Movie Nation

Like the Italian footballer who is its subject, “Baggio: The Divine Ponytail” leaves one feeling unsatisfied, as if we’ve seen a life and a movie that are incomplete.

A biography of one of Italy’s most beloved soccer stars, but one who never took The Big Brass Ring (winning the World Cup), “Ponytail” sets out to chart his many journeys — professional, psychological and spiritual. Letizia Lamartire’s 90+ minute film doesn’t really do justice to any of them.

We’re left with a perpetually poker-faced Baggio (Andrea Arcangeli) with “please my unencouraging father” issues, an injury-and-confidence-plagued star who takes up Buddhism as a way of coping, and a legend frustrated by the asterisk attached to his storied career.

The film poorly dramatizes his youthful embrace of Buddha, thanks to a proselytizing record shop owner (Riccardo Goretti) and leaves hints of what he might have gotten from a later spiritual advisor (Thomas Trabacchi) without sinking its teeth into the subject.

Was the filmmaker, like Catholic Italy, keeping Buddhism at arm’s length? The film doesn’t even make much of his adoption of his signature look — the ponytail that he wore in dreads even as he turned grey over his decades of playing.

His stern, remote father (Andrea Pennacchi) was the one the boy of three promised to atone for Italy’s loss in the 1970 World Cup by winning “the World Cup, against Brazil, for you” some day. That’s a big goal, and Dad never let him forget it. But “tough love” was his way.

“You’re not better than your brother,” he reminds the 18 year-old who’d signed the biggest contract ever seen. “He busts his ass at the factory!”

His home life with his first and only love, Adreina (Valentina Bellè) is glimpsed, but little more that that.

The right word for Arcangeli’s performance, which sets the tone for the film, is “mopey.”

The little snatches of soccer recreated for the screen are half-speed (there are more shots of fans at home or in bars watching the games on TV) and the Baggio Arcangeli gives us is melodramatic — “If you love me, kill me,” he tells his parents after his first (teen) injury. He is also nonplussed at his World Cup coach (Antonio Zavatteri) who is “crazy” for not exploiting his open-field “skills in dribbling” and misuses his star, who is, he assures Baggio, “like Maradona (of Argentina), fundamental to the team.” But his “temper” is more Buddhist resignation than fury.

Which is to say this isn’t so much an unflattering portrait of a great “artist” of the soccer pitch, as one that isn’t the least bit flattering either.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Andrea Arcangeli, Valentina Bellè, Thomas Trabacchi, Andrea Pennacchi, Riccardo Goretti and Antonio Zavatteri

Credits: Directed by Letizia Lamartire, script by Ludovica Rampoldi and Stefano Sardo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

Pity the fools who can’t appreciate the magnificent mayhem of “The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard,” the screaming, bustierre-busting glories of Salma Unleashed.

Whatever middling “charms” the carnage-packed caper “The Hitman’s Bodyguard” wrung out of pairing up Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson in 2017, casting Salma Hayek seriously ups the comic ante in this slaughterhouse of silliness. SERIOUSLY ups the ante.

And you can’t cast Salma without bringing in her Brother from a Spanish Mother, Antonio Banderas.

Stuff them all into a veritable travelogue of scenic Europe — Trieste to Tuscany, Zagreb to “Capri, like the pants” — with epic melees of stunning stuntwork, all breathlessly shot and cut together by director Patrick Hughes’ team, a “CAR CHASE” or three, often a called-shot by Reynolds’ bodyguard-in-therapy character, and you’ve got unfiltered, uninhibited popcorn pic escape, albeit with a staggering body count.

Reynolds’ Michael Bryce is on the couch, recalling his recurring dream, one in which he wins “Bodyguard of the Year” and gets his “AAA” bodyguard license back, which leads to orders from his therapist. Give up guns and bodyguarding. Take a “sabbatical,” maybe on an Italian island, “Capri, like the pants.”

