Movie Nation

Projections were as low as $40 million and as high as $80.

Too low. Tom Hardy is a Money making marvel, Michelle Williams and Woody Harrelson deserve bonuses. Andy Serkis hath directed a blockbuster.

Yeah, “Let There be Carnage” is a noisy gory bore. A bit worse than the other genre bores that preceded it this year.

But it made more moolah than “Widow,” “Shang Chi,” any of them on opening weekend.

“Addams Family 2” pulled in $18, not awful. Not good at all.

“Shang Chi” fell off at long last but is over $206 domestically, total. $5.6 million this weekend.

Everybody watched the “Sopranos” prequel on HBO Max. But $5 million for the pilot to a new “Many Saints of Newark” series? Found money.

Figures from Exhibitor Relations.

One image I’ve never been able to shake from my memory, decades after reviewing a history of hip hop documentary, is the picture of young Tupac Shakur in ballet tights. The hardest of the hard rappers, “assassinated” according to some in the middle of his posturing, high-profile record label feud, was a coddled mama’s boy who took ballet lessons.

“Forever Rich” is a tense Dutch thriller about another hip hop tough guy whose pose runs up against harsh reality.

A streetwise (ish) kid, a mama’s boy, Rich has focused on one thing since childhood — hip hop fame. “Forever Rich” opens with a home video his doting mom (Hadewych Minis) took of him as a tween.

Adult (ish) Rich (Jonas Smulders, superb) is about to see the culmination of that dream — a sold-out show in his hometown, a Sony record deal pending, a baby boy and a baby mama in tow and a gaudy Rolex and gaudier Mercedes G-wagon among his prized possessions.

But Rich, whose “Forever Rich” tour is launching, is about to go through some things. In a long day and night, he is mugged by “1112 Street Soldiers,” allegedly teenaged fans (from his rough and poor 1112 postal code). He is videoed and ridiculed by them on social media.

The online humiliation — not taking into account there were four of them and they were armed and just Rich and his unarmed tour manager Tony (Daniël Kolf) — is swift and disastrous.

“Poser” (in Dutch, with English subtitles) is the most polite criticism.

They have his watch. They beat him up at knife point. They have his phone, and we know what idiot under-25s put on their phones, don’t we? It all starts crashing down around his ears.

And even before that is obvious, Rich instinctively reaches for revenge. He will get that damned watch back. He will punish the punks. He will video their defeat and rally social media to his cause and turn the tide. When the bored cops offer “no special treatment,” he will take matters into his own hands.

Yeah, that’ll work out. And tell me Hollywood isn’t salivating to remake this. That is one can’t-miss premise.

Over the course of that evening, Rich loses control of the narrative — his agent (Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing can’t control his smothering, alcoholic mother) — gets “friends” (employees) injured and endangered in his single-minded pursuit, and blunders again and again in learning Robert Palmer’s long-sung-about life lesson, “Wise men know that revenge does not taste sweet.”

I got a laugh out of Rich thinking he’s outsmarted the muggers, tracking his phone to a hotel, jumping a guy with the stand-out shoes he noticed during his beat down. Then the guy’s girlfriend shows up and drops Rich like a sack of…tulip bulbs.

Director and co-writer Shady El-Hamus (“About That Life”) isn’t shy about showing Rich’s infantile streak and his delusions of toughness. Auto-tuned, tattooed and grilled up, what do you want to bet there’s a tutu or two in his past, too?

But Rich instinctively grasps image and perception and the stakes involved. His idiotic lashing out, lunging this way and that, has a logic to it. If he can get that watch back, maybe humiliate a mugger, he can regain control of his narrative.

Laws broken, cops crossed and possible consequences for his actions? None of that matters. He’s that focused, has that much to lose. And he knows it even if the viewer is slack-jawed at the clumsy, out-of-his-depth extremes he will lunge into.

Sinem Kavus plays his latest girlfriend, mother of his child, and gives Anna an edge that suggests she’s only willing to take so much in clinging to her sugar daddy.

Kolf’s Tony is a voice of reason who instantly caves to every furious whim Rich pursues in getting even, and getting even online, with these masked punks who have set off a bomb in the middle of his finest hour.

Mustafa Duygulu plays “Appie,” Rich’s beefy head of security, a guy who might have embellished his own legend in getting the job but who has to put up or shut up when his paycheck is mugged in a parking garage, of all places.

But this is Smulders’ show, a performance that lets us see the myopia, mania and native cunning in play (or missing) in his single-minded pursuit of getting what’s his back.

