Producers: David Boies, Kevin M. Brennan, Shannon Houchins, Chris Parker, Zack Schiller and Dylan Sellers  Director: Potsy Ponciroli   Screenplay: Mike Vukadinovich   Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Himesh Patel, Lily James, Tim Blake Nelson, Uzo Aduba, Nina Arianda, Jim Gaffigan, José Yazpik, Joey Lauren Adams, Simon Rex, Traci Lords, Neva Joan Howell and Yingling Zhu    Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: C

Move the locale from the freezing Midwest of “Fargo,” to a faceless town on an island off the coast of North Carolina and you’ll have some idea of what Potsy Ponciroli’s “Greedy People” aspires to.  But by piling bad choice on bad choice and corpse upon corpse, the would-be dark comedy grows ever more overburdened with compromised characters; along the way it also forgets to be funny.

The town where the action occurs is called Providence, perhaps to suggest that everything that happens is preordained.  (It was actually shot by Eric Koretz, without much distinction, in Southport, North Carolina. The bland production design by Chad Keith and costumes by Brianna Quick certainly don’t make the place look attrative.)  A new cop has been added to the force by Captain Murphy (Uzo Aduba)—nervous Will Shelley (Himesh Patel), who had some trouble at his last posting.  He and his pregnant wife Paige (Lily James) are still moving into their house when he’s off for his first day on the job with his voluble, volatile partner Terry Brogan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who spends most of his day cadging free cups of coffee from the locals and enjoying afternoon quickies with Yu Yan (Yingling Zhu), while her husband’s away and Will waits in the patrol car by the curb.

That explains why Will’s alone when a call comes in, and he has to proceed solo to a house where a break-in is supposedly underway.  There he encounters buxom housewife Virginia Chetlo (Traci Lords), who’s frightened by his intrusion and gets into a tussle with him.  When they crash into a table, she’s fatally injured, breaking the first rule Brogan had given his new partner before going off for his tryst: “Don’t kill anybody.”

Unwilling to shoulder the consequences, the two cops decide to stage a burglary to blame Virginia’s death on a thief, but in the process find a stash of a million dollars and scheme to steal it for themselves.  What they don’t know is that Virginia’s husband Wally (Tim Blake Nelson), the local shrimp entrepreneur, had left the cash as payment to a killer called The Columbian (José Yazpik) he’s hired to off his wife: he’s been having an affair with his secretary Debra (Nina Arianda) and wants to be free of his marital impediment.  Now The Columbian, arriving after the fact and finding his money gone, is demanding his fee anyway, though Chetlo thinks he’s being double-billed.

That’s most of the folks in the chain of misfortune the complicated plot offers up for ridicule.  Others include The Irishman (Jim Gaffigan), a second hired killer in the tiny burg, who boasts a mailbox with his nom de guerre on it where his clients drop off their payments; Keith Crawford (Simon Rex), a dim-bulb masseur who knows what the cops did; and his domineering mother (Neva Joan Howell).

There are some mildly amusing moments in “Greedy People”—Nelson makes a proper doofus, though he doesn’t come close to William H. Macy, whose turn in “Fargo” is the obvious inspiration for Wally, and the relationship between Keith and his know-it-all mother is good for a few chuckles.  But otherwise the humor mostly fails to register—Aduba is nice enough (with poignant bookending scenes in her home), but Murphy is no Marge Gunderson, and even Gaffigan can’t do much with The (underwritten) Irishman.

As a result the movie becomes little more than a nasty catalogue of human folly and cascading death, played out by writer Mike Vukadinovich and director Ponciroli with a decidedly blunt satirical knife and haltingly edited by Jamie Kirkpatrick. But it’s difficult to care about characters being knocked off when they’ve barely been introduced.  All the cast do adequate work trying to fill in the sketches the script provides them with (Patel and James work especially hard, though the writing does them no favors) but there’s only one standout—Gordon-Levitt, who brings real ferocity and menace to the unpredictable Brogan.  Except in a few opening scenes, though, the performance is more frightening than amusing, and by the last reel it feels like he belongs in an unabashed film noir.   

As to those responsible for “Greedy People,” they might take to heart something The Irishman says to a potential client: “You can know you’re not good, which is better than believing you are.”

