Movie Nation

Nina has a pointed question for Mr. Bremond, the realtor offering to help her neighbor, Madeleine, sell her home in Moselle, on the French/Luxembourg border.

“Mr. Bremond,” she fumes (in French, with English subtitles), “Do you have a problem with old ‘dykes,’ ‘lezzies,’ LESBIANS?”

No. Of course not. You can’t be judgemental in real-estate! Not in France!

So why, Nina wants to know, turning to Madeleine, can’t you tell your FAMILY about us?

“Two of Us” is a romantic tragedy about a loving couple, together for decades and having lived across the hall from other for years and years. They’re retired, now, and making plans to travel and to simplify life by making themselves a one-apartment couple.

Only Madeleine (Martine Chevalier) can’t make herself “come out” to her adult children. And Nina (Barbara Sukow), slightly younger and German, is exasperated by this.

The consequences of that fear, hesitance and indecision will batter them both over the course of this simple, emotionally harrowing debut drama from director and co-writer Filippo Meneghetti.

Madeleine — “Mado” to Nina — wants to tell her divorced daughter Anne (Léa Drucker) and son Frederic (Jérôme Varanfrain) at a little birthday gathering for her. We can see it in her eyes, hear it in her “I have something I want to say.”

But even though she desperately needs to get this out in the open, even though she has promised Nina time and again that she will, she cannot.

Neither child has a clue, but her testy son has accused her of cheating on their late father, and moments after she backs out of speaking up, he lets another “You couldn’t wait for dad to croak” crack.

For Nina, it’s not the cowering that hurts. It’s finding out from the realtor that Mado backed out of the sale. She plainly lost her nerve. Nina is furious.

She’s still fuming when she stumbles into the smoky apartment where Mado has left food burning. She’s been rushed to the hospital. She’s had a stroke. She cannot speak. Her eyes have the vacant stare of the insensate.

And Nina, dashing to her side, has no legal or social standing. Daughter Anne is puzzled. The health care system is quite firm. Nina is shut out, growing more desperate to elbow her way back into Mado’s life and care for the woman she loves.

Meneghetti, who co-scripted this with Malysone Bovorasmy, takes just enough time to let us see what love looks like. Madeleine and Nina share their days on walks, their nights dancing barefoot to “their song,” an Italian cover of the pop standard, “I Will Follow You.”

Then, this is dashed. But maybe not. If only Nina can get to her, get past her family and then the caregiver they send her home with, look into Mado’s eyes and jar her memory.

The ordeal is told strictly from Nina’s point of view, with Mado (Chevallier is a veteran of French film and the Commedia dell Arte) giving us the barest hint that the character can come back from this. Nina is sure she could “save” her and their love, if only…

Sukowa (“Gloria Bell,” TV’s “Twelve Monkeys”) plays up Nina’s desperation as the script makes her cunning enough to seek ways to make this work out for them, no matter what the family might think.

Drucker, seen in Fox TV’s “War of the Worlds,” is the picture of subtlety as Anne makes the journey from woman without a clue to woman who starts to pick up on clues. She lets us see Anne do the math, lets us see Anne trying to hide her epiphany.

The film’s brevity means some ideas are under-developed. But what we’re left with is a sublime and sublimely simple portrait of a love that’s been lived in and the devotion it will take to ensure that endures.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, adult themes

Cast:Barbara Sukowa, Martine Chevallier, Léa Drucker, Jérôme Varanfrain

Credits: Directed by Filippo Meneghetti, script by Malysone Bovorasmy, Filippo Meneghetti A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:35

One can imagine those old pros Louis Mandylor (“My Big Fat Greek Wedding”) and Armand Assante (most recently in “The Deuce,” but he goes back to “The Lords of Flatbush” and “Private Benjamin”) sitting together in the makeup trailer for “The Brave.”

Maybe there was some chuckling, a few jokes about making a movie in “BFE, Bulgaria.”

Somebody might have turned philosophical. “We ALL end up making shoot-em-ups in BFE, Bulgaria!”

That’s what “The Brave” is, a cops-vs-drug-lord thriller with some heavy-duty shoot-outs, and WAY too much chatter between them. It’s set in Albania — with lovely second unit work “establishing” that locale. But it was actually filmed just across the Balkans, in Bulgaria, where all this mayhem is unleashed.

