Weekend Box Office (05/20/12): Battleship sinks, The Dictator and What To Expect When You're Expecting stumble, while The Avengers charges on.

Most box office write-ups written today or tomorrow will exclaim that 'The Avengers sunk Battleship!'.  The truth is that Battleship (review) sunk itself.  The film was terrible, a mishmash of a thousand prior blockbuster films all meshed into a generic template that seemed like producers checking off a list of ingredients on a sciencitic formula.  More importantly, the marketing accurately conveyed this and audiences decided to either stay home or see something else.  The assumption of global success, based on an arbitrary connection to a board game and $220 million worth of special effects surrounded by a stale concoction of used parts, was cynicism of the highest order.  The fact domestic audiences soundly rejected it has to be cause for optimism.  With John Carter and now Battleship (pity Taylor Kitsch, who stars in both but bears little responsibility), it appears that movie studios run the risk of indeed going broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Review: Battleship (2012) is 'Battlesh*t', representing the culmination of corporate-minded test-tube filmmaking.

Battleship

2012
130 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

Maybe it's all led up to this.  Ten years of big-budget spectacle film-making that seemed ever-more geared toward the theoretical fourteen-year old boy who doesn't necessarily know how to read his native language have brought us Peter Berg's Battleship. This is the very definition of empty spectacle, devoid of a single interesting character and (with one token exception) any interesting plot turns.  It is not so much a film as a prepackaged product, so intent on appealing to as many people as possible that it is completely devoid of any real appeal.  Battleship is the kind of movie that makes it so hard to defend the industry, and so hard to actually praise mainstream films when they do get it right.  If you're the kind of person who presumes that all movies stink and that the films being made today are by-nature inferior than the ones that were made in some by-gone era, Battleship is exactly the kind of alleged popcorn entertainment that you're probably thinking of.  If we often discuss big-budget franchise pictures in terms of food (The Dark Knight is a filet minion, Transformers 2 is a Big Mac, etc), then Battleship is basically a jar of baby food.  There is technically food inside the jar, but it is stripped of all sugar, all salt, and all taste beyond whatever natural flavors the jar might possess.

Oliver Stone's star-filled, and unapologetically R-rated Savages, the official 'adult popcorn film of summer 2012', gets a down-and-dirty trailer.

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It used to be a custom of sorts to have at least one somewhat adult-skewing genre picture in any given summer, something to stand out for older audiences who liked their summer thrills with a bit less fantasy and a bit more gore and/or nudity.  Be it Wolf in 1994, A Time to Kill in 1996, Swordfish in 2001, The Road to Perdition in 2002, or Collateral in 2004 (along with, arguably The Manchurian Candidate redo), this once time-honored tradition somewhat went the way of the dinosaur as seemingly adult genre fare like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, The Da Vinci Code, Live Free or Die Hard and Salt got squeezed into the PG-13 zone and R-rated comedies like The Wedding Crashers, Tropic Thunder, and The Hangover compensated for the lack of truly R-rated action fare.  Aside from the likes of The Expendables in 2010, summer has pretty much been the place where everything is aimed at everyone for the last several years.  But Universal senses an opening, not only moving this seemingly trashy bit of pulp fiction into the summer, but slotting it three days after the debut of Sony's The Amazing Spider-Man.

R.I.P., John Carter. What its failure means and why it matters...

With ten days down and $53 million in the domestic kitty and $179 million worldwide, it's pretty much time to call 'time of death' for John Carter.  Disney is announcing that the picture will lose them $200 million, and it's almost fitting. The film serves as a shining example of everything that can go wrong when crafting a franchise film in big-studio Hollywood.  Not only was it a case where everything went wrong, it was a film where everything absolutely had to go right on a record level in order to have any hope of making its investment back.  To be frank, they should have seen it coming from a mile away.   

Third Battleship trailer sells scale and non-stop explosions, but leaves me bored.