But there is no R&R and reading “The Secret” for our metrosexual security expert. This short, buxom stranger with the filthy vocabulary and mad fighting and firearm skills blows in, screams and shoots a lot of people who might mean “BREECE,” as she calls him, harm. There’s a plot to “punish” Europe, and her “hoooosband” has been “keeeednapped.” By God, BREECE is the one may who can help. Under duress, mind you.

“Your mouth needs an EXORCISM!”

Hayek plays Sonia, wife of hitman Darius Kincaid (Samuel L.), hellbent on freeing her man, being held by the Mafia. And that runs them afoul of the nefarious designs of Greek supervillain Aristotle Papadoplous, purred by Banderas. He is about to bring Europe to its knees over the way it has treated Greece, and his bottom line.

INTERPOL’s token American (B-action king Frank Grillo) wants to “work with the bad guys to get to the worse guys,” and these three will do nicely. And we’re off. “CAR CHASE!” Nightclub fracas, assassinations, shootouts, the works.

Perhaps it’s out of date, but if anybody can make the “Latin Spitfire” stereotype cool, funny and scary again, it’s Hayek, who all but takes over the movie with her loud, brassy and delusional confidence. Giving a name to Reynolds’ “POWERFUL asexuality” on screen, exaggerating the hell out of her accent, swearing like a Mexican sailor and fighting her way to her beloved “cucaracha” Darius while setting off sparks with Bad Guy Banderas one more time, she is “over-the-top”defined.

I laughed at almost every broad gesture and at every word out of her pretty dirty mouth.

The stuntwork is most impressive in the chases, but Hughes stages this nightclub fight/shoot-out (set to a mariachi score) that is just jaw-dropping if you pay attention to the shot selection, edits, stunts, blasts, bullets and blows in between the laughs. Bond-film level spectacular.

And Mr. “POWERFUL asexuality” nebbishes this thing up, wearing bloodspattered clothes, nicked-up face, scabs and scars in scene after scene as his straight-man takes every blow the bad guys, and Sonia and Darius, dish out. Reynolds is a great reactor, and a guy who can make even PBS underwriting ads funny gives us “sensitive” and misused and ever-so-pissed about it well.

“I’m not doing guns right now.”

Was that his own copy of the BS self-help book “The Secret?” Just curious.

We’re not talking “The Taming of the Shrew” or “The Iceman Cometh” here. What you see if what you get, and even a wind sprint like “Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard” gets gassed here and there.

But be grateful some sticks in the mud are panning this amusing mayhem. They’re just making social distancing easier at the multiplex. It’s a hoot.

MPA Rating: R for strong bloody violence throughout, pervasive language, and some sexual content

Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, Salma Hayek, Antonio Banderas, Frank Grillo, Caroline Goodall, Richard E. Grant and Morgan Freeman

Credits: Directed by Patrick Hughes, script by Tom O’Connor, Brandon Murphy and Phillip Murphy. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:39

Texas filmmaker Ty Roberts, whose “The Iron Orchard” was a period piece about the post-Depression Era boom in the Texas oil industry, takes on another piece of Texas lore with “12 Mighty Orphans,” about a scrappy, undersized football team of the 1930s.

He takes care to get the dust, blood and hardscrabble grit right in this story, and attracted a “name” cast this time, with Luke Wilson, Martin Sheen, Vinessa Shaw, Wayne Knight, Treat Williams and no less than Robert Duvall showing up for a cameo. It’s a somewhat fictionalized, sentimental, old-fashioned “Big Game” football tale aiming for the heartstrings and occasionally hitting them as it tells a familiar story of pluck, deprivation and “heart.”

No, it’s not a huge improvement on “Iron Orchard.” But it should play in Texas, where football is one of the icons of the state religion, right up there with cattle, cowboys, The Alamo and oil harvested in “Iron Orchards.”

As the title says, they were orphans, players for the Fort Worth Masonic Home, “perennial underdogs in their tattered uniforms,” as Sheen’s folksy, tippling medic and assistant coach “Doc” narrates. The movie depicts them as Seabiscuits of the gridiron, a media phenomenon inspiring a weary, downtrodden America as it climbed out of the hard times via Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Wilson plays a very successful Texas high school coach who drags his wife (Shaw) and two little girls to Fort Worth for a teaching job at a school which didn’t even have a football team. He and his wife would teach multiple subjects, and on the side, he’d give the boys “self respect” through the game he knew so well. His wife would teach the girls to be “young ladies.”

