Movie Nation

Perhaps you remember the 1986 Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren and River Phoenix movie “The Mosquito Coast,” about an American family caught up in the “self-reliance” genius and mania of a father who decides to shed the corrosive culture of ’80s America and move them all to the jungles of Central America. Maybe you remember the acclaimed Paul Theroux novel it’s based on.

If you don’t, no worries, I do. I read the source novel back then, too. And no, that’s not necessary or even particularly helpful in tackling the new Apple TV+ series starring Theroux’s nephew, Justin Theroux. Truth be told, remembering Peter Weir’s descent-into-madness tragedy, set entirely on the titular coast of Honduras, could be more of a hindrance to enjoying this new take.

This “Mosquito Coast” is basically a prequel, an updated/gunplay-packed “how we got there” tale of a family on the run, of the mishaps, escapes and deadly encounters with the cross-border human and drug smuggling trade that gets so much attention in the culture and the media of today.

None of this “get away from Reaganism/consumerism/TV-rot” of our “doomed” civilization of the ’86 film, in other words.

We meet Theroux’s Allie Fox as he and his brood (Melissa George plays wife Margot) are living on the edge on a rented farm in California’s central valley. Allie is keeping them afloat in a maintenance job with Big Ag, running their vehicles on bio-diesel of his own concoction, raiding the county dump for inspiration. Son Charlie (Gabriel Bateman in the River Phoenix role) is his Dad’s biggest fan.

“How do you make ice from fire?” was and remains Dad’s big obsession, an invention that can bring cheap refrigeration to the bush. It’s getting him nowhere, only he won’t let go of it.

“It’s not genius if they don’t reject it, first.”

But Charlie and older sister (impressive newcomer Logan Polish) have their suspicions about their parents. They’re always having to move. Why?

“Did you ever wonder, if Dad’s so smart, how we got to be so poor?”

Dad’s an ill-tempered wild-eyed dreamer and Mom’s secretive. Their world is uprooted again, but of course Dad has planned for that eventuality, when government agents (Kimberly Elise and James Le Gros) come calling.

Now would be a good time to hightail it South of the Border, to fulfill Dad’s latest dream — a liveaboard boating life, off the grid on “The Mosquito Coast.”

Most movies make this sort of “escape” seem easy, or at least dramatically perfunctory. This series gives us a better taste of how somebody on the lam might manage that border crossing north-to-south.

How do you even find someone, a “coyote,” to get you across? Where would you try it, how much water would you need, how much money would it take?

And what on Earth will you do when it all goes wrong?

That’s the driving impetus of this take on Theroux’s novel (Paul Theroux took a producer credit.), nutty Allie’s mastery of this seat-of-the-pants, improvise, lie and hustle on the fly existence and how he’s enlisted his family in that lifestyle.

They will meet and cross drug lords, see death and cause other deaths and be hunted not just by mysterious Feds and their minions, but an assassin (Ian Hart in a black suit, porkpie hat and scarab bolo tie), all as they struggle to live the patriarch’s “Kokomo” fantasy in a paradise of his own creation and not in a world where he doesn’t fit in.

Putting more of the emphasis on daughter Dina than the younger, impressionable son, would pay off better if there was more of a struggle for her soul. Her pushing back is belated and underwhelming. George (“Turistas,” “Dark City) plays a less passive version of the spouse of the ’80s “Mosquito.” Margot has assertive flashes that stand out because she’s constantly, inexplicably caving to Allie’s whims.

Justin Theroux (“The Girl on the Train”) doesn’t do “larger than life” well. This Allie is a salesman and something of a con artist, not menacing enough to impose his reality on everybody through force of will. His “tough guy” moments are few because they don’t play.

I found the series to be somewhat unmoored, lacking the subtexts of the original source material. Here it’s all about the violence, the “MacGyver” ish escapes.

It’s also jumpy and disjointed, dropping the Fox family and us into situations that have already been covered by other films and limited series — meetings and meals with drug oligarchs, facing down hired killers in matching black Suburbans in lawless stretches of Mexico, etc.

