Movie Nation

They’ve never let James Bond age. Not really. Batman gets replaced almost constantly. Spider-Man? Don’t get me started.

But there is but one Wolverine — Hugh Jackman  — and kudos to Fox and Marvel for letting the best of the X-Men make a dignified exit.

“Logan” is a bloody and noble finale to Jackman’s turn with the sideburns and metal claws. The movie and the character brood and growl, lash out and curse, and Jackman is magnificent at every one of those.

And its tale of “others” forced underground and on the run has extra resonance, considering the machinations of the current regime in Washington.

In 2029 Logan, the Wolverine, is laying low as a limo driver in the border country. About all that gets his dander up is messing with his Avanti-inspired stretch Chrysler, as a gang of car-stripping cholos learn.

The mutants are all gone — died out — though they’re still excoriated on right wing talk radio.

He’s still a wanted man.  Gabriella (Elizabeth Rodriguez) begs for his help taking her and a girl (Dafne Keen) north. Pierce (Boyd Holbrook), a metal-handed mercenary, pays him a visit to let him know “they” can come get him at any moment.

And that screws up his plans to stay out of sight, feed and protect the aged and unstable Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and X’s caregiver, the empathic mutant Caliban. All Logan wants to do is get enough money to buy a boat and get away from it all with his mentor, for both of them to die in peace.

Not happening.

Events conspire to force Logan to take that ten year-old girl, Laura, to some “Eden” — in North Dakota. And the bad guys, basically a multi-national pharmaceutical let run riot by a fascist government with Richard Griffiths as the Mad Scientist in Charge, will spare no expense and no number of minions to stop that from happening.

With all the op-ed pieces on the new American Dystopia, science fiction is hard-pressed to improve on reality. But the screenwriters work in shots at the Agri-Industrial-Complex of Mega Farms, GMOs and the high fructose corn syrup they’re shoving into everything we drink and much of what we eat.

With all the digitally-enhanced action and violence — and it is graphic and delivered in large, gory doses here — it’s easy to lose track that there have been some fine performances in comic book movies over the years. It started with Christopher Reeve, but Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., Ian McKellan, Michael Fassbender, Famke Janssen and Christian Bale have all made a mark from behind a mask or in tights.

Jackman is in a whole other class, which is why, “First Class” to last, he and he alone is Logan.

It’s not a great movie, with generic “What a disappointment you are” dialogue, gratuitous, pitiless slaughter, far-fetched “How’d a child learn THAT?” moments, and a late second act introduction — one of Logan’s foes — that took me right out of the picture. And Hollywood’s idea of North Dakota has always shown a reluctance to actually visit that arid pancake, its ghost towns and oil wells.

But Jackman makes it  all work, bringing the tragic weariness, cynicism and reluctant nobility that are the hallmarks of this X-Man to the fore.

He is a modern “Shane,” a Western Logan and Laura glimpse in one scene while they’re on the run. “A man has to be what he is, Joey… It’s a brand. A brand sticks.”

Indeed. Thus, Logan and the man who branded him take their curtain call.

Until Marvel and Fox figure out a way to cash in again and screw that up.

MPAA Rating: R for strong brutal violence and language throughout, and for brief nudity

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Dafne Keen, Boyd Holbrook, Richard Griffiths, Stephen Merchant

Credits:Directed by James Mangold, script by Michael Green, Scott Frank and James Mangold, based on the Marvel Comic. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time:  2:15

For “The Red Turtle,” Dutch animator Michael Dudok de Wit conjured up a romantic fantasy about a cast-away who angrily bludgeons and kills a red sea turtle, only to fall in love with the redheaded woman who pops out of the dead animal’s shell.

And the Japanese Studio Ghibli agreed to make it, because you have to be Japanese to find killing endangered sea life romantic.

That’s glib and culturally insensitive, sure. But this isn’t one of Ghibli’s better efforts, a lovely, wordless essay in silence and isolation with dream fugue sequences, almost no plot and a cryptic coda.

A fisherman is wrecked at sea during a gloriously animated storm. He washes up on a desert isle with only crabs, frogs and the occasional sea lion for company, and quickly resolves to turn the bamboo forest there into a raft. But every time he pushes off from shore, some unseen something thumps and thumps the raft to pieces.

