Movie Nation

The human migrant experience has a universality that spans continents and cultures, that connects the poor Guatemalan fleeing violence and the Indian hoping to escape to opportunity.

Desperation, exploitation, the pull of assimilation battling the comfort and “safety” of hanging with your “own kind,” speaking your native language — you can find this is Little Haiti or Chinatown, barrios, meat processing plants or any restaurant you could name.

Even in Japan.

“Complicity,” the subtle, tense, touching and somewhat slow debut feature of writer-director Kei Chikaura looks at this story through the eyes of a young Chinese immigrant as imagined by a Japanese filmmaker.

It’s about cultures clashing, the desire for assimilation and “succeeding” in a new country that is straining against the pull of the past, the legal and moral barriers, stresses and pitfalls faced when someone this young and poor uproots his life to try and make it somewhere new.

Parking a Chinese illegal immigrant in one of the most infamously insular and racist cultures on Earth is a situation rife with strife, at least around the story’s edges. But Chikaura makes the main focus the heart-breaking and soul-crushing pressures facing Chen Liang (Yulai Lü), who left his ailing mother in the care of his grandmother and slipped into Japan to learn a new trade, “make a lot of money” and send for them back in Henan province.

The moment we meet him, we know how wrong this dream has gone. He’s caught up in a theft ring, stealing water heaters and the like from homes and businesses.

The cost of smuggling means he’s trapped, exploited by the very community one would expect to give him shelter and help. Watch “The Search for General Tso” or “Ghosts” documentaries to see how this can play out.

Chen Liang sees his trap, and in one last desperate act, he buys fake identification (and a new phone) to escape it. He will strike out on his own, scrape together a new life, escape his recent past and unsavory associations while still lying to his mother in their weekly chats about how well he is doing.

As Liu Pei, with a made-up past (he’s now from Beijing) and resume, he takes a job in a tiny noodle restaurant in suburban Ōishida. The gruff owner, Hiroshi (Tatsuya Fuji, a star since 1976’s “In the Realm of the Senses”) becomes a father figure to him as he introduces Liu to the world of soba noodles. His daughter (Kio Matsumoto) is the very picture of accommodating kindness.

And there’s this cute artist (Sayo Akasaka) his age whom he delivers noodle dishes to. She takes a shine to him — or rather the invented version of Liu.

But every time Liu Pei starts to immerse himself in mastering this corner of Japanese cuisine, every time he figures a “normal” life is within reach, his old life an old gang reach out for him.

Why can’t he join in on this “job?” I lost my flat, why can’t I stay with you? Why can’t we all smoke in this restaurant?

Chikaura has Liu Pei see the boorish and even criminal behavior of his “gang” through Japanese eyes. Every Japanese person he meets — even police– is unfailingly polite.

A key scene — Liu Pei screws up a delivery, having trouble finding his way (by delivery bicycle) in Ōishida. He must apologize to his mentor, the daughter insists. That becomes painful for everyone involved.

Liu Pei’s back-story, delivered in flashbacks, shows us just what he was fleeing in China — unpleasant life responsibilities, a slim chance of success and “freedom” to live his own life. Not exactly slave labor or civil war.

Chikaura passes along little judgments of Liu Pei and Chinese immigrants in general like this.

The director passes up the chance to take a more conventional route, immersing us in the painstaking and oh-so-Japanese way of making buckwheat noodles and the dishes they’re used with, to focus on all the strings tugging poor Chen Liang/Liu Pei in different directions, ensnared in this new name, new lie and illegal life he’s living.

Yulai Lü gives the character a poker-faced stoicism that fits his unwillingness to show weakness and emotion to his Japanese hosts.

Surprising turns here and there don’t wholly lift “Complicity” out of the realm of melodrama. But this intimate, personal and otherwise fresh take on the immigrant experience in a place that resists immigration like an island stuffed with Arizona sheriffs has rewards enough to keep us engaged in this kid’s story, start to finish.

MPAA Rating: unrated, smoking, profanity

Cast: Yulai Lü, Tatsuya Fuji, Sayo Akasaka, Kio Matsumoto

Credits: Written and directed by Kei Chikaura. A Film Movement Plus release.

Running time: 1:56

On this side of the Atlantic, we expect our comedies to at least pay some lip service to “woke.” Even the cringe-worthy ones.

