All alone above the world

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit in "The Walk." Image courtesy TriStar Pictures.

Philippe Petit (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a hundred stories above the streets of New York, waiting to take his first steps on a wire to take him between the World Trade Center's two towers. “The Walk” has built up to this moment, kept the audience waiting to see if the man can conquer what he himself has deemed the impossible without falling back to the concrete streets below. He grabs his pole, steadies himself as much as any human being possibly can, and takes the first few steps above the void.

What happens next is depicted brilliantly in 3D by director Robert Zemeckis; a riveting, technical marvel that places the viewer into the protagonist's world amid the clouds. It's as close as anyone can get to replicating Petit's real experience, and the effect is equal parts disorienting and thrilling.

But what happens before the titular walk is just as important and very much vital to establish why exactly a man would even attempt to walk across the Twin Towers. The answer offered by Gordon-Levitt’s character during his opening monologue is effectively “why not?”, although “The Walk” does offer at least a glimpse into the Frenchman's thinking. He's a brash, talented troubadour who entertains tourists within a self-imposed chalk circle in Paris. The small potatoes nature of his scope changes when he reads an article about the World Trade Center – still under construction at the time – and is enchanted by the possibility of crossing between those buildings.

What comes next is a trial run on Notre Dame, a small training montage with master tightrope walker Papa Rudy (Sir Ben Kingsley), and the courting of charming street musician Annie (Charlotte Le Bon). As Gordon-Levitt puts it, she becomes accomplice No. 1 in his scheme (which he dubs a coup), and he recruits others (including characters portrayed by James Badge Dale and Ben Schwartz) to accomplish his dream. He also meets a like-minded fellow who works at the World Trade Center (Steve Valentine) eager to offer his assistance to the coup. After a few weeks of preparation – in which Gordon-Levitt receives what should be a devastating injury – the day of the event arrives, and the team has to navigate through tight security and a few unforeseen glitches to reach the top of the towers.

“The Walk” is at heart a heist film akin to “Ocean's 11” in which a charismatic leader somehow convinces enough people to stop their lives to accomplish an improbable. And it's a pretty fun little caper film as well, with Zemeckis showcasing a playful side not seen since the four-year stretch between “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and “Death Becomes Her.” 

 

Playful with a hint of terrifying.

“The Walk” is rather lighthearted and goofy for a film about a man risking his life to cross such a dangerous chasm, a feeling created in large part by the casting of Gordon-Levitt as Petit. Gordon-Levitt, who sports a rather preposterous French accent but offers a very good performance – is a natural ham who is happy and eager to engage in a little silliness to entertain an audience. His performance doesn't quite nail the zealousness of the real-life Petit, but he captures the puckishness, the arrogance and the inherent dreamer behind the rascally daredevil.

Gordon-Levitt's attitude, along with the tone of the film, shifts dramatically once Petit and his friends set up the tight rope between the buildings and the moment of truth begins. It's the moment where Zemeckis' knack for depicting the unimaginable kicks in and the tension of the feat itself takes over, and while there remains a hint of whimsy to the proceedings, everything else is played straight to evoke as much anxiety from the audience as possible. The highlight comes during the moment when Gordon-Levitt's Petit finally takes a second to look down from his perch above New York City and appreciate exactly what he is doing. Tightrope walkers are not supposed to do this, he notes during a bit of narration, yet the strangeness and uniqueness of the situation essentially requires that bit of reflection.

The minutes in the air for “The Walk” is the film's calling card, but Zemeckis incorporates the 3D technology well before as well, using the technology to have a little fun with his imagination and immerse the audience into the film.

I'm not sure how well the film will work outside of a movie screen – the acting, script and story support the effects instead of the other way around – but this is one of the rare films actually worth seeing in 3D and in theaters. Just be prepared to gasp a few times while watching Gordon-Levitt's Petit reenact Icarus and reach for the sun.

Except with fewer snakes and bats to contend with.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 123 minutes (Two hours and three minutes)

Genre: Biographical

Ask Away

Target audience: People in need of a little risk in their movie going adventures.

Take the whole family?: It'll get a bit too intense for rather young kids, but the PG rating is apropos for anyone without too great of a fear of heights.