There are hiccups in the narrative, and maybe a little more could be done emotionally with all Rich sees himself losing. But it’s still a riveting tale, one that will either be tidied up and streamlined or utterly botched in translation the moment Hollywood scripts a remake.

With a story as good as this one, you know they’ll take a shot.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Jonas Smulders, Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing, Hadewych Minis, Daniël Kolf, Mustafa Duygulu and Sinem Kavus

Credits: Directed by Shady El-Hamus, scripted by Shady El-Hamus and Jeroen Scholten van Aschat. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

Here’s one thing about bullying that “Runt” gets exactly right. There’s a conspiracy of silence among the kids who suffer from it, the ill-raised thugs who carry it out and today’s “let’s get this beatdown on video” insensate cretins whom we used to call “bystanders.”

Here’s another. It’s a teenager’s ultimate “Catch-22,” damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t dilemma. Speak up and the ostracization spreads among your classmates, the bullying gets worse as adults earn the sobriquet “clueless” and “ineffectual.” Fight back and you’re blamed. And the bullying gets worse. Duck and cower and you carry the shame forever. And the bullying gets worse.

“Runt” is a slightly exaggerated march through that war zone, an artistic kid picked on by a gang of jocks and threatened by the unfashionable suburban LA high school’s teachers who figure making him speak up about it is for his own good.

It’s entirely too “on the nose” to be very surprising, and the third act is a bit of a head-scratcher. But it feels lived-in, stumbled through and endured, rather like high school itself.

Disney Channel alumnus Cameron Boyce (“Gamer’s Guide to Pretty Much Everything”) stars as Cal, a smart kid living with a nurse single mom (we never see her face) and his beloved Australian cattle dog, aptly named Runt.

Cal is a talented artist and a focused kid who avoids the drugs that seem to be all around him at his school. He bags groceries in the afternoons and pines away for the cute, popular Gabby (Brianna Hildebrand) in the mornings.

As is the way of such movies, he can’t see the perfect match who keeps trying to catch his eye while right under his nose. I must add that casting cover girlish/runway-ready Nicole Elizabeth Berger (“The Place of No Words”) as Cecily undercuts the traditional “She’s dressed down, but wait till he REALLY sees her” MO of such movies.

The football team has decided that Cal is their ticket to a perfect season and are relentlessly threatening as they strong arm him into letting them cheat. When they’re caught, the clueless teacher leans on Cal and the kid’s tenuous grasp on a normal school experience is torn away.

Vic (Aramis Knight), the star QB who figures a major college will come calling if they have a perfect season, leads the gang that assaults and humiliates Cal at every turn, the more public the better, the more bruising he has to make up a lie to cover for.

A confrontation in the principal’s office reveals the insidious nature of Cal’s quandary. The jerk coach (Jason Patric) sides with his players and helps them carry off their cover up.

So much for making time with Gabby, who is Vic’s girlfriend, by the way. So much for getting to know the pretty Cecily, nicknamed “Home Schooled” by his classmates, especially his oafish friend Borgie (Cyrus Arnold).

So much for Gabby’s “come to my party” to “show them how none of this even bothers you.”

That party is where things seriously escalate in the classic bully-as-imagined-victim sense. For Cal and Cecily, school life becomes a living, physical and social-media assault nightmare.

You don’t have to know actor Boyce’s life story to find poignance in this story, the awful choices facing this kid and the future that’s being jeopardized by a gang of jocks who exist in high school’s version of “above the law.”

He’s superb at making us furious on his behalf, yelling at the screen for him to fight back. His performance and the screenplay are great at capturing how limited his options are and how ill-equipped your average high school kid is at dealing with this all-consuming, wholly personal disaster.

Cal takes stupid steps and makes poor choices because he won’t, he can’t, consult an adult on the matter.

Cecily has her own take on the situation, and Berger gets across somebody whose confidence or lack of it hides a rough home life that is her secret shame.

“Runt” has enough going for it that you may not be as bothered by its predictability, and worse, it’s melodramatic stumbles toward the finish line. But even with those shortcomings, the cast and the lived-in feel of this high school world conjured up by director and co-writer William Coakley make this “Runt” the pick-of-the-litter when it comes to movies about high school bullying.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Cameron Boyce, Nicole Elizabeth Berger, Brianna Hildebrand, Aramis Knight, Cyrus Arnold and Jason Patric.

Credits: Directed by William Coakley, scripted by Christian van Gregg, Armand Constantine and William Coakley. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:35

“The Guilty” is a solidly suspenseful police procedural thriller about a 911 call and what the dispatcher goes through to end the tragedy unfolding on the other end of the line.

