Movie Nation

“The Yinyang Master” is a fantastical, fanciful new sword-and-sorcery franchise from China. It doesn’t matter that it’s a violent, hilariously wearying and cluttered collection of tropes, character “types” and action beats. Its sequel has already come out (“Dream of Eternity”) and is on Netflix, too.

So, in for a fen, in for a yuan I guess.

There’s a lot to take in — flying martial artists, spectacular brawls, “Scale Stones” and sigils, fantastic beasts, CGI demons in the Demon Realm and a villain with a transgender edge.

I think that maybe the dismembered hand monster is my favorite, although the cuddly Red Ghost, sort of Hellboy as Sumo Wrestler, is a close second.

The plot? Um, where does one begin?

The emperor of the demon realm wants the Scale Stone, badsass Qinming (Kun Chen) and his ferret minions steal it from Captain Boya (Chuxiao Qu) of the Imperial Guards. Chief Baini (Xun Zhou) of The Defenders considers Qinming a traitor. But as they used to be a couple, maybe there’s more going on there.

Boya is disgraced for losing that stone, and to recover it and arrest Qinming he teams with the first fighting pixie (Shen Yue) to tell him he’s “full of s–t!”

There are fights with the Red Ghost and Raven Hound Twins, this startling, black-hooded four-armed warrior with a porcelain face mask turns out to be ferrets standing on each other’s shoulders inside a cloak, and the Snow Queen (Cici Wang) flings ice darts and fights dirty.

The dialogue is redolent of every other fantasy tale, East or West.

“You will help me return to the mortal world. That is your destiny!” (in Mandarin with subtitles, or dubbed into English).

The occasional flash of humor helps lighten this smorgasbord of sword-and-sorcery. “I can’t watch you fall any more. So for now, I think we’re done.”

A lot more could be done with that, but maybe the translation is leaving that light touch out.

“I used to get my demonic goods from Yanyan Le,” is a line George Lucas could have concocted to show a very old “universe” where business is business.

It doesn’t matter where films based on video games come from, they’re always most fascinating to players of the game –this fight getting you to that “level,” and so on. This has a “only for fans of the game” vibe. Even by origin story standards, it’s a mess.

The rest of us have to sit through two hours of endless “Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings” exposition, a parade of creatures, characters, talismans, spells, old grudges held by dark forces, flashbacks that pointlessly add a backstory, and challenges.

Outsiders can dive into this colorful, splashy mayhem for the costumes, critters and set pieces. But while the acting is competent, the only moving “death” is an animal’s and the only interesting performance is by the villain expressing his character’s feline-feminine side.

MPA Rating: TV-14, bloody violence, profanity, fart gags

Cast: Kun Chen, Xun Zhou, William Wai-Ting Chan, Shen Yue, Chuxiao Qu, Cici Wang

Credits: Directed by Li Weiran, script by Chialu Chang and Evan Jian, based on the “Onmyoji” video game. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:01

Hulu is the one streaming service whose wares I struggle as I try to cover and review, emphasis on the word “try.”

Rarely do they pitch anything. They expect press folks to visit their website constantly and see what’s coming up and request review versions. Or they expect you to buy subscriptions, I guess, and see it the way everyone else does.

Hulu is alone among the many streamers to have this “sit around and wait for requests” approach to publicity, but whatever. At least Disney+, Amazon, Netflix etc. are on the ball.

The bigger issue with them is subscription business practice. They are, like some online subscriber sites and assorted other “FREE, but give us your credit card number” online come-ons, prone to shenanigans.

We all know what Netflix does. Sign you up for a “discounted” service, then jump you up to their standard, pricier level when you aren’t paying attention.

I tried Hulu for a month to catch up on their product (one potential Oscar nominated film) in late Dec., canceled the service the first week in Jan., and what do I see on a March credit card statement?

They didn’t charge for Jan or Feb., but March they magically “forgot” I canceled, and snuck a charge in there.

Contact them to fix this, and they’re “We don’t correct mistakes that work out to our advantage, call your bank.”

