Movie Nation

An elite Mexican commando unit battling cartels and corruption must shoot and fight its way north — to safety in Brownsville — in the chest-thumping shoot-em-up “Counterattack.”

Nothing is made of that irony, and that’s just one of many loose threads in this loose cannon B-movie from South of the Border.

Luis Alberti is Captain Guerrero, who finishes up an afternoon of drinking and gambling with a pal by intervening when two women (Mayra Batalla and Frida Jiser) trying to report a mass grave they’ve found are hassled by cartel goons and corrupt cops.

The captain is so celebrated and intimidating that he wins the stand-off with a legion of armed mob minions and local police, and gets to just walk away after having shot a couple of bad guys — including one with a badge.

That’s the logic here. Don’t judge “how they do things in Mexico” and don’t pay too much attention to how things transpire. Try not to get too far ahead of the utterly formulaic plot and don’t sweat the layers and layers of plot lapses and genre tropes and cliches.

When’s that next shootout, compadres?

Captain Guerrero is part of a unit called Murcielagos — “bats.” The cartel leader they’re hunting (Noé Hernández) and his brother (Israel Islas) have it in for these soldiers, blaming them for killing their father. That’s why they filled a ditch with dead soldiers, which the two women — one of them on her way for an abortion — find.

The villains ambush Guerrero and his closest subordinates — nicknamed Tanque, Pollo, Toro and Combo (Leonardo Alonso, Luis Curiel, Guillermo Nava, David Calderón León) — when they’re off duty, heading north for a U.S. shopping trip.

When the army men turn the tide and wipe out their ambushers, it’s game on as they’re on foot, the bad guys’ “dogs” are in pursuit (Ishbel Baustista plays their ace tracker) and the only hope for our heroes is a “safe” extraction either near the border, or across it in Texas.

The movie sets up several promising subtexts, and all but forgets almost every one of them as we lurch from shoot-out to shoot-out, with the Murcielagos battling long odds and never missing what they aim at — unless it’s a senior bad guy, whom they wound. So he can make a speech.

After every firefight that the five survive, they “report,” aka “sound off” — “Combo STANDING,” “Tanque STANDING…”

The shootouts are first-rate, in that “bad guys mostly miss, good guys never do” way.

Alberti is a most charismatic lead, and Hernández does what he can with the doting dad/ranting, raving and murderous drug lord at work stereotype. The willowy Bautista was an interesting choice to play the tough broad killer/tracker “Cobra.”

But nothing here is written or directed in a way to make it memorable beyond that moment when the credits start and Netflix is trying to convince you to begin watching something else without giving you the chance to say “Not so fast.”

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Luis Alberti, Leonardo Alonso, Luis Curiel, Guillermo Nava, David Calderón León, Mayra Batalla, Frida Jiser, Ishbel Bautista, Israel Islas and Noé Hernández

Credits: Directed by Chava Cartas, scripted by Jose Ruben Escalante Mendez . A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:24

The Galapagos Islands, 1934, Germans get away to “Eden.” Things don’t work out the way they’d hoped.

This parable of human nature and class and the venality of man opens April 3.

Payback’s a Bitch, Down Under. And it comes courtesy of an Academy Award Winner.

May 2.

That’s the most Michael Cera thing ever, right?

April 11.

Ninety five years old or not, the news of Gene Hackman’s death still hits as a shock.

As to what happened and why, let’s not speculate on that and let the police/coroner findings tell that story of him, his wife and dog dying in their house.

An Oscar winner and one of the greatest screen actors of his generation, he was brilliant almost every time he stepped in front of a camera.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Hackman a few times, and like Kevin Kline, he was the same shy guy who turned up on talk shows. Almost too shy to chat up, it seemed.

Bill Murray and others might remember a hardass, exacting and brilliant, on the set. But Hackman always said he was trained to act, not to be a celebrity or be interviewed.

That cocky, blustery larger than life persona that turned up in many a film, debuting in “The Poseidon Adventure?” “ACTING” as they say.

I remember him apologizing for “Welcome to Mooseport,” because nobody wants to “go out with a stinker.” Just as Connery apologized for his final film.

“Bonnie and Clyde” to “Young Frankenstein,” “Night Moves” to “Heist” and “Unforgiven,” “Crimson Tide,” “Hoosiers” and on and on the filmography goes, an “American Master” PBS has yet to get around to lionizing.

Droll in “Superman,” silly in “Heartbreakers,” “Royal Tenenbaums” and “Get Shorty,” an action hero here and there — “The French Connection” movies, “The Package,” “Mississippi Burning”…

Hackman never ever disappointed.

Hackman “closed the door” on screen acting decades ago, and co-wrote Civil War fiction and did radio interviews about that which I’d catch from time to time. He seemed to be enjoying that sort of retirement.

A great one has passed, and however he passed, he was a unique presence. Find some classic he was in and watch it tonight. I know I will.

A little more effort in the “truth in translating the title” department would serve Netflix and its subscribers well, especially in the case of “A Copenhagen Love Story.”

That’s not exactly a lie, but the messaging in that innocuous title could convey anything from a rom-com to a romantic weeper. A romantic melodrama that begins with the hedonistic freedoms brought by the sexual revolution, that later dwells on the mental health challenges of “trying to get pregnant,” fertility treatments, abortion and stepmotherhood? That’s a tad unexpected.

That’s why this Danish film should have probably kept its vague but loaded with meaning Danish title — “Sult,” literally translated as “Hunger.”

“Hunger” is open to a few interpretations here. Because once you get past the callow opening act, where we meet the Danish pop novelist Mia, who spends her 30s devouring, dating and discarding younger men, this Ditte Hansen/Louise Miertitz adaptation of a Tine Høeg novel is adult in a lot of predictable ways, and in some surprisingly smart ones.

Mia’s “Tour de Force” is selling well, and she’s romantically “back in the saddle” with a “swipe swipe swipe” desire to sample Denmark’s smorgasbord of available men.

But rejecting a prospective set-up, Emil (Joachim Fjelstrup) because he’s “too old” is a moment of truth. “He’s the same age as you” (in Danish, with or without subtitles, of dubbed into English) she’s told. Emil is Mia’s chance to “date an adult for once in your life.”

Emil’s a divorced archaelogist with two small kids. And dating him changes Mia’s priorities. As she struggles with a follow-up novel, with her “process” involving a sort of confessional (voice-over-narrated) diary that morphs into a manuscript, she’s wondering about what she’s been missing while having all that free, independent fun?

“If you don’t have a child, do you remain a child?

How serious is she?

The early acts have snatches of gender reversal irony but little in the way of laughter, even as they are cast according to lighthearted rom-com formula. Mia’s got a married gay brother (Magnus Haugaard Petersen) struggling to adopt. Her person-of-color bestie (Sara Fanta Traore) has a little boy and a husband (Magnus Millang) who is more enthusiastic about having another than she is.

And her editor (Mille Lehfeldt) is eager to see what Mia’s latest personal experiences add up to in her next novel.

As Mia and Emil move in together as a family, their struggle to conceive begins. And that’s where the “hunger” in this “Copenhagen Love Story” shifts focus. They’ve simply got to have a child of their own.