Movie Nation

“Lowriders,” the last sleeper hit of the spring, is an engaging if over-familiar Latino melodrama about fathers and sons, embracing one’s culture even as you stretch it and love triangles.

Corny? Si. But set as it is against the East LA locus of Latino car culture, it is also a delightful appreciation of and history primer for anybody not familiar with where those shiny, bouncy custom cars one sees from sea to shining sea came from.

The great Demian Bichir — of “A Better Life,” and utterly wasted in “Alien: Covenant” — is the patriarch, Miguel. He owns a garage in East Los Angeles, and like his father before him, he’s a car customizer, laying on adding the flash, wiring in effects, loading the hydraulics and layering on “30 coats” to create lowriders with his Coasters car club.

Miguel is a widower who remarried Gloria (Eva Longoria), a proud man fighting for his sobriety and wrestling with guilt.

Because Miguel has two sons. Danny (Gabriel Chavarria) is a talented artist. But he works in graffiti, which could land him in jail. And Miguel cannot have that. He’s already lost one son (Theo Rossi) to the dark side. Francisco has taken on the nickname “Ghost,” because that’s what he is to his dad.

“When they’re your kids, you don’t stop trying,” Miguel’s wife counsels. But that may be too little too late. Ghost wants to have an impact on his baby brother’s life. That’s the first “love triangle” of the story. Who will win Danny’s loyalty?

But being talented, Danny draws the attention of the hip Anglo photographer (Melissa Benoist of “Glee”). She can interpret his art (through white entitled eyes), hook him up with the LA art scene, help him sell out.

“You don’t have to be poor to be real.”

Of course there’s the college bound neighborhood sweetheart (Yvette Monreal), also tugging at his heartstrings. That’s love triangle #2.

The various tug-of-wars play out in the most predictable ways in this melodrama, a term that sums up the conventions of a conventional genre story, with all the shoehorned-in relationship issues, gang fight and cop interventions the picture can manage. There’s as sure to be a kid named Chuey (Tony Revolori) caught in the middle of it all as there is a “Big Chevy” (pronounced “Tchev-ee”) car show where it all can reach a climax.

Bichir is wonderful, young Chavarria is solid in what could be a break-out role and Rossi (“Sons of Anarchy”) gives nice shading to the shady “Ghost,” a gangster with grievances, a son with a heart.

And as predictable as all that is, the film has utility and charm, letting Miguel explain the connections of lowriders to pre-automotive Latin American culture, letting Danny learn that history — the racial profiling that puts laws on the books about how low cars could sit on the road (thus, the retrofitting of aircraft hydraulics to “lift” the cars when the cops drove by).

So for all the corn, “Lowriders” can be appreciated for its rolling stock and serving a criminally under-served audience — Who do you think makes the “Fast and Furious” movies monster hits? — a film with fine performances and teachable moments amidst all the melodrama.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language, some violence, sensuality, thematic elements and brief drug use

Cast: Gabriel Chavarria, Demián Bichir, Theo Rossi, Eva Longoria, Melissa Benoist, Yvette Monreal, Tony Revolori

Credits:Directed by Ricardo de Montreuil script by Cheo Hodari Coker, Elgin James. A BH Tilt/High Top release.

Running time:

Alfred Hitchcock almost saves “Diary of a Wimpy Kid — The Long Haul.”

Keeping in mind, of course, that the movie’s for pre-tweens — children who might not have been exposed to any of the scads of “family vacation disaster” comedies that preceded it — and is thus graded on a curve bending towards the unsophisticated.

But for parents, and parents who have imposed Hitchcock on their pre-teen children, there’s a saving grace amidst all the poop/mudhole/piglet/parental sing-along-to-the-Spice Girls gags.

“The Long Haul” has the best “Psycho” shower scene send-up ever filmed. Well, after “High Anxiety.” And this one, at least, is utterly unexpected.

This is a “Wimpy” reboot, with a new look-alike “kid” (Jason Drucker of TV’s “Every Which Way”), a new, dopier-funnier drummer/brother Rodrick (Charlie Wright of “We’re the Millers”) and a couple of big-name upgrades as parents — Alicia Silverstone (“Clueless”) and Tom Everett Scott (“That Thing You Do”).