So basically I have to get a credit card company to dispute and block all charges from here into infinity for a service I canceled two and a half months ago, because Hulu can’t be bothered to deal with people who complain about their scummy business practice. That means canceling a card and getting a new one.

All because of an unscrupulous streamer.

Thanks, Hulu. And adios.

The intensity of the “twins connection” is explored, to great dramatic effect, in the German/Swiss film “My Little Sister.” Gripping performances by Nina Hoss and Lars Eidinger map out the close bond and interlocked fates sister and brother display as one of them faces a terminal illness.

Lisa (Hoss, of “A Most Wanted Man” and “The Audition”) is a playwright struggling to write from the backwater Swiss city where her husband (Jens Albinus) is the headmaster of an exclusive boarding school for the children of potentates and oligarchs. But the move there and raising two small children are relatively minor distractions. Her twin brother, Sven (Eidinger, of “High Life” and “The Clouds of Sils Maria”) has been sick.

We meet them as she picks up her brother after a Berlin bone marrow transplant. He has lost much of his hair, so she provides a wig. And being theater folk, their first stop is a rehearsal. Sven was to play “Hamlet” again for a famous director who also happens to be Lisa’s ex (Thomas Ostermeier). Only a much younger actor is rehearsing the part.

“I didn’t get a transplant to watch my understudy,” Sven pleads, in German with English subtitles.

Lisa presses his case because she sees how much her brother needs this, needs a reason to push through to some sort of recovery. Herr Direktor equivocates, because “no one wants to see that.”

Lisa’s got a plan. She’ll stay here, maybe the entire family will move back to Berlin. Plainly their scattered mother (the great Marthe Keller) can’t take care of him.

“I can’t take care of myself,” she grouses, perhaps a little tipsy. “And look at you! You give me the creeps!”

Sven leans on “My Little Sister” (born mere minutes later) Lisa literally and figuratively as she tries to plan their way out of this.

But nothing is settled in Berlin and there are complications back in Switzerland, which bringing her brother into won’t help.

Hoss lets us see Lisa’s surface control and barely hidden panic in the early scenes. As events conspire to disrupt her “plan,” she starts to lose it. As her marriage suffers and family is shoved aside in her all-consuming attempt to help her brother physically and psychologically, she breaks down in fury and despair.

Eidinger adeptly captures a man who is putting it all in his earnest and intrepid sister’s hands, but who collapses into panic attacks as he enters those famous Kubler Ross “five stages,” realizing the limits to his sister’s support even if he barely thinks of her in his own worsening state.

The acting fireworks of “My Little Sister” flare up, but co-writers/directors Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond give their stars a glorious moment of grace, storyteller Lisa calming panicked Sven by telling him the tale of Hansel and Gretel, spicing it up a little for entertainment value.

The way these two play that scene, in a movie where dialogue is spare and emotions raw, tells us everything about their characters’ relationship, letting us see in a moment that this can’t be the first time she’s done that, because even though she’s the “younger” sibling, plainly she is the rock among the two.

“My Little Sister” may tell a simple, sad story, but it has everything we treasure in great screen performances. And Hoss, acting a full range of emotions in three different languages (German, French and English) moves herself front and center into the ranks of the best screen actors of her era.

MPA Rating: unrated, nudity, sex, profanity

Cast: Nina Hoss, Lars Eidinger, Jens Albinus, Thomas Ostermeier and Marthe Keller

Credits: Scripted and directed by Stéphanie Chuat, Véronique Reymond. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:40

I hear this line so often that I’ve decided that it’s a screenwriter’s mark of confidence in her or his work, or at least a statement of chutzpah.

“Can’t this all be over?”

You have to know that late — TOO late — third act zinger could blow up in your face if your movie’s a chore to get through. But hell’s bells, here it is again.

“The Arbors” is a creature feature every bit as exciting as its title, akin to “watching trees grow,” as the joke goes.

It’s a somber, SLOW movie about a locksmith (Drew Matthews) trapped in this drab, “dreary small town,” so goes the plot description on IMDb.