Theater or Netflix?: Theater and with the 3D option included. It is legitimately worth the extra expense, and you should really only see it in theaters.

Is “The Walk” a requiem for the Twin Towers?: The film does serve as a bit of an eulogy for what was lost, although that element is shoehorned in. “The Walk” tries to posit Philippe Petit as the reason New Yorkers came to appreciate the towers – it argues his feat humanized them a little – which is a bit of an overreach. Still, it does offer a lovely romanticization of what they represented to Petit and many others; a monument to man's ability to accomplish the impossible.

Watch this as well?: “Man on Wire” isn't as technically marvelous – it is a documentary, after all – but it gets into Philippe Petit's motivation and personality in more depth and includes some rather fun historical reenactments. 

Plus images of him doing it. No pic, no proof my arse.

Navigating the divide between the rich and the poor

Regina Casé and Camila Márdila in "The Second Mother." Image courtesy Oscillloscope Films.

My brother and I were technically latchkey children in the earlier days of our childhood. We were often left to our own devices in our house surrounded by the woods as our mom worked into the evening and beyond. It wasn't a dire situation, but money was tight after the divorce and she needed the work to create that oft-spoken about better life that actually comes to fruition every then and now (and it very much did for her). I know why she put in the hours she did back then, but I'll never truly understand much she lost to earn a decent living and enough money to stock the cabinets with Ramen noodles.

It has become my comfort food.

What I have learned though is parenthood is a form of sacrifice, especially for a single parent trying to raise a child to the best of his or her abilities. It was the case for my mom, and it is the case for the titular mother (played by Regina Casé) in “The Second Mother,” a very-well acted film whose cheery exterior masks the damage caused by the little tragedies in life.

Casé's character, Val, is a housemaid for a wealthy São Paulo family headed by a hippy doctor (Lourenço Mutarelli) but lorded over by fashion guru Bárbara (Karine Teles). She's served the family for 10 years, effectively raising the couple’s son Fabinho (Michel Joelsas) and smothering the boy with kisses, kind words and general adoration. But things change when Casé's daughter, Jéssica (Camila Márdila) moves in temporarily as she prepares for a college-entrance exam at a local university. Márdila, who has rarely seen her mother over the last decade, doesn't understand the sizable gap in status between Casé and the family she serves, which effectively upturns the proverbial apple cart and results in a few awkward moments and a possible sea change in the traditional household.

On the surface there isn't all that much new ground tread with “The Second Mother” – Jean Renoir's “The Rules of the Game” covered the servant/employer relationship brilliantly way back in 1939 – and even the film doesn’t go for subtlety when depicting the inherent inequality in social strata between Casé and her employers. Yet the movie executes its points with precision, hitting the key notes about the unfairness of the current class systems – and how it transcends generations – hard enough to get the point across but not so hard to cause a headache.

That is the overt theme behind “The Second Mother,” although the deeper point writer/director Anna Muylaert seems to make involves the last word in the translated title: motherhood. This film is about the definition of that word, whether a mother is a person who births a child or the person who raises that child through the years. The argument becomes something of a slippery slope; Casé works so hard to make enough to care for her daughter that she effectively trades her for the opportunity to raise someone else's child. What about Teles’ Bárbara, a woman who works hard but rules her roost with a frozen fist and understands little about her own son? Muylaert makes it clear Teles isn't working to support the family – the money was inherited by Mutarelli from his father – so her eagerness to step away from her role as a mother is seen easily as a form of emotional abandonment, especially with how cruelly she acts through the course of the film. 

Sort of like her, just without the request to cut someone's heart out.

Except that would be too easy, and Muylaert is much too smart to keep things that simple. She has Teles overreact to a few minor (and ultimately asinine) social faux pas not just because of the violation of the unwritten rule, but out of a sense of jealousy toward Casé's relationship with Joelsas’ Fabhino and the realization that she couldn't give up enough to make her son love her as he does the family servant.

There's just so much pain in “The Second Mother,” so much hurt from all of the central characters, including the wicked Teles. All of that hurt, though, is buried underneath the societal rules and the ersatz sense of satisfaction expressed by family members who are more eager to text during supper than communicate. Casé is dragged into that sea of remorse, hiding the loneliness she feels through her affection toward Joelsas. It takes an outsider – in this case a woman not raised by the rules of order – to break through the home's everlasting grief for lost potential. Motherhood may be a sacrifice, but Casé learns it's not necessarily a zero-sum game.

