Movie Nation

Strip away the run away hits of the summer — those pre-summer phenomena “Avengers: Endgame” and “Aladdin” — and it’s been a near disaster at the box office for any and all concerned.

Another weekend, another rebooted franchise swings and misses.

So it is with the move set to displace “X Men: Dark Phoenix” at the lowered expectations top of the BO heap.

“Men in Black: International,” a classic boardroom-wants-it-and-nobody-else reboot, is riding middling to poor reviews and is set to open at $30 million, in the “Dark Phoenix” ballpark. NOT in the “Secret Life of Pets 2” range.

Box Office Mojo has been on the money by betting low on all its “slumping sequels” opening weekends. It says $28 million, tops, with “Pets 2” coming in at $25 on the last weekend it will enjoy without having to compete with “Toy Story 4.”

As with most of the bloated underwhelmers of this summer, “International” will make its cash abroad, “Godzilla” style.

“Shaft” goes full on action comedy with that rebooted franchise, and it’s also not all that as a movie. But Samuel L. Jackson could lure in $18 million, with a little help from Regina Hall, Richard Roundtree and that dull kid given the Shaft surname for a role he wasn’t up to. Imagine how this might have played with funnier offspring and maybe a villain who is a real part of the picture? Box Office Mojo says nope, $14 million — tops.

“Late Night” is Mindy Kaling’s Amazon Studios take on late night TV work, and has earned decent reviews and a platformed release. Amazon has me blackballed from previews for reasons only they know, but I will get to it eventually. It looks to earn under $5 million in wide release.

No doubt Mindy Kaling will find somebody to blame for that, although she’s used the “white male critics” card already, so who knows?

Indie icon Jim Jarmusch’s deadpan take on zombie movies isn’t out of the gate a critical darling. Without good reviews, how is “The Dead Don’t Die” isn’t likely to scare up much cash, which must have been his only reason for making it.

I mean, Bill Murray’s already done the funny zombie picture thing. The studio knew how bad it was, via their own platformed release, and didn’t even preview it in my top 20 market.

It still could earn $2 million.

Last weekend’s “Dark Phoenix” will fall off a cliff this weekend. “Pets 2” will lose under 50% of its opening audience and “Ma” and “John Wick 3” will have their last weekend in the top ten.

This couldn’t be “The Shining” sequel nobody really asked for, or could it?

Horror editor turned director Mike Flanagan adapted Stephen King’s “Shining” and

Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, the old Overlook — haunted as hell, still — and a November 8 release.

The major thematic thread that ties all the “Toy Story” movies together is “a toy’s noblest purpose,” to entertain, teach and belong to a child.

That fits neatly in the Disney and Disney/Pixar cartoon continuum, that an animated children’s film’s highest purpose is to touch us, with just music, hand-or-computer-drawn characters and sympathetic voice actors.

That’s how they get you. And “Toy Story 4” passes that toughest test.

That’s even more remarkable for the fact that it happens in a film that is, by Pixar’s “Toy Story” gold standards, unremarkable.

The animation is Next Gen vivid, and there are laughs — just not nearly as many as in the earlier classics in this supposedly concluded series.

The narrative is recycled from all the earlier films. A toy is in trouble, the child who owns it must be spared its loss, even as the toys grow more acutely aware of their mortality, how disposable they are in the lifetime of a child.

And the pacing, with the odd exceptional antic moment, is slow enough to maybe make you recall that this epic was wrapped up — perfectly — in “Toy Story 3.” Nothing we’re seeing here feels like anything more than a pointless epilogue, an anti-climactic one at that.

Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and most of the other inhabitants of Andy’s toybox have been handed down to a little girl named Bonnie, who had other toys, some of which she’s more into than the mostly vintage ones Andy passed on.

Sheriff Woody has to get used to being second banana to boss doll Dolly (Bonnie Hunt) in terms of leading Team Toybox.

He’s getting left behind in the childplay arena, again. Bo Peep (Annie Potts) was resigned to being passed on, again, years earlier. “It’s time for the next kid.” But Woody shudders at being told, “Look, you’ve got your first dust bunny!”

Bonnie’s first day of kindergarten — which the sheltered little darling resists — gives him purpose. He hitchhikes to school and smoothes the way for her in several delightful helicopter-parent (toy) moments.