“Hey,” I say to myself. “Those ugly 1970s ranch-style subdivisions, that dumpy Mayflower Seafood restaurant? Got to be Winston-Salem!”

Did co-writer/director Clayton Witmer write that publicity description himself? Because just before I moved there, forgotten hack director James Orr referred to the place as “a Hellhole,” after filming “Mr. Destiny” with Michael Caine and Jim Belushi. Witmer’s diss barely registers compared to that.

Ethan the lump of a locksmith seems totally adrift and “stuck,” working an on-call job, losing his close connection with married-with-a-kid brother Shane (Ryan Davenport), a loner and such a loser that even the teenaged son of a neighbor feels OK bullying him.

But there are these guys he’s seen in the middle of the night, poking around with flashlights while wearing Hazmat suits.

OK, they’re body shop paintbooth suits, with Harbor Freight goggles and barely-Corona-proof masks. Budget-smudget. Nothing says “Giant Government Coverup” like six guys in paintbooth suits piling out of a 1998 Jeep Cherokee.

Their “monster detector” appears to be a weed whacker with an LED light stuck on the end. Cool.

A dead deer gives Ethan an idea of what they might be looking for. SOMEthing is eating it from the inside. Naturally, he brings the dead deer home, tries to keep this oversized, toothy spider in a pet carrier, and when it chews through that…

“I…I just found something,” he wants to show to his brother. Brother’s too busy for that.

The first blood spilled is Ethan’s. A mere flesh wound…that never heals! The damned thing gets out after that, and all these people who cross him start to disappear.

Ethan’s paranoia makes him avoid the cops and avoid the ex-girlfriend (Daryl Munroe) who’d like to lure him out of town. Instead, he gets mixed up with his brother’s vigilante who think some pervert must be grabbing their kids.

As if mousy, oddball working odd-hours Ethan wouldn’t be their first and last most likely suspect.

Matthews wears the same blank, empty expression, pretty much first scene to last. A couple of the creepier acquaintances who hassle Ethan make stronger impressions, if only for a scene or two.

Trying to tie all monster chomping to something in Ethan’s increasingly paranoid and put-upon psyche seems an intellectual overreach.

And as this weary, unfunny and unfrightening slug of a thriller slides ever-so-slowly to its nearly-two-hours-away finale, an actor utters that defiant line that any karma-conscious screenwriter should recognize as tempting fate, or at least tempting the audience to laugh in ridicule at what has unfolded before us.

“Can’t this all be over?”

MPA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Drew Matthews, Ryan Davenport, Daryl Munroe, Alexandra Rose, Tony Hughes

Credits: Directed by Clayton Witmer, script by Chelsey Cummings, Clayton Witmer. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:56

If your favorite band gets labeled “the voice of a doomed generation,” maybe you figure you’re winning that debate over “the only band that matters.” Then again, if the rest of music fandom doesn’t agree, if that very band acknowledges “The World Won’t Listen,” what then?

“Shoplifters of the World” is a musical coming-of-age comedy for Generation X, a derivative but alternately sweet and edgy homage to fans of Manchester’s The Smiths. They were a twangy, tuneful and gloomy rock ensemble that flashed by in the post-New Romantics ’80s until they abruptly hung it all up.

Music documentary veteran Stephen Kijack tries for a sort of R-rated John Hughes vibe, a movie with a little “High Fidelity,” a bit of “Pump Up the Volume” and a taste of “Airheads” about it. It’s a story set on the day in 1987 that The Smiths announce their breakup. And their Denver fans — disaffected, despairing, down for “Meat is Murder” the LP and the lifestyle — do not take it well.

Whatever you do, don’t call Cleo (Helena Howard of Amazon’s “The Wilds”) a “poser.” She’s got the “Meat Is Murder” vanity plate on her ancient VW and a dead-end future staring her in the face. This is NOT the day to test her.

“I f—–g HATE Molly Ringwald...’Pretty in Pink,’ what is THAT about? That freckled freak should try living with MY mother!”

Dean (Ellar Coltrane of “Boyhood”), clerk of the only record store that lets her shoplift Smiths cassettes, takes the news just as badly. But he’s the quiet type, a brooder.

