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1 star

The Odyssey – 1.5 stars

August 9, 2026
1 star, 2026, Action/Disaster, Drama, Historical, War
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Cards on the table. My knowledge of The Odyssey is limited. So limited, when Christopher Nolan‘s film depicts the fall of Troy, I kept looking for Brad Pitt as Achilles.

So, I come to this picture with no interest in fealty to the source material. I’m open.

What’s good? Filmed with IMAX cameras, the movie is beautiful and grand in scope, and it did not feel overlong even though it is really quite long. Robert Pattinson also near steals the picture, such is his committed performance as the villain.

To the bad.

Didactic and pedestrian dialogue. Nolan explains everything. He cannot rely on a look, or a gesture, he must tell us all. And often when he does, what we are told is so painfully banal or high falutin’, it is cringeworthy. The “what you hear when the Sirens sing their song” voice over was so hilariously bad, I longed for the same ear wax utilized by Odysseus’ men to drown out their bewitching appeals. There is not one clever exchange, not one illuminating piece of dialogue. Rather, we get turgid exposition, conversation that basically exists to get you to the next thing.

Bad performances. Wikipedia tells me that Odysseus is renowned for his intellectual brilliance, guile, and versatility. Matt Damon, however, plays him as dimly solid and a bit of a lummox.

As his son, Tom Holland gives as bad a performance as I’ve seen in a major film. He’s a less chirpy Spiderman sporting Disney Channel-esque mien. Nolan’s script does him no favors, having Holland utter, on numerous occasions, the word “Dad.”

Not “my father.”

“Dad.”

Holland sounds like Richie Cunningham asking for his Pop’s advice before going to the see The Fonz.

As the wife of Odysseus, Anne Hathaway gives one of her patented over the top, histrionic performances, particularly noxious when it rams into Damon’s dullness or Holland’s puerility. She’s at a constant 13 when she should be at a 7, which will elicit an Oscar nod and my groans.

Discordant modernity. There has been spirited discussion about the propriety of casting Elliot Page, who is transgender, as one of Odysseus‘s warriors. I did not find the cast as distracting as the transgender actor playing the Philip Seymour Hoffman role in Netflix’s Ripley. But to then have that character speak gravely from Hades and say to Odysseus, “Hey, when you go back, and tell my story, feel free to add some ‘stuff’”

“Stuff.”

Also, they load Odysseus up with Page’s recrimination about not being let in on the whole horse gambit. As depicted, Page is the keeper of the horse, left to explain that it is a gift when the Trojans arrive. Page is not upset at being killed in the duty, only that no one told him he was tending a horse filled with soldiers. And if Page had known the horse was filled with Odysseus and his soldiers?

Knock, knock, knock.

“Hey, fellas? Everything alright in there?”

Modernity skews the story as well as the dialogue, at least, such as I understand it (note my prior reliance on Wikipedia). As I said, I am not going to kick the film for diverging from source material of which I am ignorant. Odysseus haunted by the sack of Troy? Okay, I’m listening. Even Athena (played by a wasted Zendaya here) was not on board with the excesses of the Greeks as they pillaged the city. Odysseus suffering from PTSD due to the war crimes he witnessed? Errr. Okay?

Odysseus then killing 25 men in dizzying acrobatics that smacks of John Wick? True to the story perhaps, but tonally moronic. Nolan wants it both ways. A classical Odysseus, who rips guts and gives no quarter and less shits, and a modern combatant, haunted by the depravity of his deeds.

Nolan also injects sophomoric Women’s Studies feminism for good measure. Hathaway spits at Holland about the unfairness of it all, kvetching that she’s been holding Ithaca together for years with nary a whisker on her chin. But near as the audience can tell, it appears she has been merely overseeing a very long, rambunctious dinner party. She does not demonstrate any ruling decisions other than withholding her hand in marriage to a replacement for Odysseus and hectoring Holland. And working on a very, very, very big blanket.