What we’re meant to accept is how this lifestyle and Allie’s survivalist ethos has made everyone in this family capable of sizing up a situation and boldly charting a way out of it. That stuff — with this instant getaway driver or that get-the-drop-on-the-bad-guys — is pure hokum.

The action beats deliver, but there aren’t quite enough of them in each let’s-drag-this-odyssey-out episode to justify the investment in time. That’s a common gripe I have of the streaming era — drip, drip, drip storytelling.

Still, if you come into this without the expectations taken from the novel and/or the earlier film, you might not be as annoyed and let down by the whole journey into Allie Fox’s “Heart of Darkness” as I was. The “hokum” you’ll figure out on your own.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Justin Theroux, Melissa George, Gabriel Bateman, Kimberly Elise, Scotty Tovar, Kate Burton and Ian Hart

Credits: Created by Neil Cross, based on the novel by Paul Theroux. Premieres April 30 on Apple TV+ release.

Running time: Seven episodes @ :42-58 minutes each.

It does nobody any favors to fixate on “Did teen Angie survive the car crash or are we watching her ghost?” in “My True Fairytale.” It’s entirely too obvious, no matter how much doubt writer-director D. Mitry tries to sew.

The film’s about our teen narrator’s (Emma Kennedy) vow to “save the world,” which means spending her time “fixing” the disconnect between parents and their lost or dismissed teen children. It sets out to be a weeper, and the odd heartfelt moment does break through.

But “insipid” shows up early and will not let go of this romantic mystery (not really) fantasy.

Angie and her pals are out for a reckless joyride, almost running over loner classmate Danni (Mark Daughtery). That’s right before she drives the SUV into the river.

What we have, the cop on the scene (Corin Nemec) tells Angie’s dad (Darri Ingolfsson), is “a three person wreck, with only ‘two’ accounted for.”

The grandparents who raised her (Joanna Cassidy and Bruce Davison) are upset, seemingly more torn up than her estranged father. But they’re all holding out hope that she got out of the car, dazed, and might still be found alive.

The relationships impacted by this crash include survivors Sarah (Morgan Lindholm) and the boyfriend (B.J. Mitchell) her remarried mother (Alyshia Ochse) doesn’t approve of — at all. Sarah’s divorced dad is the cop on the case, BTW.

Angie’s Dad Dean moved across the country to ignore her and avoid his parents, and he’s not communicating well with his LA girlfriend (Taylor Cole), either.

Danni’s workaholic single dad (Arnold Chun) is a real piece of work. And his car-service driver (Hector Hugo) is similarly clueless in dealing with his daughter (Juliana Destefano).

Can this “world” be saved?

The performances are uneven, with one over-arching cloud hanging over every single one of them. In trying to maintain a nearly non-existence “mystery,” everybody underplays the grief that would dominate any version of this scenario in the real world.

“Best friends,” family and others would be distraught, and we rarely see that in the performances. There’s no urgency to any of this — not Angie’s voice-over mission, not the slow-walked police investigation to her disappearance.

Instead, there are “clues” and “sensy” pop and maudlin background music, including a piano piece meant to tie it all together.

All of which render the whole not affecting or uplifting, but insipid.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Emma Kennedy, Darri Ingolfsson, Morgan Lindholm, B.J. Mitchell, Joanna Cassidy and Bruce Davison.

Credits: Scripted and directed by D. Mitry. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:25

A child’s quest to find a mythic figure who can save his mother, Oyelowo directed and stars in this May 7 release.

“Tu me manques” was Bolivia’s best hope for a Best International Feature Oscar nomination this year.

It’s a drama about the creation of the play it was based on, a fictionalized account of the playwright’s loss of a lover to suicide after coming out to his family, and that structure — the playwright telling the story of the play’s inspiration to a reporter — works against it just enough to let us see why it didn’t make the cut in a field that includes the Romanian self-indictment “Collective” and the Danish dazzler “Another Round.”

