Movie Nation

In the documentary “Every Act of Life,” the playwright Terrence McNally admits “my work never gave me pleasure before the last couple of years.”

To which any fan of the theater might spit up her chablis, sputter in his espresso.

A 60 year veteran of the Broadway stage, four time Tony winner, creator of “Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune,””Master Class,” “The Ritz,” “Corpus Christi,” “Love! Valour! Compassion!” and adapter of musicals from “Ragtime” to “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” and the man isn’t enjoying his creations?

Oh. That’s for the rest of us, I guess.

“Every Act of Life” is a sweet spirited genuflection before the master, a man universally adored by those interviewed by filmmaker Jeff Kaufman, quick to admit his failures and those times actors such as Nathan Lane, Christine Baranski, Chita Rivera or John Glover saved his bacon.

The film is a brisk walk-through of McNally’s life, skipping much but getting at what we have to regard as “the important stuff.” He was born in St. Petersburg, Fla. (not mentioned) but crew up in a “sh—y town,” Corpus Christi, Texas, which gave its name to one of his most controversial plays.

His dad was a Schlitz beer distributor, and “there wasn’t a day when my parents weren’t drunk.” Younger brother Peter is here to verify that miserable, abusive childhood.

But that one special teacher, Mrs. Maurine McElroy, whom he has thanked in awards ceremonies, “was the first person who really got me, my humor, got what I’m smart about…and what I’m not smart at.”

She put him on the path that sent him to New York (which he and his Broadway loving parents had visited), Columbia University and A Life in the Theater.

His first serious boyfriend was none other than “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” era Edward Albee, a combative affair that saw Albee hit his peak and McNally get a foot in the door. His 1964 Broadway debut, the critically dismissed “And Things that Go Bump in the Night,” was the first of many failures. But having a famous playwright boyfriend gets you more at-bats.

Maybe he was ahead of his time, but it wasn’t until his plays took on more overtly gay subtexts and subjects that he became the legend he is today. That took years and years.

“Frankie and Johnny” was an early success. Others followed, with the odd dud blended in. Sometimes, multiple duds.

He “gets at the core of the human condition,” and in many different ways, from different angles, says “Master Class” star Audra McDonald.

“He’s had his triumphs, and his huge disappointments,” Baranski (“Lips Together, Teeth Apart”) notes. “That’s a test of character.”

She tested it further, offered a role in his “Lips Together,” when she told him what she thought of the show. He fixed it and it became a triumph.

McNally persevered because through it all, as Nathan Lane (“Love! Valour! Compassion!”) points out, “nobody loves the theater like Terrence.”

“It reinvents itself every night,” McNally says with a smile. Lane helped him cut “Love! Valour!” into a stageable play, after first trying to get absurdly long early drafts up on their feet.

Being the son of alcoholics weighed on him and crippled relationships and may have even hobbled his earliest Broadway shows. But when Angela Lansbury tells you to “sober up,” what Broadway baby could refuse?

McNally started out writing and mounting “operas in our family’s garage,” according to brother Peter. He developed a passion for hunting for “something beautiful and meaningful and putting it on stage.” And he launched some careers (Lane, McDonald) and revived others (Chita, Rita, etc. ).

It’s a celebratory film, plainly directed by a fan. Kaufman has docs on jazz musician Chick Webb and “The State of Marriage” was about the test case that pushed gay marriage into mainstream legal thought to his credit. He doesn’t press hard on the more intriguing corners of McNally’s personal story, and doesn’t really need to.

Because McNally, after cancer scares (He has the same amount of lung tissue as John Wayne did in his final years.), flops and epoch-defining hits, celebrated his 80th birthday Nov. 3, he’s due his accolades and the victory lap Kaufman’s documentary gives him.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Terrence McNally, Edie Falco, Nathan Lane, F. Murray Abraham, Lynn Ahrens, Jon Robin Baitz, Tyne Daley, Christine Baranski, Zoe Caldwell

Credits: Written and directed by Jeff Kaufman. An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:33

For the life of me, I don’t know why they bothered.

Sure, it’s got a stellar voice cast — Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett and Naomie Harris and Benedict Cumberbatch and Andy Serkis and Tom Hollander doing voices for all the digital talking animals.

But why remake this? Again?

You’ll be able to see “Mowgli” Dec. 7 (In theaters? Then streaming?).

A little Bastardized Bard to start your day?

