Movie Nation

Gennadiy Mokhnenko is a two-fisted Pentacostalist pastor who sees himself as a character he remembers from a children’s cartoon.

He is “Gennadiy the Crocodile,” friend to children everywhere, and a friend with teeth.

Steve Hoover’s documentary “Almost Holy” follows this Ukrainian force of nature as he rescues child addicts from the streets, from those exploiting and abusing them, from a broken disinterested “system” and (ex-Soviet) culture and from the very pharmacists who sell them the drugs that take their youth, their health (some have lost limbs) and often, their lives.

In broken English, Mokhnenko describes the street kids of his city, Mariupol, Ukraine. And then he fearlessly shows you what he’s doing about them.

His methods are heavy-handed — kicking in doors, dragging kids away from their “vagabond” lives. For a pastor, he’s pretty blunt and foul-mouthed. He confronts sexual abusers with profane frankness. He shames pharmacists. On camera.

“I hope my life leaves a mark,” he says. And he is. He is making his corner of the world a tiny bit better, emptying the streets and Ukrainian version of “crack houses” of kids, intervening in the most “Scared Straight” ways.

“Why should I blow a fortune on your unlikely recovery?” he barks at one boy. Some, he gets adopted. Many, he takes into his own family. His wife Lena will bring tears to your eyes as you see both the overwhelming burden their family faces, and the unbending resolve they both have to do this work.

Hoover (“Blood Brothers”) gives voice to the controversy surrounding these “Pilgrim Republic” orphanages, the laws Pastor Crocodile breaks. And he lets us see how this work has been impacted by the Russian invasion of Crimea and assault on the rest of Ukraine. Not every child can be saved. Many want to escape back to the seeming horrors of their old lives.

Structurally, the film skips back and forth, from the “present” — a long cautionary speech at a women’s prison — to the recent past, with interventions, “raids,” counseling sessions — to the more distant past, when Mokhnenko got his start and stirred up enough controversy to wind up (repeatedly) on Ukrainian TV.

That doesn’t help the movie’s coherence or impact.

But this Ukrainian Crocodile Preacher makes an arresting subject, someone you’ll want to meet just to hear his story and see the past that put him on the path to being his country’s “Catcher in the Rye,” saving children from an ugly world and a doomed future.

MPAA Rating:R for disturbing content involving drugs and alcohol, sexual references and language

Cast: Gennadiy Mokhnenko
Credits: Written and directed by Steve Hoover. An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:49

But but but…

I thought “The Curse of Sleeping Beauty” was a children’s film!

Not animated? In 3D? No true love’s kiss, and all that?

Well, sort of.

It’s a haunted house story, though it doesn’t start that way.

Thomas (Ethan Peck, grandson of Gregory) is having nightmares. He’s in a desert, walking up on this canopy bed that’s surrounded by ancient Egyptian totems.

There’s a girl (India Eiseley), impossibly pale sleeping in a bustier to die for.

And just as he’s about to impose a smooch on her, Thomas always wakes up.

“Sleep paralysis,” his shrink advises. OK.

Maybe he’d buy that, but Thomas then inherits this rural, antebellum-styled mansion. His Uncle Clive, whom he never knew existed, left it to him. And did him no favors. Kaiser Gardens is a ruin. People disappear there — and have for years.

His uncle killed himself. Good luck finding a realtor who can sell that.

Linda (Natalie Hall) shows up with a grudge. She lost her brother and that house had something to do with it. She links up with a paranormal investigator (Bruce Davison of “Willard” fame). And they in turn link up with a computer -nerd researcher, stereotypically played by an Asian American (James Adam Lim).

Cobwebs and shadows aren’t enough to make a house spooky on the big screen any more. Adding manikins? Been there, seen that.

The effects — monsters, demons — are mildly chilling.

But Josh Nadler’s script is amateurish in the extreme. A dead give-away? Establishing/explaining locations with words, not images.

“Welcome to my home!” “Welcome to my SECRET lair!”

Welcome to my eye-roll.

The mansion has a basement, but there’s no use yelling “DON’T go in the BASEMENT!”

No point of anybody asking “Is that blood?” Because, you know, we can SEE it.