Like other films of this subgenre — Halle Berry’s “The Call,” for instance — the action takes place in “real time,” from just before that dispatcher (Jake Gyllenhaal) gets the endangered woman on the phone, to that situation’s conclusion.

The first twist here is that LA operator #625, Joe Baylor, is a demoted LAPD cop, and the second is that he’s about to go through some things that have nothing to do with this temporary duty. He’s due in court, defending his career, the next day.

This adaptation of a Swedish thriller (“Den Skyldige”) takes us and Joe on something of a roller coaster ride of panic topped by panic, as caller “Emily” (the voice of Riley Keough) is unable to speak freely, and Joe snaps into his training like a seasoned professional, asking “Yes or no questions” to ascertain her threat level.

“Do you know the person you’re with? Do they have a weapon? Have you been abducted?”

“Guilty” sticks with Joe, barking rudely at his colleagues in the call center, scrambling to dispatch California Highway Patrol, trying to ascertain the make, color and type of vehicle Emily is in, guessing who is driving the car and has taken her, directing CHP to the highway they’re on.

A big complication and new California wrinkle in this Antoine Fuqua (scripted by Nic Pizzolatto) adaptation? The mountains around the city are on fire. Emergency services are overwhelmed. There’s smoke and ash and it’s the middle of the night. Just ID’ing a vehicle under those conditions is going to be nigh on impossible.

The script and Gyllenhaal’s performance of it establish Joe’s character in a few quick strokes, mostly earlier calls. He has the arrogance we’ve come to associate with the badge and an irritability earned through years of experience.

The caller in a stoned panic over the hellish breathing conditions and confusion of an apocalyptic fire gets a little “I understand, but it’s your own fault, isn’t it?” A bicycle who’s chosen this moment to get earns an even more snappish “don’t ride your bike drunk, ass—e!”

Joe reaches out to officers on duty (Ethan Hawke voices his sergeant and former watch commander, Eli Goree plays his old partner), tries to get his ex on the phone so that he can tell his daughter “Good night,” fends off calls from a persistent newspaper reporter and becomes more agitated as the night wears on.

That’s when he starts crossing lines, urging others into dangerous, unadvisable actions or behavior that breaks the law.

Some of the third act twists in this I went with, and some seem inorganic — shoved in as a way of piling up surprises.

The heated arguments with assorted other dispatchers in his office, and on the phone from other agencies, point toward “maybe this isn’t the job for you.” And yet the guy’s experience in the field sends him to the right database here, the right “guess who took her” there.

Gyllenhaal makes Joe fascinating to watch, pretty much first scene to last, pretty much stuck in one location and on (more or less) one set. Joe curses and barks at other adults, but he softens considerably when he gets Emily’s little girl phone, assuring her that everything’s going to be OK, trying to convince her that “we,” the police, “we protect people who need help,” even if the kid isn’t buying it.

The ground covered is a tad overfamiliar, Gyllenhaal’s reactions predictably over the top and even the tropes of the genre (“real time”) can seem unsurprising and overplayed. But Fuqua makes every minute of screen time count, maintaining the suspense and claustrophobia even in those stretches where he takes the foot off the gas.

Rating: R, for language (profanity) throughout

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Christina Vidal and Adrian Martinez, and the voices of Riley Keough, Peter Sasrgaard, Ethan Hawke and Da’Vine Joy Randolph.

Credits: Directed by Antoine Fuqua, scripted by Nic Pizzolatto, based on the Swedish film “Den Skyldige,” scripted by Emil Nygaard Gustav Möller. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

George MacKay, Lily-Rose Depp and Paddy Considine star in this mental hospital romance between people suffering from species identity disorder.

Who knew, right?

This one, from the director of “Nocturnal,” comes out Dec. 3, in limited release.

This holiday release looks lovely.

“Venom: Let There Be Carnage” is wanton slaughter lightened by monstrous zingers delivered in a growl that needs subtitles, a colossal waste of talent in front of the camera and not exactly a resume builder behind it.

Seriously, I hope the talented Tom Hardy bought himself an island — or a better agent — with this.

This noisy, collateral damage-cluttered sequel lives down to its name as a second alien “Symbiote” like Venom, named “Carnage,” takes up residence inside of Woody Harrelson‘s elaborate wig. Woody plays a serial killer named Cletus Kasady.

And as he’ll be the first to tell you, “People LOVE serial killers!”

