Movie Nation

“The Vast of Night” is a mystery wrapped in an enigma and boxed up in an homage to “The Twilight Zone.”

It’s a beautiful, gloomy and nostalgic film whose “The truth is OUT there” answers may be obvious, and whose long, monologue-driven set-up will test your patience. Seriously.

The first twenty minutes, a series of showy, walking/chattering tracking shots through small town America in the late 1950s gathering darkness, is marred by one of the epic under-enunciations of the post-Brando era. Co-star Jake Horowitz rushes and mutters his lines, and being photographed from behind and like everybody else, in shadows, you can’t make out more than a quarter of what he says.

Plucky teen switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick) breathlessly tags along with him and blurts out “Why do you CHANGE your voice” when he’s on the radio?

Because, dear girl, no manager, even at WOTW in BFE New Mexico, would let him on the air if he can’t be understood.

The opening frames this story with a Rod Serling impersonator introducing tonight’s installment of “Paradox Theatre,” and for the first time, first time feature director Andrew Patterson transitions from a chic ’50s cathode ray tube showing us black and white images to our New Mexico setting (in widescreen, dimly-lit color).

It’s the opening game of basketball season, and “everybody in town” is eating take-out in their car in the parking lot, waiting for Cayuga High to take on an Indian reservation school in the town’s tiny Quonset hut gym.

Cayuga Falls, by the way, was where Rod Serling lived. It was the name of his production company, the one that made “The Twilight Zone.”

Everett (Horowitz) is the cock-of-the-walk in this tiny berg, swaggering in with his Buddy Holly glasses and Ricky Nelson vest to set up the radio station’s recording of the game, maybe help with a wiring problem that may be a repeat of “that time a squirrel chewed through it,” every single person in town wonders.

Fay, in her cats-eye glasses and ponytail, eagerly tags along. She’s got this new tape recorder and wants Everett to show her how it works. They proceed to “interview” people in the parking lot as practice, for her and him. She’s sweet on Everett, and he indulges her prattling on about several years of articles from various science magazines — “radio controlled cars, vacuum tube transport” — all of which will be around before “the year 2000.”

Eventually, she drops back in for her nighttime town switchboard operator job, and “Everett ‘The Maverick’ Sloane” drops behind the mike to spin records on the “Highway Hits” show.

“That’s the word from the bird.”

Fay hears it first, this mechanical, rhythmic static on her switchboard. Everett records it and plays “a sound bouncing around the valley tonight” to his listeners, looking for answers. Maybe they’d rather hear a live broadcast of the game which for some reason the station is tape delaying. But when we hear the rube in charge of recording and reciting his version of “play by play,” maybe not.

But this is when “The Vast of Night” settles in to solve its mystery. A long call from a guy who used to be in the military recognizes the static, but “everybody only knows ‘pieces’ (of any military secret) in the military, so nobody would know the whole thing.”

Something is “out there,” in the sky, at “Sputnik heights.”

Everett and Fay abandon their posts and dash around in the dark, looking for answers.

Patterson’s movie, working from a script by newcomers James Montague and Craig W. Sanger, cloaks all this mystery in 1950s small town nostalgia. The camera captures the eeriness of empty streets and the hominess of a place where everybody knows everybody else, and person-to-person gossip was the Snapchat of its day.

McCormick and Horowitz, suggesting a young Sam Rockwell at times, have great chemistry, with Fay’s fangirl babbling the quintessence of smart girl/small town girl charm.

The great achievement of “Vast of Night” is to revisit how utterly “out there” Serling’s “Twilight Zone” would have been in its day, even in the Atomic Age, when UFO mania was born and peaked.

But the film is a triumph of tone over substance, of aural aura over clever writing. Patterson blacks out the screen, here and there, or zooms in on an old wooden radio cabinet, letting us swim in the storytelling we’re hearing over the air. The most coherent moments are like a filmed radio play.

Still, even back then, mysterious radio (or phone line) sounds and “lights in the sky” would have people wondering if “The Day the Earth Stood Still” was coming.

