“Tenderness,” based on the 1997 novel by Robert Cormier, did make it into limited release mostly based on the star power of Russell Crowe in a top-billed supporting role. Since most of us are seeing it on the small screen for the first time, here it is. Lori (Sophie Traub) is a confused 16-year-old who re-enacts previous sexual abuse by making out with an older man she picks up at a gas station or pulling up her shirt while her boss at the supermarket strokes himself. She’s obsessed with Eric Komenko (Jon Foster), a kid who murdered his parents with his archery set but got off with a light sentence by claiming that anti-depressants drove him into a parricidal rage.

Sharing her obsession is Detective Christofuoro (Crowe), a Buffalo, N.Y., cop with an ailing wife who believes that Komenko is responsible for the unsolved murder of a teenage girl found in an upstate New York lake. Lori keeps a scrapbook with newspaper clippings of the Komenko killings while Christofuoro pores over crime scene photographs at 24-hour diners. “You’re a psychopath, Eric,” Christofuoro tells Eric during one of the youth’s last days in a juvenile detention facility, “You’re going to kill again. You know it and I know it. And I want to prevent that from happening.”

The detective is right about Eric. He is going to kill again and even has plans to meet his next victim at a dilapidated amusement park near Albany. On his way to his murderous rendezvous, Eric discovers that Lori has stowed away in the back of the Volvo station wagon he inherited from his slain parents. Eric can’t bring himself to get rid of Lori either by ditching her on the side of the road or strangling her with a rolled up length of cloth towel ripped out of a bathroom dispenser. Lori engages in a push-pull with her idol, attempting to entice him with a clumsy sexuality that she doesn’t seem to grasp. Traub’s performance as Lori recalls a young Juliette Lewis in Scorsese’s “Cape Fear” (1991), except that Traub brings far more nuance to her portrayal of a damaged teen. For his part, Foster captures homicidal compulsion mixed with small moments of pause. He hesitates to grab that claw hammer and tries to stop himself from fashioning a makeshift garrote, but in the end, he remains a prisoner of his urges.

“Tenderness” is directed by Jon Polson, who helmed the more cookie-cutter thriller “Swimfan” (2002) and appeared as an actor alongside Crowe in the gay-themed comedy-drama “The Sum of Us” (1994). Crowe, who was in between filming “Cinderella Man” (2005) and “3:10 to Yuma” (2007) during the 2006 shoot of “Tenderness,” had to be lured by an expanded part and badgered by Baz Luhrmann to appear here. Based on the strength of Traub and Foster’s performances as the leads, I can’t help but wonder what the movie would be like without the expansion of Crowe’s role. Christofuoro often comes off as too saintly, but Crowe’s trademark intensity makes the characterization engaging where it could have been dull in less capable hands.

Billed as a thriller on its DVD cover, “Tenderness” is really more of a dark character study. Eric and Lori never attempt to out-crazy each other like Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld in the similar but more horror-based “Pretty Poison” (1968), nor do their commingled personality disorders fuel a spate of random killings as in “Badlands” (1973) or “Natural Born Killers”(1994). Crowe’s detective is also held back from Dirty Harry excesses. The turmoil is mostly internal here. There are times in “Tenderness” where I wished that Eric and Lori went on that upstate killing spree and Crowe confronted them with blazing lead, but by the film’s end, I was glad that it stayed away from crime movie clichés. Despite its sparse physical violence, “Tenderness” manages a quiet but effective gut punch. Laura Dern (the two-time Golden Globe winner) appears briefly as Komenko’s aunt.

“Peacock” is another character study steeped in the language of the horror film, but the PR folks at Lionsgate have also opted to classify this release as a thriller. Please don’t judge them too harshly for their categorization hocus-pocus. Label one movie a thriller and the other “a disturbing character study” and see which one makes its way into more Netflix queues.

Cillian Murphy, the Irish actor best known as the airline passenger from hell in “Red Eye” (2005) and the Scarecrow in “Dark Knight” (2008), is John Skillpa, a milquetoast bank clerk who lives in the creepy house he inherited from his abusive mother. Skillpa rides the same rickety 10-speed to work every day that he presumably took to school when he was a kid. He also keeps his bank book and a key to a safe deposit box in a metal case filled with candy wrappers that he stashes beneath the boards of his front steps as if he’s hiding it from somebody. The person he’s hiding it from is Emma, his cross-dressed female alter ego who leaves breakfast for Skillpa every morning with a nice little note.