So an “Office” comedy like “Jefe,” from Spain, should best be compared to say the BRITISH version of “The Office,” with Ricky Gervais, and not the more squishy, pathetic “Office” run by Michael Scott (Steve Carell). We feel sorry for that clueless jerk Michael Scott. We never, ever feel sorry for the loathsome David Brent.

Well, I didn’t, anyway.

Imagine that guy taken to tyrannical, drug-abusing, homophobic, sexist and physically-abusive extremes, name him César and make him Spanish, and that’s the boss in “Jefe,” a Spanish comedy that tests our tolerance in who we’re supposed to root for.

Because this puerco isn’t likeable, not for a second. Even showing the hell César (Luis Callejo of “The Fury of a Patient Man”) goes through just to make to the office on Monday doesn’t make him sympathetic.

He berates staff in the morning meeting. That balance sheet problem, the taxes suddenly due, the inspectors who will see the game is up just by glancing at their books? That’s worth an impulse firing, some homophobic put-downs as her literally “kicknny” (on the bottom) one guy out.

Because nothing is ever César’s fault. Snorting coke and knocking back Red Bulls, he figures he can browbeat/bully/tough his way through this debacle.

“I will not LEAVE THE OFFICE until this company’s safe!” he declares (in Spanish with English subtitles, or dubbed if you prefer).

He’s so unpleasant that it’s no wonder that his wife hires somebody to tell him she’s kicking him out of the house. Not a lawyer, either. It’s a somewhat effeminate “Bad News Messenger” (Adam Jezierski, funny) who shows up with that bad news, and with talking points for César’s inevitable push-back.

She’s demanding alimony, the house and custody of their son, and that’s that.

Conversely, when he gets César’s fiery reply, Charly the Messanger has to deliver HIS bad news to her. And César is very particular about how his counter-offer comes off.

“Say it like a man! Make her CRY!”

That’s the first funny scene in the movie. There aren’t many that follow.

He ran his business into the ground by firing anybody who told him “the truth,” keeping only yes-women and “ass-kissers.”

But spending all night, every night in the office for this torturous week, he finds consolation. He hides from Ariana (Juana Acosta) when he first sees her (he’s not dressed). And she puts on a show — calling home to Colombia on the company phone, rummaging through everyone’s desk drawers, vacuuming in the buff.

And using his shower.

Callejo, Acosta, director Sergio Barrejón and screenwriter Natxo López wring a few laughs out of this dated male wish-fulfillment fantasy portion of the picture.

But office intrigues eat up most of the third act, and as there’s no way a Western audience (except for a terribly sexist one) is rooting for this pene, that’s kind of a shame.

A story arc suggested by Ariana’s line, “Imagine your problems if you were a woman,” isn’t developed. There’s no “growth” here. Summoning César to a secret meeting in the third act shows him just as awful as he’s been since the first act.

“You’ll need a roofie if you intend to rape me…Hey, I respect WOMEN. Pretty, fat, ugly, old, lesbians…”

It’ll take funnier lines, funnier scenes and a funnier lead performance to make this guy amusingly loathsome, or even amusing.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, nudity, sex, slurs, profanity

Cast: Luis Callejo, Juana Acosta, Carlo D’Ursi, Josean Bengoetxea, Maika Barroso, Bárbara Santa-Cruz

Credits: Directed by Sergio Barrejón, script by Natxo López. A Neflix Original.

Running time: 1:29

Cary Grant was 60 years old, grey and most comfortably cast in grumpy curmudgeon roles by the time the 1964 comedy “Father Goose” was tailor-made for him.

But watch him nimbly scamper down beaches, over branches and around coconuts, through whatever set this undemanding but adorable kid-friendly comedy parks him on. The dude was still fit, still leading man material.

Focus on his every facial expression — not just in close-ups, reacting to whatever outrage spoiled schoolgirls and their “teacher” (Leslie Caron) — perpetrate upon this dipsomaniacal loner, marooned with them on a deserted isle in 1942.

Check out amped-up outrage acting opposite a radio-contact-only, deliciously droll Trevor Howard as the Royal Navy officer who drafted/hoodwinked Grant’s cruising vagabond Walter into becoming a coast watcher for the Allies.

Grant shared scenes with children, and by God he didn’t let them steal’em, the little imps. Every line-reading — and we’re not talking Shakespeare here — is Cary Grant perfect.

