Movie Review: Kidman tries to make “Holland,” Michigan “To Die For”

When she read the script for “Holland,” Nicole Kidman must have seen a little of “To Die For,” the dark comedy that was her big break, the movie that set her up for Hollywood fame, Oscars and all that went with that.

There’s a frustrated woman stuck in small town “provincial” life who glimpses a way out of that trap via a younger man, and dark twists that suggest what people will do to achieve their short term aims.

Her character Nancy Vandergroot may be a lot less mercenary and a tad more “Stepford Wives” in her kitschy life in a “Groundhog Day” city that’s all about its corny Olde Country roots. The similarites are obvious and give this film’s abrupt shifts in tone and stakes some justification, even if director Mimi Cave (“Fresh”) and screenwriter Andrew Sodroski (TV’s “Manhunt”) are anything but subtle in trying to pull those off.

Nancy is a high school “Life Management” (Home Ec) teacher, mother of a spoiled, just-turned-13 son, wife of a popular optometrist (Matthew Macfadyen) and one of those cornerstones who make life and the mundane priorities of it work in her small city.

She’s all about the tulips, the local windmill tourist attraction, the native Dutch costumes and the festivals celebrating the Netherlanders who settled the Holland, Michigan, back in the day.

But Nancy married into all this — the Dutch maid costume with wooden shoes that comes out periodically, speaking Dutch with husband Fred at the dinner table, the Dutch reserve and Dutch “community,” the feeling that “I get to wake up in the best place on Earth,” she narrates.

And even if she realizes that “Fred rescued me” from whatever life she was leading before, even if she accepts how her husband teaches their son (Jude Hill) about “dealing” with women supposedly behind her back — Obsessive? Highly strung? “This is how women are.” — Nancy knows there’s got to be more to life than community pancake breakfasts and knowing the best place to get bitterballen in Holland, Michigan.

Her one confidante at school is the “new” shop teacher, Dave (Gale Garcia Bernal). But their friendship takes a turn when Nancy turns her hyper-focused attention on the latest “little mystery” she’s determined to “investigate.”

Fred takes an awful lot of weekend “junkets” for an optometrist. Credit cards she’s never seen, that parking ticket crumpled in his pants pocket to a town she’s sure he never mentioned visiting, that secret stash of Polaroid film she finds hidden in the vast model railroad complex he and son Harry are building in a workshop out back suggest Harry’s up to something.

With the usually-guarded Dave as her accomplice, Nancy starts sniffing around.

“Sometimes in life, you’ve just gotta follow the clues, no matter where they take you.”

As the mystery deepens, the woman determined to uncover her husband’s affair starts having one of her own.

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Movie Preview: A post-apocalyptic thriller that’s Born to Be Brutal — “Steppenwolf”

This nihilistic stomp through Mad Max Kazakhstan has a “Here’s your future, should you refuse to evolve” vibe.

No, this “Steppenwolf” has nothing to do with the band, the comic book character or the Herman Hesse novel that inspired them all.

Arrow releasing picked “Steppenwolf” up off the festival circuit.

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Richard Chamberlain: 1934-2025, Mr. Miniseries of “Thornbirds” and “Shogun” dies the day before his 91st Birthday

Richard Chamberlain, whose death was confirmed today, came to fame as a “teen idol,” the “McDreamy” of his day playing a young physician on the TV version of “Dr. Kildare.”

He had a few shots at big screen stardom — playing Tchaikovsky in “The Music Lovers,” cashing in with the riotous “Three Musketeers” blockbusters in the ’70s, which spun into TV versions of “The Count of Monte-Cristo” and “The Man in the Iron Mask.”

His best film roles include performances in the classics “The Last Wave” and “The Madwoman of Chaillot.”

And then Richard Chamberlain’s career enjoyed its second “idol” era. The TV miniseries was made for the man, and starting with “Centennial,” then “Shogun” and finally, the icing on the cake, “The Thornbirds,” Chamberlain stood center stage, with vast, saga-length novels on TV unfolding around him.

He collected several Emmy nominations, but no wins.