He figures out it’s a sea turtle. And when she comes ashore he has his revenge. Sure, there’s remorse after he’s flipped her onto her back to let her die a slow, agonizing death. Too late, though.

Then the shell cracks open and speechless redhead emerges. They are meant to be and meant to mate. But where can this fairy tale go from there, and how will it end?

Ghibli’s animators render wind sweeping through bamboo in amazing detail. Crabs scuttle about, birds flock and soar and turtles wrestle themselves into and out of the water.The people, however, lack expressive “anime eyes” and are simply rendered.

Their watercolor palette begins with muted hue — fantastical dreams are rendered in black and white — and gains vibrancy as red characters show up and the film progresses.

Which it does. At a turtle’s pace.

There are incidents — near tragedies, a tsunami, family idylls. They’re spread sparingly over the 80 minute running time.

What’s missing is the magic, fantasy that feels fantastical, a moral to this parable.

Maybe that last element is there. Maybe not. The conclusion invites varying interpretations.

It’s all pretty enough, but this is lesser Ghibli, more a “Borrowers” than a “Ponyo,” an animated bauble as hollow as a turtle shell purse.

MPAA Rating: PG for some thematic elements and peril

Credits:Directed by Michael Dudok de Wit, script by Michael Dudok de Wit and Pascale Ferran. A Sony Pictures Classics/Studio Ghibli release.

Running time: 1:21

“Fist Fight” offers us Charlie Day in a leading role in all his screeching glory.

And who the hell wants to see that? Or hear it?

It’s “Bad Teacher” meets “Three O’Clock High,” an “edgy” comedy about an anarchically dysfunctional school where the kids run riot and the teachers are hapless bystanders.

Except for Mr. Strickland, played by Ice Cube in Full Scowl. Strickland’s a short-tempered tyrant who has had about enough of this chaos, where the last day of the year means “senior pranks” run amok and Atlanta school district layoffs.

So yeah, he snaps. Just a little. And at a punk who has it coming.

But he left an adult witness. That would be Mr. Campbell, played by “It’s Always Screechy in Philadelphia” star Day. And when push comes to shove and both their jobs are at stake, Campbell — a day with an indulged daughter and a baby on the way — isn’t going to take the fall for Strickland.

“Snitches get stitches,” growls Strickland. And it’s on. Or will be, when the bell rings at three. That’s when the beefy, bitter Strickland plans to give the scrawny screecher a serious beat-down.

As in “Three O’Clock High,” the movie is about the countdown to facing down a bully, and Campbell’s frantic efforts to defuse the situation, remove Strickland from the building and keep his job. He tries bargaining, trickery and treachery. Nothing works.

But there’s little tension or comic build-up, as we’re treated to advice from the scatter-brained PE coach (Tracy Morgan, trotting out who he’s going to get “pregnant” jokes…again), the meth addict/underage student craving math teacher (Jillian Bell of “The Night Before”), a French teacher who hates Campbell for all the wrong reasons (“Mad Men’s” Christina Hendricks) and worthless clock-punching school security guard (Kumail Nanjiani of “Portlandia” and “Silicon Valley”) .

The kids? They carve images of penises on the football field, watch porn and masturbate in the bathrooms. Until word of the fight gets out, and then they’re all about making this coming beat-down viral.

Cube is very good at wearing a scowl, first scene to last, and Strickland — a techno-phobic, arrested development thug who sees himself as a last line of accountability to these unruly students, is almost believable. Campbell is not an unreasonable creation, either. Grown men don’t settle things with their fists.

But they do. Because that’s the title of the movie, and we know exactly where it’s headed and when we’ll get there.

The one saving grace in the flaccid direction of Richie Keen (Really?) is that fight. It’s the first time the movie comes to life.

But by that point, Charlie Day’s ensured all we have to offer that finale are deaf ears.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, sexual content/nudity and drug material

Cast: Charlie Day, Ice Cube, Jillian Bell, Tracy Morgan, Christina Hendicks

Credits:Directed by Richie Keen, script by Van Robichaux and Evan Susser. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:31

We will see worse movies this year than “The Great Wall.” But we won’t sit through one more cynical.