“Let me tell you…I am not a father figure. I am not a brother figure or an uncle figure or a cousin figure. In fact, the only figure I intend being is a total stranger figure.”

I hadn’t seen this thing since childhood, catching it on “NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies,” probably, with my parents.

Clocking in at two hours, it asks a lot of indulgence from the viewer — even taking into account the WWII “action comedy” genre this sits within. Still, the laughs are here — sight gags, Grant double-takes, kiddie hijinks.

It’s nobody’s idea of a masterpiece, but it’s Classic Cary. And if I want to add a piece of the puzzle to my lifelong love of boats — living on them, sailing them, stocking them with gin and rum and tonic and books — this movie was part of the sales pitch.

I dare say Walter Eckland’s previous boat had sails.

MPAA Rating: “Approved,” the G-rating of its day

Cast: Cary Grant, Leslie Caron, Trevor Howard

Credits: Directed by Ralph Nelson, script by Peter Stone and Frank Tarloff A Universal release.

Running time: 1:58

Just listen to this one without watching it. The insipid remakes of ’80s pop classics tells you all you need to know.

Orion Pictures made this May 8 remake.

Alicia Silverstone is the nostalgic mom of a teen. Jessica Rothe, who turns 33 at the end of May, plays Alicia’s character’s Valley Girl younger self.

Oy.

Oozing with atmosphere and dripping with violence, “Once Upon a Time in London” aims to deliver a 30 year history of the London Mob. Or Mobs.

Starting in the Great Depression, with Jewish mobsters brawling in the streets with British fascists, and running to the moment where London’s most famous gangsters — the much-documented monsters The Krays — took over, it’s basically the true story of all the thugs who inspired every Guy Ritchie gangster movie, and every other British gangster movie.

Mugs with colorful names like “Jack Spot,” Odd Legs, Bears Breath and Moishe Blueball, Electric Alfie, Elephant Dave and Billy the Yank ran rackets, bookmaking and robberies, scamming rationing during the war, and did shakedowns and extortion.

And you’d think a more colorful film could have been wrung out of this lot, and not the dry — save for the savagery and staggering amount of bloodshed — jerky drift through the decades that director Simon Rumley and British acting’s C-list deliver.

Jack “Spot” Comer (Terry Stone, who also had a hand in the script) was the Jewish head of a mob that took on Britain’s fascists, led by Sir Oswald Mosley, in the streets, which the film is more interested in talking about than showing.

Because unlike Hollywood’s treatments of gangsters in the World War II era, there’s no romanticizing this lot. WWII was just a smorgasbord of fresh opportunities.

“‘Ooo knew wartime would be so good f’business?” one crows, at one point.

Jack Spot is depicted as a raving egomaniac with a short temper and zero violent impulse control. He sets the tone for the picture and the milieu — gang wars largely settled with fists, bats, knives  and razors.

Because “only a mug would shoot someone. Because that’s the death penalty!”

They’re psychotics, but they’re not stupid. And they’re tough enough to deliver and suffer the blows, do time in hospitals and prisons, and wear the lifetime of scars such dirty work brought them.

Jack doesn’t mellow with age. As the years pass and the scars add up, he’s even more prone to delivers a beating, stabbing and slashing.

“I’M king o’the London UNDERWORLD!”

He says this a lot. Perhaps Mr. Stone added that to his portion of the script. But his performance is the heart of the picture and it is riveting in the most appalling ways.

Jack’s onetime underling and growing rival is Billy Hill, played by Leo Gregory of the lesser of the two movies about sailor Donald Crowhurst (also directed by Simon Rumley). Billy’s a smart aleck, more a lover than a brawler. He’s all over his Aggie (Hollie Earl) in the film’s early scenes.

Billy knows his place, pays whatever boss runs things in his territory his share. Until the days, several prison sentences later, when he doesn’t put up with that.

Frankie Fraser

The script is more interested in chronology than cohesion. And with the thick, street accents, picking up on the story via dialogue is trickier (maybe watch it with closed captioning on) than simply following it from brutal fight and torture to “battles” and beatings that follow.

Rumley & Co. seem most intent on upping the violence ante from the various films about The Krays (Tom Hardy was in the most recent one, the Spandau Ballet Kemp brothers in another). They succeed in this.

But the movie’s very much a witless slog through dimly lit warehouses and pubs, the odd jazz guitar trio never lightening the mood, no gangster standing out for anything other than cruelty, bravado and toughness.

