Movie Nation

Think “Hustlers” is just about strippers ripping off lap-dance clients in a well-publicized New York skin club?

Writer-director Lorene Scafaria, who scripted “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” and “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World,” sees this “true” story in epic parable terms.

These are the She Wolves of Wall Street, working class women who screwed over The Street the way Wall Street screwed over America. And Scafaria treats them as classic antiheroines, glammed-up, sisterhood strong and when the need arose — pitiless about the “Masters of the Universe” of the 2008 Great Recession, who should have been in prison when a gang of out of work pole dancers lured them into maxing out their credit cards in the years just after that.

Scafaria and a game cast headed by Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez — glittery cleavage, T-backed, tattooed and feminine to the max — strike a blow for equality in the ruthlessness they employ in carrying out their crimes, showcased on the dance floor with dazzling lighting and stripperwear, stalked into combat in the longest tracking shots this side of Tarantino.

It feels lightweight at times, with some of its rough edges rubbed off for the sake of sisterhood. But man, this caper comedy packs a punch.

Wu sheds any shred of “Crazy Rich Asians” naivete and sweetness as Destiny, a skinny dancer with a pasted-on “I need the money” smile and a lack of polish that earns her the protective pity of Ramona (Lopez) the Queen Bee of Moves, the club based on New York’s Scores, over-familiar in its day due to the constant plugging it got on Howard Stern’s radio show.

Destiny lives with her grandmother, who knows her as Dorothy. There’s something of Dorothy in the way she approaches the work, not as an innocent, but not the most competent of “new girls.” She’s not that “new” either. Moves is just a step up from the dive where she used to offer inept lap dances.

Lopez, in a showcase scene, demonstrates how to work the pole to make the faceless Johns in the audience rain bills on the stage. “Ankle hook, knee hook, table top,” selling the sultry with every move, shaking her butt, arching her back and WORK that hair, girl –WORK it.

With another dancer (stripper turned rapper Cardi B), Ramona improves Destiny’s lap dancing, and dollar bills are soon raining down.

Some of the legion of girls at the club, mothered by “Mom” (Mercedes Ruehl) bond. That’s how Ramona gets Destiny, Mercedes (Keke Palmer) and Annabelle (Lili Reinhart) to join her in a self-preservation scheme when the 2008 Recession hits and the Wall Street types they’ve been sizing up, cozying up to and servicing for years suddenly are spending a lot less money at strip clubs.

After the fact, Dorothy tells this tale to a reporter, played by Julia Stiles (the “Bourne” movies) with a perfect blend of empathy and horror. Because the short cuts these ladies take to separate rich guys from their cash would make anybody blanch.

Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez star in HUSTLERS

The script, based on a magazine article about the real women who did this hustling, fails to make the Robin Hood points it shoots for. And the distinctly feminine touches — shopping sprees (buying everything with stacks of dollar bills), line dancing, Christmas gift exchanges — are as cliched as any heist picture or caper comedy’s well-worn tropes.

The movie reduces the menfolk into simple marks — the pricey watch, the expensive shoes, the aggressive cheat, the power broker (Frank Whaley, the only recognizable male star in the cast) not shy about spending thousands for a single memorable night.

A hundred years of women being treated like meat in such movies makes this feel like a little payback. And it works. Only the women have agency, here.

Wu is transformed and Palmer (who had the title role in the indie “Pimp” last year) long ago left her child-star image behind. But Lopez is the stand-out in this cast, giving Ramona many facets — mother figure and real-life mother, user, cold-blooded cash hound and a polished dancer who has the muscle memory, the highlights, glitter, lip gloss and furs of a woman who has ridden this horse as far as she can take it and is ready, willing and able to “transition” into bigger paydays as demand for her stripping dries up.

“Hustlers” finds awkward laughs in female-on-male cruelty, loses its nerve in the late acts, but finds its heart in the finale. And it hits the “I don’t want to depend on anybody” empowerment message awfully hard.

It may not be the “cause” it tries to become, but if there’s justice at the box office, it will become a phenomenon.

And only Hollywood’s short memory could stand in the way of awards nominations for Lopez, who finally has a role as gritty and mercenary as the nickname she seemed ill-suited to wear at her pop star peak — “Jenny from the Block.” Ramona’s got rocks, too, and you’ll be shocked at what she did to get them.

