Movie Nation

A Big Saturday followed a very big Friday and those poorly-reviewed, weakly Cinema-scored (film fans are walking out of it less than thrilled) “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” look to pocket $64 65million or so, when all the Cowabungas are counted Sunday night. That’s a shock.

And while is ensures that a limp summer at the box office is finishing with a bang, it kind of buries “Guardians of the Galaxy,” which fell off to a $42 million or so second weekend.

“Into the Storm,” with even worse reviews than “Turtles,” exceeded expectations and will pull in about $18 million.

“The Hundred Foot Journey” improved enough Friday-Saturday to now sit at $11 million+, a bit better than expected. Pity that audience didn’t go see “Get On Up,” as the very good James Brown bio pic fell off 63% from its opening and got passed by a pitiable “Step Up” installment. Kids these days.

“Guardians” should clear $200 million by next weekend, where it will join “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” in that exclusive club. “Apes” should clear that mark by Tuesday or Wed.

Further down the charts, audiences have given up on Woody Allen’s latest, “Boyhood” seems to have peaked and NOBODY went to James Cameron’s 3D science project in the deep blue sea.

Those steroid-juiced “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” may not be very teenaged this time around, but that isn’t stopping them from exceeding expectations on opening weekend. Based on Thursday night-all day Friday numbers, they could top $58 million this weekend, justifying Michael Bay’s involvement in this $150 million reboot.

That means they’ll best “Guardians of the Galaxy” by a sizable margin. The Marvel marvel, which threatened to rescue the summer all by itself last weekend, has fallen off sharply in its second week and looks to earn $40-42 million, right in line with projections.

The critically derided “Into the Storm” is doing $17 million or so,, right where it was widely predicted to fall.

And “The Hundred Foot Journey” will manage a paltry $10 million. Middling reviews won’t help it, and it typically takes the audience it is aiming for — older —  to get around to seeing it.

It’s the second weekend of release for the blockbuster “Guardians of the Galaxy.” And it’s the opening weekend for the $150 million (rumored) Michael Bay produced “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” reboot.

Will it be a close race at the box office? “Turtles” got terrible reviews, overall. It’s on fewer screens. But if everybody got to see “Guardians” this past week, we could see a dead heat.

Box Office Mojo thinks “Turtles” will do $42 million, which seems a bit high to me. Low end of high expectations, parents who grew up with the turtles taking their kids, etc. That should put it right at or just behind “Guardians,” which could do $42-50 this weekend.

I’m more in line with the Box Office Guru, who figures if Ninja’s take home $36 million, they and we will be lucky. That hardly justifies doing any more of these overly violent kid pictures.

Nobody believes “Into the Storm” will do more than $17 (Guru). And nobody is thinking that the latest “Step Up” movie will do more than $10 (Mojo).

Indifferent reviews have to have hurt the Oprah and Spielberg produced/endorsed “Hundred Foot Journey.” An older audience will find this one, but it will take a few weeks. $8 million opening? Seems about right.

Eddy, played by Misha Gabriel Hamilton from the last “Step Up” movie, turns to Sean (Ryan Guzman, star of the latest film, and asks the question that’s already on our minds just ten minutes into “Step Up All In (3D).”

“What are we still DOING here?”

Five films and eight years into the unlikeliest of film franchises, a series that has changed characters, changed locations and changed studios, with none of the movies anywhere near being a blockbuster, you really do wonder why every so often — usually in the dog days of summer — “Step Up” returns.

“All In” takes us back to Los Angeles — Miami was the invigorating setting for 2012’s “Step Up: Revolution.” There’s continuity to the story in the form of characters from several earlier installments. But “story” is used loosely here, and the best that can be said for “Step V” is that it has some sparkling moments of choreography, clever gimmicks as themes for the dance-offs and lovely costumes.

And that it’s very best sequence happens under the opening credits. That’s where Sean, Eddy and Twitch (Stephen Boss) of the last film’s Miami MOB are comically humiliated through a string of L.A. auditions for commercials in which clueless casting folk put them in one ridiculous costume and situation after another.

