mrs. Claus’s semi-sultry shimmy to “Beyond the Sea,” and the rare piece of North Pole profanity.

“Don’t say ‘damn!’ You’re Santa’s WIFE!”

About the best you can say for this one is that’s it’s inoffensive, bland holiday filler, something to leave on in the next room to keep the tykes tied up while you finish your holiday wrapping, cooking and such.

Rating: TV-G

Cast: Jakub Zajac, Cyprian Grabowski, Cezary Zak, Monika Krzywkowska, Anna Smolowik and Michael Czernecki

Credits: Directed by Michal Rogalski, scripted by Marcin Baczynski and Mariusz Kuczewski. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:46

There have been other holiday movies to use the title “Twas the Night,” but it’d be hard to name one that was worse.

A farce about a family Christmas get together involving hiding a body, the only thing without a pulse about it is everything about it. Tone-deaf, ineptly scripted and directed, lifeless and tedious, it’s only 82 minutes long.

I want those 82 back.

Holly (Nicole Pringle) is prepping for the holidays, getting the house ready for her family and her fiance’s, whom she’s never met. Nick (David S. Perez) is helping mostly by “reminding” Holly to call the plumber again, locate an Advent wreath, etc.

But there’s a cloud hanging over this “night before Christmas.” Holly, a psychiatrist, has gone “viral.” Somebody videoed her having a bad day and a good old-fashioned rant at the bell-ringer charity Santa parked in front of their three story brownstone. She even made the evening news, it turns out.

Their mail is filled with “Dear Santa Killer” wishes that she drop dead.

Well, “Merry G–damned Christmas” is all she can say to that.

Don’t know about you, but I’m in her corner, right from the get-go. An incessant beardless bell-ringer outside of my house? I’m either moving or “distractedly” driving up on the sidewalk to deal with that.

But no. “Twas the Night” doesn’t have that sort of edge. Or any edge.

Holly invites beardless Santa “Jesus” (Abel Rosario) in for a peace-offering of hot chocolate and cookies. Nick comes home, there’s an accident involving a laboriously-set-up “hang the decorations without a proper ladder,” and Santa’s down, there’s blood with Nick going “Who IS this?”

“JESUS” is Holly’s only appropriate response.

As there’s no pulse and lots of blood and four parents knocking at the door, let’s hide the body and get on with our holiday. Holly can’t call the cops. She “threatened” this guy and it was caught on camera.

“I’m not ACTUALLY going to kill someone,” she sputters on the phone to a hate caller. “It’s a figure of SPEECH, genius!”

That’s the tone the movie needs, the edge that Holly should play in every moment.

Alas Pringle and co-writers/directors Chris Rodriguez and Grant Rosado didn’t see that, and their general haplessness shows up everywhere else as well.

They blow punchlines, have scenes hit their edit point long after their payoff and can’t find anything funny to do with a body in a brownstone on the night before Christmas.

There are maybe two laughs here, both of them involving Holly, both with hints of Pringle going all Sherri Shepherd “angry Black woman.”

A bigger laugh is here, on the IMDB page, where one of the directors or some sap who wrote them a check “reviewed” this dog with “10 on a scale of one to ten.”

That’s as groaningly obvious as everything else about this staggering, stumbling corpse-on-two-legs of a movie, the worst Christmas film of them all.

Rating: unrated, a little blood, some profanity

Cast: Nicole Pringle, David S. Perez, Abel Rosario, Cynthia D. Perry, Lisa Panagopoulos, Paul Van Scott, James Lee Fronck.

Credits Scripted and directed by Chris Rodriguez and Grant Rosado. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:22

“Encanto” earned another $12M, nothing to brag about as it didn’t set the world on fire opening weekend either.

“Ghostbusters Afterlife” sagged to $10M.

“House of Gucci” went into foreclosure, pulling in a meager $6M.

That piece of piffle “Eternals” clawed its way to another $3M.

And in fifth place, $2 million in ticket sales to suckers for “Resident Evil” rebooted.