A couple of non-horror related amusing lines wither and die of loneliness. The actors have nothing to draw on and little to play, so they just mimic expressions and gestures they’ve seen in other horror movies.

There’s nothing at all here to hold your interest, nothing out of the horror movie trope ordinary to see and “Curse’s” utterly generic story and execution offer no object lesson in “What NOT to do when making a horror movie.”

Except maybe look a little deeper than the Brothers Grimm for your source material. The whole Sleeping Beauty connection is lame and forced and adds nothing except “public domain” to your screenplay.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence

Cast: Ethan Peck, India Eisely, Natalie Hall, Bruce Davison, James Adam Lim
Credits: Directed by , script by . An XLRator Media release.

Running time: 1:26

Everybody pretty much abandoned this weekend to “Captain America: Actually an Avengers Movie.” It could manage another $80 million at the box office (any less than that is a sign of audience fatigue).

So there’s not a lot of new stuff rolling into theaters.

HOWEVER. I was chatting with a theater manager friend and he was asking about “Money Monster.” Lots of grownup patrons have been asking about it, he said.

“Great marketing,” he added. TV ads in all the right places. So “Money Monster” could have a decent weekend.

The reviews aren’t glowing. This is Jodie Foster’s weakest film as a director. She’s rusty, she’s not a thriller or satire or comedy specialist. All of that shows.

But it should do pretty well, pairing up Clooney and Roberts, with Dominic West as the possible heavy and some nice work around the fringes. The Box Office Guru figures $12 million for the weekend. But with that pedigree and cast, it should do better. It’s not bad, just not great. 

“High Rise” based on a J.G. Ballard novel, is set in the ’70s and feels as if it was shot in the ’70s, pre-“Star Wars” — when sci-fi was intellectually ambitious.

It’s not a classic, but it is thought-provoking, dark and features the omni-present Tom Hiddleston.

There’s a “Pele” movie about the soccer star. Casting a Pele proved to be nigh on impossible. The lead can play, but can’t act. 

“Queen Mimi” is a doc that hits limited release. ALL good reviews for this story of a homeless LA woman adopted by the community that meets her at the local laundramat. Not deep, but upbeat. 

Nobody saw “The Darkness” pre-release, so we’re all getting to it as we can. Studios never want to hide their movies, so when they do, it’s for good reason. Horror is smart counter-programming to a comic book blockbuster, though those audiences do overlap a bit. The Box Office Guru predicts $6 million on its opening weekend, which seems low. Quite low.

Another video game turned into a movie? I thought they’d all but given up that pitch? But no, Hollywood “branding uber alles” and such. Ubisoft is a big reason I never got addicted to video games. Glitchy titles in the games that interested me.

Michael Fassbender takes on the lead role in this modern-guy-goes-to-the-15th century to learn “mad skillz” to help him with present day battles.

Like Jeremy Irons, Fassbender will show up for a high paying gig and has no issues with “commercial” projects, even though he’s one of the best actors to not win an Oscar. He classes up this first trailer for the movie, which opens in December.

This cultural meme “Exceptional skills from the past we’ve lost” is a favorite of film and fiction in general. Since the passing on of such information generation to generation is the chief difference between those days and now (We’re no smarter, we just have easy access to all this acquired knowledge), that makes a certain amount of sense. But as the passing on of info was the chief barrier to advancement of any skill in any field, how these wizard warriors are supposed to have learned what they know is a comical mystery. One person’s knowledge, passed person to person, would be seriously limited.

But it’s a video game and I’m over thinking it.

What matters is the thinly credentialed behind the camera talent and a trailer that has some eye candy, and two Oscar winners (Irons and Cotillard), but no sizzle.

December, “Assassin’s Creed.”

Director Jodie Foster’s “Money Monster” aims high, an attempt to be a riotous, righteous Jeremiad about our “rigged” financial system and the TV hustlers who try to pass off hype as “business news.”

It never quite gets there, never quite takes flight as a “romp” or achieves the level of satire. It’s not a “Network” for our times.

But a game cast and a reasonably tense take on a topic that is a major component of this election year’s zeitgeist — financial cheats stealing from America, and never brought to justice — make it work.