But Bonnie’s adjustment is even better aided by the toy she makes as a school project. “Forky” is concocted out of a spork, pipe cleaner, beady eyes and popsicle sticks. Instantly, he’s her new favorite, somebody Woody, Buzz and the rest will take a backseat to and be charged with protecting from a forgetful little girl.

It’s just that “Forky” is born into existential crisis. He knows what he is, and wants to go back to being that.

“TRASH!”

Some of the funniest moments on “Toy Story 4” involve Woody and the others taking on suicide watch duty for the spork toy lol. He’s hell-bent on “disposing” of himself.

“I can’t letcha throw yourself away!”

A family vacation just magnifies the problem. Woody finds himself searching an antiques store where Bonnie manages to lose Sporky — again — and facing off with a gang of ventriloquist dummies led by Gabby Gabby, an antique who resembles that darned “Annabelle” doll of the Amityville/Annabelle/Insidious horror universe.

Woody had something Gabby Gabby (Christina Hendricks) needs.

Bo Peep re-enters the story, and the script introduces a couple of subversive plush carnival toys (the great Key and Peele) and a Canadian motorcycle stunt doll named Duke Caboom, and given his “Whoa” by Keanu Reeves.

The settings, from the store with collectible toys to the sandbox, are new versions of “worlds” previously visited by the toys. The carnival is novel and ably mined for a laugh or two.

But it’s a “Toy Story” movie, which means you can’t really compare it to “The Secret Life of Pets 2” or “Cars 1, 2” or (God forbid) “3.”

Most of the characters we’ve invested in are shuffled into the background to make room for those voiced by Timothy Dalton, Kristen Schaal and Jeff Garland. The story arc is “friend in me” worn out. And as a result, it plays longer than its 100 minute run time.

It’s easily the weakest of the four iterations of that title. If Disney and Pixar really needed to revisit a tale that they had gracefully ended, it should have been more of a victory lap.

This, whatever its modest charms, has the feel of an end zone dance — crass, unnecessary, and a slightly pale reflection of the glories that warranted it.

MPAA Rating: G

Cast: The voices of Tom Hanks, Annie Potts, Bonnie Hunt, Christina Hendricks, Keegan- Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Tim Allen.

Credits: Directed by Josh Cooley, script by Andrew Stanton and Stephany Folsom. A Disney/Pixar release.

He likes the way she shops.

Something about the items the stranger picks up at the supermarket, the care she seems to take, the fact that she pays with cash convinces Ed to compliment Ronnie.

“Strategic,” he says of her manner. “I know. And I know that you know.”

Ed may have leapt to conclusions, but he’s the sort of retiree who dives in, head first. He talks and talks. He follows her to the antique store where Ronnie is always late for work.

He instantly shares his worldview with her, the fact that the world consists of “those who want to control you, and those who don’t want to BE controlled.”

Ed (John Lithgow) is overwhelming, and Ronnie (Blythe Danner) seems like the easily overwhelmed type. But there’s a connection, generational, accepting, one might even say “settling.”

Whatever else Ed has erroneously assumed, neither one of them wants to be alone “on the wrong side of 60,” even though Ronnie instantly abhors that phrase.

“The Tomorrow Man” is a fragile fable of love between the fastidious, plan and over-plan for “tomorrow” Ed, and the passive, trapped in the past Ronnie.

Cinematographer turned writer-director Noble Jones can’t quite make it come off, but there are pleasures in watching two accomplished actors stage a character-development workshop, even in a film that isn’t all that.

Fastidious Ed has gone down the rabbit hole of conspiracies and paranoia, stocking up on food, supplies, fuel and gear for the day when the “SHTF.” The last three letters stand for “hits the fan.”

He used to work in quality control at the ball bearing plant in nearby Syracuse, but the day he discovered the Internet is the day he abandoned quality control of the information he takes in. He is wound up and not rich enough, even in their small rural town, to be called “eccentric.”

We wonder why Ronnie isn’t seeing the warning signs that we do. He overwhelms her, hyper, arrogant, a man who’s watched enough cable TV news to figure he has it all figured out.

Ronnie doesn’t share his mania for news (and a little sports). She’s into war documentaries. As passive as she is, she accepts his attention, embraces it, and helps things escalate at her own pace.

