Shia LaBeouf's nuanced performance picks up manipulative 'Man Down'

Bullies have picked on a little boy named John (Charlie Shotwell) at school ever since they heard his mom (Kate Mara) tell him, "I love you."

So, John's U.S. Marine dad Gabriel Drummer (Shia LaBeouf), back from Afghanistan, decides they a need a macho code phrase that means "I love you."

"How about 'man down'?" Gabriel asks.

"I like that!" John says.

So, we expect to experience one humdinger of an emotional payoff later when little John picks a poignant moment to say to his dad. "Man down!"

But he never does.

Instead of seizing an obvious opportunity, Dito Montiel's baldly manipulative military movie merely repeats the original scene at the end, but it's now repetitive and dull.

"Drama Down" might be a better title for this film, a tale that moves like a dirge through jumbled time frames, and mixes the sound so poorly that we barely understand the lyrics of pretentious ballads or the pedestrian dialogue spoken over them.

Adam Simon's flaccid screenplay goes off like a hand grenade, exploding chronologically shifted scenes all over the screen like fragmented shards of narrative.

This mess of a story opens with Gabriel Drummer busting into some sort of military compound to rescue little John from unspecified villains. Who are they? Where are they?

The scene suddenly shifts to Gabriel at a desk opposite Marine counselor Peyton (Gary Oldman), a thinly disguised shrink character (and one of the laziest narrative devices in movies).

Peyton presses Gabriel to tell him more about "the incident," some horrible experience that the poor guy wants to forget, and one we will undoubtedly witness before the third act concludes.

Occasionally, we're whisked back (or forward?) to an apocalyptic world in which barren, sepia-toned landscapes and twisted, hollowed-out city buildings reek of standard-issue CGI dystopian decay.

There, a bearded Gabriel and his best bud Devin Roberts (Jai Courtney) - resembling Fidel Castro impersonators - search for little John. Uh, when did he disappear?

Finally, we see Gabriel and his wife Natalie at home before his deployment, arguing in cliches the way couples do in made-for-Lifetime-Channel domestic tiffs.

"I can't be a single mom!" Natalie shrieks.

"It's not easy for me, either!" Gabriel barks.

Despite a few combat scenes and a strained revelation attempting to explain everything, "Man Down" creates confusion and boredom that undermine a powerfully rendered performance by LaBeouf, a cracked window into the soul of a troubled soldier and struggling father.

LaBeouf whisks Gabriel from soft, simple scenes through a wide range of emotions, capped by effusive madness. His nuanced, killer performance, like Rebecca Hall's haywire TV journalist in "Christine," risks going unnoticed in a movie this weak.

The same cannot be said of Clifton Collins Jr., wasted in a throwaway role as a former U.S. Marine, now an unstable homeless man and tentative metaphor for how we treat our vets.

The stilted artifice of "Man Down" never allows us to believe what we're watching, except for LaBeouf.

To him, we mean it when we say, "Man down!"

“Man Down”

★ ½

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Gary Oldman, Kate Mara, Jai Courtney, Clifton Collins Jr.

Directed by: Dito Montiel

Other: A Lionsgate release. At the Addison Cinema 20, Gurnee Mills 19 and the Woodridge 18. Rated R for language, violence. 90 minutes