That said, it works, sucking you into its “vast night” and taking us all back to an innocent time where the future was endless possibilities, “radio” was how a small town kid punched his “ticket out of here,” and TV took you to “another dimension…the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition.”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief strong language

Cast: Sierra McCormick, Jake Horowitz, Gail Cronauer

Credits: Directed by Andrew Patterson, script by James Montague, Craig W. Sanger. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:31

Everybody’s got a story of when we first recognized the addiction — usually other people’s and not our own.

A concert where phone alerts interrupted the music, church, classrooms overrun with teens unable to keep the screen out of sight.

For me, it was a Toronto Film Festival in about 2002. I’d be in previews of movies destined to open around the world over the next few months, screenings packed with industry officials and filmmakers, and you could barely focus on the action on screen without this sea of tiny blue-greenish screens.

“Crack-berries,” we called them. They’re remembered, even today, in Jon Hyatt’s new documentary, “Screened Out,” about what some medical experts and academics are loathed to call an “addiction” (“compulsion,” a few call it) but ALL agree is a rising social ill of our age.

Hyatt’s legion of experts, advocates, pediatricians and others fret over how “screens” are eating up everybody’s time, but most especially our children’s. “Neglectful” distracted parents can’t bother to watch Missy’s swim lesson or focus on Junior on the swing-set — checking that screen.

And the kids? They are literally “rewiring your children” (Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, teen addiction expert) through the engineered dopamine rush of cell-phone apps purpose-built to hook us with “the bottomless feeds” of new thoughts, information, “likes” and the like, and video games “that go on forever.”

In just a few years, first world cultures (at least in this hemisphere) have seen attention spans — our ability to focus without having a gun held to our heads — have shrunk from 12 seconds to eight seconds.

A handful of Facebook alumni — higher ups such as Sean Parker — have sounded the alarm in public appearances (Hyatt gets no one from the industry on camera himself).

Dr. Hilarie Cash of the screen-addiction center Restart in Seattle (clever, clever name) declares “If they hold our attention, they can sell us stuff.” So the Twitters, Facebooks, Instagrams and Snapchats hire behavioral psychologists and others to ensure that each new piece of their “experience” is designed to do just that.

We meet no one who admits to doing this work.

Hyatt’s film starts out as a personal memoir, a voiced-over “Super-Size Me” about trying to get hold of his own addiction and convince his wife to limit or eliminate screen usage by their small children.

After all, the cream of Silicon Valley — where most of this addictive-app innovation is achieved — send their kids to the pricey Waldorf of Peninsula School, where screen access is severely limited, an ethos the educators send home to the tech titans whose little darlings they’re turning into the Next Elite.

But this personal memoir idea and home enforcement thing is played down as Hyatt, hitherto a writer and director of short films, loses himself in his experts.

He talks to teens and gets some revealing admissions about the Fortnite addicts in their ranks, the ways screens are eating up their study (concentration) time and their sleep.

The advocates he interviews are from Common Sense Media and Screenstrong–Families Managing Media, and echo what the academics and medical professionals say about what this removal from direct social interaction is doing to our empathy and ability to connect, relate and understand others.

Are we headed into a dark age when everybody is “on the spectrum,” thanks not to a genetic condition but to all the cunning manipulation by companies with the resources that billions of subscribers and the advertisers that come with that audience have at their disposal?

The jury’s out on that, but not on the growing concern “Screened Out” scratches the surface of. It may feel one-sided, cursory or incomplete, lacking focus (put the phone back down, Hyatt) and myopic. But it lays out the parameters of the problem, the “social validation feedback loop” of effort, attention and “rewards” that these successful cell phone app businesses manipulate in ways that are insidious and destructive to society.

And “myopic refers to the cross section of America Hyatt devotes his film to. Either there are no children and parents of color concerned with this, and no Black experts in the field, or Hyatt neglects to talk with them. Maybe 100 voices, and scores more faces, and the only Black people in this are models — illustrative faces in playgrounds or what have you.