Those roles might have buried a less charismatic presence, but he held his own in these small screen epics. Those miniseries overwhelmed any movie career he might have restarted in the early ’80s. I reviewed his Allan Quartermain derring do revivals (Stewart Granger played the character in the ’50s), adventure thrillers a tad too malnourished and dated to cash in on their “Indiana Jones of their Day” cachet.

Lithe, dashing and handsome, a star at his best in sensitive, romantic roles and an actor who dabbled in a singing career as well, it was widely rumored Chamberlain was gay during his peak years, something only confirmed when he saved that piece of personal history for his autobiography, 2003’s “Shattered Love: A Memoir.”

He went on to play Maggie Wick, in drag, on TV’s “The Drew Carrey Show,” and take the obligatory guest shot on “Will & Grace,” always gracefully coasting on the fame that came more easily than the acclaim, which he earned, first appearance to last.

Dying a day before turning 91 is probably the one bit of bad timing you can lay at the feet of Beverly Hills’ favorite son.

A class act, first to last. RIP.

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Classic Film Review: Luis Buñuel serves up Colonialism’s “Death in the Garden” (1956)

Of all the “star entrances” the classic cinema has given us, from the “Stagecoach” rolling up on stranded John Wayne to Orson Welles, glimpsed in the shadows in “The Third Man” and Marlene Dietrich, dolled up and ready to sing and take a swing in “Destry Rides Again,” it’s hard to top George Marchal‘s first moments in “Death in the Garden” in establishing just how tough our tough guy antihero might be.

Corrupt, trigger happy colonial soldiers have just fired a warning volley, dispersing a mob of angry miners who’ve been ordered to abandon their diamond mining claims in dusty, backwater 1940s French Guiana. The troopers’ attention is distracted as a lone figure, leading a horse on foot, strolls across the scene as the smoke clears.

They shout at the slouching, dirty “foreigner” who pays them no heed. “Almost” no heed. Prospector or “adventurer,” the man we will learn goes by the name “Shark” doesn’t break his weary stride as he flips the armed company the bird, to their outrage. Only an officer’s intervention keeps them from leveling their guns at him.

Filmmaker Luis Buñuel, with his friend Salvador Dalí, invented cinematic surrealism with “Un chien andalou” and “L’Age d’Or” in 1929-30. A Spanish born writer-director who filmed in Spain, Mexico, Central and South America and in France, he moved into the cinematic mainstream in the 1950s, taking on thrillers (“Los Olvidados”), adventure tales (“Robinson Crusoe”) and religious melodramas (“Nazarin”), but always with higher-minded, psychologically savvy and politically aware and insightful scripts.

“Death in the Garden” (1956) or “La mort en ce jardin,” is a politically-charged adventure yarn, with hints of “Wages of Fear,” “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “The African Queen” folded into its story of colonialism’s corrupt excesses, which are visited not just upon the hapless natives being exploited, but taken out on the disreputable French nationals venturing to these hinterlands.

A colonial edict ends diamond prospecting in a remote town on the edge of the jungle. The miners, almost all of them armed, are enraged. Even grandfatherly Castin (Charles Vanel from “Wages of Fear”) is put out. He’s found diamonds, put some aside for himself and his deaf-mute daughter Maria (Michèle Girardon, later to appear in “Hatari!,” “The Lovers” and other films from the French New Wave) to open “a restaurant by the sea in Marseilles” (in French with English subtitles). Has he earned enough to ensure that dream?

Protesting to corrupt Captain Ferrero (Jorge Martínez de Hoyos) gets the miners nowhere. With all the guns in this crowd, shoots are sure to be fired. Soldiers and protesters die.

And that’s when “the foreigner,” Shark (Marchal) wanders in, a convenient outsider target with a money belt that will be split up by the madam of the local brothel, Djin (Simone Signoret) and the captain when she turns Shark in.

An ineffectual missionary priest (Michel Piccoli, later of “Belle du Jour”) preaches peace and mercy, but the miners rightly see him as an instrument of the corrupt “exploitation” of the natives and working poor. Blundering into aiding Shark’s escape may be his finest moment. Not that he meant to do that.

With the army unit shot up and their headquarters blown to smithereens, many will need to escape to Brazil to avoid “justice” in the form of army reprisals. But catching a ride with the venal and bribe-taking riverboat skipper Chenko (Tito Junco) is no certain thing, as he’s in cahoots with Captain Ferrero.