Nolan also gives us a nasty witch (Samantha Morton) who turns Odysseus’s hungry but unfailingly polite men into pigs when they ask, mind you, if they could eat from her kitchen. When Odysseus inquires as to the point of her cruelty, well, you know… it’s the patriarchy. But Morton also turned her sister into a bird, and when Odysseus pedantically inquires as to the crimes that resulted in that particular fate, Morton implies that her sister was just a bitch.

Repetition. There’s too much disembarking where Odysseus and his men clamber up a hill and then, in a Keystone Cops manner, scurry back to their ships. Which reminded me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and “Run away, run away!”

Humorlessness. An odyssey is a long time. And when you are being chased by a Cyclops, or turned into a pig, or just floating around endlessly on a boat, there has to be some levity. Not here. The only person who smiles is Pattinson, and even that is mostly a malevolent leer.

Ultimately, I’m heartened this film was made, and that it is racking up kabillions. I fear the extinction of the historical epic, and Nolan has now given us three, along with Dunkirk and Oppenheimer.

Two out of three ain’t bad, even if the third is.

Good Morning Vietnam – 1.5 stars

July 24, 2026
1 star, 80s, Comedy
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Based on a true person if not story, Adrian Cronauer (Robin Williams) is a popular disc jockey stationed in Vietnam where he entertains the troops with his wacky hijinks, falls in love with a local gal, has a run in with her Viet Cong brother, and finds out that the true enemy is not the North Vietnamese, but an uptight sergeant (J.T. Walsh) who hates his funny so much he routes him through a VC-controlled highway, presumably, because he hopes he will be killed.

Because Cronauer is a wise ass, and later, a humanitarian, he must die. 

Barry Levinson’s (Diner, The Natural) schmaltz fest is really just a vehicle for Williams to be zany. He more than delivers. In the doing, the men love him and snigger at the squares who do not, including the sergeant who so hates bits, sound effects, impressions, and double entendres he tries to have Cronauer killed. 

But our watermelon-smashing Gallagher Christ, he won’t be held down.  Not after this pep talk:

EDWARD

And I literally think that you owe it to all of them to get your ass back on the air.

ADRIAN

If you haven’t noticed, the army doesn’t really want me, Ed. They’ve been harassing me since the day I got off the plane.

EDWARD

So what? It’s the guys in the field that matter, remember? Those are the guys that are dyin’.

A homogenous 80s sit-com fluff ball with half-hearted altruistic pretensions, powered solely by Williams’ manic energy, which, to be fair, can be entertaining.   

Bugonia – 1.5 stars

July 2, 2026
1 star, 2025, Drama, Sci-Fi
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Like all Yorgos Lanthimos films, Bugonia is adept, thought out, and at times, mesmerizing. Slowly but surely, the viewer is drawn into Lanthimos’ vibe in his story of a mentally ill conspiracy theorist (Jesse Plemons) convinced that the CEO of a corporate behemoth (Emma Stone) is, in fact, an alien deposited on Earth to kill us all. With his hapless, dim cousin (Aiden Delbis), Plemons kidnaps Stone to make her fess up and save humanity.

Unfortunately, Lanthimos quickly reverts to his sweet spot, rank sadism. Of his pictures, Poor Things is the only one I like. In re-making the Frankenstein story with an innocent (Stone, again), he allowed for joy and humor as she explored her boundless lust and curiosity while clashing with societal convention.

Here, like The Lobster and The Favourite, Lanthimos is artfully back to picking wings from flies. His mean-spirited abuse of his characters – in particular, Delbis, an Of Mice and Men Lenny-type – is capped off with a grandiose coda that expresses just how much he really does hate people.

Lanthimos’ conceit is that he is delivering something of import – be it commentary on environmental cataclysm, the perils of the internet, or corporate soullessness – but really, he’s just a nasty brute with a good eye. If it weren’t for the game efforts of Plemons and Stone, who can be captivating in their cat-and-mouse exchanges, this would have been a zero.