I sense a wide-open field (Minority Communities and Social Media Use and Addiction) for enterprising researchers to dive into. And if there already are members of Latin and African American communities researching that, maybe Hyatt will figure out a little “inclusion” makes a universal concern seem actually, you know, universal.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Jon Hyatt, Melanie Hempe, Nir Eyal, Nicholas Kardaras, Alex Pang, Jean Twenge, Hilarie Cash, Michael Rich and Sid Bolton

Credits: Written and directed by Jon Hyatt. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:11

Suicides that might be…murders?

Shawn Ashmore, Daniella Alonso, Gary Cole and Lin Shaye are the names in the cast.

June 12.

Hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD and mescaline, the active ingredient in Peyote, aren’t addictive.

They don’t kill people.

And in studies, only now being renewed after decades of criminalization, they show promise in helping with anxiety, depression and other forms of mental illness.

That’s the serious side of the argument that “Have a Good Trip” Adventures in Psychedelics,” a new Netflix documentary by veteran “Simpsons” writer Donick Cary.

But aside from all that, as our “brown-acid” lab-coated host Nick Offerman reminds us, “they can also be hilarious.”

The film, using interviews with comics, musicians, actors (overWHELMINGLY white), a single academic expert, and that snakeoil salesman Deepak Chopra, comic reenactments and animation, proceeds to have people like Sting, Rosie Perez, Ben Stiller, Judd Nelson, Nick Kroll, Diedrich Bader, Natasha Lyonne and A$AP Rocky, revisit their acid/magic-mushroom etc. trips.

Sarah Silverman describes “the tipping point,” that moment that “always (arrives) when you say, ‘I don’t FEEL anything.'”

Sting remembers “trees WAVING at me,” on his farm, before being summoned by a farmhand to help a cow give birth.

Nick Kroll roars with laughter at the tripping friends who buried him in sea kelp, and he tripped over how much he enjoyed the experience.

And Ben Stiller is here to point out that “a few minutes in, I knew I never wanted to do this again.” So he didn’t.

You remember that there’s a reason nobody ever saw The Grateful Dead straight. We laugh at the old cautionary government instructional films that “exaggerated” the dangers.

There’s even a recreation of an “After School Special” (this one starring Adam Scott) and the warnings that sort of programming passed on. People are always “jumping through windows” on acid, the oft-repeated myth goes.

The “one with the universe” and “connected to the Earth” and “your hand becomes translucent” commonalities are explained.

We’re told that the movies and their many LSD trip simulations (“Across the Universe” had my favorite) “never get it right,” except for that moment in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” where Hunter S. Thompson (Johnny Depp) sees the casino carpeting turn into a moving melange of paisley and purple.

But then we hear the now-dead Anthony Bourdain’s story, of idolizing Thompson and wanting to take same risks as a teen, going on a “road trip” and picking up hitchhiking exotic dancers and one of them “Pulp Fiction” dying on them in their motel room (she didn’t, actually).

And the now-dead Carrie Fisher talks about how LSD takes planning, setting aside time, finding a safe space and “friends” you actually know to take it with, that “it’s a very HARD drug to take” and that she went so far as to have “outfits that went with acid, MUSIC that went with acid, makeup that went with acid,” the amusing humiliation of being nude and blitzed on a tourist beach in the Seychelles (“Travels with Acid”).

She mentions John Belushi first turned her on to the drug. And others talk about Dead concert experiences and Jerry Garcia, and you remember, “That dude’s dead, too.”

And you think, “Donick Cary, maybe if you weren’t tripping when you edited this, you’d figure out that all these DEAD people don’t really make your ‘legalize it/harmless’ case for you.”

No, it wasn’t LSD that killed any of them. But, well, not one of the dead confined their mind-altering substances to mushrooms, soaked sugar cubes or coated tabs of paper.

Instructions include “cover all your mirrors” if you don’t want to over-scrutinize your appearance. Always a mistake. And while one and all preach “Don’t DRIVE high,” here’s Judd Nelson and Silverman and soooo many others talking about their experiences in automobiles “tripping my balls off.”

Mixed message?

Suggestions of “psychotic episodes” (bad trips) that make this mind altering or consciousness “expanding” experience “not for everyone” are cautionary, but glibly passed-over. The idea that “retreats” could be set up for people (with money) to commune with nature under the influence and under supervision is endorsed.

