“The Batman” managed to hold onto almost 50% of its opening weekend take and stir up another $66.3 million Friday-Sun, cleaning the $400 million mark worldwide by the end of the weekend.
That’s all based on a Friday take of nearly $19 ($18.7). Wonder if they’ll make a sequel?
“Uncharted” managed another $9.2 million, “Spider Man” another $4. Tom Holland keeps winning.
Pixar/Disney sent the puberty cartoon “Turning Red” direct to streaming, which might have tamped down fake outrage pushback — the subject matter isn’t really something under 8s will connect with. And it would have been lucky to clear $25 million, and that’s a tiny audience. But as Deadline.com points out, that’s one reason “Sing II” is still making money months after its release. There’s no animated family competition.
That’s all because NOTHING new, no major wide releases, hit theaters this week.
Box Office Pro notes that “Jackass” has cleared $56, and will finish its low-budget run in the $60 million range.
I missed “OutlawKing” when Netflix dropped it in 2018, because I occasionally drop Netflix when I find myself running out of content to watch/review and have seen every Indonesian romance, Turkish those story and Brazilian comedy that might interest me.
The feeling of how odd this seems as a screen follow-up for Team “Hell or High Water” lingers over this write-a-big-check Netflix project, until you consider the wee surname of director and co-writer David Mackenzie. He’s of Scots descent and had the money to “Braveheart” the shyte out of the battles and historical detail as he took on Scotland’s “greatest national hero,” not the one Mel Gibson played.
But Chris Pine as Robert the Bruce? How was that ever supposed to work out? I’m a Pine fan. And his struggles with a leader who has sort of waffles and backs into going to war, has a marriage forced on him, stumbles and stumbles and eventually triumphs, are understandable. Bruce, as suggested in biographies and other film depictions, has something of the brooding brute you somehow underestimate about him.
But Pine seems off in the part. Could you cast a Chris Hemsworth, to use the “Three Chris’s” as your starting point? Bruce was a Thor-sized warrior, but can Hemsworth manage the cagey, silent type? And Chris Evans might have given us a more introspective and navel gazing version than the one Pine presents.
The moments when the Chris they cast really has to turn on the bellowing bravado are passable, at best. The fictionalized take on the man makes him less than the most inspiring leader and feels less imposing as “the finest warrior of his generation” as well.
Robert’s impulse to murder a rival nobleman who’s just threatened him, kill him in a chapel, no less, seems to come out of nowhere. The historic picture of Bruce — and the one we see in other films — suggests calculation at every turn.
Stephen Dillane (“Game of Thrones,” The Greatest Game Ever Played”) makes a less sociopathic King Edward I, too short to be the “Longshanks” English despot hellbent on bringing the Scots to hell at the point of a sword. He is Edward in his last years, his final great coup — the capture and execution of William “Braveheart” Wallace — leaves him spent, as indeed the old man must have been. When the junior Bruce (or “Brus,” with James Cosmo playing Robert’s father) is forced to act after the murder of Wallace, Edward plainly doesn’t have it in him to do this invade, rape and pillage Scotland thing all over again, not so soon after eight years of war.
“I am so SICK of Scotland!”
Thus we have the less competently murderous Prince of Wales (Billy Howle) and his brutish lieutenant Valence, Earl of Pembroke (Sam Spruell) ambushing and ambushing Robert and his shrinking army, band and finally tiny corps of disciples into the far reaches of Scotland.
A very young and petite Florence Pugh is Elizabeth, the arranged marriage Edward imposes on the widowed Robert “to unite our two countries.” Pine is appropriately older (a ten year difference in the characters’ ages upon marriage) but there’s an awkwardness to their scenes that has more to do with the significant difference in height. Her educated pluck is played up, and Elizabeth’s suffering as the English take her hostage. But Pugh has too few scenes to make much of an impression.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the once-and-always “Kick-Ass,” seems to be the only player to be having any fun playing the only character allowed to. Howling “DOUGLASS” with every swing of his sword, he plays the scion of a clan who fights with insane zeal to recover “stolen” lands. Taylor-Johnson pretty much steals the movie thanks to that.
Director and co-writer Mackenzie gives us grand Scottish locations, castles (some digitally added to the background) and horrifically gruesome, bloody and muddy battles. Combat was at its most savage and personal in this war, and showing us Wallace, after he’s been drawn-and-quartered, is something even the sadistic Mel Gibson didn’t dare do.
But “Outlaw King,” while more photographically impressive than the better-cast (Angus MacFadyen, who also played Robert in “Braveheart,” which made him too old to play the king in that 2019 “sequel”) but also underwhelming “Robert the Bruce” biopic, leaves one with the impression that the definitive “Bruce” picture has yet to be undertaken.
