Movie Nation

Whatever is going on around her and whoever else is in the overripe Netflix murder mystery “His & Hers,” Marin Ireland is the one who gets it.

The latest project from the director of the feature film “Lady Macbeth” is straight-up trash. Ireland, who dresses down as fearlessly (“Dope Thief,” “Hell or High Water”) as any of her peers, is the foul-mouthed bug-eyed fury of this grisly “Mean Girls Grow up Meaner” series — nowhere near top-billed, but lowdown and “out there” in ways that more than do justice to the pulpy source material.

She doesn’t just play trashy, she revels in it.

Based on a novel by Alice Feeney and well-acted by a cast headed by Tessa Thompson, Jon Bernthal, Sunita Mani (“GLOW,” “Death of a Unicorn” and “The Roses”) and Pablo Schreiber, this is an infectious page-turner of a six-part series. Red herrings abound. “Oh no she/he DIDN’T” moments are tucked into laughably far-fetched plot twists and a sixth episode that so over-explains the last of those twists (clumsily given away earlier) that it waters down the impact of everything that came before.

Ireland sets it off every time her character, Zoe, appears. Thompson transforms into a TV anchor-beauty with cunning and “issues.” And Bernthal drawls through his turn as a north Georgia sheriff’s department detective whose true expertise isn’t really crime solving. His Jack Harper is a poster boy for Southern sheriff department policing, a man who like many of his peers truly expert in one thing — knowing just how much a compromised cop can get away with.

Thompson is a “leave of absence” Atlanta TV anchor who returns to her tony hometown of Dahlonega just in time to spy her not-ex-husband Jack cheating, with that cheating preceding the murder of his sex-in-a-truck-in-the-woods paramour. Ex-anchor Anna knows things, so many things that the “story” that erupts around her seems to be manipulated by her.

Her “There are at least two sides to every story” voice-over narration underscores this.

Jack’s enthusiastic sex partner (Jamie Tisdale) is a former private school classmate of Anna’s. Twenty years ago, Rachel was queen bee — the meanest and prettiest of the mean girls. She married money, settled into an “open marriage” and never had to give up her mean girl games.

As Det. Harper gasps at not just the murder of someone he was having a fling with, but a crime whose crime scene is covered with his DNA, he finds himself endlessly swatting away leads, queries and theories of the fresh-out-of-school partner Priya, (Mani) whom he nicknames “Boston.”

But is his not-quite-ex setting him up? The way she side-eyes him, smirks and ignores his many demands to “not report” this or that detail that she seems to know before him sets us up to believe that.

We know that in pulp fiction murder mysteries, it’s never the “obvious” first suspect we’re presented with, is it?

We meet the blonde anchor-woman (Rebecca Rittenhouse) who angled her way into the chair in Anna’s absence, and that bitter, cutthroat rivalry is renewed. Anchor-lady Lexy’s news videographer husband (Schreiber) is lured into that.

We hear of what sent Anna into her spiral and probably contributed to her husband losing an Atlanta PD job. We meet his boozy, broke, single-mom sister (Ireland) and Anna’s neglected, dementia-suffering mom (Crystal Fox).

And flashbacks take us back to St. Hilary’s School, where the rich girls and Anna mingled and Rachel’s corps included future school headmistress Helen Wang (Poppy Liu).

“His & Hers” is basically a slow-walked/series-length variation of “Out of Time,” the Carl Franklin-directed Denzel Washington/Eva Mendes thriller about a corrupt but not murderously dirty cop covering his tracks and his ass in a similar (enough) situation in South Florida, not North Georgia.

The sordid goings on, intimate connections and dirty secrets of a town where everybody knows everybody else make an inbred, over-the-top backdrop for a thriller that often shortchanges the stakes, the ticking clock element and “clues” that might come from the victim’s phone, the detective’s history, the reporter’s seeming manipulations and a junior detective who may at some point put a lot of pieces together.

Ireland, Chris Bauer as the less-than-grieving rich widowed husband and a few others take this script at its over-the-top face value. Bernthal is deliciously desperate and despicable as another unaccountable cop who assaults persons-of-interest and blurts accusations at others when where’s no one there to rein him in or correct his over-reaching lies.

