Boots Riley holds nothing back in his audacious, surrealist social satire “I Love Boosters.” The film is a go-for-broke expression of wild imagination and social consciousness that’s impossible not to admire for its wacky, bold vision, with teleporting, high fashion snobbery and pyramid schemes.

Here is a movie where we get Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige leading a vigilante shoplifting operation, Demi Moore as a toxic girl boss, Don Cheadle as a sleazy lifestyle evangelist, Will Poulter as a fussy store manager and LaKeith Stanfield as a discount brand model with a strange accent and a hypnotizing stare. It sounds like fun, right? Like a raucous, madcap ride through the inequities of the fashion business from the executive suite, down to the retail store where the goods are sold and the Chinese factories where they’re made? And on a certain level it is all of that, but one thing it is not is very funny. “I Love Boosters” can be amusing and clever, but the laugh-out-loud comedy just isn’t quite there. And it doesn’t help that the film goes more off the rails as it progresses to a climax that is less rousing than mind-numbing.

The thing is, “I Love Boosters” does start on a strong, albeit minor key as we’re introduced to the Velvet Gang, Corvette (Palmer), Sade (Ackie) and Mariah (Paige) and their booster operation, stealing overpriced designer wares from high end stores and selling them for a steep discount on the street. There’s a kind of a Robin Hood sensibility to it all. Mariah calls it “Triple F,” or “Fashion Forward Filanthropy.” She knows how to spell philanthropy, she deadpans; This is branding.

But despite the colorful surroundings, there’s a pervasive hopelessness in this off-kilter world that looks a lot like our own. Corvette, particularly, feels outside of it all, as a woman who dreams of being a designer herself but is currently squatting in a closed fast food chicken shop and being haunted by a boulder of debt (like, literally). It doesn’t help that the founder she idolizes, Moore’s Christie Smith, has become obsessed with stopping the boosters. To Christie, a genius megalomaniac, they’re the big problem with her business and not the fact that her store employees are being paid a pittance and her factory employees even less. The people who work at the factories are also getting sick from sandblasting the denim. And yes, these are all real things.

Eiza González’s vaping Violeta becomes the face of the store employees forced to use their own paychecks to buy their uniforms. Poppy Liu’s Jianhu, who teleports herself from China to the Bay Area, is that for the factory workers. This oddball group of five women band together to get revenge against Christie. Again, this all sounds like it should be a fun time, but the film is too busy jumping around and throwing ideas and concepts at the screen (teleporting somehow the least distracting of them) for us to spend much time just hanging out with these vibrant personalities.

It is a crime that this is only Riley’s second produced movie. Though it might not reach the crackling heights of his debut, “Sorry to Bother You,” his imagination is still on fire. Unlike so much of what’s out there, “I Love Boosters” has both style and substance, which is worth something even if it doesn’t land perfectly (or capably inspire any kind of revolution). In a marketplace full of content and franchises, here is a filmmaker with something to say and an interesting way to say it.

“I Love Boosters,” a Neon release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “strong sexual content, brief drug use, nudity and language throughout.” Running time: 115 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

Lupa Systems, the media and tech holding company owned by James Murdoch, is set to acquire nearly half of Vox Media.

As part of the deal, Murdoch’s company will own Vox Media’s podcast network, Vox.com and New York Magazine, once an asset of his father, industry giant Rupert Murdoch. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the price tag was reportedly over $300 million, the New York Times reported citing people familiar with the deal. The goal of the investment is to bring “influential journalists, top-rated podcasts, and digital brands with large social footprints” to Lupa and help grow its media portfolio, the company announced Wednesday.

“This acquisition aligns well with our existing holdings and investments and reflects both our interest in the forward edge of culture and our deep commitment to ambitious journalism and agenda-setting conversations,” Murdoch said in a statement.

The three new assets will function as a subsidiary of Lupa Systems and will keep the name Vox Media. The deal includes New York Magazine’s popular verticals like The Cut, Vulture and Intelligencer, as well as Vox’s most successful podcasts like “Today, Explained” and “Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway.” Jim Bankoff, Vox Media’s current CEO, will continue to lead the company.

The other Vox Media properties, which Murdoch did not purchase, include websites like Eater, The Dodo and The Verge. These platforms will be run under an unnamed new company by the current president of Vox Media, Ryan Pauley.

This investment strengthens Lupa Systems’ position in the evolving media landscape. The business has other holdings including the parent company of Tribeca Film Festival, the owner of Art Basel, Robert DeNiro and Jane Rosenthal’s entertainment company Tribeca Enterprises, and Bodhi Tree Systems, an investment platform behind a popular Indian streaming service.

