Producers: Grant Bradley, Derek Dienner and Dale G. Bradley   Director: Damian Harris   Screenplay: Dale G. Bradley and Lynn Robertson-May   Cast: Jared Harris, Nicholas Hamilton, Jamie Harris, Sasha Bhasin, Will Price, Kimberly Fairbanks, Meredith Sullivan, Cole Tristan Murphy, Banks Quinney, Tobias Segal, Ben Sarro, Sung Yoon, Niva Patel, Pat DeFusco, Brandon Miles, Elise Hudson, Susanne Sulby, Michael Harrah and Carol Florence   Distributor: Angel Studios   

Grade: C

Today’s faith-based films don’t always deliver the heavy-handed religious messages they once did; often they play down the explicit religiosity in favor of more generalized inspirational uplift.  That’s the case with this latest offering from Angel Studios, in which there’s a brief shot in which a man clasps his hands in what looks like prayer in a hospital corridor, but which overall is more like a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie than a Christian homily.

That’s not to say that “Brave the Dark” isn’t heavy-handed, just that it doesn’t hit you over the head with a Bible.

Essentially it’s a based-on-a-true-life tale of the power of kindness to change the life of a teen damaged by the traumatic events of his childhood.  We meet Nathan Williams (Nicholas Hamilton) as a surly high school student trying to work off his anger on the running track of Garden Spot High in Lancaster, Pennsylvania; the year is 1986.  He’s noticed by genial, gregarious Stan Deen (Jared Harris), the nice-guy English teacher everybody likes, as the kid bangs away furiously at a vending machine.  In class Stan gives him a chocolate bar to break the ice.

Nate has fallen in with the wrong crowd; rich classmate Johnny (Will Price) is a particularly bad influence, enticing him into penny-ante thievery, which leads to Nate getting arrested.  Stan intervenes, despite warnings from his faculty colleagues, including his friend and colleague Deborah (Kimberly Fairbanks), because he thinks Nate has promise.  (Or maybe it’s because he’s in the midst of directing the student production of “Flowers for Algernon,” and sees Charley’s potential in the boy.  Or maybe it’s because, his elderly mother having recently died after he’d cared for her for eight years following her stroke, he’s desperate for something to fill his days.)  Anyway, Stan uses his many friendships—he seems to know everybody in town—to get Nate released to the custody of his elderly grandparents (Michael Harrah and Carol Florence) until his case comes up in court.

Nate’s life, we gradually learn, has been an unhappy one.  His beloved mother Grace (Meredith Sullivan), who’s introduced in gauzy flashbacks playing with him (Blake Quinney) as a kid, died when he was very young—in an accident, the grandparents say, though they add she was always trouble—and since they couldn’t deal with him, they placed him in an orphanage.  Now he’s assigned to a foster family, but has been sleeping in his car; he joined the track team to have a place to shower.  To make matters still worse, Tina (Sasha Bhasin), the classmate he’s infatuated with, has been ordered by her father to break up with him because of the arrest, and Nate goes ballistic seeing her with another guy (Cole Tristan Murphy).  It appears that he inherited extreme jealousy, and the propensity to lash out because of it, from his father (Tobias Segal)—a violent man, as will be revealed in a revelatory flashback toward the film’s close.

Determined to help the boy, Stan persuades Nate’s grandparents to turn over guardianship to him—the judge, whom Stan of course knows, readily assents—and the youngster moves in with him.  The yin and yang of the relationship is pretty predictable.  Nate shows himself a talented photographer, but still occasionally goes off the rails over Tina and can be lured back into crime by Johnny.  (Luckily, Stan’s friendship with his parole officer Barney, played by Jamie Harris, helps when the boy stumbles.)  Nate does research on microfilms of old newspapers to confirm his repressed memories about how his parents actually died.  He invites Johnny over to Stan’s house while Deen’s away, and the evening burgeons into a drunken party that leaves the place a mess.  There will, naturally, be a suicide attempt, which explains that scene in the hospital corridor.  But despite a moment after the house-trashing when he seems inclined to throw in the towel, Stan persists, and in the end Nate, of course, overcomes his trauma and emerges a good man.

The actual Nathan Williams (who, were told, ultimately changed his name to Deen) appears at the end of the picture to promote Angel’s usual “pay it forward” policy, and to invite contributions to the Stan Deen Foundation (Deen himself died in 2016).  But despite the fact that Dale G. Bradley and Lynn Robertson-May based their script on one Nathan himself wrote with John P. Spencer, the film quickly falls into formula.  Nor does it help that Hamilton proves a rather stiff presence as Nate, though he loosens up for the song “Never Alone” (a title that gives you a hint of the on-the-nose quality that pervades the picture), which he co-wrote himself (with Arthur Pingrey) and sings in a duet with Belinda Carlisle over the final credits.

Perhaps to compensate, Jared Harris, usually a fairly restrained actor—even in sinister roles—is frantic, almost manic, as Deen. There are moments suggesting that Stan is suffering from severe heart trouble, but that plot thread is simply allowed to drop unresolved; rather, apart from moments of exasperation with Nate or sadness at the thought of his mother and that one instance of being ready to give up, he’s relentlessly, even exhaustingly, upbeat.  Under the apparently liberal direction of his brother Damian, he just seems to be trying too hard.  By contrast third sibling Jamie—this is a family effort—as Nate’s parole officer, seems nearly incapable of moving a facial muscle for the sake of expression.  The supporting performances range from competent (Price, Fairbanks, Sullivan) to amateurish (Bhasin, Segal).  Little Quinney appears utterly lost.