On Netflix.

Against All Odds – 1 star

May 20, 2026
1 star, 80s, Crime/Mystery, Romance
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In these sensitive times, I’ll risk observing that Rachel Ward was exceedingly attractive. In various states of undress, even more so.

So, a steamy semi remake of Out of the Past featuring an on-the run Ward, coveted by her jealous and obsessive boyfriend, sleazy LA fixer and club owner James Woods, who enlists recently cut NFL player Jeff Bridges to find and recover her for him … it has promise.

Alas, the smoldering Ward is the only good thing about this Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman, Ray) dog.

Bridges does indeed find Ward. They fall in love and press the flesh in the steamy environs of Mexico.

So far, so good.

But soon, they are back in LA, propelling a paper-thin plot that lazily meshes real estate and political corruption, game-fixing, and blackmail.

Bridges is badly miscast as a jock. He is too effete for the role. Woods is working way too hard to do something with nothing, and everyone else is stock.

The script also calls for characters to do bizarre things. Case in point – Swoozie Kurtz is a legal secretary who meets Bridges briefly early on, is smitten, and on that connection alone, risks her life to help him gets files from her offices when he shows up out of nowhere later in the picture. Similarly, Alex Karras is a football conditioning coach who, after Bridges betrays Woods with Ward, comes down to Mexico to … bring her back forcibly, at gunpoint. Which means, by my estimation, even taking Bridges out of the equation, a ferry, a small plane and then a jet back to LAX, gun in hand.    

Worse, the score is cheezy tech crap that makes every scene feel like you’re watching 70s porn or at a sketchy massage studio.

Bad through and through, as the ending will attest, as if Hackford said, “Well, we need to wrap this turd up with more Rachel and the Phil Collins hit.”

I did read that after this film, Ward took a sabbatical to study acting. That tracks.   

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere – 1.5 stars

February 11, 2026
1 star, 2025, Drama, Musical
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At the outset, we meet Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) as a little boy, hearing his father (Stephen Graham) coming up the stairs, drunk, to spar with him. Bruce catches a slap, and we know it’s gonna’ be these two guys the whole picture, as the shy, depressed superstar makes his most personal, least commercial opus, Nebraska, while grappling with his troubled upbringing.  

I read Bruce’s autobiography and was impressed with its honesty, charity, and equanimity. There was little, however, about his abusive father. Maybe Bruce wasn’t ready to share. But the point is relevant because in the film, while his father seems to be a handful, he is not portrayed as such a monster so as to justify the depths of Bruce’s torment. In fact, when Bruce is writing Nebraska, he seems more influenced by Terence Malick’s Badlands than Daddy issues.

In the midst of his struggle, Bruce has a relationship with a single mother (Odessa Young). Their union is supposed to be simple, earthy, a local rocker and a “heart of gold” fan who sees through The Boss’ facade. Mind you, this is post The River. Bruce is massive. He’s been on the cover of Newsweek and Time.

No matter. The picture persists in the massive conceit of Bruce the regular guy. When Bruce drops his waitress gal off, because of course she’s a waitress (in a diner, no less), it is in a blue collar row house, oil storage tanks in the background. Her father comes out and says, in a hackneyed, suspicious New Jersey small townie way, “is that the … uh … guitar player fella’?” Dad then sneeringly brings up Uncle Dave, who also “played guitar” and presumably, was not much of a success.

Oof.

Worse, the relationship doesn’t add much if anything to the story. Given the woman didn’t exist, one would expect writer/director Scott Cooper (Hostiles) to do more with the character. But she is there solely to be dumped by the angsty Bruce and to utter pap like, “if you can’t be honest with yourself, I don’t know how I can expect you to be honest with me.”

Holy Moses.

