Movie Nation

“Commitment” is something you hope to see from actors even in a movie that might not offer the most ambitious roles, cleverest dialogue or most surprising script.

Malin Akerman and Bella Thorne deliver that with every punch, kick, head-butt and one-liner in “Chick Fight,” a movie they co-produced.

It may be a movie that’s literally nothing more than its billing, a “Fight Club” romantic comedy with women, Mean Girls and “mom jean” jokes. It’s sentimental, tries too hard to be coarse and manages no real surprises, start to finish.

But these two, with the help of stunt coordinator Shauna Galligan and her team, flat out bring it. And they make a middling movie pretty damned likable.

I mean, who could hate a picture where the in-the-ring trash talk goes “there?”

“Are you ready to BLEED?”

“Yeah, but not for another MONTH!”

Akerman plays Anne, a lonely, flat-broke cafe owner in that gorgeous, beachfront corner of Puerto Rico that’s way too pretty to pass for Florida. She’s losing her business, her car’s just been repossessed and her Dad (Kevin Nash) just ended his mourning for her late mother (dead nine months) by coming out as gay.

But Anne has that one sassy best friend, Charleen (Dulce’ Sloan, funny), a cop who introduces her to that thing that can change her life, a fight club for women, where Bear (Fortune Feimster) presides.

“OK, let’s get more prepared to RUuuumble!”

It’s a dizzy, if somewhat brutal scene — stunned “first-timers” looking at shirt and wondering “Is that my blood?” “It sure ain’t KETCHUP!,” librarians choking out or knocking out baristas.

Here, you “Fight it out, then hug it out,” even if you get knocked out. At least there’s a cute doctor (Kevin Connolly) on hand if things get out of hand.

“Oh, I’m a TERRIBLE doctor. Ohio State. I was drunk the whole time.”

One word of advice? Avoid “Kung Fu Barbie,” the “ninja cheerleader” Olivia (Thorne). She’s “super baller,” quick to fire off a “mom jeans” put-down lest this fight club become a “support group for basic b-tches.”

If Anna’s going to do this, she needs training. That might come from the guy who trained Sugar Ray, the local tiki bar lush Murphy (Alec Baldwin). He’s so lame he just lip-syncs his karaoke (Make the effort, Baldwin!). He’s so loaded he spends more time falling down than standing up.

“I like you, Heidi!”

“Anna.”

“OK. we’ll go with that.”

And yes, everything that happens after that is as predictable as everything that came before it. One novel touch? Teaching somebody to punch and “look for the weak spot” with a watermelon. Old School boxing trick?

“Nah, I saw it on Youtube.”

The script is thin on one-liners, which forces director Paul Leydon (“Come Back to Me”) to lean HEAVILY on training montages and fight montages. The soundtrack, laced with Final Child, Qveen Herby, Menace Beach and Bones UK, atones for that.

Riding that “fight movie” formula this hard, and giving it a lot of sisterhood sentimentality, means “Chick Fight” was never going to be all that. Saying it “works” is a tad generous, considering how utterly predictable it is.

But for a bad movie, it’s a fun.

MPA Rating: R for language and sexual material throughout, some violence and brief drug use

Cast: Marin Akerman, Bella Thorne, Dulce’ Sloan, Fortune Feimster, Kevin Connolly and Alec Baldwin

Credits: Directed by Paul Leydon, script by Joseph Downey. A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:37

As funny as a mass shooting at the North Pole, and relying on just such a finale to sell it, “Fatman” is one of the epic miscalculations of any cinematic holiday season.

And I say this as somebody who adored “Bad Santa,” who finds Mel Gibson‘s B-movie Purgatory a fascinating turn in his career (gritty, lowdown action pics) and laughs at pretty much anything Walton Goggins says or does.

Throw all that out with “Fatman.” It’s a Gibson shoot-out sh-tshow pitched as a dark comedy. Eighty-two minutes without a single solitary dying-of-loneliness laugh, then the first and only chuckle arrives and the real mayhem begins.

The writer-director siblings of “Small Town Crime” lured Gibson, Goggins and the wonderful Marianne Jean-Baptiste (of “Secrets & Lies” and the most recent “Robocop” reboot) into a movie with little point and even less entertainment value, a lump of coal just in time for the holidays.

In a cynical time not unlike our own, Chris Cringle (Gibson) has “lost my influence.” His small town (North Peak, Alaska) sweatshop of elves isn’t meeting its numbers any more. Because, frankly, we’ve raised a generation of brats.

“This is Christmas, we’re not handing out PARTICIPATION trophies,” he grouses to a dissatisfied client. “All I have is a loathing for a world that’s forgotten,” he whines to his wife (Jean-Baptiste).”