It starts with our Wimpy narrator becoming the victim of a viral video when he tumbles into a kiddie foam-ball playpit and freaks out as he comes up with “diaper hand,” and then it puts the lad on the road for four days with his family as they drive to granny’s 90th birthday celebration in Indiana. Or to a nearby video game convention, if Greg can figure out how to pull that off.

There are more of moronic Rodrick’s efforts to torment/mentor his kid brother and disappoint his parents. Mom (Silverstone) sends the lads into a store with a shopping list.

“I couldn’t read your curly/oldie fashioned writing!”

“You mean CURSIVE?”

And when they stop for a country fair, Greg gets stuck with his toddler littlest brother, and eventually, a piglet.

The shower scene in question kicks off a livelier third act, as Greg — covered in mud — is trapped in the hotel bathroom shower of their nemesis family as their “Beardo” patriarch (Chris Coppola) uses the facilities. The wimp’s discovery — after a gross and kid-friendly bowel movement — is a shot-by-shot recreation of Hitchcock’s most famous screen sequence, from ripped shower curtain hooks to mud circling the drain. Kudos to Brit director David Bowers for the effort.

The scattered laughs that precede it (Rodrick lines, mostly, Silverstone and Scott singing along to “Wannabe”) don’t add up to much, and the movie lacks the wince-with-recognition middle school spark that marked the first film in this tweenage franchise.

But even if you drop the kids off, come back in time to duck in for a quick shower. It makes “The Long Haul” totally worth it — almost.

MPAA Rating:PG for some rude humor

Cast:  Jason Drucker, Alicia Silverstone, Tom Everett Scott, Charlie Wright

Credits:Directed by David Bowers, script by Jeff Kinney and David Bowers, based on Kinney’s book. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:30

If you need a “name,” even a little-known one, to get your D-movie financed, filmed and released, you want want who’s going to give you fair value.

You want a leading man with a sense of urgency, a dynamism that captures the shock and awe of the supernatural events going on around him. You want an actor who doesn’t look downcast for being cast.

That’s the overwhelming impression Christopher Denham gives in “Camera Obscura,” a thriller which sees its shellshocked war-photographer “hero” stunned by the realization that this pieced-together vintage camera “photographs the future,” then mindlessly accepting its prophecies, which he is heedlessly willing to kill to keep from coming true.

The plot is a spin on the sci-fi/fantasy trope “gadget that sees the future” (See “Time Lapse.” Actually, don’t.).

Denham (“Argo,” TV’s “Billions”) is Jack, a combat photojournalist who saw one too many dying kids and is determined to use what he’s seen as an excuse to never pick up a camera again.

“Life is just a game,” he philosophizes. “Death always wins.”

His shrink (Carol Sutton) may hear him out. But his fiance  She (Nadja Bobleva) wants to end this funk in a flash. She gets him a vintage German 35mm camera that a collector has pieced together from broken bits of other cameras. And as Jack bores the last photo lab in town about how “exciting it is be shooting again,” he can’t help but notice — as do the photo techs — that weird, black and white crime scene photos are what the camera is producing.

And they’re of murders, violent deaths, that haven’t happened yet!

All of a sudden, Jack is blacking out, losing track of what he’s done and what he’s photographed, and in the film’s best (only good) line, he complains he’s “living in an episode of ‘Goosebumps.'”

Jack quickly wonders if he can he intervene, change the course of the future. And when he starts seeing dead shots of Claire, that curiosity becomes a mania and takes on urgency.

Or it would, if Denham gave us any hint of either of those emotions. Denham never gets past “tentative,” never commits to headlong panic. Jack’s descent into a personal hell never feels like more than an actor dipping his toes in tepid water.

The film is framed in a flashback, Jack at his wit’s end, robbing a pizza delivery guy who turns out to be an old friend. That doesn’t really work.

What does pay off is the odd moment of dark comedy — Jack asking the wrongest of the WRONG questions of a hardware store clerk (he’s seeking knock-out drugs, and doesn’t know those are peddled by the neighborhood pharmacist). The cops who keep seeing his connections to various crimes are incredulous, save for the detective in charge (Catherine Curtin). That alone is good for a laugh.