She’s too genteel to brush him off, too flattered to let this last chance at something wander off, too damaged to admit that this “compromise” is between two people with little in common other than their generation.

She suffered a great loss, and never recovered from it. She’s the polar opposite of Ed.

But he bulldozes on, wearing his emotions on his sleeve and sharing his deepest secret with her — the stash he has hidden behind a wall of his house, his survival insurance.

To his credit, Lithgow never lets this guy become a Fox News/InfoWars/Glen Beck gold-buying caricature. Every family has its Ed’s in this day and age, reasonable people who lost their reason just at the moment when cynical media figures realized the political value in scaring such folks half to death.

Danner is likewise believable, real. Ronnie has let life get away from her and lets Ed be her unlikely and somewhat unstable lifeline.

I mean, the guy stops his pickup and runs into a field, weeping, when she sings along to “Muskrat Love” on the radio. DING DING DING — warning bell #16!

Writer-director Jones wrings what little he can out of this unlikely pairing in the real world, and then slaps “fable” onto it in the finale and hopes for the best. That feels inorganic and the picture, start to finish, has a touch of “padded” and “filler” about scenes and contrived situations, like their over-the-top Thanksgiving dinner with his “What happened to you, Dad?” son (Derek Cecil) and her constant conferring with Goth girl boutique manager Tina (Eve Harlow).

There’s a demographic niche desperate to be served that this movie is aimed at, and more’s the pity that it’s not better as there are so few filmmakers and studios willing to tell stories of this generation, for this generation.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief strong language and some suggestive material

Cast: John Lithgow, Blythe Danner, Derek Cecil, Eve Harlow

Credits: Written and directed by Noble Jones. A Bleeker Street release.

Running time: 1:34

Back in the heyday of “blaxploitation” cinema, the men were men — laws unto themselves, righting social, racial and criminal wrongs with their fists and guns.

Women were, well, objects of desire — conquests, helpless in the smouldering gaze of our heroes. Or shrill resisters of those charms.

And heaven help the young guy whose eagerness to join in on those “conquests” wasn’t, shall we say, obvious.

Whatever else this latest, jokey reboot of “Shaft” is, at least the screenwriters got that retrograde sexism and Afro-American homophobia right.

“Ride Along” and “Think Like a Man” director Tim Story and his screenwriters struggle to update Shaft for modern tolerances, finding nervous laughs every time the “Black James Bond” (Samuel L. Jackson) questions his F.B.I. analyst son’s sexual preference. “Besmirching our family name” is one way Dad describes it.

And they strain mightily for laughs in this long, body-strewn action comedy.

Not that there aren’t plenty. But when you rely on every time Samuel L. drops the “n” word or his many colorful variations of the F-bomb to get a giggle, even that wears thin after a while.

The comedy in this convoluted hunt-for-a-murderer-mystery revolves around the contrast between Junior (Jessie T. Usher, of “Independence Day: Resurgence” and TV’s “Survivor’s Remorse”), a buttoned down “metrosexual” in sneakers meant for “badminton,” and his ’70s-80s badass private eye Dad, who still busts heads, pulls triggers, drives a ’71 Chevelle SS and wears way too much leather.

John Shaft Jr.’s ex-junky college pal (Avan Jogia) has died under mysterious circumstances, and Mr. “I hate guns” figures he can stop data digging long enough to figure out who did it by working the streets.

Getting slapped around is getting off lightly with those folks.

So, behind his sure-to-disapprove mama’s (Regina Hall) back, Junior seeks the help of his estranged, absentee Dad (Jackson).

Junior is about following the digital trail, Dad is about going out to “baby sit your ass” while they “handle our bidness.”

The kid is smart-phoned to the max. Dad keeps his files as…files — scattered all over the office where he occasionally beds a comely client.

As this case involves an Army vet and onetime drug addict who also happened to be Muslim and attended a New York mosque on the F.B.I.’s watch list, it will require delicacy, diplomacy, not going off half-cocked.

John Shaft is none of those, especially — to hear him tell it — the half you-know-what.

As the duo picks, punches and pistols their way through New York, Shaft Senior is all about schooling, or least insulting through innuendo, the “fluid, cis-gender” coconut water-drinking, hip-hop loving kid who bears his name.