With Castin delusionally hoping Djin will marry him and care for his daughter “if anything happens to me,” the mercenary Djin angling to get her hands on Castin’s diamonds, the priest skipping town and Shark laying low until the Eustolita casts off, will “escape” be that easy?

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Netflixable? Sofia Carson indulges her dead mother’s insistence on finishing “The Life List”

The one real surprise in the Netflix romance “The Life List” is a somewhat logical twist in the finale, one that finishes this Sofia Carson star vehicle with a solid-enough tug at the heartstrings.

It doesn’t wipe away the watchable schmaltz that permeates the picture’s three, slow-to-unfold acts or give us insight on true love or the human condition. But it’s still a nice wrap up, and would’ve made the movie sit easier on the memory had they not slapped a bland anti-climax on after of it.

It’s about a dying mother’s parting gift to her only daughter, an adult challenge to “complete” a life list of things thirteen-year-old Alex reasoned-out in and wrote down in middle school.

“Learn to drive.””Get a tattoo.” Make the most of a “mosh pit.” Read “Moby Dick,” the whole novel. No cheating. Learn to play “Clair de Lune” on the piano. Oh, and “Find true love.”

Sofia Carson (“Carry On,” “Purple Hearts”) is Alex, 30ish and adrift. She lost her teaching job, so she took on a nepotism gig at Mom’s Rose Cosmetics firm. She’s living with a lovable lump (Michael Rowland) who might has well have “dead end” tattooed on his chest. Estranged from her dad with siblings married and making babies, Alex is taking her sweet time to grow up.

That is what’s behind mother Elizabeth’s (Connie Britton, excellent as always) decision to carve out a corner of her will to deal with Alex’s indecision. Elizabeth was late breaking the news to her three kids that “It’s back,” the cancer that will kill her this time around. But she went beyond being fair with her will and left Alex DVDs with instructions about how she can collect her share of the inheritance.

“I may not be able to dig you out” of any more messes, Mom assures her. “But I can sure as hell leave you a shovel.”

Alex will be rewarded with fresh DVDs from mom every time she crosses a threshhold and checks off an item among the twelve on the list — “Become a great teacher.” “Reconcile with your dad (José Zúñiga).” And there’s the promise of a bigger payoff at the end.

Can she accomplish this in twelve months? The family’s young pup lawyer (Kyle Allen of “West Side Story”), executor of Elizabeth’s will, seems on the fence.

But he’s there when Alex comes to grips with “Do stand-up comedy,” if not checking her worth regarding Herman Melville’s epic novel of the sea and a great white whale.

The cute lawyer is in a relationship, but not to worry. There might be true love with the handsome, rich Brit (Sebastian De Souza of TV’s “The Great” and “Fair Play”) who volunteers at the women’s shelter, where lawyer Bradley fixes Alex up with a job.

The narrative is Hallmark Channel worthy in its “Rich, entitled New York beauty’s problems” plot and solutions. “Play one-on-one with a New York Knick” is possible when you’ve got access and money.

The sentimental stuff — some of it anyway — lands well enough, reconnecting with that childhood piano teacher to learn Debussy’s most famous composition for that instrument, for instance.

But there’s little humorous here that manages to much as a chuckle. The stand-up comedy bit, the tendency to want to dance and sing along whenever “That’s Not My Name” pops up on the radio or jukebox, are presented as funny but “cute” will have to suffice.

This seriously slight film from the director of “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason” struggles and strains and fails to justify its 123 minute running time, as in “It’s on Netflix, nobody will notice the funereal pacing.”

Theatrical cinema has had an awful time trying to remember how to write, act and film romances or romantic comedies. Netflix has had better luck in the genre by aiming young.

But “The Life List” is as bland as its title, a movie unworthy of comparison to most any “Bucket List” movie you can think of. Well, exxcept for that dramatic climax, the one that comes before the fender-bender of an anti-climax.