The earlier era of legalized experimenting is remembered, fondly, by Timothy Leary’s son and folk rocker Donovan.

But as anybody will tell you, hearing about other people’s benders or drug trips has its own tolerance level, and for most of us, it’s “OK, you stared at your hand for six hours. Great. Now, how about this weather?”

Maybe pitching this right now, with democracy in peril and American carelessness getting a lot of people killed, is, you know, messed-up. It’s flippant and glib, sure. But there are too many dead people in it for it to make its “so very safe” point.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, drug use, profanity

Cast: Sting, Sarah Silverman, Nick Offerman, Ben Stiller, Rosie Perez, A$AP Rocky, Deepak Chopra, Donovan, Anthony Bourdain, Carrie Fisher.

Credits: Written and directed by Donick Cary. A Netflix Original.

Running time: 1:25

“Proximity” is an alien abduction thriller that’s more about the time travel. The look, the paranoid vibe and the music scream “late ’80s,” and seeing as how it’s from a guy whose visual effects credits include “Tron: Legacy” and “Stranger Things,” that’s literally by design.

The movie? There’s a cheerful cheesiness about some of the effects and a few jokes are tossed into the early part of the third act. But the cast is a collection of bland unknowns, the plot is buried under nonsense, the dialogue often tin-eared and the entire enterprise gets worse the longer it goes on.

And it does. Go on. And on.

Ryan Masson stars as a young signal researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena. Isaac Cypress is a geek among geeks (Kylie Contreary and Max Cutler play colleagues) , cycling to work, seeing a shrink, quick to trace signals from space to their (often) Earthbound origins.

His “hobby” is playing around with what looks like a bulky late ’90s camcorder. The psychotherapist thinks he should do a video diary with it.

That’s how the kid happens to make a recording of his alien encounter and abduction. Since everybody in Southern California saw the mid-day fireball streak across the sky and crash (more of a “touchdown”), running this video through channels at his workplace won’t do.

Isaac uploads the video the video onto the Internet. Very cool “skinny alien out of ‘Signs’ followed by the camera tracking Isaac’s ascent into the flying saucer (No saucer shots, lad? Sloppy.) and going to static.

He endures a TMZ’d media feeding frenzy, does one TV appearance where he’s asked dumb questions and all-but-mocked by the blonde reporter stereotype. And that’s when “others” take an interest, even as there are plenty of people going on TV to discredit him. He has barely met the oddball Sara (Highdee Kuan) and un-credentialed but suspicious “writer” who “stumbles” upon him when he and Sara are abducted again.

Agent Graves (Shaw Jones) does NOT consult a lawyer before nabbing these two or interrogating them.

“We have detained you, against-your-will,” because he and his “people” see Isaac “as a danger to society.” I mean, the liabilities in that admission are through the roof.

At some point, a lot of what comes out of characters’ mouths starts to sound like a “Try again” English-as-a-Second-Language writing assignment.

At no point do our players look as freaked-out and alarmed by any turn of events as your normal human being would.

I mean, Isaac and Sara are interrogated in classic, featureless sci-fi “white rooms.” They’re guarded and chased by Storm Trooperish robots with C3PO heads and no digital ability to properly aim a laser blaster.

There’s a mysterious “expert” helper (Christian Prentice) who knows what’s going on and who’s doing it, an earlier abductee to flee to and laser fire to dodge all along the way.

Eric Demeusy is the effects specialist turned writer-director behind “Proximity,” and he gives us a few quite-cool effects — a pickup truck lifted skyward and flipped, humans tractor-beamed up towards a generic flying saucer, and a carriage-roof chase on a train as seen in infra-red.

But this clunky movie is more fun to play the “Wait, why?” game with than to actually watch.

Why would people on the run be making their getaway on a Canadian short-run steam excursion train? Why would Isaac think a “writer” would have access to a “lie detector” app for his laptop, and that such an unprofessional version of that procedure would have any value in making his case?

Why would a UN alien-research agency (ISRP doesn’t just mean “International Society for Respiratory Protection” any more.) deploy cumbersome robot soldiers straight out of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?”

