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    ‘Goodrich’ Review: Daddy Lessons

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    An art gallery owner (Michael Keaton) gets a shock when his second wife (Laura Benanti) goes to rehab and he has to take care of their twins.“Goodrich,” by Hallie Meyers-Shyer, is a crowd-pleasing family comedy so frankly observed that you can imagine the first draft being scribbled on the back of a therapy bill.An art gallery owner named Andy Goodrich (Michael Keaton) gets shocked out of his self-absorption when his second wife, Naomi (Laura Benanti), phones to announce that she’s checked herself into 90 days of Malibu rehab. Andy hadn’t noticed she was strung out on prescription pills, much to the disdain of everyone else who had, including the couple’s 9-year-old twins, Billie and Mose (Vivien Lyra Blair and Jacob Kopera), and his 30-something daughter, Grace (Mila Kunis), from his first marriage, who rightly refuses to pick up his slack.Today’s modern father is expected to be more engaged than when Keaton first faced elementary school drop-off in the 1983 movie “Mr. Mom.” Yet, Meyers-Shyer makes clear that women are still shouldering the burden — and blame. Upon realizing he has no clue where his family stores the spices, Andy sputters in frustration, “Why would somebody keep the salt there?”That joke, plus dozens of others, hits its target like a pie to the face. Keaton’s an old pro at getting audiences to love a well-intentioned jerk, and the script gets good chuckles out of his inconsiderate attempts at generosity — offering to take Grace, who is pregnant, out for sushi, or treating the tykes to a movie night where he insists on watching “Casablanca.”Meyers-Shyer is a realist, so don’t expect Andy to turn his life around after delivering a big, wet-eyed speech. But Kunis’s Grace gets a great one about loving him despite his shortcomings that’s so honest and raw she made me giggle, tear up and giggle again.GoodrichRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ Review: Delightfully Undead Again

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      Tim Burton has brought the band back together — Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, even Bob the shrunken head guy — for a fun but less edgy sequel.After more than three decades and assorted ups, downs and spinoffs like an animated series and Broadway musical, most of the key players in the original “Beetlejuice” band — Tim Burton, Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Bob the shrunken-head guy — are back together. A lot has predictably changed along the way, yet one of the enjoyable aspects about reunion tours is that when a group has charmed its way into your consciousness, like this one did back in the day, a.k.a. 1988, you don’t mind (too much) its sporadically sour notes and slack timing.And, so, enter the dependably delightful Ryder as Lydia Deetz, the onetime Goth Girl whose family got into so much trouble the last time. Dressed in her customary black, from bangs to booted toe, her face as ethereally pale as ever, Lydia is the host of a paranormally inclined TV show, “Ghost House With Lydia Deetz,” and now a minor celebrity. She puts on a good front on camera, but Lydia remains a haunted soul, and now there’s more than memories of Beetlejuice (Keaton) that plague her: She’s a widow, and her daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), is an eyeball-rolling, heavy-sighing mini-me of gloom, one who’s just itching to have her world rocked.Burton seems anxious to do just that, and he gets this party started without ceremony, cranking it into nicely morbid life as the characters make their introductions. Among these is the first film’s most clueless chucklehead, Lydia’s stepmother, Delia (O’Hara), an arty artist with an outsize ego and cruel lack of talent. Lydia is on warmer terms with her, partly because she needs someone on her side, given that her father is soon dead; he’s dispatched early in a satisfyingly bloody animated sequence. (The character was played in the first film by Jeffrey Jones, who pleaded guilty in 2010 to not updating his registration as a sex offender.)Her father’s death becomes the excuse for Lydia and the rest to return to the family’s old shrieking ground, a hillside fun house with an airy porch and troublesome pests. Once there, Burton cuts loose his cheerfully malignant clowns, and the characters settle down to business with magic portals and visitors from beyond. In bland strokes, Burton et al. also toss in a few romantic complications, partly, it seems, because someone here believes that female characters require love interests. One entanglement involves Lydia and her producer-boyfriend, Rory (Justin Theroux, farcically insufferable), a mindful kick-me-sign; the other, less developed one concerns Astrid and a local cutie, Jeremy (Arthur Conti).I don’t know why anyone thought that Beetlejuice needed any kind of love interest outside Lydia, his old crush. Whatever the case, Monica