That’s what prompts Eddy to ask, after three years of effort, why they’re still struggling for this elusive, low-paying, short-lived dream. It’s that “Chorus Line” sentiment and it’s as deep as “Step Up” movies get. So most of The MOB de-mobs back to Miami.

But Sean spies this VH-1 promo for “The Vortex,” a Vegas dance-off to be hosted by Lady Gaga-style pop star Alexxa Brava (Izabella Miko, deliciously vampy). In the film’s second best bit, Sean and our old friend Moose (Adam Sevani) piece together a crew, which includes twins, a killer Robot the comically shrill Kido (Mari Koda) and the husky-voiced Annie (Briana Evigan) from earlier “Step Up” installments.

They’re all working at odd jobs, the way dancers and actors do. And to a one, they walk off those jobs for “one last shot.” Because that’s what dancers do.

There’s a tepid new villain (Stephen Stevo Jones) and, in Vegas, another place for “Step Up” to step off to. But everything else is at it ever was.

“Does this ALWAYS have to end up in big dance battle?”

It does.

There’s always a half-hearted love story, always a series of elaborate, impossibly expensive set pieces and always a big lip-lock at the final curtain.

Christopher Scott’s choreography sparkles and Trish Sie’s direction captures it, with hats, squirt bottle blasts of water and the like flying off the 3D screen. But the writing is poor and the acting uneven, at best. Our leading man is so unconvincing he could have starred in “Into the Storm.”

So Moose’s Old World grandfather provides the short review here, a man who refers to the trials of life as “sheep poop.” And in life, sheep poop and “Step Up” movies, “Sometimes you just have to shovel through it.”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some language and suggestive material

Cast: Ryan Guzman, Briana Evigan, Adam Sevani, Mari Koda, Stephen Stevo Jones,Izabella Miko

Credits: Directed by Trish Sie, screenplay by John Swetnam. A Liongstate release.

Running time: 1:51

“Into the Storm” is as close to a real tornado as most of us would ever want to get. Its effects are so spectacular that it makes “Twister” look like “The Wizard of Oz.” You wonder, as immersive as all those objects flying off the screen are, why they didn’t film it in 3D. Secretly, you’re grateful they didn’t.
But as impressive as the effects can be, as effective as the blend of TV news helicopter POV shots, security camera footage, cell-phone video and storm chaser images mimicked here turn out, the human stories are given short shrift in this “spend our budget on effects” action picture.
Late in the season, “Tornado Alley” storm chaser Pete (Matt Walsh) hasn’t scored the money shot. He’s a freelancer with the backing to get the image nobody else has — the “eye” of the tornado, shots from inside the vortex. He’s got a hired gun meteorologist, Allison (Sarah Wayne Callies), “Titus,” a veritable tank of a chase vehicle, some young videographers and backers about to pull the plug on this venture if he doesn’t produce.
“We got nothing you can’t get on Youtube,” he gripes, blaming Allison’s forecasts for their woes.
That last big system whipping across Oklahoma,is their chance. Everybody else is headed towards one town, Allison insists the REAL action will be in Silverton.
Where it’s graduation day at Silverton High, and widowed vice principal Gary (Richard Armitage) is hoping they can hold the ceremony outdoors, and that his rebellious sons — Donnie and Trey (Max Deacon, Nathan Kress) — will video it, along with scores of testimonials for a “video time capsule.”
Donnie (Deacon) gets distracted by a girl (Alycia Debnam Carey) who needs to videotape an abandoned factory that’s a waste dump for her internship, so he’s a no-show. But the super cell isn’t.
The twister hits and we’re sucked into that school with it. But the realism of this gripping school-under-assault scene isn’t the first grabber moment. That comes in the opening credits — teens caught — in a car, obsessed with cell-phone recording the tornado that swooped down on them the previous night. If “Into the Storm” has a theme, it’s that. We’ve become a nation of gawkers, cultists forever holding our phones up to whatever dangerous, tragic or comic disaster is unfolding in front of us.
Drunken rednecks Donk and Reevis (Kyle Davis, Jon Reep) are exemplars of this — beer swillers with cell phones out imitating those guys glorified by The Weather Channel, The Discovery Channel and others.
“I’m in a TORNADO! I’m in a Tornado!”
But Pete is just a better-financed, more mercenary version of them. He’s also taking stupid risks more for glory and video fame than science.
Where “Into the Storm” makes you appreciate 1996’s “Twister” is in the ways the new film makes the victims mostly anonymous, even if their deaths are spectacular. There’s a reason movies are cast with movie stars, and with every under-reaction to something this character or that one has never seen before, performances that lack urgency, panic or even awe, you see “Into the Storm” fail.
Movie stars have not just acting chops and screen presence, but that ineffable spark that creates instant empathy. Director Steven “Final Destination 5” Quale never gives his cast of cable TV unknowns the chance to achieve that empathy except very late in the picture. That’s also, belatedly, when a “ticking clock” kicks in and we start to fear for characters’ lives.
The “America’s Funniest Home Video” jokes are weak, foreshadowing is ignored, tamping down the dread the viewer should feel, and everything is just an elaborate set-up for the next “touchdown.”
That’s when the characters do what the audience does — gawk, in shock and something like awe. In a disaster picture, that only gets you so far.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of intense destruction and peril, and language including some sexual references
Cast: Richard Armitage, Sarah Wayne Callies, Matt Walsh, Alycia Debnam Carey, Max Deacon
Credits: Directed by Steven Quale, screenplay by John Swetnam. A Warner Brothers/New Line release.
Running time: 1:29

