Movie Nation

There are EIGHT credited screenwriters for “Major Grom: Plague Doctor.” You know what they call that in Mother Russia and its satellite state of Kentucky?

SOCIALISM.

Imagine a “Batman” in which Alfred the Butler is the real caped “crusader,” a masked vigilante fighting the injustice of a corrupt city. Tell that creep’s story from the point of view of the rebel cop, Major Grom, hunting this “villain/hero,” a gadget-loving goon who calls himself “The Plague Doctor,” and you’ve got this two hour and twenty minute goulash of an action comedy.

It’s not credited as a comic book on the disastrously-redesigned IMdb, and I didn’t see Netflix acknowledge that either. But it is. You can tell, and not just from the title, which ineptly suggests the titular “hero” is both Major Grom AND the Plague Doctor.

No. Major Grom is the recurring character and hero. The Plague Doctor is his latest toughest foe. Better translation of title? “Major Grom vs. The Plague Doctor.”

It’s an over-the-top bore about an over-the-top /no-rules cop (Tikhon Zhiznevskiy) who chases down clown-masked bank robbers on foot — they’re in a van, spilling rubles all over St. Petersburg. He almost dies — we think he has — in that opening caper. But inside the coffin or out, he’s got a job to do.

Because SOMEbody is killing off Russia’s legions of unreachable, politically-protected villains — a callously drunken son of an oligarch, a fatcat polluter, rich and corrupt this, rich and venal that. Yes, to the West, THAT guy sounds like the hero.

The Plague Doctor (Dmitriy Chebotarev) posts his executions online on this new, free-speech and privacy-protecting social media site. The twist? He’s the deranged, self-righteous underling of the tech genius (Sergei Goroshko) who founded that social media network. And tech mogul is threatened into silence by that murderous, vigilante underling.

Major Grom has to fend off firing threats by his commissar-sized boss (Aleksey Maklakov), the clinging “trainee” (Alexander Seteykin) who insists “We’re PARTNERS,” and the social justice warrior and rebel online reporter Yulia (Lyubov Aksyonova) whose scoops are making the inept, trigger-happy cops look bad.

The funniest bits are in the police station itself, a milieu where factoids like “one in five people in detention are here by mistake” and one suspect complains (in Russian with English subtitles, or dubbed, “Seriously officer, we don’t go to jail for domestic violence in Russia!”

Hilarious.

The script is otherwise just nonsense-in-motion. The set-pieces are noisy, messy deployments of Bugs Bunny Physics that aren’t the most exciting or visually coherent chases/fights I’ve ever seen. The best of those is a clever montage of Grom kicking down doors all over town in an “I need INFORMATION” fury.

“Who ARE you, a superhero?”

No, just a comic book one. And afairky bland one at that. He is Riggs in “Lethal Weapon” with a cute cap and no edge. None.

In abler hands, this vigilante “Doc” could have been that rarest of creatures, the villain with a sympathetic point of view. Magneto in Russian, avenging himself on a kleptocracy and the Gremlin in the Kremlin who rules it.

But no. Again, eight screenwriters, plus the actor weighing in.

Perhaps the Russians should stick to that which their cinema is famous for — brooding romances, laments for the long lost glories of communism, and fake viral videos. This comic book adaptation thing evades them.

MPA Rating: TV-14

Cast: Tikhon Zhiznevskiy, Alexander Seteykin, Sergei Goroshko, Aleksey Maklakov and Dmitriy Chebotarev

Credits: Directed by Oleg Trofim, script by Vladimir Besedin, Evgeny Eronin, Artyom Gabrelyanov, Aleksandr Kim, Roman Kotkov, Nikolay Titov, Oleg Trofim and Valentina Tronova. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:16

A bucket list inheritance comedy with a twist? July 30.

Dolled up and dead? July 23 this one hits theaters etc.

A September release about a multi million dollar coupon scam.

This hits Apple TV+ in late August.

Interesting choice for JGL.