But while writer-director Rodrigo Bellot’s film adaptation of his play may cover tragic, if over-familiar gay “coming out” ground, its finale packs a culture-shifting punch to the gut that makes it all pay off.

Sebastian (Fernando Barbosa) gets the news in New York, an accidental, enraged minute of Facetime with Jorge (Oscar Martínez), the father of his ex-lover. He didn’t mean to respond to Sebastian’s many “Tu me manques (I miss you)” emails, but since I’ve got you on the line…

“STAY AWAY,” he rages (in English and Spanish with English subtitles). “You’ve caused enough pain in our family…We don’t have people ‘like that’ in our family!”

He throws in an “I know ‘your kind'” and a death threat for good measure. And then he drops the bomb. Gabriel is dead. He killed himself rather than get on a plane back to New York.

The recriminations go back and forth, and Sebastian figures that’s that, and starts doing what aspiring playwrights do. He wrestles with his grief by trying to create a play about Gabriel’s closeted life in the Catholic homophobic machismo of Latin America.

Only Jorge shows up at his door, wanting to “know” his son’s life in New York. Their arguments and debates turn into a journey through the city that Gabriel (Luis Gamarra) knew, the restaurant where he worked, their life together, their mutual friends (including one played by Almodovar favorite Rossy de Palma), even a visit to a “meat market” gay nightclub.

Sebastian relates this tale to a reporter, and throws in flashbacks within flashbacks to show their adorable retail men’s wear department “meet cute,” and Sebastian’s later struggles to get his play — with 30 actors playing “Gabriel” — on stage in conservative Bolivia.

Bellot’s depiction of New York gay life can feel like a cliche as we meet the most flamboyant of his and Gabriel’s friends, Alonso (Dominic Colón) and the bitchiest, TJ (Tommy Herlinger). But Herlinger nails the “degrees of gayness” gay spectrum lecture to Gabriel, delivered at the newcomer’s first gay New York party, seven “steps” that range from “I’m gay but…” to “flamboyant martyr.”

The play gets a “Chorus Line” audition treatment, assorted young Bolivian men telling their painful personal stories to Sebastian’s video camera, material that might turn up on stage as Gabriel’s story is turned into a universal one. Real life gay bashing interrupts rehearsals.

There’s also a clever scene where Sebastian takes Jorge to a New York priest who explains the various Biblical condemnations of homosexuality and pretty much “outs” St. Paul as self-loathing and closeted.

The clumsy structure interrupts the flow of the film and makes “Tu me manques” more of a mixed bag than it might have otherwise been. But the good moments stand out and the finale sticks with you, an arresting piece of theater whose power isn’t diminished when the camera simply shows you what actors are doing on a darkened stage.

MPA Rating: unrated, nudity, sex, profanity

Cast: Fernando Barbosa, Oscar Martínez, Rossy de Palma, Dominic Colón and Tommy Herlinger

Credits: Scripted and directed by Rodrigo Bellot, based on his play. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:50

More than one political figure hoped to gain recognition for their newly formed state in the Paris talks following the end of World War I. Ho Chi Minh might be the most famous today, thanks to what didn’t happen there.

But Queen Marie’s efforts at making Romania a state are also historical fact. This May 7 release looks period piece sumptuous and promises intrigue and a tortured prophecy for the future.

Barry Pepper makes the best of a rare leading man turn in “Trigger Point,” a predictable if efficient assassin “gone to ground” thriller filmed in end-of-winter Ontario.

He’s been credible as a man of violence since before “Saving Private Ryan,” and that makes him easy to accept as “Lewis,” a killer for “the Agency” until he was taken prisoner and talked some years before.

Now he’s hiding out on a remote, camouflaged farm with the usual CCTV cameras and movie prop “gun room” arsenal and standard issue cinematic flashbacks hinting at what he went through which pop up any time he’s “triggered.”