When a caboose detaches itself from a train and crashes in his backyard while Skillpa is in a housedress pinning laundry to a clothesline, his Middle American, “Mad Men”-era neighbors assume that Emma is his wife. Emma soon becomes the talk of the town. She’s on the front page of the paper, gives the OK for a senator to use the crash site for a campaign rally and makes friends with the mayor’s wife (Susan Sarandon), who runs a local adoption agency and home for women. John, on the other hand, is still bowled over by the mayor (Keith Carradine) and dumped on by the requisite asshole boss (Bill Pullman).

Emma soon hatches a plan to adopt Jake, John’s son that he fathered with a local waitress and sometime prostitute named Maggie (Ellen Page from “Juno”) under nightmarish circumstances. John is against all of Emma’s machinations, but can do little to rein in his conjoined better half. As Emma continues schmoozing with the town’s elite, she gains in confidence and soon starts driving the dead mother’s Impala instead of pedaling that old bicycle. By the time Emma takes up smoking and picking up drifters in dive bars, she’s in the driver’s seat.

More enlightened viewers may be uncomfortable with co-writer and director Michael Lander’s likening of cross-dressing to mental illness, and “Peacock” can almost use the distinction of multiple personality disorder from transvestism drawn by the psychiatrist during the conclusion of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960). With its mother issues, the art director’s use of taxidermy (albeit not in Skillpa’s house) and early 1960s setting, “Peacock” already owes so much to “Psycho” that it might as well have dredged the swamp behind the Bates Motel just a little bit longer. However, “Peacock” isn’t a Hitchcock homage like DePalma’s “Dressed to Kill” (1980) nor a shot-for-shot remake, à la Gus Van Sant. Instead, “Peacock” feels like the same basic story as “Psycho,” but altered greatly as it made its way through the rural grapevine. While Skillpa has plenty of skeletons in the closet, he doesn’t keep a mummified corpse in the fruit cellar.

“Peacock” is short on thrills but will mess with your mind sufficiently. Although it’s the weaker of these spooky character studies, it still packs enough atmosphere for a digital download or old-school movie rental. The DVD features an alternate ending that is both darker and more predictable.

Well, as John Cusack says in “2012,” ripping off Woody Allen in “Annie Hall,” welcome back to Planet Earth.

This week marks the release of the above-mentioned blockbuster from that Auteur of Dumb, Roland Emmerich, a director who makes Irwin Allen seem like Michael Haneke, the man who puts the “nothing” in sound and fury signification. The most offensive thing about “2012″ isn’t that it is stupid, or about an hour too long, or full of bad science and worse dialog.

No, the truly offensive thing about “2012″ is that it is impervious to my scorn, amassing such a critical mass of stupid that it is beyond anyone’s ability to mock it. Stopping the tsunami of dumb of “2012″ just can’t be done, any more than stopping the apocalyptic events it delightedly depicts. And really, why bother to try? The entire thing is trailer for itself, with no actual movie attached. One thing I will say, “2012″ has the courage of its lack of convictions. Any time the film was faced with making the drama human, or blowing up something iconic, the choice was made.

Boom.

Like some sort of spiritual Novocaine, “2012″ numbs your face, and after the third “plane takes off as runway crumbles” scene, you actually find yourself wishing a nerve, somewhere, might inadvertently get hit.

One can imagine the story meetings for this idiocy. As in Daffy Duck’s frenzied story pitch in the 1950 classic “The Scarlet Pumpernickel,” absurd climax follows absurd climax, only lacking Daffy’s cavalry charge and the $1,000 piece of kreplach. Perhaps that moment can be found in the DVD’s extended scenes menu. I do know that like Daffy at the end of “Pumpernickel,” after watching “2012,” I too wanted to blow my brains out.

Now, there are some good things about this bloated epic. A friend of mine adept in CGI assures me that the effects are absolutely state of the art. Not only do the L.A. skyscrapers crumble, but you also see ant-sized people at their desks, falling to their deaths. Hmm, where have I seen that image before?

