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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

Man, who had weaselly Bob Odenkirk as The New Liam Neeson in the “savage cinema of the future” pool?

The “Saturday Night Live” writer, “Drunk History” mainstay, dopey “How I Met Your Mother” boss and “Breaking Bad” breakout/spinoff star completes his journey to “fiftysomething dude you don’t want to mess with” in “Nobody.” It’s the latest thriller built out of the suburban Dad, Mom or whoever with “particular skills,” skills that only come to the fore when somebody without a clue does him or her a great wrong.

It’s a little “John Wick,” a bit of “Taken,” a touch of “The Accountant,” and so on. These characters just “want to be left alone.” Thank heavens there’s always somebody not interested in keeping the peace.

Our guy is introduced, bruised and bloodied, in police custody and that immortal question is snapped in his direction by befuddled cops.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Me? I’m NObody!”

It all started with a home invasion. Mild-mannered Hutch (Odenkirk) comes at the intruders with a 3-wood, but holds back. His teen son (Gage Munroe) gets the drop on them, but Dad backs off. The kid shames him. A neighbor gives Hutch the “I wish they’d come in MY house,” a cop rolls his eyes even as he’s saying “You did the right thing.”

His wife? She (Connie Nielsen) gives him a look of pained pity.

But we’ve seen him size the intruders up, notice a tattoo and make note of them. Whatever his “you being you” day job — half-bullied accountant at a machine shop run by his father-in-law (Michael Ironside) — we figure there’s something he’s not telling us, some reason for deciding to “minimize the damage.”

But when his little girl’s kitty cat bracelet goes missing, that’s it. Time to hit the mean streets — of Winnipeg, Manitoba — and take care of business.

“John Wick” screenwriter Derek Kolstad has used Russian villains before, so why not Canadian Russians here? “Nobody” also has much of the savagery and a similarly droll-about-his-skills hero.

“I used to be an auditor” for some agency, Hutch explains, “the LAST guy you want to see” type.

Kolstad and “Hardcore Henry” director Ilya Naishuller don’t bother to hide the borrowings from “John Wick.” No Lance Reddick or Peter Stormare here. We have Christopher Lloyd (Hutch’s nursing home-bound Dad) and RZA (as Hutch’s advisor and tie to his old life) instead.

RZA is a fair action director himself. Wonder if he took notes on set? Because Naishuller puts on a clinic on how to give a formula thriller violence that pops and comedy that takes a little of the edge off.

Musical counterpoints to the brawls and shootouts range from Tchaikovsky and Pat Benatar to Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong, Gerry and the Pacemakers and…Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme’.

And Odenkirk, far more EveryMan than say, Man Mountain Liam Neeson in the “Taken” films and their variations, does what he does in most of his screen appearances. He under-reacts. He’s capable in the fight scenes and deadpan everywhere else. His best lines are growled in voice-over.

“I hope these ass—-s like hospital food.”

Our villain (Aleksey Serebryakov) is just good enough, even if he’s playing a Russian mob “type” that’s been worn out over the past 20 years of action pics.

“Eeef you cannot recognize wolf eeen sheep’s clothing, I kvestion the viability of your EMPLOYMENT here.”

There may be nothing new to “Nobody.” But Odenkirk & Crew make sure that this mass production action movie has plenty of bespoke fun stitched in.

MPA Rating:  R for strong violence and bloody images, language throughout and brief drug use 

Cast: Bob Odenkirk, Connie Nielsen, Aleksey Serebryakov, Michael Ironside, Christopher Lloyd and RZA.

Credits: Directed by Ilya Naishuller, script by Derek Kolstad. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:32

So many (rhetorical) questions. What DID bad guys look like before three-day stubble was perfected by Don Johnson? What did they drive in the years before the black Excursions and Escalades?

“Enhanced” is a unimaginative and generally drab sci-fi thriller about experimental “enhanced” humans on the run and those from SAISEI who hunt them.

The “enhanced” live as off-the-grid as they can, sleeping in vans, doing menial work.

The simple act of defending themselves gets people killed. They can summon up this psychic EMP that knocks electronics out and knocks their adversaries for a look.

They don’t realize they should worry that one of their own might be out hunting and killing them. But there also might be someone from their ranks looking to save them.

No, he’s not bald, not named Xavier and doesn’t have any “special school.”

Anna (Alanna Bale) is our heroine, lying low as a mechanic who needs fewer power tools than most who do that job. George (George Tchortov) is a SAISEI operative, “just following orders…I’m protecting people from their mistakes…try not to take it personally.”