Netflix gave Martin Scorsese a blank check to make “The Irishman.” They couldn’t avail themselves of the exchange rate, pitch in with Signature (the producing studio) and get Ritchie, Matthew Vaughn or Paul McGuigan to do this justice?

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, sex, more violence and profanity

Cast:Terry Stone, Leo Gregory, Hollie Earl, Josh Myers, Christopher Dunne and Shereen Guerlin Ball.

Credits: Directed by  Simon Rumley, script by Will Gilbey, Simon Rumley and Terry Stone.  A Signature release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:51

Not many people saw “Thousand Pieces of Gold” when it hit theaters in 1991, although more saw it when it aired on the PBS indie cinema series “American Playhouse.”

It’s worth remembering and revisiting as an example of the ambition indie cinema once had. You couldn’t make a movie on your cell phone, with just actors and a sound mixer and a script. But you could make a Western on a shoestring, an original melodrama of scope and relevance — good enough to attract some of the best character actors working.

The regal Rosalind Chao took on a rare leading role for this period piece. TV’s “After M*A*S*H” was her biggest credit to date, “The Joy Luck Club” came a couple of years later.

She plays Lalu, a young shepherd in a nomadic family in the 1880s Mongolian steppes, “the North,” as people in China put it.  After three years with no rain, with their sheep dying off, her father abruptly sells her to a marriage broker.

Lalu is shipped off to America, where Chinese immigrants will pay a premium for a wife who isn’t one of the “white demons” who make up the majority of the U.S. dating pool.

Jimmy (Dennis Dun) is the sympathetic soul who buys Lalu, “who can’t even understand Cantonese,” at auction in San Francisco. “I am not your husband,” he tells a confused Lalu. Merely her escort to Oregon.

Leading his pack-train north, he starts teaching her the lingo and the wonders and ways of this new land.

“Learn English,” he lectures. “Start your own business. Carry a gun. Don’t let anyone push you around.”

But the man on the receiving end of this journey isn’t what she might have hoped. Hell, he isn’t even in “Oregon.” Hong King is “too OLD,” she whines, upon meeting him in Idaho. He (veteran character actor Michael Paul Chan) is a callous brute with certain expectations of her. And he is partners on a drinking establishment with hard-drinking Charlie (a very young future Oscar winner, Chris Cooper).

Hong King renames her  — “‘Polly’ is all the demons understand” for names, he grouses. “Forget about your family. You father SOLD you!”

But she cannot forget about them, or about Jimmy — who was kind and sweet. And she has a hard time ignoring/fending off the attentions of Charlie, who figures he’s just being sweet and all. He helps her with her English.

“Aye LEEV at de sah-LOON,” she learns. “No whore” is how she rejects the advances of the miners and other ruffians among the “white demons, ghosts” or “black demons” who give her the eye.

What follows is a romantic melodrama, a test of wills and a fish-out-of-water tale about adapting to a new world — one that has a long and difficult history of accepting “others,” especially Chinese.

Lalu’s odyssey has an easy familiarity about it, with just enough surprising twists included to keep it interesting.

Chao and Chan, Dun and Cooper make their characters compelling and complicated. The only caricatures are the bit parts surrounding them.

Director Nancy Kelly has yet to direct another feature, although she’s gotten a couple of documentaries made. She’s not quite early enough in the “Women Step Behind the Camera” story to be called a pioneer, not enough of a stylist to make us wince at a career smothered at birth.

Her great achievement here is in simulating 19th century Mongolia and the American West (basically the same location), putting flesh and blood people in those locales and telling a grounded story on a shoestring, making it look like an A-picture.

This newly restored IndieCollect is earning a virtual cinema re-release through BAM and The Gene Autry Museum and in select cities, a way to watch a good movie you almost certainly missed and support non-profit screening rooms.

It’s worth tracking down, especially if you’re a filmmaker just starting out with a cell-phone camera and a dream. You don’t HAVE to tell a story from the here and now, shot just down the street. If the script’s good, good actors will crawl over each other to help you tell an original, resonant story torn from history.

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Cast: Rosalind Chao, Chris Cooper, Dennis Dun, Michael Paul Chann

Credits: Directed by Nancy Kelly, script by Anne Makepeace, based on the novel by Ruthanne Lum McCunn. A Kino Lorber Virtual Cinema streaming release.