The culinary culture clash comedy “The Hundred-Foot Journey” dawdles, like a meal that drags on and on because the waiter is too busy texting to bother bringing you the check.
Based on the Richard Morais novel, it’s a low-flame romance and low-heat feud about a family of Indian restaurateurs who set up their spicy, gaudy, and noisy eatery across the road from a posh, Michelin-endorsed haute cuisine establishment in rural France.
Lasse “Chocolat” Hallstrom directed, Helen “The Queen” Mirren is the imperious, snooty French restaurant’s owner, and the young leads — Manish Dayal as the aspiring Indian chef, Charlotte Le Bon as the winsome French one — are charming.
How did this smorgasbord turn out so bland?
It begins with promise. Hassan (Dayal) learns to cook from his mother at their family restaurant in Mumbai. Mom (Juhi Chawla) teaches him to cook with “all the senses,” that “To cook, you must kill. You cook, you make ghosts.” Meats and vegetables must retain their “spirits” for the dish to be great.
Violence in India kills the mother and sends her brood — led by Papa (Om Puri) — first to Britain, then to France, where the locals don’t know Indian food. Why would they? They have French cuisine, the world’s finest.
A road accident forces the Indian clan (Papa and five kids) to take a closer look at a charming village in the south of France, and Papa is drawn to an empty restaurant. The huffy Madame Mallory (Mirren) provokes him into sealing the deal. Maison Mumbai opens, a flurry of curries and riot of color and noisy Indian music, right across the road from Madame Mallory’s long-established, one-star fine dining institution.
Hassan tries to impress her, she’s not having it. He tries to make peace, and her signature dishes with a dash of Indian flavor, she won’t have it.
When the newcomers go to the market for fresh fruits, meats and vegetables, Madame Mallory has already bought everything up (she got a look at their menu). “War is war!” Papa declares, and it’s on like Avignon, a tit for tat fight that escalates around the ears of the town mayor, a gastronome who only wants to enjoy that next meal.
Meanwhile, Hassan is discovering French culinary tradition through the books lent him by the pretty sous chef at Madame Mallory’s place (Le Bon), and discovering love in her eyes. It’s a pity they work for sworn enemies.
The novel this is based on follows Hassan’s journey, from boy learning from his mother to the height of the Paris cooking establishment. Dayal and his character aren’t charismatic enough to carry the picture, so Hallstrom and his screenwriter focus on the fish-out-of-water elements of the tale, on the older character’s “war” and the sparks they set off. When he abandons that to follow Hassan deeper into his career, the movie lurches to a halt.
Mirren is regal as ever, and Puri, best known in the West for “Charlie Wilson’s War,” fumes up a nice blubbering rage. But nobody else gets much screen time. Ugly French xenophobia pops up, abruptly, and is dismissed just as quickly.
And all those sensual delights that great food films are known for “Hundred-Foot Journey” shortchanges. Close-ups of dishes are not enough. As Jon Favreau showed us with the far superior “Chef,” seeing the care a cook puts into the food requires an actor who is plainly doing his or her own chopping, mincing, filleting and stirring.
So this “Hundred-Foot Journey” seems to end several steps shy of completion, a bland romantic comedy where the actors don’t show us their characters’ love for each other or the food that supposedly is their reason for living. They merely talk a good game.
　
MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements, some violence, language and brief sensuality
Cast: Helen Mirren, Om Puri, Manish Dayal, Charlotte Le Bon
Credits: Directed by Lasse Hallstrom, screenplay by Steven Knight, based on the Richard C. Morais novel. A Touchstone release.
Running time