The “subjects” are classified as “Delta, Charlie, Echo and Bravo” class “enhanced.” What about Alpha?

“Enhanced” is the sort of script (James Mark of “Kill Order” wrote and directed it) where a character says “Alphas don’t exist,” and we know before seeing one (Chris Mark) that they do.

There’s a cool bright-blue-eyeball effect that the “enhanced” exhibit before they show how “enhanced” they are. There are cheesier effects — little arm-shield gadgets the SAISEI agents wear over their matching Old Navy pea coats, retractable nightsticks with bright blue bulbs on the tip.

The fights are staged at not-quite-full speed, the dialogue is cheesy and of the “You have what belongs to me” variety.

The performances? Perfunctory.

People put up money for this, other people put in effort. It’s always a shame to write off a picture with “nothing new to see here,” but that pretty much covers “Enhanced.”

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Alanna Bale, George Tchortov, Chris Mark, Adrian Holmes

Credits: Scripted and directed by James Mark. A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:40

Still mystified at all this support of the script for the mockumentary “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.”

But Emerald Fennell’s scalding script for “Promising Young Woman” is the real deal amd worthy of its Oscar momentum, even if I would’vd voted for several alternatives.

https://variety.com/2021/film/news/wga-awards-winners-2021-writers-guild-1234935361/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

The Rodrigo Garcia addiction drama opens May 21.

Https://youtu.be/Tb42RG3T1uk

Sound or the lack of it is an under-appreciated element of cinema, so much so that films that pay extra attention to it stand out.

The Oscar-nominated “Sound of Metal” is wholly conceived around loud noise and learning to live in silent deafness. The filmmakers behind “Rose Plays Julie” take care to use muffled sound, soft ringing or stony silence to show not just the effect of injuries, but numbing shock and momentary disconnects from the world.

That underscores how Rose (Ann Skelly of TV’s “Vikings”) has become unmoored from her reality. A student at a Dublin veterinary school, she is reeling not just from the extended section of her lab study involving animal euthanasia. She’s gotten news and doesn’t know quite what to do with it.

She can’t complete that first phone call to London. But when she does, she catches the actress (Orla Brady of TV’s “Into the Badlands” and “Fringe”) in a World War I nurse’s uniform on the set.

“My name is Rose,” and although the actress once wrote “no contact” on the adoption forms, the young woman is reaching out “because I don’t know what else to do.”

This isn’t the most welcome contact Ellen Wise has had, and she lets that be known. But Rose won’t be rebuffed. She books a flight, checks out the address she was given, and seeing the house is for sale, contacts the agent for a showing.

We have plenty of time in the first act of this Christine Malloy/Joe Lawlor thriller to consider how shaken and disturbed this news has made Rose, who was “Julie” on her birth certificate. Stalking somebody by touring their home, looking at their photos and prescription bottles, meeting her (other) daughter (Sadie Soverall)? Creepy.

And finally getting some answers from Ellen doesn’t improve Rose’s mood or state. There’s a reason she wanted “no contact,” a reason she gave up an unplanned child in her ’30s, and no, it’s not just an “actress and career” thing.

“I was raped.”

Lawlor and Molloy tease out the push and pull of this daughter/biological mother “relationship” into a sort of resigned dread. We’re not sure who we can believe, not sure of Rose’s motives, not sure whether Ellen should be worried for herself or the man she names as her attacker.

And we’re REALLY weirded out by the many scenes of Rose’s veterinary classes and their animal deaths and necropsies.

Skelly makes Rose seem poker-faced and sane. But can we be sure? “Young and impulsive” is a universal truth. How will she act on what she’s trying to process? Numbed by news or stunned by violence, we hear the silences Rose slips into in a story she narrates.

The script also lays out the psychic pain of hearing all this in her ’20s. She’s had just enough time to rationalize that “It wasn’t my fault,” that “whatever the reason, I was wanted.” Now that’s off the table, and in the worst way imaginable.

The story’s direction becomes deflatingly predictable once all the various characters and plot elements are set up. But “Rose Plays Julie” is a psychological thriller where pathos, suspense and the silent confusion of our heroine compete for primacy. Start to finish, this is damned unsettling.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Ann Skelly, Orla Brady, Aidan Gillen 

Credits: Scripted and directed by Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:40

Yeah, there’s a whiff of Jason Bourne in “Trigger Point.”