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

Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Cardi B, Constance Wu, Keke Palmer, Lizzo, Julia Stiles, Mercedes Ruehl, Madeleine Brewer and Frank Whaley

Credits: Written and directed by Lorene Scafaria, based on a magazine article by Jessica Pressler. An STX release.

Running time: 1:

“Inspired by a true story,” women working at New York’s notorious Scores strip club, taking the marks for all they were worth. Or some of it, anyway.

Are the Toronto Film Fest group-thinkers right, that Lopez an itd STX have a shot at an Oscar nomination for her in a Sept. film about strippers/thieves?

We shall see what we see when we see it.

She is haggard, as something in her life, this city or her apartment is keeping her awake at night.

He meets her, inscrutably scrutinizes her apartment as he walks from room to room. He listens.

“Mind if I lie down?” he asks.

“Is that typical?”

It is. And that’s where the “house tuner” reaches his conclusion. His diagnosis?

“I think you need a new toaster. That should do it.”

She’s mildly flabbergasted. That’s IT? But he’s certain, something to do with a minor chord the toaster resonates at clashing with her fridge’s motor hum.

“I’ll have a new model sent over soon.”

The first seventeen minutes of “The Sound of Silence” plays like the best short film in many a year. It’s compact, provocative and thanks to the serenity of its star, Peter Sarsgaard, and fraught exhaustion of the client (Rashida Jones), draws us in pretty much instantly. It leaves us with a sense of whimsy unexplained — mystery.

It’s so good you figure out “The Sound of Silence” was a short film before reading that in the credits. Alas, not every short film can sustain its interest when the mystery is unraveled, when the characters, story and back story are augmented to feature film length.

“Before I Disappear” is one recent example of a short turned into a winning feature.  “Silence” isn’t on a par with that, but compelling performances and an unbroken tone established by the acting, the sound design and a dimly-lit production design make this eccentric indie drama worth your while.

Peter Lucian has been studying New York City’s sound for years, covering neighborhoods, breaking out a tuning fork or two — or three — finding the pitch, the chord, the equivalent musical note for the sonic nature of that corner of town.

He takes meticulous notes, by hand and old analog microcassette recorder. He keeps a vast hand-notated map detailing his findings. He has an academic mentor (Austin Pendleton) who might help him get his “G Major Theory” published.

But that’s his passion. His vocation is consulting on what ails people’s lives, tonically and sonically. It might be a couple that’s worried about the stress their relationship is undergoing, a newcomer to the city wanting “soundproofing” or, as with Ellen (Jones), somebody who isn’t sure why they’re not sleeping.

Word of mouth recommendations are his lifeblood in a city where faddish cures, “readings” and treatments are worn like status symbols, something you know that your circle of friends have never heard of.

Lucian has even been profiled in The New Yorker’s quirky “Talk of the Town” life-in-this-city column.

Sarsgaard suggests preternatural calm as this lone prophet of sonic sanity in the cacaphony of the Big Apple. He is a professional with the resolute confidence of a man who knows what he’s about. And the messages clients leave on his answering machine bear out his unerring ear, and his success rate.

The movie, of course, is about the woman who becomes his greatest challenge. She is recently single, 40ish, works for a non profit helping the homeless. And his “toaster” prescription doesn’t do the trick.

He can talk about “foundation notes” and the “tonic” landscape surrounding her, the notion of “oppressive chords” and the “electrical silence” of a building that’s been perfectly grounded (as any recording studio or radio engineer about that).

She’s still not sleeping. And she’s throwing his game off. His mojo has fled.

A go-getter grad assistant (Tony Revolori) meant to help collate Peter’s research doesn’t help. Meeting with the CEO (Bruce Altman) of a company meaning to profit from giving frazzled New Yorkers more visually and aurally tranquil surroundings shows Peter’s obsession with his “great discovery.”

“This is about universal constants, not commerce.”

And Ellen is curious, maybe even attracted to this soft-spoken oddball who cannot, for the life of him, find a simple sonic solution to what airs her. Whatever she has, it’s contagious, and it derails his equilibrium.

None of these plot embellishments does much to extend or heighten our enjoyment of “The Sound of Silence.” Sarsgaard gives the fictional Peter a nice downward spiral, retreating into himself, lashing out, grasping for whatever it was that her troubling case (her office makes him fumble for sound-canceling earbuds) took away from him.

