Weekend Box Office (02/24/13): Identity Thief tops Oscar weekend, Snitch and Dark Skies open "okay".

I can't confirm this offhand, but I'm pretty sure Snitch has the biggest opening weekend of all time for a film based on a Frontline documentary.  The 'mandatory minimum sentences are evil' action drama debuted with $13 million this weekend.  That's not a huge figure, but it's above the sub-$8 million debuts from Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Jason Statham in the last two months.  Lionsgate/Summit procured the film for just $5 million, so this is a solid win all-around.  The picture played 77% 18-49 and 53% male, earning a B from Cinemascore.  The solid 3.17x weekend multiplier, especially considering the predicted Oscar drop today, means that the film may have legs and an outside shot at $45 million.  It's not a massive success, and it means that Dwayne Johnson needs a viable franchise to be 'box office', but for a film with nothing but The Rock to sell, this isn't a bad debut at all (it's higher than the $8 million debut for 2010's Faster, for example).  Johnson still has G.I. Joe: Retaliation next month and the sure to be *huge* Fast & Furious 6 on tap for May, so this almost qualifies as his "one for me" art film.  It's a good movie that I hope finds an audience and it's clearly a better choice for action junkies than A Good Day to Die Hard.

Review: Scream 4 (2011) exists purely to acknowledge its own pointlessness.

Scream 4
2011
110 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

It is rare that a film spends such a large chunk of its running time basically admonishing its own existence. Yet Wes Craven's return to the world of Scream is not only a relatively unnecessary franchise revival, it wears its uselessness on its sleeve. Call it 'meta' or call it a genuine distaste for those who would demand a fourth installment of this particular series, but Scream 4 shouts early and often about the myriad of ways in which it rips itself off. While it delivers the bare essentials (violent murders, copious blood, pretty people being stalked), it becomes, due to a lack of emotional potency and an unwillingness to take itself particularly seriously, a pale imitation of not only itself, but of those that ripped it off over the last fifteen years. Scream 4 is like a the last couple Michael Jackson albums: it's disheartening seeing the franchise that reinvented the wheel merely doing what its successors did, but at an inferior level.