George Clooney is Lee Gates, a gimmicky, shtick-loving anchor/pundit for the Financial News Network’s popular “Money Monster” show. He dances, he jokes, he hypes. He’s flip and glib and acts as if it’s all “Other People’s Money.”

The only difference between Clooney’s Gates and real-life TV clowns like Jim Cramer is the hair, and we don’t actually want Gates shot or blown up by the end of “Money Monster.”

Because that could be his fate, thanks to one ill-informed, super-hyped stock tip too many. A delivery guy (Jack O’Connell) gets onto the set of his live show, pulls a gun and makes Gates don a bomb vest. The overwrought Kyle lost his shirt when IBIS Financial dropped $800 million in a single afternoon.

The CEO (Dominic West) is nowhere to be found. And the only explanation the company gives is that its automated, super-fast investment algorithm experienced “a glitch.”

Kyle fires shots into the ceiling, locks the doors and traps the crew and director (Julia Roberts) in their Manhattan studio.

“I’m not the REAL criminal,” he shouts. “It’s rigged. It’s all fixed! They literally OWN the airwaves!”

He wants answers. And he’s hellbent on getting them.

“I came in knowing I’m not walking out.”

Clooney lets us see the panic and growing sense of guilt Gates might feel at putting everybody he works with in mortal danger with “research” and tips that are basically corporate press releases. And yeah, a lot more people than Kyle were taken in by his hype.

Roberts’ director, Patti, has already joked that “We don’t do JOURNALISM here,” but her think-on-her-feet competence gets a lot of people out of the building when the chips are down. Can she remember enough of her journalist past to find the answers before that bomb goes off?

There are the inevitable hostage drama benchmarks (Giancarlo Esposito is the head cop), but the script finds laugh-out-loud surprises in those. However, Foster squanders the story’s urgency with slack direction that robs the thriller of its ticking clock.

The communications director (Caitriona Balfe) of IBIS isn’t the rigid stonewaller the story needs her to be. The reporting shortcuts are what passes for “deus ex machina” in the movies these days — computer nerds/hackers reached by cell-phone.

And truth be told, the movie pulls its punches when it comes to business cable TV’s culpability in all this.

But after a TV-savvy opening, with Gates and Patti seat-of-the-pantsing a dazzling, ditzy show, the outrage flares up and never drops below a simmer.

And Foster moves us ever-so-cleverly onto the fence about whether this Cramerish clown should die for his sins, even if he looks like George Clooney. That’s why the world drops what it’s doing to watch.

And that’s the money emotion of “Money Monster” — unfocused rage finally given something to that rage at, if only for 98 minutes.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, some sexuality and brief violence.

Cast: George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Jack O’Connell, Dominic West, Caitriona Balfe, Giancarlo Esposito
Credits: Directed by Jodie Foster, script by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore, Jim Koif. A Sony/Tristar release.

Running time: 1:38

Harry Hawkes is loud, boorish and overbearing, a real life of the party because he insists on being just that.

To state the obvious. Never was a man so intent on making a splash, or in his case, “A Bigger Splash.”

But there’s a desperation to this guy’s face-consuming grin, Harry’s backslapping way of bowling over friends or anyone more polite or genteel or considerate than he is.

Harry, given every ounce of impulsive, brash, unfiltered brio that Ralph Fiennes can give him, is the last thing rock star Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton) needs as she recovers from throat surgery. Her beau, Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) will say it even if she has no voice.

“Jesus, does he EVER stop?”

The answer is “No, never,” and before Paul can get out his objections on the phone, Harry is off the plane on the small Italian island where they’re staying, imposing himself and a young lady (Dakota Johnson) on these two with not so much as a “by your leave.”

Of course they’ll pick them up at the airport. Of course they can stay in their modest villa.

“Christ, THAT took long enough,” is what passes for “Thanks” from Harry.

He’s a record producer, and the young woman is a daughter he never knew he had. Harry and Marianne have history. Paul knows this history and is wary.

Harry’s flirtatiousness extends to one and all, even his supposed daughter. And sparks are sure to fly, as the woman who cannot talk cannot get in a word edgewise to protest this blast from her past that threatens to blow everything up all over again.