A lot of talent was drawn to this interesting idea in the “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead” vein.

“Star Wars” weak sister Daisy Ridley has the title role, as Prince Hamlet’s cruelly misused lady love “Ophelia.”

I like the idea behind this retelling of the tragedy of “The Melancholy Dane.””George MacKay is Hamlet, Clive Owen is Claudius and Naomi Watts is Gertrude, and Ridley gets to show us something more than the dainty English rose who’s supposed to be all tough and space-experienced in the J.J. Abrams “Star Wars” movies.

It began with a 2015 email from out of the blue to a reporter, Bastian Obermayer, with a newspaper in Munich, Germany.

The author, labeling her or himself “John Doe,” was “just a concerned citizen” seeing ” unbelievable amount of corruption” at this Panamanian law firm and promising a data dump to ensure this got “exposed” and reported.

It was the “world, hidden from most of us” detailing how “French Revolution level income inequality” was being perpetrated by the super rich preying on governments and “We the people” who make up those governments.

It became “the largest leak of secret documents in history,” millions of emails and PDFs detailing offshore tax avoidance, money laundering and criminality ranging from stashing cash for drug kingpins to tax dodging to the money laundering “investments” that get hotels built for a certain future American president.

Dummy corporations and shell companies attached to Syria’s dictator Assad, Saudi sheiks, President Sharif of Pakistan, Prime Minister Gunnlaugsson of Iceland, Putin and Trump, Lionel Messi and the FIFA officials who govern his sport were exposed.

“The Panama Papers,” as they were called, became a scandal unlike any other, global in scale, “revealing a hidden world” where human civilization’s wealthiest codified global income inequality through outright criminal acts, and colluding with other criminals.

Alex Winter’s documentary “The Panama Papers” tells the story of “How we got that story,” names names and gets into the fallout from this story, which wasn’t the easiest to sell to a planet that’s come to see “kleptocracy” as “the new normal.”

Leaders were impeached or resigned, others stonewalled or refused to release their tax returns, and reporters died — killed by the powerful and shady figures (and public ones) whom this story hurled into the spotlight.

The wealthy of 200 countries were tied, via some 11.5 million documents shared by this one anonymous “John Doe,” to the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, since closed, its leader imprisoned. It was a firm married to the mob and mobsters, where “their business was secrets,” a business supposedly incorruptible politicians (David Cameron) felt the need to hire to avoid taxes and launder investments from underworld figures (Donald J. Trump).

The original reporter, Obermayer, started to realize “Maybe it’s not a good idea that only I know.” When you’re reporting on the corruption of murderous Russians and Saudis, of South American drug lords, there’s safety in numbers. He and his newspaper drew in American news organizations, The Guardian newspaper in Britain and papers and reporters in most every country which had famous names locked in that cache of data — Malta and Spain, Iceland and Panama.

Winter, who has used his post “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” years to become a good documentary filmmaker and a sharp interviewer, built his movie on interviews with the reporters, lengthy quotes from “John Doe’s Manifesto,” the whistleblower’s reason for leaking the data (Elijah Wood reads that manifesto in voice-over), graphics and clips from the movie “Scarface,” which touched on how widespread money laundering — the practice of taking illegally-obtained drug or human trafficking, murder for hire, etc. cash, and getting it “cleaned” by pouring it, along with bribes, into allegedly legitimate businesses — is.

One good example, the ways Donald Trump finances hotels with his name on them. Here’s proof that one in Panama used money from unsavory underworld figures to finance and build it, the details of how Trump creates such deals with crooks the world over. The crooks overpay for those investments, and Team Trump gets to skim from that.

We see political leaders confronted and chased from office in some countries (Iceland, Britain, Brazil), hear about Leticia Montoya, a poor secretary with the law firm, who serves on the boards of 10000 paper corporations — not benefiting from this big con one cent herself.

Winter, heard asking smart, pointed questions off camera, celebrates the heroic journalists involved in this story, getting them to give mini-autobiographies before they show and tell how they, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, went through the papers and found the dirt that shook the world.

A couple of folks from McClatchy News Service, which I used to work for, talk about how hard it was to “sell this story to our company. Reporter Kevin Hall notes, “Who’s surprised that bad guys hide their money?”

Marissa Taylor, one of over 100 journalists worldwide involved in the expose, adds “Why are people going to care that the rich don’t pay their taxes and crooks are crooks?”