Review: Four out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 112 minutes

Genre: Drama 
 

Ask Away

Target audience: People who are hardcore nerds for foreign cinema, along with Brazilians.

Take the whole family?: There is no reason why this film deserves an “R” rating, so it's more than cool for mid-teens and above.

Theater or Netflix?: You might have to wait to see it at home, although it is worth an afternoon matinee if you can find it.

Is it OK to be a working mother?: In the film's universe, the answer is a little murky. “The Second Mother” certainly respects Casé's Val for what she's trying to do, but it chastises her a bit for missing out on much of her daughter's life. It’s certainly worth a good argument, which is one reason why this would be a great film for a women’s studies class.

Watch this as well?: To stick with the foreign vibe, take a look at two older films from Spanish director Pedro Almodovar that deal with the perils of motherhood: “Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “Volver.” Both have a relatively light tone, but for something that will knock your soul down a skosh, try “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.”

 

One of those films in which everything happens when nothing is happening.

Aaahh!! Middle-aged monsters

Dracula and his flunkies in a scene from "Hotel Transylvania 2." Image courtesy Sony Pictures Animation.

Monsters aren’t quite as scary as they used to be, at least in the universe of “Hotel Transylvania 2.” The beasts and creatures that went bump through the night have instead become celebrities, their images turned into advertisements for stale Halloween cereal and their motivation for terrifying locals dissipated. For these monsters, it’s more convenient and more profitable to slouch around lethargically than to menace an entire village; the profit margin for option two never seemed to justify the energy expended anyway.

So how does one portray monsters that no longer need to scare and aren’t really capable of doing it so well anyway? The answer for the people responsible “Hotel Transylvania 2” is to have them whine and moan and break into dance to recently faded pop hits for reasons related less to creative intrigue and more to stretching the remnants of an underwritten film.

That’s kind of funny, as there could have been plenty of material had the filmmakers spread out the machinations of the first act a little more. “Hotel Transylvania 2's” runtime, per IMDB, is approximately 89 minutes, and the movie runs through six years of material within the first 15 minutes. And a whole lot happens in the first 15 minutes: the reintroduction of hotel owner and vampire Dracula (Adam Sandler, combining a few accents from his “Saturday Night Live” days); the wedding between Dracula’s daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) to human slacker Jonathan (Andy Samberg); a pregnancy that results in the birth of grandson Dennis (Asher Blinkoff); and glimpses of the first four-plus years of the boy's life. The closest approximation to conflict that exists in this film is tied to the young boy’s potential to either remain a human or turn into a creature of the night; according to the film, the boy has until the age of five to grow his fangs and go full vampire. Mavis is set to move Dennis and Jonathan away from the hotel if the young lad doesn’t develop into Nosferatu II.

Hopefully he'd be a hint more fetching than this fellow.

Dracula, being a bigoted jerk, tries his darndest to ensure the boy’s nature leans more vampiric than human. He recruits a few monster friends (Kevin James' Frankenstein's monster, Keegan-Michael Key's mummy, Steve Buscemi's werewolf, and David Spade's invisible man) to teach Dennis the ropes of monsterdom, but the attempt is terrifically unsuccessful. The last resort is for Dracula to maybe, possibly accept his grandson for who he is; that logical plan is kyboshed when Dracula's human-hating, über-traditional father, Vlad (Mel Brooks), tries to scare the fangs into poor Dennis. Again, not the best of ideas, especially after bat-creature Bela (Rob Riggle) takes things a little too far. There’s also a side plot in which Mavis gets a sneak peek into life outside of the hotel and monster world when she visits Jonathan's parents (Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman) in California, but it is a bit underdeveloped. 

At least it brings Ron and Tammy back into our lives.