“A Bigger Splash,” a remake of “La Piscine (The Pool),” a 1969 French film starring Alain Delon, is directed with a tantalizing sexual tension by Luca Guadagnino, who also gave Swinton the sexually charged star vehicle “I Am Love.”

It is a movie of sumptuous, sun-baked and terraced hillsides, tiny, curvy dirt roads, a quaint town, remote tidal pools and a real pool…which Harry dives into naked, always without invitation.

There’s a competition set up. Who will bed whom, who will get out of here with what he or she wants? Flashbacks fill in the characters’ history together, third act revelations undercut some of that history.

The performances are of the meaningful, lingering stares variety, everybody working out what everybody else’s game is.

Fiennes exults and explodes and throws his weight around, Schoenaerts simmers and Swinton, sort of playing a Patti Smith/Joan Jett/Bowie mashup, sways back and forth in the tug of war.

Johnson tries on a Lolita-tease, hinting that there’s nothing innocent going on behind those bangs. She is, as she has been ever since “Fifty Shades of Grey,” attractive without creating anything interesting to watch. Guadagnino lets his camera linger over her more enticing body parts. She is piling up a lot of performances that call for her to be naked, but at least she isn’t alone here.

There’s heat and confrontation and a big dollop of melodrama in “A Bigger Splash,” a film whose location and situation dredge up memories of ’60s Euro-thrillers (“Knife in Water”) and Italian sexual melodramas (“Swept Away”).

It never measures up to any of those, as Guadagnino melodramatically telegraphs the script’s foreshadowing. It’s a slow film — patient might be a more apt description — as we can sense betrayals and confrontations almost from the start. I was actually disappointed that more anticipated red herrings weren’t tossed into the simmering sexual soup cooked up here.

But the striking Italian setting encourages the nudity, and the filmmaker and cast lead us into temptation, even though we can see it coming from a long way off.

MPAA Rating:R for graphic nudity, some strong sexual content, language and brief drug use

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Ralph Fiennes, Matthias Schoenaerts, Dakota Johnson
Credits: Directed by Luca Guadagnino, script by David Kajganich, based on the French film “La Piscine.” A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 2:04

Addiction and overcoming it is the most traumatic thing most people who endure it will ever experience.

Harrowing, dangerous, destroying your health and relationships and taking lives all around you, its very intensity must convince you that nobody has ever experienced anything like this.

Unfortunately, millions have. There’s so little that’s new or unique to say about it that it’s a subject that rarely makes for an enlightening or surprising movie.

So even though director Rob Reiner’s son co-wrote “Being Charlie,” an addiction/recovery drama loosely based on his own problems, there’s nothing here we haven’t seen before. That makes the movie a 97 minute slog to a conclusion we see coming in minute one.

We meet Charlie (Nick Robinson) as he’s bailing out of yet another rehab. It’s in Utah, and he leaves with an act of defiance — breaking the stained glass windows of the chapel.

His second act upon escaping? Hitchhiking. His third act? Stealing oxy pills from the driver’s elderly mother who is dying of cancer.

That’s the sort of creep Charlie is, an affluent punk of 18 who is deep down the rabbit hole of denial, arrogantly lying that “This time it’ll be different” to his wants-to-believe-mom (Susan Misner).

But it isn’t. The guy who dashes out to fetch him in Barstow (Devon Bostick) is his best friend, and best enabler. He’s into drugs and girls who are into drugs.

Spoiler alert. Charlie must A) figure this out the hard way and B) finally decide to “accept” his disease, and vow to help himself.

The wrinkles in that standard issue AA narrative are that Charlie’s dad is a famous pirate actor (Cary Elwes) running for governor, that Charlie meets a fetching, damaged girl (Morgan Saylor of “Homeland”) in recovery and that he’s an aspiring stand-up comic.

Romance “gets in the way of your recovery,” his counselor (Common) lectures. But Charlie knows better. Such sponsors, group therapy leaders and the like, are righteous folks, many of them recovering addicts themselves. But to Charlie, they’re just voyeurs looking for “courtside seats to human suffering.”

