BAD BOYS FOR LIFE

R, 123 minutes. Waterford, Lisbon. The third edition of the “Bad Boys” franchise starts as it must do: With a gleaming Porsche swerving at impossible speeds through Miami traffic under the expert control of Will Smith, with Martin Lawrence growing very sick beside him. The engine snarls, the car repeatedly fishtails and strains. Smith looks over to his partner with alarm and points out that the interior of the sports car is hand-stitched leather. Lawrence’s cheeks bulge; he’s about to hurl: “You better drink it,” the driver barks. All is good. We’ve again got Smith’s cocksure Detective Mike Lowrey beside Lawrence’s more cautious Marcus Burnett. There’s the customary playful banter between opposites. So it’s so disappointing that “Bad Boys for Life “soon swerves into weird neighborhoods and gets bloated as it tries to get deep, trying to explore topics like religion, mortality, biological determinism, individual legacy and aging. — Mark Kennedy, Associated Press

BIRDS OF PREY (AND THE FANTABULOUS EMANCIPATION OF ONE HARLEY QUINN)

R, 109 minutes. Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. The best thing to come out of 2016’s much-derided DC antihero team-up “Suicide Squad” was Margot Robbie’s inspired take on Harley Quinn, the self-proclaimed “Joker’s girl” and quirky chaos clown. Robbie’s Quinn, with her colorful pigtails and baseball bat, instantly became an icon, a perennial Halloween costume, eclipsing even her lesser half, Jared Leto’s heavily tattooed Joker. But enough about him; the Joker is so 2019. 2020 is Harley

Quinn’s year. And in the wake of her breakup, she’s back and better than ever with a brand-new girl gang in the brilliant, breakneck “Birds of Prey.” Director Cathy Yan soars with her stylish sophomore feature, which is colorful, campy and cheerfully brutal, a perfect reflection of Harley herself. Robbie, as usual, tears into the role with a wideeyed gusto that is equally childlike and unhinged. With her Betty Boop accent, wacky wardrobe and gymnastic facility with a bat, Harley is one lovable psychopath. It’s impossible not to root for her, even as she’s reducing chemical factories to clouds of rainbow-colored smoke, gleefully dropping hordes of police officers with shotgun blasts of glitter and demolishing bad guys with roller skate high kicks to the face. Robbie makes Harley a bedeviling, beguiling antiheroine, not just any old crazy ex-girlfriend. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

BLUMHOUSE’S FANTASY ISLAND

H1/2 PG-13, 110 minutes. Through today only at Westbrook. Still playing at Waterford, Stonington, Lisbon. Retooling the late 1970s/early 1980s ABC prime-time staple “Fantasy Island” as a sinister gotcha! outing isn’t a bad idea. That’s the wheel. The spokes are everything else, and most everything else about the new horror movie, from the Blumhouse crew and director Jeff Wadlow, is not good. Four intertwining fantasies, four stories’ worth of lame ideas, poorly executed. Call it “De-Plane Crash.” Call it “The Island of Dr. No-Thank-You.” Call it “Worstworld.”Call it “The Butterfly Effect,” with a dead butterfly and no effect. Call it surprising, to me, anyway, if it finds an audience past the first week. Just don’t call it much of a movie. Gone, of course, is the grandly gesticulating Ricardo Montalban as Mr. Roarke, though his white suit has been retailored for a subdued, somewhat indistinct Michael Pena. The mysterious resort owner’s personal assistant and general greeter is now played by a woman, Parisa Fitz-Henley, best known for the TV series “Midnight, Texas,” another, better supernatural foray, and here one of the few bright spots in an otherwise dim mashup. “Fantasy Island” toggles between the elaborate fantasies of four different sets of characters. Lucy Hale and Portia Doubleday enact a “Mean Girls” revenge scenario. Maggie Q plays a woman yearning for a husband and child, but mired in self-loathing and regret derived from a tragic accident years earlier, one with endless reverberations, as we learn. A pair of literal and figurative bros (Ryan Hansen and Jimmy O. Yang) just want to have fun, but they too must reckon with life-altering decisions. The fourth plotline anchor is hoisted by Austin Stowell, who lost his soldier father at a young age and has struggled to get right ever since. — Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

BRAHMS: THE BOY II

PG-13, 86 minutes. Waterford, Westbrook, Lisbon. After a family moves into the Heelshire Mansion, their young son soon makes friends with a life-like doll called Brahms. stars Katie Holmes, Owain Yeoman, Christopher Convery, Ralph Ineson. A review wasn’t available.

THE CALL OF THE WILD

1/2 PG, 100 minutes. Niantic, Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Much like our furry friends, movies about man’s best friend come in all shapes and sizes: lost dog movies, talking dog movies, military dog movies, reincarnated dog movies. “The Call of the Wild,” directed by Chris Sanders and based on the classic novella by Jack London, is what one might call a literary dog movie, even if there is technically no actual dog in it. The star of “The Call of the Wild,” Buck, is a CGI creation. And it’s only through the technology that his dangerous and harrowing adventures in the Alaskan wilderness during the Gold Rush, as outlined by London, could be realistically brought to the big screen, for better or for worse. Known for his work on the most recent “Planet of the Apes” films (and who thrilled and terrified in an ape-inspired performance art piece in “The Square”), accomplished motion capture performer Terry Notary brings Buck’s movements to life, and it’s a truly skilled performance. But Buck’s digital nature is noticeable right away. It’s initially off-putting, and something you can never quite shake throughout the film. The computer-generated creation doesn’t have the weight, the heat, the feel of a real dog (or any creature for that matter), though the movements, gestures and expressions are accurate. Fortunately Buck plays opposite several solid human actors who can hold up their end of the tale. After the rambunctious Buck is kidnapped from his comfortable family home and sold as a sled dog in Alaska, he luckily finds himself in the employ of Perrault (Omar Sy), who teaches Buck the way of the sled while delivering mail across the Yukon. Sy brings a warmth and joy to the role that’s infectious and a necessary element in the otherwise terrifying story. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service