The kids were older orphans, the teens “that no one ever takes home,” and the film (based on journalist Jim Dent’s book) gives us little bits of the trauma some of the boys experienced before arriving there. Many were abandoned by their families, but Hardy Brown (Jake Austin Walker of TV’s “Stargirl”) is dropped off by the sheriff (comic Ron White) covered in his father’s blood. The old man was killed by shotgun, something the movie doesn’t go into much detail about.

The experience made Hardy furious and broken, with that rage eventually focused on football, where he became “the toughest sumbitch” coaches and players on every team he met had ever seen.

Wilson’s Russell experiences World War I flashbacks watching the “combat” on the football field. But the actor gets some nice scenes inspiring the players and sticking up for the kids, defending them from the sadistic manager (Wayne Knight) of the home and its for-profit printshop business, rallying them against “the city boys” who made up their foes in that storied 1938 season.

“It’s tough to get you to believe when all you’ve known is hurt, loss and abandonment.”

The movie suggests this huge career step backward for Rusty Russell was because he himself was an orphan. As the movie has him arriving at the school in 1938, when Russell actually came on board in 1927, our buy-in to the story includes accepting that this is “the Hollywood version.”

The players — Hardy, Snoggs (Jacob Lofland), Wheatie (Slade Monroe), Chicken (Sampley Barinaga) and Fairbanks (Levi Dylan) et al, were real. As was the Fort Worth newspaper tycoon Amon Carter (Treat Williams) who championed them.

But little touches like having the “Doc” a “Hoosiers” style boozer and letting Coach Russell, after a season-opening beatdown, invent the “spread offense” thanks to a drawing by his daughter encourages eye-rolling. Profanity in the dialogue aside, the film feels sanitized and borderline whitewashed — “Texas history” as Texans like to remember it.

There’s a big cast, and hints in the closing credits of much that was cut out in editing — orphanage romances, Hispanic players on the team, etc. Good actors are cast and kind of left in the lurch with nothing much to play.

When you’re bringing in a second villain, a rival coach (a hammy Lane Garrison of “Iron Orchard”) hellbent on stopping these “orphans” by hook or by crook, a rich Masonic benefactor (Duvall, in one scene) and no less than FDR (Larry Pine) enlisted as a fan, “kid in the candy store” casting hurts the movie.

As a director, Roberts comes off as more of a producer. He can get a movie made, he’s just damned artless in making it.

A few jokes dress up some seriously dull dialogue, topped with the colorless “Seabiscuit” imitating voice-over narration by Sheen — “Rusty knew that life inside the orphanage held little promise…”

The script lets few of the player characters stand out, and the film has an “assembled” rather than written and directed feel. The simple story has no flow to it beyond the inexorable march through that “magic” season.

Leave this one to Texas, because even if you’re starved for football this summer, “12 Mighty Orphans” don’t quite fill the bill.

MPA Rating: PG-13, violence, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Luke Wilson, Martin Sheen, Vinessa Shaw, Jake Austin Walker, Wayne Knight, Treat Williams, Ron White, Larry Pine and Robert Duvall

Credits: Directed by Ty Roberts, script by Lane Garrison and Kevin Meyer and Ty Roberts, based on book by Jim Dent. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:57

This looks great and comes our way July 23.

Ever heard of Alvin Ailey? The dance company named for him? Prepare to learn.

This one has a little promise, and opens July 6.

A thriller with “realistic” zombies is the smart premise behind “Awake.” If you want to see human beings turn into the walking dead, take away their sleep.

Exhaustion heaped on top of panic, the shakes, impaired judgment teetering into psychosis, accidents, the works — Who needs “BRAINS! Must have BRAINS?”

That promising premise turns into a sluggish, sleepwalk of a thriller with a little pathos but entirely too little urgency to pull us in.