The drawl grows more pronounced the more desperate Jack gets. Ireland gets her Cracker Dander Up. But most characters in this world would shed the accent — especially those in TV — and that’s the case here.

Thompson does a decent job of suggesting sinister and cunning in a character we’re ordered to misjudge and convict, based on the script.

Creator, writer and (in some episodes) director William Oldroyd works in “Twin Peaks” and “Chinatown” needle drops or overt references which underscore the lethal, blood-spattered playfulness he was going for.The lone “Southernism” in the dialogue also hints at the tone he was reaching for, a line uttered by a sheriff’s deputy to the detective.

She was “smilin’ like she got the last parkin’ spot at Cracker Barrel.”

But as a series, “His & Hers” is best at luring us in. The payoffs are consistently disappointing and the final episode basically an eye-roller, start-to-finish — all filler and “explanations” and “You didn’t see THAT coming” when we most certainly did and a long time before.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic bloody violence, explicit sex, profanity

Cast: Tessa Thompson, Jon Bernthal, Marin Ireland, Sunita Mani, Pablo Schreiber, Crystal Fox and Rebecca Rittenhouse

Credits: Created by William Oldroyd, based on a novel by Alice Feeney. A Netflix release.

Running time: Six episodes @ 40-47 minutes each

If you see enough movies, attend enough plays and make it through enough literature, you earn the license to say you’ve “seen’em all.” There are only so many basic plots, with a vast but still finite number of variations on the many themes, after all.

But that can be a curse. I could see where the German thriller “The Tank” was heading within minutes of its opening titles. Chances are, many of you will as well. I won’t spoil it for you but I will throw a few names out there that the savvy will recognize and nod their heads at the drift of it all — Serling, Hitchcock, Bierce, Tim Robbins and Danny Aiello.

Classic plots get to be classics because they’re clever, poignant and even surprising the first few times you see versions of them. So its no sin to try your own variation of one. But for the viewer who picks up on where it’s going too soon, well…

“Der Tiger” as it was titled in German is a sometimes suspenseful, only occasionally far-fetched fascist “Fury” tank crew at war tale that’s pretty much wholly undone by not just driving down a plot path many have traveled before, most notably the short story author who was the subject of “Old Gringo.” The filmmakers feel the need to explain the hell out the finale, so whatever anti-war war film novelty they were going for is spoiled if not exactly undone.

We meet our Tiger tank crew on a bridge over the Dneiper River in the fall of ’43, a few months after Stalingrad, when the German army has tumbled into a terminal retreat.

The last of their infantry has crossed, but as Russian tanks and troops close in, tank commander Lt. Gerkens (David Schütter of Netflix’s German “Barbarians” series) keeps ignoring pleas (in German or dubbed) to fall back before the bridge is blown up.

His driver (Leonard Kunz) and gunner/second-in-command (Laurence Rupp) shout and plead and fire as the dutiful radio-man/machine-gunner (Sebastian Urzendowsky) and boyish cannon-loader (Yoran Leicher) fight back the panic and follow orders.

But they survive for Gerkens to get new orders, a “secret mission” to rescue a Colonel trapped behind Russian lines. The crew will “obey” and drive “the greatest tank ever built” in their own “Saving Col. von Hardenburg” quest through the hell of the Eastern front no man’s land.

They will witness war crimes that remind them that “The Reich has developed such an appetite for killing.” They will overhear Catholic mass in Latin on their two-way radio. They will face dire odds, fire and flood and superstitions as they do the bidding of “Our friend Adolf, the Austrian.”

Above all else, they will “follow orders.”

Director and co-writer Dennis Gansel wrings a bit of pathos about the moral quandary and cost of such misguided loyalty. But the picture’s heavy-handed way with allegory make it about as realistic as a “Sisu” thriller.

The trek is hardly hidden from view, but we only see Russian (CGI) fighter bombers at night, not in the daylight when anybody with one good eye could spy the cloud of smoke and road dust these V-12 behemoths churned out. The crew stops for a campfire, muses on family and girlfriends and their lives “before the war.” The front lines are largely depopulated, with set-piece confrontations and genre tropes nakedly borrowed from “Fury” (and other tank tales).

