Movie Nation

Who says feel-good tear-jerkers can’t have a little edge?

“Wish Man” may be the story of the Arizona police officer who founded theMake-a-Wish Foundation, the quintessence of “heartwarming” as subject matter. But it’s got violence, dirty cops and alcohol abuse, to go along with flashbacks to a traumatized childhood.

Hell, it’s even got profanity. You know how cops talk.

The squishy, emotional stuff is intercut with the story of a highway patrolman being framed for beating a suspect he most certainly never beat. But in British writer-director Theo Davies’ messy, meandering but heartfelt and righteous film, it all points Officer Frank Shankwitz (Andrew Steel) toward the path he eventually took — making the dying wishes of children come true.

The film opens on Frank’s 1950s awful childhood of poverty, bullying and neglect. His mother (Fay Masterson) drags him from place to place, trailer to hovel, just to keep him out of the reach of Frank’s father.

Her motivations, the film suggests, are purely venal. She just wants to deny her ex (Jason Gerhardt) access to his son. Even though he’s from Chicago, Dad wears cowboy hats and boots. And he teaches young Frank “There’s only one way to make a promise — a cowboy’s binding contract!”

That’s a handshake exchanged over a fence, showing a man’s as good as his word.

But handshake or no, it’s mom who sneaks them out of town again, abandoning the family dog as she does. There has GOT to be more to this story than this, but never mind.

Decades later, it’s 1980 and Frank has become an Arizona Highway Patrolman. He’s a womanizer who gets phone numbers for letting pretty speeders off with a warning, a honky tonk barfly used to making women jump when he barks, “C’mere!”

Kitty Carlisle (not the famous one) doesn’t respond well to that. But events will throw the two of them at each other soon enough.

We see the drunk driving traffic stop that derails Frank’s career (the formidable Dale Dickey plays the foul-mouthed, two-fisted driver). And later we see the accident that makes his heart stop for three minutes.

That scene, by the way, with an allegedly trained officer on-site choosing to let a PASSERBY administer CPR, is the dumbest moment in the movie.

Frank’s sergeant (Robert Pine) assigns new-secretary-hire Kitty (Kirby Bliss Blanton) to stay with skull-fractured Frank until he’s out of the woods and on the road to recovery.

Yeah, she thought that was out of line, even in 1980.

The story of Frank’s departmental and legal difficulties plays out in the 1980 fictive “present,” as snippets of many bad stops in the travels of his childhood pop up to remind us of how rough Frank always had it. As a boy, one diner owner (Danny Trejo) might fire him, with the angry cook delivering a terrible beating afterwards. But another diner owner (Steven Michael Quezada) comes along to take him on, feed him and teach him his second and most important life lesson.

“Remember, someone needs help, you give it to him!”

All of which points to that 1980 moment when Larry Wilcox, playing an old friend of the department, shows up and gives us that “first wish,” a dying child who is obsessed with the TV show “CHiPs.” Yeah, that’s cute, casting Wilcox in that part.  

“Wish Man” unfolds like a movie with multiple personality disorder. The film it compares to in my mind is that TV movie about the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous, “My Name is Bill W.” But there’s this whole violent and corrupt Frank Whaley/Tom Sizemore subplot, playing bad cops who cover for each other and implicate Frank in an incident of police brutality that he didn’t commit.

And there’s the love story, which drifts from afterthought to perfunctory. As I said at the outset, the picture is just “messy.” Writer-director Davies has only one other feature credit, “Five Hour Friends” starring Tom Sizemore. His inexperience at wrestliing this cluttered script into something tighter and more coherent shows.

But Steel, a Sam Rockwell look-alike, does a decent job of making this cop no angel. Frank’s change from ill-tempered hell-raiser to granter of wishes is thrust upon him, although the events of his life are meant to show this as fated-to-be.

It’s no surprise that’s some well-known players didn’t hesitate to sign on to a film about such a righteous subject — Whaley, Sizemore, Trejo, Dickey and Pine are joined, in the latter acts, by Bruce Davison. All give good value.