Why would translated alien space messages include directions to “the solar system” and “Earth?” I mean, both are on ALL the star maps.

Those head-scratchers wouldn’t stand out if the cast could make us care, fear for their future, declare that “The truth is ‘out there'” and demand that we hear about it. They don’t.

Masson may have the right, odd look — — a skinny/gawky, less-butch and Americanized Eddie Redmayne. But there’s little to this performance, and Kuan’s character is so under-written that even a good performance (nope) would be hard-pressed to make her interesting.

The promising premise here, that whole encounter and media frenzy, is tossed aside. The effects are worth noting because they’re the stand-out trait of “Proximity.” Making the aliens generic and un-menacing while the hilariously-flawed and easy to elude UN robots are the villains? Kind of a Mick Huckabee-inspired blunder.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, some violence

Cast: Ryan Masson, Highdee Kuan, Christian Prentice, Shaw Jones, Don Scribner

Credits: Written and directed by Eric Demeusy. A Shout! Factory release.

Running time: 1:55

A little moving picture history was made this week.

Tiny little also-ran independent Vertical Entertainment, which won the Tom Hardy/Linda Cardellini/Matt Dillon”Capone” biopic pretty much by default, is at the top of the current iteration of The Box Office.

It’s the top dog indie film streaming on iTunes, and I dare say elsewhere. Exacting  and David “Lynchian,” dark and brooding and obscurant, “Capone” is getting attention that Warner Brothers wouldn’t mind going to “Scoob!” which they refused to screen for critics.

The star had been a stunt man for most of his career, and an occasional bit player.

The rest of the cast was the very definition of “unheralded” at least in Hollywood.

The screenwriter is mostly forgotten, with no other credits of note.

The director was green and Canadian, with only a couple of shorts to his credit, and would only live long enough to make four more movies, none of highly regarded.

“The Grey Fox” is a 1982 indie Western that could easily be overwhelmed by its myth, the near miracle confluence of talent rising above its station and pure luck. But it’s so good, a minor classic in its timelessness, that it stands on its own, without any “little engine/movie that could” back story.

It’s grand in scope and intimate in feel, so beautifully shot and edited as to make you miss celluloid. And it’s been restored and is streaming on Kino Lorber Marquee (starting May 29) to support your local art cinema.

Richard Farnsworth has the title role, of “Gentleman Bandit” Bill Miner, a veteran hold-up man whose specialty was robbing stagecoaches. But that world had passed him by during a long sentence in prison. Getting out of San Quentin in 1901, he was a man pushing 60 and entering a changed world.

“A man of my age, the future doesn’t mean too much,” he says in a genteel drawl, “unless you’re talking about next week!”

He gets a sales pitch on “electrification” changing the world from a salesman he sits with on the train, marvels at the puttering “horseless carriages.” And after staying with his sister and considering his limited options, he ducks into a Far West moving picture show. “The Great Train Robbery” is playing — 12 minutes that made motion picture history, 12 minutes so jolting to the naifs who saw it that one fires his pistol in the storefront cinema where Bill sees it.

Bill kicks around oyster digging and sawmill jobs, until he decides on his new specialty.

“A professional always specializes.”

But he and his impromptu gang botch a holdup in Oregon. A lot of blood is shed.

And that’s how he winds up in British Columbia, meets his new sidekick Shorty (Wayne Robson) and makes his legend, the first hold-up man to use the phrase “Hand’s up!” and a robber so polite he cautions a railroad engineer “You be careful backing up, now” as he leaves and the railroad man has to re-couple cars in the dark, carriages Bill & Co. have disconnected.

Farnsworth would go on to lend his wry, sentimental twinkle to films like “The Natural,” “Misery” and most famously, “The Straight Story.” Here his easy going charm sells the romance he strikes up with the feminist labor agitator and photographer Kate (Jackie Burroughs) and his flinty Old West competence lends authority to defending himself from fellow ex-cons, handling a horse and even attempting something he’s never done as he’s coerced into horse stealing.

“Rustling isn’t my line.”