Watches stop ticking and surreality pokes its nose around the edges before elbowing its way to center stage.

But the tracks and the wheels underneath them truly come off in a “What was it all for?” finale, a real teeth-grinder of unreality, illogic, cliches and German soul-searching about what they once went through which the rest of the world seems to have forgotten.

“The Tank” isn’t inherently terrible. The actors are game, the allegory timely and the action sequences — including one straight out of a hundren U-Boat movies — play. And helpfully, the cinema usually goes a few decades between versions of the story that was its framework and inspiration — early ’60s, early ’90s — allowing new generations to experience it.

But the execution of this well-worn plot device begs for mystery, not over-explanation. The finale isn’t just obvious, it’s obtuse. If you’re going to explain your movie’s ending, it’s usually a good idea not to botch the explanation so badly that anyone who’s ever seen a variation on this plot is given license to shout at the screen.

Ratng: R, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: David Schütter, Laurence Rupp, Leonard Kunz, Sebastian Urzendowsky, Yoran Leicher and Tilman Strauss.

Credits: Directed by Dennis Gansel, scripted by Dennis Gansel and Colin Teevan. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:56

clumsy arrival

One of the pleasures of youth is experiencing the stages and phases and Big Moments of life for the first time. And one of the indulgences of being pre-“thirtysomething” is the feeling that you’re “discovering” or reinventing things earlier generations got to before you.

Netflix has had pretty good luck on teen and collegiate romances — rom-coms, mostly. Hollywood lost its way in that genre and the streaming service has had such films all to itself.

But “People We Meet on Vacation” is confirmation that as much as they’d like to exploit the dirth of (somewhat) more adult romances and rom-coms from theatrical studios, their magic touch doesn’t translate.

“People” is a Sony production without the star power, spark, wit or edge to draw viewers to a cinema. It’s so humorless its “meet cute” is a “meet bored.” The dull narrative meanders through “When Harry Met Sally” imitation flashbacks-through-a-friendship-that-becomes-a-romance structure. It slow walks us through genre cliches towards a finale with a climax confessional — cue the rain — followed by four anti-climaxes because three anticlimaxes weren’t enough.

The leads — Emily Bader (“Fresh Kills” and TV’s “My Lady Jane”) and Tom Blyth (TV’s “Billy the Kid”) — are pretty but stunningly bland, with a director (Brett Haley did “The Hero” and hit a personal best with “Hearts Beat Loud”) who can’t steer them or this lumbering beast clear of the schmaltz that often trips him up.

So whatever the “It’s a MOVIE. Let’s LOVE IT” fankids over at Pubescent Tomatoes say, it’s a drag. That’s also a handicap of youth. The little dears haven’t seen enough good romances to know what works.

The script, based on an Emily Henry novel of a couple of years back, follows small-town Ohio girl Poppy through her years-long connection to hometown boy Alex.

A present day “destination wedding” in Barcelona which travel-writer Poppy may skip because she’ll run into Alex prompts a parade of voice-over-narrated flashbacks that tell of their connections and trips together as “just friends.”

They meet cute (not in the least) when she’s late for the ride-sharing trip home from Boston while both are in college. Half a dozen sitcoms and the late Rob Reiner’s “The Sure Thing” got more heart and humor out of that trapped-in-a-Subaru-together situation.

A college kid of the mid 2010s is into…Paula Abdul?

Somehow, they overcome their disconnection — she’s free spirited and ditzy in an inconsiderate way, he’s predictable and “small town” in the usual uninteresting ways.

As her dream is to travel, she becomes a travel journalist — jetting hither and yon and writing advertiser/destination friendly prose tantalizaing enough to make the reader envious and want to go there herself/himself.

His dream is “home” and “family.”

Over the years, they reconnect and we catch up with their annual friend-trip travels to Canada (Alex is that boring), New Orleans, Prague and elsewhere. We re-meet them and their potential mates. And we ponder why these two good-looking Boston College buckeyes can’t make a love connection.