Bellucci turns up as his ex, the latest in a line of showy Burton vixens. Given her character’s soul-sucking toxicity, it’s hard not to wonder if the filmmakers are making a joke about bad divorces. Bellucci doesn’t have much to do but look hot, which is easy. Like Willem Dafoe — who’s predictably diverting playing a hammy (totally canned) dead actor — Bellucci is attractive filigree, something to admire amid the chats, chuckles and appealingly humble practical effects that still carry the touch of the human hand.The greatest special effect remains Keaton’s Beetlejuice, however attenuated. The original movie was at once a funfair and a comic family meltdown with heart (and other body parts), but what pushed it joyously over the top was Keaton. With his deathly white face and electric-chair shock of hair, Beetlejuice had been designed to seize your attention (and maybe evoke Jack Nicholson in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”). What held you rapt, though, was Keaton’s exciting expressive range and unpredictability. With his wild eyes and raspy growl, he pushed and pulled at your affections, and made you wonder about the guy under the get-up. He seemed borderline dangerous, which gave the film frisson. Even as “Beetlejuice” playfully hit its genre notes, Keaton’s vocalizations — he spat words and all but scatted — and his twitchy physicality kept the film from slipping into the generic.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Michael Keaton Michael Keaton Michael Keaton

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      There’s a scene in the upcoming indie dramedy “Goodrich” where Michael Keaton’s character, a Los Angeles art dealer lost in the weeds of a late-midlife crisis, agrees to attend a breath workshop to win over a New Age-y prospective client. As setups go, it’s something of a soft target: a fish-out-of-water Boomer, drowning in California woo-woo.But the actor, his face a small hurricane of hope and anxiety, does more than find his “higher vibration.” He bobs and weaves and tries some kind of freestyle tai chi; he bats at a swarm of invisible bees and unleashes a primal scream (more like a strangled yelp, really). This is the Keaton that the “Goodrich” writer-director Hallie Meyers-Shyer envisioned when she conceived the screenplay.“I wrote it 100 percent with him in mind,” she said, “to the point where if he had said no, I would have buried it and myself in the backyard.”And it’s the same sense of unpredictability, a certain wild-card gleam, that has compelled the filmmaker Tim Burton to cast Keaton in five movies over nearly four decades, including, most recently, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” “When you just look at Michael in ‘Beetlejuice’ or even ‘Batman,’ he has this sort of look in his eye,” Burton said. “That’s why I wanted him to be Batman, because you just look at him and go, ‘This is a guy who would dress up like a bat.’ You know what I mean? There’s something behind the eyes that’s just very intelligent, funny and dangerous and kind of crazy.”Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton, who both starred in the original “Beetlejuice” movie, return for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”Warner Bros.The Keaton who settled into the corner booth of a hushed midtown Manhattan hotel lounge on a late-August morning didn’t seem like much of a maniac. Dressed in the dapper cool-dad uniform of fine-gauge knitwear and fitted slacks, he was still whippet-slim at 72 (he turned 73 on Thursday), and so soft-spoken in person that it was sometimes a strain to hear him over the cappuccino machine.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tim Burton, Michael Keaton and More Share How ‘Beetlejuice’ Sequel Came Together

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      Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara and their director, Tim Burton, look back on the first movie, the “Day-O” scene and their ghost comedy’s afterlife.If you wonder why it took 36 years for “Beetlejuice” to spawn a sequel, consider how complicated it was simply to reunite its busy principals for a video call last month.The director Tim Burton joined from the south of France, where he was editing the second season of the Netflix series “Wednesday,” while Winona Ryder signed on from Atlanta, on a brief break from filming the final season of “Stranger Things.” Michael Keaton spent the call roaming a cabin he’d built in rural Montana — “I’m reheating coffee, if you want some,” he told the group — while Catherine O’Hara, the last to sign on, did so from her cottage in Ontario, Canada.Still, even on a video call that catered to a torturous number of time zones, the quartet’s comic chemistry remained strong. Ryder said revisiting their decades-old bond was the best part of making “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” which opens the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday before its theatrical release Sept. 6.