“Women want a man to be a man…Men don’t APOLOGIZE.” And about those clothes, your “tight-ass jeans’r cutting off the blood to your BRAIN.”

Junior comes to realize, to his dismay, that “There’s NO non-violent people in Harlem!” And that Dad’s “Give her the Shaft, boy!  It’s your duty to please that booty!” isn’t going to work on his college crush, Sasha (Alexandra Shipp of “X-Men:Dark Phoenix”).

She hates the kid’s sexist, racist, homophobic and trigger-happy old man.

So, too, does Dad’s ex, Junior’s mom.

Until, of course, she sees him back in action, her eyes lighting up at his masculinity and mad firearm skillz.

Sadly, as the bodies pile up, Sasha too gets that turned-on-by-gunplay look in her eyes. If you ever doubted guns were penis substitutes, “Shaft” settles that. It’s a shame the filmmakers thought being glib about gunplay, flippant about firearms, is funny in itself.

It’s one thing to bring back the leather, the muscle cars and the turtle necks. It’s quite another to revive stereotypes for cheap laughs or glorify guns as a symbol of manhood.

Laughs of every kind become harder to come by the deeper this “Shaft” goes down the um, rabbit hole. The missing-from-the-movie villain (Isaach De Bankolé) is a non-entity, young Usher underplays John Jr. to such a degree that he’s rarely funny enough to warrant watching.

And the original Shaft, Richard Roundtree — you’ve seen the TV commercials, so this isn’t a “spoiler” — doesn’t show up early enough to save the comic day. That leaves Jackson to carry the picture, even he’s a little tentative with some of the attitudes he’s espousing and lines he’s trying to finesse.

I appreciate the direction they wanted to take this, but the jokes needed work, the ridicule should be more directed at Jackson’s character’s various blind spots and intolerances — “This is my ‘Puerto Ricans I don’t trust’ file.” —  and disrespect for human rights.

At some point, too, gun worship becomes fetishized. Story didn’t make those moments of mayhem, or choosing which firearms to make that mayhem with, amusingly over-the-top. They’re just violently over-the-top.

That pretty much goes for the movie as well. And that’s more an ’80s “action comedy” thing than a “Shaft” tribute. Ya dig?

It’s MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, violence, sexual content, some drug material and brief nudity

Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Jessie T. Usher, Regina Hall, Alexandra Shipp, Isaach De Bankolé and Richard Roundtree

Credits: Directed by Tim Story, script by Kenya Barris, Alex Barnow, based on the character from the Ernest Tidyman novel and 1970s movies. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:51

By turns glorious and thrilling, revealing and well — mythic and fictional — Martin Scorsese’s “Rolling Thunder Revue” joins the ranks of epic concert tour documentaries, capturing a moment in American roots music and the icon who conjured it.

Put it on the pantheon with “Don’t Look Back,” “Mad Dogs & Englishmen,” “Gimme Shelter” and “Festival Express” as a document of one of those incredible music made during a road show that lost somebody — if not everybody — a lot of money.

But when “promoter” Jim Gianopolus takes the credit for coming up with “the idea” for the tour, and sums up the financials for “Rolling Thunder,” he calls it a “disaster, a catastrophe,” we can’t actually tell how much of a debacle it was. Because Jim Gianopolus was never a concert promoter. He’s with Paramount Pictures, and Scorsese has him “playing” a promoter.

It doesn’t exactly spoil the grandiose feel of it all to see Sharon Stone telling a marvelous whopper about how Bob Dylan came up with the idea for wearing face paint thanks to her hanging out on the tour and wearing her KISS t-shirt.

But damn, Marty. Your movie’s 2:22 long and otherwise lovely and immersive. Why stick Michael Murphy as his “Tanner ’88” character in here, “remembering” how Jimmy Carter got him on the tour when “Tanner” was but a young Congressman?

Yeah, that’s a moment when anybody watching this who’s the least bit hip and yet hasn’t read a review maybe catches on that Scorsese and Dylan are having them on. A little. But yeah, you’re also wasting our time, Marty, because the movie doesn’t need the fiction.

Dylan saying, “I don’t remember a THING about Rolling Thunder. It happened so long ago I wasn’t even born.” is enough of a reminder. The man’s a changeling, a shaman and a con-artist. We remember. He’s not to be taken at his word.