It’s Chinese pandering — pure agitprop — packaged as Hollywood poppycock. I can hear the pitch now — “Get your MESSAGE out! Chinese ‘order,’ Chinese know-how, China as the hope of civilization!’ Monsters and heroes, special effects and costumes, we’ll build a DIGITAL Great Wall — you provide the money, the thousands of extras, a few local stars, one of your great directors!

“And the money! Did I mention the money?”

The People’s Republicans probably never knew what hit them.

Seriously, if you’d wagered me that you could throw a big budget, director Zhang Yimou (“Raise the Red Lantern,” “Hero,””House of Flying Daggers”), screenwriter Tony “Michael Clayton” Gilroy and Matt Damon and Willem Dafoe at a movie and have it come out this silly, I’d have taken that bet.

But many hands made this mess, many more credited writers strained to get their Chinese image-polishing in.

Damon and Pedro Pascal play two Medieval soldiers of fortune, the last survivors of an expedition bent on trading for China’s “Black Powder.” That would be the world’s first Weapon of Mass Destruction — gunpowder.

But on their way, they’ve been attacked by a beast — green, reptilian, a Wildebeast with claws for feet and a cavernous, toothy mouth. When the Chinese — a cultural model of order, organization, mass discipline, high tech and color-coded haute couture armor — capture them, they’re intrigued. Spies? Probably.

Still, the English archer-swordsman William (Damon) killed a Tao Tei monster. They’re impressed. They let the English mercenary live and keep his Spanish sidekick around for the banter.

“I haven’t surrendered in a while.”

“Follow my lead. It’ll come to you.”

The Westerners are most impressed by this wall. What on Earth could they need something this big for?

Alien monster invasions! Every sixty years!

A whole civilization, a great bureaucracy and a vast army have been organized around fighting this menace. The Nameless Order raises warriors — female and male — to battle the beasts. Commander Lin Mae (Tian Jing) gives the order of battle when the hordes wash against the wall like a tidal wave.

“Crane Squad!” Those are lance-armed women bungee jumping up and down off the wall, poking the Tao Tei. “Death Squad!” And so forth.

Meanwhile, their guests are taken into the confidence of an earlier Western prisoner (Willem Dafoe) who wants their help escaping. There’s money to be made by the first to get back West with the “black powder.”

The script posits China as a bulwark of civilization, the only defense against slaughter by monsters. OK. So why the supernatural silliness? Because China served that function in history, battling the Mongols.

Oh. Right. The Mongols overran the pre-People’s Republican kingdoms before turning West and laying waste to much of Western, Indian and Islamic civilization. There’s no hopeful ending provided by history.

This is basically a zombie movie, a “Dark Ages World War Z,” borrowing imagery and story-beats such as the “evolving”  Tao Tei piling on top of each other, like ants, to scale the wall, just as in “Z.”

The moral of the story — “greed” destroys mankind, “A man must learn to trust before he can be trusted,” seem like addenda to Mao’s “Little Red Book.” The Chinese image here is of self-sacrificing masses — not a coward in the bunch — giving their all to the common good. All that’s missing is a patriotic song. Perhaps that’s in the Chinese version.

The only acting in this thing comes from the light touch Damon and “Game of Thrones” star Pascal have with their exchanges. Tian Jing is a slip of a thing with runway-ready hair and a toothy scowl she flashes in combat.

The Great Dafoe, like way too many people involved in this, was here for the check.

Yimou’s earliest films were filled with coded criticism of the totalitarian state he worked in. Here, he’s just cashing in, rolling his eyes and letting Hollywood have the “credit.”

But all this credit-sharing/buck-passing is no way to earn big bucks. Perhaps its Chinese box office covered the budget.

For the rest of the world, here’s the only value judgement that matters.

It’s as bad as the trailers promised it would be.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of fantasy action violence

Cast: Matt Damon, Tian Jing, Pedro Pascal, Willem Dafoe, Andy Lau, Hanyu Zhang

Credits:Directed by Zhang Yimou, script by Carlo Bernard, Doug Miro, Tony Gilroy, story by Max Brooks, Edward Zwick, Marshall Herskovitz. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:36

“It’s more than  a hobby,” it’s a passion, Zora declares. Filmmaker Jon Manning follows Zora and her mom as she preps for an appearance, hand-bedazzles assorted parts of her costume and prances on stage to take it all off. Well, most of it.