I can’t say “Wish Man” is a great film, or even a particularly good one. But it has heart, Steel & Co. make it likeable and writer-director Davies makes its emotional payoff pay off.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, with violence, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Andrew Steel, Kirby Bliss Blanton, Fay Masterson, Frank Whaley, Tom Sizemore, Dale Dickey, Robert Pine, Danny Trejo, and Bruce Davison

Credits: Written and directed by Theo Davies.  A Vision Time/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48

Considering what they did to “Lion King” and “Aladdin,” let’s keep our expectations low.

Looks pretty though. War, real spectacle.
China will be pleased, and come next year, we might be too.

Here’s a well-intentioned World War I quickie designed to steal a smidgen of the thunder of the Oscar-contender, “1917,” which debuts Christmas Day in some of the country.

“The Great War” is about racism in the segregated American Expeditionary Forces in the last hours of World War I.

It stars a mostly-unknown cast, with the commanding Ron Perlman as U.S. General John J. Pershing, and Billy Zane as an apparently fictional top aid to the general.

Perlman looks nothing like Pershing, and if you’ve never thought northern Minnesota, where this was filmed, looks anything like WWI France, you’re not alone.

It’s an ahistorical tale about the patrol that has to fight its way through German lines to track down a “lost platoon” of African American soldiers in the Argonne as the Germans frantically try to grab territory that the screenplay suggests they could “keep” after the 11-11-1918 Armistice.

Never happened. But here’s what writer-director Steven Luke, who directed a WWII movie no one saw called “Wunderland” as Luke Schuetzle, was probably inspired by.

General Pershing’s nickname, related by Perlman in the film, was“Black Jack” (a “softer” version of the nickname) thanks to his service leading Buffalo Soldiers, African American cavalrymen, in the 1890s. The film suggests his admiration for African American fighting men, even though the Army was rigidly segregated during the war. African American combat units did fight — under French command — because Pershing was determined to keep “real” U.S. troops under U.S. command.

What those who fought it came to call “The Great War” did have an instance of American troops “lost” behind enemy lines, the famous “Lost Battalion.”

But as World War I on the Western Front was fought almost entirely on French soil, with the losers (the Germans) in general retreat right up to the Armistice. It’s idiotic to imply fierce fighting was going on “to hold ground” when it was French territory, both before and after the war.

So one can praise the idea of putting the racism,” how most of the men feel about colored troops,” on display in a “Saving African American Army Privates” mission the most racist among them resent and complain about. It’s just that the guy who wrote and directed this pine forest-set, guys-with-anachronistic weapons war movie didn’t make much of an effort to get it right.

Bates Wilder plays the shell-shocked captain who, with the help of an African American doughboy guide (?) played by Hiram A. Murray, must lead a platoon of Brooklyn Italian-American racists and guys who sing the old Confederate marching song, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” in search of fighting men pinned down by the Huns somewhere out there.

Perlman’s Pershing reads aloud from a letter written by Abraham Lincoln, the searching soldiers pass by a Red Cross aid station, quarrel, suffer losses during firefights and use the word “boy” a lot.

And the African American officer (Leonard Searcy) leading those trapped Buffalo soldiers gets off the best line of the picture.

“If it ain’t black, kill it!”

The script is mostly recycled war movie cliches, with the props — guns, explosions, etc. — occasionally giving away the paltry budget. The picture may pursue an interesting angle, but the writing, performances and unconvincing combat (high school drama “stage punches” are thrown), makeup make it impossible for characters to engage us in their story.

The seed of a good idea is here, but Luke ignored the historical record, something he could have easily written around, even made Billy Zane a French-accented officer who urges Pershing to save this “lost platoon.” And Luke staged and filmed the quest in the the least dramatic ways, and he didn’t have the money to polish what he ended up putting on the screen.

No wonder he changed his name. I wonder if he’ll do it again.

MPAA Rating:R for war violence

Cast: Bates Wilder, Hiram A. Murray, Jordan McFadden, Ron Perlman and Billy Zane

Credits: Written and directed by Steven Luke. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:48

Here’s a straight-up mob moll hides out with a hitman thriller, with a few Latin American twists.