Mandylor plays Rei, the US-educated Albanian cop with a quick trigger and a quicker temper. Assante is “Franco,” the Italian-American mobster who runs this dirty drug empire on the muddy boot-bottom of Europe.

The police boss — played by Igor Jijikine (who’s played more Russians than #MoscowMitch) — lectures his troops on what they’re embarking on.

“We are takink bayek Albania! Trust een the LAW, een Justice, een your people!”

Jijikine has a lot of lines in this Marco Balsamo script (Balsamo is an actor, look for “Seba”), more than I can ever remember this Indiana Jones heavy having in a movie. That’s one of the problems, here. Everybody has too many lines.

Rei’s “team” includes the mysterious Elena (Ravshana Kurkova) and others.

Every time they think they’ve got the bad guys cornered, Franco outsmarts them. That big raid on the manikin factory? It’s empty, with Franco sitting in an office chair, waiting on them to show up.

“Listen,” he purrs, “Whatever blows your dress up!”

The conceit here is that everybody speaks English with some sort of vague Slavic accent. Mandylor’s comes and goes. Assante, being Italian-American, doesn’t have to work at it.

Lots of Eastern European actors overfill the supporting cast, and they have to speak English, too. With that accent. It just feels off.

What isn’t “off” is the action here. One character bellyaches how Albanians are always “criminals” in the movies (see “Taken,” et al). The world captured here has cops using a CHILD as an informant, wired as he goes into the mob night club, serving as a mob courier.

Director William Kaufman is no Walter Hill, but his shootouts — and there are many — are competent. It’s not a good script and it’s not a good thriller, so this isn’t much better than his earlier efforts (“The Hit List,” “The Prodigy”).

One overriding gripe, other than the endless talking scenes that don’t really illuminate the plot or advance the story, is the body count. Scores and scores are gunned down. Nobody makes a sound. Not one cry in agony, gurgling death rattle or death with any real meat or meaning to it.

Save for the end. But like everything else about “The Brave,” you already knew that.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violent as all get-out

Cast: Louis Mandylor, Ravshana Kurkova, Igor Jijikine, Besart Kallaku and Armand Assante.

Credits: Directed by William Kaufman, script Marco Balsamo. A Mercury/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

Blake Lively goes all vengeance thriller in this Jan. 31 release.

Looks good, doesn’t it?

Faith-based films, as a general rule, are big on emotion and message but lack risk and edge. They “preach to the choir” and play it safe, serving up comfort food for the faithful.

But boy, “Assassin 33 A.D.” doesn’t lack for ambition. By turns prophetic and pious, pistol-packing and profane, it is the nuttiest “Jesus movie” since “Life of Brian.”

And remember, I reviewed the “gay Jesus” satire from Brazil, “The First Temptation of Christ.”

It’s about time travel, commandos armed to the teeth going back to “prove” Jesus wasn’t God, and maybe mow-down a bunch of Roman soldiers and disciples in the process.

It’s nuts.

All the gunplay and bloodshed? Oh yeah, it was filmed in Texas by the writer-director of “Evil Behind You.” Very Texas.

And then one of the scientists (Lamar Usher) who goes back to STOP the commandos runs into Jesus (Jason Castro) in the Garden of Gesthemene. Simon the scientist may be an Ivy League physicist, but he still speaks in the street-slang that screams “urban stereotype” to generations of white screenwriters.

Simon wants to warn Jesus, who being the Son of God, picks up on English 1100 years before it exists.

“I’m from the future. And I’ve seen your movie. Got it on bootleg. Didn’t finish it, though.”

Dramatic pause.

“They mess you up pretty bad…But don’t get bummed out!”

Jesus isn’t bummed, and he doesn’t want this not-the-Apostle-Simon to worry.

“I know what is going to happen.”

Dramatic pause.

“And if you’d finished my movie, you’d know, too!”

Eric Idle couldn’t have written a better crucifixion joke. And he tried. With Our Lord John Cleese as my witness, if I hear a funnier exchange in a movie this year I’ll be tickled indeed.

“Assassin 33 A.D.” has moments of camp like that, and a lot of just bad writing and middling acting to go with its decent production values, heaping helpings of Islamophobia and obscene levels of violence.

Morgan Roberts plays Ram Goldstein, who leads a research team that includes Simon, Amy (Isla Levine) and Felix (Cesar D’ La Torre). They’re scrambling to invent “matter transference.” They want to build the first “Star Trek” transporter for their Arabic boss (Gerardo Davila).