Cast: Zora von Pavonine, Babs Jamboree, Angelique Devil

Credits:Directed by Jon Manning. An XLrator Media release.

Running time: 1:17

Telling the full story of Ukraine’s tortured history as a subservient state to Russia, then the U.S.S.R., and more recently Russia again would take a mini series. So “Bitter Harvest” zeroes in on the most infamous Evil Empire crime against Ukrainians.

It’s an historical drama set during Holodomor, the Stalin-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s. It was genocide, a crime against humanity.

Young Yuri (Max Irons) is a boy with an artistic bent growing up in a Ukrainian village between the World Wars. All he wants out of life is to draw or write, and to be with his childhood love, Natalka (Samantha Barks), and to leave his rural town for the big city of Kiev.

But Ukraine was and is “the breadbasket of Europe.” And Uncle Joe Stalin (Gary Oliver) has other plans. Collectivize, ship your grain, livestock, fruit and vegetables to Moscow, or starve.

A nervous adviser pleads that “this will mean the death of millions,” but Stalin is unmoved. “Who will know?”

Thus begins the Sovietization of the region. A ruthless regiment of the Red Army, led by the sadistic Commisar Sergei (Tamer Hassen) shows up, beats and bullies the large landowners whom everybody works for.

And Sergei’s Cossack grandfather (Terence Stamp) and father (Barry Pepper, in an elaborate Cossack haircut) take up arms.

“No one can ever take away your freedom,” Grandpa, a former general nicknamed “The Wold Boar,” intones. “Remember that.”

Yuri is an artsy disappointment to him. But as the slaughter to force compliance begins, the boy must choose between the artistic life and love he dreamed of and the reality of one of the worst genocides in history.

Writer-director George Mendeluk conjures up a pastoral idyll of harvest greens and golds, followed by the mayhem of mass murder and resistance. “Bitter Harvest” coasts along on a story arc so conventional — Natalka’s virtue threatened, Yuri’s decision to fight — that you’ll swear you’ve seen this before in dozens of Hollywood films set in Occupied Europe, or elsewhere.

And while Stamp always gives fair value and Hassen makes for a marvelous villain, young Irons (“The Woman in Gold”) never rises above bland, giving a colorless performance that rests on his good looks and his surname (he’s Jeremy’s son) and little else. There’s no spark, no heat or passion here.

It’s an important subject, and a timely one, given Russia’s designs on re-occupying Ukraine and a new U.S. president who doesn’t seem to mind that.

But “Bitter Harvest” never amounts to more than a colorful misfire, a picture with much of the pageant of the period, but little of the roiling passions that dominate politics in the Breadbasket of Europe, even today.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and disturbing images

Cast: Max Irons, Samatha Barks, Terence Stamp, Barry Pepper, Tamer Hassan

Credits:Directed by George Mendeluk, script by  and George Menduluk,  A Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:43

The Old West has never seemed bloodier, grimmer, more Godless or lawless than the version rendered by Dutch filmmaker Martin Koolhoven.

The director of the pictorially striking and tense World War II in the Occupied Countries drama “Winter in Wartime” brings a picture postcard eye to the landscapes, homesteads and rustic towns of “Brimstone.”

But this grimly unpleasant two and a half hour endurance contest is an almost unwatchable, frustrating smorgasbord of blood, guts and gore. Eviscerations and head-shots, summary hangings, gooey childbirth and sickening self-surgery land in almost every scene of this fable.

He tells the story out of order to further muddy/bloody the waters of comprehension. The last thing this stupidly overlong saga needs to be doing is demanding our concentration.

“Brimstone” is the story of a mute farmwife, Liz (Dakota Fanning) raising her little girl, caring for a resentful stepson and married to a much older man ( William Houston).

It’s a tough life, but Liz endures it with an admirable stoicism until a new Dutch pastor shows up in town. The Reverend freaks her out. And since he’s played by Guy Pearce garbed in black, facial scars and hellfire sermonizing, we get it.