Gina Rodriguez stars as an already sleep-deprived ex-junkie, a widow and military vet working night security at a hospital where she steals drugs — sleeping pills, etc. — for re-sale. Jill has lost custody of her kids to her disapproving mother-in-law (Frances Fisher) when “the event” happens.

In a flash, electronic devices fail, the grid collapses and everything “with chips in it” quits — jetliners to Jeeps.

Jill grabs ten-year-old Matilda (Ariana Greenblatt) and teen Noah (Lucius Hoyos) and takes off, but not before noticing that Matilda — unlike everybody else — is able to grab a little shut-eye. And not before figuring out that the “military” she used to work for, including the sleep-deprivation torture expert psychotherapist Dr. Murphy (Jennifer Jason Leigh), want Matilda to “study” so that they can find a cure.

The family’s odyssey takes them through a zombieland of murderous but “old car expert” (the only ones that’ll run) rednecks and marauding bands of goons, of mass prison escapes and elderly nudists staggering towards the sun.

But like zombies in every other movie about the dead-on-their-feet, “Awake” lurches along, an intense moment here, a long, dull and static pause that drains the narrative of urgency and kills the quest’s momentum there.

Barry Pepper impresses as a preacher whose flock goes “SACRIFICE her!” entirely too-quickly, weeping “This is not who we are!” after a more-trigger-happy-than-usual cop shoots somebody. Maybe this is “who we are?”

Finn Jones plays a scientist who hastily explains the pathology of sleep deprivation, what the body and mind go through before lack of sleep kills you.

And Shamier Anderson makes an empathetic ex-con one of the more interesting characters they stumble into on their journey.

Rodriguez has to carry the picture, but hamstrung by the “reality” of the role, she only plays two notes — exhausted and manic.

The cleverest thing here is the initial conceit, that mass sleeplessness is the REAL “Night of the Living Dead.” And the dumbest has to be Jill’s sudden, poor-decision-making driven efforts to teach her ten year-old everything she needs to survive for the rest of her life, as the rest of humanity may very well go extinct — how to use a library without computers, shooting, driving, siphoning gas, etc.

Rodriguez shows us little in those scenes or this role, because no one involved realized that sleepwalking through a performance is the worst way to win over your audience.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence, animal medical experiments, profanity

Cast: Gina Rodriguez, Ariana Greenblatt, Lucius Hoyos, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Frances Fisher, Finn Jones, Gil Bellows and Barry Pepper.

Credits: Directed by MarckRasso, script by Joseph Rasso and Mark Rosso. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

This comes out on late July and co-stars Bruce Willis and Emile Hirsch.

Maryam has decided to run for office, a position on the municipal council in her suburban town. But her widowed father isn’t having it. And he’s trotting out his catch-phrase for everything to do with her campaigning for this office.

“Think of my BLOOD pressure!”

“I’ve checked your blood pressure hundreds of times,” she snaps back. “It’s FINE.”

When you’re arguing with a daughter with “MD” after her name, you’d better bring something stronger than that. Especially if you’re taking on “The Perfect Candidate.” Even if you’re the patriarch in one of the most patriarchal societies in the world — Saudi Arabia.

This understated dramedy is about an ambitious young woman who finds herself running and seriously rocking the boat, almost entirely by accident. Avoiding melodrama and the well-worn tropes of “woman taking on a man’s world” stories, director Haifaa Al-Mansour and co-writer Brad Niemann immerse us in a culture that might be evolving from a Kafkaesque nightmare into a milder Kafkaesque bad dream. But it isn’t happening fast enough for people like our young heroine.

We commute with Maryam, played with a dash of fire by Mila Al Zahrani, as she copes with the endless work-arounds a woman faces in hidebound Islamic fundamentalist Saudi culture. A modern state with the theocratic bureaucracy of a Medieval one, she must comply with all these restrictions on her dress and her movements — a hijab, with the full-face covering of a single-woman’s niqab — changing into sneakers and lab coat at the only clinic in her town.