Running time: 1:45

The rise and fall of a hustler, crook and con-artist always makes for a compelling yarn, and making the tale German doesn’t change that.

If anything, a nasty “bait and switch and repeat” real estate shuffle/money laundering drama takes on relevance, considering what turns up when you Google“Deutsche Bank and Trump”on any given day.

“Rising High” is a story of struggle and decadence, working the angles and breaking and entering, dodging taxes and snorting coke. It’s “Blow” and “Wolf of Wall Street” lite — 95 minutes of a German hustler telling tale of ill-gotten gain to a German journalist.

Viktor (David Kross) was always told “Smile, and you’ll conquer the world” by his old man. But his father never amounted to much, his mother left and Viktor had to start his adult life scrambling.

He moves out, tries to get an apartment, and runs into the “We need to see your open-ended employment contract.”

He needs to prove he’s employed, that he can afford it. And that demand is even more alarming in German (with English subtitles, or dubbed into English by Netflix). He takes a crappy job that only Bulgarian itinerant laborers would want — construction. That’s the modern day share-cropping trap of the desperate.

But Viktor, we and his interrogator learn, is a quicker-than-quick study. He fakes an ID, fakes a bank account balance and fakes an employment contract. The guy at the print shop isn’t fooled, but “Don’t get caught!” Taking “Dirk Diggler” as your new name won’t fool anybody who’s seen the porn saga “Boogie Nights.”

“He was my boyhood hero!”

Viktor’s first hustle gets him a penthouse, which he subleases to unruly Bulgarian laborers who are there just long enough to trash it and get arrested. But that’s how he meets Gerry (Frederick Lau). He’s even sketchier than Viktor, and teaming up, the German real estate, insurance and banking businesses never see what hits them.

The tax man? That’s for the third act, of course.

Gerry’s never had a fresh shave, never without his hat, never long between brothel visits and never shy about bringing whoever they’re dealing with — an insurance firm they leverage into their portfolio — down to his level.

“I’d like to sing a song, now, if that’s OK,” he tells a flabbergasted boardroom, beginning a Christmas carol. “Anyone NOT joining in, is fired!”

An accountant offers to help cook their books — “We only employ people who take drugs. Do you?”

Kross (“War Horse”) and Lau (of the famous “Nazi classroom experiment” drama “The Wave”) capture the in-the-moment morality — or amorality — of this breed of predator. It’s too flattering to call them sharks. They’re not brave, smart, deep or even particularly cunning. They’re all bluff and misdirection, hurtling from hedonism and bravado to panic several times a day.

We see versions of them on every infomercial or Trump press conference.

“Rising High” (“Betonrausch” in German) follows its too-familiar story arc to a somewhat expected conclusion. The financial dodges range from amusing (winning real-estate auctions by bribing the doorman to send their competitors to an empty room) to confusing.

The pitfalls — drugs, marriage (Janina Use) to an amoral hustler to happens to be a banker) — are tried and true, if not downright trite.

But it starts well, finishes with a flourish and finds enough “Isn’t this rip-off cute?” moments to be worth your while.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, drugs, sexuality, profanity

Cast: David Kross, Frederick Lau, Janina Use,

Credits: Written and directed by Cüneyt Kaya. A Netflix Original.

Running time: 1:35

Beware those who haunt the seedy motels of America. They’re not just the traditional hunting grounds of the Norman Bates/Aileen Wuornos crowd.

That’s where Riz tumbles ashore, a new  arrival from India who never plans on going home.

She may be naive enough to let the too-helpful desk clerk and owner take her passport –“We get you AMERICAN one!” — and shove her into a job, cleaning the rooms. But it wasn’t just fate and desperation that brought Riz (Geetanjali Thapa) here. And the first predators she meets — that Russian owner (Cynthia Nixon), the 20ish maid/hooker she makes Riz room with (Olivia DeJonge) or the other Indian (Samrat Chakrabarti) staying there — had best keep a watchful eye.

This prey has a past. And this place, the Tides Plaza Motel in Poughkeepsie, isn’t the trap it first seems — for her.

“Stray Dolls” is a bracing if uneven debut feature by editor-turned-director Sonejuhi Sinha, a seedy crime story of the “Motel Noir” genre.  We can tell that by its opening moments, Riz and her roomie Dallas (DeLonge), dressed in cheap blonde wigs, their faces giving away in an instant that they’re not headed out for a night of fun, or even trolling for Johns. There’s bad intent in those scowls.