Jones has less to play around with, a bigger leap to make. Awkward on-the-spectrum types like this chap are catnip to the opposite sex ONLY in the movies. “Silence” needed more scenes with her and about her, less of Peter’s rising paranoia about his “discovery” and those who might steal it.

But we still have two empathetic actors playing compelling characters to latch onto. And we still have that perfect short film that is never completely subsumed in the “noise” that fleshing out this charming, autumnal tale of loneliness, sleeplessness, sounds and silences in the big city gives us.

MPAA Rating: unrated with PG-level content

Cast: Peter Sarsgaard, Rashida Jones, Austin Pendleton, Tony Revolori, Bruce Altman

Credits: Directed by Michael Tyburski, script by Ben Nabors and Michael Tyburski, based on their short film. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:28

The guiding ethos of “Aquarela,” by the Russian documentarian Viktor Kossakovsky, is water, in all its forms, reminding us who Earth really belongs to and the warnings water is giving us.

Men — Russians, apparently — struggle with winching a sunken station wagon from a frozen lake that is usually frozen solid “three weeks longer” than they’re used to. It’s tedious work, shown at excruciating length. It’s also darkly comic, with tragic undertones. We see this work in the foreground as behind them, SUVs dash across the too-thin ice, crashing through it off-camera (an attempted rescue fails).

A Greenland glacier (no locale is identified on screen, and there is no narration) rumbles and CRACKS and calves off icebergs, and we’re shown the underside of these mountains of ice underwater, and how it dwarfs a 60 foot cutter–rigged ketch used in the production.

That ketch, with an intrepid crew of two, experiences “Lord, thy sea is so great and my boat so small” in thunderous, rolling seas, some of the most striking sailing footage ever captured.

Waterfalls, floodwaters overwhelming Third World villages and a dam in the American West, a hurricane pounding Miami, there’s water water everywhere, and we’d better watch out for it and take care of how we pollute it.

Anyway, that’s what I took from “Aquarela.” Lacking narration and scene-setting intertitles, the viewer is overwhelmed with images of our Waterworld, presented in mesmerizing detail (super high resolution projection is available in some theaters) without explanation, nature’s beauty and power for their own sake, with humanity’s hapless efforts to cope with it.

It’s stunning stuff. But lacking a story, per se, and with no narrative drive, “Aquarela” is almost sleep-inducing, like a loop playing on super-high-resolution video on the screen.

Kossakovsky and his crew bowl us over with images which would make glorious second unit footage on a movie with an actual story to tell. “Aquarela” hasn’t enough shape to its water to recommend it as a stand-alone feature.

MPAA Rating: PG for some thematic elements

Credits: Directed by Viktor Kossakovsky. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:29

It’d be fun to drop in on the tail end of the documentary “Liam Gallagher: As It Was,” having only the Oasis singer’s reputation to go on, his Wikipedia biography to tell you what to expect.

He’s charming in that part of the film — giving, generous, well-adjusted. He’s older, mellower, playing at being the attentive dad to two sons and a daughter he only recently connected with.

He’s said “All I care about is getting the fans back” in the documentary, meaning the massive crowds that embraced Oasis until his brother Noel Gallagher quit the band and broke it up. And as “As It Was” concludes, the fans are indeed, back.

But the rep? “Loutish,” “arrogant,” with the “abrasive bearing” of someone his brother Noel, the guitarist and principal songwriter of Oasis, described as “the angriest man you’ll ever meet.”

His mother, in this documentary about the decade it took for Liam G. to figure it all out again, declares “He never changed. He is who he is.”

His “partner and manager,” is Debbie Gwyther, the Sharon Osbourne to his Ozzy, who helped him turn everything around after the breakup of Oasis, the collapse of Beady Eye, Gallagher’s first post-Oasis band, and the end of his marriage. She admits “He’s impulsive. He swears a lot.” But adds that she knows he has “regrets” about the way he’s treated people, and hurt some.

Sometime after filming was completed, the police were called to investigate a domestic violence incident. But maybe that’s just “the press” which has “never had anything nice to say about him,” as his Mum puts it.

None of which is readily evident in the triumphal finale of “As It Was,” the title a play on his “As You Were” comeback LP. But a great deal of the first act of this flattering, conventional but somewhat shapeless documentary gets all of those personal failings across.