But they have history. When he hisses, “I’m here to PUNISH you,” she believes it, even if her husband doesn’t. As that husband is gruesomely murdered and she grabs the children to make her getaway, we start to understand.

A flashback takes us to the rescue of an abandoned girl, Joanna (Emilia Jones), tattered and wandering the wastelands. Chinese immigrants sell her into a life of prostitution lorded over by the pitiless pimp Frank in his Inferno Bar.

We piece together the story that connects the film’s opening to that pre-history through chapters Koolhoven titles “Revelation,” “Exodus,” and the like. We glimpse The Preacher’s early years  out west, with Carice Van Houten (“Black Book”) as his abused wife.

We see sheep gutted “as punishment,” a man disemboweled, murderous highwaymen shooting and hanging one another and prostitutes beaten, abused and hung when they dare to fight back against the assorted depraved cowpokes who frequent Frank’s establishment.

Pearce takes to the omnipresent crack-shot preacher/tormentor with his usual relish. But there’s no pleasure in this monster, or in the fight against him. Fanning doesn’t give us anything more than her usual inadequate reactions to every situation, the curse of her adult acting career. Carla Juri and Vera Vitali, playing hookers, make stronger impressions.

There’s a grim illogic to it all, as if Koolhaven got all his research from “Worst Crimes of the Old West” books. Even though I can buy that in this world, cruelty comes easily and is every man’s default mode, characters act against their self-interest and the relentless, remorseless savagery makes the viewer ache for a justice that never comes, “Retribution” that one chapter in this morbid tale promises but refuses to deliver.

MPAA Rating: R for brutal bloody violence, strong sexual content including disturbing behavior, graphic nudity, and language

Cast: Dakota Fanning, Guy Lucas, Carice van Houten, Kit Harrington

Credits:Written and directed by Martin Koolhaven . An eOne/Monument release.

Running time: 2:28

The Great Poet played his part, almost too well.

An egoist and charmer, he could be relied on to recite verse, on demand, at parties, at brothels, to strangers on the street.

Callous, yet soulful, devoted yet a womanizer, he lived, walked and spoke (in his public “poet’s voice”) like the national/international treasure he knew himself to be.

Pablo Neruda knew how to carry himself like his pal Picasso, both of them “rock stars” before there was such a thing.

“Neruda”is a playful, picaresque look at the poet at his peak, a man of letters, fame and public service who could turn his voice and withering way with words on his proto-fascist foes in the Chilean Senate as a member there, and a whimsical hedonist who went underground when communists, like himself and his miners’ union friends were being rounded up and killed, or sent to concentration camps in the Chilean desert.

The world already knew Neruda, given a wry, bemused resignation by character actor Luis Gnecco, as the Great Love Poet, author of lines such as ““I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.”

But in his native Chile, he was known for his politics — a man of privilege who served as foreign consuls overseas, a communist convert in the Spanish Civil War, a champion of the working class, the campesinos of his native land, whom he celebrated and urged to action with his political poems.

But when he insults the sitting president on the floor of the Senate, a warrant is issued for his arrest. Neruda, his long-suffering wife Delia (Mercedes Moran) by his side, is spirited off into the night, hidden in safe houses by his fellow communists.

Writer Guillermo Calderon and director Pablo Larrain turn this period of Neruda’s life into a cat-and-mouse game. They over-reach for a tone, an interpretation of Neruda not unlike the one that came out of the Italian romance “Il Postino,” where Neruda gives advice to the lonely postman who delivers his mail on a remote Italian island where the poet was exiled, for a time. Here, the “comedy” comes from the poet’s chief persecutor,  the prefect of the State Police, Inspector Oscar Peluchoneau. Gael Garcia Bernal plays him as Neruda’s personal Javert, a fedora-wearing dandy who narrates the chase that Neruda sets him on.

In this telling, Peluchoneau is a tormented man, unacknowledged by his famous policeman father, sneering at the decadence and hypocrisy of wealthy leftists like Neruda. Let the “revolution” come, and they’d be the first to flea to the comforts of decadent dictatorships that surrounded Chile in the South America of the ’40s and 50s.

