Movie Nation

The reviews of “Captain America: Civil War,” have been overwhelmingly positive. Many are raves.

Just like the reviews of “Barbershop: The Next Cut,” or “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”

I’ve been in that tiny minority, on all three occasions, shouting “Wait, this isn’t all that” or “this is crap” into the infinite void.

But at least I haven’t been alone. Movies have changed, Marvel has moved into mass production, a comic-book assembly line stretching out into the foreseeable future.

And the disappearance of so many legacy media critics has tilted reviewing in a new direction. Let’s call it, “Lie back and think of England.” Because that’s what it feels like, a lot of people sort of rolling over for this or that sure-to-be-blockbuster (“Barbershop” had many media entities sending their C-reviewers, which still doesn’t explain why Johnny and Jane have no taste. Or guts.).

Doesn’t matter that given just a tiny bit of time, fans and critics stop huffing whatever it is they’re inhaling and REALIZE what a more diverse cast but still inferior carbon copy of “Star Wars: A New Hope” “The Force Awakens” actually is.

Because it takes a certain nerve to endure the abuse you know you’re going to get from fanboys (it’s always the boys who’re the ugliest) when you pan a movie that’s set to become a temporary “phenomenon.”

Overwhelmingly positive reviews for “Captain America: Civil War,” which doesn’t deserve to be in the same conversation as “Captain America: The First Avenger,” or “Deadpool.” Not that the fanboys want to hear that. It’s not cinematic, the action is repetitive obviously sped-up to make movie stars look like superhuman superfighters and the script, not even bothering to ID this villain or that hottie in the short skirt and knee-highs, is strictly needs-based, as in “We need to invent a reason for these guys to fight. Doesn’t matter if anybody buys into it. It just needs to happen.”

Cynical. Marvel is watering down its brand while the brand is still platinum. 

Everybody in the Marvel universe (not even close) shows up in this one. But mention Ant Man, and some nerd from Puerto Rico is cussing you out for “spoilers.” Dude, it’s in the art the studio provided for the movie. See above.

Shakespeare brought back a crowd favorite, Falstaff, to make his “Merry Wives of Windsor” a surefire hit. More recently, Hollywood TV producers and film moguls have encouraged crossover mashups to draw a crowd. It’s an idea they borrowed from the comics of the ’60s.

Special editions, or “Let’s make a boatload of money off our fans by giving them the team-ups they wanted” invaded the DC and Marvel titles, seemingly when they’d run out of other ideas and villains worth fighting.

So it is with the Avengers movies, and “Batman v. Superman.” They’re stealing some of the X-Men thunder, in the process. But at least those came to big screen life in that form — the more “mutants/enhanced beings” the better. More and more tickets sold, enthusiasm only grows.

I sat in the theater Tuesday, knowing that overseas reviewers and a few domestic fanboy critics had creamed their jeans over it. And up until the Battle Royale, I was scribbling in my notepad, “They’re all worked up over THIS?”

Just bandwagoning, I figured.

“Civil War” has already opened huge, overseas. That “America” brand has value everywhere, even among the Godless communists and third of the world that hates us. Go figure.

The Box Office Guru figures Marvel and its Disney overlords will pocket $185 million by midnight Sunday. That might be low.

Nothing else of note is opening wide, nothing else in theaters is going to make a dime.

And then the younger X-Men show up.

Let the summer comic book takeover begin.

There’s a “for fans only” feel to the latest “Avengers” movie, “Captain America: Civil War.”

A talky, often ponderous exercise in comic book movie elephantiasis, it overdoses on characters, old and new, sometimes not even bothering to name them.

The script has a villain with a point of view and motivation, though the “Civil War” of the title seems more a plot necessity than anything anyone thrown into conflict on screen actually believes in. And the villain is nobody we can sink our teeth into.

The film lacks Joss Whedon’s light touch with that script, Jon Favreau’s whimsical way with the characters or Joe Johnson’s lump-in-the-throat pathos behind the camera.