“I really do wonder what’s left to live for these days?”

Cleo’s pals include Sheila (Elena Kampouris), a Madonna wannabe who eschews “that whole ‘boy toy’ thing,” Sheila’s “vow of celibacy” British boyfriend, Patrick (James Bloor) and their pal Billy (Nick Krause), “about to make the biggest mistake” of his young life. He reports to the Army the next day.

Billy crushes on Cleo, Patrick isn’t sure if he digs girls, Sheila is sexually frustrated and Cleo won’t stop bemoaning The Smiths. Sounds like a fun evening. Let’s hit a party!

But Dean? He’s got a gun, a box of Smiths LPs and a beef. He takes Full Metal Mickey at KISS-101-FM hostage and forces him to lay off the Ozzy and “Judas F—–g Priest” and spend an evening spinning “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable” and “I Know it’s Over” and “Girlfriend in a Coma” and their ilk.

As Full Metal Mickey is played by manic man mountain Joe Manganiello, you can imagine how that goes down. No “pansy-ass records” for Mickey. He won’t be responsible that “spike in the suicide rate,” nossir.

Except the kid’s got a gun. “Hair bands, BOY bands, endless loops of moldy ‘classics.’ This station vomits CHEEZEwhiz all over Denver!” The kid won’t be dissuaded.

“Shoplifters” is a parade of ’80s MTV fashions — proto-Goths and dueling Madanna wannabes, androgynous eye-liner for the sexually uncertain guys. Nobody wants to admit that EVERYbody is a poser at that age (early 20s), and their musical tastes reflect that.

The cool kids are into Morrissey and The Smiths, might consider Happy Mondays, and wear the uniforms of their tribe accordingly.

Coltrane is getting a lot of shots at stardom, but he lacks the screen presence to carry off a major comic role like this off. He needed to watch the radio station held hostage comedy “Airheads” to get an idea of how to hold his own with Manganiello in this tense and presumably hilarious situation.

Come to think of it, that’s not a very “Smiths Fan” thing to do — taking a gun into a radio station. Perhaps that’s an unsolvable acting dilemma.

Howard has screen presence but needs a role that calls for her to do more than rant and take dramatic, inexperienced drags on various cigarettes.

There are little flashes of fun in all this — a Thomas Lennon (record store owner) cameo here, a Manganiello rant there. But the whole is so overfamiliar that “Shoplifting” never gets over being a drag.

MPA Rating: unrated, gunplay, drug abuse, sex and profanity

Cast: Ellar Coltrane, Helena Howard, Elena Kampouris, Nick Krouse, James Bloor, Thomas Lennon and Joe Manganiello.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Stephen Kijak. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:31

“Six Minutes to Midnight” is the sort of high gloss “programmer” Hollywood and Pinewood (and Shepperton, etc.) used to turn out by the dozens.

The plot has Nazis, spies, action and preposterous coincidences and improbabilities, a “talks too much” villain, cheap thrills and sentimental sop. But thanks to a game cast and a clever and historically-accurate hook, it’s poppycock that plays.

Eddie Izzard co-wrote and stars in this story of murderous intrigues at Victoria Augusta College in Bexhill-on-Sea, a finishing school for the daughters of the German elite. We meet them as they march, exercise and sing like the good little Nazis they are. For fun, they like nothing better than listening to Der Furher on der wireless.

Miss Rocholl (Oscar-winner Judi Dench), their English governess, dotes on her charges and teaches poise, manners and comportment while almost-an-Olympian Ilse (Carla Juri) ensures they’re properly exercised.

But they have a problem keeping English teachers. We meet the first as he comes to an unfortunate end. He was onto something at the school.

It’s August of 1939, the world is teetering toward war and the English are enjoying the last days of peace and summer at the beach. But Mr. Miller (Izzard) needs a job, and “journeyman teacher” or not, Miss Rocholl needs that post filled. He’s hired.

He, like his predecessor, is a spy. And these girls? “

“Every chess game has its pawns.”