The film’s full title is “Conjuring the Rolling Thunder Re-Vue,” and it begins with a little black and white silent cinema “magic,” and a lot of context — a Dylan small venue/too-many sidemen and women “Medicine Show” journey in the middle of the American Bicentennial, 1976, a last big hurrah for Americana music in America’s most Americana-obsessed moment.

“Saigon had fallen,” Dylan remembers. “People seemed to have lost their sense of conviction, for some reason.”

“Two people tried to shoot the president (Ford) in the same month!”

Scorsese builds on this interview and scores of others, some dating from the actual tour, and uses extensive concert footage and even snippets of Dylan’s abortive feature film project, “Renaldo and Clara” (scripted by Sam Shepard, interviewed here shortly before his death) to create this tribute to the “the inspired Dylan” who, as the late poet and tour-performer Allen Ginsberg remembered, was “back” and the reason for the tour in the first place.

You can’t help but think that nostalgia for the “family” of folk music, the hootenanny nature of folk music/poet parties, was part of Dylan’s thinking in pulling this economically unsustainable delight together. He missed what he’d once been.

Tour dates took them from Plymouth to Lowell and Bangor, Lakeland to Salt Lake City and odd points in between.

And along the way, Bob and Allen G. would visit Jack Kerouac’s grave in Lowell, Massachusetts, Bob would stop by CBS Records in New York to sit (stand) in on a planning session for the marketing of his epic (The Ballad of) “Hurricane.”

He’d drink beer from a can, goof around with the huge entourage and interact with women at after-parties, quizzing them, re-string his guitar just like the broke folkie he once was.

And then the next day, he’d launch into ethereal duets with his former love, Joan Baez, and tear through re-interpretations of the Bob Dylan Songbook, a tight but gloriously shambolic, impromptu-seeming band running through a setlist only the Maestro could explain. Which he never does.

Stand-out fiddler Scarlet Rivera related (back then) how she met Dylan — he almost hit her with his car. We see the exotic beauty and violin virtuoso swaying and playing, following his lead at his right shoulder, start to finish, in performance after performance.

Her playing defined this period in Dylan’s music, for some.

We see Bob Dylan driving an RV, back in the day, just like a future retiree. And in between hearing him in glorious voice, passionately reinventing his vast repertoire, we get another clue as to how seriously we should be taking his present-day explanations for what happened, and why.

He’s jokey, self-effacing, contrary and…coherent. There’s little of his mystical, cryptic have-one-over-on-us nonsense that long defined how he treated questions of any sort.

Dude must be acting the part.

A couple of favorite moments — the solemn, monk-like (dressed in dark raincoats) procession of touring musicians getting the under-the-falls tour at Niagara, and young Bob remembering a folk protest song from prodigious memory, “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” by his contemporary Peter La Farge and playing it, off the cuff, on a visit to an Indian reservation.

Damn.

The film’s fakery aside, “Rolling Thunder Revue” feels right at home among Scorsese’s music documentaries about the Stones, Dylan, The Blues, The Band and George Harrison, films not just to watch, but to savor and revel in.

And as you can tell from the links included in this review, it’s a real down-the-Internet rabbit hole for anybody really into the subject (like Scorsese), the times, the lucky souls who got to participate, and the fans who, in one sequence after the lights have come back up, sit slack-jawed and weeping at the music they’d just experienced.

Cast: Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsburg, Roger McGuinn, Ronee Blakely, Sam Shepard, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Sharon Stone and Joni Mitchell

Credits: Directed by Martin Scorsese. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:22

Yeah, I know “summer” has moved up and up the calendar, thanks to climate change and Hollywood’s eagerness to jump start the blockbuster season.

But we can’t count April, or shouldn’t. So leave those “Avengers” at home. And nothing that’s opened since has shown any signs of owning the hottest season of the year at the box office.

“Godzilla, King of Monsters” is fading. “Dark Phoenix” didn’t rise. “Secret Life of Pets 2” is nobody’s idea of a secret smash. “Aladdin” may prove heard to surpass, as it is still making money off the Disney princess (and prince) fanbase. Over $250 this weekend, for sure. Yes, it opened in what is “spring,” calendar-wise. Still a “summer” movie.