If you know anything at all about the band, chances are you reached the same conclusion as Noel. The guy’s an overbearing, temperamental jerk.

Noel and Liam are still estranged, so the only snippets of Noel in this film are from radio interviews. The feuding siblings can’t stop slagging off on one another. But he’s the only critical voice, here, and that dings the film’s credibility and makes this portrait of a “mellowing” rock legend too much of a promotional film to have much value as biography.

“As It Was” kicks off with snippets of news footage, acting up on airline flights, defensive, hostile interviews at every turn and that fateful night in 2009 when the show no longer went on. It was in Paris, and a backstage fight ended Oasis.

The film is about the singing Gallagher’s long journey from “‘E split me band up!” to “not becoming a f—–g casualty…not letting the bastards win” to the realization that heedlessly charging on after Oasis with Beady Eye (the same Oasis band, sans Noel) wasn’t going to work.

Visiting every pub in Ireland when on break (they’re from Manchester, but Ireland’s where the Guinness is made) wasn’t paying off.

“You stop in for a Guinness. And you know how it is. You never stop at one.”

Acting agrieved wasn’t a good look. “Rumbling on Twitter,” lashing out at one and all wasn’t solving his problems.

“You’re no longer playing giant venues, no longer headlining?”

“Headlining? Been there, done that.  F—–g done with it!”

The GQ Men of the Year Awards 2017 – Arrivals Featuring: Liam Gallagher, Debbie Gwyther Where: London, United Kingdom When: 05 Sep 2017 Credit: Lia Toby/WENN.com

Brother Paul turns out to be the most reliable witness here, noting the “childlike charm” that comes through, backhandledly hinting at the ways Liam derailed the band, which both brothers have picked at, like a scab, in the decade since.

And there are hints of the character of the man in the ways he attempts to gloss and sugarcoat his image, hiking with his family in California — three kids from different mothers — in between shows, noting how well his now-teen children have turned out.

“The mothers have done great bringing them up!”

The saving grace of “As It Was” is Gallagher’s saving grace as well, that John Lennon-meets-John Lydon voice, the songs he wrote or co-wrote that brought him back from the dead, the album that restored his place in British rock.

The tunes are generously sampled, with snippets of studio sessions and lots of live concert footage that underlines his great talent and stage charisma.

He knows he needs this, needs them. Otherwise, he’d probably not worth the trouble.

The movie? Indulgent and despite following that “Falling from a great height, climbing back up” formula, is all over the place and the sketches of Gallagher it provides seem polished and officially approved. It’s probably for fans only.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with alcohol consumption and lots and lots of profanity

Cast: Liam Gallagher, Debbie Gwyther, Peggy Gallagher, Paul Gallagher

Credits: Directed by Gavin Fitzgerald and Charlie Lightening. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:28

It’s a documentary about a little girl found hanging from a swing set in rural North Carolina in 2014. Accident or a modern day lynching? Jacqueline Olive’s award winner opens in limited release Sept. 20.

It’s the endless costume changes, the ornate extravagance, the pastoral idylls and the Christmas Village quaintness of it all.

There’s the jewelry, the flapper bangs, the scrubbing, trimming, boiling, polishing and smug sub-minimum wage satisfaction of the servant classes at having done a menial job to perfection. And we cannot leave out the bemused smirks of the ruling bluebloods when they realize no one’s there to pour their third cup of tea, but they can manage perfectly well on their own, thank you.

Class conscious without the class conflict, or much of it, deference to one’s “betters,” we get the idea that even the “betters” are cowed in the presence of royalty — “You’ve seen their majesties. Let that be enough!”

The withering put-downs, the sense of place and propriety, upstairs — “Royal women are not meant to grin like Cheshire cats!”– and downstairs — “I will pour wine for the Queen’s sweet lips!” — it’s all here.

And the snobbery! Oh, the snobbery!

But at some point, you abandon the eye-rolling archness of it all, on orders of your opthalmologist. You stop gritting your teeth at this to-the-manner-born soap opera and its celebration of noblesse oblige among the English in-bred, and just give yourself over to “Downton Abbey,” the big screen epilogue to the hit BBC and PBS TV series.

Julian Fellowes’ TV event becomes a big screen extravaganza that does justice to the series and fills a larger screen with its scope, but little more.