But what does Ahmed want this for? Ram stumbles across the answer, and that runs him afoul of Ahmed’s new ex-military head of security. We’ve seen Brandt (Donny Boaz) survive a car wreck and curse (Ok, not literally “curse”) God for “taking my family from me!” Heidi Montag plays his wife.

Brandt is all too quick to help Ahmed torture Ram when he discovers what they’ve actually invented is a time machine, which Ram wants to keep out of the hands of Ahmed and his terrorist minions.

The film’s first hilarious lines are Brandt assuring everyone that “no one has to get hurt” AFTER we’ve seen him beating the Hell out of Ram.

Ahmed barks, “Keep him comfortable until I return,” again — AFTER the beating — and after we’ve seen Ram’s parents gunned down in front of him as part of “being persuasive.”

Yeah it’s a fiercely stupid movie. They should have stuck to comedy, but that’s a hard sell to the devoted American Christian film audience, especially with Easter coming up.

The bad guys go to the past to mess up the Arrest, Crucifixion and Resurrection, “correcting the greatest deception of All Time — dismantling Christianity!”

Ahmed hates those “Christian scum.” He does. But when he grabs fruit off a vendor’s table in The Holy Land, he’s made his biggest mistake.

“It’s a tomato! So what?”

So, tomatoes wouldn’t be imported to the Old World until 1500+ years later, you ahistorical scum!

There’s a little biting banter between the atheist scientist Ram and his devoutly Christian colleague/girlfriend Amy.

“Please stop them from killing JESUS!”

“If Jesus is God, he can take care of himself!”

Writer-director Jim Carroll tries to wrap this in “faith-being-tested” and “non-believers converted” homilies. Characters also struggle, as such characters do, to explain the twisty, turny time-lines of time-travel.

But none of that’s as easy as just throwing in another shootout, messing up the timeline further as all these dead people are going to alter ancient history, and future history.

A few effects impress, the gunplay — not so much. The moral leaps many characters make are as risible as the logical leaps forced into the plot.

“Assassin 33 A.D.” may not find its intended audience, and if it does they may not be as gobsmacked at the picture’s goofiness as sci-fi fans who have seen well-made time-travel done on a budget — “Primer,” “Timecrimes,” “Safety Not Guaranteed,” etc.

But then again, maybe sci-fi fans are a better audience for this so-bad-its-funny trip back to Golgotha.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence and thematic elements.

Cast: Morgan Roberts, Isla Levine, Lamar Usher, Gerardo Davila, Jason Castro, and Heidi Montag

Credits: Written and directed by Jim Carroll. A Fireside release.

Running time: 1:49

The director of the smash “A Star is Born” rounded up some big time producers for his planned Leonard Bernstein film biography.

Spielberg and Scorsese are the two biggest names.

The famed composer, New York Philharmonic director and popularizer of classical music via TV’s “Young People’s Concerts” might not be the most commercial follow-up for a star and director at his peak. Which might be why he wasn’t able to get this project into a traditional studio’s lineup.

Cooper announced plans to film this in the spring of 2018.

Enter Netflix.

Oh, it’s totally happening now.

It is a chilly Martin Luther King Day in America’s vacationland, and I am in a suburban multiplex with a couple of anime fans, and maybe a dozen anime apostates, all here for “Weathering with You.”

The latter group know enough to choose to be there, to buy tickets. But like me, they’re not given to swooning over something simply because it wears that “anime” badge. So while I laugh at some of the intentional gags — the 20ish journalist Natsumi who rides the young hero, 16-year-old Hodaka, with “Are you looking at my boobs?” — the rest of the audience is there to remind us of the silly, over-the-top gestures, emotions and facial expressions of this beloved Japanese art form.

This tale (in Japanese with English subtitles, dubbed in some theaters) is a romantic fantasy with a somewhat muddled environmental allegory at its heart. Writer-director Makoto Shinkai (“Your Name.”) and his animators deliver fantastical images — all manner of translucent “fish” which live in the clouds — attached to a story that otherwise could have been filmed with live actors on real sets in Kanto (the region around Tokyo).

But would anybody have given this a second thought if it wasn’t animated?

The story, which takes a solid half hour to set in, follows the runaway Hodaka from the ferry boat, which he almost falls off of during a storm, to the offices of the gruff 20something Suga, who runs a conspiracy news service for magazines, with the fetching Natsumi as his assistant.