The “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” earn a Michael Bay-produced 3-D re-boot that spares no expense in special effects and spares no decibel in the volume that is the soundtrack to all their new mayhem.
These digitally-animated super-sized turtles have real-world presence and weight, stumping onto the scene like teenagers who haven’t learned to do anything quietly. Their brawls with their trigger-happy foes from the Foot Clan are a blur of body blows and bullets. Their wise-cracks are up-to-date, their love of pizza unabated.
Their human friend is a fluff-friendly TV reporter played by Megan Fox. So yeah, Bay gave this production the full “Transformers” treatment. It’s entirely too violent, but teenaged turtles armed with ninja swords, knives and nunchucks have always been violent, from their origins in the 1980s comic books to assorted TV series and the films of the ’90s and an animated flop of 2007.
The new film, directed by Jonathan Liebesman (“Battle Los Angeles”) handles the back story — a lab experiment, a fire — quickly and gracefully — and puts shapely TV reporter April O’Neil (Fox) on their case right from the start.
The Foot Clan, led by the mysterious megalomaniac Shredder (voiced by Danny Woodburn) is trying to take over New York. But these masked vigilantes keep foiling their plans.
April starts to piece together a puzzle that points to her own past, the man her scientist father was in business with (William Fichtner) and the “mutagen” and other chemicals they were toying with.
The heroes are masked ninjas, mutant turtles who grew huge, learned English and trained in martial arts with the inscrutable rat, Splinter (Tony Shalhoub). Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello and Leonardo only occasionally act like teenagers, usually in their banter.
“Did you tell her his name?”
“Maybe she’s clairvoyant!”
“Maybe she’s a JEDI!”
April cannot convince her boss (Whoopi Goldberg) that she’s not crazy. And her on-the-make cameraman (Will Arnett, toned down and not nearly funny enough) is also a hard-sell regarding these “heroes on a half-shell.”
“So, they’re aliens?”
“No. That would be STUPID.”
The animated rat has a much bigger role in this film than is usual for this series, and the animaters give Splinter a few cute tricks to pull off with his tale, as well as an Asian martial arts master’s long, thin goatee.
The action beats are bigger and better than they’ve ever been in a Ninja Turtle film — brawls, shootouts, a snowy car-and-truck chase with big explosions and what not.
But in between those scenes is an awful lot of chatter and exposition. For a film that aims younger (save for the die-hards who grew up with this franchise), that’s deadly dull.
And Fox, emoting as if her “comeback” depended on this, plays it all straight, which tends to rob the film of needed-playfulness. The turtle brothers are somewhat less distinct as character “types” — the tech nerd, the angry rebel, the boy on the make, the leader. Among the voice actors playing the Project Renaissance turtle brothers, only Johnny Knoxville stands out.
“Oh look, he’s doing his BATMAN voice!”
So even though they “did justice” to this beloved franchise, there’s nothing here that won’t be forgotten by the time you’ve gotten home — AFTER you stopped for pizza.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sci-fi action violence
Cast: Megan Fox, Will Arnett, William Fichtner, Whoopi Goldberg, the voices of Tony Shalhoub, Johnny Knoxville, Danny Woodburn
Credits: Directed by Jonathan Liebesman, scripted by Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec and Evan Daugherty. A Paramount/Nickelodeon release.
Running time: 1:40