“Downeast” is an indie thriller so simple as to be elemental.

It’s about a small town under the thumb of a local gangster, a crime long-ago covered-up and heroin headed for Boston’s rough and ever-so-Italian “North End.” The setting, the frosty lobster port of Long Island, Maine, just gives it a lived-in feel.

The Long Island depicted in the movie is a place “the young people” flee, so that there’s nothing left but lobstermen and the waterfront bars where they drink the chill off.

The first man we meet is the guy who “runs” this place. “Every town is built on bad decisions,” Kerrigan (Judson Mills, a “Walker, Texas Ranger” survivor) narrates. “And I built this town, brick by brick.”

He sees himself as being the lifeblood on Long Island, bringing in money, controlling not only the street trade but the trans-shipment of drugs down to Boston.

Tommy (Greg Finley) might’ve been a contender, once upon a time. He doesn’t box anymore. He works his dad’s boat, the Wild Irish Rose. And he pours the old drunk (Gareth Williams) into his pickup after every night’s beer-and-many-many “bumps.”

His old crush, Emma (Dylan Silver) is back in town. But their history isn’t a happy one. He’s just one of many locals who “didn’t talk” when her brother died, years before. And now, as he’s finding wrapped packages of drugs in his father’s lobster traps and facing new questions from Emma about what happened to Mikey, past and present are about to hit him all at once.

Finley, of “Blackjack: The Jackie Ryan Story,” came up with the story for “Downeast.” He plays a character pressed from all sides, the guy who hears or overhears every pithy line various bad guys mutter.

“Sometimes a man’s gotta do what he doesn’t want to do.”

Mills has the chewiest part, with writer-director Joe Raffa (“Dark Harbor”) stashing him away for use in scenes where he has the most impact, unloading almost every quotable line on Kerrigan.

“You can shear a sheep many times, you can only skin it once,” he counsels his minions, who need to keep their supplies of drugs and anxious customers alive to keep consuming them.

The biggest problem with being the big fish in this very small pond? “There’s always a bigger fish” in the bigger pond nearby.

The story clips along, never feeling rushed, never letting its over-familiar elements overwhelm its chief virtue, that setting described in the title — Downeast.

The resolution is entirely too pat, the romantic complications more detailed than you’d expect or that seems absolutely necessary. But if you like your thrillers compact and geographically distinct, “Downeast” delivers the goods.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug content, profanity.

Cast: Greg Finley, Dylan Silver, Judson Mills, Gareth Williams, Joss Glennie-Smith, Joe Holt and Kirk Fox

Credits: Scripted and directed by Joe Raffa. An APS release.

Running time: 1:29

A24 picked this up, it played at Cannes, and looks wonderful — an expansion of Kilmer’s recent breezy autobiography.

“Secret Magic Control Agency” is an animated comedy that works up its own “wizarding world” for a fanciful spin on alternate lives for fairytale siblings Hansel and Gretel.

The animation is polished 3D/CG, with tactile, pliable plastic-looking humans and dogs, candy and cookie characters and settings and a candy-coated color palette.

Laughs? Not really. It’s aimed at very young children, so “cute” is about as far as it goes. But as time-killers go, it’s harmless.

Gretel (voiced by Sylvana Joyce), is a top agent with the titular agency, an organization that licenses and monitors all the magicians, potions and “tricks” in the kingdom. She’s the one Agent Stepmother (Georgette Reilly) puts on the case when the pastry-loving king (Marc Thompson) is kidnapped.

But Gretel can’t find him and the magician who kidnapped him with “black magic” on her own. Agent Stepmother decrees that she arrest and work with her wayward “charlatan” brother, Hansel (Nicholas Courtney Shaw).

They set off, bickering like siblings, in search of clues. There is an…accident, in a potion storage facility. Their job gets tougher because they’ve reverted to childhood.

The crone in the woods Baba Yaga (Mary O’Brady) who was nearly their downfall in the “traditional” version of the fairytale must be questioned. If they can avoid her stock pot.