“Are you looking at my boobs again?”

Establishing scenes offer a fascinating glimpse of how the down-and-out manage life in one of the most expensive cities on Earth — cubicle-sized apartments, cafes that feature shower services, cheap noodles eaten on the fly in a street-scene whirl of McDonald’s, Starbucks, Kent cigarettes and Suntory ads. The only words he hears from cops or potential employers are “Are you a minor?”

Tokyo is a minefield of exploitation (sex trade, etc.) for homeless minors.

A free Big Mac is how the hungry Hodaka stumbles into a doozy of a story. The McDonald’s girl who slips him the burger, Hina, has this weird gift. We’ve seen her climb to a battered rooftop shrine on an abandoned building after watching over her dying mother in a nearby hospital.

Hina’s prayers are for a break from Japan’s relentless run of rainy days. A beam of sunshine tells her, and us, that her prayers were answered.

A fortune teller relates that there are “Sunshine Girls” and “Rain Girls” who can control the weather. In the age of cell phone cameras and universal internet access, this ancient belief turns out to be easy to “prove,” and make viral.

Hodaka and Hina set up an online “Weather Maiden” service. Want to be certain your outdoor wedding or party comes off without a hitch? Need for it to be a clear day just long enough for your late husband’s spirit to come home on the anniversary of his death? Text her, pay her and she’ll make it happen.

The slice-of-Japanese life is one of the best features of anime, not just the photo-real streets, skyscrapers and neon. Traditions and superstitions of the “Spirited Away/My Neighbor Totoro” variety have their charms. You can lose yourself in that, here and there, in “Weathering with You.”

But that’s just background and subtext, and the movie’s text — the unconvincing love story it tries to set up, the melodramatic introduction of a handgun that falls into Hodaka’s hands, scaring off sexual exploiters but putting the cops on his tail.

There’s inherent pathos in the idea of a nation that worships “girls” to an almost creepy extent having these “Sunshine Girls” and “Rain Girls” who can, briefly, in the blush of maidenhood, influence the weather. What happens when they’re no longer girls is where the story attempts to take us.

But the storytelling is slack, and the moments of ditziness can take you right out of the film. The everyday “magic” (shades of “Kiki’s Delivery Service”) is only magical on first sight. The whole TV news broadcasting this or that bit of “conspiracy” or “magic” or proof of this supernatural belief in Japanese life is far more interesting than the meandering story and subplots Shinkai chose to develop.

It’s fanciful enough, but “Weathering with You” is too scattered with dashes of dullness making for many dead spots. It’s not on a par with virtually anything the anime master Hiyao Miyazaki made, and falls well short of the heart of  “Your name.”

It barely passes muster as a time-killer on a chilly day in America’s vacationland.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for suggestive material, some violence and language

Cast: The voices of Kotaro Daigo, Nana Mori, Shun Oguri

Credits: Written and directed by Makoto Shinkai. A GKids/Fathom Events release.

Running time: 1:53

That makes it a January blockbuster. No wonder Sony is rushing to set up a fourth film in the Will Smith/Martin Lawrence franchise.

It achieved the second biggest Martin Luther King holiday weekend opening ever.

“Dolittle” managed $29.5 million over the four day weekend, not awful but not nearly enough.

“1917” to it’s awards season bounce tl third place. It has now earned over $81 million. “Bad Boys” made almost as much in four days. Formula and franchise matter. And stars.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl1182631425/?ref_=bo_hm_rd

Foreign language films, or “international” films as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences now calls them, immerse you in a culture, and the good ones — no matter the subject, can tell you a lot about a place without ever visiting.

Brazil is very much on the cinema buff’s radar this winter, thanks to the Oscar contending documentary, “The Edge of Democracy,” about the one-time dictatorship’s loss of democratic rule to a recognizable alliance of the very rich, the very racist and the exceptionally gullible.

And then there’s the scalding “Christmas special” titled “The First Temptation of Christ,” which drew violence and protests in Brazil and calls for a Netflix boycott in the U.S. when it popped up on the choices of the easily-offended this holiday season.

Both those films are instructive if you choose, as I did, to do a deep dive in Brazil via Netflix offering the paired preacher bio-pics “Nothing to Lose” and “Nothing to Lose 2.”

I’d never heard of the charismatic and “entrepreneureal” Protestant preacher Edir Macedo, who megachurch-based media empire made him famous and rich, and attracted unwanted attention from Brazil’s government and supposedly its Catholic Church.