“En Brazos de un Asesino” (In the Arms of an Assassin) is a Dominican production, set in Mexico, about a young woman, Sarai (Alicia Sanz of “Billionaire Boys’ Club”) held as a sex slave by a drug lord. When a hired assassin (William Levy, who produced and co-wrote this) shows up to be paid for his next assignment, Sarai sees her chance and escapes from the clutches of Javier (Roberto Sosa).

Javier, of course, wants her back. She’s his “favorite,” we hear. Even though the killer insists, in smoldering Spanish (with English subtitles) that “Interfering is not my business,” she demands that he “Take me to the border.” As if that snub nose .38 she’s holding on him will see to that.

What follows is a pursuit and a series of bust-ups and shoot-outs as the bad guy (the assassin) kills legions of badder guys, all to keep this woman he seems to regard as “a bargaining chip…a guarantee” alive and out of the clutches of the gang.

Simple, right? It’s every “Transporter” movie, and a whole lot of “hitman” romances, including TV’s “Good Behavior” from a couple of years ago. How can you screw that up?

Well, one way is to treat this as the potential franchise debut (it’s from the first in a series of novels) it is, and slow-dance past the climax — which arrives just over an hour into the picture.

Everything that follows, more violence, sex scenes, intrigues, villas and private jets and even a sexed-up “Eyes Wide Shut” sex party for the rich — is just 33 minutes of anti-climax.

The trick to launching a franchise is to make the first movie so good that it leaves open the possibility. The fights here are crisply rehearsed, staged, shot and edited. The hero is a rock-hard-abs hunk, and the heroine sexy and fiesty.

There’s nothing original much to this, no surprises. The villain’s violent sexpot sister (never ID’d by name, so I have no idea who she is in the credits) is a hissable monster, and Sosa makes a fine heavy. It’s just that “En Brazos” is never anything more than servicable hit-man/romance filler.

The film’s forward motion comes to a halt with that climax, and nothing afterwards gets it back up on its feet.  

Matías Moltrasio made his feature directing debut with this, but blaming the misfire on a “rookie mistake” doesn’t take into account what the producers wanted out of this, the film’s real shortcomings.

Maybe we’ll see more from this “Killing Sarai” series. If not, “En Brazos de un Asesino” is stark proof of why that didn’t happen. 

MPAA Rating: R for bloody violence, sexual content and nudity

Cast: William Levy, Alicia Sanz, Adrián Lastra, Roberto Sosa

Credits: Directed by Matías Moltrasio, script by Jeff Goldberg and William Levy, based on a novel by J.A. Remdenski. A Pantelion/Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:41

Not everything is better in French, even though it sometimes feels that way in movies.

“Let’s Dance” is a light, artsy and sweet French variation on “dance battle” genre, home to many “Step Up” installments, “You Got Served,” “Battle of the Year” and the like.

It’s every bit as athletic and graceful — on the floor — as those films. There are cute touches, not the least of which is its central premise — bringing a corps de ballet to hip hop.

But whatever its French charms, its a “Step Up” movie without any sexual heat and nothing resembling sweat. Director Ladislas Chollat keeps his camera too far removed from the exertion and action far too often for the dance to pull us in.

The story’s clever deviations from formula don’t plug the holes in the picture’s heart. Romance is shortchanged, heartbreak is brushed over and serendipity overrules anything logical about the plot.

The leads are likable, and the comic scenes of conflict, inspiration and culture clash pay off. But the whole is missing too much to be a compelling 100 minute sit-through.

Three friends show up in Paris, 20ish dancers ready to join a crew and compete in the Masters of Hip Hop competition.

Joseph (Rayane Bensetti),  Emma (Fiorella Campanella) and Karim (Mehdi Kerkouche) are gambling that they’ll be able to crash at Emma’s brother’s tiny flat, that they’ll be able to land jobs to support themselves, and that Emma’s inside-track on joining the crew of choreographer/dancer Youri (Brahim Zaibat) isn’t just for her.