But they told the story anyway, and in much of the world, heads rolled and continue to roll. In America, we elected a kleptocrat president.

“This story revealed a whole hidden world. This was…the goods,” Taylor says.

Most disturbing of all are the investigative journalists who use the phrase, “state capture” in describing countries where vandal capitalism has put the crooks in charge. Malta, Iceland and Brazil are named, and then U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s sham of a confirmation hearing is repeated, his dodging of questions about sham corporations and tax avoidance and worse (Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort is juxtapositioned with Mnuchin) suggesting that this has happened in the United States as well.

With Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, married into a Chinese oligarch family, covering the vast array of crimes and criminal appointments up, we are looking at “Trump cozying of to his fellow kleptocrats as a way of making this the new normal,” former Senate ethics lawyer and tax law specialist Jack Blum declares.

It’s all pretty distressing, and the fact that so many other scandals have chased this epic one off the front pages just adds to to helplessness such exposes cannot help but create. Winter has made an important film, but an exhausting and dispiriting one about a scandal 99% of the world should care about.

While American journalists haven’t been killed (save for one the Saudis murdered in Turkey), you really wonder if we will ever see a story like this brought to light again, and if the world’s embattled news organizations will ever have the resources to stay with this until “justice is done, though the heavens may fall.”

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Luke Harding, Frederik Obermaier, Bastian Obermayer, voiceover by Elijah Wood

Credits: Written and directed by Alex Winter. An Epix release.

Running time: 1:40

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” morphs into The Girl with Nine Lives in “The Girl in the Spider’s Web,” a bastardized borrowing of Stieg Larrson’s avenging hacker angel.

Lisbeth Salander has more narrow escapes than Jason Bourne in this stylish but stale reboot of the Franchise Hollywood Never Quite Gets Right. It’s still snowy and Swedish (once removed), still a chilling peek at the seamy underbelly of the blonde and beautiful socialist paradise. But here character is sacrificed pure action and story becomes whatever they can make of a fifth rate Bond villain and ridiculous plot device.

There’s an encryption expert (Stephen Merchant) who wants something he sold to the Americans stolen from them,” the sum of all my sins” is how he describes it. Lisbeth, here played by the fierce Claire Foy of “The Crown” and “First Man,” is underground and on the run.

But she has a motorcycle, mad computer hacking skills and hacking support (“Plague,” played by (Cameron Britton) and a rep as a “righter of wrongs.” She’ll take the job.

That puts her, the code expert and the guy’s doted-on son (Christopher Convery) in jeopardy. There’s this murderous pan-national gang “The Spiders” — with tattoos to ID them — who want that computer file as well.

Lisbeth has to take a break from her “vigilante…defender of women” hobby and evade her pursuers, who also include this seriously irked NSA agent (Lakeith Stanfield of “Sorry to Bother You” and “Atlanta”) and the Swedish intelligence service and its bristling chief (Synnøve Macody Lund).

She escapes from an exploding building, dodges cops on her river-ice worthy motorcycle, makes a getaway in a Volvo and eventually steals a Lamborghini.

All made possible because of that lazy deus ex machina  of modern fiction and screenwriting — the Omnipotent Hacker.

Lisbeth can find anyone, take control of anything, often via her handy-dandy smartypants smart phone. And even if she can’t say, break into a building and tell you everyone in it and where they are within that building, her pal Plague can.

Lisbeth’s journalist pal and sometime lover (she’s gay, as are several other characters in this) Mikael Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason) has been reduced to bit-player/pawn in this tale, perhaps a reflection of the shrinking role of journalism in “righting wrongs.”

Foy, dressed down, butch haircut and covered in piercings and tattoos, gives Lisbeth back the fierceness that skinny rich model Rooney Mara never could manage, even as the script can’t decide here if Lisbeth is violent and vengeful or not. She keeps letting bad guys she knows are murderous go, only to have them try and kill her again.

The little boy is rather bland in the role (some of that’s a scriptural “on the spectrum” requirement), the villains murderous but also inclined to let Lisbeth live when logic dictates they have what they need from her.

The fights staged for director Fede Alvarez (“Don’t Breathe”) are epic. Novel uses of a taser and cattle prod are among the props, and Foy holds her own here — wholly committed to the violence Lisbeth metes out and takes.