Hopes that he might conjure up something more like the tighter and funnier Robert Altman film he scripted that inspired “Downton,” “Gosford Park,” fall by the wayside. Dreams that we might see the Crowleys, Lord and Lady Grantham and the rest, coping with say, the comeuppance of The Great Depression, or pitching in to lend land and labor to “Their Finest Hour” — the World War II years, will have to wait for a future sequel.

No. Here, we’re treated a giggling reminder that it’s Maggie Smith’s world, and these other toffs are here just to provide mares and stallions — clothes-horses all — for her to insult. And that’s what made the damned thing fun in the first place.

Fellowes concocted a bloated, melodramatic story that services every character, pairs many up with fresh foils and puts everybody on the dance floor for the finale.

Finally, after all these years, we get a dose of what the lesser nobility go to all this trouble, all this expense, what they kept these immodest, immense houses for — the chance of a royal visit.

That’s the ingenious crucible here, the arrival of notice that the King and Queen (George V and Queen Mary) will be making a tour of Yorkshire, and they need a place to crash for a night or so.

The flurry of activity that sets in motion, the pride that wells up in family, staff and the village that depends on the Great House for so much of its livelihood, make a marvelously compact stage for all the dramas that have played out here in the years on TV that led up to this moment in 1927.

“We can still put on quite a show when the need arises,” Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) quips in a room crammed with silverware.

The people doing all that prep work may be in a tizzy, but there’s still time for “republican” vs. “monarchist” debates in the kitchen, where mouthy Daisy (Sophie McShera) can avoid talking about marrying a butler by getting her anti-monarchist back up to the cranky cook, Mrs. Patmore (Lesley Nicol), who isn’t having it.

“It’s the King of England! They’s only one’a them in the world!”

Mary orchestrates a few more humiliations for gay butler Mr. Barrow (Robert James-Collier), the biggest of which is her panic in bringing back the retired Carson (the regal Jim Carter), fetching him from his days of gardening in shirt, tie and vest to supervise.

The fresh conflict comes from the imperious royal household staff who insist on taking the place of every single one of Lord Grantham’s servants. Almost every Downton hired hand has a bone to pick with somebody attached to Buckingham Palace.

The privileged few? They have fresh intrigues over another inheritance, an ancient family feud between the Dowager Countess (Dame Maggie) and her cousin, a Lady in Waiting to the Queen, Lady Bagshaw (the formidable Imelda Staunton).

Baroness Merton (Penelope Wilton) takes one last stab at mediating a Dowager throw-down.

“There’s no need to argue.”

“I NEVER argue. I explain.”

Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) frets over one more ball gown. Irish widower Tom (Allen Leech), the commoner who married into the clan, gets a few more dashing and egalitarian moments.

The Lord and Lady (Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern) may have less to do, but that makes way for the actual royals with their royal troubles to throw their weight around. There’s unhappily married Princess Mary (Kate Phillips) and Kingly concern for the absent playboy Edward, who would one day fall for the wrong woman and abdicate.

The twinkly British character actor Simon Jones makes a fine, white bewhiskered George V, even if one suspects the once-and-always Arthur Dent of British radio and TV’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” has never been on a horse before. Which sovereigns must mount for royal parades, you see. And Geraldine James lends gravitas to a Queen Mary the script makes the very model of kindness and understanding.

Director Michael Engler and the script take their damned sweet time about getting this lumbering beast up on its pedicured feet, the better part of an hour.

The film’s clutter of characters and all the moments set aside for backbiting and bickering serve a purpose — they set up a house staff coup plot, sexual and political intrigues and a cringe-worthy faux pas that is the absolute highlight of the comedy.

Fellowes is better than most at turning stately, slow episodic TV storytelling into a feature film. He doesn’t cut characters or witty lines. But narrowing the period of time and the scope of the plot makes the film work and march forward.

Stille, if you don’t know the series well, you’ll need a program to keep track of who is doing what to whom.

Change is, as always, in the air. Working folk are expressing themselves, mouthing off and demanding a seat at the table. And — bless their hearts — the Crowleys are chafing at the responsibilities, the expense, the dated, reactionary politics of their ruling class, the oblige of their noblesse oblige.

Much of that plays like politically correct lip service, and like much of this “Downton Abbey,” feels unnecessary. But that’s the thing about a cinematic feast for the eyes and the ears like this. You trim the fat, you run the risk of making the whole meal tasteless and dull.

And one mustn’t do that. What would the best sorts of people think?