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

Cast: Sofia Carson, Kyle Allen, Sebastian De Souza, José Zúñiga,
Jordi Mollà, Michael Rowland and Connie Britton

Credits: Scripted and directed by Adam Brooks, based on a novel by Lori Nelson Spielman. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:03

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Movie Review: A Transgender Journey through the storm-traumatized Philippines — “Asog”

On the many islands and languages present in the Philippines, there are a couple of widely accepted words for transgender and transexual — bakla and asog or “tomboy. That suggests that there’s less mussing about with pronouns and somewhat less debate about the legitimacy of such people in the population.

That doesn’t mean discrimination and persecution of the country’s LGBTQ populace doesn’t exist. It just signifies a long-term acknowledgement that such people exist and that even scapegoating politicians have lost any war on their legitimacy before they start it.

“Asog” is a Filipino-Canadian docudrama about a transgender teacher’s island-hopping trek to a contest that she hopes will restart her “show business” career. She once co-hosted a regional TV chat show. She ends up taking a former student in search of his father along on the journey from Tacloban City on Leyte Island to Sicogon Island.

As the opening credits tell us, these “actors” are played by real people with the real problems depicted here. Mr. Andrade (Rey Aclao) wears dresses to work at school, but after hours and on stage, she is Jaya, a transgender woman in a committed releationship with Cyrus (Ricky Gacho, Jr.).

There is still debris everywhere, in between the buildings not destroyed by Super Typhoon Yolanda. That disaster, which killed well over 6,000 people, left a generation of Filipino children “traumatized,” Jaya narrates, something she keeps in mind when she’s dealing with her middle school students.

Jaya dreams of returning to (local TV) fame, even as she acknowledges “dreams can become nightmares”(in Spanish and Tagalog with English subtitles). The traumatized Cyrus may be supportive, but when Jaya quits her teaching job in a huff over how much cold, hard reality about how tough life she can share with her students, Cyrus is shaken.

Jaya’s going to be rehearsing and enduring this long, broke journey to Sicogon without him. But traumatized student Arnel is trying to get there to see his estranged father. They’ll travel together by sidecar trike and Jeepney bus, on foot and by undersized, under-regulated ferry boat to complete their respective quests.

They see the ruined but recovering land, hear about lost coconut crops and what it takes to bring orchards of trees back to life. And the viewer learns — from them and from Arnel’s estranged father (Raul Ramos, seen in a separate narrative thread) — about the predatory real estate developers, backed by armed goons and a government that turns a blind eye, who swoop in and displace the storm-impoverished locals by conning or simply strong-arming them off their land.

As you can tell from this long explanation, there plenty of texts and subtexts to this sometimes lighthearted film that sets up as a Filipino “Transamerica” or “Will & Harper,” a simple “road picture” that surveys the Philippines and transgender tolerance there.

Canadian director and co-writer Devlin, who did the dramedy “When the Storm Fades” and the documentary “Whoa Canada,” even has Jaya voice-over narrate this long, convoluted folk tale about the Crab King and his dealings with a frog and a mosquito that loosely ties in to the mythic origins of the word “Asog.”

Obscure touches like that make this cluttered, meandering film hard to follow.

The passing parade of locals, some more tolerant than others, scenes of storm damage and of how the working poor get by and get around are shuffled into scenes of Jaya trying to “teach” Arnel to stand up for himself and a too-brief encounter between Arnel and his dad, who is more concerned with all the friends and neighbors forced off Sicogon Island by rapacious resort developers.

We can see what Devlin saw in Aclao, his leading lady, an outsized “Tangerine” personality with dreams of small scale fame and domestic happiness. The themes and subtexts he wants to work into the narrative are compelling.

But the worthy, watchable and sometimes entertaining docudrama he parks her and all these “issues” in is too messy and voice-over chatty to easily understand or appreciate.

Rating: unrated, adult subject matter

Cast: Rey Aclao, Arnel Pablo, Ricky Gacho Jr.

Credits: Directed by Sean Devlin, scripted Rey Aclao, Sean Devlin and Arnel Pablo. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:44

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Movie Preview: Hiddleston stars in “The Life of Chuck” for Stephen King and Mike Flanagan

Mia Sara, Chewitel Ejiofor, Karren Gillan and Mark Hamill also star in this “Truman Show” vibe “genre bender” from the director of “Doctor Sleep” and the guy who wrote the book “Doctor Sleep” was based on.