But to rage against the soulless machine that created, marketed and distributed this film is as much a waste of time, mine and yours, as sitting through this epic, so let’s move on to a film that is all about those ants, “Miracle Mile.”

Released in 1989, and starring a shockingly young Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham, “Miracle Mile” (the only movie ever made by writer-director Steve De Jarnatt) takes place during the countdown to doomsday, this time, a self-induced nuclear war. The movie starts with a meet-cute in Los Angeles’ iconic Page Museum overlooking the La Brea Tar Pits, and the film and its protagonists never leave the ‘hood. While waiting around at the still-extant Johnnie’s Restaurant for a late night date with Winningham, Edwards intercepts a call at an outside phone booth. The voice at the other end hails from a North Dakota missile silo, and briefly confusing Edwards for his father, the terrified caller tells him that the war has begun. The missiles are incoming, and will obliterate Los Angeles and everything else in just an hour and 10 minutes.

The entire movie revolves around one simple question.

Now what?

The rest of “Miracle Mile” is set in real time, and we watch the tremendously likable Edwards as he tries to connect with the new love of his life, and, in a parallel plot development to “2012,” just get the hell out of town. Or get anywhere rather than the world they are about to inhabit.

This ticking clock begins as Edwards tries to rally the late-night shift at the diner, where it seems “Eggs-O-Stential” must be on the menu, for dialogue, performance and archetypes are all a tad on the overwrought side. But, hey, the world’s ending in a little over an hour, so all is forgiven. And as that hour progresses, the viewer forgives an awful lot — even the ’80s outfits and haircuts. Some of the plot beats in “Miracle Mile” are not very much more logical than those in “2012,” but the shadow that falls on the characters in the first few minutes covers up those trespasses.

What “Miracle Mile” has that “2012″ so disastrously lacks is a focus on the perspective of its characters. It is all about a reality transformed by the unthinkable. If the budget had been any bigger, it would not have been nearly so good, or nearly so haunting. The desperate quest as Edwards tries to escape his fate is reminiscent of Griffin Dunne’s hallucinatory lower Manhattan imprisonment in another bit of ’80s marginalia, Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours.”

But this time, the stakes are as high as they can possibly be.

The Age of Reagan inspired two other “Armageddon Out of Here” films, “The Day After” and “Testament,” and while there is nothing in “Miracle Mile” that approaches the desperation and pathos of Jane Alexander’s brilliant “Testament” performance, “Miracle Mile” still resonates. Watching it after its elephantine doppelganger is akin to sipping a glass of ice cold water after a bracing draught from those La Brea tar pits. There are a few times when “Miracle Mile” resembles the effects sequences from “2012″ as essayed by the Max Fischer Players in “Rushmore,” but, unlike in “2012,” these sequences are not the entire point. Overshadowing everything is that damn, pulsing, insanely compelling concept.

What would you do if you knew you had a little over an hour to live?

“Miracle Mile” builds to an unexpected and absolutely wrenching climax, and stays in your head like some kind of brainpan hologram, while the well rendered pixels of “2012″ fade from memory within 10 seconds of the beginning of the end. Not the end of humanity — the end of its own credit roll.

The sad thing about “2012″ isn’t that it is so bad, it is that it actually could have been so much better if only the filmmaker exhibited any spark of soul, of humanity.

But, maybe — well, definitely — this is beside the point.

“Only the morally courageous are worthy of speaking to their fellow men for two hours in the dark,” Frank Capra once wrote, “and only the artistically incorrupt will earn and keep the people’s trust.”

Emmerich’s incredibly successful and critic-impermeable career invalidates the second part of that observation, but that is not his problem.

It is ours.

Now, if the preceding doesn’t exactly inspire you to run out and rent “2012,” there is another release this week that might restore your general faith in humanity. And that would be “Ponyo,” yet another masterpiece from Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. And the fact that I can be so blasé about tossing around the “M” word should in no way suggest that I take Miyazaki for granted.

His artistic existence, incorrupt and otherwise, soothes the soul.

I can’t wait to see what the Master has in store for us, in say, 2012.