Borsos blends his scenes of rustic, Western Canada, the Kamloops, Monte Creek and Silverdale where Miner made his name, with grainy footage of silent Westerns, including “The Great Train Robbery.” This is a glorious effect, a real-life relic of that era pursuing his “line” in an age where people were looking back, with nostalgia, on such criminal exploits in the flickers — early cinemas.

The script takes ridiculous liberties with “the real story, but Borsos makes them feel real and Farnsworth lets us shrug that if this wasn’t the way it was, it sure as shooting is the way it should have been.

Cast: Richard Farnsworth, Jackie Burroughs, Wayne Robson, Ken Pogue, Gary Reineke and Timothy Webber

Credits: Directed by Philip Borsos,  script by  John Hunter. A Kino Lorber (streaming) release.

Running time: 1:30

A truism at the heart of any affair or breakup is that inevitably one person makes the decision to move on and the other is shocked they weren’t “consulted.”

No matter how long the warning signs have been there, no matter how obvious it might seem to one party, even outsiders looking in, there’s always shock, wounding and a lack of that meaningless cliche “closure.”

That’s the secret sauce of writer-director William Nicholson’s biting but somewhat enervating “Hope Gap,” a very British chamber melodrama starring American Oscar winner Annette Bening and reliable British brooder Bill Nighy.

They’ve been together 29 years, Grace with her passion for poetry, dropping W.B. Yeats on old friends, “Nor public man, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight,” history teacher Edward adding “wiki” touches to his lectures about Napoleon’s “Retreat from Moscow.”

She misses their adult son (Josh O’Connor), but when he’s summoned from the city, she starts in on him about his non-belief. He was raised Catholic, after all. Dad’s the peacekeeper, looking for some non-confrontational way of letting him off the hook.

Faith is like “love. You don’t tell love, you feel it.”

Her interrogation of Jamie, about his singlehood, his love life, has a kind of relentless quality. The kid says he’s “fine” and it’s “fine isn’t the same as HAPPY,” she says. WE’RE happy, aren’t we Edward?”

Her husband’s eyes-averting agreement is the entire marriage in a sentence.

“Yes. We’re fine.”

Three words give away the game. Edward, who is slapped in the middle of one “Why don’t we ever TALK, the way people do?” tussle, has had enough. He’s talked the son into showing up so he can break the news to him first.

She can’t hear him when he tells her, is taken aback with the key nugget in the declaration, “There’s someone else.” And damned if she’s going to accept this fait accompli. She wasn’t “consulted.”

What follows is a lovelorn son pulled in two directions by parents who are breaking apart. He doesn’t have to choose sides, but he needs to keep his contacts with his father limited in scope (no meeting the new woman) and pretty much secret. Dad is expecting Jamie to deliver this or that bit of bookkeeping business — divorce papers, “You can have the house,” etc.

Mom? She’s furious, as only Annette Bening can make her.

“He’s MURDERING a marriage. Marriages don’t bleed, but it’s still MURDER.”

Screenwriter (“Gladiator,” “Unbroken”) and sometime writer-director (“Firelight”) William Nicholson gets more good lines in than good scenes, here.

The casting makes for a little embrace of this stereotype (Nighy is the very picture of English introversion) and shattering of another. Bening, playing “British,” is more an American cliche — outspoken, angry, demanding answers and/or satisfaction.

The weakest link is O’Connor, kind of squishy in a squishy “Why can’t I make anybody love me?” role. Meeting with a couple who are both friends with him give the film a little variety from its three-hander intimacy (with lovely seaside settings, the “White Cliffs of Dover” included). But they don’t advance the plot or illuminate the battling parents.

Jamie is, therefor, the screenwriterly product of a dysfunctional marriage — unable to speak up (like his Dad), not satisfied enough to leave things be (like his Mother). He’s more his Dad, if one has to put him on the couch.

It’s always lovely to see Bening and Nighy, always a warm delight to set some of this tug of war on the pebbly beaches, rocky crags and chalky cliffs. Otherwise, it’s a “kitchen sink” drama, without many blowups, no big shocks and not a lot that sticks to the ribs after the credits have rolled.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic elements and brief strong language

Cast: Annette Bening, Bill Nighy, Josh O’Connor

Credits: Written and directed by William Nicholson. A Screen Media release of a Roadside Attractions production.