Youri comes off as a jerk, bully and a spurned lover when Emma shows up with hunkier Joseph in tow. But one backflip-filled Joseph audition (45 seconds in length) later, and they’re in. Just like that.

We know it won’t last. The “my girl,” “No, MY girl” (in French, with English subtitles) tiffs grow, and Joseph and Karim find themselves knocking on a man’s door in the middle of the night, kicked out of Emma’s life and Youri’s dissolving crew.

The first interesting twist is this man they’ve come to stay with Rémi (Guillaume de Tonquédec) and Joseph have history. And as we’ve heard Joseph’s voice mail to his father, announcing he’s run off to Paris, we know he’s not his father. All we know is that he has a ballet school, used to be a dancer and is irritated as all get-out that the kid has shown up at his door.

The mind has a LOT of screen time to figure out this relationship — hustler-lover, uncle in the arts, first teacher — before the Big Reveal on what they are to each other.

What’s less mysterious is series of absurdly fortunate events that solves every character’s most urgent dilemma. Joseph and Karim need work. Joseph, now leading cast-offs from Youri’s crew, needs to learn how to choreograph.

And Rémi needs these messy, freeloading punks to pull their weight, pitch in, and oh — by the way — save his job at the ballet school that bears his name.

Teach his ballerinas and danseurs (the men) “to let go…dance like CRAZY!”

He contradicts himself in suggesting that Joseph and Karim teach “what cannot be taught,” but no matter. All of their problems can be solved by injecting this “new blood” into the stodgy school.

And maybe the hip hop crew can benefit from the relationship, too.

Scenes show the corps rebelling, then contemptuously slow-walking through Karim’s amusing, energetic routines. Rémi shows Joseph how to see dance in everday life as the street life of Paris pedestrians is transformed into a big, brief dance number.

There’s a cute, stubborn ballerina (Alexia Giordano) as uptight as her hair-bun, until Joseph ridicules her in class — “I don’t want to see the little rich girl! I want to see the DANCER!”

To its credit, the movie doesn’t lose itself in the “battles,” and the standard conflicts in such movies are played down. Youri disappears, and the “battle” is limited to an opening audience, and a finale. There are still conflicts, but the “love triangle” set up here is a non-starter.

Kerkouche, de Tonquédec and Giordano have the showiest roles. Bensetti has a kind of Garrett Hedlund in baggy camos quality, but doesn’t give us much more than his good looks in this performance. Some of it’s the writing, but there’s not a lot of flash in the actor behind the character, either.

Having reviewed all of the “Step Up” movies in theaters with the films’ target audience, I’m curious as to who will be interested in this PG (instead of PG-13) rated dance-off dramedy, in French (unless you switch languages for it) and with subtitles.

Sure, “Step Up” is ancient history now. No reason to assume anybody under 18 has seen any of the films, or even the Youtube series that spun out of them. Is the demand still out there for this genre, and if so, will they dig it without all the muscular, sweaty and sexual close-ups and the romances that spin out of that Invitation to the Dance?

MPAA Rating: TV-14

Cast: Rayane Bensetti, Alexia Giordano, Guillaume de Tonquédec, Mehdi Kerkouche, Fiorella Campanella, Brahim Zaibat

Credits: Directed by Ladislas Chollat, script by Ladislas Chollat and Joris Morio. A Netflix (Pathe) release.

Running time: 1:49

“I See You” is a thriller of urban legend topicality and Hitchcockian plot twists. Well-acted, cleverly-plotted and directed with extra attention being paid to tone, menace and hiding its secrets, the best word I can think of to describe it is so archaic as to risk an “OK, Boomer,” from the inexperienced and unread who use that  put-down.

It’s a corker.

Oscar-winner Helen Hunt stars as a small-town therapist and marriage counseler, married to a cop (Jon Tenney of “Scandal” and the most recent “True Detective”), mother to an enraged teen (Judah Lewis).

Why is Connor so mad? Mother Jackie Harper has cheated. Greg, the dad, is sleeping on the couch. And nothing Jackie does to begin the process of patching this up is working, especially with the kid.

“You ruined our family, and you should f—–g PAY for it!”