But before he was a disc jockey, he had a club called Rodney’s, on Sunset. It was the first disco in L.A., when disco meant they played records instead of live music, and had nothing to do with the Bee Gees. And because of that club I watched the movie with more than a passing interest.

It was the summer of 1974, and I was 17. All of us had jobs, some of us had cars, and for a while we went to Rodney’s as often as we could. We’d get all dolled up in our South Bay best and head north on the 405, then take Sunset east to faraway Hollywood.

We went mostly because we loved the music they played: T-Rex, Mott the Hoople, David Bowie. Too young for the Whiskey or the Troubadour, it was also one of the few places we could get into. It was a little like going to another planet, with the boys in their silver jumpsuits and sky-high boots, and the life-size cutout of Suzi Quatro near the front door.

The movie opens with a concert scene – Rodney is getting ready to introduce the band X. There are a series of interviews with an odd assortment of musicians and celebrities ranging from Nancy Sinatra and Brooke Shields to Ray Manzerek and Gwen Stefani. The story then shifts to his childhood, which set the psychological stage for an early fascination with celebrity.

Like a moth to the inevitable flame, Rodney moved to L.A. in his early teens. He became a stand-in for Davy Jones on the Monkees, lived on the streets, and was semi-adopted by Sonny and Cher. Really, and that’s not the half of it.

They always played a beach-themed song when we walked in the club — it was the summer of “Beach Baby” by First Class, and that got played a lot.

The club wasn’t very big. There were tables in the front, and a VIP booth off to the side. The dance floor was in the back. It was fairly small, always packed, and lined with mirrored walls – the first we’d ever seen.

They took pictures of everyone dancing, and then made the pictures into slide shows they’d play in the following weeks (multimedia!). So while you were dancing you might see a picture of you or your friends from a previous night, larger than life, famous.

From the movie, I learned that Rodney moved to England in the early 70s and got immersed in the burgeoning glitter rock scene there. It was David Bowie who suggested he come back to L.A. and open a club like the ones that were sweeping England.

And so he did. Rodney’s English Disco quickly became the epicenter of the scene in LA, famous for attracting rock stars (nascent and established), and infamous for attracting underage girls from all around the city. Hmm.

My jaw dropped a little as I watched the long parade of musicians and bands who visited or hung out there: Marc Bolan, Led Zeppelin, Iggy Pop, Elton John, Elvis Presley! We had no idea.

And I watched in fascinated horror as one person after the other talks about the debaucheries that went on at the club, with plenty of slides to prove it.

The focus shifts to Kim Fowley, one of Rodney’s closest friends, and best known as the producer of the prototype girl band, the Runaways. Cherie Currie, the lead vocalist from the group, calls him a beast, and says that no one under 18 should be allowed near him. While she is talking, the movie cuts to a picture of Kim at the club. And there, standing next to him, is me.

Wait. Did I really see that? I stopped the movie and went back. Why yes, yes I did. There I am, sun-burned and laughing, in a brown halter dress that I suddenly remembered wearing. When I get over the shock, I’m annoyed at the implication that I was impressed by Kim Fowley, which was never true.

One slow night at the club, Rodney introduced us to his friend Kim, who immediately took a shine to my friend Carol. They started dancing together, flirting outrageously. He gave me the creeps, but she didn’t seem to mind.

That same night, Rodney took an interest in me. We danced for awhile, and then he invited me up to the VIP booth. It was somebody’s birthday, and I helped him cut the cake. He asked how old I was. Eighteen, I lied. He asked to see my ID. A short time later, I was ushered back down to the floor.

When we were ready to go it was hard to get Kim away from Carol. He followed us out onto the sidewalk. She gave him a fake phone number and we left.

I put the DVD on pause and took a good look at the girl on the screen. Who was she, staring back at me across three and a half decades? She had long blonde hair, no makeup on, and was probably wearing flip-flops – no wonder we stood out in that crowd. She was prettier than I ever felt. And I suddenly saw how young she was, waaaay too young to be in a place like that.

Like a sleeping tigress, the mother in me woke up. Where were my parents, and how was it that we were allowed to go there? The place was notorious, even then.