Many a lesson is (supposedly) learned about accepting others and rejecting bigotry (both humans and monsters fall into some anti-species behavior) in all its forms, at least until the ending undermines that lesson and lets Dracula off the hook. “Hotel Transylvania” remains an Adam Sandler film (he wrote it alongside longtime SNL scribe Robert Smigel), and Adam Sandler characters are always proven right in the end no matter how awful they act in the minutes leading to the third act. So, yes, Dracula drops his grandson off the top of a very high tower just to see if the kid starts to fly on his own, and he continuously violates the trust of his daughter for purely selfish reasons, and it takes him an entire film to maybe, possibly accepts his grandson for who he is. (Something his ultra-scary father does within about 10 minutes.) But, again, he’s the good guy because his intentions aren’t entirely bad, and he at least catches the poor boy before he splits his head open.

This is lazy thinking from a lazy man whose hands are all over this film, including numerous dance scenes (Dracula at one point dances with his cape to Flo Rida's “GDFR” because why not) and jokes that continue forever without going anywhere, both of which do serve the purpose of getting the film into the precipice of the 90-minute mark. The humor that exists beyond the filler material is more often than not tepid, with little urgency or agency to the one-liners and jokes.

Yet there are a couple of jokes that do land – among them a killer toss-away one liner I gather came from Smigel's strange mind – and the screening of “Hotel Transylvania 2” did feature few, if any, crying children in the seats. So the film at least succeeds at the bare minimum for any animated film aimed at children, but at least one film this summer showed cartoon flicks can do much more than that with at least a modicum of effort put into it.

Review: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 89 minutes (One hour and 29 minutes)

Genre: Animation

Ask Away

Target audience: Families and any Adam Sandler fans left after “Pixels.”

Take the whole family?: The film gets surprisingly violent toward the end, so keep the kiddos younger than 6 away.

Theater or Netflix?: Feel free to stay at home and wait if you must watch it.

Whither Genndy Tartakovsky?:  The one person involved in this film deserving of some pity is director Genndy Tartakovsky, whose hands are tied by Smigel and Sandler's lackluster script. The man behind three of Cartoon Network's best animated shows (“Powerpuff Girls,” “Samurai Jack” and “Dexter's Laboratory”) has a quirky sense of humor rooted in optimism and fatalism, along with a keen eye for a good fight sequence. With a little luck he’ll get another project, this time with greater creative control over the proceedings.

                                     Reason No. 7 why the '90s didn't completely suck.

Watch this instead?: This is a perfect opportunity to advocate once again for one of my favorite animated films of this decade, “ParaNorman.”

The king of South Boston

Johnny Depp in a scene from "Black Mass." Image courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

People still speak of James “Whitey” Bulger in hushed tones around Boston, even though his presence as a crime lord in Southie ended decades ago. He remains one of those rare larger-than-life figures, the type of person who commands that brilliant blend of respect and outright fear along the broken-down streets of a community in constant need of resurrection. 

A popular search term via Google is "Southie Boston rough."

“Black Mass,” the biopic about Bulger’s life, certainly offers plenty of examples as to why the denizens of Southie would fear Bulger, but it never gets around to explain how the man endeared himself to the community, at least enough to warrant its protection. That's truly to the film's detriment, as a movie purportedly about the rise and fall of one of the city's most notorious and flamboyant criminal figures really should focus on what the man means to the community that raised him, and the one he actively terrorized for two decades. 

The who of Whitey Bulger is revealed through the use of some mild pop psychology, statements from former flunkies, and whatever one receives from Johnny Depp's performance (more on him in a bit). “Black Mass” doesn't reveal Bulger to be a man of many multitudes; rather, the film depicts him as a person who follows a flexible moral code in which loyalty to him matters above all. He can dole it out a little, at least to his younger brother and state senator Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his beloved mother (Mary Klug), but he expects it in spades from his Winter Hill Gang (Jesse Plemmons, Rory Cochran and W. Earl Brown, among others), and from his girlfriend Lindsey (Dakota Johnson, who is in the film for around five minutes). 

He certainly demands it from FBI agent and sycophant John Connolly (Joel Edgerton), who convinces his FBI bosses and cohorts (Adam Scott, Kevin Bacon and David Harbour) to use Depp's Bulger as an informant against the Italian mafia. Sure, the information helps Depp's Bulger in the long run – the enemy of my enemy and so on – but Edgerton impresses the bosses for a spell and earns a spot in his idol's good graces. They term the agreement an alliance, although the details favor Depp’s Bulger more than Edgerton; the crime lord expands his empire beyond Southie and outright murders people during his two decades working with the FBI.