He uses a drone to check intruders — animal or human — on his property, a loner who always takes the one seat at the town diner where he can best see any potential threat and who makes himself useful at the local bookstore.

But the opening sequence of TV vet (“Hawaii 5-0,” “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” “MacGuyver”) Brad Turner’s film is filled with spitting sounds. Somebody is killing their way to him, and using a silencer as she does.

Colm Feore plays a former boss who finds Lewis first, a man fretting about old conspiracies, the crimes of Lewis, whom he calls “Nicholas,” and a daughter who’s been grabbed by the bad guys.

“Most of your friends want you dead more than your enemies” is an interesting way to say “Hello.”

Our man in Ontario finds himself shooting and sleuthing his way towards the missing Monica (Eve Harlow) and making a lot of spitting noises himself.

“Trigger Point” is shockingly conventional, with many a plot point, story beat and even shoot-out recycled from decades of other such films.

I used “efficient” earlier, as this picture piles up a body count without making the viewer deaf (silencers abound) or taking a lot of time doing it. But “perfunctory” seems more descriptive.

We know what’s coming. So does the cast. There’s not much point in any foot-dragging, then. Let’s get on with it.

The acting isn’t so much “bad” as pro forma, with players hired to do what they can do without breaking a sweat. Pepper and Feore do that with ease, and if the movie they’re doing more than go through the motions to perform in isn’t anything we haven’t seen too often before to let this be of any interest, that’s hardly their fault.

One “surprise?” The bad guy drives a Bentley. All these years of “Jaaaags” and they’re moving up in class?

MPA Rating: unrated, gun violence and lots of it

Cast: Barry Pepper, Colm Feore, Eve Harlow and Laura Vandervoort

Credits: Directed by Brad Turner, script by Michael Vickerman. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:22

This one gets a limited theatrical release in the us on April 30.

“Monday” is a “lost weekend” romance, something so obvious a one of the main characters uses the phrase at his most blitzed.

It’s a love affair that walks on eggshells for the better part of two hours, two people with hints of co-dependency who have no business being together, sticking it out for that weekend — and many to follow — just trying to make it to “Monday.” And even though it overstays its welcome and its characters achieve a degree of “grating” that you wouldn’t think Denise Gough and Sebastian Stan could manage, it makes for a compelling portrait of denial, because that’s one big thing these two have in common.

Chloe and Mickey are a couple of ex-pats living in Greece. He’s a sometime musician and popular DJ living like he knows this line of work and lifestyle has an expiration date. When we meet her, she’s leaving drunken messages for an ex who dumped her.

It’s boozy love at first sight. Or lust. That’s how they end up naked on the beach and arrested. It’s “Friday” a title tells us. They’re kind of thrown together for the weekend by the fact that she misplaced her purse. There’s a “big gesture” and a brittle connection — with the odd testy moment — is made.

It’s just that Chloe, an immigration lawyer helping immigrants who want to come to the States, is finally done with the place and is flying home Monday.

Mickey’s “You’re always gonna regret not doing something rather than doing something” doesn’t move her. His last ditch effort to interrupt her passage through the terminal does.

“Monday” tracks their love affair — impulsive sex, co-habitation, an impromptu street rave to celebrate her furniture, which won’t fit into his apartment, through their first “his friends and YOUR friends” party, humiliations and slights — and deep into the messy intimacy that comes from people with baggage and “issues” coupling up.

Stan, of the “Captain America” movies and TV shows, hits on a sort of blitzed, uninhibited Jason Bateman vibe and makes it work for him here. He lets us see that Mickey’s old enough to know better, and that he can’t help himself.

Gough (“The Kid Who Would Be King,” “The Good Traitor”) has the tougher performance as the viewer’s surrogate. Chloe sees the signs and hears the warnings about “Mickey Go Lucky” and what a “baby” this “irresponsible,” self-destructive guy she’s hitched her future to, and Gough lets us watch the doubts creep across her face and body language even as Chloe’s scrambling to tamp those doubts down.