“It was nostalgic, but not in any saccharine sense,” Ryder said. “It went straight to the heart.”In the 1988 original, the newly dead couple Barbara and Adam Maitland (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) marshal all their ghostly might in an attempt to scare away the Deetzes, city slickers who’ve moved into their Connecticut house. Eccentric hauntings ensue, including a memorable dinner-party possession where Delia Deetz (O’Hara) lurches in time to Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O.” But when the Maitlands go looking for added firepower, they make the mistake of hiring Beetlejuice (Keaton), a trickster spirit who plays by his own rules and has romantic designs on the Deetzes’ daughter, the dark and morbid Lydia (Ryder).From left, Keaton, Catherine O’Hara, Ryder and the director Tim Burton, all participants from the original film, in New York to promote the sequel.Theo Wargo/Getty ImagesThe new film picks up decades later as Lydia, now the host of an exploitative paranormal-reality series, heads back home with her stepmother, Delia, and skeptical daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), in tow. Meanwhile, Beetlejuice lies in wait, still pining for the goth girl that got away.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Knox Goes Away’ Review: A Not-So-Simple Plan

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      Michael Keaton is quietly compelling as a beleaguered hit man in this downbeat thriller.Movies rarely pause to simply watch a character think, and not all actors can withstand the scrutiny. Michael Keaton, however, has always been uncommonly adept at telegraphing intent with minimum dialogue. So when, early in “Knox Goes Away,” his character, a contract killer named John Knox, is warned by his doctor of an imminent mental health crisis, Keaton’s control is more eloquent than any breakdown.Unfolding over seven weeks, “Knox Goes Away” is, like its antihero, smart, unconventional and almost obsessively careful. Its unhurried pacing and mood of quiet deliberation won’t be for everyone; but this low-key thriller resolves its shockingly high stakes with a twisty intelligence. Knox is a creature of habit, a lover of philosophy (his longtime Polish escort — the wonderful Joanna Kulig, of Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2018 romance, “Cold War” — calls him Aristotle) — and a prized professional. But when his final job goes very wrong, and the blast radius threatens to enclose his criminal associates, Knox must accelerate his retirement plan. Of course his long-estranged son (James Marsden) chooses just this moment to beg for help in resolving an emergency of his own.The pleasure of “Knox Goes Away” lies in the tension between Knox’s rapidly deteriorating mental faculties and his meticulously devious plan to solve both predicaments, all while hoodwinking the cunning detective (Suzy Nakamura) following behind. Both Al Pacino and Marcia Gay Harden are perfectly understated in small, crucial roles, and the film (Keaton’s second as director, after his similarly brooding 2009 drama, “The Merry Gentleman” ) relishes their restraint.At a time when too many actors are cosmetically prohibited from raising an eyebrow or wrinkling a nose, Keaton reminds us that an expressive face is still a movie’s most valuable asset.Knox Goes AwayRated R for cold blood and a hot temper. Running time 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Flash’ Review: Electric Company

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      In the latest DC Comics blowout, Ezra Miller suits up as the speedy superhero alongside special guests like Batman (hello, Michael Keaton).The Flash, the latest DC Comics superhero to get his very own big show, isn’t the outfit’s usual brooding heavyweight. He’s neither an old-style god nor new (a.k.a. a billionaire), but an electrified nerd who joined the super-ranks by accident, not by birthright or by design. Out of uniform, he is a normie, a goof and kind of endearing. He’s really, really fast on his feet, you bet. But what makes him pop onscreen is that when things go bigger and grimmer here, as they invariably do in blowouts of this type, he retains a playful weightlessness.That’s a relief, particularly given how the movie tries to clobber you into submission. Big action-adventures invariably give the viewer a workout, smacking you around with their shocks and awesomeness, though it sometimes feels as if contemporary superhero movies have taken this kind of pummeling to new extremes. That may be true, though movies have long employed spectacle — pyrotechnics, lavish set pieces — to bait, hook and bludgeon the audience so it keeps begging for more. If the bludgeoning feels more inescapable these days, it’s partly because the major studios now bank so heavily on superhero movies.