And there’s something unsavory about the absence of fanboy punching bag Pepper Potts, more precisely the actress playing her (Gwyneth Paltrow). She’s kicked out of Iron Man’s life in a manner that screams “pandering” or at least “market research.”

“We’re on a break!”

That said, “Civil War” makes for a watchable parable about infighting, hubris and all-powerful “enhanced” personalities who never ever can admit they were wrong. It’s about the limits to absolute power and the consequences of “avenging.”

A parable of America in the drone era of the endless “War on Terror”? Yeah, maybe. A Marvel riff on “The Incredibles”? Most certainly.

The “Winter Soldier” (Sebastian Stan) is still out there, Hydra’s last assassin, and is supposedly behind a bombing at a U.N. meeting. Captain America (Chris Evans) alone is sure his former childhood pal has been set up.

Bureaucrats (William Hurt, Martin Freeman) are all about reining in The Avengers, whose brawls have been cool to watch, but with a body-count and collateral damage only now being brought into question. Iron Man Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and War Machine (Don Cheadle) are reluctantly willing to accept some limits and responsibility for their “very public mistakes.”

Cap and Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and the unidentified Scarlet Witch (tarted up Elizabeth Olsen) are too high-handed for that. Their sense of certitude has them hunting for answers.

And this African prince (the wonderful Chadwick Boseman of “42”) resolves to don his own “enhanced” superhero suit (Black Panther) to avenge his father’s murder in that U.N. bombing, with or without help.

Meanwhile, this odd Putin-esque presence (Daniel Bruhl of “Rush”) is piecing together old Hydra manuals, digging into the Soviet-linked work that led to The Winter Soldier, pulling the strings.

“I want to see an Empire fall.”

Flashbacks foreshadow where the past — a younger (digitally de-aged Downey) Stark recalls his last conversation with his parents (Hope Davis, John Slattery) — ties into the present. We bounce from Vienna to Berlin, Washington to Cleveland, with every city ID’d with huge, portentous titles.

“CLEVELAND.”

All of which brings the SuperFriends, um, Avengers, to a breaking point, a “Whose side are you on?” rupture.

And that’s where “Civil War” finally finds its sense of fun, dragging in much of the rest of the Marvel universe so that they can all fight it out. Iron Man summons up his Marvel favorites. Captain America has his own superheroes up his sleeve.

Co-directors Anthony and Joe Russo are no better at comedy than they were back with “You, Me and Dupree.” The film’s pacing is slow, thanks mostly to a script that has all these waypoints to hit to reach its title-decreed destination. It takes a good hour and a half to really get going, not that there aren’t a few (action sped-up) fights and chases before then.

They’ve made a film claiming life-or-death consequences for uses of force (Alfre Woodard is given half-a-scene to make that point), without the guts to deliver those consequences. They’ve introduced a villain with a real Magneto-sized beef with the world, but the script and Bruhl never let us see that.

They’ve split up the Avengers with no more thought than they gave the other bone they tossed the fanboys with the removal of the GOOP gal.

“We’re on a BREAK.”

As shown by “Batman v. Superman”and earlier “Avengers,” comic book movies have morphed into the ensemble era with a sense of their own gravitas, with screenwriters determined to freight them with analogies to the state of America and the world. It works here about as well as it did with the Bat and the Man of Steel. Only this series — A”Captain America” movie without the heart, or an “Avengers” movie without the comic sizzle? — strains to find its footing in either tone.

What might be lost without a Whedon, Favreau, Johnson or others of like mind, is a sense of fun, the real marvel of Marvel. And if you’re not having fun with guys and gals in tights and capes, what is the point?

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Cast: Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Anthony Mackie, Elisabeth Olsen, Don Cheadle, Daniel Bruhl, William Hurt, Paul Bettany and Chadwick Boseman.
Credits: Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. A Marvel Studios release.

Running time: 2:26

As much as we all love “discovering” fresh, new talent, there’s something to be said for casting your film with, if you can, movie stars.

They understand, perhaps intuitively, something about the camera, how to leap through the lens, make us forget every other role they’ve played and connect.