On the technical side, the movie is okay, but no more.  Though it’s shot on actual Pennsylvania locations, Michael C. Stone’s production design and Marianne Parker’s aren’t terribly evocative of time or place, and Julio Macat’s cinematography is just ordinary, as are Toby Yates’s editing and the background score by Jacob Yoffee and Roahn Hylton.

“Brave the Dark” is earnest and heartfelt in encouraging acts of kindness to others.  That’s certainly a welcome message in today’s world.  It’s a pity the movie delivers it in such a flat, formulaic fashion.

Producers: Robert Schwartzman and Natalie Farrey   Director: Gia Coppola   Screenplay: Kate Gersten Cast: Pamela Anderson, Dave Bautista, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song, Billie Lourd and Jason Schwartzman   Distributor: Roadside Attractions

Grade: C

Pamela Anderson hasn’t entirely disappeared from view since her stint as iconic blonde bombshell C.J. Parker on “Baywatch” in the 1990s, but by placing her in a lead dramatic role Gia Coppola’s film aims to establish her bona fides as a serious actress of a certain age.  And though Anderson, usually dismissed as a celebrity of modest talent, gamely tries to meet the challenge, the flimsiness of Kate Gersten’s script, the raggedness of Coppola’s approach and her own thespian limitations sink the movie. 

Anderson plays Shelly Gardner, who’s been a member of the troupe in a Vegas hotel show called “Razzle Dazzle” since it started back in the eighties.  Though from what we see of it the show is threadbare and passé, she considers it a classic and, as a result of that delusion, is proud of her long association with it—for which, it will become clear, she sacrificed pretty much everything else. 

That’s why it comes as such a shock to her when laid-back, soft-spoken stage manager Eddie (Dave Bautista), invited to Shelly’s grubby place for dinner one night, tells her and the rest of her little “family”—younger dancers Mary-Anne (Brenda Song) and Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), a onetime colleague now reduced to the role of cocktail waitress to the casino regulars—that the hotel owners are closing down the show in less than a month, replacing it with an expansion of a raunchy “circus”-style extravaganza that’s already taken over the stage a couple of nights each week.

Perhaps Mary-Anne and Jodie will be able to find other jobs—though as the former says after an audition, they’re looking for dancers much younger than she is—but for Shelly the news is a nearly incomprehensible disaster.  The film opens with her auditioning nervously before a director whose face is obscured in darkness, dodging queries about her age before beginning her desperate routine; the sequence is resumed late in the film, when the director (now revealed as Jason Schwartzman) abruptly cuts her off and, in response to her complaints, brutally informs her of the facts of professional life.    

To add to Shelly’s stress, a somber girl named Hannah (Billie Lourd) shows up.  Shelly is overjoyed at the news that Hannah’s graduating from college, but it’s only gradually revealed that the girl is her daughter, whom she’d sent to live with friends while she continued her so-called career.  Their reunion is bittersweet at best.  Given how solicitous Eddie is about Shelly, it will come as no surprise that, further on, he’s identified as having played a role in her life greater than just a friend.

So yes, this is another regurgitation of the hoary old chestnut about someone who’s over-the-hill in a profession trying desperately to hang on to fading glory nonetheless (think, on a more exalted level, of the boxer in “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” for example, or of Willy Loman—recent real-life examples from politics will spring to mind as well).  There’s always poignancy to such stories, and inevitably there’s a measure of that here. 

But Gersten’s feeble script does no one any favors.  It’s so thin that even as edited by Blair McClendon and Cam McLauchlin to under ninety minutes, the result is sluggish and repetitive, despite cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s attempt to energize things occasionally with some hectoring hand-held work.  Coppola’s direction is lackadaisical, allowing too many scenes to drag, and the threadbare look of the film (production design by Natalie Ziering, costumes by Jacqui Getty) emphasizes that this is a low-budget effort.  (It’s also a family one: Jason and producer Robert are both cousins of the director.)

Among the cast Bautista underplays so completely that he virtually disappears.  At the other extreme Curtis bulldozes her way through her scenes, with an impromptu pole dance that must be seen to be disbelieved.  (One has to give her credit for fearlessness, though.)  The lesser roles are adequately, if unimpressively, taken, though Shipka shows off how limber she is while previewing a dance routine backstage.

But of course attention will be focused on Anderson, and she’s clearly trying very hard.  But the girly giggling she does when trying to appear upbeat is annoying, and her attempt at solemn pensiveness, as in the frequent sequences of Shelly walking around alone and occasionally breaking out into dance moves, gets old, if you’ll pardon the phrase.  It’s only in the bifurcated audition scene with Schwartzman that she really hits the mark.

“The Last Showgirl” isn’t a disaster, like “Showgirls,” sort of its reverse, was.  It’s just an instantly forgettable take on a musty plot that gives Pamela Anderson the chance to take center stage, even if to less effect than some might have hoped.  You’ll be better off sticking with Ryan White’s well-received Netflix documentary about her.