“Kids, pretty plump and TASTY.”

But if they work together, maybe the evil Ilvira or Elvira (Erica Schroeder) will be foiled and the king will make it back to the palace in time for his sugar rush birthday.

Talking cupcakes, gingerbread soldiers, candy cane pillars and icing icing everywhere make up the design. There’s a gadget guru who offers the team magical classes and “anti-stray” pebbles (stones that light up and keep you from losing your way back home).

Inside gags include that potions room, a repository of “real magic” where the Sword in the Stone and Aladdin’s lamp are kept under lock and key. “Transformations” pop up here and there as the story meanders about, adding characters and critters and middling set pieces.

The most “adult” joke is a “don’t forget to rate your rideshare.”

“Harmless” is what you hope for in a 6-and-under cartoon, and this one passes that test — the characters (if not the voice cast) are a moderately diverse lot.

The animation isn’t on a par with the Big Leagues, nor is the story or the passable-but-nothing-extra voice acting. It’ll play as dull to all but the youngest, least discrimination viewers.

If you need a Netflix babysitter, that’s about all “Secret Magic Control Agency” is good for.

MPA Rating: TV-Y7

Cast: The voices of Sylvana Joyce, Nicholas Courtney Shaw, Alyson Leigh Rosenfeld, Bella Hudson, and Marc Thompson.

Credits: Directed by Aleksey Tsitsilin, script by Analisa LaBianco and Vladimir Nikolaev. A Wizarts production for Netflix.

Running time: 1:45

An old woman is tormented to death and her tormenters are lured into dialing her up in her grave as punishment in “The Call,” a thriller so derivative it gives “derivative” a bad name.

It’s another “face your personal nightmares” tale, another script inspired by “Long Distance Call,” a “Twilight Zone” episode and somewhat less interesting than any other movie by this title — and there’ve been a few.

Chester Rushing plays Chris, the “new kid in town,” who arrives at Willow Falls High School in mid-school year, and under a cloud. But flirty Tanya (Erin Sanders) doesn’t know that. She invites him to join “tough guy” Zach (Mike Manning) and his obedient brother Brett (Sloane Morgan Siegel) for a night at the carnival, with a little added “fun” to finish off the evening.

Tanya’s little sister disappeared years before, and she blames the day care operator who last saw her. Let’s go over and toss bricks through her windows!

The old woman, played by horror legend Lin Shaye, confronts them, refuses to back down and rages “As much as you hate me, I hate you more.”

But she’s suffered from this sort of judgment and abuse for years, and the love of her husband (horror legend Tobin Bell) isn’t enough to placate her. She takes her life.

So the husband summons the kids to the house for a proposition. Go upstairs, make a call to a number he’s provided, and stay on the phone for a full minute. They have to do this one-by-one, but the payoff for anybody sturdy enough to last that long is $100,000, which was seriously money back in 1987.

The catch? Mr. Cranston installed a landline to his late wife’s grave. If anybody answers, “You don’t have to worry about me,” he whispers.

The quartet of kids will have face the terrors of their childhood, conventional but horrific, each in their own way. Will they survive revisiting those during “The Call?”

Shaye plays the harassed woman with her usual (limited range) panache, and nobody whispers propositions or threats like Mr. Jigsaw himself, Bell. The rest of the players? Meh.

Shaye and Bell lift this thin, over-familiar material, but not enough to compensate for the trite terrors that turn up, the dead spots in the narrative and cardboard characters one and all are saddled with playing.

Don’t leave a message, don’t answer the phone, don’t make “The Call.”

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Chester Rushing, Erin Sanders, Mike Manning, Sloane Morgan Siegel, Tobin Bell and Lin Shaye

Credits: Directed by Timothy Woodward Jr., script by Patrick Stibbs. A Voltage, a Shudder release.