Running time: 1:40

As a lifelong Mario Van Peebles fan, let me take a little license as I take issue with his turn as the star of the hostage thriller, “A Clear Shot.”

There’s a difference between acting the line “I’m getting too OLD for this s—,” and letting us see it, first frame to last.

MVP plays Det. Gomez, a burned-out, flask-sipping and under-emoting hostage negotiator tasked with freeing 40 civilians from a Sacramento electronics store after four wound-up Vietnamese teens take it over.

And while it’s no stretch to say Van Peebles the actor/director could have gotten a more suspenseful, more exciting thriller out of this than the director of “Janitors,” Nick Leisure, that’s no excuse for not bringing your A-game to every scene after you’ve been cast.

He gives us flashes of that in the third act. But this picture mopes along on mild-mannered turf war debates, not-that-tense standoffs with the SWAT guys, the ones looking for “A Clear Shot,” and flirting (over that flask) with one of the uniforms (Jessica Meza) on the scene.

Eighty-seven minutes, gunplay and life-and-death consequences, and this feels like a perfunctory drag — a Movie of the Week from back when TV made those.

A jokey opening sets us up for a “Dog Day Afternoon” take on the biggest hostage stand-off in U.S. history. Store managers (including Mandela Van Peebles) josh with each other, insulting customers to their face (Remember electronics stores? Good times.). There’s an extended family (Sandra Gutierrez, Diana Acevedo and David Fernandez Jr.) that’s shopping, and shoplifting

Then POW — a quartet of heavily-armed amateurs storm in and demand access to the safe. They’re big on firing warning shots and screaming, but not the quickest studies. For one thing, these dunces are robbing an electronics store. There’s a reason they’re almost all gone. NO CASH.

The cops show up and they’re trapped, 40 or so shoppers and staff are hostages, a couple of other staff hide out and start helping the police.

Det. Gomez shows up in his beater (“car with character”) and rubs the top cop on the scene (Marshal Hilton) the wrong way. His “under control” laid-back approach gets under everybody’s skin.

“I don’t like chatter,” gripes the SWAT hothead (Rafael Siegel).” It’s a waste of time, in my opinion!”

“I don’t like trigger happy cops,” Gomez half-whispers, because that’s how he speaks. “They get people killed…in MY opinion!”

Inside, the volatile, testosterone-fueled teens turn out to be Vietnamese, and family. Long (Tony Dew) is the oldest and most sociopathic. Loi (Hao Do) is the one who gets on the phone with Gomez, a hothead who calls himself “Thailand.”

He’s the one who screams demands at the sheriff’s deputies and SPD people elbowing each other around outside.

We want vests…leg armor, like ‘Robocop!’ We want million dollars! We want CHOPPER.”

And yes, the “Dog Day” punchline — “We want GINSENG TEA!”

There’s a fine line you walk between tragedy and parody in such stories. Leisure falls off that tightrope, early and often.

The picture’s biggest problems are pace and tension. A hostage thriller has a built-in “ticking clock” for amping up suspense, and easy to exploit elements for reminding the viewer of the stakes.

With hostages who veer between injury and fear, and “These kids are CLOWNS” in their dealings with their captors, a lot of that evaporates.

We’ve seen scores of these movies over the decades. We know how they’re supposed to work. Tight shots, sweaty faces, close-ups of fingers on triggers, criminals whose eyes grow wilder (again, close-up) the closer we get to “Times UP” in the “ticking clock.”

Leisure is entirely too leisurely at tackling those problems. And that pained, weary look Van Peebles wears in his eyes, start to finish? It shows us he realized that, too.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Mario Van Peebles, Jessica Meza, Hao Do, Marshal Hilton, Mandela Van Peebles, Sandra Gutierrez, David Fernandez Jr., Tony Dew, Glenn Plummer and Michael Balin.

Credits: Written and directed by Nick Leisure. An Uncork’d release.

Running time: 1:27

Classics, international and esoteric film distributor Kino Lorber restored this 1982 Western adventure starring Richard Farnsworth. A 4K makeover for one of the best Canadian films ever.