Barry Pepper and Colm Feore are the stars in this spy-out-for-revenge thriller, opening April 23.

I had the wickedest thought while watching “Operation Varsity Blues,” Netflix’s docudrama about “The College Admissions Scandal.”

This is Hollywood’s revenge for the way that story was played in the American media.

Who were the faces of it? Two Hollywood parents trying to get C-student kids into A-list schools. Hell, the FBI even named their sting after a James Van Der Beek high school sports movie from 1999. And if the last four years of Ivy League-credentialed incompetence and corruption taught us nothing else, it’s that monied mediocrity isn’t just a Hollywood phenomenon.

So forget you-know-her and you-know-her-better. “Varsity Blues” gives us Bill McGlashan and Jane Buckingham, Gordon Caplan, Agustin Huneeus Jr. and Devin Sloane. If there’s a sin of omission here, it’s that “Varsity” doesn’t paint — through casting actors to recreate incriminating phone calls — a broad enough portrait of the indicted and accused. It’s not just rich WASPs and Jews, but there are Asian and Hispanic parents who were in this mess, too.

“Tiger King” producer Chris Smith directed this hybrid documentary, using scores of interviews with journalists and a few principals in the story, guidance counselors, lawyers and Feds, and recreations — with actors — of the hours of intercepted phone negotiations between the rich and the “coach” who had the inside track, the “side door” way of getting their middling student into her or his preferred Destination College of Choice.

Matthew Modine plays Rick Singer, performing every line straight off of transcripts of those wiretaps, so immersed in the part that we get a real sense of what a driven, focused but myopic bore this fellow must be.

A workaholic, onetime college basketball coach (allegedly with anger-management issues, not seen here), Singer reinvented himself as a sort of “life coach” and “college prep counselor” who developed relationships at elite schools and a way to get kids into those schools without buying Harvard a new wing on this building or naming rights for that one. He had, to borrow the names his companies went under, “The Key” to help these “Future Stars” get into “the right college.”

Modine’s Singer (and others) explain that there’s a “front door” way of getting in to USC, Stanford, Princeton and Yale et al — merit, outstanding scholarship, acclaimed “interests and activities,” with the weight of “legacy” enrollment and protected minority status helping. The “back door” way is through BIG donations to the school.

The “side door” Singer exploited was often a bogus connection to “niche” athletics — rowing, sailing, fencing teams, underfunded corners of the Full Ivy League/Seven Sisters/Stanford et al “experience.” Photograph a kid on a sailboat, or photoshop her head onto a coxswain in a rowing racing shell, get the coach to sign off on this “talented” potential “walk-on” (non scholarship) “athlete,” and that “set aside” gets your kid in.

“A donation to my foundation,” we hear Singer pitch, is all it takes — a few hundred thousand. Because that “foundation” has to make a “donation” to that program, or its coach, among others.

Singer would fudge and exploit minority status, even have a hired “proctor” for your little darling’s SAT or ACT test, somebody who would “correct” the answer sheets to get the desired grade.

And it worked, for years.

Smith uses the breathless TV news coverage to paint a picture of the extent of the scandal, and montages of students anxiously waiting to see if they got into their first, second or third choice school to show us just what college has become — a zero sum, all-or-nothing, social-media bragging rights game of American elitism in action.

And the elite, to ensure they remain elite, are desperate to pass on their status to their little darlings by getting them into the schools that “everybody wants to get into.” A corrupt need arises, and a corrupt coach and his corrupt USC et al insiders move to fill that need and get rich in the process.

The whole “scandal” could seem overblown to anyone clear-eyed and cynical enough to recognize that borderline illiterates like Donald Trump or third-rate thinkers like Jared Kushner aren’t getting their educational pedigree on the up-and-up. What’s “news” about that?

Smith and screenwriter Jon Karmen those they interview personalize it, hint at how this sort of Late Roman Empire corruption eats away at institutions, rots society and populates the highest echelons of government and business (not science and art, supposedly) with Brett Kavanaughs, Amy Coney Barretts and serial bankruptcy princes with success at their feet if they’re not too stupid to run every business they take on bankrupt.

Touching on how the rich even exploit fake “minority” status will rankle many. Learning how Singer encourages kids to fake “special needs” testing status so that the rich and not-that-sharp get days to take a test (with extra time for cheating) that the rest of America has to take in a single morning is guaranteed to blow any college applicant’s fuse.