But this marital melodrama isn’t what “I See You” is about. It’s background, a major setting, a “Psycho” sidetrack for the coastal town’s bigger problem.

Young boys are disappearing. We’ve seen one ride his bike into the forest, and SNATCHED from it by an unseen force. The community is organizing mass searches.

The cops are leaning on Greg’s partner, Spitzky (Gregory Alan Williams) to provide clues. The modus operandi of the disappearances matches a case he handled 15 years before.

And strange things are happening in the Harper house — weird noises, doors slamming shut behind the inhabitants, coffee mugs and silverware turning up in odd places, hamster escapes.

We sense the evil, and perhaps the next target. Or perhaps the target’s the perpetrator. That’s when a seemingly random death complicates matters, a body must be buried and this tale takes a turn toward the bizarre. Twist upon twist turns in on itself.

No spoilers here, save for this one word, not nearly as current as it once was — “phrogging.”

The frog that best applies here is the one, out of hundreds of misfiring indie thrillers one reviews in a given year, that a critic kisses and is shocked to see turn into a prince.

“I See You” was directed by Adam Randall, whose only prior feature film credit was “iBoy,” and he cooks up a polished picture of ominous aeriel shots, creepy extreme close-ups and actors giving utterly convincing renditions of confusion, guilt, pain and panic. Little that we see is alarming. The overcast skies, fracturing family and “zing” sound effects when a knife shows up just contribute to the dread that the film feeds on.

Hunt anchors a fine cast, which includes Libe Barer and Owen Teague in the latter acts. But first-time screenwriter Devon Graye is the break-out star, here. He’s an actor, perhaps best-known for playing the young serial killer of serial killers “Dexter” in episodes of that series. Here, he sets us up for one movie, and abruptly shifts into “What were we REALLY seeing/hearing back there?” mode.

That sudden change in point of view is handled just gracefully enough to not take us out of the movie. And as it sets up the twists folding into twists that follow,  he shows real skill at weaving in disparate storylines and manipulating the arc of characters.

In other words, SOMEbody was paying attention to those “Dexter,” “C.S.I.,” “American Horror Story” and “The Mentalist” scripts he’s been reading and acting-out for a dozen years.

Taut, smart and satisfying, “I See You” is the sleeper of the month, and should put Graye on the radar as a screenwriter to watch. And it should remind Hollywood that if smart cookie Helen Hunt sees something in it, this is a project worth filming.

MPAA Rating: R, for violence and language

Cast: Helen Hunt, Jon Tenney, Judah Lewis, Libe Barer, Owen Teague and Gregory Alan Williams

Credits: Directed by Adam Randall, script by Devon Graye. A Saban release.

Running time: 1:38

Partly because he drives the most collectible Aston Martin on Earth.

Looks pretty cool for an April thriller, launched to get an early jump on summer.

An accomplished cast, including William Hurt, Christopher Plummer, Ed Harris, Samuel L. Jackson and Sebastian Stan, impressive combat footage, a potentially compelling story?

Too bad “Roadside Attractions” has“The Last Full Measure.”Nobody’ll see it when it comes out Jan. 24.

I’ve seen a couple of Ned Kelly biopics over the years.

He’s generally portrayed as Australia’s Billy the Kid. A rebel, cunning, ruthless, celebrated, infamous.

Here he’s starting “a revolution.”

George MacKay is Kelly, with Russell Crowe, Charlie Hunnam and Nicholas Hoult in the cast. Let’s hope it gets decent U.S. distribution.

Here’s a devilish dose of macabre, masochistic guilt for everything you bought on Black Friday, and just in time for Christmas!

With “In Fabric,” horror auteur Peter Strickland (“The Duke of Burgundy,” “Berberian Sound Studio”) takes on consumerism, wage slavery and the global curse that is fashion, viewing them all through the prism of the lurid, kinky ’70s horror films of Dario Argento and his ilk.

It’s a tale of a dress possessed, giving everyone who wears it a rash. As if that’s not enough, this stylish 1970s “Ambassadorial Function Dress” has a mind of its own. If the rash and the dreams it provokes don’t drive the wearer mad, the damned thing will slide its metal hanger down the metal rack of your closet — screech screech — and try to suffocate you, or worse.

