Movie Nation

You gawk. You gape. You wonder what the Hell Hulu was thinking.

But hey, if Netflix and Amazon are going to push the envelope in “teens behaving badly” comedies, go big or go home, right?

Thus, “The Binge,” a sipping and gulping, smoking and snorting comedy riff on “The Purge.” Nobody imbibes, consumes, pops, smokes or pops any more. Except for one day a year. Hilarious idea.

And here’s Vince Vaughn, resurrecting the manic, profane patter that put him on the map before he aged out of “hipster” and came out of the closet as a Trumpster.

Is that really Morgan Freeman providing voice-over narration, “Binge” history about “a despondent” America, “self-medicating” to the point where a near Prohibition was enacted? Probably

Skyler Gisondo (“Booksmart,” “Feast of the Seven Fishes”) and Dexter Darden (“The Maze Runner” movies) play two BFFs who will indulge in their first Binge since each turned 18.

Maybe Griffin (Gisondo) will “drink enough to make a move” on the lovely, pals-since-childhood Lena (Grace Van Dien of “Lady Driver”). That’s Hags’ (Darden) biggest, bestest hope. Because Brown U.-bound Griffin is entirely too shy to ever have the guts to shy his true feelings otherwise.

Maybe a little alcohol — a LOT of alcohol — will give him the edge over the anonymous fellow who left a “prom date” invitation in Lena’s locker.

If only they can escape their parents’ annual root beer “Goats” and games party. If only they can get wrist bands into the hot party of the night, “The Gauntlet” drinking game championships at the Carnegie Library.

Odd detail, that one.

If ONLY Lena can pull one over on her dad, the “Don’t Binge” obsessed city councilman and principal if American High School.

“Go FLAMING Eagles!”

That would be the role Vince Vaughn (“Wedding Crashers”) plays, rah rah principal.

“Animaniacs” veteran Jordan VinDina wrote the script, which toys with the myths that high school kids invent about drugs and booze before they’ve ever had a taste of them. Exaggerate that into a future when nobody drinks and kids have even less access than now, when cheerleaders relate tales from “Sex and the City” as ancient history, and you get a lot of “I’ve heard…you know so-and-so says…My older cousin binged and” bad information.

“I heard that if you eat mushrooms and sacrifice an animal, your whole world turns into a musical!”

That theory will be put to the test over a night-long quest for the boys — with long-abandoned friend Andrew (Eduardo Franco of “Booksmart”) in tow — to reach that “Gauntlet” party, where Lena hangs out waiting, and her dad, Principal Carlsen, threatens and punches his way through town trying to find her.

How do Griffin and Hags get out of their parents’ party? They put them to sleep, or rather Hags does.

“You ROOFIED our parents?”

Who gives them a lift to the drunken ball at the Carnegie? Limo driver Pompano Mike (Tony Cavalero), who’s not really from Pompano Beach, “I just like to live my life in a Florida state of mind.”

Mike’s blasted, and he knows the nickname for every drug in popular use at the moment — a little PCP on your pot?

“Dragon’s Breath, cheese tacoes, chicken tamales, Hip Hip Hooray, Monkey Punch, Deuces Wild, Pirates Booty, Toledo, Nuts a Bnuch, (Bridge) to Terabithia.”

There aren’t many laughs, although I chuckled at the “first ever drink of alcohol” (whisky, a mistake), kids frantically sucking down ketchup to put out the fire.

The drinking games of “The Gauntlet” contest include “Cocaine Scarface,” in which contestants snort a mountain of the stuff and do Al Pacino impressions every time they come up for air.

“The only ting een this world that gives orders…ees balls.”

The human chalupa punishment the kids faced — duct-taped together like “a Tootsie Roll,” is um, different.

And let’s not forget the song and dance sequence.

“We’re gonna get high, we’re gonna get baked

“Until every inch of us just aches!”

Vaughn resurrects his staccato speaking style, the kids are generic and dull — save for Franco, who deadpans some laughs into play.

The whole affair is just nuts, staggeringly irresponsible. No, a montage of “Just say no” public service announcements at the outset doesn’t excuse it.