Cletus killed lots of folks over a long period of time before Carnage came calling. And he got caught and is now awaiting execution in San Quentin. Yes, he’s so evil that California amended its death penalty laws just for him.

That’s how hapless reporter Eddie Brock (Hardy) ends up in the cell block with an exclusive interview. And that’s when the serial killer takes a bite out of the reporter (hazard of the profession) and that bite is what creates Carnage.

Shy, mopey Eddie still misses Anne (Oscar winner Michelle Williams), but she’s taken up with the more suitable Dan (Reid Scott).

Even Cletus has a lady love. Or had one. He’s obsessed with reconnecting with his equally-disturbed other half, Francis (Naomie Harris). Does he know her “special power?” He will when they get back together. There’s a reason he names her “Shriek.”

Stephen Graham is an actor ill-suited for comic book movies trapped in a comic book movie playing a cop trapped between a dangerous reporter and a dangerous serial killer.

Venom? He’s still a nag, calling his host body a “loser” for losing his girlfriend and refusing to sate his symbiote’s appetites for human flesh and brains.

“We should out there, protecting the city — LETHALLY!”

Eddie just wants to set boundaries.

“This is a ME thing, not a WE thing.”

Bodies are flung about, pierced, beheaded and generally violated as our two symbiotes act up and act out on their way to their host-and-symbiote showdown.

Actor-turned-director Andy Serkis delivered a noisy, bloody and brisk visit to this corner of the Marvel universe. All these characters, all this “carnage” and he only burned through 98 or so minutes of our time. But that’s still 98 minutes wasted.

The story’s simple through line exposes how inept screenwriter Kelly Marcel (“Fifty Shades of Grey” is quite the um, recommendation) is about finding entertaining things to show us as we march from Point A to Point B.

Serkis works in a Hunchback of Notre Dame, with a King Kong chaser, visual homage. But the fights are in the hands of digital animators, with all the brawls staged in gloom and the action lapsing into a blur.

The ladies acquit themselves well, with Williams finding the humor in all this mayhem and Harris (Miss Moneypenny, to you.) committing heart, soul and voice to Shriek.

But if most comic book adaptations have trouble being “about” something, the “Venoms” have that problem in spades. This is, what, Eddie Brock killing his way out of his shyness?

Every beef anybody might have with the genre is writ large in the two “Venom” movies, something “Let There Be Carnage” underscores with extreme prejudice. This is visually incoherent ugliness played for laughs that just aren’t there.

Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some strong language (profanity), disturbing material and suggestive references

Cast: Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Naomie Harris, Reid Scott, Stephen Graham, Peggy Lu and Woody Harrelson.

Credits: Directed by Andy Serkis, scripted by Kelly Marcel. A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:38

One cannot help but be struck by what a beautifully animated film “The Addams Family 2” is.

From the photo-realistic scenery (including The Grand Canyon), the sheen on Gomez Addams’ hair and suit, the marvelous baroque-meets-art-deco design of the family RV, the cute visual take on Charles Addams’ New Yorker cartoon characters down to the ghostly-ghoul buttons on Uncle Fester’s overcoat, Cinesite Animation really outdid itself here.

The story, a sort of Wednesday’s tween rebellion inspires a cross country family road trip? Sure. Fine.

But the sight gags and one-liners? There’s barely a laugh in the thing, and I’m not kidding about that.

A Big Name Voice Cast has almost nothing even faintly amusing to say or play. The overall tone is pleasantly light, but the giggles are all gone.

I almost chuckled when Morticia (Charlize Theron) lectures Uncle Fester (Nick Kroll) about diving into dinner.

“Fester, now, let’s wait for the children.”

“Children? I thought we were having CHICKEN?”

And the best sight gag, a variation of one edited out of the original film, has Wednesday (Chloe Grace Moretz) finding a fresh way to torture brother Pugsley (Javon Walton, this time) at the beach. That elaborate sand sculpture she’s luring him into?

It’s a guillotine made of sand.

The first act sets up Wednesday’s general disdain for all things “family,” Gomez in a panic over it, Wednesday’s school science fair experiment attracting the attentions of a tech billionaire (Bill Hader, wasted in the part) and his minion (Wallace Shawn) and the suggestion the girl might have been switched at birth.

Wednesday? She’s in a mild-mannered tizzy over the participation trophy nature of the science competition, in which she mixed the DNA of her brilliant pet octopus with that of dim bulb Uncle Fester.

“How can there be a WINNER if nobody LOSES?”