The second half of the film goes straight into the ditch. Bruce is struggling to present Nebraska in his stripped down vision while fending off the mildest of pressure to release Born in the USA. In the doing, he engages some more with his father while struggling with depression. It’s a long slog, with Bruce upset his cassette tape sound cannot be replicated in the studio, a struggle treated as if we were watching Oppenheimer and his team of scientists making Fat Man. In these moments, the film has absolutely no sense of proportion and lapses into the ridiculous.

The Boss’ head is in his hands. A lot.

Another negative is the Jon Landau character (Jeremy Strong). As Springsteen’s manager, Landau is supposed to provide some obvious tension between the Boss’ failure to follow up The River with something more commercial than his sparse, acoustic passion project. But there really is no tension at all because Landau is first and foremost an acolyte, and an uber reverential one at that. If Bruce said he wanted to follow up The River with hand puppetry, from this Landau, we’d get: “Hey [deep soulful look into Bruce’s eyes, hand on shoulder]. I Iove you. You do you.” When Landau and his wife discuss the Nebraska demo, their conversation is the most elemental exchange you’ll hear in film, as if Cooper fears the audience is so stupid it must be painstakingly explained just what a departure this record is and just how “dark” it seems. When Bruce plays the hit Born in the USA, Landau says, “I think a Muse came down and kissed you on the mouth.”

Sweet Mother of Jesus.

Ultimately, Cooper cannot land on any one thing for very long, and it is just not very cinematically interesting to watch a film about a guy writing a personal solo record.

The resolutions at the end are brutally maudlin, shield your eyes syrupy.

“You need therapy man.”

“You did the best you could. You had your own battles to fight.”

This while Bruce, an adult who just finished a concert, is sitting on his father’s lap.

There is a positive. Jeremy Allen White is really quite good as Springsteen. One has to be really careful with such a mythic figure, and White does a very understated job while still capturing the persona. The script calls for him to be perpetually tortured but he pushes back with a refreshing natural humanity. This is no small thing given how humorless and dour the script portrays him.  

It’s not grotesquely terrible. But it’s pretty bad, hopelessly muddled and much duller and pedestrian than it had to be.

Nuremberg – 1 star

January 6, 2026
1 star, 2025, Drama, Historical
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If AI did not write this film, then we need more AI in film. 

I feel confident, however, AI had a hand in this empty, soulless picture, which feels like a Marvel flick but doesn’t even meet that low bar. The movie looks good, moves relatively well, and the actors are for the most part fine. But the script is predictable slop and the presentation so dumbed down, all things equal, it must have come from an algorithm. Writer/director James Vanderbilt has a few Screams and Spidermans under his belt, but, inexplicably, co-wrote Zodiac. So color me perplexed.

The picture also offers a glimpse as to what the future holds for historical films. Not a single bit of this recitation of the Nuremberg trial rings true. Sure, it technically comports with some of the facts, but the feel is all “now.” Viewers can glean just enough information to get a sense as to historical stakes (Nazis bad, Herman Göring bad but sneakily charming), but the picture never nears informative or elucidating.

The Nazis have lost the war, and in an over-long lead-up, we learn it is critical they be placed on trial through Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon), who spars over the wisdom and efficacy of such a trial with his wife via witty banter. When the trial becomes threatened, Jackson goes to the Vatican to enlist the Pope’s blessing, which he receives by blackmailing the Church as an arguable co-conspirator with Hitler, a complete fabrication. But a lie that serves an exchange in keeping with this simplistic rendition.

Pope cowed. Full steam ahead.

Russell Crowe plays Göring, the biggest fish in the dock. He must go to toe-to-toe with army psychologist Rami Malek, a cynical practitioner so full of himself his eyes bug out.

Okay. Cheap shot.

The men bond in verbal exchanges that are dull and unilluminating. One gets the sense Crowe got the role because he’s heavy and imposing, but he competently delivers the muck given him. As for Malek, his casting is a mystery. He should not receive any further film roles unless in Bohemian Rhapsody II or movies where he plays offbeat or weirdo. When Malek engages with Göring’s young daughter, as he passes letters between father and family, he almost takes on the mien of a molester. Peter Lorre as William Holden.