Peluchoneau is as Neruda imagines him, an officious fop to be toyed with, led hither and yon all over Chile in a merry but deadly chase. For while Neruda is in genuine fear for his safety and his friends are frantic to get him out of the country, he is also determined to make a game of it, to entertain the people and rally them to his cause.

He leaves paperback detective novels with autographed taunts inscribed inside the covers for the cop to find. He flaunts his fugitive status at brothels and parties, a man all of Chile is talking about even as its government is labeling him a communist traitor.

And along the way, as Neruda takes foolish chances and is foiled at this border crossing or that Chinese merchant ship getaway, he writes and bickers with his protectors and wife, hugs and kisses his adoring public and turns on “the Poet’s Voice” — the sing-song incantation of a priest reciting his famous lines — for one and all.

It’s a playful film, in Spanish with English subtitles, with melodramatic undertones, a score filled with romantic yet urgent strings — the music of Ives, Grieg and Penderecki — telling us “the fat communist” is in peril, even if he seems to be having a pretty good time of it.

Bernal is content to play the straight man in this morbid comedy, tormented by the pursuit and determined to see it through. But Gnecco, a Chilean comic actor well-known all over Latin America for assorted TV series, smirks and recites and plays Neruda as the legend he was and the role of a lifetime he’s become.

MPAA Rating: R for sexuality/nudity and some language

Cast: Gael Garcia Bernal, Luis Gnecco, Mercedes Moran

Credits:Directed by Pablo Larrain, script by Guillermo Calderon. A The Orchard release.

Running time: 1:47

It’s still as pretty as a toybox, eye candy in the brightest plastic colors and textures.

The creators of the second big screen LEGO toys movie stick to the rest of the formula, as well. There’s one original pop song. Yes, Batman sings in “The LEGO Batman Movie.”

The pop culture gags and one liners, most of them delivered by famous actors this time around, pepper the picture.

But you only get to take big screen audiences by surprise once. And as comfy as the Lego film folks have gotten with a winning formula that extends back to their many direct-to-video “adventures” with toy tie-ins, I can honestly say that this time around, they start to seem a little spent.

At 104 minutes, this CG/looks-like-stop-motion cartoon, drags. The screen is overcrowded with characters and gadgets that make it feel like a long, LEGO commercial.

And the song Batman sings is instantly forgettable, unlike that ear worm “Everything is Awesome.”

It’s still fun, a self-conscious parody that warmly references every big screen Batman dating back to the 1940s movie serial, and the vampy Adam West Batman TV show from the ’60s.

And Will Arnett? The funnyman was born to voice the Caped Crusader,  a self-absorbed, self-promoting “night stalking crime fighting machine” who lives in “sweet, sweet isolation.”

But the Joker (Zach Galifianakis) senses something is missing in their relationship. Like, a relationship. He wants to be known as Batman’s “number one enemy.” But the vainglorious Bat doesn’t give hugs and doesn’t admit that he needs anybody — even a nemesis.

With a new Commissioner Gordon, the former Commissioner’s daughter (Rosario Dawson) vowing the clean up “the most crime-ridden city in the world” with pro-active policing and social service, and with a new haphazardly-adopted ward, Dick Grayson (Michael Cera, perfect), Batman’s going to need to share.

“You can’t be a hero if you only care about yourself.”

We have our lesson to be learned, sharing is caring and work is all about “teamwork.”

And we quickly get a crisis that pushes our hero toward that lesson. Reluctantly. Alfred the Butler (Ralph Fiennes) may revoke Batman’s computer privileges for not sharing, and he’s not shy about letting the Bat know what “fatherhood” demands. But the Bat isn’t biting.

“Vigilantes don’t have ‘bed times.'”

The picture’s giddy opening is topped by some trippy later moments — Batman crashing Superman’s (Channing Tatum) “57th Anniversary of the Justice League” party at his Fortress of Solitude– “What, I didn’t get an invitation?”; visiting every bad guy, from Bane to Penguin, Scarecrow to Tw0-face, in a LEGO version of Arkham Prison.

Then there are the villains Joker releases from The Phantom Zone, a space purgatory where Superman and others have shipped everyone from the Wicked Witch of the West to Sauron of “Lord of the Rings,” Daleks from “Doctor Who” and Medusa from mythology and “You Know Who” from the Harry Potter universe.