The big money has yet to enter the game. “Shaft” won’t show, “Men in Black: International” figures to fold early.

There are five potentially summer-owning blockbusters on the calendar. Where’s the smart bet?

J. J. Brewis over at SBD, Sports Betting Dime, says “The Lion King” live-action (with digital critters) remake is the surest thing. They give it +300 odds to better “Aladdin,” which is enough for me to raise an eyebrow. I may take that bet.

“Toy Story 4” seems like a far safer wager and guess, +600 odds from SBD. Pixar is going to make a mint or Disney will start looking into folding them into the regular Disney Feature Animation. That’s MY prediction. Pixar’s had some up and down years (which explains “Toy Story 4,” a sequel they need more than we need to see) while the Mouse House has had “Frozen” and has “Frozen 2” and Disney’s classic cartoons are becoming live-action features that make another bundle off the same script, songs and “property.”

Why keep Pixar? Its innovative time might have passed and IF “Toy Story 4” doesn’t blow up the box office, surely the Fox-layoff-happy Disney will have to give the post-Pixar animation market some thought.

The summer of sequels continues with yet another “Fast and Furious,” which is how Universal is titling its spinoff, “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw.” As if anybody could not figure it out, but why gamble with your bottom line?

That has 6 to one odds of being the summer’s biggest stand-out smash.

And oh yes, your “friendly neighborhood Spider-Man” takes a trip, falls for a new MJ and shows up in time to own July and potentially the rest of the box office season until schools re-open. SBD figures “Spider-Man: Far from Home” is a +400 shot to make the most money (for Sony, which will need it after “MIB: International”).

So you’ve got your odds, and maybe you watch the box office (as I do) and visit Box Office Mojo and chew the fat over prognostications over on The Box Office Theory and are ready to try your luck at beating Vegas. Or SBD.

Anything to spice up an otherwise sequel-slammed summer at the movies, right?

His code-name is “T,” in the “Men in Black” fashion. But in the London office, everybody calls him (Liam Neeson) “High T.”

Get it? Good. That’s a rare thing, a joke that lands, even softly.

And in his sage advice to his younger charges in “Men in Black: International,” he leans a bit on squishy, B.S. pop- psyche Oprahspeak entirely too hard.

“The universe has a way of putting you where you’re supposed to be at the moment you’re supposed to be there,” he purrs.

But what universe put “Men in Black” back on screens after that franchise had shown little sign of life? And who thought F. Gary Gray, who started his career with junk stoner comedies before graduating to thrillers and then the fine NWA bio-pic “Straight Outta Compton” behind the camera? Let’s not blame that on “the universe.”

Oh. Right. He followed “MIB” director Barry Sonnenfeld before, doing “Be Cool,” the sequel to “Get Shorty.” A lifeless retread, so how’d that work out?

“International” reboots the franchise with the fetching, droll Tessa Thompson and the self-mocking hunk Chris Hemsworth, putting Emma Thompson in charge of the New York HQ and Neeson in London.

So far, so good, right?

Tess T. plays Molly, who saw an alien as a little girl and made E.T.’s her life’s work and getting her own black suit, tie and sunglasses her obsession. She grew up to be a hacker and space invader tracker who uses those skills to stalk MIB agents after an assignment back to their headquarters, and from there to bluff her way into a job with O (Emma T., no relation.).

O: “We don’t hire. We recruit!”

Molly: “I look good in black.”

Cute.

Just like that, she’s in, and the picture perfunctorily skips to shipping this “probie” (probationary agent) to London, where she finagles sidekick status to swaggering Agent H (Hemsworth), a heroic goof we’ve seen save The Eiffel Tower, Paris and the World from “The Hive,” who are now back and working their way from Marrakesh into Europe in pursuit of…something.

A clever touch. The villains are “Les Twins,” a French dance duo turned into scowling Islamo-menacing aliens that no mere “MIB” can foil.

The new “pet” alien is the sole survivor of a tiny race caught up in the mayhem, a hamster-sized palace guard named “Pawn” (“Pawnie” to his new pals) and voiced, to amusing effect, by Kumail Nanjiani of “The Big Sick.”