For the first time, I became aware of how alone I always was, and utterly on my own—navigating the empty space without a compass where someone should have been. Not so unlike a lot of other people in that movie.

I wanted to reach across time and tell that girl that it’s all going to be okay; show her my house, and my garden, and the people we love. I wanted to tell her not to be afraid—her instincts are good. The worst things that happened, happened early, and they’re over. She will always find the help she needs. And though she can’t see it yet, her guardian angel is as tall as the moon.

A few weeks later my wallet was stolen from my purse while I was dancing. Someone called from a grocery on Sunset to say they had found it. We drove out in the middle of the day to pick it up. There was a slight orange tint to the air, and in the harsh light the whole area looked seedy and depressed. I got my wallet back, minus the money that had been in it, but we never went back to Rodney’s.

The club closed in 1975, just before disco started to take on a whole new meaning. Rodney started his radio show a short time later. Like everyone else, I listened to it religiously. He’s still on the air today, on Sundays from midnight to three. And I still love T-Rex.

But this one-sided Death Match between legend and life is what ultimately tied these men together. Elvis and Jackson brought an impermeable membrane of fame and self-delusion with them that kept the real world outside their experience. Both “This Is It” and “The Way It Is” shoot through that membrane, and those rare glimpses of the tortured soul inside are what give the films their real power.

This “splendid isolation,” in the words of Warren Zevon, made the end of their careers a slow-motion bus wreck — and we were all bozos on that same bus.

“To me,” wrote Bruce Springsteen the week Elvis died, “he was as big as the whole country itself, as big as the whole dream. He just embodied the essence of it and he was in mortal combat with the thing.”

From about that moment on, Springsteen consciously crafted that growth industry called his career on Elvis’ shaky foundation. The lessons he has articulated over and over again in both song and interviews are his attempts to try to live outside that bubble of fame. But it isn’t easy. In a recent small book by Big Man Clarence Clemons, the only truly insightful and honestly disillusioning images that emerge are Springsteen’s private jets flying from concert to concert, and the alpha celebrity decorum of who sits just where along the way. And, oh yeah, a second jet for the wife and her entourage. And special planes dispatched for the likes of Brian Williams. But, as Clemons (actually, probably, his hack ghostwriter) points out, Springsteen does make a point of personally greeting everybody in all rows, on every flight, so, it’s a start.

I guess.

Springsteen’s talent has been very comprehensible, and his career arc tightly controlled. Bob Dylan’s talent belongs more in the incomprehensible category, and he has somehow made it work for him. For the last 20 years, Dylan has conducted a bold experiment in hiding in plain sight, called the “Never Ending Tour.” Night after night, Dylan appears in State Fairgrounds and minor league stadiums in minor league towns, and at night, according to at least one local police report, roams the streets in hooded sweatshirts, searching for Dylan knows what.

Nobody is more closely guarded than Dylan both on- and offstage, in all senses of that word, but somehow, he stays connected to his muse, and it, somehow, to him. If anything, one of his many particular geniuses has been turning the very act of retreating from legend into accelerant for its fire. It’s only in the last 20 years where Dylan finally carries the burden he promised he would heft in the notes to his second album. “I don’t carry myself yet the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lightnin’ Hopkins have carried themselves. I hope to be able to someday, but they’re older people.”

Bob Dylan made that legend thing work for him, and only went a little crazy along the way. But as we all know, Elvis and Jackson went big-time crazy, and if you know where to look, you can see in these two films just where — and maybe, why.

While Elvis was in mortal combat with some kind of dream of America, Michael Jackson became the poster boy for an even more devolved America, one where self-delusion, narcissism and grotesque materialism are somehow mistaken for canny career management. He even had the spectacular bankruptcy thing going for him, with the promise of an impending bailout, if he could pull off that one last desperate deal.

Which leads us to this week’s release of “This Is It” — a film swept off the cutting-room floor of Jackson’s last hurrah, and last rehearsals.

To be clear, this film was originally conceived of as a home movie, financed by Jackson personally. Had things gone differently, an abbreviated version might have appeared as a supplement on some future holo-hagiographic 3-D monolith box set commemorating Jackson’s 10th year onstage at the Luxor in Vegas. And like so many DVD supplements, there is a cheap, offhand quality to the production.