It’s hard to develop much sympathy for this rich kid’s self-inflicted trauma. And Reiner, whose last good movie was “Flipped” (2010), does nothing to help young Robinson (“Jurassic World”) rise above the utterly routine script. The direction is pedestrian and the movie, start to finish, makes us feel nothing.

Whatever high-mindedness was behind it, “Being Charlie” is no different from being any other addict. From intervention to check-in, group “sharing” at the halfway house to backsliding and skipping some of the twelve steps, we’ve seen it all before.

It takes nothing away from the awful thing people who experience this go through in saying that movies about it all too often are all tropes that render it trite.

MPAA Rating:unrated, with violence, drug abuse, nudity and sex, profanity

Cast: Nick Robinson, Morgn Saylor, Devon Bostick, Common, Cary Elwes
Credits: Directed by Rob Reiner , script by Matt Elisofon, Nick Reiner. A Paladin release.

Running time: 1:37

The best of this year’s admittedly weak selection of Mother’s Day movies, the one getting a wider release AFTER the Hallmark holiday, is “The Meddler,” a broad and uneven comedy that coasts by on the charms of Susan Sarandon and the twinkle of J.K. Simmons.

Writer-director Lorene Scafaria won this battle with the casting. Her slight, unchallenging comedy about a hovering Jersey mom who has moved to LA to be nearer her “We need some boundaries” daughter, relies on low-hanging fruit for its jokes. But Sarandon in the title role, Rose Byrne as the put-upon daughter and Simmons doing his best Sam Elliott impression as the possible “love interest” give it the spark of life.

Marnie has been widowed a while, and has decided to fill her days with phone calls to her daughter, a TV writer (Byrne). Or pop in visits.

“I brought bagels!”

Marnie is lonely, given to impulsive gestures like, well “bagels.” Oh, and paying for the wedding of “what’s-her-name” (Cecily Strong of “Saturday Night Live”), a distant friend of her daughter’s.

But daughter Lori has her own issues. She’s newly dumped, by an actor, no less. She’s got a sitcom script to polish. She’s barely keeping it together and Mom cannot help but bring up her ex. Incessantly.

” I think we should get you a hobby.” Why not volunteer at the hospital? At least that’ll keep her from grilling Lori’s shrink for details about why she’s so sad.

Marnie is outgoing, though you sense she was something of a shrinking violet around her late husband’s gregarious Italian family. She trots out astrological judgments, unsolicited advice and presents. She still misses her husband and is in a little denial over that. She fills her time by imposing her generosity of spirit upon others.

“The Meddler” is a film of cute moments and the odd touching scene, which serve to interrupt the steady cavalcade of cliches. Marnie stumbles onto a movie set and is mistaken for “background” (an extra). Marnie stumbles across an old woman who has lost her voice in the hospital. Marnie takes too much of an interest in her favorite Apple Store employee’s (Jerrod Carmichael) education and life.

But Sarandon gives this material plenty of grace notes, imparting the sensual delights of the perfectly prepared, farm-fresh egg-in-a-hole.

She gets to play that because Marnie is set up to be charmed by the mustachioed and twinkly ex-cop turned chicken farmer Zipper. Simmons literally lights up the movie in his scenes with her.

Will Marnie learn to move on, live again and maybe stop bugging her only child to death? You don’t have to be a mom to know the answers. You just have to have a mom, “a birth mom” or that winning substitute characters talk about her, “an Earth mom” — somebody who cares enough to get under foot, and stay there.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for brief drug content

Cast: Susan Sarandon, Rose Byrne, J.K. Simmons, Cecily Strong
Credits: Written and directed by Lorene Scafaria.  A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:40

It has eye-popping special effects and a true larger-than-life villain.

“X-Men: Apocalypse,” is actually about something, with the intramural/intra-mutant quarrel built on a reality that the shoe-horned in fight in the blockbuster “Captain America: Civil War”lacks.

The violence has consequences. Blood is spilled, and people die.

And it has, for the most part, better actors — James McAvoy, the tormented and empathetic Micheal Fassbender, Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence and the omnipresent Oscar Isaac’s jawline and furrowed brow  are visible under the makeup and effects as that villain.