So it’s no wonder that “the whole operation’s goin’ tits up.” It’s no wonder that he’s hitting his local watering hole for his “usual” (“a Johnny Carson,” whisky and Alka-Seltzer, a “Mad Man” favorite).

Working the phones, begging Elon for contracts, doesn’t cover their nut. Maybe the military needs some cheap labor.

But one of those brats has the means of getting even when he doesn’t get what he wants under the tree. Rich Billy (Chance Hurstfield) has “our friend” on retainer, an enforcer-hitman (Goggins) who ensures that the kid wins every science fair, filling the void the child’s always-absent father leaves.

Billy’s cruelty hasn’t gone unnoticed. Because “he sees you when you’re sleeping,” etc. But seriously, a lump of COAL?

“I’d like you to KILL Santa Claus.”

California’s Nelms brothers bring all that they don’t know about dark comedy to Canada for this production, filling the film’s first hour with Santa’s struggle for fulfillment and making payroll and the hitman’s hunt for “Fat Ass,” as he refers to the fellow in the red suit we never see the Fatman wear.

We do see a reindeer. “That’s Donner. Sometimes he gets a mite nippy.” And apparently Santa’s used to getting shot at, and shot — flying low over GunNut Nation and all. Gibson loves self-surgery scenes.

Meanwhile, our hunter is picking his weapons, Schwarzenegger style, and attacking US Postal workers, Louis DeJoy fashion, in his hunt for an address.

Hilarious.

Even though it’s been a while, we know Gibson can do comedy. Even he can’t turn “I’m just a silly fat man in a red suit” funny.

Goggins has even less to work with. Even his way with an F-bomb falls utterly flat here.

Humor is the most subjective entertainment form to review, and the best anybody can manage is to try and approach a movie like “Fatman” on its own terms. I was primed for this to work.

In this case, that doesn’t help. Nothing does.

Cast: Mel Gibson, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Chance Hurstfield and Walton Goggins

Credits: Written and directed by Ian Nelms, Eshom Nelms. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:40

Considering that its target audience is older and thus “at risk” in terms of the exploding pandemic, this $4.1 million seems like a pretty robust showing.

I could see a far far from certain Oscar nomination coming out of this one, even if this feels like the year Netflix will own the Academy Awards.

“Come Play,” also from Focus Features, earned another $1.7 million in its second week.

Maybe next year at this time these tiny turnouts of people wearing masks will be fading into memory.

That sparkling cast adorns a sort of It fantasy, a story that explains Alice and her Wonderland and Peter Pan and his Lost Boys.

Inclusive casting should help, the effects twinkle and the story seems very…mashup messy.

Bill Nighy also stars in this account of Japan’s mercury pollution scandal that turned the city of Minamata into an international symbol of Big Polluters aided in their cover up by their government.

As Depp is staring at the end of his career, enjoy this 2021 release from Vertical while you can.

The five films of Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” play like a series of sketches of what we can take to be his experiences growing up in the ’70s and early ’80s among the Caribbean islanders transplanted to the Big Island of Britain.

The series take its title from a Bob Marley song, which declares “So if you are the big tree, We are the small axe Ready to cut you down.” Visit Britain, sample its post-immigration cuisine, culture, music and dress and you get the metaphor.

The films share settings and some characters, but each is a stand-alone in style and theme. “Lovers Rock” is the impressionistic, free-flowing romance and music film of the series, McQueen’s camera tracking through a cover-charge house party circa 1980. It’s immersive, at times almost giddy — with more than a hint of the racial and sexual tensions of the day (and today) packed into its 70 minutes.

We see the prep for the party, the cooking (do NOT watch this hungry), the moving of furniture, the set-up of the sound system with the DJ practicing his rhymed proto-rap patter.

We see the neighborhood primping and dressing up, ready for the night, warily eyed by the white neighbors still living in this corner of what we assume is Brixton, then and now a Little Jamaica in South London.

As the cooks sing Janet Kay’s “Silly Games,” two young women getting dressed chime in with Blondie’s “Sunday Girl.”

“Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up and wait…”

And we meet friends Martha (Amarah Jae St. Aubyn) and Patty (Shaniqua Okwok) as they dress for this Saturday night do like it’s prom night, blending in with the vast crowd, dancing and drinking and sometimes eating.

One running thread through “Lovers Rock” is the incessant to the point of RELENTLESS come-ons from the menfolk there. Every young woman in the place has to fend off advances — most pretty aggressive by today’s standards — just to dance or have a conversation or get into the damned restroom.