The overarching theme of the story, postulated by Poppy, is that people “vacation to get away from their lives,” that “Vacation Alex” is thus a lot more interesting — skinny dipping, posing as a married couple, etc. — than “real life” Alex.

Except he isn’t. His declaration that he “doesn’t do stupid s—” ever, much less on vacation, can be taken to heart as the skinny dipping is Hallmark Movie with a hint of Nudity tepid.

Poppy is on a journey to overcome the boredom of perpetually traveling. And another generation discovers that making something you love and dream about your vocation strips some of the joy out of it.

Alex needs to get out of himself and won’t, because tiny Linfield, Ohio beckons, with or without the PhD he works his way into. Poppy? She needs to park her luggage and take care of “life” outside of the jetway.

Haley and three screenwriters neglect the “best friend/sounding board” roles — Alex doesn’t get one at all, basically — overdo the motherly, hip and concerned “fan” travel mag editor/boss role (Jameela Jamil) and leave her promisingly adorable, annoying and sexually hip parents (Molly Shannon and Alan Ruck) behind too soon.

It all feels and plays recycled and watered-down — the longing, the testy edge that’s supposed to signal “sparks,” the heartache of indecision.

The writerly narration is travel-blog bland, and nothing in Poppy’s “written” words tell us she’s the new Hemingway, Bourdain or Pico Iyer.

Maybe Poppy’s got a point, resisting being attracted to this unsurprising, “reliable” and unsophisticated, untraveled potential beau. The fact that the script simply isn’t having it is no reason to sit through this if you’ve ever seen another screen romance.

But if you’re young enough that you haven’t viewed the “modern” benchmark movies of the genre — “The Sure Thing,” “French Kiss” and “When Harry Met Sally” for starters — and you think “Anyone But You” is your high bar, by all means have a go.

Rating: PG-13, nudity, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Emily Bader, Tom Blyth, Sarah Catherine Hook and Lucien Laviscount, with Alan Ruck and Molly Shannon.

Credits: Directed by Brett Haley, scripted by Yulin Kuang, Amos Vernon and Nunzio Randazzo, based on the novel by Emily Henry. A Sony release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:58

Filmgoers looking for a little escape from the more-horrific-than-fiction daily news out of America will be hard pressed to find it in a movie with “Greenland” and “Migration” in its title.

The sequel to the surprise post-apocalyptic Gerard Butler hit “Greenland 2: Migration” has impressive renditions of flooded cities, a half-melted Eiffel Tower and the canyons of the now-high-and-dry English Channel. But the plot is a perfunctory parade of fresh woes heaped upon our American family with its working class Scot (Butler) husband and father as they’re forced to venture through this hellscape.

Earthquakes and comet-debris meteor bombarment, volcanic rifts and superstorms and a tsunami and “marauders” from Eastern Europe menace the Garrity family in this ruined and irradiated Future Earth.

Even with life-death-of-a-family-and-civilization-itself-stakes director Ric Roman Waugh can’t squeeze urgency or suspense out of a single moment.

The “Migration” is just a succession of landscapes and seascapes turned catastrophic, with nothing that most dramaturges would describe as real “drama” about it.

Five years after Comet Clarke tore a big hole in the South of France and ended what passed for human civilization, the Garritys — scientist wife Allison (Morena Baccarin of “Deadpool”), now-teen-son Nathan (Roman Griffin Davis) and blue collar-competent dad John (Butler) are still holed up with elite scientists and a few military folk in a post-apocalypse-bunker on the remains of Thune Airbase in Greenland.

John’s a whiz with anything that pumps, cranks-up or closes a circuit. That hazmat suit he dons is just for scavenger hunts around the ruins of the base and the Greenland beach where all sorts of handy things wash up — a destroyer, assorted lifeboats, etc.

The ruling council has no sooner decided that rescuing folks close enough by to have sent a distress signal is the humane thing to do when an earthquake causes the bunker complex to collapse.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me” aside, the Garritys vow to fight on even if the “Slowly dying is still DYING” faction of the bunker has a point.

Rumors of an Edenic “promised land” bursting with new life, breathable air and drinkable water in the comet’s gigantic crater make that the family’s next quest.