There’s little backstory about the source of Jack’s shellshock, little chemistry with Bobyleva, little here that we haven’t seen in assorted TV and movie horror tales with that “know the future” sci-fi twist.

All of which might matter less if Denham had studied the works of Nicolas Cage, Rutger Hauer, Natasha Henstridge or the late Powers Boothe — players who knew you have to bring that A-game every day, even when you’re earning D-movie money.

“MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Christopher Denham, Nadja Bobyleva, Catherine Curtin

Credits:Directed by  Aaron B. Koontz, script by Cameron Burns, Aaron B. Koontz. A — release.

Running time: 1:35

“Who hasn’t at least thought about it?” Howard Wakefield narrates, pleading his case.

The idea of just…checking out, fleeing the scene, disappearing — Howard makes it feel like a logical alternative to participating in and walking through “the slow trajectory of a collapsing civilization.”

But Howard (Bryan Cranston) isn’t content to flee a testy, turbulent marriage. No. He’ll drop out of sight, simply not show up at work or at home. More self-absorbed than self-aware, he’ll park his Mercedes in the suburban New York home’s detached garage. He’ll close the garage door.

He’ll hie it to the rarely-used attic of the garage, and like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, see what happens with those he left behind.

That’s the simple, revealing and darkly comic premise of “Wakefield,” a film by writer (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) turned writer-director Robin Swicord, a movie meditation on marriage, family and surviving both by taking the time to examine what’s wrong.

“What is so sacrosanct about a marriage and a family that you should have to live in it — every single day?”

Howard’s wife, the one-time ballet dancer Diana (Jennifer Garner, regaining her edge), makes him jealous — or so he claims — by strutting around in her dancer-bod-nudity in front of open windows, by paying too much attention to other men who cross their paths at parties and the like.

“All I want is to get through the day,” she sighs, in a flashback. “That’s all I think about. ‘Just get through the day.'”

Married 15 years, they have two daughters entering their teens. They, too, tolerate Howard. Do any of them love him? Will they miss him in the least?

Slipping off to hide in that attic is one impulsive way to find out.

There are just a couple of flashbacks with dialogue exposing the nature of the marriage and the guilt-ridden courtship in which Howard stole Diana from his best friend (Jason O’Mara of “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”).

The rest of the film is Howard’s odyssey, his lengthy (too lengthy) interior and exterior monologues — mimicking the voices of others, losing himself in his own head and scavenging like the raccoon who “inspires” his exile, “surviving…literally, on garbage” like a “castaway.”

Or a homeless bum, like the ones he competes with for left-overs.

Swicord wrings every last dramatic possibility out of this thin premise, and then some. It’s still an 84 minute movie straining to escape a 108 minute one.

Cranston treats Howard like the tour de force he is, man-of-means, solitary philosopher and man-of-action scrambling to avoid detection, asserting himself on “the streets,” losing his humanity but not himself as he descends into bearded madness.

The one deft bit of directorial cleverness (dictated by her script) has Swicord playing out Diana’s saga — from the first moments of annoyance that Howard isn’t on time, to the inept police visit to the grief, and then flinty way she resolves to let life go on — in pantomime. Garner defty navigates this emotional journey without us hearing a word she says — to colleagues and others who might want to comfort her, to her mother (Beverly D’Angelo), to her dealings with her seemingly un-impacted twin daughters.

Garner makes us see what Howard must see for himself. Girlfriend will be fine without you around, the “trap” of a disappearance (not death or divorce, with monetary settlements) notwithstanding.

“Wakefield” is a sometimes funny, always smart movie that never quite finds the depth to be brilliant. But Cranston and Garner give it life beyond the narrow concept and make us care about this selfish man and bitter woman, something few screen romances — even the ones where the characters share scores of scenes together — can manage these days.

MPAA Rating: R for some sexual material and language

Cast: Bryan Cranston, Jennifer Garner

Credits: Written and directed by Robin Swicord. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:48

“Gladiator” may have been the movie that won Ridley Scott his greatest acclaim. “Blade Runner” gave him enduring cult appeal. And “The Martian” proved he still has it, even as he pushes 80.