Producers: Mark Wahlberg, Stephen Levinson and Jeff Waxman   Director: Julian Farino  Screenplay: Joe Barton and David Guggenheim  Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Halle Berry, J.K. Simmons, Mike Colter, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Jessica De Gouw, Alice Lee, Jackie Earle Haley, Lorraine Bracco, Dana Delany, Patch Darragh, James McMenamin, Juan Carlos Hernandez and Stephen Campbell Moore   Distributor: Netflix

Grade: C

There’s plenty of efficiency involved in manufacturing a by-the-numbers action comedy like “The Union,” from cobbling together a script that contains all the necessary tropes to assembling a watchable cast to choreographing the obligatory chases, gunfights and stunts.   It’s the spies who populate the result that are all, by narrative necessity, incompetent.

So it is with the members of the eponymous U.S. organization, a super-secret outfit that supposedly can handle crises beyond the abilities of the usual alphabet soup of public agencies.  After a botched operation in Trieste to retrieve a computer loaded with information on the West’s operatives that costs the Union six of its crew, survivor Roxanne Hall (Halle Berry) convinces her hard-talking boss Tom Brennan (J.K. Simmons) that the right man to replace her dead partner Nick Faraday (Mike Colter) is a complete newbie, Mike McKenna (Mark Wahlberg), an old flame from her high school days in Paterson, New Jersey.  He’s a rambunctious construction worker, one of those guys who’ve never grown up, still live with their mothers and spend their off-time womanizing and drinking. Mike’s introduced waking up in the bed he’s shared with his seventh-grade English teacher (Dana Delany) and boozing it up with his pals over a pool table in their favorite bar.  Roxanne simply waltzes into the bar, invites him to a sort of reunion outside, then drugs and kidnaps him. 

He wakes up in London, where he’s invited to join the Union, says yes and undergoes the usual couple of days training before becoming an integral cog in a mission to recover the MacGuffin—that device stolen in Trieste—that’s being auctioned off online.  Naturally his introduction to undercover operations goes awry, and the team—he and Roxanne in particular—must go through hoop after hoop to track down the villains and prevent the intel from being sold to the Iranians.  (One of the saddest elements of the finale is that the chief Iranian negotiator begins by saying “Let’s finish this quickly.”  Would that they could, but it turns out there’s thirty minutes of mayhem left.  And Mike has to get back in time to serve as best man at his buddy’s wedding!)

There’s plenty of unsurprising twists (including suspicion there’s a mole in the organization), empty derring-do and mindless brawling—as well as intermittent pauses for bonding between Mike and Roxanne—as the screenplay by Joe Barton and David Guggenheim follows its inexorable path to a flamboyantly hectic resolution on the beautiful Istrian coast (shot in glossy tones by cinematographer Alan Stewart).  The supporting cast is capable—in addition to Simmons, who delivers his customary stentorian turn, the Union agents include Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Alice Kim and Jackie Earle Haley, while Lorraine Bracco gets laughs in her few scenes as Mike’s know-it-all mother and Stephen Campbell Moore elicits hisses as an officious CIA man who, of course, is always wrong.  Jessica De Gouw makes a slinky villainess.

But though the movie is competently put together, with capable direction from Julian Farino, a solid production design (Morgan Kennedy) and nice costumes (Beatrix Aruna Pasztor), and is decently edited by Pia Di Ciaula, it all feels prefabricated; it’s also burdened with a score by Rupert Gregson-Williams that accentuates the air of over-familiarity.

As for Wahlberg and Berry, they make an agreeable pair, even if their banter is second-rate and the trajectory their characters follow is all too reminiscent of other films of this sort. Naturally after the mission is over they wind up together at that wedding back in Paterson, and a closing sequence with Simmons indicates that they’re to be a Union team in future.  Cue another Netflix action franchise.

But not one to especially look forward to.  One of the cutesy “aren’t-they-made-for-each-other” moments Mike and Roxanne share comes when they awake from a night in bed together and accuse one another of snoring–“You snore, no you snore.”  The truth is that despite all the frenetic action and pounding music, a cookie-cutter movie like this, however slickly done, is bound to make us all snore.