At least she’s allowed to drive now, we think. But once at work, she has to deal with elderly men furious at being treated by a woman, and Maryam isn’t above snapping back at the old sexists.

The road to that clinic is a rutted quagmire which interferes with getting patients in the door quickly, annoying her to no end. Maryam would like to get that fixed, but is easily dismissed by the men in charge. She’d like to escape to a real hospital in Riyadh. And it’s the string of appalling roadblocks The Kingdom throws up in front of her as she tries to do just that which puts her on the ballot.

A flight to a conference where she can network her way into Riyadh won’t let her board as her single woman’s travel papers are not in order. She’s a grown woman with a medical degree who needs her father’s permission to renew them and fly, and he (Khalid Abdulraheem) is off with his traditional Saudi wedding band, on tour and not big on answering his phone.

The portrait of Saudi inefficiency, dogmatic “the system won’t let me” bureaucrats and official/religious/cultural control of women is more infuriating than chilling here. The deadlines she is fighting include the multiple daily interruptions for state-sanctioned prayers. How does anything get done?

Maryam’s sister Selma (Dae Al Hilali) is a wedding photographer, and through Maryam’s frantic visit to her about the travel papers we see the gender segregation of weddings, with the women entertained by singer Khadeeja (Khadeeja Mua’th), able to laugh and sing along and be themselves, until the men enter the room.

Thus, the mistaken “filing” for council, a mistake that Maryam runs with as she, with the reluctant help of videographer/sister Selma and the pouty opposition of teen sister Sara (Nora Al Awad) and a lot of internet tutorials on “how to run for office” (an unpolished rural Tennessean who wants to be governor is her exemplar), joins the political fray.

“The Perfect Candidate” crosses every expected bridge and hits a lot of the anticipated potholes such movies have always traversed. Sexist TV interviewer? Check. “Traditional” women bashing a female candidate for her “impudent” online ads, “showing herself off to men” after she’s gone to the extra trouble of hiding her eyes, too? Got it.

The film’s novelty is built into it. We have a most photogenic candidate unable to show her face to the public, a woman campaigning on a single issue that impacts men as much as women, but she is unable to address them directly “by law.”

The blowback, when it comes, is online-predictable and “powers that be” subtle.” And even the “I’ve had about enough of this” blasts of temper and the lump-in-the-throat moments that hints at “change” are preordained, if pleasantly so.

But Al Zahrani, making her screen debut, holds our interest by not holding her temper. Maryam is young enough to be impatient, traditional enough to play by the rules and realistic enough to see the futility of it all.

And yet, she persists. The Kingdom has no idea what’s coming.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Mila Al Zahrani, Dae Al Hilali, Nora Al Awad, Tareq Al Khaldi and Khalid Abdulraheem

Credits: Directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour, script by Haifaa Al-Mansour, Brad Niemann. A Music Box release.

Running time: 1:44

So what sort of gonzo nonsense have Antoine Fuqua and Mark Wahlberg cooked up now?

“Infinite” is about humans who wander the Earth, “gifted with a memory of all their past lives.” Wahlberg plays an “Infinite” who has forgotten his. Because of course he has.

It squares him up against Chiwetel Ejiofor, who shaves his head and grew a James Harden beard because that’s what all the best villains are wearing. He says things like “Impossible, impossible,” when staring at his foe, hanging onto the tsuka (“handle”) of a samurai sword we’ve seen him forge himself.

He’s hanging on to that tsuka because he’s jabbed the sword through the wing of a military transport jet and it’s all that’s keeping him from being blown off.

“Infinite” has all sorts of absurd “Bugs Bunny physics” like that, and big fights and epic car chases in vintage Ferraris, Aston Martins and the like. Because it you remember all your past lives, you’re going to remember the coolest car you ever drove, right?

Here’s the money scene for me, one I’m assuming screenwriter Ian Shorr adapted from the novel, “The Reincarnationist Papers,” by D. Eric Mainkranz. The heavy, Bathhurst (Ejiofor) is about to interrogate this Evan fellow (Wahlberg) to determine if he’s his ancient foe, Treadway.