Movie star moments light up the otherwise drab ensemble melodrama “Mothers and Daughters,” a soapy serial about a wide range of somewhat inter-connected mothers and daughters and how they relate.

Mira Sorvino, playing a designer of “haute couture brassieres,” will make you a little moist-eyed.

And Susan Sarandon, as a mom still supporting the daughter who can’t be bothered to visit home, will stick with you for laying a little mother-daughter wisdom on us all.

“I needed to have you to teach me to be a daughter to MY mother.”

Christina Ricci and Courteney Cox have too few scenes to make an impact, Sharon Stone, Eva Amurri Martino, Alexandra Daniels and Selma Blair play assorted mothers and daughters (and both) in the film, which covers a lot of variations on motherhood/daughterhood in its 91 minutes.

One woman has just found out she wasn’t raised by her mother, and that her “sister” isn’t exactly her sister. That sister is dealing with some big-time guilt.

Another is living off mom’s cash, supporting her cupcake chef-to-be boyfriend but keeping mom at a distance for some long-ago offense.

Another mother is trying to figure out why her Princeton-educated daughter is waiting tables. That daughter is coping with a dying friend.

One is about to meet the daughter she gave up for adoption long before.

And one woman’s a careerist who discovers she’s pregnant and has to decide what to do.

Paige Cameron’s script attracted two Oscar winners and some pretty big names, but director Paul Duddridge (TV’s “McKenna”) delivers a movie that emotionally flatlines through this material.

Every intersection had the characters take the road more soapy — terminal illnesses, terminal grievances, sexy OB-GYNs, an “abortion” choice that the movies long ago lost the courage to make.

The stories don’t give any of the mother-daughter pairings enough screen time. Cox looks as if she needed a few more weeks off for whatever procedure that’s frozen/deadened her facial muscles to wear off. She looks like a “Real Housewife,” with the plastic to prove it. It’s worth mentioning because it’s distracting enough to make you wince.

Ricci, Sorvino and Blair have been criminally under-employed for years. But there’s little here to make Hollywood make amends for that.

There’s one funny line — “You’re a straight guy who wants to sell pastries in lower Manhattan. Not exactly a slam-dunk.”

Otherwise, “Mothers and Daughters” is drabness on the screen personified, a “Lifetime Original Movie” too unoriginal for Lifetime to want anything to do with it.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some mature thematic elements and brief drug use

Cast: Selma Blair, Susan Sarandon, Mira Sorvino, Christina Ricci, Sharon Stone, Courteney Cox, Eva Amurri Martino
Credits: Directed by Paul Duddridge, script by Paige Cameron. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:31

Suspension of disbelief is maybe the most important ingredient in drama — on film, stage or TV. We need to believe the characters, the situations, in order to empathize with those characters and lose ourselves in the story.

That one most important building block is missing from the frankly half-arsed Ricky Gervais farce, a “Netflix Original Movie” “Special Correspondents.”

Never, for one moment, does anything in this resemble radio news reporting the way it is now or has ever been. Gervais plainly did zero homework.

Never for one moment to we believe the swaggering rogue reporter at an obscenely-over-equipped New York station. We don’t believe Eric Bana is a reporter. We don’t believe this operation, which includes the given-nothing-to-do co-stars Kevin Pollack and Kelly Macdonald.

We might be almost amused by the caricatured Latino restaurant owners played by America Ferrara and Raul Castillo. But we don’t believe them, either.

It’s all a lie, a joke with a feeble set-up and pathetic thud of a payoff. What’s hardest to believe is that Gervais kept his name on this abortion. But excising it would have been tricky.

Writer-director-co-star Gervais, playing a loser-producer who loses his and his reporter’s tickets and passports to a war zone, decides to “fake” going to Ecuador, using “sound environments” (sound effects) to pretend to be in a tropical war zone. Bana’s star reporter character, wanting to save his job, goes along with it.

“You need to grow a pair,” Frank Bonneville (Bana) snaps.

“What, breasts?” poor Ian, whose wife has just left him, asks.