Rating: R for sequences of brutal war violence, some sexuality, language and brief nudity
Cast: Chris Pine, Florence Pugh, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Stephen Dillane, Billy Howle, James Cosmo
Credits: Directed by David Mackenzie, scripted by Bathsheba Doran, David Mackenzie and James McInnes. A Netflix release.
Diana Agron and Simon Helberg play siblings coping with end of life issues for their dad, played by Dustin Hoffman, while keeping their mom (Candice Bergen) on an even keel in this Mayim Bialik family dramedy.
Quiver Distribution has “As They Made Us,” which releases on April 8.
This film based on an Indian folk looks simple, old fashioned even.
But we are intrigued. It streams March 15.
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Fen was all set to live out her “coming of age” in Los Angeles, a Taiwanese transplant who still speaks Mandarin when ordered to, but who has grown up with American English and American attitudes.
But she quickly figures out that being exceptional in “the States” counts for little when her family has to move “back home.” In Feng-I Fiona Roan’s semi-autobiographical drama, she’s just a 13 year-old “American Girl” struggling with Mandarin, school and an unhappy home life.
Caitlin Fang shines in the title role of this Taiwanese fish-out-of-water tale. Fen sulks, struggles in school and takes out her frustration on her kid sister Anne (Audrey Lin), the mother (Karena Kar-Yan Lam) who moved them back and the father (Kaiser Chuang) who barely knows his kids and barely tolerates the wife who’d insisted that they raise them in the United States.
Whatever was going on in this marriage — and they had a place in LA and an apartment in Taipei to make this work — their reuniting as a “family” isn’t smooth sailing. The kids have American tastes and aren’t keen on the cuisine. They talk back and speak English around their father when they’re not supposed to.
Mom just wears the thousand-yard stare of somebody staring death in the face. She’s come home with cancer.
Roan’s film is set in 2003, so in addition to coping with a deadly disease, the shock of a school system which shames and canes kids who don’t do well and the friendless isolation of their new lives, there’s this new “flu,” SARS, tearing through Asia for the kids and their parents to deal with.
Dad has a management job that keeps him in Asia and sends him to the mainland for stretches. He’s their sole means of support, and wife Lily wants them living in better quarters, the kids both want bicycles and nobody eats his cooking after Mom starts chemo.
Little Anne, who is closer to her mother, frets about her health. But Fen is the one who picks up on the fatalism in her voice, the mid-argument pleas for her husband to take this step or that one because “I won’t be around much longer (in subtitled Mandarin, with passages in English).”
Fen may reconnect with an old friend at school who shares her teen obsession with horses, but lags academically and blames her mother for moving them and upending her life.
“It’s like when you got cancer, we ALL got cancer.”
Roan hits the waypoints in this standard-issue reconciling-with-your-parents story lightly, giving us the “one teacher who reaches out” (underplayed here) and making little of the culture’s acceptance of schools that punish and mother Lily’s futility in fighting that. We see Fen’s slow softening towards her gruff, short-tempered father and the self-absorption that makes reconciling with her mother a longer row to hoe.
Through it all, Fang makes her debut performance feel lived-in, with realistic dimensions, reactions and teenaged over-reactions.
The novelty of the setting and the particularly trying situation never lifts this formulaic coming-of-age story above that formula. But it’s still a richly-detailed remembrance of fitting in when you don’t want to in a place where fitting in is everything, and being an “American Girl” was a handicap.
Rating: TV-MA, corporeal punishment.
Cast: Caitlin Fang, Karena Kar-Yan Lam, Kaiser Chuang, Audrey Lin and Kimi Hsia
Credits: Directed by Feng-I Fiona Roan, scripted by Bing Li, Feng-I Fiona Roan. A Netflix release.
For his latest feat, Mr. Canadian Trade-Balancer Ryan Reynolds travels through time to trade barbs with his 12-year-old self, further extends the warranty for action comedy hack Shawn “Night at the Museum” Levy and makes Mark Ruffalo funny.
Pulling those off for “The Adam Project,” a noisy/cutesy and kid-friendly mashup of a dozen more original movies, is no mean feat. But for a picture that’s no big deal and no credit to the genre, it passes the time pleasantly enough, largely thanks to its intensely likeable, quick-quipping star.
You could say the same for the last Levy-Reynolds team-up, “Free Guy,” it’s worth noting. Levy knows when to throw a few effects at you, and when to let his star and those paired up with that star take over and make with the funny business.
Reynolds has the title role, and when we meet Adam, he’s getting shot at and shot up as he steals a time jet. It’s 2050 and our hero has business in the past. That business is back in 2022, and it’s where he runs into his younger self.
Walker Scobell has the tricky job of being wired and witty Ryan Reynolds-as-Adam at 12, and he’s passably quick on the uptake. The short-for-his-age Adam’s suspended from school for fighting (getting beat up) again, something his older self understands.