An “ordinary guy” named “Chuck.” Doesn’t sound like Tom Hiddleston, but the dude did play Hank Williams, you know.

A summer release from Neon.

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Movie Review: Satire that Doesn’t Satisfy — “Death of a Unicorn”

Could it be that “Death of a Unicorn” isn’t as clever as the folks who made seemed to believe?

Oh it certainly could.

What was sold in the trailers as a dark, droll and possibly gory farce raised expectations. And distributor A24 has cachet. But writer-director Alex Scharfman’s satiric stab at rapacious capitalism, inbred “old money,” opportunistic greed and salvation turns out to be somewhat insufferable and most definitely interminable.

We get it. It’s obvious enough. And? So?

Gathering a willing and witty cast is almost no help as this lumbering beast just drags on and on, never quite bleeding out, never really perking to life. Watching the clock doesn’t help. Muttering “Make it go away” doesn’t either.

Jenna Ortega plays another dark and somewhat disturbed teen, a nose-ringed, acne-pocked coed joining lawyer dad Elliott (Paul Rudd) on an excursion to meet Dad’s moneybags clients.

The Leopolds are the latest generation of an old pharma fortune, with a vast chateau inside of an even more vast northern Canadian nature preserve, set up as a tax dodge that guarantees they’ll never lose the land or have neighbors.

But the flight and drive up, where Dad is to finalize his position as legal proxy on their board, is fraught, as daughter Ridley is neurotic and annoyed about Dad selling out, which is worrying. The Leopolds want to meet and judge Elliot’s “family.” And Elliot just wants to close this deal and set himself and his daughter up for life.

He’s so nervous about them blowing their big chance that he’s distracted on the drive. Next thing he knows, he’s run their rented Volvo into something in the wilderness.

That “something” is on four hooves, bleeds blue-green and has a horn in the center of its head. Whatever it is, Dad figures A) “it’s suffering” and B) it’ll queer his “deal.” He finishes it off and they stuff it in the trunk.

Smashed-up rental car or not, Dad won’t admit to the Leopolds what he’s done. Patriarch Odell (Richard E. Grant) is imperious and dying, with doting but dithering wife Belinda (Téa Leoni) unable to focus on much else. Cocky, fickle and unfiltered idiot son Shepard (Will Poulter) talks a good game, even if none of them could make it an hour without the constant attention of long-suffering cook/servant Griff (Anthony Carrigan) and humorless majordomo Shaw (Jessica Hynes).

The “thing,” “a horselike mamalia” in the trunk isn’t dead, and as the family glosses over Elliot’s lies about what he insists never happened, they ponder what it is after it kicks its way out and is put-down again — with a bullet.

“I think we know exactly what it is,” Ridley says, between nervous sucks on her vape pen.

It’s a unicorn of myth and legend, whose blood has curative powers. Ridley’s zits vanish, for instance.

And the minute that’s established, generations of exploitive inbreeding amongst the Leopolds kick in. How can they pretend to care about this rare species and their PR-promoted “moral compasses” and kill and exploit it to prolong Odell’s life and add to their vast fortune?

The almost-moronic kid wants to snort the ground up horn and mix the blood with his favorite aperitifs, for Pete’s sake.

Only Ridley, who touched its horn and tripped-out communing with the magical creature, sounds the warning. She’s caught up researching “The Unicorn Tapestries” and knows the “Christ analogy” that this animal is supposed to be — all-curing, eternal life-bestowing, like nature itself.

Of course lizard-brained humanity can’t have nice things like that without killing them.

At some point, a central problem in writer-director Scharfman’s horror comedy becomes its unbearable weight. Who cares? About any of this or anybody in it?

Killing and rekilling a less and less convincing the more we see it CGI creature is barely worth a smirk.

Was the script better on the page, or do his skills at pitching exceed his talents? Simply being on the crew of “The Witch” and a credited producer on “Blow the Man Down” hardly explains how this got the green light.

Love the cast, and scattered moments of this play as cutting or funny. The problem is, almost every one of those bits is in the trailer, which plays as a lot more amusing than this drag.