But what keeps this “This Is It” from being a shameless exercise in commercial necrophilia is the sheer joy of watching a performer, if not at the top of his game, in the bullpen warming up. Based on the performances here, Jackson had it until the end. Just what “it” was remains open to debate, and this movie does not help the discussion.

Throughout the two hours, Jackson stands alone, surrounded by indifferent technicians, a puppet being put through his paces by the Geppetto of his own ego. Many of the production numbers look as if they were choreographed by Albert Speer, and the fascist architecture of the proceedings don’t shed much light on their creator.

It helps that much of Jackson’s dialogue is subtitled, for he seems to be speaking a private language. “I’m trying to adjust to the inner ears,” whispers Jackson at one point, “with the love — L.O.V.E. It’s not easy, though.”

Tell me about it.

Director Kenny Ortega cajoles Jackson like a toddler being coaxed to eat his broccoli. Jackson is clearly phoning it in, but one is often reminded, what a phone.

One such moment occurs at the end of “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You,” where Jackson takes off at the end of a duet with an anonymous background singer. This sequence is intimate, sexy, and we see Jackson momentarily possessed by the music and his muse. But then, the song ends, and Jackson crashes back to Earth, clearly angry at being led to this kind of self-revelation. You see for an aching moment the raw talent that Jackson had all the way to the end, and then, the door slamming shut on it.

Which brings us to our second feature.

“Elvis: That’s the Way It Is (Special Edition)” was shot in the summer of 1970 and reworked by TCM for this 2001 rerelease. It is perhaps the best surreal evocation of the ’70s since “Zodiac,” except, of course, this is a documentary. Shot by the great Lucian Ballard, it brings you as close to the real Elvis as you want to go.

The film begins with some more tantalizing rehearsals. The musicians look at Elvis like the borderline hysteric family looked at demon child Billy Mumy in that great “Twilight Zone” episode. It feels like everyone always laughs a millisecond too late at his jokes, and you can feel his entourage praying that they too don’t get wished into that cornfield. Why is it not at all surprising that Rod Serling’s opening narration from this “Twilight Zone” episode was sampled in 2001 for a song called “Threatened” — by Michael Jackson? In one particularly gruesome sequence, Elvis has an onstage water fight with members of the Memphis Mafia. When Elvis, in a flash of feigned anger, picks up a mike stand, as if to impale them with it, you get the idea that this, in fact, could happen.

It is clear that Elvis just had nowhere to go, no one to talk to about the hellhounds on his trail. Every conversation is a transaction, and Elvis knows it. The striking thing is how little is different backstage from onstage. Same jokey nervousness, same nonchalant diffidence to his musical gifts. Elvis was always on, and could just never get off. In all of the footage, he can’t stop moving, looking for distraction from the Sisyphean task of just being himself. One can see his genius emerging like the chest buster from “Alien,” and at times, Elvis looks as shocked at the results.

At least Bruce Springsteen can get it off his chest with Brian Williams.

But there are compensating musical treasures. Where Elvis is all looseness and evasiveness, lead guitarist James Burton is all paisley precision, spitting out chicken-licking’ licks and anchoring the proceedings like the Country Gentlemen he is. “Play it, James,” Elvis regally commands, and Burton does just that, brilliantly. When they swing into an impromptu medley of “Little Sister” sliding into “Get Back,” one wishes that the Beatles, instead of breaking up that same summer, had dropped by this rehearsal studio instead.

They might have changed their minds.

When we move to Las Vegas for the pre-show rehearsals, you can feel the dingy surroundings and smell the fossilized cigarette smoke in the carpets of the “International Hotel” where the show had to go on.

Shot across six nights, the performance footage is a Groundhog Day’s nightmare of the same songs, same fans, same jokes. Here we stand by helplessly as Elvis, as described in some other lyrics of Zevon, throws it all away for that “porcelain monkey,” and his face on Velveteen. There is a viscous quality in the film, like you are trapped in the amber with Elvis, and after about an hour, you just want to get out of there. At one juncture, during “Love Me Tender,” as Elvis leaves the stage and walks deep in the ballroom it feels like nothing so much as watching grainy footage of a Bigfoot sighting.