“You have a very punchable face.”
The kid isn’t as quick as his/their dog to figure out who this stranger who’s busted into his house is. But he is fast on the flippant threats, about facing years of therapy telling a shrink “where the bad man touched me.”
Something happened in the past that’s messed up the future. There’s an oligarch (Catherine Keener) who has all this power. Older and younger Adam have to fight off the villains, circumvent Mom (Jennifer Garner) and find their way back to Dad (Ruffalo). Otherwise, the future?
“You’ve seen ‘Terminator?’ That’s 2050 on a GOOD day.”
“Adam” is built on a “Guardians of the Galaxy” template, from the parent-child sentiment to the derivative action beats and gadgets — “Is that a light saber?” “No, it’s a (Older Adam turns it on)…” “It’s a light saber.” There’s joke after joke about other movies in the genre, slavish devotion to classic rock tunes on the soundtrack and of course Zoe Saldana, here cast as adult Adam’s action-heroine wife.
Saldana is almost criminally under-used here, but she has a moment or two, mostly emotional grace notes that turn up throughout the picture amidst the levity and mayhem.
The way their pet Labrador recognizes Adult Adam, and the looks he has trying to figure out how this scent-recognition thing is shared is one such moment. Adult Adam reassuring grieving Mom that her little boy loves her is another. Kids that age?
“It’s like living with a urinal cake that yells at you.”
Lots of funny lines land, as does a sight gag or two. Where can I get that hilarious “Face/Off” joke T-shirt that professor-dad (Ruffalo) calls attention to in his college lecture?
Everything here is something we’ve seen before — chases, “light saber” fights, the big Bond-sized set-piece finale. It gets fairly tedious fairly early on.
But if you love Reynolds, you’re here to hear him crack wise, smirk and get complimented on how “ripped” he is. Because he won’t be Canuck Eye Candy forever. And who knows how funny he’ll be in his fast-approaching Betty White/victory lap dotage?
Rating: PG-13 for violence/action, language and suggestive references.
Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Walker Scobell, Zoe Saldana, Catherine Keener, Alex Mallari Jr. and Mark Ruffalo.
Credits: Directed by Shawn Levy, scripted by Jonathan Tropper, T.S. Nowlin and Jennifer Flackett. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:46
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Have a smirk over the irony of naming an exploitive sex, webcams and coeds killer tale “Exploited.” It’s not like it’s going to score any other points for cleverness.
A feebly-plotted, meekly-acted raw dog softcore porn pic masquerading as a thriller, the only promise it keeps is that it’s as unpleasant as the webcam sex interrupted by assault opening scene, start to finish.
College freshman Brian (Jordan Ver Hoeve) may have an older sibling at Starling University, aka Second Choice U. But the blonde kid brother (Half brother?) has some things to work through in between the classes, parties and wrestler-bully roommate Jeremy (Andrew Matthew Welch).
Like the fact that Jeremy might be into initiating Brian, sexually. Jeremy’s girlfriend (Makenzie Vega)? She doesn’t need to know.
But every little secret just might be exposed when Brian, and then his part-time drug dealing brother (Will Peltz), dig deep into this mysterious flash drive which shows the wide range of kink a former classmate (ColinBates) serviced via web cam — gay and straight, S&M, clowns, furries.
Are we seeing the guy murdered on camera in the last of those “acts?” That makes this a “snuff” drive.
No, let’s not go to the police. Let’s try and figure out who that was and who the clients were amongst our classmates and that one particularly arrogant B-movie beauty physics professor (Leah Pipes).
There’s email, webcam and cell-phone text hacking and manipulation, more and more people get sucked in or on as we stagger towards some sort of anti-climactic climax.
The mystery doesn’t entirely play fair, not that it’s interesting enough to entice one into sticking with this. The acting is pretty bad, and there’s a general unpleasantness to the proceedings that makes the film a video equivalent chastity belt.
Rating: unrated, graphic violence, explicit sex, drug use, nudity, profanity
Cast: Jordan Ver Hoeve, Hannah Rose May, Will Peltz, Makenzie Vega, Andrew Matthew Welch, Leah Pipes and Colin Bates.
Credits: Directed by Jon Abrahams, scripted by Carl Moellenberg and Anthony Del Negro. A Gravitas Ventures release.
Dermot Mulroney and Jason Isaacs are among the co-stars of this B-movie Mel special. And yes, that’s Barkhad Abdi from “Captain Philips,” along with Katie Cassidy, Annie Ilonzeh and Adan Canto, whose work I am unfamiliar with.
Director Grant Johnson did a Chace Crawford, Michele Weaver and Kevin Zegers vehicle called “Nighthawks” a few years back.
Movie Nation 