One thing about this story that the late novelist Stieg Larsson would have approved of is the stench of corruption the permeates the shiny, progressive gloss that is the world’s image of Sweden. But you have to wonder if Larsson, obsessed with the sordid, Nazi sympathizing past of Sweden’s wealthy elite, would have thought up a story, characters and plot devices as trite and worn as those used here.

Had he lived, I’ll bet he’d have gotten into Sweden’s uneasy relationship with its non-white immigrants and beneath-the-surface attitudes the blue-eyed blondes never let the rest of the world see.

“Spider’s Web” — and the screenwriters seem too embarrassed to acknowledge that slapping new tattoos onto the tale was stupid and lazy, so they don’t make much of it — is never less than watchable. But for all that wintry Swedish gloom, all that ultra-violence and vengeance, there isn’t a minute in its 117 minutes that you’re not aware you’re watching an inferior photocopy.

When it comes to girls with a dragon tattoo, give us Noomi Rapace and a story by Stieg Larsson, or let it go.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, language and some sexual content/nudity

Cast: Claire Foy, Stephen Merchant, Sylvia Hoeks, Lakekeith Stanfield, Sverrir Gudnason, Cameron Britton

Credits:Directed by Fede Alvarez, script by Jay Basu, Fede Alvarez and Steven Knight, based on the David Lagercrantz novel which used Stieg Larsson’s characters. A Sony release.

Running time: 1:57

Start-up distributor STX is dabbling in animation, too.

Their MO — throw money at “names” of dubious cinematic merit — applies to the animated side, too. Janelle Monae, Kelly Clarkson, Nick Jonas, Gabriel Iglesias, Wanda Sykes, Emma Roberts and Blake Shelton do the voices in this cartoon about “being different” in a world where dolls are usually not quite so ugly.

“UglyDolls” opens May 10. 

“Astral” is a British thriller in the “Ouija” mode, young people creeped out by what they stumble into exploring the “other” world.

Shot quickly and on the cheap (12 days, limited locations), it plays like a prospectus for a bigger, perhaps better movie that could expand on this limited supernatural suspense story. If you see a Hollywood remake built around this low-key “sizzle reel” of a movie, don’t be surprised. .

But taken on its own terms it quietly, quickly and efficiently gets down to the simple business of raising the hair on the back of your neck.

Frank Dillane, of “Fear the Walking Dead” and a couple of Harry Potter pictures, is Alex Harmann, a college kid with brooding good looks and a personality to match.

He’s 21 and one of his classes at his stately British university touches on “astral projection,” the idea that you can give yourself an OBE — not an “Order of the British Empire” honor but an out of body experience.

Alex is interested. OK, obsessed. 

“With increased awareness we can see into another world?”

He’s so taken with this “theory of astral projection” that he barely notices the comely coed Alyssa (Vanessa Grasse of “Leatherface”) who flirts with him almost non-stop. He wants to see if he can detach his spirit from his physical body.  So he reads up on it.

“Had a go at that astral projection thing,” he tells his mates (Damson Idris, Ned Porteous, Jennifer Brooke and Ms. Grasse). “Useless.”

But Professor Powell (Trevor White) was convincing, if skeptical. Alex hunts for instructions on the Internet. Naturally he finds them, and of course they work.

“I’ve perfected it. I’m a genuine projectionist!”

All he has to do is come up with “proof” for his doubting, not-easily-fooled friends.

That’s where “Astral,” which opens with a “Don’t try this at home” credit, draws us in. Computer recording Alex during his sleep with a proof-pendulum (an object dangling from a string) suggests the long-haired kid was wandering outside his physical body in his dorm room.

And proof or not, that “projection” made him start to see things — “shadow people.” What’s worse, his friends do, too. And I don’t know which is creepier, the ghostly glimpses in the movie, or the fact that “shadow person” warrants an entry in Wikipedia.

Dillane, son of top notch character actor Stephen Dillane, gives away the speed of this shoot only rarely. Oftentimes, rushed filming leads to rushed performances. Here, he gets caught underplaying the odd chilling moment when he needed another take to give us something to move us or shake us.

“I swear, I was outside of my body, looking down!”

Writer-director Chris Mul’s script has a tidy symmetry about it, a formulaic way of treating foreshadowing (the pre-credits prologue ends with a suicide) and only a few mild frights to it.

But less can be more in such movies, limiting the frights to a few key moments, lulling the viewer into complacency first. “Hmm, they’ve got video proof we can leave our bodies…Wait, what’s THAT in the corner?”