“The Flash” is one of the more watchable ones. It’s smartly cast, ambitious and relatively brisk at two and a half hours. The story tracks Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) and his superhero persona, the Flash, as he whooshes, wrapped in tendrils of lightning; traverses space-time continuums; and tries to exonerate his father (Ron Livingston), who’s in prison for killing Barry’s mom (Maribel Verdú). As is usually the case with superhero movies, the story is nonsensical and convoluted — it’s no wonder a character uses a tangle of cooked spaghetti to try to explain a major plot point — but not calamitously so. The overall vibe is upbeat.Some of that liveliness comes from Miller, a tense and almost feverishly charismatic presence. (Their well-publicized offscreen troubles hang like a cloud over this movie.) Some of the Flash’s appeal, of course, is also baked into the original comic-book character, “the fastest man on Earth,” who first hit in 1940 (via creators Gardner Fox and Harry Lampert) and was revamped (by Robert Kanigher and Carmine Infantino) in 1956. Five years later in Issue No. 123, these versions of the Flash (there are others) discover that they exist on two seemingly separate Earths, an idea this movie, well, runs with by introducing parallel DC Comics realms.It’s a conceit that pays off the second a shambolic Michael Keaton makes his entrance as a graybeard puttering about a near-derelict Wayne Manor. Having hung up his Bat-suit in his reality (while DC has repeatedly rebooted the franchise in ours), Bruce appears to have entered the Howard Hughes chapter of his cosseted life when Barry drops by. Long story short, the two rapidly join forces, dust off the Batcave tech, furrow their brows and suit up, as other members of the DC stock company join the party, including Alfred Pennyworth (Jeremy Irons), General Zod (Michael Shannon) and Supergirl (Sasha Calle).The entrance of these company players are timed like special-guest appearances — ladies and gentlemen, Zod the Zaniac! — and they’re obviously meant to delight true believers. To a degree, they also feel like they’ve been brought in to shore up the Flash during his first stand-alone outing. Cramming the screen with established names to hedge their expensive bets is an old-fashioned studio gambit, whether in a 1920s musical revue or 1970s disaster flick. Whatever the rationale here, the results are amusing, and it’s especially nice to see Keaton, who first played Batman in Tim Burton’s 1989 film. He seems to be having a good time, and when he looks in the mirror approvingly, it’s easy to share in his self-admiration.Working from a script by Christina Hodson, the director Andy Muschietti keeps these pieces greased and quickly moving, though he almost blows it as soon as the movie begins. It opens with an unfunny protracted bit in which Barry, who’s late for work, orders a sandwich from a pokey server. (That the first villain in the story is a service worker is a choice.) While the guy readies the order, Barry turns into the Flash to help his world’s Batman (an uncredited Ben Affleck) dispatch some villains. It goes as expected — bam, splat — but then a hospital wing collapses, and newborn babies go flying, hurtling toward the street.It’s a creepy setup that Muschietti milks for laughs that become queasier and ickier the longer and the more gleefully flamboyant the scene plays out. It’s absurd, outrageous, digitally fabricated and needless to say the Flash will save the day. The problem is that Muschietti, who has a talent for fraying your nerves with images of child endangerment (as he showed in the “It” horror flicks), is so obviously pleased with these airborne babies that he keeps showing off (turning a microwave into a bassinet), which drains the sequence both of its outlandish comedy and of any tension that might make the Flash’s heroism resonate.The movie more or less recovers, settling into its lively groove, even if the Flash remains a curiously uncertain presence. Surrounding him with bigger superheroes may have made branding sense, but the net effect is that the movie never persuasively establishes the Flash as a confident stand-alone entity. That may make the question of Miller playing him in the future moot. Who knows? Last year, Miller apologized for their behavior and said they were seeking treatment for “complex mental health issues.” I liked “The Flash” well enough while watching it. But thinking and writing about it and everything that has gone down has been dispiriting — real life has a way of insinuating itself into even better-wrought fantasies.The FlashRated PG-13 for superhero violence. Running time: 2 hours 24 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Harry Colomby, Teacher Who Aided a Jazz Great’s Career, Dies at 92

