LOS ANGELES, March 7, (RTRS): As if her first teaming with director Josh C. Waller on his 2013 debut feature, “Raze” — involving a sort of lethal female fight club — weren’t punishing enough, Zoe Bell gets pummeled (and occasionally shot) throughout most of “Camino.” This thriller abandons that earlier pic’s featureless underground interiors for dense jungle terrain, but otherwise similarly trades in violent action as our photojournalist heroine flees the anti-government freedom fighters who’ve turned on her. Set in 1985 Colombia, “Camino” is a competent but unmemorable B-movie that eschews any real political content in favor of simple, brutal survival melodrama with scant room for surprises in plot, character or directorial style. Bowing on VOD and iTunes March 8, just days after a limited theatrical launch, this resourceful low-budgeter should do well enough as a streaming item in various markets.

Having just won a photojournalist-of-the-year award for her coverage of war zones, Avery Taggert (Bell) is too cynical and surly to enjoy the moment, instead letting editor Donald (Kevin Pollak) pack her off immediately to another far-flung, potentially dangerous assignment. This time it’s tagging along with a small group of armed guerrillas/missionaries out to “save Colombia” by bringing medicine and revolutionary fervor to remote villages under expat Spaniard Guillermo (Nacho Vigalondo, writer-director of the inventive Spanish genre pics “Timecrimes” and “Extraterrestrial”).

His few followers range from idealistic, like Sebastian (Jason Canela), to borderline psychotic, like the trigger-happy Alejo (Tenoch Huerta). But the “mission” itself seems well intentioned until one night, when Avery happens to spy Guillermo conducting a secret transaction that casts great doubt on his personal motives. Worse, there’s another witness — an innocent village child — whose immediate demise Avery captures on film. Caught literally redhanded, Guillermo in turn fingers her for the murder, in order to erase both evidence and accuser.

This happens at about the half-hour point, leaving nearly 75 minutes more for a chase through the jungle in which Avery must outwit and occasionally off her pursuers. Meanwhile, some of the latter (also including Francisco Barreiro, Sheila Vand and Nancy Gomez) begin to doubt Guillermo, questioning why a famous, well-connected gringa would kill a child in order to smuggle drugs (his version of what happened). As Guillermo does not take criticism well, he soon becomes a deadlier adversary to his own troops than the one they’re stalking.

Eventful

The eventful screenplay is by Daniel Noah (who also wrote Waller’s sophomore feature, “McCanick,” as well as his own directorial features “Twelve” and “Max Rose”), and was apparently written in great haste to take advantage of a narrow production window. Still, the intriguing premise of a wannabe-Che “people’s savior” turning out to be corrupt and increasingly mad isn’t exploited in any truly interesting ways. Though there’s one decent late twist, there are also glaringly implausible moments (such as the villain choosing to leave Avery alive at one juncture when he could easily finish her off), and neither the situations nor the character writing ever rise above workmanlike survival-action formula. That would be OK if “Camino” conjured more suspense, mystery or exotic atmosphere from its simple narrative concept, but Noah’s direction is uninspired. As in “Raze,” the violence is incessant enough to be borderline monotonous, convincingly brutal yet handled sans any particular visceral flair.

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LOS ANGELES: Joseph Gordon-Levitt has ditched his “Sandman” project at New Line due to disagreement with the studio.

The announcement came a day after New Line confirmed that “The Conjuring 2” writer Eric Heisserer had come on board. “The Sandman” had been set up at Warner Bros   in 2013 with Gordon-Levitt coming aboard to produce with “The Dark Knight” screenwriter David Goyer for an adaptation of the DC Comics title.

Gordon-Levitt said Saturday that the disagrements emerged after Warner subsidiary New Line took over the project.

He posted the statement on his Facebook page Saturday:

“So, as you might know if you like to follow these sorts of things, a while back, David Goyer and I made a producing deal with Warner Brothers to develop a movie adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman,” Gordon-Levitt wrote. “Neil himself came on as an executive producer, we hired the excellent screenwriter, Jack Thorne, and we started in on the ambitious task of adapting one of the most beloved and boundary-pushing titles in the world of comics. I was pleased with the progress we were making, even though we still had quite a ways to go.