The best moment might be the rare funny one. Alyssa has finally decided to tell her feelings to Alex, who is so jumpy from what he’s been seeing that his eyes dart and he keeps turning his head, looking for shadows. Only his realization that now is the time I should lean in for a kiss keeps her from fleeing this long-haired wack-job.

British girls are made of sterner stuff.

Mul and his players keep a British drollery about everything that’s going on that’s cute and culture-clash funny. “Ghosts…the ONLY plausible explanation.”

It’s just that there’s so little here that the finale arrives abruptly and feels like it needed more buildup and oomph. We’ve seen “Ouija,” and that means you’ve got to give us more when you’re ready to confront the shadows stalking you.

“Astral” may have a refreshing quiet dread about it. But at some point, the stakes are raised and a big payoff is in order. The climax has to feel like something the movie preceding it has earned. Not here.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Frank Dillane, Vanessa Grasse, Catherine Steadman, Damson Idris, Trevor White

Credits:Directed by Chris Mul, script by Chris Mul, Michael Mul. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:22

Filmgoers have lots of choices at Fandango.com or in the line at their favorite cineplex box office this weekend.

The holdover “Bohemian Rhapsody” should continue the Queen revival.

But “The Grinch” gives families with small children something to go see, even though the Chuck Jones cartoon from the ’60s is far better, and cheaper to obtain.

“The Grinch” is sitting in “fresh tomato” territory on Rotten Tomatoes, but isn’t even close over at the more selective Metacritic. 

I thought it Cumber-boring, pretty, empty-headed and heartless. 

Horror fans, video gamers, mashup movie buffs and their ilk — referred to as “fanboys” and “fangirls” — have to be salivating over the J.J. Abrams produced “Overlord,” which was pitched as “D-Day with Zombies,” dollars to donuts.

It’s getting mostly favorable reviews, although not raves — something Metacritic reveals more readily than Rotten Tomatoes.  

For me, “The Zombies of Navarone” was a bit of a drag. A good-looking one, but so reliant on cliches (noble sacrifice, child in danger, suicide mission, Nazis in leather, intrepid French beauty who speaks English and isn’t collaborating, etc).

But as pioneering film critic Abe Lincoln once said, “Those who like this sort of thing will find it the sort of thing they like.”

Poor notices and the lack of a screening in my market mean I will get to “Girl in the Spider’s Web” later today. I do love that Claire Foy, though if I was doing a fresh installment in that franchise, I would have given serious thought to using the one and only Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Noomi Rapace. Still, could be good. Fingers crossed.

Box Office Mojo is predicting a $60 million weekend for Universal’s latest version of “The Grinch,” which allows the studio to make bank before “Ralph Breaks the Internet” comes in to rain all over their Disney Parade.

Box Office Mojo is thinking $52 million is more likely.

Deadline.com figures “Grinch” will hit $70 million in the US on its opening weekend.

No word yet from Deadline.com about Thursday night preview ticket sales, but I saw “Overlord” in a mostly-full IMAX (it wasn’t really, AMC just charges more) showing. Guessing it got the jump on “The Grinch.”

I also would bet the bank that BO Mojo’s prediction that “Overlord” will only add $11 million to Paramount’s bottom line is laughably off. The fanboys and fangirls are eating up the zombies/WWII D-Day movie mashup. Box Office Mojo is saying $14. I figure over $20, but we will see.

The “Girl/Spider’s Web” predictions are in the $8-10 range, which may be a tad high.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” opened to a gravity-defying $51 million last weekend. Anything more than $30 this one will be a big win for Fox, anything less suggests it’ll never match “A Star is Born” in the fall musicals box office race. “Star” is over $170, “Bohemian” not quite at $70. Will the Gaga/Fat Bottom Girls gap close?

“Overlord” grafts World War II combat movie cliches onto zombie and Frankenstein “Give my creature LIFE!” cliches, a D-Day with Monsters mashup with splendid firefights, digitally dazzling airdrop action and gruesome as all get out Nazi Walking Dead effects.

It’s such a slick spin on the two genres that it feels familiar, first scene to last. But when your whole concept is “Let’s give these cliches a new setting,” this “Re-animating Private Ryan,” “Frankenstein SS” or “The Zombies of Navarone” (I see a drinking game in the making) is rarely more than a grind. We know where it’s going, know the settings, know the action beats long before they show up. As comfortingly familiar as they are, the cliches play like a checklist from a screenwriting seminar.