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements, some suggestive material, and language

Cast: Michelle Dockery, Maggie Smith, Hugh Bonneville, Elizabeth McGovern, Jim Carter, Matthew Goode, Imelda Staunton.

Credits: Directed by Michael Engler, script by Julian Fellowes. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:02

The dire state of water here on the Big Blue Marble, or what happens when the ice melts.

Years ago, I had a lunch interview with the journalist/screenwriter Mark Boal (“The Hurt Locker”) as he passed through town promoting his second film with Kathryn Bigelow, the Hunt for Bin Laden epic “Zero Dark Thirty.”

The conversation wrapped up the way these things usually do, with “What’re you doing next?”

He launched into a lovely and lengthy description of what he hoped he and the director would wrestle onto the screen, a tale set in the middle of nowhere South America — the lawless drug lords/smugglers’ jungle where several countries’ borders intersect, the “Triple Frontier.”

He and Bigelow found it far easier to get their grim story of police murders during a race riot, “Detroit,” (2017) on the screen. From the looks of the “Triple Frontier” that finally was filmed, for Netflix and without action auteur Bigelow behind the camera, they never did get a handle on a story that takes us there.

J.C. Chandor (“All is Lost”), a fine director and writer in his own right, directed and co-wrote what turns out to be an utterly generic yarn about warriors pulling a heist.

Yes, they’re robbing a drug lord. But they plan on assassinating him as well. So even though they’re not “wearing that flag on my shoulder,” they’ll be performing righteous work and doing the world a favor.

Yes, the amount of money is insane. Greed gets the better of our heroes.

Yes, there’s a woman insider, an “informant,” who can get them close.

The plan is elaborate, and elaborate plans go wrong — in the real world and especially in the movies.

And yes, we must have the obligatory “I’m getting the band back together” assemble-the-team scenes in the opening act.
Oscar Isaac is Santiago, the U.S. “asset” working closely with law enforcement in South America as they hunt the elusive drug lord Lorea.

He’s always half a step behind, despite Santiago’s efforts to protect his best source inside — Yvonna (Adria Arjona).

But when she gets a “promotion,” he sees his best chance yet. And the fact that she’s doing money handling, he sees a score — legal, or at least quasi-legal — that sweetens the deal.

With the promise of a government guaranteed percentage of the take, the guy his brothers in arms nicknamed “Pope” tracks down the old gang with a piece of work that could get them all paid. Millions are at stake.

“Do we finally get to use our skills for our own benefit?”

That gets the attention of the reluctant retiree turned real estate agent “Redfly” (Ben Affleck), of “Ironhead,” (Charlie Hunnam), a by-the-book commando turned officer who gives pep talks to younger commandos to keep them from leaving government service to become “contractors,” his swaggering, whooping, cage-fighting younger brother (Garrett Hedlund) and a cracker jack pilot (Pedro Pascal) who lost his license, but doesn’t need one “where we’re going.”

The formula, chiseled in stone in combat films (“The Dirty Dozen”) and Westerns (“The Magnificent Seven”) since “The Seven Samurai” laid it out 70 years ago, always makes for a watchable film, even if it as predictable as a Rolex.

Pepper the collection of tough guys with tough guy dialogue.

“Hell, you’ve been shot four times!”

“Five.”

The homoerotic brotherly bonding of warriors is sealed with a smirk.

“Are you in?”

“You know I am. I go where you go.”

That makes for an action picture that is perfectly watchable, and perfectly generic. There’s not a surprise in this thing, from the “one last mission” to “the code” (which they violate) to the “Treasure of Sierra Madre” pitfalls of confronting that much cash to the tough talk of men at arms.

That runs from “I miss this” to “Stock boy job at Walmart’s starting to liok pretty good right now.”

Hedlund has the best lines and makes a great case for future employment in movies of this genre. Affleck is reliably reliable in such roles, Pascal (of TV’s “Narcos”) impresses and Isaac is more prepped for action here than he was in “Operation Finale” or the “Star Wars” movies.

Hunnam has the flattest character to play, something that doesn’t help a guy who always comes off as a less interesting, less fun version of Hedlund, even in movies where they don’t co-star.