Malek gets deeper into Göring’s psyche while acting as Jackson’s mole and stoolie, which is incongruent, given all of Jackson’s testaments to fairness. Malek also intercedes on behalf of Göring‘s family when they are arrested. Depressed, he takes refuge in the arms of a buxom reporter and spills his guts. She prints a front page article betraying him and leading to his ouster from the Army.

Most of these plot points are either false or distorted. In reality, the Malek character was not cashiered; he was promoted and back in the U.S. by the time Göring took the witness stand.

In the film, Malek attends the trial and before so, he rushes in to see Jackson to offer his book of notes entitled, How to Get Herman Göring.

The big day arrives.

The Nazis and lawyers don their outfits for legal battle.

Göring does pushups in full regalia and walks out amongst cheers from other caged Nazis. Like in Gladiator.

Cue AI dialogue. 

“In seven hours, the whole world will be focused on this room. This is it. This is everything.”

“Let’s finish this war.”

“This is your day. You’re ready.”

“Bury him.”

“He’s got him.”

While watching this drivel with my family, we started a game. A character would say something. We would pause the movie and take a stab at what would be said in response. Our success rate was shockingly and depressingly high.

Example. The interpreter who works with Malek offers him a cigarette. When Malek notes the interpreter does not smoke, he explains he carries cigarettes to curry favor with officers. The interpreter then states wistfully that perhaps, at the end of the war, he will have a cigarette. Malek responds, “the war has ended.”  There is a silence.

The movie was paused. Bets were placed on whether the interpreter would have his cigarette at the moment of conviction of the Nazis.

EXT. PALACE OF JUSTICE – NIGHT

Howie stands outside. Silence save for the crickets. He pulls out the pack of cigarettes. Takes one out. Puts it in his mouth. Goes to light it. Hands shaking…From inside, we hear the gallows drop again. Another man down. Howie stands there. Pulls the cigarette from his mouth unlit and tosses it away.

There is a great deal of this hackneyed bullshit throughout the flick.

Thankfully, the dreck eventually ends. Malek, who writes a book about the experience, is portrayed as a haunted soul, desperately trying to warn the world that the good German is in all of us.  And then, he kills himself, just like Göring.

Sans the push-ups.

Streaming.

Being Eddie – 1 star

December 16, 2025
1 star, 2025, Documentary
2 Comments

Did you know Eddie Murphy was funny? That he always knew he would be a star? That he inspired many a black comic? That he was angry at SNL when David Spade took a dig at him?

If so, you’re good to go.

If you insist on watching this tepid Netflix documentary, prepare for what seems to be a retrospective about a funny man that inexplicably does not show him being all that funny.

There is no delving into his craft, no in-depth discussion of how he matured in stand-up or established himself in films.

There are no great stories of Hollywood.

There is, really, very little insight at all. 

Rather, Murphy is presented as a pleasant, sensible fellow, a bit of a homebody, guarded but practiced in the art of bland recollection.

It is all very boring, and made more so by the likes of Arsenio Hall, Michael Che’, Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, Jerry Seinfeld, Pete Davidson, Jamie Foxx, Chris Rock, and others basically blowing so much elegiac smoke up Murphy’s ass that he seems more demigod than man. Which is weird when you see his oeuvre laid out, and his sermon on the mount is playing so many characters in The Nutty Professor who can fart.

Look, I love Eddie Murphy. When I saw 48 Hours, I was blown away by his presence and the interplay with Nick Nolte, a buddy cop flick with real comedic teeth in the articulation of racial tension. I also thought Murphy was overlooked in Dreamgirls, though I was pleased to see his Best Supporting Actor nomination and was dying to hear him explain how he evoked a true falling star, and one with substance abuse issues, given his own clean living. As for his unheralded classic, Bowfinger, all we get is how it was nice for him to walk to lunch with Steve Martin.