But “Alien” was his masterpiece. A gritty, lived-in sci-fi horror tale that held us in gloomy dread before its string of shocks left us slack-jawed and exhausted, it’s a movie that fans (like me) would drag friends to, just so we could hear them scream.

And it’s a damn shame the old master won’t leave it alone.

“Alien: Covenant” continues the chest-busting terrors in the equally-muddled, revived “Prometheus” storyline“Prometheus” storyline, a ridiculously illogical sequel that builds on the secondary threat that’s always existed in the corporate “Alien” universe. It’s not bug-eyed (and bodied) monsters we have to fear, it’s our own technology.

But when “Covenant” is not head-slappingly obvious and perfunctory — Suspense? Surprises? — it’s just laugh-out-loud ludicrous.

Ten years after the Prometheus (with Noomi Rapace and “synthetic” robot Michael Fassbender) disappeared, the crew of the Covenant, a colonizing ark, is jolted out of hibernation by a deep space storm.

The captain (seen in flashback) doesn’t survive the awakening. The movie’s most terrifying death comes in those first seven minutes.

So command falls to the deer-in-the-headlights, quote “the book” first officer, Oram (Billy Crudup). There’s barely time for the captain’s widow (Katherine Waterston of “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”) to weep, when the indecisive and faith-based Oram makes his first and deadliest mistake.

They’ve heard a “distress call.” Actually, it’s John Denver’s “Country Roads” emanating from what looks like an “ideal” planet for colonization.  Wonder how “the Company” missed it? Wonder what’s down there?

Not-quite-everything that follows is EXACTLY what we’ve seen before. This crew, comprised of couples and a Next-Gen synthetic (Fassbender, again), would supposedly be more wary and professional than the blue collar gang from that long-ago freighter, Nostromo. But no. They drop to the planet, sans space helmets, and immediately and repeatedly stick their necks out and their noses (and ears) in it.

With too-easily-anticipated results. The “infection” takes different forms, as indeed it did back in 1979’s “Alien.” And faster than Danny McBride can radio, “Babe, are we talking quarantine protocols?”, said protocols are abandoned, the women have weepy meltdowns and scream (very unprofessional) and the crew of 15 is sliced, burst, chewed and gutted. One by one.

It’s a pitiless picture lacking much in the way of tension or urgency. But Scott and the John Logan/Dante Harper script set us up for something more cerebral than “In space, no one can hear you scream” with a prologue that has Last-Gen synthetic David (Fassbender) pondering “I think, therefor I am” with his “father” — an inventor played by Guy Pearce in a serene, austere designer future-mansion in that under-populated Earth that sci-fi often presents as our future.

That’s a “2001” promise this silly movie cannot keep.

McBride, as a drawling straw-cowboy-hat wearing space jockey named “Tennessee,” has a couple of the best lines.

“We didn’t leave Earth to be safe.”

But Scott and Co. want this to be a meditation on the machines we’re building that will someday, Stephen Hawking and James Cameron say, wonder what they’re keeping us around for. So it is that David has survived the Prometheus on this planet, and had a lot of time to think and misquote poetry. And Walter (Fassbender), the newer model on the new ship, gets to listen to David’s pitch, making us question what they’re planning and what we’re doing, giving so much control of civilization to gadgets.

As a thriller, “Covenant” is strictly low-brow horror, eye-rolling scenes where you can shout, “Wait? WHAT? Don’t go in there/out there/OVER there ALONE!” Nobody listens. Or wears a helmet on this alien planet, which once had a civilization that we see traces of, in addition to the familiar horn-shaped ship that the first “Aliens” were found in. Instead, everybody is dragged into a dank castle straight out of Grand Guigonol. And what happens in Grand Guignol castles? Ask Edgar Allen Poe.

The great Scott entrusts his movie to the great Fassbender. But whatever higher debate was intended in his scenes with himself, he cannot overcome the laugh-out-loud stupidity of “David” teaching “Walter” something he’s learned in his ten years on this lonely planet — how to play the recorder.