If they’re smuggled out, it means war is imminent. If the Brits seize them first, “we could start the whole bloody thing ourselves.”

Can Mr. Miller, who shocks the little Eva Brauns when he answers their German insults in German, find out what’s going on? Will he meet the same fate as his predecessor, and at whose hand?

What we have here is a bit of history with a couple of classic films mashed up around it. This is “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” grafted onto “Eye of the Needle.” Nazi plots and intrigues swirl around the indoctrinated students.

“We shouldn’t apologize for passion,” Miss Rochell rationalizes, “or a country that strives to be great.” But despite such Furher-apologia, not all of the students are obedient mistresses of the Master Race.

Izzard makes a plucky hero, an Everyman a bit long in the tooth for derring-do. But it helps to think of the comic-turned-actor as the obsessive marathoner (for charity) that he’s become in each of Miller’s many far-fetched escapes.

A second Oscar winner, Jim Broadbent, shows up as a local bus driver who cracks “Auf wiedersehen” to anybody getting getting off at “that school,” and James D’Arcy (“Dunkirk”) plays a cop a little too fond of saying “Old boy.”

“I don’t like your tone!”

“Quite all right. I get that a lot.“

It’s a trifle silly. But you don’t have to take “Six Minutes to Midnight” seriously to lose yourself in the pleasure of some very fine actors having a go at an old fashioned B-movie, poppycock included.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for some violence

Cast: Eddie Izzard, Carla Juri, Tijan Marei, James D’Arcy, Jim Broadbent and Judi Dench

Credits: Directed by Andy Goddard, script by Eddie Izzard, Celyn Jones and Andy Goddard. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:40

“Experimental films” rarely make it beyond film festivals, or college cinema societies, but “My Mexican Bretzel” gained enough notoriety in that world to achieve DVD and streaming release.

It’s an exercise in social commentary and memory, embracing the nostalgia of watching soundless old home movies with friends and family, and the modern improv comedy gimmick of inventing a story to fit the images.

If one of the cardinal rules of cinema is that the story can be approached and understood simply by what we see on the screen, writer-director Nuria Giménez fails utterly. The project makes little sense without reading up on its back story, even if it makes obvious points about our narcissistic need to film where we are and what we’re doing and the fact that this predates the cell-phone selfie era.

Giménez uses home movies shot on 16mm by her filmmaker-grandfather (Frank A. Lorang) to tell the tragic, privileged, Forrest-Gumpish story of Leon and Vivian Barrett, a Swiss couple whose lives are tracked from the 1940s into the late 1960s.

The people “playing” that couple are Giménez’s Mexican grandparents, Isle G. Ringier and Lorang.

Using a little black and white Swiss Air Force footage from the ’40s, “Bretzel” establishes that Leon was a pilot who lost his hearing in a crash. But their upper middle class lives and fortunes are secured when he’s brought in on a sweetheart pharmaceutical deal, a “miracle drug” called Lovedyn.

In glorious time-capsule color footage, we experience (with an occasional sound effect) their extensive travels — Paris to New York, Barcelona in the ’50s, a Grand Tour of France and the Med, Mallorca, train travel, motor yachting the lakes of Switzerland, crossings on the Queen Mary, airline flights from the propeller driven ’40s to the jet age ’60s.

They show off an auto show concourse’s array of the great coupes and roadsters of the era, visit the Italian Mille Miglia road rally and attend the infamous 1955 24 Hours of LeMans, where a crash killed over 80 spectators.

And most of this is experienced in silence, with scattered sound effects and British newsreel commentary on the LeMans disaster.

Vivian “narrates” the story of a fading marriage, dalliances, depression and the many sayings of her favorite pre-Beatles writer-guru, Paravadin Kanvar Kharjappali.

The narration is delivered in subtitles, not voice-over. And that “writer,” the one who serves up “Lies are just another way of telling the truth” and “life is a mixture of play and prison?” Also fictional.

The footage is fascinating in and of itself, and kudos to Lorang for shooting it and Giménez for rescuing it.