The endeavor is generic, Commissar-approved dreck through and through. Though I give it 1 star for a few clips of Eddie’s hilarious, now deceased brother, Charlie.

The Battle of the Bulge – 1 star

December 3, 2025
1 star, 60s, War
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Tediously directed by the same person who helmed The Longest Day, once dubbed “The Longest Movie,” Ken Anankin’s resume’ does not inspire confidence. The picture takes forever to start, and when it gets going, it is permeated with flat ahistorical battle sequences and clunky dialogue. All the actors seem to be taking their cue from Henry Fonda, who plays the lone officer who foresaw the Nazi surprise attack through the Ardennes. Fonda sports a ho hum bemusement that screams, “Did the check cash?” The usual suspects for WWII flicks – Telly Savalas, Robert Ryan, Charles Bronson – make their bank as well, and similarly phone in their personas.

A bore through and through, it looks cheap and inauthentic, particularly when they put the leads in tanks with the actual film footage on a screen behind them.

Very Batman and Robin TV show driving.

Though it maintains a soft spot in this old heart for reasons having nothing to do with artistic merit.

When I was in high school, due to economic strain, my mother was forced to take in boarders. One, Klaus Kristmas (name changed because if my Googling is correct, he’s a rather accomplished German government official) was a smart, ramrod straight, punctilious young man whose father was in the Bundestag. Klaus was great fun, and my mother immediately made him part of the family. He even came to the beach with us, where we recoiled in horror as he pulled down his shorts to reveal a European look, the mini-Speedo.

At home, I would hang out with Klaus and watch TV. One night, sure enough, we watched this flick, which is all Germans kicking ass for the majority of the picture. When Robert Shaw, as the lead Panzer commander, nears the oil depot that will allow his continued advance, however, things have shifted. Shaw burns to death when a fuel drum hits his tank.

Klaus: “Oh nooooooooooooooo,”

14 year old Filmvetter : “USA, USA, USA!!”

On Tubi.

Frankenstein – 1 star

November 30, 2025
1 star, 2025, Scary
2 Comments

One scene encapsulates the silliness of this film and perhaps of writer-director Guillermo del Toro. The enraged monster crashes a fancy wedding party but before he arrives, we see the dandy of a groom telling the hired hand walking around with a basket of rose petals, essentially, to “keep them coming. No matter what.” The monster busts in and kills two or three people, grabs the bride, and walks out of the party with her draped in his arms, slower-motion.

Amidst a shower of rose petals.

And they say you can’t get good help.

It’s the shot, the look, that consumes del Toro, obliterating pace, story, dialogue or, in the case of the hardest working petal thrower in film history, common sense. As beautiful as his eye may be, The Shape of Water, Crimson Peak, Nightmare Alley, all are gorgeously photographed but empty vessels. No matter how many frames look like paintings, the effect is one of misdirection, not involvement. del Toro keeps larding it on, way past the moment when the Wizard’s curtain is pulled away, and a pudgy bureaucrat with a lot of bells and whistles is revealed.

Yea, the picture is gorgeous. And for the first 45 minutes, it connects, but truth be told, it connects because it is economical and lighter, in a Tim Burtony way. 

When Dr. Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) begins his work on the monster and descends into madness, the picture becomes absurdist. When the monster (Jacob Elordi) is loose, we move to an uncomfortable mix of turgid and maudlin. When the chase is on, as Dr. Frankenstein must hunt the monster to the outer reaches of the North Pole, if you are not stifling a laugh or making cracks, bully for you.

By the film’s resolution, the monster has transformed into the Hulk and the film packs all of the emotional wallop of a Marvel film.