Thus, the tag line is all that’s really changed in 38 years of “Alien” pictures. “In space, no one can hear you giggle.”

MPAA Rating: R for sci-fi violence, bloody images, language and some sexuality/nudity

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Cruddup , Danny McBride, Amy Seimetz, Demian Bichir

Credits:Directed by Ridley Scott, script by . A Fox release.

Running time: 2:06

Amy Schumer, the comic vulgarian whose every utterance is a “Vagina Monologue,” seems somewhat defanged in “Snatched,” her sophomore outing as a movie star.

It’s “Romancing the Stone” with semen jokes and feminine hygiene sight gags and exposed breasts as punch lines.

Like Melissa McCarthy, looking for mainstream middlebrow amusement with “Tammy,” Schumer has chosen a formula “buddy” comedy with one of “The Banger Sisters” as her mom and co-star. McCarthy paired-up with Susan Sarandon, Schumer with Goldie Hawn. And we all know how that worked out.

Still, Schumer adds a little “acting” to her resume as Emily, a spoiled, narcissistic drain on society with an adenoidal whine. No wonder her musician boyfriend (Randall Park) dumps her. Upcoming Ecuadoran vacation or not, he’s not sticking with somebody without “any direction,” who can’t even hold on to a stockroom job at a cut-rate clothing store.

Desperately selfie-and-instant messaging through her social network for a replacement companion for the non-refundable ticket, Emily draws the attention of her mother (Hawn), who notices her “no relationship” Facebook status.

“You still have two years left to find someone!”

But upon visiting her divorced, cat-obsessed mom, still taking care of her agoraphobic piano teacher brother (Ike Barinholtz), Emily has maybe her first ever moment of altruism. MOM needs this. Mom, paranoid about…everything — will travel to a Third World country, take in the sights — at the gated resort — and keep an eye on her careless, thoughtless oldest child.

“Mom, you are too YOUNG to be acting like this!”

“You are too OLD to be acting like THIS!”

But Emily carelessly gets them into a situation where they wind up kidnapped, with a menacing gang leader (Oscar Jaenada), and a shut-in, socially inept sibling and two tough-talking “companion” tourists (Wanda Sykes and a hilariously silent Joan Cusack) as their only hope of rescue.

“Snatched” is a comedy of low-hanging fruit — old lady jokes, unattractive Amy jokes, “rape whistle” (a dog whistle, naturally) gags, Beyonce “All the Single Ladies” quotes and “Powder” movie references.

Screenwriter Kate Dippold, thanks to “Parks and Recreation” and “The Heat” and “Ghostbusters,” has a reputation for inferior femme-centric laughers, a rep which “Snatched” chisels in stone. The story lurches hither and yon, taking on convenient new characters to magically remove our heroines from this or that dilemma. The characters’ “arc,” or learning curve, with each woman learning something important from the other — seems imposed just before the final edit.

The deaths — generally kidnappers dispatched by “accident” by Emily — are kind of funny. As are the “You’re on your own” calls to the State Department (Thanks, Trump) and brother Jeffrey’s furiously incompetent threats to the do-nothing bureaucrat (Bashir Salahuddin) dodging those calls. Hawn still has that Oscar-winning timing, and Schumer’s on-set riffs and brazen “out there” big girl body confidence amuses. 

Director Jonathan Levine, who has fallen a ways since “50/50,” wisely keeps our kidnapped heroines in the dark about all the Spanish-speaking going on around them (no subtitles), even if he can’t cover the “magical” arrival of a tapeworm-curing jungle doctor as a clumsy plot contrivance. McCarthy often has Paul Feig behind the camera, covering her stunt doubles, looking out for her interest. Schumer would hate to hear this, but she needs somebody like that in her corner. Hired gun Levine phones this in.

In all honesty, it’s got enough laughs to get by. But it’s a real crossroads picture for Schumer, who proves herself shamelessly willing to go where her plus-sized sister Melissa McCarthy has gone before. The crass shtick will only take her so far. Acting and physical comedy that doesn’t rely on others doing all your “stunts” (too obvious) create staying power.

