bathetic

Will Close, as England’s captain and star player, Harry Kane, plays up the striker’s famously laconic manner, providing a bathetic counterpoint to the coach’s earnest rhetoric.

This bathetic prelude is perhaps meant to communicate the man’s impudence, but it also readies the audience for a film of modest ambitions.

The action sequences, simultaneously thrilling, slapstick and bathetic, served the larger purpose of “Barry,” to tell the story of an antihero without celebrating his antiheroism.

That they’re all various degrees of bonkers and/or bathetic is the joke, though it’s not always easy to distinguish between this more strenuously underlined absurdity and regular Wesworld whimsy.

All Kubrick did was make “The Shining” 10 times scarier and 75 percent less bathetic than the book.