Bathurst vs. Treadway. Sounds like a British courtroom comedy, right?

Bathurst pulls out this collection of objects, a wine cork, a bullet casing, etc. “Which of these belongs to you?” If you’ve ever or read about the process of “identifying” a new Dali Lama, that’ll seem familiar. The reincarnated Lama will be the one who recognizes something he used to own. That’s a fact an author writing about reincarnation games would know.

Only here, Bathurst ups the ante. He adds a threat to the questioning. He loads a revolver with a single bullet, spins the cylinder, and pulls the trigger at Evan with every wrong answer. Maybe the next Dali Lama will face a similar game of Russian roulette.

“Infinite” is about a missing doomsday bomb called “The Egg,” which is “designed to kill every living thing on Earth.” As if anyone would want to use it. But apparently Bathurst does.

Before all this business about “Infinites” and their warring factions — “Believers vs. Nihilists,” a play of “The Big Lebowski’s” bowling league? — Evan thought he was just a “diagnosed schizophrenic with a history of violence.”

But he remembers things, things he just knew “how to do,” like turning iron into steel and forging it — “folding it 27 times” — into a sword.

Now he’s teamed with this tough, British “believer” (Sophie Cookson) who drags him hither and yon to try and figure out where “he” hid “the egg.” In a previous life.

Jason Mantzoukas of “The House” and “John Wick 3” and TV’s “Brooklyn-99” and “The Good Place” is “The Artisan,” a tech whiz/guru sort whom Mantzoukas turns into the guy having the most fun in this story.

He does that in every movie, and in a lot of animated TV shows as well. A LOT of them. Funny guy.

Wallis Day is here to give us that action pic moment when the tall, supermodel-thin blonde dons a black leotard and turtleneck and shows off her assassin skills. Before you can say “CAT FIGHT,” she and Cookson are mixing it up. It’s their destiny.

Evan? “Destiny has even more in store for you.”

Walhberg serves up some voice-over narration here which doesn’t sounds like him, an acting challenge he decided to trot out for a picture he had no idea would go streaming without a theatrical release.

It’s still an impressive looking movie, with grand stunts and some decent effects. And if Fuqua & Co. had taken a more askance view of this quintessentially goofy concept, they might have gotten an “Edge of Tomorrow” out of it, with Wahlberg and Ejiofor in on the joke.

They didn’t, opting for “gonzo nonsense” that’s as watchable as it is forgettable.

MPA Rating:  PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, some bloody images, strong language and brief drug use

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sophie Cookson, Jason Mantzoukas, Rupert Friend, Toby Jones, Kae Alexander, Wallis Day

Credits: Directed by Antoine Fuqua, script by Ian Shorr, based on the novel “The Reincarnationist Papers” by D. Eric Mainkranz. A Paramount+ release.

Running time: 1:46

“Upheaval: The Life and Journey of Menachem Begin” is an adoring profile of the combative right wing Israeli prime minister who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat for courageously negotiating the Camp David Accords, ending decades of Egyptian-Israeli conflict.

An army of Begin’s fans — Knesset members and colleagues from his cabinet to assorted sympathetic authors, journalists, conservative Israelis on the street old enough to remember his seven year rule, two Israeli ambassadors to the U.S., a couple of American diplomats, Begin’s personal secretary and U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman all sing his praises and color in his personal story, showing us the Zionist struggle, which he began in Belarus in his youth, that shaped his life.

The film is straight-up hagiography. The closest “Upheaval” gets to a contrarian view of Begin’s militant, combative and eventually-scandalized career is the presence of Jordanian-born think-tank member Ghaith Al-Omari. Where are the critics, at home and abroad, who might lend balance and thus authority to this film?

It’s worth stating upfront that this is a film from the director of “The Yoni Netanyahu Story,” a 2012 film about the Entebbe Raid commando timed to fluff the image of Israel and its controversial and then-embattled, now-ex prime minister, Netanyahu’s brother Bibi.

Right Wing Israeli hagiographies are pretty much filmmaker Jonathan Gruber’s brand, and this echo-chamber portrait is much in keeping with that. Take it’s conclusions with a sack full of grains of salt.