“Operation Varsity Blues” tends to overwhelm us with such details, and not every phone call is damning enough to merit recreation. There’s “mission creep” in the movie as it tries to dissect how “going to college” became “go to THE college” in the American mindset. And while there might be one actual “victim” in all this, it is impossible to feel sorry for any of these misguided parents or their children, even if “she/he could have gotten in on his own.”

But it’s a healthy reminder that fighting corruption, even in something as mundane as college admissions, is vital to society’s health, that Americans need to at least believe there’s a “level playing field,” and that not guaranteeing that is how we mediocre our way from the top of the world to Banana Republic in just a generation.

MPA Rating: R for some language

Cast: Matthew Modine, John Vandemoer, Naomi Fry, Daniel Golden

Credits: Directed by Chris Smith, script by Jon Karmen. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

“The Courier” is an engrossing espionage thriller set, as so many of them are, at that one point when the Cold War seemed most likely to turn nuclear hot.

Well-acted and early ’60s period perfect, about the worst you can say about it is that it’s a washed-out copy of “Bridge of Spies,” which is its easy analog and far more suspenseful and immersive.

Benedict Cumberbatch is our unlikeliest of “heroes,” a chain-smoking, elbow-bending British salesman coerced into carrying messages between a Soviet turncoat and the West in the blustering, impulsive last years of Nikita Khrushchev’s rule.

How MI6, at CIA urging, settled on Greville Wynne as their go-between is skimmed over in Tom O’Connor’s script. A chance meeting that an espionage operator (Angus Wright) recalls in a pinch, a lunch date arranged, with a CIA intermediary (Rachel Brosnahan), fine food and a bit of booze and flattery and appeals to patriotism seal the deal.

Wynne’s bonafides are that he represents British firms wanting to sell machine parts, and has that salesman’s gift of remembering names and knowing when to lose when golfing with a client. He likes to eat, drink and smoke and travels the Eastern Bloc on sales calls. In “The War” he was a mere private who “never saw action.”

“The truth is, if this mission was dangerous, you’re the very last person we’d send,” his handler-to-be (Wright) purrs.

The Whitehall use of “mission” in an Oxonian accent should scare Wynne off. But he reads the papers. He might prefer to make sales inroads to the USSR “when things are a mite cooler,” tensions-wise. His would-be handlers’ leverage is simply this. Nuclear war is edging closer and the CIA has no inside information about Kremlin thinking or planning. If this Russian (Merab Ninidze) who has reached-out can’t help, the world’s only going to get more dangerous. Wynne relents.

Veteran stage director Dominic Cooke and screenwriter O’Connor skimp on the “tradecraft” — mere suggestions that “every Soviet is the eyes of the State,” a package hand-off here and there — building their thriller on the personal relationship between the salesman and the spy-trained Soviet who is a higher up with a ministry in charge of industry and trade.

Oleg Penkovsky is a father fretting over how “unstable” Khrushchev seems to him, and is desperate to “prevent a war.” He is also a spy, part of whose job “is to steal technology from the West.” He is confident and reassuring to his inexperienced “courier” of documents and microfilm.

“I am better at this than ‘they’ (the KGB/GRU) are.”

But hanging their film on that partnership depends on chemistry and the sense that a deeper bond is forming, as “Alex,” as he prefers to be called in English, escorts Wynne around Moscow, visits Britain on a trade trip and meets and dines with Wynne’s family (Jessie Buckley, Keir Hills).

We get plenty of the wining, vodka-ing, smoking and dining, and in the film’s cleverest touch, proof of Wynne’s grinning answer to that most important query if you’re trying to fit in with and trick Russians.

“Can you hold your alcohol?”

“It’s my one true gift!”

It’s that extra pathos, that intimacy that would personalize the stakes in this movie about a world lurching toward the Cuban Missile Crisis, that’s sorely missed here.

Cumberbatch makes Wynne a Brit of his times — reserved, stoic, suppressing emotions as he lives this secret life that his suspicious wife doesn’t know about. We get a hint that the salesman’s soul is finally reached when he learns to appreciate Russian ballet (“Swan Lake”), but little else that explains his later actions. The picture stumbles into a dry-eyed third act that should be wrenching but plays here as an extended epilogue.

Cumberbatch’s commitment to the role is most impressive in that stumbling third act, but this internalized performance is more historically appropriate than audience-endearing.

Buckley and Brosnahan are the players who give us more to latch onto than our buttoned-down leads. And if we’re handing out plaudits, kudos on landing a wonderful big screen Khruschev (Vladimir Chuprikov), and keeping the Soviet scenes “Russian” (with subtitles).