Butler is more stoic than action-heroic here, and no additions to the cast have enough screen time to make more than a modest impression.

There’s little emotion to anything that comes at them and us here as the screenwriters cut and paste one disaster movie cliche after another on the screen and the effects crew does their damnedest to at least make it all look real. Butler’s go-to director Waugh returns from the first “Greenland,” the “Has Fallen” films and “Kandahar,” and appears to have rushed through this shoot to get the picture away from the actors and into the hands of the effects folks ASAP. Big mistake.

The lone joke from an epoch when humor is dead is how quickly humanity forgets the difference between “classical rock” and yacht rock.

What’s left is “2012/Day After Tomorrow” disastrous and impressively so, with British and Icelandic locations turned into a world without civilization. Human interactions, human conflict (dog eat dog Darwinism), human intellect and human resolve never made it into the finished film.

If I want something this disastrous and heartless centered around Greenland, I’ll log onto the news feed at Bluesky.

Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity

Cast: Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Amber Rose Rivah, Roman Griffin Davis and Sophie Thompson.

Credits: Directed by Ric Roman Waugh, scripted by Mitch LaFortune and Chris Sparling, based on characters created by Chris Sparling. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:38

Wonder if they take refugees fleeing Nazis?

“Band on the Run” is a sweet little nothing of a roadtrip comedy where the “nothing” overwhelms the “sweet.”

It has its moments. Just not that many.

Writer-director Jeff Hupp set this tale at the end of the golden age of “indie,” when a band could dream of wrangling an invite to Austin, Texas and the chance to play for an audience that might deliver the prize that could change their fates and lives forever — a record deal.

Back in 1999, before it outgrew its original appeal, the South by Southwest Festival could deliver on those dreams.

Jesse (Matthew Perl) is such a dreamer. A downtrodden low-level functionary at a Detroit ad agency, Jesse’s watching his parents’ marriage come apart as his disabled, wheelchair bound dad (Larry Bagby) is half way to just giving up.

Jesse and his two Hot Freaks bandmates (Dylan Randazzo and Daniel Blair) fear they’ll “NEVER get out of here” if they don’t get that “South By” invite.

“Every band that matters will be there!”

That includes their nemesis, Bull Roar, a “gimmicky” two-piece hipster rock ensemble whose douche bro lead singer (Landon Tavernier) likes to drop snatches of Spanglish into his speech and who plays the “Do I know you?” card every chance he gets.

Both bands get invitations, with only one invited to “headline.” Both will drive South/Southwest to the festival in vans — one in a rented beater with a grump in a wheelchair onboard, the other in a lot more style, with their logo on it and everything.

Let the road trip hijinks begin.

There are mishaps, misadventures, moments of truth with Dad and pranks along the way — nothing that you’d figure was worthy of “going viral,” but that’s what the script ordains.

There’s barely a laugh in it, and even the bawdy ones provided by a stolen “magic” mike stand (the microphone spins turning vocals into a DIY special effect) and a hooker isn’t much.

The performances never quite lapse into “colorless,” but never rise above that, either.

With no comic edge and no music rights to anything anybody would care to hear twice, the “sweet” payoffs feel like cheats that nobody involved has earned.

Like the bands and indie films booked for South By, “Band on the Run” banks on potential. But it never lives up to it.

Rating: 16+, profanity, vulgarity

Cast: Matthew Perl, Larry Bagby, Landon Tavernier, Jessie Pettit, Dylan Randazzo, Jake Eberle and Daniel Blair.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jeff Hupp, co-directed by Brian Cusac and Merritt Fritchie. A Freestyle release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:28

France’s great re-invention of cinema, pioneered by the “New Wave” of French filmmakers who started writing and directing in the 1950s, is charmingly remembered in Richard Linklater’s affectionate homage “Nouvelle Vague.”

The director of “Boyhood” and more tellingly “Me and Orson Welles” takes us back to the age of Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol, Agnès Varda and Alain Resnais, movie makers who “broke the rules” of filmmaking, cemented the power of the director as “auteur” (author) of a film and brought new life to the cinema amid the rising tide of television.