Running time: 1:37

You don’t have to be into the art rock/glam rock/proto-punk synth pop pranksters Sparks to get a kick out of “The Sparks Brothers,” the definitive documentary history that fanboy Edgar Wright created in their honor.

The director of “Shaun of the Dead,” “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” and “Hot Fuzz” is enthusiastic enough for all of us. And in this playful, insightful and thorough film — it’s two hours and twenty minutes long — that enthusiasm is contagious.

What Wright does — in telling us the story of Ron and Russell Mael, quirky Californians who blew up in Europe and never quite got there in North America — is let us share his and other generations of Sparks fans the delight of discovery.

In the ’70s and ’80s, most of us ran across Sparks the same way — on TV. “Oh, the band with Hitler on keyboards. You have GOT to see this!” Legions of their fans, from Wright and Mike Myers to Jane Wiedlin, Weird Al Yankovic, Fred Armisen, Flea and Beck, recount their encountering this “eccentric,” “mysterious” and “quite interesting, but you can’t quite put your finger on it” duo.

Many of us gave their odd art-rock/glam-act processed-vocals tunes a listen, a laugh and a pass. But others, many of them giving on-camera testimonials here, took the tack that early producer Todd Rundgren embraced.

“It’s this weird? Isn’t this great?”

The Maels? They just kept on changing, trying new styles, almost always ahead of the musical curve as they did it. They started out as the Halfnelsons (not their first band) sounding a lot like The Kinks, with a Zappa/Captain Beefheart sensibility. And every year or three, they’d evolve into something new, always with these satire-centric stage performances that played up Russell’s pop star handsome face and songwriter/keyboardist Ron’s ludicrous Fuhrer look.

That became their mystique. Actor Jason Schwartzman appears here and declares he doesn’t want to see this movie because he wants to preserve that mystery, but he “will see it, because I’m in it.”

That play-it-as-a-lark tone fits the music, appearing on LPs with titles like “Kimono My House,” “A Woofer in Tweeter’s Clothing” and “Angst in my Pants” (25 albums, over 500 songs in all). And it matches the movie, which uses comical moments from their stage shows, clay stop-motion animation, archival footage and fresh interviews to tell their story.

The songs can be deep, were often ahead of their time, and wryly comment on their pursuit of rock/pop stardom and just what it’s all about, this “business” of a music career that started in the ’60s and continues to this day approached through “creative recklessness.”

The suggestion that Sparks needed to make “music you can dance to” prompted them to cook up “Music That You Can Dance To,” described by British DJ Jonathan Ross as “a perfectly crafted sell-out pop song. — except that it isn’t.” Sparks could work in many a pop idiom, master it and mock it all at the same time.

They changed record companies constantly, and with every change, the backing band changed. Many of those musicians appear here, cheerfully grateful for their place in this story, not terribly resentful at their interchangeability.

In “Dick Around,” when singer/frontman Russell sings Ron’s lyrics, “All I do now is dick around,” he’s speaking a truth, ridiculing the fact that he’s letting us look behind the curtain, and celebrating the fact that guys their age (guys in their ’70s) still get to do just that — record, perform, put a lot of effort into repetitious tunes that sound like no effort at all.

They grew up on films, went to UCLA and at various points almost made movies with Jacques Tati (“Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday”) and Tim Burton (an adaptation of the manga “Mai”), and finally have one coming out this year (“Annette”). That should top their screen debut, as an amusement park band in the ’70s bomb “Rollercoaster.”

But they needn’t fret over their legacy and whether, as a “cult band” they’ll be remembered. Wright has paid the ultimate fan homage to Sparks here, a movie so adoring and infectiously fun that they’ll live on in the “music films” queue, later the “classics,” when it finally arrives on Netflix for as long as there is a Netflix.

Cast: Russell Mael, Ron Mael, Todd Rundgren, Jane Wiedlin, Giorgio Moroder, Pamela Des Barres, Mike Myers, Weird Al Yankovic, Jason Schwartzman, Beck, Flea

Credits: Directed by Edgar Wright. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:20