That’s basically half of what every movie playing last weekend earned on this weekend.

Things will pick up, but how much is anybody’s guess as “West Side Story” is sure to skew older and “National Champions” is the only other wide release.

Events surrounding college athletics and the idea of compensating “student athletes” have shifted so quickly that it’s a little surprising that a motion picture — which takes a few years to gestate, finance, cast and produce — could keep up and have anything relevant to say about the subject.

But the twisty gridiron drama “National Champions” manages that in a tale of idealism, ulterior motives, big money and a soap opera-sized cast of many moving parts. Well-cast, occasionally surprising and moderately suspenseful, as they say in sports, it “goes out a winner.”

It’s about a top-draft-choice-to-be quarterback (Stephan James of “If Beale Street Could Talk” and TV’s “Homecoming”) and his far-less celebrated roommate/teammate from the trenches (Alexander Ludwig of “Vikings”) staging a believable but well-planned escape from the team/media bubble of a Superdome-adjacent hotel, going online and announcing a strike.

As QB LaMarcus James tells his Missouri Wolves teammates, and stars among their scheduled foes for the Big Game a couple of days away, “I ain’t playing until they pay me.”

But wait, doesn’t a media darling like LJ get “name, image and likeness” money? Isn’t he about to land a fat NFL contract? Sure. He says he’s doing this for all of the players who take the risk, without even health insurance, with slim-to-none prospects of every getting that NFL signing bonus — guys like his roommate.

Lobbying other players with an evangelical fervor, he uses “collective action” and asks “You ever read ‘The Jungle?'” Somebody went to class if they’re taking inspiration from labor agitator Upton Sinclair’s early 20th century novel.

Everybody is blindsided by this. Other players are hard to convince, sniffing around for some other motive in LJ’s actions. “You can’t square-off with the entire system!” This little stunt “don’t make you Malcom X, bro.”

But in an impromptu press conference, the Wolves’ well-compensated, accomplished but “never won the Big One” coach (J.K. Simmons) looks personally hurt, sputtering “These kids don’t fully understand what they’re doing.” Privately, in war-room meetings with conference and NCAA officials, they get it. “He’s out to destroy the ‘student athlete’ designation,” “This could get out of hand” and “Where in hell IS he?”

If you follow college football at all, everyone in this is a recognizable “type” — the well-paid-but-not-quite-clued-in conference commissioner (David Koechner), the icy NCAA administrator protecting the status quo (Jeffrey Donovan), the assistant coach eyeing the chance to step up (Lil Rel Howery), the “helpful,” corrupt and in-the-loop booster (Tim Blake Nelson), the lawyer-fixer with all her arguments at the ready (Uzo Aduba).

Even the coach’s wife (Kristen Chenoweth), the one character flirting with caricature, has a hint of “sure” about her — once a trophy bride, now a monomaniacal workaholic’s afterthought.

There’s a tendency in Adam Mervis’s script, based on his play, for characters to launch into speeches, for players and coaches to quote the Bible, and for the complications to cross over into a season’s worth of soap opera.

Things get not just “out of hand,” but damned far-fetched at times.

But the lawyer, a Black woman, absolutely should be making the argument that football props up tens of thousands of kids in other sports who would never get a college education otherwise. A couple of pros (Super Bowl-winning QB Russell Wilson among them) almost certainly would speak up for the college kids. And even in-bed-with-the-NCAA ESPN would have to take LaMarcus’s call, putting him on Mike Greenberg’s show to make his case, point out how many houses his multi-millionaire coach has and demand that they “fix the system.”

“National Champions” isn’t set on the field, and that makes it something of a sermon at times — a LOT of times. But hiring stuntman-turned-director Ric Roman Waugh (“Shot Caller,” “Greenland,” “Angel Has Fallen”) insures that there’s a lot of movement and pop to even the hotel-room debates, even as those debates and “other” complications slow the movie down.

And Oscar -winner Simmons and James bring a crackling intensity that lets us feel what each has at risk, a quarterback who could be “Colin Kaepernicked” by the league he is hoping makes him rich, a coach who could lose his job, and maybe a house or two if he can’t inspire his players to play — for free.