The focus is on the New Wave’s “bad boy,” Jean-Luc Godard, like many of his contemporaries, a musing, passionate critic from the influencial magazine Cahiers du Cinema. Others from there had made movies because, as Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) quips — quoting Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard) in “Nouvelle Vague” — “The best way to critique a film is to make one!”

But when Godard made “Breathless,” the cinematic world was rattled. All these “rules” for how you tell a story on film are made to be broken.

“Nouvelle Vague” follows Godard, opinionating, preaching, hustling and smoking-smoking-smoking his way to making his feature film debut.

“All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun,” he preaches (in French with subtitles) behind his omnipresent — day or night, indoors or out — sunglasses. And by God he’s going to prove it.

He’ll need a producer (Bruno Dreyfürst) gullible enough to give him the pittance it’ll take to make his movie. He’ll need a combat-tested cameraman (Matthieu Penchinat) who can shoot, in black and white and on the fly with sound to be added later. He’ll need a script supervisor (Pauline Belle) to keep the story straight and ensure the shots match up in continuity terms when the film is edited, even though he is determined not to have a script, but a mere “outline.”

And for any of those elements to fall into place, he’ll need “the girl.” Luckily, the American starlet of “Saint Joan” and “Bonjour Tritesse” is in France with her new French husband
François (Paolo Luka-Noé). The arrogant, cool poseur Godard crashes a celebrity party, angles up to Seberg and before you know it, he’s got his movie.

It was the great coup of Godard’s career, landing an international star who woud ensure his movie got made and seen the world over. And the coup of Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague” came from casting Zoey Deutch (“Set It Up,” “Not Okay,” “Buffaloed”) as Seberg.

This isn’t the brooding, paranoid (with reason) rebel Seberg of the Kristen Stewart bio-pic. Deutch and the screenwriters give us a starlet who quickly picked up on Hollywood’s heirarchy and the boundaries and barriers she’d face, who just as quickly clues in on Godard as something of a fraud.

But she’ll do the film “if the big bad wolves (of Hollywood) will let me.” Just watch yourself, Monsieur Godard. His amateur theatrics and unprofessionalism — no script, no sound-on-film (all the dialgue etc. will be added in post-production) — No “direction” other than “No performance!” — short shooting days because “I’ve run out of ideas” and the like bring out her blunt threat, delivered in French.

I just might quit your film,” you silly sunglassed French wannabe.

Deutch makes Seberg savvy, sassy and fun. Her Seberg clicks with her acting novice “boxer” co-star, screen newcomer and Godard pal Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin). “Nouvelle Vague” takes off when she shows up and slows down every time she and Dullin aren’t in a scene.

I’d call the title “Relentless” truth in advertising, althought “Pitiless,” “Endless” and “Senseless” work just as well.

This new thriller from the sarcastically surnamed writer-director Tom Botchii (real name Tom Botchii Skowronski of “Artik” fame) begins in uninteresting mystery, strains to become a revenge thriller “about something” and never gets out of its own way.

So bloody that everything else — logic, reason, rationale and “Who do we root for?” quandary is throughly botched — its 93 minutes pass by like bleeding out from screwdriver puncture wounds — excruciatingly.

But hey, they shot it in Lewiston, Idaho, so good on them for not filming overfilmed Greater LA, even if the locations are as generically North American as one could imagine.

Career bit player and Lewiston native Jeffrey Decker stars as a homeless man we meet in his car, bearded, shivering and listening over and over again to a voice mail from his significant other.

He has no enthusiasm for the sign-spinning work he does to feed himself and gas up his ’80s Chevy. But if woman, man or child among us ever relishes anything as much as this character loves his cigarettes — long, theatrical, stair-at-the-stars drags of ecstacy — we can count ourselves blessed.

There’s this Asian techie (Shuhei Kinoshita) pounding away at his laptop, doing something we assume is sketchy just by the “ACCESS DENIED” screens he keeps bumping into and the frantic calls he takes suggesting urgency of some sort or other.

That man-bunned stranger, seen in smoky silhoutte through the opaque window on his door, ringing the bell of his designer McMansion makes him wary. And not just because the guy’s smoking and seems to be making up his “How we can help cut your energy bill” pitch on the fly.