At least they’re flirting in that lovely Jamaican patois, that is as entertaining and musical as any variation of spoken English on the planet.

“Wha’yo pappa CALL you, gorgeous? Me a GENTLEman–gentleMAN.”

That one doesn’t work on Martha. But Franklyn (Michael Ward) is intent on figuring out what does.

During the course of the night, nothing happens that we haven’t seen in a hundred other “House Party” movies. It’s the dreadlocked culture and setting that sets the various “Small Axe” films apart, that and McQueen’s polished, ultra-realistic handling of the material. The movies themselves are genre pieces and not the least bit surprising.

But “Lovers Rock” is the most charming — the enthusiastic sing-alongs that go on after the sound system has switched on, the energetic, near-frenzied dancing, men peacocking for the ladies, the women acting underwhelmed.

The message here is that this diaspora — many characters are second generation Brits, like Martha — has adapted, how they fused reggae and disco and soul and house parties into courtship rituals that might have been meat-market messy, but they sure were fun.

And if you want to see how McQueen (“Twelve Years a Slave”) does “giddy,” check out the camera that dances through a near-full-length dance to “Kung-Fu Fighting.”

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Amarah Jae St. Aubyn, Michael Ward, Kedar Williams-Sterling and Shaniqua Okwok.

Credits: Created and directed by Steve McQueen, script by Courttia Newland and Steve McQueen. A BBC Films release on Amazon.

Running time: 1:10

Oscar winner Steve McQueen’s terrific “Small Axe” series of five film-length inter-connected stories of life in London’s West Indian community opens on a high point with “Red, White and Blue.” It’s a generic “new to the force” cop story about a college educated Jamaican who decides his destiny is helping to integrate London’s racist police department in the late ’70s given weight and dramatic power by “Star Wars” veteran John Boyega.

When forensics scientist and college teacher Leroy Logan (Boyega) tells his musician brother (Tyrone Huntley) “I want to join the force,” the brother makes the late ’70s joke we’re all thinking.

“You wanna be a JEDI?”

But that’s the lone light moment in a gritty, by-the-book story of a smart man with a cause trying “to bring change to this organization from the inside out,” facing all the expected pitfalls from a rigid culture resistant to change.

Leroy learned to carry himself with dignity and not accept police harassment as a fact of life as a boy. His father, played with the dogged focus and seething resentment of an immigrant who “wanted us to be more British than the British” by veteran character Steve Toussaint, accepted nothing less than the highest aims from his son.

No wonder Leroy, married (Saffron Coomber is Grace) and with a baby on the way, keeps the news that he wants to “make a difference” for his community from his Dad.

That’s hard to do, as Dad has run afoul of the cops, and taken a beating for trying to debate a ticket. His father’s outrage is just the first time Leroy hears “traitor.” “Constable Judas” and “coconut” are two of the more creative insults he hears as he trains and takes on a beat in his new job.

What’s striking about “Red, White and Blue” is how everything we see — every situation encountered — is familiar and expected, and still stirring and somehow fresh. The indelible sense of place, the musical patois of the island people who left their former British colonies and migrated to Britain, and Boyega’s performance give this film-length episode its power.

Watch Boyega’s face betray real doubts the first time he dons the uniform and that towering bobby’s helmet. And feel his Sidney Poitier as “MISTER Tibbs” fury at confronting institutional racism, seeing the long road ahead he must travel, alone for now.

This is a script stripped down to types and situations as timeworn as The Cop Drama itself. But Boyega puts on the sort of acting clinic for McQueen that nothing else he’s done allowed him to do.

Marvelous.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, some profanity

Cast: John Boyega, Saffron Coomber, Steve Toussaint

Credits: Created by and directed by Steve McQueen, script by Courttia Newland and Steve McQueen. A BBC/Amazon release on Amazon.

Running time: 1:22

Let the record reflect that Alexandra Daddario does one helluva drunk act.

The “Baywatch” (the movie) babe isn’t the headliner of “1 Night in San Diego,” but she is one of the funnier highlights of this hit-or-miss “Romy and Michelle” ladies road trip romp from the writer-director of “Just Sing.”

Jenna Ushkowitz and Laura Ashley Samuels are Hannah and Brooklyn, two East Coast friends, new to the Hollywood Hills, looking to get something going in LA.

Hannah (Ushkowitz, of “Glee!”) had a reality series in Jersey, “Parsippany Hills” something or other, and longs to “get into production.” Rich girl Brooklyn (Samuels) has set herself up as “an influencer,” and as a “Conscious Cuddling” therapist, thanks to her study of Deepak Chopra.