He looked at the rituals of Catholicism, as practiced in the backward Brazil of his youth, and found his calling — preaching the gospel, in parks and street-corners, practicing direct action Christianity by caring for the homeless, failing healing, etc.

And by the ’80s he was such a “threat” he was getting hounded by the government, eventually jailed under charges of money laundering and a laundry list of other infractions.

But when your ministry is as rich as his, with his own TV channel at home, adjunct ministries around the world, you can do what Billy Graham and the Mormon Church have done in the U.S. — put your message, your “version of the story,” into movie theaters.

The two films cover much of the same ground, stories dominated by Macedo’s persecution — or persecution complex — and depiction of his indomitable spirit.

“I like to say I have broad shoulders,” “Bishop” Macedo (Petrônio Gontijo) modestly declares (in dubbed English if you choose, or the original Portuguese). “It’s one of my duties, to be a lightning rod for the church!”

“If Jesus had his disappointments, why shouldn’t we? We trust the Holy Spirit, and he is leading this mission!”

The films are both artless exercises in agitprop, the dialogue dull, scenes flatly staged and shot in soap opera fashion — save for the sermons, the arrests and a little trip this modern day prophet took in imitation of his idol.

Gontijo comes off as far more convincing and “charismatic” in the original Portuguese, however. And even though the films recycle the persecution, with mustache twirling police, state and Catholic officials scheming to find something to charge Macedo and his “cult” with, and him blithely telling his inner circle the obvious.

“It’s obvious they want to attack me…So much disrespect for the Bible!”

“Nothing to Lose 2” is one of the most pointless sequels ever, as it recovers too much of the same persecuted and rising above it ground.

But “Nothing to Lose” is far more interesting, as “origin stories” inevitably are. We see Macedo’s doted-on childhood, kid teasing him with the nickname “Pinky,” and his teen awakening to the puzzling hilarity of all these rituals on the Catholic calendar — parades with statues of the corpse of Jesus, or of the virginal Mary.

“Is God dead or alive, Dad? If the Bible is true, to make people believe in the image of a DEAD God makes no sense!”

He starts showing up at altar calls in a local Protestant church, finds the woman who shares his beliefs and his life, Esther (Day Mesquita), starts pulling homeless people into the church he’s attending, and when that’s frowned on, sets up on his own.

Can assuming the title “Bishop” be far behind? Jesus went to Sinai for his moment of truth. Macedo and his entourage take a Cook’s Tour just to walk the same path — if only briefly.

And how can a man get this rich if he’s really that busy helping the poor in a country where poverty is as racial (virtually no black Brazilian faces show up in either film) as it is endemic?

But if there’s nothing else one takes away from “The Edge of Democracy,” it’s that the powers that be have been paranoid about anybody mobilizing a great following, and that as we learned from “The First Temptation,” people there take their religion violently serious.

So the movies neither make the case that Macedo is the con man the government says he is, nor gives him self-manufactured, self-financed exoneration.

And both are dull enough that the reports out of Brazil, that his Universal Church of the Kingdom of God made the films, bought out theaters to show it, gave away tickets to both films, and still couldn’t get people to show up.

Seeing the movies, you understand. As a movie producer, Bishop Edir Macedo is still just a street corner preacher with a megaphone — small time.

“Nothing to Lose”

“Nothing to Lose 2”

MPAA Rating: PG, and PG-13, violence and thematic elements

Cast: Petrônio Gontijo, Day Mesquita

Credits: Both films directed by Alexandre Avancini, scripted by Stephen P. Lindsey and Emílio Boechat , based on the memoirs of Edir Macedo .

“Nothing to Lose” running time: 2:14

“Nothing to Lose 2” running time: 1:36

It all seems cut and dried as far as acting awards go, doesn’t it?

Same winners, show after show after show.

But Best Picture seems like a three picture race, thanks to that Sscreen Actors Guild (SAG) award for best ensemble last night.

Editors, producers and other guilds narrowed the field to “1917” and “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” — but the largest guild of all goes for “Parasite,” a most worthy winner.

“Once Upon a Time…” seems like more more of a long shot. “Little Women” canot elbow it’s way into tje conversation.

Brad Pitt and Joaquin Phoenix have been giving wonderful speeches. Renee and Laura might want to step up their game.