The long flashback that follows shows that they didn’t start out that way. Riz is shoved into a room with her fellow maid, only to be robbed by the girl with the stripper/hooker name the moment she walks in on her.

Dallas is quick to pull a knife, quicker with a threat. She wants “OUT of here,” and Riz might be her latest ticket of escape. Rob the customers and she’ll “give you your stuff back.”

Can she do that? As she cleans one patron’s room, we realize she can. So does she. Sal (Chakrabarti) speaks to her in Hindi and offers her chai. Then he gets down to business.

“How much to see you in one of those towels?”

In the Tides Plaza, there are no “predators” and “prey.” Only predators. And when Dallas turns friendlier and asks Riz about her past, her scars, we stop fearing for the illegal immigrant — just a little.

Una (Nixon) may coo motherly nothings about having a “big heart” and wanting to help. Dallas may talk tough, but she’s waiting for her sometime squeeze Jimmy (Robert Aramayo) to make that one drug deal that will rescue her.

And they may be two diminutive young women swimming in a motel pool full of sharks. But nobody should underestimate their survival instincts or survival skills.

Young film school trust fund filmmakers make movies based on other movies, and that’s what “Stray Dolls” feels like. It’s gritty reality grounded in cinema.

One thing that works against Sinha’s film is that we don’t buy that Thapa’s Riz is “fresh off the boat,” not for a second. Her calls home, lying about “I love it here, the skies are so blue” (it’s winter, and “grey” is a good day) and swimming in the pool that’s “shaped like a…kidney bean” (the pool was paved over years ago) are the most innocent moments she can manage.

Riz led a hard life to get here, and whatever street life she led back home makes the “sweet innocent” plays plays with her mother on the phone her best acting job.

DeJonge plays a discount motel cliche — a closet full of fishnets, hot pants, and rage. She makes enough money for cheap clothes and a phone. The cocaine she craves and slips into Riz’s milkshake? She must score that from Jimmy.

Nixon’s Russian accent goes and comes — mostly goes. And Aramayo’s “Jimmy” is every dead-ender who chose to get a snake tattooed on his neck without a thought for the life that sentenced him to.

But the violence, when it comes, is shocking. The native cunning, when it makes itself known, is chilling.

And the American dream of the dead broke “huddled masses,” symbolized by a brochure for Niagara Falls, is a lot further away than the Tides Plaza Motel’s owner lets on.

How’re two broke hustlers supposed to cover 375 miles with no money, no car and no passports?

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug abuse, sex, profanity

Cast: Olivia DeJonge, Geetanjali Thapa, Robert Aramayo,  Samrat Chakrabarti and Cynthia Nixon.

Credits: Directed by Sonejuhi Sinha, script by Charlotte Rabate, Sonejuhi Sinha.   A Samuel L. Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:37

The action set piece is prefigured the moment we see the business our crusty hero runs for a living.

The shoot-out, brawl, blaze and saw-off in the FORESHADOWED sawmill eats up over half of “Earth and Blood.” So the action around that silent-movie era thriller setting had better be good.

It is. But it’s not quite potent enough to get us past how abrupt events were that brought us there, the thin back-story on that owner, Said (Sami Bouajila) and the unlikely dominoes that fall which put him in the position of defending himself, his deaf daughter (Sofia Lesaffre) and his business from a vicious drug gang out to retrieve some stolen cocaine.

Director and co-writer Julien Leclercq (“The Crew,” “The Assault”) makes rough, tough and abrupt thrillers that get down to business and get that business over with — often in 80 or so minutes. Not much time for niceties or preliminaries.

Widowed Said gets out of an MRI, decides to sell the mill, lets his family know, and then figures out that one of his employees (Samy Seghir), an ex-con, was strong-armed into holding some drugs for somebody.

The drugs came from a police station evidence vault. And the ruthless crew that took them, led by Adama (Eriq Ebouaney), shot up the station and a bunch of cops, and isn’t going to be in a bargaining mood when they show up.

In a flash, Said transitions from depressed, concerned father and businessman to tough guy, slapping the ex-con kid Yanis around, barking out orders, sign-languaging his daughter and loading his shotgun.