It’s a sports movie that’ll make you think, and its release — cleverly-timed for the weekend when the only college tilt is the rare one with real “student athletes,” the Army/Navy game — invites fans to put down the beer, get off those Internet sports gambling sites, and think about what’s going on.

Fat chance? Sure. But hey, sometimes “only a movie” is a movie that has something worth hearing.

Rating: R for language throughout and sexual references

Cast: J.K. Simmons, Stephan James, Uzo Aduba, Alexander Ludwig, Lil Rel Howery, Jeffrey Donovan, David Koechner, Tim Blake Nelson, Timothy Olyphant and Kristen Chenoweth

Credits:Directed by Ric Roman Waugh, scripted by Adam Mervis, based on his play. An STX release.

Running time: 1:57

So I guess this year’s gay Christmas rom-com doesn’t have Kristen Stewart in it?

“Single All the Way” is a “Home for the Holidays” rom-com that’s “rom” enough, but entirely too safe to be anything other than Hallmark Channel fodder in the rom or com department.

A gay romance that pulls a TV-PG rating? Jerry Falwell must be fuming…in Hell.

Aside from “How far this country’s strolled down that Road to Tolerance” feeling, there isn’t much to this. But it has its moments and is perfectly PG in all the usual rom-com ways.

By that, I mean there’s a Britney dance and lip-sync scene, and Jennifer Coolidge shows up.

Michael Urie stars as Peter, an LA casting director/producer of ad campaigns for razors and such, summoned home for the holidays, to East Bridge or Bridgeport, New Hampshire, where his family lives, runs a very PG-rated bar and celebrates the Dickens out of Christmas every December.

Mom (Kathy Najimy of “Sister Act”) goes by “Christmas Carol” all season long.

Dad (Barry Bostwick) is such a tuned-out senior he’s never even heard of HGTV.

“Homosexual Gay TV Network?”

“Basically.”

“It’s not porn, is it?”

“Kinda.”

Peter was planning on bringing a beau home, but SOMEone turned out to be married and to have never told his wife who his sidepiece was. To save face, Peter talks his best-friend/roommate, children’s book-author and “Task Rabbit” on-call handyman Nick (Philemon Chambers) into traveling with him. His family adores Nick. He’s”a 10. And Peter’s a New HAMPSHIRE 10.”

Yes, they love and accept their “out” son, but the fact he can’t make a match that takes means “I’m this problem they have to solve.” And again, they adore Nick.

“Christmas Carol?” She’s arranged a blind date with the exercise coach/ski instructor hunk James (Luke Macfarlane), aka The Only Gay (Mom knows) in the Village.

“They” means EVERYbody — Dad, who gives Nick advice on who he should be with (Peter), siblings, nephews and nieces, all of whom conspire to make this Nick thing happen.

Aunt Sandy, played by the brassy Coolidge, is a theater type coming home to direct the local Christmas pageant, which she’s given the happy title “Jesus H. Christ.” She might need some help.

“All the world’s a stage, and most of us are desperately under-rehearsed!”

So Peter’s family is match-making, Peter is clicking with James on a date or two, there’s Christmas decorating and a show to rehearse. And Peter and Nick need to be thrown together to help Aunt Sandy save the show. Because, you know, they’re gay and it’s theater.

Yes, there are jokes about that and how nobody should leap to that conclusion. But come on, if the stereotype fits…

There’s a funny line here and there. Peter, for instance, keeps getting mid-date messages about all the stuff he’s missing by not being at home with the family. And Nick.

“You have FOMO,” James diagnoses.

“I DO. I’m a FOMOsexual!”

But this is pretty thin entertainment, just gay and funny enough for the heartland, a bit of an eye-roller for anyone not stuck in 2005. Even Coolidge can’t save it, and that’s saying something.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast. Michael Urie, Philemon Chambers, Luke Macfarlane, Barry Bostwick, Kathy Najimy and Jennifer Coolidge.