It’ll be a chore, just keeping your kids from sneaking around to watch it.

Alcohol and narcotic content be damned, it’s fine. Kids can figure out it isn’t that funny call on their own.

MPAA Rating: unrated, drug and alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Vince Vaughn, Skyler Gisondo, Dexter Darden, Grace Van Dien, Eduardo Franco, Zainne Saleh and Esteban Benito

Credits: Directed by Jeremy Garelick, script by Jordan VanDina. A Hulu release.

Running time: 1:38

As primal as it is topical, “Buoyancy” is a brutal minimalist thriller about human trafficking in the largely-illegal Thai fishing industry.

The violence is a grim slice of reality, the human suffering shockingly common and well-documented. Australia’s selection for contention in the Best International Feature category in last year’s Oscars is a harrowing story of a handful of men on a rust-bucket fishing boat — some of them the brutish armed and well-fed crew, others the starved, overworked forced labor they’ve “bought” to do the dirty work.

For his debut feature, writer-director Rodd Rathjen uses little dialogue and simple imagery as he patiently tells the story of a 14 year-old Cambodian runaway, Chakra (Sarm Heng) who would rather take his chances in factory work in Thailand that slave away in the family rice paddies back home.

The fact that he has no money to pay the Cambodian equivalent of a “coyote,” the smuggler, means he will “go to a different factory” across the border. When he and a family man (Mony Ros) whom he throws in with are hustled about a boat “to take you to the factory,” the older man smells a rat.

The punches he takes tells us he’s not wrong. The look he gives the kid — helpless and despairing, answers the question he asked the kid when they first spoke.

“Is it worth the risk?”

They’re shuffled onto a 45 foot trawler, barked at and threatened as they dredge up the meager harvest in the over-fished waters of the Golf of Thailand. “What’s this for?” (in Khmer and Thai, with English subtitles) the kid wants to know.

“Dog food.”

The boy is sure they’re just working off their transport into Thailand debt. The man knows better, and grows more bitter by the day. He, like others, looks for ways to escape.

“We will die before we make it back. This is the sea of DEATH!”

The kid? He starts kissing up to the sadistic captain (Thanawut Ketsaro), fetching the pick of the day’s catch for him and his two paid crewmen — well-fed brutes who share a pistol — still hoping and expecting they will do this for a month or so, and be dropped ashore.

The first slave to get sick and give up disabuses the kid of that. Or should. The grinning skipper tosses him overboard. It won’t be the last murder, and yes — Google it. This enslavement and murder at sea of Indochinese and Burmese slave laborers is commonplace in Thailand’s un-regulated and corrupt-cop-protected fishing industry.

Will Chakra adapt? Will there be a mutiny? Will the crew, some of whom don’t speak the same language, figure out the math and a way to defeat the thugs with the gun?

Rathjen gets a lot of movie out of this uncomplicated story, patiently showing Chakra’s evolution, his hardening, the captain’s wary eyes taking in the kid’s increasingly callous turn.

The performances in “Buoyancy” are unfussy, unadorned and spot on, with Heng standing out, embodying a child quick to learn, trusting, headstrong and somebody who learns to not turn his back on anybody else even as they start to figure out they should treat him the same. Ketsaro is every grinning, brawny bully in the flesh, the embodiment of a man capable of anything because he fears no resistance or repercussions.

The detail, the worn-out wooden boat that is the main location, is perfect. And the calming effect of the sea is utterly spoiled by the tension that’s always there. Daily routine aside, every encounter with the pitiless crew is fraught with peril, and the violence when it comes — is shocking, primitive and sadistic.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Sarm Heng, Thanawut Ketsaro, Mony Ros 

Credits: Written and directed by Rodd Rathjen. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:32

A haunted child, the sleepover from Hell.

Focus Features has this one. High end horror, in other words. Coming out Halloween.

An American “Babadook,” anyone?

So it was a Bond film all along.

All the speculation, the mystery spinning out of the trailers, the hype. And Christopher Nolan gives us his take on James Bond, tailor-made for our perilous times, a bang-on Bond film buddy picture set in Bizarro World.