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Jenna Ortega, Paul Rudd, Téa Leoni, Will Poulter, Jessica Hynes, Anthony Carrigan and Richard E. Grant.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alex Scharfman. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:47

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Movie Preview: DiCaprio, Penn, Benicio and Teyana in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another”

“The Revolution” doesn’t begin here. It’s ongoing.

Well, it stopped for a while. And now we’ve got to “get the band back together” to save one of their own.

Oscar winners DiCaprio, Penn and del Toro are joined by Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor and Wood Harris.

And Alana Haim (“Licorice Pizza”) is in this nearly three hour epic to remind us that sometimes, Paul Thomas Anderson swings and misses.

Sept. 26, this awards-bait comic thriller opens wide and invites us in.

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Movie Review: Jason Statham takes care of business in Ayer’s “A Working Man”

The Brotherhood, the elders of the Russian mafia in America, solemnly gather for a war council in Chicago.

“We are facing a devil,” the mobster called Symon (Andrej Kaminsky) intones. And those gathered round him pause to hastily themselves — pious murderers, drug dealers and sex traffickers fearing the worst.

They’ve crossed Jason Statham. And we all know what that means.

Welcome to David Ayer World at the movies, a thriller where the mayhem is masterly, where guns are fetishized, sex traffickers sell to perverts in cape, ponytail and top hat, where the Russian villains aare in charge and the cops are on the take, where old military comrades get three scenes and the pub, nightclubs and bars are production-designed to death — pulsing lights, beautiful dancers and drugs, where gaudy mobsters mix and perhaps mate.

Ayer, of “Harsh Times” and “End of Watch,” co-scripted “A Working Man” with Sly Stallone, who would have certainly taken the starring role in this “Taken” variation 25 years ago. Their embellishments on Chuck Dixon’s novel render this vengeance/rescue thriller both more and less than standard issue Statham.

Statham plays Levon, a construction site supervisor for the Garcia family construction company, the guy whose daily pep talk to the crew is “Let’s all go home with the same amount of fingers we came with.”

He sleeps in his F-150 pickup, as often as not. Widowed, he’s spending all his money on lawyers in a custody fight with his father-in-law over his little girl (Isla Gie).

But there are signs that he’s more than the sum of his circumstances. A gang shows up to intimidate a co-worker, Levon gives them a beating with whatever is at hand — a bucket of nails, for instance. The street-sweeper shotgun? Hey, it’s Chicago. Don’t leave home without it.

So when we see the daughter (Arianna Rivas) of bosses Carla (Noemi Gonzalez) and Joe (Michael Peña), targeted, stalked and kidnapped on a night of celebrating completing “one semester” of college, we know who they’re turning to.

He can protest “I’m a different person, now.” But we know Royal Marine Levon will be kicking ass and taking names, not selling “cartoon balloons in town.”

He consults with his blind archer mate Gunny, a fellow veteran (David Harbour) for reasons only a cut-and-paste screenwriter can justify.

And things get ugly in a hurry as Levon waterboards a complicit bartender, meets his first Russian (Jason Flemyng) and crosses every line there is to cross, and faces the wrath of The Brotherhood.

“Who are you?” and “What are you?” will be asked as he kicks, knocks, slices and dices every Ivan who isn’t on the White House payroll in search of plucky coed Jessie.

The violence is in-your-face the sets are striking and the villains are cartoonishly-dressed clowns even as the plot features gaps and lapses that upend any logic the journey from A-to-B that the formula demands.

And the one-liners are “thought we would have a little chat” canned, but delivered with Statham relish.

“Do you know who I am?”

“No. Should I?”

It works, in that arch-action-vehicle-built on-cliches sort of way.

And Statham delivers the requisite sadistic beatings, stabbings and shootings as he and we walk the predictable primose path down to the morgue, or the sex traffickers’ abandoned mansion hook-up party where it all comes to a head — one of them wearing a bedazzled festive top hat.

Rating: R, violence, sex trafficking, drugs, profanity

Cast: Jason Statham, Arianna Rivas, Jason Flemyng, Eve Mauro, Noemi Gonzalez, Michael Peña and David Harbour.

Credits: Directed by David Ayer, scripted by Sylvester Stallone and David Ayer, based on a novel by Chuck Dixon. An MGM release.

Running time: 1:56

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