“Snatched” won’t.

MPAA Rating: R for crude sexual content, brief nudity, and language throughout

Cast: Amy Schumer, Goldie Hawn, Ike Barinholtz, Wanda Sykes, Joan Cusack, Oscar Jaenada

Credits:Directed by Jonathan Levine, script by Kate Dippold. A Fox release.

Running time: 1:31

Because when else would you release a moody movie about drugs, paranoia murder and-or suicide? Release it just when fall fashion season is underway.

The trailer to this Kirsten Dunst picture doesn’t give much away, aside from the fact that it was co-directed by fashion designer sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy (Rodarte) and is being released by those canny purveyors of smart cinema, A24. Intriguing? Goes without saying.

Everything we need to know about the marriage of Mary and Michael is plain to see, just in Debra Winger’s eyes. Whatever writer-director Azazel Jacobs’ script for “The Lovers” tries to get across with words and actions, Winger manages with just a look.

There’s guilt and regret, weariness and longing and just a hint of panicked confusion, captured in lingering, wordless close-ups of Mary’s no-longer-young face. And that jolts this darkly comical exercise in romantic minimalism, a movie whose lapses in logic and rationality and minutely observed stasis needs such jolts.

Michael (actor/playwright Tracy Letts, last seen in HBO’s “Divorce”) and Mary are middle class Californians who have suffered through their cubicled careers, collected the nice suburban house and two cars and gotten their son into college.

What they’ve forgotten in all this is each other. Neglect ices up the screen when they exchange their nightly banalities after work.

“I just came from the gym.”

“Actually, I’m getting drinks with Ben after work tomorrow.”

Why they even bother lie to is a mystery. But lie they do — to each other, to themselves and to their new loves. Michael is infatuated with Lucy (Melora Walters), a children’s ballet teacher. And Mary is recapturing her youth by taking up with a younger writer (Aidan Gillen).

The remade couples communicate via that illicit-affair-enabler, the cell-phone. They text and call. They disguise the numbers that ring in as “work.” And they argue. Not Mary and Michael. They’re past that. It’s the side-guy/side-chick who hears the empty promises about “Joel, our son, is coming home…I’ll him/her then. It’s over.”

Jacobs (HBO’s “Doll & ‘Em”) crosses us up by making the paramours openly unpleasant people. Robert the writer (Gillen, also seen in “King Arthur”) is insistent, pleading and threatening. “It’s me or him, and this time I mean it.” Lucy is a weeper, a near hysteric and mistrusting enough to be the only one of all these consenting/cheating adults to figure out what’s happening.

But in both cases, we ponder the depth of the connection, the high-maintenance nature of the “new” partner. Walters’ Lucy is borderline bipolar and Letts lets on that Michael might be content to give up all the drama if things turn around with Mary.

Because they just might. The act of cheating gives the long-marrieds a little kick, magnified when they stumble into a re-attraction of sorts, a torrid clandestine affair with each other.

All of which is going to be hard to swallow when that highly-strung college kid (Tyler Ross) and his girlfriend (Jessica Sula of “Split”) show up.

“The Lovers” is a compact tale, a chamber music melodrama underscored by lavish, romantic strings and a Prokofiev waltz. It never quite escapes the stage-bound feeling. Having Americans drop “hence” into everyday chit chat does that to your script.

Letts, who wrote “August: Osage County,” as an actor has a prickly persona and little of the subtlety that might make Michael attractive to a younger woman. His smiles and laughs seem insincere, though he has a droll way with come-ons, phone sex and the like. His resting bitch face from earlier roles (“Indignation”) seems his best go-to move.

But Winger, lured back onto the screen by a part that lets her show what a wonder she would have been during the silent cinema, is worth the price of admission, all by herself. Her Mary is every affair explained and justified, every punishment for such transgressions internalized.

She is the “Lover” we identify with, pity and feel for even as these aimless “Lovers” “go round and round and round in the Circle Game.”

MPAA Rating: R for sexuality (nudity) and language (profanity)

Cast: Debra Winger, Tracy Letts, Aidan Gillen, Melora Walters, Tyler Ross

Credits:Written and directed by Azazel Jacobs. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:24

Well, if the Queen didn’t exile the members of Monty Python for their “Holy Grail,” Guy Ritchie has little to worry about with his “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.” For now.