This is one of the largest deals Murdoch has closed since he and his family resolved a $3.3-billion dispute last year. The conflict centered on the future of the family’s media empire, which includes Fox News, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal. In the settlement, James Murdoch received roughly $1 billion and his elder brother, Lachlan, assumed power over the family’s assets.

Before the legal blowout, Murdoch previously served as the chief executive of major global media companies like 21st Century Fox and Europe’s Sky Group.

The billionaire told the New York Times that, with this new acquisition, he didn’t want a “daily news business.” He wanted “longer-form, thoughtful journalism that can really speak to the culture.”

For years, author Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character was a fixture of the multiplex, with movies providing reluctant-leading-man-of-action opportunities for Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck and Chris Pine. Most of them were hits. (Sorry, Chris!) In that context, it might seem a little low-rent that the newest character’s newest adventure, Jack Ryan: Ghost War, is actually a made-for-streaming continuation of an Amazon TV series, where John Krasinski takes over the CIA analyst role. But there are potential advantages to this approach, too: four seasons of the show can establish the character and his world, relieving the movie version of the full reboot burden. (No small thing for a familiar character who’s nonetheless been played by five different guys.) In particular, the existence of the hit show eliminates the standard waffling over what stage of Ryan’s career he should start in. Let the TV show handle the salad-days stuff, and the movie can join him mid-career without requiring several box office successes to get there.

And to its credit, Jack Ryan: Ghost War manages to stand alone quite well despite the preceding 30 episodes of set-up. (I certainly don’t remember them all with crystal clarity, and I was never lost on a plot level.) Less fortuitously, it’s more coherent than competent, especially compared with the previous movie versions. That might not seem like a fair fight, but Ghost War does position itself as some kind of movie after four seasons of serialized television; there must be some reason for this new framework, whether it’s a bigger budget, a more pulse-pounding story or a chance to put Krasinski alongside his predecessors. (He’s already played Ryan for more hours than any of them.) By the end of its 105 minutes, though, the movie seems to eliminate the most obvious possibilities, and its reason for being hangs in the air.

Ghost War rejoins Ryan, who has quit the CIA and landed a job with a hedge fund, hoping for a shot at the normal life his cloak-and-dagger past has denied him. (His normal life apparently must involve unfathomable wealth.) Then his old boss James Greer (Wendell Pierce), deputy director of the CIA, resurfaces to ask Ryan for a minor favor during an upcoming business trip to Dubai. But a quick (if elusively described) meet and drop-off becomes more complicated when the other guy is murdered mere feet away from Ryan. Soon the ex-agent and his former colleague/current contractor Mike November (Michael Kelly) are tenuously joining forces with MI6 agent Emma Marlow (Sienna Miller), tracking a plot to reactivate terrorist groups.

A plot to reactivate terrorist groups could also describe Jack Ryan: Ghost War. Obviously terrorism still exists, but there’s something about this movie’s geopolitical outlook that feels firmly rooted in the late 2000s, when 9/11 was still a relatively recent world event and countless government norms remained in place, no matter how morally murky foreign policy might get. Ryan’s questioning of the American dream, which is more or less how he puts it in a howler of an argument he has with Greer, focuses almost entirely on shady international affairs, in the vaguest and most fictionalized terms possible. The harder the movie ignores political realities of the 2020s, the more it feels like a period piece drifting through the ether.

Krasinski has a greater degree of accountability for the bad speeches than past Ryans; he’s the first actor to play Jack Ryan from a script he co-wrote. It’s dire stuff, especially considering the decent work he did on those Quiet Place movies; here, there are no less than three lines predicated on the phrases “that’s a thing” or “that’s not a thing”, dialogue that wouldn’t pass muster in a sitcom or a Marvel movie, let alone something aiming for more substantial gravity. If it seems like four seasons of TV would be more than enough time to work out feeble jokes about espionage earpiece etiquette, think again. Ryan has been variously played as gruff, nerdy, charming, self-righteous and slick. Krasinski is the first actor to make him look like a smug lightweight. (Yes, Pine’s underseen version was vastly more likable.)

Surely Ghost War must at least work as a bigger-canvas action movie, then? Not really. There’s a moderately entertaining car chase and some high-volume shootouts, and director Andrew Bernstein certainly keeps it all moving along at a pace. But the film’s thrills are sadly limited and small-screen-y, with only flashes of globe-hopping intrigue. The big climax takes place in an anonymous-looking skyscraper under construction, which beats the green-screened anti-locations of a few early scenes, but not by much. Diehard fans of the show might find more enjoyment in seeing Krasinski, Pierce, Kelly and Betty Gabriel back again, or adding the believably hard-bitten Miller to the mix. The movie does set up potential for a continuing movie franchise. Mostly, though, Jack Ryan: Ghost War feels like a sad state of affairs for the world’s dads (and dads at heart), who deserve to see airport-novel espionage brought to less chintzy life.