That’s the caliber of jokes here. Perhaps Gervais needed a beer or three (Golden Globes hosting) or to script this the way he writes those burning, pithy tweets that light up the Internet.

Ian and Frank hole up in their favorite Mexican restaurant. They get the owners to shout things in Spanish in the background of jungle birds, gunfire and helicopters sound effects Ian conjures up.

“Real Madrid!” “Julio Iglesias!”

Amazingly, knowing little about the country, and not having anyone on scene in INTERVIEW — that magic thing that radio and sometimes TV reporters do to PROVE they’re in a place and actually REPORTING there — their boss (Pollack) buys into it.

So they get bolder, inventing facts that no one actually there (Benjamin Bratt plays a TV reporter) can easily disprove.

Vera Farmiga plays Ian’s wife and has a delightfuly snappy flirtation/seduction with Bonneville/Bana.

Aside from her,  there’s nothing to recommend this at all. Poor Macdonald only showed up to practice doing an American accent.

Gervais fans may be willing to bend over backwards to allow his special comic genius to finally reveal itself, but to no avail. A guy whose hosting gigs and nuclear Twitter put- downs are legendary has nothing to say about media, love, marriage, integrity or anything else here. Nothing at all, much less anything funny.

His character fakes going to Ecuador to cover a story. Gervais fakes caring about character, jokes or doing the work to make “Special Correspondents” come off.

He’s never made a worse film. And topping that, he’s never made a lazier one.

MPAA Rating: TV MA, profanity, sexual situations

Cast: Eric Bana, Ricky Gervais, America Ferrara, Vera Farmiga,  Kelly Macdonald, Benjamin Bratt, Raul Castillo
Credits: Written and directed by Ricky Gervais. A Netflix original release.

Running time: 1:49

Damn. That’s on the money. Emma Stone as Billie Jean King and Steve Carrell as Bobby Riggs? The middle of the Glory Days of American Tennis, and a tennis match that turned into the Shot for Equality Heard Round the world.    “Battle of the Sexes” is due out next year.

A couple of pictures going into wide release this weekend are earning widespread endorsements.

A couple of others, not so much.

“Keanu” is mostly for fans of Comedy Central’s “Key & Peele” sketch-comedy series. It’s a sloppily-plotted, violent, hit-or-miss R-rated farce. It hits more than it misses, largely thanks to the whole metrosexual-dad-dealing-with-gang members thing that Keegan-Michael Key plays so well.

And it’s got the cutest kitten (many stunt kittens) ever to appear on the big screen. So it works and gets endorsed by most reviewers.

“Green Room” is the best thriller of the new year, a sort-of horror movie without zombies, supernatural slashers or alien monsters. A rock band gets trapped backstage at a Nazi skinhead club. Rave reviews for “Green Room.”

It goes into wider release this weekend, and opens in Orlando at the Enzian.

Garry Marshall’s latest “all-star” slab of sloppy sentiment, “Mother’s Day,” won’t do much for discerning filmgoers. It’ll almost certainly draw a big crowd. Julia Roberts and Jennifer Aniston have their fans. Jason Sudeikis has his…never mind.

Critically trashed, up and down the line. Nuked.

“Papa Hemingway in Cuba” is a maudlin, malnourished melodrama that was shot in Cuba — the first “Hollywood feature” filmed there since Castro’s revolution. A nice sense of place, a sloppy, anachronism-packed set-dressing that occasionally spoils the “moment in time,” and an unimpressive Papa ruin it. Terrible reviews for this one. 

In limited release, Jason Bateman’s adaption of the novel “The Family Fang” gets a pass from critics. We love J. Bates. I found the movie heartless and almost pointless, though. 

If  you’re a filmmaker, chances are you’re going to be shoved into a pigeon-hole. Your best hope is to find a fun, comfy one and maybe make the best of it.

John Carney’s “first, best destiny,” as Mr. Spock of “Star Trek” might put it, is making street musicals. “Once” was the musical movie epitome of romantic longing, love expressed through music when no other outlet is open to you. Even “Begin Again” crackled with music-at-the-moment-of-creation life.