It all gets to be too much, what with the full frontal at the drop of a hat, and “four, no SIX shots of tequila” and “Get us drugs” and complications from each character’s history. No scene seems superfluous even if many go on too long. “A bit of a wallow” may cross your mind, as it did mine.

But director and co-writer Argyris Papadimitropoulus (“Suntan”) doesn’t let his baby drown in the bathwater, even if he never figures out he could have turned off the tap twenty minutes before the closing credits and delivered the same message in a tighter film.

MPA Rating: R (Sexual Content|Drug Use|Pervasive Language|Nudity/Graphic Nudity)

Cast: Sebastian Stan, Denise Gough, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos, Dominique Tipper, Eilli Tringou and Andreas Konstantinou.

Credits: Directed by Argyris Papadimitropoulos, script by Rob Hayes, Argyris Papadimitropoulos. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:57

The only thing keeping every member of the cast of “Game of Thrones” from having her or his own movie to star in is a lack of chutzpah in the outliers’ agents.

Eugene Simon, once Lancel Lannister on TV, is on his third film post-“GOT,” misleadingly titled “Sensation.” It follows “The Lodgers” and the dark ensemble comedy “Kill Ben Lyk.”

It’s a drabber-than-drab DNA-driven “special” people fantasy, and it’s not stretch to say the material leaves him drab in it. “Sensation” is so lifeless and pointless as to make one ponder “What is the half-life on a ‘Game of Thrones’ career bounce?”

Simon’s Andrew Cooper, an intense London postman curious about his ancestry. But getting the “results” of his test proves to be a test in itself.

The bullying older man who insists he be addressed as “DOCTOR Marinus” (Alastair B. Cumming) is all obfuscations, threats and contempt.

“All data is the property of the company,” he sneers. And his “program” has “flagged certain characteristics” in the lad’s genetic makeup that mean “You are coming with us.”

Cooper, without “any idea” of how he’s doing it, snaps bones and bests the “muscle” Marinus has brought along in case the kid gives him any backtalk.

We puzzle over why Cooper still gets in the car with these creeps, despite having abilities he didn’t realize he had.

We wonder what’s up with his eyes, which wobble wildly when he takes in information, and about his manic violin playing, something he “just (copies) videos I watch” to master.

And we fret over this English manor house where people like him have been gathered “for study” by the expressionless supervisor Nadia (Emily Wyatt). It’s the sort of place where people with “special” senses and “abilities” are told “No one’s holding you here” when we can plainly see several someones are.

The “tests” the talented undergo there involve scenarios transmitted into their heads that have them thinking they’re shooting someone or witnessing somebody tossed off a double-decker bus, all while they’re confined to the grounds of this “institution.”

Like Cooper, we wonder what they want with him and how much of what he’s experiencing is real and what is merely induced-hallucination.

Director and co-writer Martin Grof (“Excursion”) has no effects budget here, so simple digital edits take Cooper in and out of scenarios, with music “selling” the transformation (not even close) we’ve just witnessed.

The “training” these subjects undergo at this facility are rendered in exercises too bland to mention. The action beats — aside from the “Is this real?” questions — are dull.

Among the cast, only the sinister Cumming (“What a Cirus”) stands out, and his character all but vanishes after the first act.

With the release of “Sensation,” Eugene Simon can take comfort on last month’s news that HBO has signed George RR Martin for six possible spinoff series. That doesn’t do the Slovak director Martin Grof any good, but at least his star could have a future in Westeros.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, some profanity

Cast: Eugene Simon, Emily Wyatt, Jennifer Martin and Alastair G. Cumming

Credits: Directed by Martin Grof, script by Magdalena Drahovska, Martin Grof. A GROFilm release.

Running time: 1:35

Yes, it’s a sequel. You remember that sassy, silly violent action comedy Samuel L joined @vancityreynolds for back in the early days of RR’s gin peddling days?

This summer’s installment adds Salma and her brand of murderous sass. “Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard” is slated for June 16.