They make the movie seem like it’s crawling along at half-speed.

Jovan Adepo (“Fences”) heads a little-known to unknown cast, playing Boyce, a “90 day wonder” in the 101st Airborne, dropped into Occupied France on the eve of D-Day.

It doesn’t pay to sweat the militaria in this, so don’t get caught up in “The Army wasn’t integrated in WWII” and the Screaming Eagles required a lot more training than 90 days pre-D-Day.

His squad, led by a crusty, foul-mouthed Sgt. (Bokeem Woodbine, fun), is to take out a German radio jamming station built into a church in a French village.

The Sarge gives his men, including the testy new guy (Wyatt Russell, Kurt’s son), the Jewish kvetcher (Dominic Applewhite), the combat-inept photographer (Iain De Caestecker) and the wisecracking Bronx Tale Italian (John Magaro) a call-and-response pep talk. His “ladies” need reminding that the Nazis are “destroying everything that’s good in this world. So what do we have to DO?”

“Our Goddamned JOBS, Sergeant!”

And then all Hell breaks loose — a waking nightmare of anti-aircraft explosions, shrapnel slaughter, a fire on their C-47 Dakota and a frantic CGI plummet into Hitler’s Inferno topped by plunging into a lake.

The handful of survivors are surrounded by Germans, now led by the testy Corporal and still with that “save D-Day” mission, knocking out that tower by dawn.

Fortunately, a French lass who speaks English (Matthilde Ollivier) is wandering the woods amidst all the carnage and combat. She will take them to town.

There’s a long, chatty and noisy interlude in Chloe’s house, where her cute little brother longs to play baseball with the Americans and her aunt, who has been “helped” by the German doctor in town, looks like every George A. Romero extra ever.

The rumpled, chain-smoking SS officer (Pilou Asbæk of “Game of Thrones”) must be captured and interrogated — “Zis is VAR, eh? Pipple die in many UNFORTUNATE vays!”

And eventually, they remember to get around to their urgent, desperate and against-the- odds mission.

J.J. Abrams produced “Overlord” and his touches are everywhere. The film has a lovely sheen, the darkness lit up by acres of light blimps (no doubt), the explosions and monstrous effects have a no-expense-spared gloss.

It never feels less than big budget (save for the cast), even if it the strain of every contrived moment shows. Of course the child is taken, naturally Boyce stumbles into the leftover “Captain America” sets of the science lab/underground lair.

The characters may be “types” borrowed from scores of films (a sniper with a “Put me in range of Hitler” boast stolen straight from “Saving Private Ryan”), but every now and then, a funny line crosses their lips.

“That’s weird.”

“Add it to the list.”

Adepo makes a fine, surrogate-for-the-audience lead, Magaro can handle a punchline and Russell has a lot of screen presence. Ollivier has a sexy spitfire air and Asbæk makes a perfectly vile villain. Still, the characters are never more than cartoons, and they spent no money hiring a proper mad scientist, a mistake “Captain America” didn’t make.

One pitfall of building your movie out of recycled materials is always going to be pacing. When every character is cardboard, every scene is preordained, you have to get more pop out of the performances and move this damned thing along. Director Julius Avery (“Son of a Gun”) was never going to be a guy to sprint us through the usual J.J. Abrams bloat.

“Overlord” has a “just work with me here” vibe, an invitation to “just go with it” goes without saying. But at some point, this 85 minute genre mashup in a 110 minute package, with its assaultive soundtrack and requisite shock-effect images, sucking chest wounds and mangled corpses coming back to life, just wore on me.

It crawls from “Sure, great,” to “OK, expected that” and onward, ever onward to “All right, get on with it” far too slowly to be that much fun.

MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, disturbing images, language, and brief sexual content

Cast: Jovan Adepo, Mathilde Ollivier, Wyatt Russell, Pilou Asbæk, John Magaro, Iain De Caestecker and Bokeem Woodbine

Credits:Directed by Julius Avery, script by Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:49

It’s a Lars von Trief horror film, but really — aren’t they all?

It looks monstrous.

Dillon’s most challenging film since “Factotum,” I’d say.

“The House that Jack Built” is a serial killer tale starring Dillon, with Bruno Ganz is also in the cast, with Riley Keogh.

It opens at the end of this month, Nov. 28.

“Director’s cut,” they say. The horror, the horror, say I.