“Sing Street” is the latest delight he’s added to his pigeon-hole, a infectious, effervescent coming-of-age comedy about Irish lads trying to make their mark during rock/pop’s “New Romantics” era. All because the lead singer has a crush on an older woman.

Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) should never have set eyes on her. But his parents (Maria Doyle Kennedy, Aiden Gillen) are fighting over money, so it’s no more Jesuit school for him. He’s off to Synge Street’s cut-rate Catholic school chaos, administered by bullies, with bullies-in-training filling the ranks of its students.

A pretty and posh boy like him will never fit in, which is why Conor makes up and sings songs, to drown his sorrows and mask the racket of his parents’ matches.

But Raphina gets his Irish eyes smiling. On an impulse, he offers to put this pouty, 16-year-old would-be model in a music video. It’s Dublin. It’s 1985. U2 did it. How hard can it be?

The ginger haired squirrel Darren (Ben Carolan), a hustler-in-the-making, will be their manager. He takes Conor straight to the Master of All Instruments Eamon (Mark McKenna). Darren insists they bring on the only “golliwog” (Irish racist for “black guy”) in school (Percy Chamburuka) on as keyboardist. A couple of other kids join in.

And they call themselves “Sing Street,” a pun on the name of their school.

Naturally, there’s an older, music-loving brother, given a fine stoner-bluster by Jack Reynor of “A Royal Night Out.”  He’s a wise, but aimless drop-out, and he pulls out records and pushes Conor in the right direction — Hall & Oates, yes. Genesis? God, no.

“Rock and roll is a risk. You risk being made a fool of.”

The girl has a boyfriend. But he’s into Genesis. No problem.

Raphina (Lucy Boynton) makes a fine muse, with her Sheena Easton hair and ’80s Madonna-wear. She prods the lovestruck kid to learn the “happy sad” state of mind that makes a great pop song.

So the boys drop their attempts at covering Duran Duran and Conor, renamed “Cosmo” by Raphina, writes songs with Eamon. Raphina also plays around with his look. He’s already been picked on for being “gay” by his hateful classmates. One day, he’s John Taylor from Duran Duran. The next, Rick Astley. Can A Flock of Seagulls be far behind?

Carney tosses in a little Catholic sadism (Don Wycherly plays the brutish priest in charge of the anarchic school) and the obligatory bullied-kid-turned-bully-himself (Ian Kenny).

Truthfully, all Carney was going for here was a sort of “Commitments” lite, even casting Kennedy from that 1991 Alan Parker hit as Conor’s mom.

Thus, “Sing Street” skips through many of the tropes of such musicals, and gives short shrift to every character save for the three at the very center of the story — Conor, Raphina and Brendan.

The ’80s Golden Age of Music Videos/New Romantics Era setting is strictly for costume kitsch value and upbeat pop for the lads to draw their inspiration from.

But the tunes, co-written by Carney, are catchy, sweet and fun. And the kids’ under-polished performance of them (and DIY videos) add to the charm.

So even though “Sing Street” covers familiar ground, its director knows how to make his pigeon-hole adorable. The address’s charms win you over in the end.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements including strong language and some bullying behavior, a suggestive image, drug material and teen smoking

Cast: Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Lucy Boynton, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Mark McKenna, Aiden Gillen
Credits: Written and directed by John Carney. A Weinstein Co. release.

Running time: 1:46

There’s a world-weary misanthropy than runs through child-star turned adult comic actor and director Jason Bateman’s work. And that trademark “I have no you-and-I-no-whats left to give” permeates “The Family Fang,” his second feature film as director/co-star.

But that pose’s shortcomings as an ethos, a way of looking at the world, weigh-down this smart but half-hearted farce, based on a Kevin Wilson novel.

It’s about this quartet of professional performance art pranksters — parents who enlisted/coerced their kids in their stunts, from an early age, in the name of “art.”

They’d fake a bank robbery, and Baxter, whom his folks (Kathryn Hahn plays the younger version of his mother, Jason Butler Harner his father) call “Child B,” would pass the note to the teller, pull out the gun and fire the shot that brings the “robbery” to its climax.