Her sulking is what inspires the road trip. First stop, Niagara Falls, “the great wonder of the world that kills the most tourists!” Having fun, Wednesday?

“I’m staring at Canada, if that answers your question.”

The family hits Miami Beach, San Antonio (where Wednesday is booked into a “Little Miss Jalapeno” pageant, almost funny) and onward, chased by the persistent minion of the tech billionaire even as Uncle Fester slowly morphs into an octopus, one prone to “toilet” (octopus ink) accidents.

As Wednesday might put it, “Hilarious.”

Three writers are credited on the script, and from the looks of things, many more were needed to joke this up. A good kids’ cartoon silences its underaged audience between laugh-out-loud gags. This doesn’t. There’s barely enough going on to hold their attention, judging from the crowd I saw this with.

It’s understandable that MGM would want to make a sequel to their sleeper smash of a couple of years ago. It’s laudable that they stuck with the same animation house that made that one, giving them another fine visual showcase. But it’s unforgivable that MGM would do a rush job sequel and waste all this glorious animation on a corpse of a kids’ comedy.

Rating: PG for macabre and rude humor, violence and language

Cast: The voices of Oscar Isaac, Charlize Theron, Chloe Grace Moretz, Nick Kroll, Javon Walton, Bill Hader, Snoop Dogg, Bette Midler and Wallace Shawn

Credits: Directed by Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon, scripted by Dan Hernandez, Ben Queen and Benji Samit. An MGM release.

Running time: 1:33

“Memoirs of a Black Girl” is an earnest micro-budget indie melodrama, a “film festival film” of earnest intent if modest means.

If the ambition to punch above its weight were enough, it might pass muster. But unpolished performances, incessant and inane voice-over narration and obvious plot twists pointing at an equally obvious conclusion ensure that it never escapes its featherweight class.

Khai Tyler stars as Aisha, an over-achiever in her corner of Roxbury, Boston, a teen with Harvard dreams.

Her working class Caribbean mom might not be able to make that wish come true. But there’s a big scholarship in play. If Aisha can maintain her perfect grades and ace the SAT, everything might work out for the best.

But there’s a corner of this predominantly Black high school that hates her “Wikipedia” guts. Mean girl Rudi (Juliette Estime) and her posse have it in for our girl. Grades, her supportive teachers, her BFFs Marcus (Nicholas Walker) and Marisa (Carolina Soto) and “Black girl magic” might not be enough to change Aisha’s destiny.

First-time feature writer-director Thato Rantao Mwosa hurls one melodramatic obstacle after another at our heroine. Her brother’s (Juvan Elisma) always in trouble with the law. And there’s that one time she has to go to the bathroom mid-class, and gets bathed in the scent of pot that Rudi and her minions are smoking, threatens to bring her dreams to an end.

When she’s accused, there’s nothing for it but to “rat them out.” As we all know how impossible it is for a school to keep a secret, Aisha finds herself dealing with online and bus-ride harassment and threats.

We may have heard “Snitches get stitches” a thousand times before, but when drug confiscations, expulsions and arrests compound this “snitching,” we can see Aisha is in serious trouble.

Mwosa does her best to put our heroine in peril, but weak performances — especially by the heavies — defeat her. We never truly fear for Aisha’s fate.

Marcus is, of course, gay and his parents don’t know. Of course. The film’s one light moment might be subjecting the kid to his parents’ and church’s attempts to “pray the gay away.” Even that seems pre-ordained, as if every high school movie has to have not just a character like this, but this very character facing the same treatment such characters have faced in films for 30 years.

The high school depicted here never seems real, the bane of many a tiny-budget motion picture. But how much does it cost to loop in students-in-the-hallway noise to make the place feel lived-in? More attention was paid to the hip hop included in the score than the actual soundtrack. Dudley High sounds like the waiting room of a funeral parlor.

Voice-over narration is a crutch a lot of inexperienced filmmakers lean on, and Mwosa doesn’t escape that trap. She’s constantly having Tyler narrate scenes that visually make the points that the narration is merely repeating, or serve up sentiments that sound trite when someone allegedly high school age announces them to the world.

That goes for the rest of the dialogue. You can appreciate “This ‘aim for the stars’ stuff is for rich white girls, not me” for its sentiment, not for its eye-rolling obviousness and unoriginality. Almost every word out of a teacher’s mouth in this is “After School Special” insipid.

The violence is laughably short of anything a stunt crew or much better actors could have faked.

All that said, the picture moves and the story unfolds apace. The characters, “types” or not, are engaging and the players make us care what happens to them, somewhat.