Yeah, its a little funny to hear Eddie Izzard do Voldemort with Ralph Fiennes, the “real” Voldemort, playing a butler.

But few characters outside of Batman’s inner circle register, either as written gags or as voices (Jemaine Clement does Sauron. Who knew?).

The jukebox load of pop music montages — “One” “is the loneliest number,” George Michael, Rick Ashley, “We Are Family” and “Fly, Robin Fly” among them — aren’t amusing enough to warrant buying the rights to them.

And while the LEGO lair of the Batman, the LEGO Fortress of Solitude and LEGO Batboat, Batmobile, Bat Zepellin and Bat Kayak, are cute, they only seem to be here for the product placement.

“Mommy, what do I need to build THAT?”

MPAA Rating: PG for rude humor and some action

Cast: The voices of Will Arnett, Michael Cera, Rosario Dawson, Zach Galifianakis, Ralph Fiennes, Jenny Slate, Eddie Izzard

Credits:Directed by, script by . A — release.

Running time: 1:44

Those “Fifty Shades” dullards are still flirting, fornicating, breaking up and tying up in “Fifty Shades Darker,” a film which promises “darker” but delivers “funnier” — with some of the laughs intentional.

It’s a soapy sequel, a drinks-in-the-face/masked ball/helicopter crash/melodramatic mediocrity that a better director (James Foley of “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “At Close Range” and “A Perfect Stranger”) can’t lift above laughable.

Meanwhile, English author E.L. James, creator of the ridiculous names Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey, typist of such bon mots as “I don’t know whether to worship at your feet, or spank you,” laughs all the way to the bank.

And yes, Anastasia (Dakota Johnson) opts for “the second option.” Otherwise, there’d be no movie.

That’s an achingly obvious flaw in this S&M female wish-fulfillment fantasy. Anastasia (Ana) has broken off with the uber rich “most eligible bachelor” of Seattle (Jamie Dornan), eschewed the pleasures/pains of his “red room” of torture/teasing delights and started her career. But all he has to do is throw flowers her way and promise “New rules” for their sex-play/relationship, and she’s on her back or on her knees again.

The “Darker” of the title refers to the consequences of Christian’s form of sexual release. One of his former “subs” (submissive to his dominance), a tortured soul played without a hint of pathos by Bella Heathcote, is stalking Ana. His initiator (Kim Basinger) into the world of bondage, whips, etc. is still in his life, warning Ana off, disapproving of her in every way.

S&M creates bonds for life. Apparently.

And all the poor girl really wants to do is impress her stubbly, hair-flopped-over-one-eye boss (Eric Johnson), the fiction editor at a Seattle publishing house. The novelist James seems to think it daring or telling that Ana would pursue professional ambitions when her celebrated suitor, who shows up everywhere in a convoy of Audis, could just say “It’s been taken care of” to her every want and need.

The film takes a stab–or cigarette burn — at creating motivations for Grey’s sexual deviance, flashbacks to a tortured childhood and “crack whore” mom. Yawn.

Give Foley credit for making the sex scenes — ten of them — some actual sexiness. He can’t give the fourth-choice actors cast in the leads chemistry, but he can make their copulation titillating and believable. Johnson isn’t outgrowing her mousy screen presence, but at least she’s mastered her orgasm face. Ben Wa balls, elevator gropes and the like have certainly given her enough practice.

It’s all so opulent, from the penthouse Grey calls home to the family mansion (Marcia Gay Harden is his mother, giving this film two Oscar winners) that spawned him, to the stunning, cavernous apartment that Ana manages on an office assistant’s salary.

And it’s all so decadent and empty, designer duds gained without struggle, “trust” and “win her back with the Big Romantic Gesture” moments with no heart, sex without love.

Worst of all, this two-hour clock watcher that doesn’t really go anywhere is the merely the set-up for a third film, whose title at least promises some relief.

“Fifty Shades Freed.” Can’t wait for that.

MPAA Rating:R for strong erotic sexual content, some graphic nudity, and language

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Kim Basinger, Marcia Gay Harden, Bella Heathcoate

Credits:Directed by James Foley, script by Niall Leonard, based (screenplay), E.L. James . A Universal  release.

Running time: 1:53