The rich hues of the past captured in that footage is the main appeal of “My Mexican Bretzel,” but Vivian’s narrated observations on our need to film ourselves and what we’re doing — constantly — are the heart of the film.

“I don’t know whether we film what we do, or do we do the things we do to film them.” Sounds like a Salon.com essay on selfiedom and social media humbragging in the making. Vivian comes to resent the boat, the lifestyle and the constant filming, declaring decades before vacations became the victim of iPhone obsession that “Leon is only looking at me through the lens.”

Experimental films aren’t for everyone, and I found this one’s silent narration — subtitles only — a serious drawback. How would it have hurt the film to hear a “Vivian” tell her story and make her musings, in English and/or Spanish? Not in the least. It’s an unnecessary extra obstacle to the film being approachable.

As with many films in this broad category of cinema (It’s not really a genre.), once you “get” the gimmick, there’s a little struggle with what comes after — the “Yeah, and?” conundrum.

“My Mexican Bretzel” is minimalist enough that the viewer takes from it some of what she or he brings to it. But like the inane natterings of a philosopher whose gift is stating the obvious in the most obscure way he or she can think of, Giménez’s musings layered on top of her grandparents’ story have the whiff of “emperor’s new clothes” about them.

MPA Rating: unrated, smoking

Cast:  Ilse G. Ringier and Frank A. Lorang

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nuria Giménez. An Indiepix release

Running time: 1:13

Knowing a movie like this is on my calendar is what gets me up in the morning. Opens Friday.

A vegan vampire hunter sits — I’m envisioning the lotus position — on the horns of a dilemma.

Pretty hard to reconcile those competing agendas.

“First of all, no hurting…or killing.” No “stakes,” in other words. Or steaks.

But if mellow, tai chi loving Rev (Ari Schneider) is going to join his paranoid schizophrenic security guard pal Hawk (Ryan Barton-Grimley) in his mania, a” fight against injustice and the supernatural,” killing “blood-sucking allergic-to-sunlight filthy-ass vampires,” well some compromise is in order.

“Hawk and Rev: Vampire Slayers” is a laugh-littered no-budget vampire slaughter comedy in the tradition of “Tucker and Dale vs. Evil.” Over-the-top blasts of fake blood, sight gags by the score, at times jaunty and with many a throw-away funny line, it is tailor-made for a (socially distanced) party of Tommy Chong’s best customers.

Stone cold sober? It’s got a few giggles. On the whole, I’d call it a near-miss.

Hawk is living in a tattered pup tent in his parents’ backyard when we meet him. His mood will not improve as he’s late to work and quick to mock how angry he makes his exasperated and religiously prudish boss (Casey Graf).

“Don’t worry. I won’t tell your wives.”

Rev tries to calm Hawk’sconstant “Anger Management” issues. But tai chi on the beach with janitor Rev doesn’t promise any quick fix.

“Take that up with the liberals!”

He spies pasty-faced, bloody-fanged folk he IDs as vampires, and he’s on the case, stake in his back pocket and backup tool/weapon at the ready.

“Good enough for the Swiss Army, it’s good enough for me!”

Soon they add would-be writer/researcher (Jana Savage) to their ranks, with the blessing of Hawk’s Army prison mentor (Richard Gaylor), they take on their quest.

Writer-director-star Barton-Grimley gets a little winded here and there. And pictures this peppered with jokes can be wearing if the plot and the gags — increasingly graphic vampire violence — aren’t all that. Whiplash edits and whiplash sound effects keep it moving, but the drag of repetition sets in.

Cheapness as a virtue is a long-established horror comedy tradition. And you’ve got to appreciate the anger — “What kind of loser-ass vampire lives in a garage?” — and skewering, self-owning Tarantino shots.

Yes, “From Dusk Till Dawn” starred “that handsome TV doctor” and “the director who tries to be an actor.”

Cheese like this is best served with giggly friends. Rent “Hawk and Rev” after “a proper date, dinner in a place named after a ‘garden!'” Just remember to finish off the wine before you do.

