As Jesse Eisenberg’s ride-share driver Ralphie stares at the rearview mirror at his passengers and looks out with disdain at the gray streets and the people around him, you half-expect him to start reciting Travis Bickle’s journal entries from “Taxi Driver,” e.g., “All the animals come out at night. … Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets.”
The callbacks to “Taxi Driver” and, on a lesser level, “Fight Club” are many in South African writer-director John Trengrove’s well-shot but heavy-handed and depressingly obvious “Manodrome,” a blunt indictment of toxic masculinity that strikes mere glancing blows and packs a relatively soft punch.