Depp, whose physical resemblance to Bulger is on par with a New Yorker cartoon, plays the man with intensity and verve, hiding his wickedness and murderous nature behind a crocodile smile, minor grotesqueness, and a cool leather jacket akin. Depp is cold, calculating and committed to his role, and he employs his inherent creepiness and uncommon charm to provide a little peak into the mind of a monster. This is a very, very good performance from a man who is capable of drawing great performances from rather strange places. 

For example.

And yet Depp is the wrong person for this role. The aforementioned creepiness Depp possesses doesn't stem from a place of malice – he's more akin to an alien learning about the planet around – which is vital for a character as explosive as Bulger. There's simply no menace to Depp's performance, just as there’s little sense of it in the film.

“Black Mass” talks a lot about Bulger, discusses his murders, his control of the drug trade in Southie, and about his criminal empire in general. The first of those three is shown repeatedly (it almost becomes a fact of life to watch Bulger take someone out), but the movie is uninterested in getting into the nitty gritty of his operation, about how the man rose to power, and how he garnered enough loyalty to build a his massive criminal operation. “Black Mass” never even shows Depp's Bulger broadening his empire; the idea is, once again, talked about but never actually shown.

There's much too much talk in “Black Mass,” far more said than shown and far too many voices inserted into the film's machinations. Is the story about Bulger, or is it about Bulger’s effect on the people around him? Or perhaps it’s about how one’s morality can slip so easily, or how a boogeyman is formed. Is Bulger a romantic figure, a monster, a man who loses touch his humanity, or a warning on what power can do to the human soul? “Black Mass” isn’t sure how to portray Bulger on screen, and the result is a muddled story that fails to capture the man’s dirty legacy.

Review: Two and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 122 minutes

Genre: Biopic

Ask Away

Target audience: People in the mood for a lot of violence, very little sex, and Johnny Depp with some terrible teeth.

Take the whole family?: “Black Mass” contains about all of the murders, so definitely not.

Theater or Netflix?: It might get some academy award buzz, so a matinee trip to see what the fuss is about won't hurt.

Johnny Depp, Oscar winner?:  I have a sneaking suspicion he'll sneak into the final five for best actor (Oscar prediction sites have him as a contender), but I don't think he'll win the award. Depp will lose to a performance that's a little more Oscar befitting (one that pops up frequently is Eddie Redmayne in “The Danish Girl”) or perhaps to someone like Leonardo DiCaprio, who has come ever so close to winning one and is theoretically due for an award.

Watch this as well?: I seriously, seriously wish Martin Scorsese directed this film, so I'm going to recommend revisiting older flicks like “Goodfellas” and “Mean Streets,” along with “The Departed” (Jack Nicholson's crime boss is based on Whitey Bulger) and “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

One of the few moments in the film in which Leonardo DiCaprio isn't acting bananas.

To Grandma's house we go

Deanna Dunagan and Peter McRobbie in a scene from "The Visit." Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

“The Visit” is M. Night Shyamalan's necessary attempt to step away from the horror field and reinvent himself as something more than a Hitchcock yawn, or at least as a better director than his recent gun-for-hire flicks indicate. It’s very much a departure from what he’s done before: the filmmaking technique is less trained; the tone is lighter (there are many moments purporting to be comedy, and Shyamalan even pokes fun at himself a hint); and the director stays well off the screen. Those tweaks help form a more interesting film than Shyamalan has done in a long while, and they even help craft 10 good minutes of tension in the third act.

But the shifts are undermined by a few are cheesy Shyamalan idiosyncrasies, all of which undermine his plan to escape from himself. So yes, “The Visit” has a twist – I won't spoil it, but it's not an overly surprising one – along with lazy, unmissable foreshadowing akin. Also, like much of Shyamalan's work, “The Visit” features people acting strangely for mysterious reasons the writer/director will reveal at a time of great import.

Twists are important.