Actually, I kind of like that. None of this “very particular skills/ex-Special Forces/Jason Statham” nonsense. Just a man in a pinch working a deadly problem on the fly — with his trusty over-under shotgun.

The mayhem that follows is as predictable as that “Perils of Pauline” era setting.

Bouajila is a veteran of gritty action pictures (he even played a guy named “Yanis” in “The Crew”) and throws his weight around like a Franco-Algerian Ron Perlman.

Ebouaney, seen in the recent thriller “Domino,” carries his “heavy” weight with skill.

If there’s a fault to the movie around them it goes back to that word — “abrupt.” We need more to connect us with the characters, pull us into the situation, reason our way out of it as Said must do.

And “abrupt” goes for the ending as well, which is as predictable as any thriller with a sawmill in it that doesn’t have somebody tied to a log at some point can be.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, drug content, profanity

Cast: Sami Bouajila, Eriq Ebouaney, Samy Seghir and Sofia Lesaffre

Credits: Julien Leclercq, script by Julien Leclercq and Jérémie Guez. A Netflix Original.

Running time: 1:22

Those ancient puppet punching bags, Punch and Judy, still have lessons to pass on five hundred years after their birth.

“Judy & Punch” is a darker-than-dark comedy that takes us back to those early days, the 16th century. A puppeteering couple struggles to win an audience in an age of ruff-collars and rougher justice, of superstition and mob rule and hanging, beheading, drowning, burning or stoning “heretics” — basically anybody seen by the mob as well, “unusual.”

One lady is accused of “staring at the moon for a suspiciously long time.” That’s all the  good, ignorant citizens of Seaside (“nowhere near the sea”) need to commence to stoning.

“The theaters are reopening,” and that means Judy (Mia Wasikowska) and Punch (Damon Herriman, Charlie Manson in “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood”) can return to their local stage, “the greatest puppeteer of our time” and uh, the guy who claims that billing.

Judy is the one who mends the puppets, cleans the theater and dazzles with her use of strings. Punch is the one who hisses “I’m an ARTIST” when Judy complains about how “smashy” the show has become.

He insists on giving the mob what it wants — violence.  As long as he stays sober and they have enough to care for their baby, she goes along with it.

Wouldn’t you know it? The one day she needs to go clean the theater and prep for the next performance, the easily-distracted Punch gets distracted — and then drunk. That baby’s a goner.

Punch goes all “Dr.” Phil, “Dr.” Oz” and “Dr.” Drew and mumbles “What’s done is done. I suppose we just move on with our lives.” And when Judy isn’t hearing it, he gives her the “smashing” we’ve always suspected he’s capable of.

Dispose of the bodies, and commence to accusing the elderly couple (Brenda Palmer, Terry Norris) who cook and take care of their house for them. That’s Punch.

“Heretics! They cooked and ate my baby, and moidered me wife!”

Actress turned writer/director Mirrah Foulkes introduces a constable (Benedict Hardie) very much a novelty for Seaside. He may be hapless, but he wants to “investigate” the crime.

“We should be guided by reason and justice!”

The locals call that his “outlandish social experiment,” and insist “Lock them up” and “We’re overdue for a hanging!”

Punch cheerleads all of this. He’s “projecting,” casting the blame for his crimes elsewhere, like certain politicians we could name.

Will there be justice? Will the short arm of the (constable’s) law deliver it? Can we expect Divine Intervention? Will it come via the town’s “heretic” outcasts, the ones who weren’t stoned to death but live like Gypsies in the Black Forest?

Or will the mob and the villain have their way?

The violence is a bit of a tune-out (the director, producer and some in the cast were in the movie version of “Animal Kingdom”). But even if we can guess some of the places “Judy & Punch” will take us to, that doesn’t mean the journey — back to the 16th century, taking a hard, serio-comic look at the 21st — isn’t worthwhile.

Wasikowska’s character arc is fun, Herriman makes a perfectly charming and vile villain, and the period detail in this Aussie production — more Brothers Grimm 16th century than the real thing — gives “Judy & Punch” the perfect stage to tell their satiric story without having to pull any you-know-whats.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Damon Herriman, Benedict Hardie, Virginia Gay, Lucy Velik, Gillian Jones, Tom Budge, Brenda Palmer, Terry Norris

Credits: Written and directed by Mirrah Foulkes. A Samuel L Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:45