True, it bears about as much resemblance to the “Once and Future King” Arthur of Camelot that English myth and various twistings of that myth we’ve seen on the big screen. And for the first half-hour of this gloomy, grim and effects-packed riff on the myth does make one remember how Guy Ritchie rhymes with Alan Smithee — as in, “Jeez, should he have taken his name off this?”

But then the Cockney slang bursts out, the famed backstreet banter Ritchie perfected in “Snatch” and “Rock’n Rolla” and the like — the quick cut flashback “stories” characters hilariously launch into.

“And ‘ow did you get money from a VIKING?” a Blackleg villain, one of the usurper King’s men, bellows.

“I feel a joke coming on,” Arthur, played by Charlie “Sons of Anarchy” Hunnam, quips, in his natural accent.

Reprobates, members of “my crew,” have names like “Chinese George,” “Flatnose Mike,” “Goosefat Bill,” “Wet Stick” and “Back Lack.” Heck, there’s even Ritchie-styled heist packed into the picture, complete with floorplans to prep it with. Were there floorplans in Arthurian Angle-land?

No matter. “King Arthur” is a Guy Ritchie picture, not a Thomas Mallory “Morte de Artur” adaptation. Lots of “Sherlock Holmes” supernatural effects and Chinese martial artists, where Sir Bedivere is played by the classiest African ever to grace a Camelot picture — and the first — Djimon Hounsou.

John Boorman’s “Excalibur” remains the definitive telling of this tale, but “King Arthur” isn’t really “that” tale. This is almost a spoof of anything with “Camelot” in it. It has the actual historical (not legendary) tyrant Vortigen (Jude Law) betray his brother Uther Pendragon (Eric Bana), with the boy Arthur fleeing into exile.

In classic Ritchie style, we see the boy grow up, a veritable Artful Dodger on the streets of Londinium, running his “crew,” living in a brothel.

Until that day when the sorcerer-assisted Vortigen decides he must track down this “born king” by testing every young man of the right age against the Sword in the Stone.

You remember that, right Disney cartoon fans?

And that’s where the young man becomes the Young Rebel, and his crew joins assorted holdovers from Uther’s righteous reign (Hounsou, Aidan Gillen) to challenge the fashion plate King and his Men in Black (Blacklegs) Gestapo.

I like the way the wizards become “The Mage,” a hunted subclass of the kingdom, mistresses (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) of the animals, the weather and the land’s tectonic plates. I miss Merlin. But Vortigen consults a beautifully-conceived version of Macbeth’s witches, slithery serpent-women wriggling in one hissing, prophesying and tentacled body.

The color-blind casting is amusing, in light of Britain’s electoral xenophobia.

But in all honesty, the rat-a-tat repartee and tasty touches of Classic pre-Madonna Ritchie don’t excuse a bastardization that takes forever to get on its feet, that lacks the requisite love story (Ritchie and his “boys will be boys” pictures), that presents too much of Angle-land as a burnt-out pit quarry, that revels in anachronisms.

“You’ve got some heat on you, Arthur.”

Indeed. Because none of this is the fault of young Hunnam, with his Hollywood haircut and Saville Row leatherwear. He throws himself into the spirit of this legendary lark.

Law is more than game, and he gives his villain a sense of a man trapped in the fate he sealed for himself. And there’s no match for the regal Hounsou for dressing up ridiculously, playing an absurd-on-its-face character in a loony tune of a movie — see “Guardians of the Galaxy” or “Seventh Son” or “Eragon.”

But the whole “Lord of the Rings” (the movies) riff on the Once and Future King stumbles and drags and over-reaches far too often. The screenwriters and the director ignore the warning in their movie’s best line, the equal measures of combat, magic, romance and origin myth sentiment are all out of whack.

“Balance is a law that cannot be transgressed!”