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      A chance encounter with Thelonious Monk led to a 14-year stint as his manager. After seeing a young Michael Keaton at a stand-up club, he became his manager, too.Harry Colomby was a schoolteacher with a love of jazz when he stopped by the Cafe Bohemia in Greenwich Village in 1955 to remind the drummer Art Blakey that he and his band, the Jazz Messengers, were scheduled to perform in a few days at the school where Mr. Colomby taught.While waiting, Mr. Colomby greeted the celebrated composer and pianist Thelonious Monk; they had met once before. “Oh, Harry. Yeah, I remember you,” Mr. Colomby recalled him saying, as detailed in the liner notes to the live 1965 Monk album “Misterioso.” “Say, you got your car here? You can drive me uptown?”In the car, Monk asked if Mr. Colomby was ready to quit teaching. “So I drove Thelonious to his house at 2:30 in the morning and at 3 a.m., a half-hour later, became his personal manager,” he wrote. “I’m still not sure how it happened.”Mr. Colomby’s younger brother, Bobby, the original drummer with Blood, Sweat & Tears and later a record producer and an executive at several record companies, said in a phone interview that Monk viewed Harry as someone who was “bright, honest and would work hard,” adding, “Harry told him, ‘I can’t promise you you’ll be rich, but you’ll be appreciated as an artist.’”Thelonious Monk in 1961. “I realized that Monk was more than a jazz musician,” Mr. Colomby said. “He was potentially a symbol.”Erich Auerbach/Getty ImagesMr. Colomby died on Dec. 25 at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 92. His brother confirmed the death.When Mr. Colomby began working with Monk, he was little known beyond the jazz cognoscenti and his unorthodox approach divided critics. He was also rarely heard in New York City because he lacked a cabaret card, which in those days was needed to perform in bars and nightclubs there; he had not had one since 1951, when it was revoked because of a drug arrest. In 1957, Mr. Colomby helped Monk get his card back. His subsequent extended engagement at the Five Spot in the East Village was the beginning of his emergence as a jazz star.For most of the 14 years that he managed Monk from obscurity to renown, Mr. Colomby taught English and social studies at high schools in Brooklyn, Queens and Plainview, on Long Island. “I had no illusion about how much money there is in jazz,” Mr. Colomby told the historian Robin D.G. Kelley for his biography “Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original” (2009). “But I realized that Monk was more than a jazz musician. He was potentially a symbol. He was symbolic of strength, stick-to-it-iveness, purity, you know, beyond music, beyond jazz.”Harry Golombek was born on Aug. 20, 1929, in Berlin, and fled with his parents and his brother Jules to New York City in the spring of 1939 to escape Nazi persecution. Family members who had immigrated earlier to the United States changed their surname to Colomby. His father, Saul, who became Fred in the United States, started a watchmaking company in Manhattan. His mother, Elsie (Ries) Colomby, worked there.After graduating from New York University in 1950 with a bachelor’s degree in English, Harry began his teaching career.As a manager, Mr. Colomby had only four clients: Monk; the singer and pianist Mose Allison; the comedian and impressionist John Byner; and the actor Michael Keaton.Mr. Byner said that he met Mr. Colomby in the early 1960s at a John F. Kennedy impression contest. “He was fantastic,” he said in a phone interview. “He knew everybody.” But they parted in 1986 because Mr. Colomby became focused on his business with Mr. Keaton.“He left me for another guy,” Mr. Byner said.Mr. Colomby first encountered Mr. Keaton, then a stand-up comic, performing at the Comedy Store in Hollywood in the late 1970s.“What I saw in Michael was something original,” Mr. Colomby told The Los Angeles Times in 1988. “I also saw charisma onstage. Something about his look and timing was exquisite.”Mr. Colomby was also the producer or executive producer of starring vehicles for Mr. Keaton including the television series “Working Stiffs” (1979) and “Report to Murphy” (1982) and the films “Mr. Mom” (1983), “Johnny Dangerously” (1984) and “One Good Cop” (1991).In addition to his brother Bobby, Mr. Colomby is survived by his wife, Lee, and his son, the actor Scott Colomby. His brother Jules, who briefly ran a jazz record company, Signal, died in the 1990s.Mr. Keaton was Mr. Colomby’s client for about 25 years, and the two remained friends afterward.“What we shared was, we saw things in an offbeat way and we’d talk for hours and make each other laugh,” Mr. Keaton said in a phone interview. “I was probably the only stand-up whose manager was funnier than he was.” More

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      ‘Worth’ Review: Appraising Lives