There were of course TV winners as well. Go to the link to see Jennifer Aniston, “Fleabag,” “Mrs. Maisel” and “The Crown” celebrated.

https://deadline.com/2020/01/2020-sag-awards-winners-list-screen-actors-guild-1202835426/

Love that Terry Crews.

When it comes to big, burly character actors who can credibly play tough guys, and hilarious goofs on their tough guy image, he has just two peers — Danny Trejo and Dave Bautista. Pretty good company to be in.

And if there’s anybody you can picture in your mind when you hear the folk song “John Henry,” it’s Crews, a big man right at home with a sledgehammer in his hand, as a “steel-driving man” or a menace to a bad man.

But as John Henry, he’s parked in the middle of an archetypal “Man of Peace” forced to become a “Man of Violence” revenge thriller that — short as it is — loses track for LONG stretches of just what it’s about. It’s a cluttered, disjointed and not terribly satisfying variation on the “die with a hammer in my hand” legend that might have been a great showcase for a character actor given a leading role, for once.

Grainy home video flashbacks tell us who John Henry is and how he came to be this way. He grew up “straight outta” Compton, and his amusing blowhard of a widowed dad (horror veteran Ken Foree) loves telling him the story, “You know why I named you John Henry?”

It’s because he was strong, even at birth. A man-mountain of an adult, wearing a permanent scowl, he’s not the sort to take having his little dog run over lightly, only to have the gangster (Gerald “Slink” Johnson) who killed the dog rage about the blood it got on his Escalade, and threaten John with a pistol.

But John Henry does take it. He picks up his pet and walks away from the confrontation.

The neighborhood’s notorious for a reason. When a big gang card game ends in a massacre, your first thought is “John Henry got around to his vengeance early,” but no. The gangsters were bragging about all the “ho’s” they’ve rounded up to make money for them. The shooters were there to end that.

One girl (Jamila Velazquez) gets away and hides under John Henry’s house. He’s not going to give this stranger up, even when the cops cruise through, sweeping the neighborhood for survivors or witnesses, “some kids” who escaped the carnage.

John lives in the house he grew up in, caring for his still-bragging-about-his-sexual-prowess Pop, “BJ.” Big John’s on oxygen and in a wheelchair. His massive, sensitive son may have the kind impulse of hiding “Berta” there. But it is BJ who knows enough Spanish to let them communicate.

There’s the set-up. John and BJ hide Berta, the cops are sort of looking for her, and the surviving members of the gang, led by Hell (Ludacris) are looking, too.

So are her brothers who, it turns out, were the ones who shot up that card game trying to free her. Emilio (Joseph Julian Soria) finds Berta, and soon they’re all holed up in that house waiting for Hell to unleash hell upon them.

That simple plot tells us where this is going, but writer-director Will Forbes is loathe to get to the point. The script loses its suspense, power and minimalism as we get all this Berta back story, more John Henry backstory explaining why he’s non-violent and his connection to Hell, John Henry bonding with Berta, John Henry bonding with Emilio and John Henry catching up with old classmate Tasha (Kimberly Hebert Gregory) and an even older neighbor.

The story is disjointed and abandons its minimalist focus on who and what is important. Stupid interludes with gang-bangers — who all dress in white — explaining “The Human Centipede” to each other while on watch, an off-key Tasha/John dance-reminisce moment where they remember “our jam” from back in the day, add nothing.

The picture stops dead for the better part of an hour during all of this, even as the viewer is muttering “Commence to HAMMERING, John.”

Ludacris, playing a character who calls himself “king” and sits on a throne in his gang hideout, has never looked more worthy of his chosen moniker than wearing this blinged-up metal jaw he sports here – ludicrous.

Once the picture finally gets around to what it’s supposed to be doing, it almost turns exciting and visceral, and it kind of makes sense. Nothing shows viscera and blood to better advantage than white on white clothing and decor — spattered and arterial sprayed. All a bit too little entirely too late, here.

Crews isn’t bad in the title role. But he overdoes the “triggered” by violence thing. The editing wipes out any subtlety to the performance.

And anyway, by the end we know it’s going to take more than a hammer to fix “John Henry. ”

MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, pervasive language, sexual references and some drug use

Cast: Terry Crews, Ken Foree, Ludacris, Jamila Velazquez, Joseph Julian Soria, Gerald “Slink” Johnson and Kimberly Hebert Gregory

Credits: Directed by Will Forbes, script by Will Forbes and John Skinner. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:32