Credits: Directed by Michael Mayer, scripted by Chad Hodge. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

Here’s a peek into a world few Americans knew existed, a thriller built out of the cultural connection between two immigrant communities bonded by the racism each faced because “we were all brown.”

Writer/director/star Bari Kang‘s “The Scrapper” envisions a crime connection between Punjabi (often Sikh) human traffickers and Mexican drug cartels as an outgrowth of relationship dates back to the America of the early 1900s.

But despite having that novelty as a hook, the film he got out of all that is a formulaic slog, almost undistinguishable from any other indie thriller saddled with weak performances.

Kang stars as Jake, a metal scrapper who does salvage work as a job fresh out of prison. He and wife Kitt (Ava Paloma) have a baby on the way, and his hulking, mentally-challenged older brother JB (Gugun Deep Singh) lives with them, meaning money’s tight.

But Jake won’t relent and go back to work in the New York family scrapyard and trucking business his sister Linda (Allison Thomas Lee) now runs, because he’s all about going clean and they’re not. Like every “pull me back in” mob thriller ever made, events conspire to change Jake’s mind.

A new cartel heavy (Andhy Méndez) is throwing his weight around, and calling old debts in. Linda, who has been money laundering and the like for the cartel, has days to come up with an impossible sum.

So when a Sikh underling spies a big cash handoff between the Mexican mob and the Punjabi mob (Samrat Chakrabarti, Anil Kumar), Linda sees a chance to get out of their hole and lures safecracking ex-con Jake back in.

That burglary goes just wrong enough to start the bloodshed and upend every life wrapped up in this world.

The early scenes in Kang’s second indie crime feature — “Lucky” was the first — are static and dull, with the charisma-starved performances to match. Chakrabarti, whose son of a Punjabi mob boss is also passed off as a cop, has some real menace about him. Kang comes off as credibly blue collar, but “soft” in a crime film sense. And Mendez is saddled with an empty caricature of a character who smacks his lips and unloads long patches of exposition.

“You Punjabis fascinate me,” his Frankie pontificates. “You bring our drugs across the border, but you don’t sell them. You offer your own people a ‘new life’ in this country, only to enslave and abuse them.”

Yeah. And your point is?

The story’s too-predictable arc plays as a slower-than-slow set-up for a finale that’s bloody and at least a bit more exciting, if no more interesting, than what’s preceded it.

Kang’s unique gift to the cinema is in providing an entre to this Indo-Mexican-American world. We see the Sikh Khanda tattoo on Jake’s wrist, and watch his accomplice leave his kirpan behind lest their burglary turn into “armed robbery.” “Scrapper” gives us glimpses of Sikh culture and “code” — which somehow allows wriggle room for the Sikhs mixed in with the Punjabi mob’s wrongdoing. We duck into a New York Punjabi nightclub and later into a Sikh temple.

This could have been a B-movie of the “Eastern Promises” variety, America crime given a new twist via an under-represented (on film) immigrant class, with details that leave the viewer fascinated and appalled.

But the details here are confined to those “glimpses.” There are potential “our cuisine” meal scenes that never happen. The pace is mimicked by the unhurried lack of urgency in almost every scene. When a movie’s this slow, every moment of foreshadowing is underlined and notarized. Yes, we noticed the nail gun, thanks.

And the performances lack that pop that makes even an over-familiar plot play. Kang might have “hard ex-con” in him. But the director — him — doesn’t give him the closeups where he grits his teeth to do what a hard man’s gotta do. The script leaves out any interior life.

Instead, Jake tells us a little family history and Punjabi/Mexican history in voice-over and in married life “explainer” scenes at home.

That’s “The Scrapper” in a nutshell, a movie that tells us instead of showing us, that checks off waypoints on its played-out crime story journey, with almost everybody in it blank-faced and perfunctory as they recite all those explanations along the way.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Bari Kang, Ava Paloma, Allison Thomas Lee, Gugun Deep Singh, Samrat Chakrabarti, Anil Kumar and Andhy Méndez.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Bari Kang. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:26