Those familiarities are wrapped in a whole new format for the Pepsi ONE De Palma, as Shyamalan joins the faux-documentary style as seen in films like “Paranormal Activity,” “Cloverfield,” and 40 percent of the horror films streaming on Netflix. The person behind the camera for this fake documentary is precocious 15-year-old Becca (Olivia DeJonge), an aspiring director who on a trip with younger brother/wannabe rapper Tyler (Ed Oxenbloud) to visit their grandparents (Deanna Dunagan and Peter McRobbie) for a week. This isn't the average trip to grandma's house though; the children haven't met their grandparents before due to falling out with their mother (Kathryn Hahn, who pops in and out of the film via Skype) due to an affair Hahn had with an older man.

The titular visit begins swimmingly for all involved, with the children giving nicknames to their grandparents – Nana and Pop Pop – and the older couple baking cookies and chopping firewood in their rural Pennsylvania home. Then things become a little funky when the hosts exhibit some rather peculiar behavior that worsens as the days go by and the kids learn a little more about their hosts.

The strangeness is captured via the use of a pair of video cameras operated by DeJonge and Oxenbloud, and the genre's main question of “who did the editing?” is solved at the end in a technically logical but still kind of stupid fashion. But aside from providing an answer to that question, Shyamalan doesn't do anything of note or true interest with the format; rather, he relies on the same tricks exhibited in “The Blair Witch Project,” “The Last Exorcism,” “REC,” and a whole host of others.  

“The Visit” would benefit greatly if Shyamalan had taken ownership of the format, although the style is more of a device the director uses to shift away from dourness and into a lighter, more playful mood. Compared to the visual and tonal darkness Shyamalan usually revels in, “The Visit” is a comparably happy little ditty, one in which Oxenbloud spends a fair amount of time attempting to rap and Dunagan shows much more of herself than Tony-award winner often wood. The director even gets in a few fart and poop jokes along the way.

What a twist!

It is nice to see Shyamalan try something different; the shame of it is he doesn’t work. His sense of humor is trite and childish, and it’s often derived from cruelty toward people with mental illness, as if the man was pointing at the frail elderly couple and saying “old people, am I right?”

Then again, the lighter tone does provide a nice contrast for when the shenanigans get real and the consequences of the requisite big twist arrive. Shyamalan delivers 10 minutes of quality tension and strangeness in which almost anything can happen. He builds it up steadily and wonderfully… at least until he misses the landing, breaks his ankle, stands up to an imaginary round of applause, then somehow breaks his other ankle while attempting a victory lap. That's what makes Shyamalan so frustrating; the man has oodles of talent and some nifty ideas, but he just can't deliver them without trying to impress himself first.

“The Visit” is at its best a tease, a film that shows exactly what the legendary in his own mind director is capable of. It at least doesn't achieve the levels of risible Shyamalan has reached in recent years, although it's not a particularly good or memorable film. That, somehow, makes it the best film Shyamalan has done in more than a decade.

Thanks to Reddit for doing the work for me.

Review: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer. 

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 94 minutes

Genre: Thriller

Ask Away

Target audience: People hoping for M. Night Shyamalan to make another (or a) good film.

Take the whole family?: Some unexpected nudity and cursing makes it inappropriate for anyone below the 12-13 age range.

Theater or Netflix?: Another log for the Netflix/Amazon pyre.

Has M. Night Shyamalan ever made a good film?:  Perhaps one, although even his more famous films aren't actually that good when viewed for a second time. The twists that define films “Signs” and “The Sixth Sense” are clumsy and notably forced upon, and “The Village” falls apart with that asinine final twist. Shyamalan does have one rather good film under his belt in “Unbreakable,” which remains one of the best super hero films of the last 20 years.

Watch this instead?: For found footage types of films, "[REC"] is great, the first two “V/H/S” movies are at least pretty entertaining, and “the Last Exorcism” is interesting until the last 10 minutes or so. For anyone looking for a film to mess with them a bit, watch either version of “Funny Games.”

Nothing left in the tank

Ed Skrein brawls in a scene from "The Transporter Refueled." Image courtesy EuropaCorp.

As a kid, I had a habit of closing my eyes and wishing for something to come true. I would put a lot of effort into this practice, squeezing my eyes shut tightly while hoping to receive an ice cream cone or a Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card. I still do this sometimes as an adult as a lark, because in theory you never know what might happen.