Next thing our techie knows, shotgun blasts are knocking out the lock (Not the, uh GLASS) and a crazed, dirty beardo homeless guy has stormed in, firing away at him as he flees and cries “STOP! Why are you doing this?”

Jun, as the credits name him, fights for his PC and his life. He wins one and loses the other. But tracking his laptop and homeless thug “Teddy” with his phone turns out to be a mistake.

He’s caught, beaten and bloodied some more. And that’s how Jun learns the beef this crazed, wronged man has with him — identity theft, financial fraud, etc.

Threats and torture over access to that laptop ensue, along with one man listing the wrongs he’s been done as he puts his hostage through all this.

Wait’ll you get a load of what the writer-director thinks is the card our hostage would play.

The dialogue isn’t much, and the logic — fleeing a fight you’ve just won with a killer rather than finishing him off or calling the cops, etc. — doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny.

The set-piece fights, which involve Kinoshita screaming and charging his tormentor and the tormentor played by Decker stalking him with wounded, bloody-minded resolve are visceral enough to come off. Decker and Kinoshita are better than the screenplay.

A throw-down at a gas-station climaxes with a brutal brawl on the hood of a bystander’s car going through an automatic car wash. Amusingly, the car-wash owners feel the need to do an Idaho do-si-do video (“Roggers (sic) Car Wash”) that plays in front of the car being washed and behind all the mayhem the antagonists and the bystander/car owner go through. Not bad.

The rest? Not good.

Perhaps the good folks at Rogers Motors and Car Wash read the script and opted to get their name misspelled. Smart move.

Rating: R, graphic violence, smoking, profanity

Cast: Jeffrey Decker, Shuhei Kinoshita

Credits:Scripted and directed by Tom Botchii.. A Saban Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:34

“Everything to Me” is a coming-of-age dramedy so inconsequential as to make one question how it ever got financed and shot.

Skipping past the still rarish nature of such tales told from the point of view of girls and young women, it’s still ninety minutes of nothing, and that should matter.

Writer-director Kayci Lacob frames her debut feature with the dullest author’s public book reading ever, and trots through an utterly conventional collection of genre cliches as she tries to make the story of a child-teen-coed obsessed with becoming Steve Jobs interesting. She fails.

Our heroine (Victoria Pedretti) strolls, uncertainly, into a San Francisco book store where the crowd for her reading from her memoir “The Book of Jobs” is around the block. The tech corridor/Silicon Valley proximity might explain the line. Or the author’s runway model-looks on the back cover might be a lure.

But once Claudia Lerner begins to read, Pedretti — who must have more expressions in her actor’s bag of tricks than this colorless deadpan — and the screenplay bore us so close to death that paramedics and an electronic defibrillilator should be standing by anybody watching.

The “book” all the film’s voice-over narration that follows is taken from is lifeless, drab — lacking the music of narrative, a compelling story or even a gift for the language.

Little Claudia (Eliza Donaghy, then Abigail Donaghy) grew up in this corner of the world determined to be Steve Jobs. Not “the next Steve Jobs.” Jobs was a visionary so focused and driven that she quotes his “wisdom” from her tweens onward, a kid determined to copy Jobs right down to his famous/infamous “reality distortion field,” which helped him badger his underlings to achieve the impossible and create a future no one else could conceive.

Claudia makes friends (Lola Flanery) in spite of this monomaniacal drive. She’s got a plan — excel, achieve, check off all the boxes that will get her into Stanford, which she figures is her ticket into Silicon Valley, fame, wealth and glory.

She won’t let her stop-and-live-a-balanced-life preaching biology teacher (Utkarsh Ambudkar, not bad), her parents’ (Judy Greer and Rich Sommer) failing marriage or Mom’s cancer diagnosis get in the way.

The script hints a couple of times that it will be about something actually substantial. Does adult Claudia have tales to tell of the toxic sexism of Silicon Valley? Mom’s abandoned engineering career is another indicator that something consequential is to come.