“Tenet” unfolds like a screenwriting exercise, a time-bending work of back-engineering a plot from its end to its beginning, and then back again. It gives its heroes a simple dilemma — How do you outsmart somebody with access to the future, who can thus predict your every move?

It turns John David Washington into an action hero, Kenneth Branagh into a Russian supervillain and parks Robert Pattinson in an enviable sidekick role, and in skinny boy combat fatigues at one point. Let’s hope he bulks up before donning the Batsuit.

It promises two and a half hours of sitting in a theater, wearing a mask as we listen to Nolan characters try to make themselves heard through their masks. Kind of a thing with him. Dialogue is lost in many a noisy scene — the Bond style “opening gambit” assault on a Ukrainian opera house, the big bang Bond set piece finale, even in a bit of catamaran racing, where the wind and roar of racing foils cutting through the Mediterranean Sea drown out the words.

“Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.”

Awful things are afoot, and a CIA agent (Washington) is brought up to speed after a near death encounter with modern civilization’s irredeemable villains — Russians.

“Inverted” radioactive bullets point to somebody manipulating time, violently altering the present with help from the future.

The hunt for that “somebody” will require access to a lethally inaccessible Indian arms dealer (Dimple Kapadia), a model-gorgeous trophy wife/art appraiser (Elizabeth Debecki), a “free port” airport vault heist and meetings with and threats from the Russian monster who wants to end us all.

Stopping him will require the help of a mysterious British spy (Pattinson trots out a posh accent for that) and mastering the art of “inversion,” a brawl, shootout and car chase that runs backward and forward in time.

It will require a lot of things left unexplained.

“Ignorance is our ammunition.”

The story beats are Bond movie story beats, so there’s more awe at the spectacle than genuine surprise.

“Tenet,” for all its accents, masks and masked dialogue, does manage light touches. Michael Caine’s obligatory appearance isn’t necessary, but is a delight. And Washington and Pattinson click as reluctant “buddies,” even if Nolan never quite takes the picture there.

It’s an ambitious film, but that’s a given with Nolan.

It’s not his best, although perhaps some of that is a product of the extra months of breathless anticipation and speculation.

In the end, we do “feel it” more than we wholly understand it, despite many a pause to explain “the grandfather paradox” of time travel/history changing and the ways the international super rich avoid meddlesome laws and morality imposed on we mere mortals, with their own economy where those who serve them declare “We put no priority above your property.”

We accept Washington — who has screen presence, a wicked side-eye and a deftness in fight scenes, even if the charisma has a ways to go, even if most of his co-stars (Debecki especially) tower over him — as a bonafide action star.

I fretted over Branagh as a Russian heavy. But like Washington, he pulls it off and we accept him in the part.

And we accept that “Tenet” must be seen on the big screen to be truly felt, even if watching at home is the only way we’ll remain “quarantined, and our best chance to really catch (on closed captioning) much of the dialogue.

All this hand-wringing on whether the next James Bond should be female, Asian or Black, and here the thinking film fan’s action sci-fi auteur has shown us the way — Nolan, as always, just ahead of the curve. “Tenet” is as much mind-challenging, action-packed fun as sitting in cinema wearing a mask for two and a half hours can be.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some suggestive references and brief strong language 

Cast: John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debecki, Clémence Poésy, Kenneth Branagh, Michael Caine, Himesh Patel, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Dimple Kapadia, Martin Donovan

Credits: Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:30

Look for this drama on Sept. 29.

“The Argument” is an indie comedy built on the frame that supported that favorite of community theaters, far and wide — “Noises Off.”

Show us a frazzled, rattled and unsatisfactory story — one that leads to an “argument,” in this case. Then show us the folks in that argument walking through the scenario again, with equally unsatisfying results.

All of it heads towards a finale that is a manic, thrown-together rough facsimile of what we’ve seen happen, aka what we know is SUPPOSED to happen, and let us laugh at the chaos that ensues.