It was only recently I learned this trick doesn’t work though, because I did my darnedest to wish for Jason Statham to appear on screen once again as Frank Martin in “The Transporter Refueled.” Instead, I kept getting an anthropomorphic ice sculpture called Ed Skrein, along with oodles of disappointment to go along with it. Luc Besson's infamous B-movie factory EuropaCorp didn't offer the British action bloke enough cash to return for a fourth “Transporter” film, so they found Skrein and asked him to whisper with menace as fell down around him on screen. Sure, the I Can't Believe It's Not Statham version of Frank Martin gets to punch a few bad guys amid a plot that makes many a logical leap of faith, but there's just something missing without the balding menace around.

He seems like an affable bloke though.

It's worth bouncing back into EuropaCorp to emphasize how entertaining the bloody studio can be at its best. Aside from the “Transporter” series – I admit to seeing just one, the rather engaging third installment – the studio has produced flicks like the “Taken” trilogy and “Lucy,” banana films that revel in utter ridiculousness for around 90 minutes. “Refueled” never reaches the craziness or zaniness of those other films; rather, it settles for a milder brand of action with fewer punches and roundhouse kicks and more scenes of people discussing things of little import to the rest of the film yet add a few precious minutes to the clock.

The plot, or whatever this film has that resembles one, is a rambling, rumbling mess in which Skrein's Martin gets involved with former prostitutes (headed by Loan Chabanol's Anna) seeking revenge against their vicious pimp (Radivoje Bukvic) who happens to dabble in all sorts of illegal goings on. Much of what happens is based on “The Three Musketeers” – the book is literally shown onscreen – and a little crisscrossing between the pimp and a few old cohorts. Along for the ride is professional That Guy Ray Stevenson as Skrein's father, a former spy and current romantic Lothario who is somehow insanely easy to kidnap. 

Like Princess Peach without the fashion sense.

Stevenson knows the movie isn't very good – films like “Refueled” have at least one – which is reflected clearly by a breezy, light-hearted performance that adds a necessary hint of levity to a rather dour movie experience. His cohorts, however, seem to take things a little more seriously and deliver their line readings as if someone killed a puppy in front of them right before the cameras rolled.

This isn't a necessarily a problem with the writing; the dialogue includes the requisite number of quips and banter to classify it as a modern action flick. Those lines, however, get a little lost in translation due to the heavy use of European actors from the more eastern areas, meaning English is not the first language of choice.

Skrein is the exception, a Brit who should have a rather firm understanding of his native tongue. But his one liners come out as if a dentist reached in and extracted them, and his personality never reaches anything beyond frozen agua.

It's almost unfair to compare the poor chap to Statham, the latter of whom didn't get enough credit for his underlying sense of humor until this summer's “Spy.” Statham's brilliant at exasperation, of indicating how he'd much rather be left alone than deal with all of the bad guys chasing after him with guns, knives and pipes. Then he'd dispatch said waves of flunkies and big bads with a flurry of punches and kicks, along with a withering glower and a growl in his voice while delivering the token corny quip. 

                                      Seeing it is way more fun than describing it.

“Refueled” still wouldn't be a good film with Statham in Skrein's place – the pacing remains a mess, as does the quality of the other actors and the lowly fight sequences – but Statham has a habit of resurrecting mediocre material. His presence would have added some entertainment to the proceedings, at least more than what the ersatz Skrein has to offer.

Review: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 96 minutes (One hour and 36 minutes)

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: “Transporter” fans and people who enjoy trashy European films.

Take the whole family?: A fair amount of blood, punching and bullets to the brain make this a solid teen and older flick.

Theater or Netflix?: Stay at home and stream if you must.

How are the action sequences?:  Not that great. With a few exceptions – one being a kick through a car window – the scenes generally feature little ingenuity, innovation or even spark to make them interesting. They're sturdy, competent and dependable, which isn't nearly enough to cover for a film with the plot problems and poor acting this one has.

Watch this instead?: Luc Besson's, and by extension EuropaCorp's, filmography is deep, spotty, but crazy interesting when done well. A good place to start is Besson's “The Professional” – a model for the “Transporter” series and one featuring a young Natalie Portman and an insane performance from Gary Oldman. For a people searching for a little nuttiness, check out last year's “Lucy” or “The Fifth Element.” “Transporter 3” also has its moments.