Not amusing enough, but that’s kind of what we’re dealing with, here. The remixed theme song plays back at a slower tempo, here, and damned if that doesn’t infest the entire movie. It’s like a slow-walked comedy. So director Gray may have absorbed some, but not all of the Sonnenfeld comic ethos (“Comedy is fast,” he once lectured me. “And close-up.” The bigger the lens, the bigger the face in the camera, the funnier according to Sonnenfeld and now Gray.).

“Mission: Impossible” villain Rebecca Ferguson plays a heavy who shows up later, Rafe Spall is a grumpy London HQ nemesis for Agent H and nobody else is even given the chance to register — no funny alien voices, nada.

Thompson’s best moments are early on, trying to apply for jobs that will get her to the Men in Black. Hemsworth has a little fun in the part, but he’s going at half-speed, like everything else. Watch for one good sight gag involving a tool that’s been a favorite prop in his action career.

The aliens are far more lifelike than they ever were in the Will Smith/Tommie Lee Jones “MIB” movies, but the shiny ray guns are as generic as ever and the shootouts surprisingly dull, if expensive looking.

The universe — ok Sony — had the bad luck to put this movie in theaters in a summer overrun with desultory sequels. You know the dishonor roll — “Godzilla,” “Dark Phoenix” and let’s be brutally blunt, a $billion at the box office doesn’t transform “Avengers: Endgame” into a movie anybody will remember by the time it hits streaming.

Why gamble on a new action picture, period piece, rom-com or true life adventure when you own the rights to “Spider-Man” into infinity and beyond?

Until audiences stop showing up, this is our fate and these will be our choices. And they’re turning out to be no choice at all.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sci-fi action, some language and suggestive material.

Cast: Tessa Thompson, Chris Hemsworth, Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson

Credits: Directed by F. Gary Gray, script by Matt Holloway and Art Marcum, based on the Lowell Cunningham comics. Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:54

You might have heard the name, if you subscribe to Billboard. Maybe you caught him on “Soul Train,” just once.

The last name he shared with Obama’s pick to be U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, his daughter.

He got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He’s best friends with Quincy Jones.

And then a montage of the famous folks he’s linked to, revered by, people he helped — from Hank Aaron and Bill Withers to Bill Clinton, Andrew Young and Barack Obama, Jimmy Jam AND Terry Lewis, tells you who Clarence Avant –it’s pronounced “A-vant” — knows.

“The Black Godfather” they call him. They laugh; Jamie Foxx, Clinton, Lionel Ritchie, almost all of them with stories of some time “Clarence cussed me out.”

The man is a veritable Samuel L. when it comes to his generous use of the phrase that first references your mother and then what you do to her.

“The Black Godfather” is filmmaker Reginald Hudlin’s love letter to Avant, a major figure in music, politics, concert promotion, the star making machinery of Hollywood and the friendly ear and — when needed — megaphone with connections who can “get you paid.”

It’s a film of warm remembrances and salty anecdotes, deals made with just a phone call, “power” wielded almost always behind the scenes.

Greensboro born, raised in tiny Climax, N.C., Avant’s life is only shortchanged in Hudlin’s film — he did “Marshall” and “Boomerang” and a LOT of TV — in those early years. We get a hint of how he got out of rural N.C. during segregation, and no idea of how he landed his first showbiz gig or three.

But Avant went from running a club in South Jersey to handling much of the black talent for powerful, mob-connected agent Joseph Glazer’s portfolio at a time when black agents were as rare as black presidents.

Composer Lalo Schifrin is the first to give us a hint of Avant’s catholic tastes. If he’s an equal opportunity offender, sweetly and profanely insulting the high and mighty, from early on he made no distinction about talent. Being shipped to Hollywood to help jazz man Schifrin get his foot in the door composing for movies and TV (“Mission: Impossible,” scores upon scores of scores), he didn’t mind rattling cages as a short, well dressed black man representing a white jazz man.

When he started his own record label years later, he got in trouble with black radio stations for making guitarist Dennis Coffey an instrumental soul hits star. Coffey’s white, something that only became obvious when he hit “Soul Train.”

Avant dabbled in sports when he was asked to mediate getting Jim Brown to agree to do a documentary with TV producer David L. Wolper.

“He said, ‘You want to do movies?'” Brown remembers. “The Dirty Dozen” and a long screen career, after football, followed.