Our KGB villain (Kirill Pirogov) may not have enough scenes to make a big impression. But “The Courier” does a passable job of passing on the paranoia of a country where betrayal and summary arrest could come from anyone, at any time.

It’s that “passable job” that’s the rub here. As this “true story” hews closely to the plot points of many a spy thriller, “The Courier” invites comparisons that highlight its shortcomings, telegraphing punches that we sense are coming and failing to ever land a telling blow.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for violence, partial nudity, brief strong language, and smoking throughout

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Merab Ninidze, Jessie Buckley, Angus Wright, and Rachel Brosnahan.

Credits: Directed by Dominic Cooke, script by Tom O’Connor. A Lionsgate film.

Running time: 1:51

OK, I laughed maybe half a dozen times at this Brazilian farce (in Portuguese, with English subtitles). And a couple of those were belly laughs.

One involves a martial arts brawl that comes out of nowhere, with the tide turned when the good guy wets a bar towel and uses it like nunchucks. Another is when two guys are trying to convince a goat to defuse a bomb for them by doing what goats do.

And don’t even get me started on the battle royale finale.

“Get the Goat” is a romp through “Beverly Hills Cop” starring “The Other Guys,” guys who in this case are hapless Brazilians.

The first is a rural “badass,” the son of an “action movie fanatic” father who named a daughter “Melgibson,” one son “Charlisbronson” and our “hero” Brucuilis. We meet him as he’s chasing down a Lothario who’s just stolen an electric fan from his lover’s cabana. “Bruce,” played by motor-mouthed funnyman Edmilson Filho (His “O Shaolin do Sertão” has similar manic “Hai-YA” mayhem.) is so cool, at least in his own mind, that he merits his own entrance music.

Ever heard “The Heat is On” in Portuguese? Just you wait.

Bruce is a real bull in a china shop in his little corner of Ceará province, the small town of Guaramobim. We learn Brazilian slang for “IDIOT” from his boss.

Trindade (Matheus Nachtergaele) is the seriously hapless pencil-pusher cop enlisted by Operation Thunderbolt and its chief Priscilla (Letícia Lima) to stage a buy from Ping Li (Eyrio Okura) that will get them closer to the mysterious Big Boss of the Brazilian drug trade, The White Glove. Trindade doesn’t take a bullet for her partner in that operation, which means he “got my best man killed,” according Priscilla. He’s promptly demoted to a small, sleepy São Paulo precinct.

When Bruce screws up one time too many and loses the town goat (formerly a city councilwoman) Celestrina and the mascot of their Rapadura Festival, he will stop at nothing to get her back, chasing the drug courier who winds up with her all the way to Trindade’s turf.

Can these two nitwits foil Ping Li, catch and “out” The White Glove and “Get the Goat” back?

I can’t say much for this silly script except that every so often, some of its low-hanging fruit produces jam.

Trindade isn’t eager to pursue a stolen vehicle case, but if a five year old “kid” named Celestine has been (literally) “kidnapped?” He’s all in, if confused.

They try to wring laughs out of a Chinese restaurant that might have some clues. If only they can get over their stereotypical ideas of who works there. No, they’re not Chinese and all martial artists. They’re locals.

They run a stake-out out of an Uber, leap to conclusions about who they’re after and get chewed out by Priscilla, who’s taken a Chief Inspector Dreyfuss attitude towards her own Inspector Clouseau. She has Trindade’s picture attached to her target at the firing range.

The fight scenes are antic and hilarious. Perhaps director Vitor Brandt realized this too late to add any, but the finale — a shoot-out/punch-out — is a doozy. The two leads click well enough to be funnier than their material, with only the slapstick and mugging (they get taken hostage a time or two) paying off.

This would be an eye-roller, coming out of Hollywood, which has taken more shots at this formula than any other. It almost gets by on just being jaunty. The funniest thing about “”Get the Goat” (original title, “Cabras de Peste”) is seeing timeworn Hollywood cop comedy tropes, gimmicks and gags through a Brazilian lens.

Not great, but it’s got a few laughs, so not that bad either.

MPA Rating: TV-14, gun violence, drug content

Cast: Edmilson Filho, Matheus Nachtergaele, Letícia Lima, Leandro Ramos and Evelyn Castro

Credits: Directed by Vitor Brandt, script by Vitor Brandt, Denis Nielsen. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37