But that label “film festival film” kept popping into mind watching “Memoirs of a Black Girl,” as in “This isn’t bad. It’s exactly the sort of little film we root for at film festivals.” It’s just not good enough to warrant release outside of them.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity.

Cast: Khai Tyler, Nicholas Walker, Carolina Soto, Juvan Elisma, Juliette Estime

Credits: Scripted and directed by Thato Rantao Mwosa. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:16

Perhaps your first reaction upon stumbling onto “The Assignment” was the same as mine.

“How did THIS trainwreck escape my notice?” in 2016-17 when it was released?

But right there in the opening credits, we see that “Warriors” and “48 Hours” and “Wild Bill” director Walter Hill is in charge. And it’s showing us a solid B-list cast that includes Sigourney Weaver, Anthony LaPaglia and Tony Shaloub.

And hell, it’s not every day that star Michelle Rodriguez gets to play full frontal nudity scenes as a male, and a female.

Yes, this is “that” movie, one labeled “transphobic” thanks to its subject matter — a hitman (Rodriguez) kills the wrong person, and wakes up a trans woman thanks to a skilled and vengeful sex change surgeon (Weaver).

The protests over this seem misguided, but I’m not transgender and can make no claim to extra sensitivities on the subject. You look at that cast and you know there’s no way they saw it those terms.

It’s just a very bad movie, so bad that it probably ended an aged action director’s career, as Hill’s “Dead for a Dollar,” his follow up, was filmed and is still listed as in post production five years later.

If, like me, you saw “The Warriors” and found it a life-changing film, you can see straight off what Hill, who co-scripted this, was going for. He did “Johnny Handsome,” a criminally-neglected modern film noir that’s well worth tracking down. It’s about a career criminal, a born underling, whose life is changed when a plastic surgeon (Forest Whitaker) transforms him into Mickey Rourke.

But everything about this story goes wrong, almost from the start. The opening tough guy voice over doesn’t sell it or Rodriguez as a hardboiled, soul dead contract killer. Michael Shannon’s “Iceman” is the definitive, realistic archetypal mob murderer-for-hire.

Just meeting Rodriguez as Frank Kitchen renders the film “nothing I’m sitting through” in those first scenes, “full frontal” or not.

The frame of the movie is a shrink (Shaloub) interviewing the straight-jacketed, imprisoned doctor (Weaver) who did the deed. She’s in prison, telling a story.

That’s deathly dull. And no matter how many flashbacks, not wholly artless in their execution, they can’t overcome that duller than dull framework, the banal dialogue, the sense that a lot of people involved maybe had second thoughts about the whole enterprise (perhaps they did decide it was transphobic) once filming got under way.

As Hill was a producer on the original “Alien” franchise and is widely credited as the smart cookie who said “Let’s make Ripley a woman,” thus ensuring its place as a landmark sci-fi/horror thriller and making Weaver a full fledged film star, we can see how “Assignment” came together.

But the question it never fully answers is why?

This had any number of ways it could have been improved in script and pre-production planning. Have Frank Kitchen make the decision to undergo the sex change to escape those hunting him down is a start. Introduce Rodriguez as the post sex-change Frank, sexually active and still into women, perhaps seeing the need to cover her tracks by killing off anybody who knows her secret.

Yes, transgender characters can be villains. And shifting the movie to the present day would limit Rodriguez’s scenes as a somewhat unconvincing man, thinning out the flashbacks where that is necessary.

But again, going back to “Johnny Handsome,” I see what Hill saw in this idea and its not as dubious as it seems in this form.

Scene after scene of that underworld milieu (LaPaglia is right at home here) is rendered laughable by “Frank” not convincing anyone he’s butch enough to be a butcher.

Hill made a science fiction film (“Event Horizon”) that was so bad he took his name off it. This is, if anything, worse. This isn’t “Peeping Tom,” a daring if misguided and transgressive thriller that all but ended the career of Michael Powell (“Black Narcissus,” “The Red Shoes”). It’s a disaster that just besmirches the memory of films from “Hard Times” and “The Driver” to “Southern Comfort” and “Last Man Standing.” Damned shame Walter Hill had to go out like this, “transphobic” or not.

Rating: R for graphic nudity, violence, sexuality, language and drug use

Cast: Michelle Rodriguez, Sigourney Weaver, Tony Shaloub, Anthony LaPaglia

Credits: Directed by Walter Hill, scripted by Walter Hill and Denis Hamill. A Saban Films release on Tubi, other streamers

Running time: 1:35