The movie is also badly acted. Isaac plays Frankenstein like a dude on a speedball. As his brother and the brother’s intended, Felix Kammerer and Mia Goth are as dull as dishwater. They simply do not resonate other than as clotheshorses for del Toro’s unnecessarily ornate costumery. As the financier of the project with a ham-handed agenda of his own, Christoph Waltz is only missing a mustache to twirl. Elordi is just big.

As bad as this whole endeavor is, it is made worse by del Toro’s cringingly infantile script.  His monster is a tortured soul whose transformation from a conglomeration of electrically charged parts to the most erudite Hulk is so ridiculous as to be Mel Brooksian. His Dr. Frankenstein is such a douchebag you can no more invest in him than Bradley Cooper as “Sack” in Wedding Crashers. Indeed, Frankenstein’s primary impetus for his forswearing of his creation is that Goth and the monster got on for a moment and he, coveting his brother’s gal, is now jealous. His secondary factor is that the monster is a lot of work.

Another note. del Toro luxuriates in the gratuitously violent here, yet another brushstroke on his canvas. He can make the monster’s ripping the skin off a wolf’s head super cool looking. But to see such a struggle with mere wolves, followed by Elordi moving an entire ship with a little push at the finale, it just hammers home the director’s ruinous fixation.

A colossal failure that scored an 85% on Rottentomatoes.

Hacks.

On the plus side, if you have Netflix, it is free. 

F1 – 1.5 stars

July 15, 2025
1 star, 2025, Action/Disaster, Drama
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A big, flashy, visually overwhelming nirvana for speed junkies. But when cars are not going vroom vroom around the cinematic coliseums of the Formula 1 race tour, the film is unoriginal, dull, sexless, and stupid. It is also badly acted (Brad Pitt excepted, as he doesn’t act so much as pose).

Pitt is a journeyman racer, much like Tom Cruise’s Cole Trickle in Days of Thunder, though Cruise was silly as an old “I can race anything with wheels” hand given his youth in that picture. Pitt is more plausible as a man who can race anything, be it in NASCAR, Lemans, Formula One, Baja, or, the Sahara, on a camel. But he’s still silly as a a man looking for something transcendent and elusive, like Kwai Chang Caine in Kung Fu. When Pitt’s old chum Javier Bardem arrives to offer him a spot on his flailing Formula One team, Pitt can’t say no even if it interrupts his quest.

The old timer Pitt joins the team and runs into a hotshot younger driver teammate (Damson Idris). Idris is resistant to the grizzled interloper. He makes his mark on social media more than on the track.

Pitt teaches him maturity, discipline and self-respect.

Pitt also runs into team car design guru Kerry Condon.

Condon teaches Pitt how to be a good teammate.

They also sleep together.

Pitt has not had very good on-screen chemistry with women since Thelma and Louise. The trend continues Here, he is a stoic, and in return, Condon musters all the heat of a flagging sterno cup. With a strongly established “older brother, younger sister” vibe, they have what can only be envisioned as some of the worst sex in history.

Just when you are nodding off, another race will start. You will perk up, because the spectacle is kinetic and exciting. But you can only watch so much racing. These people will have to start talking again, and when they do, it is drivel.

The plot then begins to echo that of a much better racing film – Talladega Nights. There is corporate skullduggery in the form of Tobias Menzies, who wants control of the entire racing team and schemes to depose and supplant Bardem. Like Ricky Bobby, Pitt must not enter the final race for Menzies’ machinations to succeed.

Pitt, of course, enters the final race and saves the day.

In a withering coup de grace, Pitt texts Menzies an emoji.

It is the finger.

Now, we have just spent an entire film trying to establish that Pitt is a simple, grounded, live-in-your camper, shut-out all of the noise enigma.

Yet, in declaration of his own worth and independence, he texts an emoji.

Yeesh.

The movie is terrible when characters talk, impressive when wheels are turning, a bit of a conundrum, because I can’t imagine it would transfer as well at home.

Use your best judgment. Knowing what I know now, I believe mine would have been to forgo the film and watch the vastly superior Rush.