“His online courses are the TITS!”

Hannah needs a break from her control-freak/anger management issues boyfriend (Tanner Sarff). And Brooklyn, left swiping her way through LA, finds an answer. That gym teacher they were hot for in high school? He’s now an actor, and he’s got a show in San Diego.

Let’s go to COMIC-CON!

It is one of the unfortunate failings of “1 Night in San Diego” that producers go no permission to get within a mile of footage of anything remotely resembling that Gathering of Nerds, even to use as background color. Because “1 Night” is a short road trip, followed by a long night of bar hopping, a Fringe musical spoof of “SVU,” jail and a lot of limp misadventures that could have used a LOT more San Diego flavor, with or without Comic-Con.

“Let’s get white girl wasted!”

The script owns up to the “Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion” similarities, with our two heroines varying shades of shallow and out-of-their-depth. Brooklyn has gotten by on her looks all her life, and figures that even a gay doorman will let them in the club for free.

“I LOVE the gays. All my best friends are gays. I’m practically a gay man.”

Need to break free of a stranger coming on a little too strong?

“My herpes is starting to flare up.”

There’s an old friend turned into a Matthew McConaughey impersonating stoner-guru (Eric Nelsen). Gordo has a lot of trouble talking about his didgeridoo and where it came from.

“Austria-lia?“

The cast is game, but plainly not in a position to add laughs to a script that feels more workshop-ready than “locked.”

One barfight (Daddario’s moment), a random lame encounter with two Comic-Con cosplayers and a pedicab ride back to their sleazy Eastern Euro-trash budget hotel are kind of the high points.

“How long have you been a pedo?”

“That’s a very funny joke, you terrible bitch.”

You want to love it, you’re lucky if you find a few moments where “like” isn’t a stretch.

MPA Rating: unrated, alcohol abuse, sexual humor, profanity

Cast: Jenna Ushkowitz, Laura Ashley Samuels, Eric Nelsen, Kelsey Douglas and Alexandra Daddario.

Credits: Written and directed by Penelope Lawson. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:26

One night, the Latvian newspaper editor and his wife are enjoying Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” where Melanie Vanaga can lose herself in its most famous aria, “Un bel dì vedremo.”

The next day, Soviet security police pound on the door of their Riga flat, barge in arrest them all — husband Alexandrs (Ivars Krasts), Melanie (Sabine Timoteo) and their pre-teen son, Andrejs (Edvins Mekss).

Their crime? “Fascists” — the catch-all accusation that served every Soviet need when it came to purging the intellectual, the leaders and the educated from a sovereign state they would absorb. Latvia and the Baltic States were but a 1941 warm-up for the rest of Eastern Europe.

“The Chronicles of Melanie” tells this story through the displaced and imprisoned Melanie, separated from her husband, struggling to keep herself and her son alive in a Siberian gulag filled with women and the low-life Russian predators charged with working them to death.

Writer-director Viesturs Kairiss based this film on the memoir of Melanie Vanaga, which she was only able to publish after the Soviet Empire crumbled and Latvia regained its independence. It’s a moving if somewhat stately (slow) drama of tragedy, privation and perseverance, with hints of poetry poking through the permafrost.

Because Melanie, rendered in shades of resignation and stoic defiance by Timoteo (“180 Degrees”), will not let go of her language, no matter how many Russian brutes who demand that they all “learn a civilized language.” She may fight pigs for the potatoes their captors feed the hogs with, but not eat what her son finds in the Russians’ waste.

“We are NOT going to eat trash!”(in Latvian, with English subtitles).

And she won’t lose the memory of the world they left behind, family holiday feasts, culture and art and “Madama Butterfly,” which returns to her memory and the soundtrack at several poignant moments.

Kairiss filmed this in flat, somewhat featureless black and white, so there’s not a lot of visual lyricism to his treatment of a hard-edged story.

Told she has 15 minutes to ready for transport, Melanie makes her child join her in wolfing down food because “We have no idea when the next meal is coming.”

A mother of small children, taking in the shock that “our husbands were killed,” takes a razor to her children and then herself in the crowded cattle car that hauls them all thousands of miles to the East.

An older woman, casting her eyes on the tractless forests of Siberia where their rudimentary camp has been set up, wanders into the woods to die. And no one stops her. Bodies are scattered everywhere, and losing a toddler means haggling with a callous local carpenter over nails.

Being women, the propositions by the guards have an have-sex-and-eat-or-die bottom line.

Melanie won’t give up, and won’t let her son give up either — through years of hardship, sickness and despair and a diet consisting of whatever herbs and berries they can sneak out and pick, and “400 grams of bread a day,” which is instantly cut to 200 because she speaks out, a “smart ass” surrounded by uniformed thugs.