Begin’s early life has been widely discussed, but it remains fascinating to take in. He was radicalized early, and his years of Zionist activism led the Soviets to throw him into a Gulag, only to release him to fight the Nazis in the Middle East during World War II. Begin emigrated to Palestine and fought the British instead, which probably didn’t bother the Russians that much.

He led the Jewish militant group Irgun, labeled a “terrorist organization,” which blew up British trains in Palestine and later the British headquarters of the protectorate, the King David Hotel, in an effort to force the British out so that the Jewish immigrants could declare an independent Israel. That’s his picture on a British wanted poster.

“Upheaval” paints an interesting picture of the “Jewish civil war” that nearly broke out as Begin set himself in opposition to other founding fathers of Israel like David Ben-Gurion in the late 1940s. It makes him come off as statesmanlike for not letting something he was about to cause happen.

After decades as leader of the opposition far right Likud Party, Begin became prime minister in 1977, and “Upheaval” shows the ways his seven year rule changed Israel’s shape and security and planted the seeds for strife that continues to this day.

Begin pushed the peace process with Egypt at a time when most Israelis were opposed to that. He spoke publicly about making one state where Jews and Arabs could co-exist. Then he ramped up Israeli settlement building in lands won in the 1967 Six Day War. Labeled as “honest” and “a mensch” by everybody testifying here, the viewer hears him playing semantics games — “We don’t use the word ‘annexation.’” And we see him and hear him start the ongoing Likud “settlements” talking point, citing the Bible as proof of “ownership” of the lands of historic Israel, Judea and Samaria. Begin was the Likud prime minister who normalized the party’s embrace of conservative religious sects and their far right politicians.

The de-facto result of this process of taking Palestinian land for Jewish settlers has another name in other parts of the world — “ethnic cleansing” — with the Israeli Defense Forces backing the settlers up. “Apartheid” has come up in international criticism of post-Begin Israeli governing.

Begin’s tolerance and acceptance of the Palestinian Arabs within the state is played-up in “Upheaval,” as is his championing of civil rights for such people when Likud was a minority party.

But more important to Begin was welcoming in Jews from Africa and the Middle East and mending fences between those populations. When he and his apologists here remark on his embrace of “multi-culturalism,” they’re too tone deaf to acknowledge that he always punctuated such declarations with “of the Jewish people.” Jewish ethnicity and Jewish culture were his obsessions.

I noted the film’s one contrary voice, mentioned above, in this chorus of adoration and endless rationalizations of everything controversial Begin said or did, the one expert who noted Begin’s “fascist” reputation, his fame built on “a lot of violence against Arabs.” I wanted to know who this was giving a more measured account of the man. Unlike every other of the scores of expert witnesses on camera in “Upheaval,” Ghaith Al-Omari isn’t identified until very late in the film.

Gruber starts the movie with a montage of news accounts of anti-Semitic attacks worldwide justified by their attackers as anti-Israeli, and that sets the film’s tone. He sentimentalizes a bellicose man famous for perfecting the “any means necessary” pre-emptive military/foreign policy by divorcing a violent world today from the violent “upheaval” that began the moment the word “Zionism” was coined, and the blowback today that still seems like shockwaves from the “upheaval” this “mensch” created.

There is interesting historical material and some cogent analysis of the man, his psychological makeup and career in “Upheaval.” But like Begin himself, any time something unsavory starts to emerge about himself, he would gush and gush about his wife. Gruber’s film plays that sentimentalizing trick, too, by slipping in such gushing here and there.

One thing Gruber either doesn’t realize or is loathe to embrace is that his films, focusing almost exclusively on people who share a view and an agenda he is pushing, have no authority.

Movies like “Upheaval” are more propaganda than history

MPA Rating: unrated, scenes of violence

Cast: Menachem Begin, Dr. Avi Shilon, Stuart Eizenstat, Joseph Lieberman, Ghaith Al-Omari, Yona Klimovitsky

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jonathan Gruber. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:27