The romantic comedy recipe is so well-known and foolproof that the great mystery about them is how rarely the romantic fools in Hollywood get it right.
“What If” does. It’s a healthy serving of great “obstacles to romance,” generous helpings of cute, alluring leads, a dash of funny-sexy “best friends,” an enticing location filmed at its best and topped with bright, witty (but not precious) banter. It and its adorable stars — Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan — have us rooting for them from first frame to last.
Wallace and Chantry “meet cute” — at a party. He’s creating faintly forlorn poems out of fridge-magnets, she reshapes them into more hopeful odes to love.
He’s 379 days past his last, broken-hearted breakup. And her? She’s beguiling, an animator with big eyes, easy to talk to. They chat about the sandwich that killed Elvis — “Fool’s Gold” — and how much of that confection was found in The King’s colon.
“We should hang out,” she says as he walks her home. Great! Then, as she’s fishing for her keys, “My boyfriend will be worried about me.”
There’s the rub. She’s in a five year live-in relationship with a handsome, successful U.N. copyright attorney, Ben (Rafe Spall). Wallace is perplexed. Naturally, he turns to his hipster-Lothario best friend, Allan (Adam Driver, sort of “Justin Long: The Next Generation.”). What’s Allan’s rule?
“If it starts dirty, it ends dirty.” In other words, even if Wallace attempts to win Chantry — And what kind of name is that? — luring her away from a relationship means getting her to cheat. If that’s how they begin, that’s how they’ll end.
“What If” — a limp title for a movie based on the Canadian play “Toothpaste & Cigars” — is about Wallace’s longing, Chantry’s winsome doubts and the other people’s efforts to interfere with what might be happening as they attempt to “just be friends.”
Everybody in this is amusing, but not stand-up comic amusing. The cleverness feels unrehearsed and spontaneous. The first time Wallace meets Ben, he’s come over to dinner at their apartment and Ben stops chopping vegetables to wave his knife at Wallace and ask, “Are you trying to sleep with my girlfriend?”
Allan hooks up, for good, with Nicole, played by the willowy and edgy Mackenzie Davis (“That Awkward Moment”), and they animate every scene they’re in with a groping/kissing/pillow-talking hilarity. Megan Park scores snarky points as Chantry’s on-the-make younger sister, who sets her eye on Wallace because Chantry, plainly, is out of bounds.
Kazan, as she proved in “Ruby Sparks,” has a whimsical, quirky girl-next-door appeal. Radcliffe, wearing post-Harry Potter stubble and delivering toothy, jaw-jutting grins, makes it easy for us to believe he cannot get her out of his head.
As they “hang out/not date” through the many charming corners of Toronto, neighborhoods where 20somethings can gather for knitting parties in a yarn shop, or skinny-dip in the lake, “What If” keeps us guessing. The only real give-away is the walking sight gag these two are. Director Michael Dowse surrounds them with people who tower over them. Spall’s Ben has to bend over at the waist to keep his girlfriend, and his girlfriend’s “friend,” in the frame and in eye contact.
But the recipe, fools slowly rushing in while joking about Fool’s Gold, works. It’s every bit as irresistible as that potentially lethal combo of bacon, butter, jam and peanut-butter ever was.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content, including references throughout, partial nudity and language
Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Zoe Kazan, Adam Driver, Mackenzie Davis
Credits: Directed by Michael Dowse, screenplay by Elan Mastai based on a play by T.J. Dawe and Michael Rinaldi. A CBS Films/eOne release.
Running time: 1:42