Returns? Even harder in Britain than they are in America. Especially when you’re dealing with a staff that just checked out of the Hotel Transylvania.

A dark comedy awash in style that creeps you out and pins the “ick” meter won’t be to every taste. Violence isn’t the half of it. Menstruation to masturbation, this one covers a lot of bases, none of them pleasant. But with each passing minute that “In Fabric” weaves its chillingly comic spell, it wraps the viewer in a shroud we can’t escape without tripping as we do.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste of “Secrets & Lies” and TV’s “Without a Trace” is Sheila, a newly-separated bank teller with only her rebellious teen painter son (Jaygann Ayeh) for company. She could do with a little companionship, and this being the age of landlines, rotary phones, answering machines and personal ads in the local weekly, she’s starting to date.

Montages of still photographs and bursts of retro TV ads for “The Sales” reinforce the idea that this is Britain in the ’70s, and that January — the big post-Christmas shopping frenzy — awaits. That’s when Sheila sets out to buy the dress.

The store she chooses is the most peculiar clothier this side of “Seinfeld’s” version of J. Peterman. And the Slavic-accented sales clerk (Fatma Mohamed) promises her “a panoply of temptation,” a dress that will flatter her and fill “the crevices of clarity” in her date’s mind.

Damn. That’s some sales pitch. Miss Luckmoore (Mohamed, a mainstay of Strickland’s films) is pale as death, dressed in black and given to the plummy locutions of an exotic Mistress of English as a Second Language.

“Your dressing room awaits…your dress to coalesce into a simple union of wonders!”

Thus begins Sheila’s dark night of the retail fashion soul — a rash, nightmares, a dress that literally does battle with her washing machine and might just smother the insufferable and insulting artist’s model (Gwendoline Christie) who has taken up with her son.

Better keep the receipt, honey.

Sheila’s battle with the scarlet dress — what to do about it, with it — is but the opening salvo of a war. Others will be helpless in its thrall. And with the perverse rituals Miss Luckmoore, her boss (Richard Bremmer) and staff perform on store manikins after hours, it’s no wonder. That dress is ready-to-wear Satanic possession.

The British emigree Strickland makes his home, if not his movies, in Budapest, Hungary. His obsession with Transylvanian Gothic reaches full flower with “In Fabric,” from its blood-red dress-of-death to the Daughters of Dracula sales staff in the women’s wear department at Dentley & Soper’s.

He finds humor in sex scenes, with one or two partners. He scores his satiric points not just in caveat emptor, or let the covetous beware. Through Sheila’s two weirdo (gay, nosy and invasive) bank bosses (Julian Barratt and Steve Oram) Strickland scores points on the rising imbalance in the employer/employee relationship.

Their clucking voices have a touch of passive aggression and threat, their eyes close in almost orgasmic delight at noting every imagined shortcoming, every psychological issue extrapolated from some idiotic invented transgression that they lay on Sheila in their best human resources-speak. An “insolent salutation” could be a black mark on her record.

Mohamed is the break-out in this fine cast, her deft way with the florid, Slavic-accented poetry of retail scripted by Strickland is a thing of rare beauty.

The score, by Cavern of Anti-Matter, smacks of electronic harpsichords swirling into power chords — a Walter Carlos before Wendy Carlos came to be evocation of the ’70s. The montages of still photographs — people shopping, street scenes, etc. — have a “Night of the Living Dead/Zapruder Film” tint.

“In Fabric” takes a while to settle in, and that goes for the viewing experience, too. It takes a few minutes for us to surf the wave Strickland wants us on, to get in sync with the vibe he’s going for.

But rare is the horror movie that finds off-the-rack laughs in everything from ’70s fashions and consumerism to ’70s British sex and slang, and does it with haute couture style.

MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content including a scene of aberrant behavior, and some bloody images

Cast: Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Fatma Mohamed, Hayley Squires, Leo Bill, Julian Barratt and Steve Oram

Credits: Written and directed by Peter Strickland. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:58