When Andrew Young decided to run for Congress in Georgia in the 1970s, Avant calls him up and offers to mount a benefit concert. Isaac Hayes and Rare Earth packed 30,000 in Young’s kick-off event.

When Hank Aaron was near to breaking the all time home run record, Avant offered to go to Atlanta’s most famous company and get the man a decent endorsement deal.

He marched into the president of Coca-Cola’s office in 1975, Aaron remembers, and says, sans introductions or any niceties — “N—–s drink a LOT of Coke!”

The man was Samuel L. Jackson before Samuel L. Jackson came along.

“I don’t have problems. I have friends.”

He signed 30something aircraft toilet builder Bill Withers to his start-up record label and made him a star. He signed Sixto Rodriguez, too. “Took 40 years” for the rest of the world to catch on to the voice, the poetry and the man who became “Sugar Man,” subject of a classic documentary and all-time great comeback story.

And on and on it goes, testimonial after testimonial, a man who often didn’t get paid for these “favors,” but who’d produce Michael Jackson’s “Bad” tour — even though he knew nothing about concert promotion, who strong-armed ABC, where he had a consultancy, into backing off letting Dick Clark run “Soul Train” out of business by launching the competing “Soul Unlimited” dance and music show.

“Godfather” they still called him, “Kingmaker.”

His status as a political fundraiser and voice in the ear of big time Democrats is verified by sit-down interviews with Clinton and Obama, Kamala Harris and Andrew Young.

Story after story backs up Bill Withers’ chuckling assessment of this man who has “never seen…with a tool…His tools are his ability to manipulate people. I don’t mean that in a bad way, necessarily. He puts people together.”

Avant laughs at all this, curses a little. Constantly. “Say Clarence Avant’s name and doors opened and the seas parted!” offends his modesty. “A celebrity’s celebrity” seems more than his due.

It’s a shame nobody thought to use the Yiddish word “chutzpah,” or the other one, “mensch,” because both fit the man to a T.

Here’s Quincy, Jones, rolling his eyes at every Avant pronouncement (they’re interviewed together), but offering, “He was fearless, man…He was in there calling Lew Wasserman (chairman of MCA) a mo-fo. And got away with it!”

There’s Snoop Dogg, getting choked up, Jamie Foxx attempting an impersonation, Hank Aaron the most bemused and relaxed we’ve ever seen him in an interview, David Geffen, Cicely Tyson, that daughter Nicole, who ruffled Dad’s feathers a little when she chose to campaign for this little known Senator from Illinois, rather than Dad’s friend Mrs. Clinton in 2008.

Of course, we’ve heard the story about the call Avant made that got Obama’s famous 2004 Democratic National Convention speech moved to prime time. So he can’t have been too upset.

“You either join the country club or you remain a GD caddie,” Avant growls. “I’m not a f—–g caddie!”

“Life is about numbers…” he preaches, talking money. Always money.

For a man who’s self-made, come up from nothing to the very highest corridors of power, largely based on favors, advice and legs up he’s given others (as the film has it), he sure obsesses about money. Then we hear about the time he went broke.

A two hour film seems his due, although “The Black Godfather” is quite repetitive and lacks anything resembling a discouraging word. Even people he’s feuded with have nothing but sweet things to say about him.

He’s no “Supermensch,” to compare this to another “rare Hollywood man of integrity.” But Avant, like Shep Gordon, the always-helping/unfailingly kind agent of that documentary profile, reminds you that whatever you’ve done to get to that Oscar, Grammy, Emmy or Tony podium, or that Washington office, the person who encouraged you, helped you and kicked your behind when you needed it at whatever stage of your career you had it coming to you is worth remembering, too.

Seminal figures behind the scenes should get their due, too.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Clarence Avant, Quincy Jones, Hank Aaron, Kamala Harris, Bill Clinton, Snoop Dogg, Bill Withers, Lionel Ritchie, Jackie Avante, Jamie Foxx, Barack Obama, David Geffen

Credits: Directed by Reginald Hudlin.  A Netflix Original.

Running time: 1:58

Tessa Thompson, Chris Hemsworth, Emma Thompson and Liam Neeson take over the franchise.

New blood new life? We’ll see.

The review embargo is 9am Wed.

Which has now passed. HERE is my review.