With Bryan Singer back behind the camera, the action beats are meaty and the odd lump-in-the-throat is possible as the story sums up so much of what we’ve learned about these characters, who have survived brawls, betrayals, discrimination, the Holocaust and the Atomic bombing of Japan between them.

But the epic effects, titanic struggles timed out every 30 minutes or so and ever-growing, ever-evolving line-up of characters of “Apocalypse,” coming hot on the heels of “Civil War” and “Batman v. Superman” and “Deadpool,” underline the exhausted ingredients of the formula these movies all use. So many movies, so many mutants, with filmmakers straining to find something new to do with them, and watching them try too hard is wearying. They’re joyless technical exercises, as predictable as a video game.

It’s 1983, and Xavier (McAvoy) is happily running his school for the “gifted” (mutants). Magneto (Fassbender) has been in hiding since trying to overthrow the government back in ’73. He’s sweating away in a steelworks in Poland, married with a little girl.

Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) is every schoolkid’s heroine after besting Magneto a decade before. But she’s keeping a low profile through the ’80s her own self.

Scott Summers (Tye Sheridan) is discovering he’s just as “special” as his brother, Alex, aka Havok (Lucas), and maybe an ordinary high school isn’t for a guy whose eyes can burn through steel.

The lightning-quick Peter Maximoff (Evan Peters) figures it’s time to leave home and show his stuff.

There’s an underground world of mutant cage-fighters in Berlin and a cult dedicated to this long-gone mutant in Egypt. And that cult may get its wish if En Sabah Nur, the Original mutant (Oscar Isaac) comes back from the dead and fulfills his dream of remaking, “cleansing” and ruling the world.

Puny humans have no prayer against the First X-Man. Might the other X-Men have a shot?

This finale to the “prequels” sees Xavier finish rounding up the technology we saw in the original trilogy, and hears McAvoy sound a LOT more like Original Xavier Patrick Stewart in the role.

Xavier preaches “hope” and cautions that every gift can sometimes be considered “a curse.” Especially the most special gifts of all — reading minds, moving objects with your brain, shooting fire out of your eyes and what not.

And the junior mutants learn this lesson the hard way.

The most interesting new character is Quicksilver (Evan Peters), and Singer shows off the best stop-time effects the movies have ever seen as he dashes in to save others in less than a blink of an eye. He gets a his own showcase scene set to ’80s Eurythmics pop.

Least interesting is Psylocke, mostly due to the fetching Olivia Munn’s lack of comfort in her skimpy costume and the elbow-length gloves that confuse her about what to do with her hands.

The most fascinating continuing character is Magneto — Holocaust survivor, given to switching sides and turning on humans because he’s seen the worst the human race has to offer. He’s the most motivated villain these movies have produced.

The coolest character? You know who that is, and can only hope he skips that barber’s appointment and makes an appearance.

Fassbender makes us feel things in ways nobody in the “Avengers” universe seems inclined to try. McAvoy, too, gives his character heart and motivation.

But Lawrence’s disengagement as an actress in her two past-their-expiration-date franchises (“Hunger Games” and X-Men) has been obvious in her performances. She has a “big speech” in this just as she did in the last “Hunger Games,” and she never looks more like a gawky teen than when she’s supposed to be commanding.

Isaac is mostly lost under prosthetics and effects.

“Who rules this world?” he growls, upon awakening to the sight of “$25,000 Pyramid” and “Knight Rider” on TV, ’80s haircuts and Atari and “Six Million Dollar Man” T-shirts.

The attempts at humor don’t have the light touch of the best “Avengers” pictures. Singer and the script and the newby characters try too hard.

Take away “Deadpool’s” self-referential sarcasm and the genuine gloom “Batman” still conjures up, and one is hard-pressed to think of anything novel any of these movies have brought to the medium or the comic book popcorn picture this year.

Box office numbers don’t back this up, but could 2016 be the year we finally overdose on comic book movies? The staggering ticket sales have producers all sure they’ve found the foolproof formula for a blockbuster — Lots of special people, The More Mutants the Merrier — wisecracking and brawling with one another.