Watching him kiss one bouffant fan after another, on the lips, you truly get a feeling of what hell must be like. At one point, one hysterical, crying fan almost swallows Elvis alive. He pulls back in shock and discomfort, but then, moves to yet another predatory encounter. And another.

Six nights, and then, 600 more nights, until it all ran down.

It is clear from both of these films that Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley were getting everything they wanted, and nothing they truly needed.

As William Carlos Williams so famously wrote, “The purest products of America go crazy.”

That was the lecture.

These films would be the lab.

Got any fly-on-the-wall-of-musical-train-wreck “Double Bill” ideas for “This Is It”? That Wilco film, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart?” “Don’t Look Back,” or better, a bootleg of Dylan’s 1966 surreal masterpiece, “Eat The Document”? Kirk Douglas IS a chin-dimpled Bix Biederbecke in “Young Man With a Horn”? Do tell!

“The Marine 2″ already pulls off a near impossibility in being the first straight-to-DVD sequel that’s better than the theatrically released original. The first “Marine” (2006), which sported the insanely huge John Cena grunting and groaning his way through car crashes and CGI explosions, was a PG-13 affair that watered down the brutality in a bid to make nonstop violence more family friendly. “The Marine 2,” on the other hand, goes for broke with an R rating, since there’s little to stop tweens from slipping a copy into the basket at Target when their moms aren’t looking.

This time around instead of Cena as John Triton we have Ted DiBiase Jr. (his father was an ’80s wrestler dubbed “The Million Dollar Man”) as Joe Linwood, a Force Recon sniper who watched a young boy get killed in the crossfire during his last mission. While on leave, his wife (Lara Cox) convinces him to attend the grand opening of an exclusive Southeast Asian seaside resort owned by her boss (Robert Coleby), a billionaire motivational guru with shifting accents who wants to surround his pristine beaches with electrical fences to keep the local kids away. Thankfully, it’s not long before said beaches are stormed by tribal mask-wearing, machine-gun toting insurgents who must have read Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” and are really pissed off about it. Our marine gets away after taking out a few bad guys with body slams, but his wife, her boss and a buffet line’s worth of high-income partygoers are taken hostage and held for ransom.

This is the same setup from the previous “Marine” and the WWE’s 2009 John Cena epic, “12 Rounds.” It’s also the plot of any number of “Die Hard” movies or “Taken” with Liam Neeson. This hardly matters. We don’t need originality. It will only confuse us as DiBiase goes it alone through several slow-motion fight scenes and cataclysmic pyrotechnics to free the hostages before they are decapitated live via iPhone.

As a screen actor (as opposed to a “sports entertainer”), DiBiase’s first effort is a valiant one. He’s not nearly as wooden as the Rock was in his first starring vehicle, “The Scorpion King” (2002). While his acting needs a little more mat time, DiBiase’s wrestling experience gives him the ability to do his own stunts during extended takes, a skill that will only become more valuable as high-def makes stunt doubles more obvious. One fight sequence pits DiBiase’s clothesline takedowns against two quick Muay Thai kickboxers in a series of hard moves that’s as satisfying as anything in an “Ong Bak” film. As long as DiBiase sticks to roles where his massive trapezius muscles aren’t out of place, he is well on his way to the same level of cult action star status as Jason Statham (“Crank”) or Michael Jai White (“Black Dynamite”).

Dutch director Roel Reine, a straight-to-DVD specialist who has given us a recent Steven Seagal flick, keeps the pacing quick but isn’t afraid to give us an interesting shot here and there. As the rebel leader, Temuera Morrison is much more menacing here than he was as Boba Fett’s dad in two “Star Wars” prequels (although he could have been a tad more sympathetic in order to assuage my p.c. sensibilities).

If you enjoyed “Die Hard 4″ or “Rambo” and remain unashamed, “The Marine 2″ will bring no dishonor to your Netflix queue. Martial arts fans will also want to see the outtake reel in the DVD extras. As long as WWE Films produces action flicks of this quality, they have a shot at cornering the home theater market for such guilty pleasures at a time when multiplexes prefer to screen “Avatar”-scale spectacles.