But as we oh-so-slowly drift through Claudia’s clciched account of her school years — with pauses for benchmarks such as first menstruation (played “cute,” but kind of cringy) — chapters with inane titles from “Black Smoke” to “Contagion” to “Dumbledore” pointlessly break the tedious story up.

And never for one moment does the dialogue rise above Daily Inspiration Calendar quips.

“Life is not a means to an end…Vulnerability is a gift. It makes us better.”

Lacob got her movie made, somehow. But all she has to show for her efforts — let’s hope they didn’t actually spend money to take this picture to Italy to film this insipid “class trip” sequence — is to make the only film Judy Greer ever appeared in that has nothing other than her to recommend it.

Rating: unrated, sexual situations, adult themes, profanity

Cast: Abigail Donaghy, Eliza Donaghy, Victoria Pedretti, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Lola Flanery, Rich Sommer and Judy Greer

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kayci Lacob. A Bullseye release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:30

A dynamic and charismatic action heroine gets lost in “Revolver Lily,” a ponderous and repetitive period piece about a lady assassin indirectly trying to head off WWII by protecting a kid who has documents incriminating the Japanese Army in an illegal fund-raising-for-war scheme.

It’s something of an action fantasy, with a ghostly shaman/healer woman and a villain (Hiroya Shimizu) who seems unkillable. There’s a little rewriting history, and more myth-building about naval genius Admiral Yamamoto (Sadao Abe), who is a mere high-ranking captain in the film’s between-the-world-wars setting.

And our bloodied heroine (Haruka Ayase) has more lives than a Looney Tunes animated cat.

But as the plot is basically this kid (Jinsei Hamura) gets caught by army goons time and again, only to have veteran assasin Yuri Ozone (Ayase) rescue him, time and again, “repetitive” speaks for itself. And with the action consisting of Ozone slicing, stabbing and shooting a few companies of 1920s Japanese infantry, director and co-writer Isao Yukisada’s picture struggles to escape that repetition.

Even strikingly-staged shootouts — Oh look, they’re blindly blazing away at each other in dense Tokyo fog! — play as static set-pieces that make us question how many times our 111 pound heroine can be shot and stabbed before she bleeds out.

Goons bust in on a “connected” Chichibu family and when they don’t find the patriarch there, they massacre the women and children.

Young teen Shinta (Jinsei Hamura) survives, holding his tongue as blood drips through the floorboards onto him in his hiding place. His instructions from dad were to find this lady detective and accomplished killer, Yuri Ozone.

She’s been laying low. “I’ve stopped killing people,” she insists, when asked. But when straw-boater-hatted dandies swoop down on the kid on a train, she finds him. She can’t help but note that — matching Gatsby shirt, trousers, vests and hats aside — their weapons are army issued.

Those “documents” the kid has detail money-raising through stock fraud, and the army is hellbent on keeping them from the public and maybe from the navy, as well.

Yuri has a life partner geisha (Kavka Shishido) and a younger sex-worker-district ally (Kotone Furukawa). And where would any of them be without the crusading lawyer Iwami (Hiroki Hasegawa) on their side? He’s pretty handy to have around in a fight, too.

There are lots of those, seeing as how the boy Shinta keeps getting grabbed — on the train, on the street, in the hills and by the lakes.

The fight choreography has its moments, and others where we see the easily-dodged stage-punches.

The shootouts sound like the effects team settled on nail-gun noises to use instead of anything resembling a pistol shot.

But the period detail is OK, with the occasional anachronism (two-way military radios showing up a decade early) to keep us on our toes.

The entire affair has too many characters three or four top villains — to track and too many longueurs between the action beats to sustain interest.

Still, as lady assassin stories are all the rage, especially in Asian cinema, we trust that all those Yuri Ozone action figures Ayase supposedly posed for will get better use in other films.

Rating: unrated, bloody violence

Cast: Haruka Ayase, Hiroki Hasegawa, Jesse, Hiroya Shimizu,
Jinsei Hamura, Itsushi Toyokawa,
Kavka Shishido and Sadao Abe.

Credits: Directed by Isao Yukisada, scripted by Tatsuo Kobayashi, Kyô Nagaura and Isai Yukisada. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:19