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      This drama starring Michael Keaton is a surprisingly effective movie about a tricky subject — the creation of the Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund.The central question of “Worth” is whether it’s possible to reduce a life to a dollar value. The film, directed by Sara Colangelo (the American remake of “The Kindergarten Teacher”), dramatizes the creation of the Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund, which the federal government established after the attacks to limit lawsuits against the airlines. The lawsuits’ downstream effects, the reasoning went, could sink the United States economy.“Worth” follows Kenneth R. Feinberg (an excellent, Boston-accented Michael Keaton), the lawyer appointed as the special master of the fund, through the two-year process of defining the project’s parameters and of getting potential plaintiffs to sign on.Notwithstanding skepticism from others, including Camille Biros (Amy Ryan), the business manager of Feinberg’s firm, it takes some time for the film’s Feinberg to understand he has underestimated the grief of the bereaved. Cold and imperious, he barely gets a word in at his first town hall with the victims. He discovers he won’t be able to farm out every interview or clerical assignment. A man who shuts out the world by listening to opera on headphones, he will have to leave his rarefied comfort zone.Even assessing “Worth” as entertainment feels fraught. Only survivors can judge whether its Hollywoodized simplifications are appropriate. The screenplay, by Max Borenstein, substantially funnels the breadth of criticism directed at Feinberg into the character of Charles Wolf (a superb Stanley Tucci), who, as he did in real life, runs a website demanding fixes to the fund. The other potential beneficiaries are composites. Laura Benanti plays a firefighter’s wife whose husband left more obligations than she knew. Andy Schneeflock appears as a man whose same-sex partner died in the Pentagon attack. The deceased’s parents and Virginia law don’t recognize the relationship.With most characters standing in for swaths of people who didn’t fit Feinberg’s formulations, “Worth” itself risks reducing individuals to types. Still, it’s probably impossible to make a mainstream movie without such streamlining, let alone to make a movie like “Worth,” on a subject that is not only challenging but superficially too technocratic for a two-hour movie. There are not many classic films about heroic legal settlements.For all the ways in which it might give short shrift to the politics or policy of the fund, “Worth” is uncommonly moving by the standards of biopics and certainly by the standards of movies that risk addressing 9/11 so overtly. Colangelo directs with what appears to be conscious restraint, in ways by turns calculated and powerful. She keeps the faces of figures who will die in the attacks just out of view as they leave their spouses for work the morning of Sept. 11. She doesn’t re-create images of the burning towers except in a reflection in Feinberg’s train window. A lengthy pan gradually reveals the size of a wall of missing-persons posters.The principal performances are uniformly strong, even with actors who do not resemble their real-life counterparts. Is it possible to reduce such complexities to an absorbing procedural? “Worth” argues yes.WorthRated PG-13. Trauma from the attacks. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Protégé’ Review: Ladykiller

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      Maggie Q and Michael Keaton play characters that get turned on by termination in this monumentally silly action movie.“The Protégé,” — a lady-assassin movie whose heroine is as indestructible as the genre clichés surrounding her — might profit from the unexpected presence of Michael Keaton, but not by much.An ultraflexible Maggie Q plays Anna, rescued as a child from Vietnam by Moody (an underused Samuel L. Jackson) and trained to follow in his contract-killer footsteps. When it appears that Moody has been offed, Anna embarks on a vengeance spree that will unearth a seductive villain named Rembrandt (Keaton) and a ragtag biker gang led by Robert Patrick, who seems understandably uncertain of his character’s motivation.The silliness in Richard Wenk’s script is epic. Anna is no everyday executioner, but a cat-loving, cupcake-making bookstore worker who knows her way around a first edition. She’s the kind of gal who can go from torture chamber to dinner table with nary a blemish, and she does, flirting with Rembrandt over the size and capabilities of their respective firearms. Who knew waterboarding could give you such a glow?Plot credibility, of course, is the least important aspect of movies like this, which are all about attitude, lethal accessories and generic, smart-mouth dialogue. (When someone says, “Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” you know it will occur almost immediately.) Shot mainly in and around Bucharest, Romania, “The Protégé” has little to distinguish it except a director, Martin Campbell, with competent action chops and a penchant for pairing violence with make-out music.Kudos to Q, though, for a performance anchored in classy disdain for the baloney around her. If there’s a sequel following her and Keaton’s characters in couples therapy, I might be forced to buy a ticket.The ProtégéRated R for risible romance and creative slaughtering. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters. More