MPA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, sexual gags, profanity aplenty

Cast:  Ryan Barton-Grimley, Ari Schneider, Jana Savage, Richard Gayler, Jeff Lorch and Casey Graf

Credits: Scripted by directed by Ryan Barton-Grimley. A Loaded Image release.

Running time: 1:25

Deep sea treasure hunters become Bank of Spain robbers in “The Vault,” a heist picture built on “The Italian Job” model, only without the laughs.

The criminal masterminds are British and there’s a hint of jingoism in their quest. They’re trying to recover something associated with privateer/warrior/explorer Sir Francis Drake. There’s no Michael Caine, no jokes and not a Mini Cooper in sight. And it’s in Madrid and not Turin, Italy. But come on. It took five credited screenwriters to come up with this humorless, tepid “Italian Job” knockoff?

Freddie Highmore plays an oil baron’s son just finishing up engineering school. He’s fending off suitors from his father’s world when a mysterious text arrives. The “opportunity of a lifetime” awaits.

The blonde pickpocket who changes hair colors, accents and names? She (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) might have been called “the bait” in a less woke era. But young Thom Laybrick (again, FIVE screenwriters) is more intrigued by the veteran deep sea “salvager” (Liam Cunningham) and his pitch.

There’s something he wants. It’s in the Bank of Spain, in an ingenious, gigantic, overbuilt and “impossible” vault. Are you in?

This strikes me as where “The Vault” starts to go wrong. We’ve been treated to a not-quite-suspenseful prologue where Walter (Cunningham) and his ace diver (Sam Riley) recover treasure that they then legally lose custody of. Lawyer Margaret (Famke Janssen) was no help at all. So this bank job is to recover something they’ve already risked big cash and lives to get their hands on.

Walter makes nothing of that, no “Get back what’s mine” (because it isn’t) outrage, no “England expects every man to do his bank-robbing duty” rubbish. Specifics of the “prize” are sketchy. And we aren’t treating skilled, alluring and amoral young female accomplices as “bait” in such pictures any more.

But the trouble is, there’s too little here that’s supposed to lure this earnest, privileged and dull young engineer into crossing the line and risking prison or worse — just the “problem” of this “impossible” low-tech vault.

Next thing we know, we’re in Madrid to meet the German IT whiz (Axel Stein) and the Spanish procurer (Spanish star Luis Tosar of “Eye for an Eye” and “Retribution”). He can get “whatever you need” — 3D printers have just been invented, “thermal lances, a fire suit and 500 liters of nitrogen” come later.

What follows is a wildly improbable, generally dull attempted heist with pre-robbery robberies, ziplines and water hazards and a fanatical Spanish security chief (Jose Coronado) trying to keep his vast “team” engaged in defending the vault in the middle of Spain’s march to victory in the 2010 World Cup, which has the country transfixed.

I kept groping around for something about this story to latch onto, and finding nothing.

It’s not funny, not romantic or sexy and not particularly colorful. Thom joking that he’s no “Danny Ocean” is the closest “The Vault” gets to that light tone.

Which is fine. There are caper comedies and there are heist pictures, and this is the latter. So it needs to get by on “the plan,” an engaging “team,” suspense and clever improvisation when “the best laid plans” of the burglars “Gang aft a-gley.”

But there’s little tension and a lot of nonsensical tech to “The Vault,” great big sets but not much to the set pieces.

It starts to feel compromised early on, and that costs it a point of view. A Spanish co-production about Brits, a German and Spaniards robbing the Banco de España needs more intense motivation for everyone involved. Every character in this seems blithely unaware of the risk-rewards ratio in this enterprise. The actors reinforce this “low stakes” air. It’s as if they see that there’s not a lot of logic to any of this and the on-screen “planning,” a staple of the genre, feels half-assed.

And when your film’s not a comedy, that matters even more.

MPA Rating:  R for language (profanity)

Cast: Freddie Highmore, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Sam Riley, Luis Tosar, Jose Coronado, Liam Cunningham and Famke Janssen

Credits: Directed by Jaume Balagueró, script by Rowan Athale, Michel Gaztambide, Borja Glez Santaolalla, Andrés M. Koppel and Rafa Martínez. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:58