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

Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Jude Law, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Djimon Honsou, Eric Bana, Aiden Gillen

Credits:Directed by Guy Ritchie script by Joby Harold, Lionel Wigram and Guy Ritchie. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:06

“The sniper film” is an almost irresistible brand of thriller that straddles genres. Simple in construction, primal, it’s the ultimate “kill-or-be-killed” drama.

Snipers promise the viewer that “first person shooter” video game rush of dealing death with little chance of capture or punishment, or if you’re on the other end of the scope, the terror of a murderous, hidden assailant who must be outfoxed for you to survive.

So “The Wall,” an Iraq War combat film about a sniper team targeted by a deadly Iraqi shooter, has all the ingredients of a superior thriller. We see the conventions of the genre — the patience-testing “stalk,” the terror of bullets that whiz by before the would-be victims hear the shot, the deadly game of hunters turned into the hunted.

It boasts two quite-likable leads — John Cena (“Trainwreck”) and Aaron Taylor-Johnson (“Kick-Ass”) and a top-flight thriller director, Doug Liman (“The Bourne Identity,” “Edge of Tomorrow”).

It’s got combat grit, action and actors captured in extreme, dust-covered close-ups and jolting violence. And the story is told in a brisk version of near-real time, 81 minutes from the credits-to-credits.

And when “The Wall” goes wrong, it doesn’t instantly crumble, though you can feel the foundation collapsing underneath the film’s feet. Taylor-Johnson, who must carry it, holds our interest. It’s just that we know, judging from that fatal flaw screenwriter Dwain Worrell built in as a plot contrivance, that it won’t end well, either.

Cena is Sgt. Matthews, the shooter — decked out in camouflage, staring through his scope, looking for movement in the battlefield below. Taylor-Johnson is “Eyes” Isaac, his spotter, the one who radios Matthews “You’re clear, 360,” when in fact Matthews isn’t clear 360 degrees around him.

Before you can say “Where’d THAT come from?” shots are fired, bullets enter flesh, tourniquets and painkillers are applied and “Eyes,” the guy who doesn’t take the shot, is trapped behind the remnants of a wall, trying to see where the shots are coming from, trying to overcome the panic long enough to figure out a way to get the wounded Matthews to safety and them both rescued.

The short running time doesn’t mean we don’t have time to get a taste of Eyes’ back-story. I like that the guy is not classically “heroic.” When his shooter goes down, his merest hesitation is all that keeps him from following his instincts — flee to cover, “The Wall” of the film’s title. None of that “Can’t leave a man down out in the open” suicidal fatalism. It gets irritating, after a while. Why won’t this guy, you know, SHOOT BACK?

Yeah, they explain it in the backstory, but still.

The very economy of the story and the film’s length means that writer Worrell and director Liman need something to keep the conversation going, require a short-cut to ratchet up the tension and personalize the impersonal murder of war.

They need to get this “super shooter,” apparently the mythic Iraqi sniper nicknamed Juba, “The Ghost,” into the story. He was a legendary sniper rumored to life during the Iraqi Occupation. And the script has to get this killer talking.

So they put Juba on the radio, questioning, tricking, teasing and taunting Eyes as he tries to figure out a way to save their bleeding-out skins out from under the nose of this long-distance killer with unearthly sniper skills.

And that conversation makes “The Wall” come tumbling down. It’s madly illogical, in a predictable sort of way. “Sniper” turns into “Phone Booth” right before our ears as American policy in Iraq is debated (the reason the American team is there is that Juba has gunned down a contractor detail repairing an oil pipeline), personal, probing questions are tossed out.

“I just want to have a conversation with you,” Juba purrs. “We are not so different, you and I.”

That’s an instant F — or should be — in Screenwriting 101. That one trite, “talking villain” cliche — “We are not so different, you and I.”

And whatever tension, grit, guts and on-the-ground professionalism that “The Wall” offers up — doing the math and geometry it takes to figure out where this shooter is hidden — is ruined by this inane back-and-forth.

“The Wall” needs more combat, more action and a real understanding of that combat cliche first uttered by Hermann Goering, of all people  — “Shoot first, and ask questions later.”

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout and some war violence

Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, John Cena

Credits:Directed by Doug Liman, script by Dwain Worrell. An Amazon/Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:21