But it’s getting to be enough, already. And when the end comes, studio executives, unlike our favorite mutants, are not clairvoyants. They’re killing the golden goose. And when it dies, they’ll never see it coming.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of violence, action and destruction, brief strong language and some suggestive images

Cast: James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, Oscar Isaac, Rose Byrne, Olivia Munn, Sophie Turner, Tye Sheridan, Nicholas Hoult
Credits: Directed by Bryan Singer, script by Simon Kenberg. A Fox/Marvel Studios release.

Running time: 2:23

Tina Fey never gave Katrina Bowden much to say or do on her TV show, “30 Rock.” All Cerie, her character, had to do was waltz on screen in some tight, revealing outfit, and Bowden’s work was done. Jaws dropped and clocks stopped.

Fey’s approach was, “Fair is fair. She was dealt a full-house, looks-wise. Why add to that stacked, um, deck, by letting her act?”

So it takes a little getting used to, Bowden acting impulsive, doling out advice to teens as a stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold in “Hard Sell.” She’s not bad, and neither is the movie, even if they’re both overly reliant on her other already-established assets.

Writer-director Sean Nalaboff has tried to cook up a “Risky Business” for a much MUCH more politically-correct era. No way you’d be able to remake the film that launched Tom Cruise and Rebecca DeMornay to stardom. A rich teenager acts as pimp for a hooker he hires to entertain his peers? Come on. Mothers Against…something would be up in arms.

The PC version has Hardy Buchanan (Skylar Gisondo, of “Vacation”) as a working class kid living with his mentally-broken mother (Kristin Chenoweth), wondering how he’s going to get into a good college, pay for a good college or finance the cancer operation on the family dog, the only thing keeping Mom going.

“I could’ve SWORN I made dinner!”

Never mind how this unemployed Long Island mom keeps her boy in Spirit Academy, where the preppies come to play.

A bit of extra-curricular volunteer work at a homeless shelter is how Hardy meets “Bo” (Bowden). He says the obvious, as if that makes us forget how much the entire set-up strains credulity.

She is “WAY too hot to be in your position.”

Bo is a stripper with “stage fright.” Funny, because we’ve seen her flee a mental hospital in that backless gowns that do nobody (save her) justice in the film’s opening scene.

Bo is casual by nature, and a little off. His horny teen peers gawk at her, she flashes them for cash and a lightbulb pops on in Hardy’s head. She’ll overcome her “stage fright” by taking off her top, for cash, in the boy’s locker room. And that’s just for starters.

Next thing you know, Hardy is full-on pimping the woman out to country club kids who need a date to the dance.

“No touching. No photos.”

That goes for Hardy himself, who doesn’t merit so much as a “You have GOT To be kidding” when he talks about coming on to Bo. That dispenses with the pity sex/pity striptease dilemma.

Another tricky dilemma to navigate — Hardy knows that she’s a bit mental. “All the women in my life are crazy.” He’s taking advantage of a gorgeous crazy woman.

The twist in the story is Bo’s sympathetic ear for all manner of high school angst — pressure from parents about college, about dating “the right person,” about sexual preference. There’s nothing here to suggest she has the wisdom to be dispensing advice, but she does. You either go with it or you don’t.

“Kids are like penguins — always lookin’ for a place to chill!”

More promising is the “Ferris Bueller” turn the story could take, at any minute, thanks to Hardy’s friendship with the disaffected Goth he keeps running into in the school infirmary. (Each is using up excuses to get out of class/tests, etc.)

Hannah Marks of TV’s “Awkward” is beguiling in that ethnic girl-next-door Hollywood way. And Gisondo is a competent leading boy/man, if little more.

Chenoweth dials down her bubbly musical theater persona to play depressed and smaller-than life.

But this “Risky Business” is averse to risk. There’s no edge to it. Only the sentimental stuff works.

The clumsy, makeshift, steer-clear-of-trouble plot forces us to reckon with the leading lady. And Bowden is simply not up to the heavy lifting.

She’s more than “30 Rock” ever let her be, but not by much, judging from “Hard Sell.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with adult situations, pot use and profanity

Cast: Skylar Gisondo, Katrina Bowden, Kristin Chenoweth, Hannah Marks
Credits: Written and directed by Sean Nalaboff. A Momentum release.

Running time: 1:36