As for the movie? “Netflixable” to me means anything that kills a couple of hours while I’m waiting to see where the hurricane hits. “Triple Frontier” does that. But nothing more.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and language throughout

Cast: Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Pedro Pascal, Garrett Hedlund, Charlie Hunnam, Adria Arjona

Credits: Directed by J. C. Chandor, script by Mark Boal and J.C. Chandor. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:04

The comic Jim Gaffigan takes a deep dive into the dark side with “American Dreamer,” an almost relentlessly downbeat character study in despair. It’s a thriller with no hero, just a funnyman who tosses aside his amusing baggage even when he desperately needs it just to keep our sympathy from start to finish.

Things weren’t always this bleak for Cam. He had a wife and son, had a job in tech, had a nice new Impala.

Now he’s piling up the miles on that Chevy for Hail — Lyft or Uber by another name — in Norfolk, Virginia.

He can paste on a smile and try to make small talk. That doesn’t keep the cheap locals from stiffing him out of his tip.

The wife (Tammy Blanchard)? He can’t just show up, hoping to see his son, to give him a toy car he picked up on impulse at a discount store. She calls the cops on him the moment he rolls into the driveway.

“Sir, I need you to calm down.”

The good job and marriage are long gone. He’s behind on child support, slack-jawed, deflated and defeated.

“I’m doing great!” doesn’t have the ring of truth when he’s calling a sibling to beg for cash, putting on a brave face for a former colleague about his job loss, “that whole thing that happened.”

His wife and brother provide the final clues — “Are you taking your medication?” “You need to be in some kind of facility.”

Thank goodness he has a side hustle, driving “off duty” for this guy who likes nothing better than an unassuming, late model Chevy where he can stash the bag in the trunk, driven around by a pasty-faced redheaded 50 year-old.

Mazz (Robbie Jones, fierce and cruel) is a drug dealer, not shy about trotting out the menace or whipping out a pistol, a man who wears his street cred on his game face. Cam is just another minion to him, a $200 a day driver.

“Turn that frown upside down, n—a! You alright!”

He brutalizes underlings. Cam he just bullies. Maybe that’s why the guy at his wit’s end, who shows flashes of compassion and hints of an unmedicated temper, decides on a half-assed kidnapping scheme to score some quick cash.

I only have to use the word “toddler” to touch on the dread that hangs over “American Dreamer” the moment this crime against a criminal enterprise begins.

We can only hope that the compassionate and caring Cam let us see earlier will save one and all. But as the mayhem he unleashes unfolds, a frantic trigger-happy hunt through port town Norfolk’s underworld, it’s just Jim Gaffigan’s affable on-stage persona that we cling to. We hope against hope that things will work out, that we can root for this on-the-spectrum wreck whose actions wreak havoc.

But Gaffigan is so far removed from that pre-“Dreamer” persona that he makes this leap an impossible one. His reactions to the horrors he overhears and sees, which he has to know he’s caused, have a touch of shock about them.

Cam seems numb or dumb to it all — the pistol whippings, threats and executions. His lack of empathy is contagious. Why, exactly, are we pulling for him?

Co-writer/director Derrick Borte (“The Joneses”) gets a spot-on turn from Robbie Jones (“Hurricane Season,” TV’s “The Fix”) and from Isabel Arraiza as Mazz’s baby mama. And he gives Gaffigan some great scenes showing how low he’s fallen.

“You look like s–t!”

“No I don’t!”

But his star doesn’t give us anything to cling to when the s–t hits the fan. As with Borte’s other films (“London Town”), there’s a disquieting lack of connection, a remove from the humanity of it all that may be by design, but weighs on the film and makes our experience of it a lot like Cam’s experience of life — deflating.

Why exactly do we root for him? Because he’s a disaffected white guy on a downward spiral, so whatever carnage he causes in this Afro-Latino world he dabbles in doesn’t matter?

Gaffigan is getting a lot of credit for trying something this grim, and while it’s deserved, it seems a bit beyond his reach. Something closer to Will Farrell’s “Everything Must Go” performance would have helped here — a lighter touch, flashes of humanity, pathos.

“American Dreamer” is riveting to sit through, but too pitiless to embrace.

MPAA Rating:R for disturbing material, violence, some strong sexual content, pervasive language, and drug use

Cast: Jim Gaffigan, Robbie Jones, Isabel Arraiza, Tammy Blanchard, Alejandro Hernandez

Credits: Directed by Derrick Borte, script by Derrick Borte, Daniel Forte A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:38