Yes, it’s a very writerly conceit. But throw some funny people at it and let’s see if it works.

Veteran funnyman Dan Fogler (“Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” “Take Me Home Tonight”) plays Jack, a struggling screenwriter made awfully insecure by his actress girlfriend of three years, who seems a little TOO into her co-star in this Mozart play they’re doing.

Emma Bell (“Deviant Love,” TV’s “Relationship Status”) is Lisa, all worked-up over what she hopes is her big-break, playing ditzy wife Constanza to co-star Paul’s randy Wolfgang Amadeus.

Jack hopes to be supportive, get past the argument they had in bed before opening night with a little get-together with his literary agent Brett (Danny Pudi of “Community”) and Brett’s no-nonsense entertainment lawyer lady friend, Sarah, played by Maggie Q of the “Divergent” films, and “Balls of Fury,” with Dan Fogler.

But their tetchy evening — Sarah’s first words are “We should probably be heading out…” — takes a more openly hostile turn when Jack realizes that Lisa’s invited her flirty co-star Paul — Tyler James Williams (“Everybody Hates Chris”) — and Paul’s ditzy British accented girlfriend, Trina (Cleopatra Coleman of TV’s “Last Man on Earth”).

The giddy actors romp around, doing rambunctious scenes (spanking) from their “Amadeus” knock-off. Jack grits his teeth between trips to the kitchen. Sarah? She fumes.

“You have a LOVELY home” Trina says to her, complimenting the wrong woman for Jack and Lisa’s shabby Mission-style bungalow.

“I do NOT live here,” is about the nicest thing Sarah will say all night.

During the course of the evening, the actors flirt, the agent keeps telling his “single screen credit” client he’s a “genius,” and Jack tries to shrug off the fact that Trina has seen that one credit, “The Dead Doth Trod the Hills at Night.”

“I never LAUGHED so hard in a movie!”

No. It wasn’t a comedy.

All this is headed towards a resumption of Lisa and Jack’s morning hostilities. And nothing good can come of that. But as the evening implodes and the guests recede and Jack and Lisa blame each other, Jack frantically comes up with a “do over.” Invite everybody back, walk through EXACTLY the same evening, and pinpoint the spot where he or she can make the point that the OTHER caused the fight.

It’s a stunningly silly conceit. Not one person who lived through that evening-on-eggshells would want to return, but here they all are again. And just in case they miss a gesture, line or moment, seething Sarah is there to correct them.

“Unfortunately, I have a photographic memory.”

There aren’t a lot of laughs in the first two acts of this three act comedy. Not enough funny lines, and Maggie Q’s dead-eyed annoyance can only carry us so far. We share Sarah’s contempt for one and all.

But the third act? That’s when screenwriter Jack decides the only way to REALLY “fix” this party and fix blame is to bring in ACTORS to play the principals. And damned if the casting session — with Karan Brar, Marielle Scott, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett and Mark Ryder struggling to get the “parts,” and then get the point of this “play,” with the characters they’re playing sitting slack-jawed or loudly protesting in their presence — isn’t hilarious.

It’s loud, fast, in-your-face, broad and low. Packing that living room with actors, having Trina cope by drinking (she really shouldn’t), with Brett and Sarah having it out and Jack raging at every recreation that doesn’t fit his script or make his point and “actors” acting like, well, actors makes “The Argument” funny.

If only the set-up was half as amusing as the payoff.

MPAA Rating: unrated, drinking and profanity

Cast: Dan Fogler, Emma Bell, Maggie Q, Cleopatra Coleman, Danny Pudi, Tyler James Williams, Marielle Scott, Karan Brar, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett and Mark Ryder.

Credits: Directed by Robert Schwartzman, script by Zac Stanford. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:24

A British period piece that mixes 1840s fossil hunting and same sex romance? Smashing!

The Oscar winning Hawkins goes medicated, depressed and possibly in love for this Brt dramedy. https://youtu.be/NiqwtgZzbds

Let’s see what all the fuss is about, shall we?

“Tenet,” much shuffled about on the release slate, opens Sept. 3.

Netflix has her number.