Child A, or Annie, would be the weeping daughter of an “innocent victim” hit by the stray bullet. Convincingly.

Or the kids would be folk singing buskers, singing “Kill your parents” to appreciative audience. Appreciative, save for two hecklers (the parents).

Dad would secretly videotape the gags, and do the reveal.

“Ladies and gentlemen, let this be your trumpet call. Life is sweet, so taste it while you can.”

That is one messed up childhood. The proof is in their adulthood. They look like successes.

Annie is a mercurial, “indie cinema darling” and loner with impulse-control issues.

Baxter is also a loner, a would-be author with writer’s block, a sometime journalist with his own warped view of stunts and what the real world can actually do to you when they go wrong.

A magazine feature he’s writing on redneck potato-gun buffs goes wrong and his long-estranged parents (now played by Christopher Walken and Maryanne Plunkett) are summoned. He summons Annie from a movie set where she’s just stirred up the tabloids with her reaction to an unscripted nude scene sprung upon her by the pervy director.

Annie and Baxter discover parents who have lost their way. It’s impossible to stand out with their elaborately planned, supposedly socially-conscious stunts, in the youtube era of viral videos of accidents, stunts-gone-wrong and cute kittens.

The kids should rejoin the team, “just like old times.” But the kids aren’t having it.

That’s when their parents disappear. Another stunt? Or are they dead? The siblings disagree about that.

Bateman dials down his already low-key slow-burn under-reactions, but never gives a hint of the man who is working out a way of turning his broken past into an asset, that he’s absorbed the lessons of his parents’ “art.”

“If you’re in control, then the chaos will happen around you and not TO you.”

Kidman works up to a fine but somewhat under-motivated fury.

Truthfully, this doesn’t really go anywhere. Unlike “Bad Words,” Bateman’s acrid world-hating comedy about a grown man competing in spelling kids’ spelling bees, there’s no hilarity in the set-ups, no pathos in the payoff.

Screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire wrote the play Kidman’s somber “Rabbit Hole” was based on, but also the book to “Shrek” stage musical, and several humorless scripts (“Poltergeist,” “Inkheart,” “Rise of the Guardians”). He doesn’t give anybody anything pointed to say or do.

And Bateman’s “Life, are you kidding me?” instincts, which have served him so well as an adult, work against “The Family Fang.” Viewers, it turns out, have to have a f— left to give for a movie to work.

Maybe it’s nothing more than some sort of demon worth exorcising. It’s a telling film selection for a former child star with a child-star sibling to make. Kids “used” by their stage-managing parents grow up a bit messed up.

But as intriguing as that is to think about, “Family Fang” doesn’t work, even  as onscreen therapy.

MPAA Rating:R for some language

Cast: Nicole Kidman, Jason Bateman, Kathryn Hahn, Christopher Walken, Maryanne Plunkett, Harris Yulin
Credits: Directed by Jason Bateman, script by David Lindsay-Abaire, based on the Kevin Wilson novel . A release.

Running time: 140

The comedy, Variety reports, will be about the late president’s second term, when “I don’t recall,” “I don’t remember” replaced “mistakes were made” and that ever-cupped hand to his ear, unable to hear Sam Donaldson’s shouts over the chopper motor noise.

Will Ferrell will produce and star in this comedy, which is about an intern helping convince the out-of-it- C in C that he is “playing the president in a movie.”

Which, as Donald Trump has said, is all the job really requires. “It’s easy.”

Needless to say, the loud but ever-shrinking Reagan Generation fans are outraged. 

Because Ferrell, after all, has already mocked one former president on the small screen and on stage.And Reagan had Alzheimer’s.

But some of the outrage is a step behind the times. Those posts “They’d never dare do one on Ted Kennedy,” missed this news about Jason Clarke and the Chappaquiddick wreck/tragedy/scandal.

This is Disney approved footage, narrated by Jon Favreau, showing some of how they conjured up the Magic of Mowgli mingling with talking animals for the film.

Even less of it is “real” than you realized.