“If I die, leave me in the taiga,” she instructs one of the few friends she recognizes and clings through through the ordeal. “It’ll be easier on my son.”

“The Chronicles of Melanie” lacks much of the agency and action of many such memoirs. The chief villain (Viktor Nemets) is left under-developed, and there’s barely a hint of an “escape attempt,” and no sense of deliverance.

But it is a vividly detailed reminder that the Axis powers did not corner the market on genocidal cruelty in the years surrounding World War II. The Russians kept at it for years afterward, and only those who endured the unendurable would live long enough to see the truth come out.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, rape, cruelty

Cast: Sabine Timoteo, Edvins Mekss, Ivars Krasts and Viktor Nemets

Credits: Written and directed by Viesturs Kairiss. A Corinth Films release.

Running time: 2:00

Civil War movies have always been a rare thing, so I was surprised to run across “Men Go to Battle” a few years late.

It came out the same year as the far more conventional “Field of Lost Shoes,” and at the tale end of the short-lived “Mumblecore” film movement of chatty, character-driven meanderings that gave us The Duplass Brothers, “Hannah Takes the Stairs,” “Baghead” and Greta Gerwig.

So, why not a mumblecore Civil War movie?

This deadpan dramedy plays now as what it was destined to become — a one-off stab at doing something different by a director/co-writer trying and failing to make his big break. It works, after a fashion. But there’s an aimlessness to its 5-years-in-Kentucky plot, a sense that too much important action or incident has been left out, coupled with a vivid, offhand-feeling recreation of a time and place.

Brothers Francis (David Maloney) and Henry Mellon (Timothy Morton) are hapless farmers in 1861 Kentucky tobacco country when we meet them. And as fall rolls in, we wonder how perchance these two goofs ever got their hand on the farm.

Because it’s so overgrown they can’t even sell the part of it that used to be good hemp land. And the rest has “gotten away” from them to such a degree it’ll take an army or a lot of animal labor to make productive.

Self-assured Francis blows cash on two mules, and one runs away. He pranks Henry, who seems to have more common sense, by “shooting” him (with no lead) to wake him up. But neither one is to be trusted when they’re in their cups.

Shenanigans with axe or knife are a good way to get hurt, and to avoid doing actual farmwork. Not to lay too much reality on this, but when their chickens drown, neglected during a storm, a sentient viewer is apt to wonder how they haven’t starved or died of careless cooking, gunplay or drunken accidents.

One such accident is how they end up needing a doctor, interrupting a dance at the home of the wealthy Small family. Henry makes incompetent small talk, arguing about the weather, with one of the Small daughters. At least he can joke about his cut hand to impress Betsy (Rachel Korine).

“Doc’s gonna amputate it tomorrow.”

Francis? He’s sticking his foot in it somewhere else.

Henry eventually makes his getaway, joining the Union Army. It might’ve made sense for both of these lazy lummoxes to avoid farmwork for meals and soldier’s pay. But separating them means the two illiterates have to communicate by letter.

“This war might last longer than me.”

But it doesn’t.

Director Zachary Treitz and his team do an impressive job of immersing us in the candlelit world of the rural 1860s, the drudgery of the life (but not the work, which the brothers avoid), the class differences between hardscrabble farmers and the affluent planters like Mr. Small (Steve Coulter).

Politics, slavery and racism don’t enter the story. We see an integrated church service, with slave-servants in the background of a few scenes. There’s no debate about which side these border state folks should be on.

Treitz and co-writer Kate Lyn Sheil concentrate on the brothers, sketching them in, looking for light laughs in their over-their-heads-in-most-situations plight.

Mid-war, with their village occupied, Francis insults a shorter Union infantryman and gets quickly punched-out.

The most interesting theme touched on is the different choices the siblings make — one, staying behind and the other opting for something like an adventure. But even that’s thinly developed.

A camp scene here, a picket line (patrol duty) moment there, a battle barely sketched-in. And then a finale that gives the film the feel of a half-digested parable.

“Men Go to Battle” isn’t awful, but removed from its film festival “moment,” it’s not all that, either. And that’s a shame. Treitz could have gotten something richer out of this setting and these characters.

MPA Rating: unrated, combat, alcohol abuse, smoking

Cast: David Maloney, Timothy Morton, Rachel Korine, Charlotte Arnold and Steve Coulter.

Credits: Directed by Zachary Treitz, script by Kate Lyn Sheil, Zachary Treitz. On Film Movement+.

Running time: 1:38