I made a comment the other day on a radio podcast I guested on, basically stating that there are at least a few 'big summer movies' that I'm not only not very excited about. I basically feel like if I end up seeing films like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Men in Black 3, or Battleship, it will be out of some kind of obligation or because there is something specific about them I may want to write about (for example, how well Snow White and the Huntsmen plays as a feminist adventure).  As for Battleship, I can see no societal value or social relevance that would merit an essay (I've already said my peace regarding the casting of Rihanna) and my only real curiosity involves whether or not the climax involves Liam Neeson muttering "You sunk my battleship!" right before he dies.  I will say that unlike a certain insanely expensive movie that came out last weekend, you can clearly see the money onscreen this time around.  The film looks pretty huge, perhaps the 'biggest' movie of summer 2012 in terms of large-scale action and worldwide scope.  But yeah, this film looks like a perfectly-blended hybrid of Transformers, Armageddon, and The Guardian.  But since the action is going to be personality-free robots attacking personality-free ships, I can't imagine any emotional investment will be found.  Maybe I'm too old for this kind of thing, or maybe Battleship really is the definitive personality-free/humanity-free blockbuster that we've been leading up to all these decades.  Maybe I'll see it, maybe I won't, but I don't expect to have too much to say about it.  This one opens on May 18th in the US but April 11th elsewhere, so we'll see...

Scott Mendelson      

She can sing, but can she act? Why exactly is Rihanna starring in Battleship instead of any number of actual black actresses?

I am not the first person to bring this up.  Heck, Samuel L. Jackson went on a mini-tirade about this a decade ago, regards to male actors.  But in a day-and-age where meaty roles for black actresses are incredibly scarce, especially in big-budget studio films, it has to be a little grating for the many underemployed African American actresses to see one of the bigger female-minority roles in a major summer tent-pole this year going to not a trained thespian, but a media-friendly musician of thus-far unknown acting capabilities.  Rihanna (full name: Robyn Rihanna Fenty) may indeed have the chops to convincingly play battle-ready Petty Officer Raikes who helps Taylor Kitsch fend off an alien invasion in Peter Berg's Battleship.  But one has to ask why a popular musician with absolutely no acting experience whatsoever got the prime gig ahead of any number of African American actresses who have struggled with the glass ceiling that exists in the industry.

Review: Confusing and unengaging, John Carter (2012) is sci-fi fantasy done wrong, making Avatar look like, well... Avatar.

John Carter: An IMAX 3D Experience
2012
132 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

I understood Brian DePalma's Mission: Impossible the first time I saw it in theaters.  I had no trouble following Chris Nolan's brain-twister thrillers (Memento, The Prestige, Inception).  It was work, but I more-or-less 'got' the core narrative beats of LA Confidential and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  But by golly John Carter is a confusing muddle of a movie.  There has been all kinds of hand-wringing about the film's rather large budget and its lousy marketing campaign.  I've taken the film to task for representing Disney's obsessive desire to ditch their core female audience while spending untold millions on boy-friendly franchises that don't pay off (HERE).  But putting all of that aside, Andrew Stanton's visually ambitious and cheerfully innocent boys' adventure film does indeed have a few moments of visual splendor and gee-whiz action.  But it is saddled by a needlessly convoluted narrative that goes nowhere slowly, and that further strains patience by telling its story through cryptic exposition as well as inexplicable casting and costuming choices that renders a large chunk of the supporting cast indistinguishable from each other at key junctures.

John Carter gets an 'introduce the heroes' new preview.

Ignoring the Disney Channel-esque voice-over (this may very well be intended to air during Shake It Up commercial breaks), the biggest problem in this 61-second preview is the seemingly awful performance from lead Taylor Kitsch.  The American trailer barely lets him speak at all, and getting to hear him toss off a few lines more complicated than 'Ugh' makes me realize why.  Again, it's just a 61-second teaser that spends most of the time introducing the heroic supporting characters (the wise mentor/sidekick, the princess/love interest, and the comic relief pet), but his few moments of actual vocal inflection leave quite a bit to be desired.  Frankly, it sounds like there is something wrong with his voice, as if someone (be it Kitsch or voice-modulators) is trying to make the strapping hero's pitch sound lower than he actually is.  Of course, a bad vocal performance isn't entirely fatal if said actor is expressive enough to somewhat compensate (Hayden Christensen's highly expressive face somewhat compensated for wooden vocal delivery in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith), but having neither positive traits can be quite fatal (think Garrett Hedlund in Tron: Legacy).  I'm assuming that this Sunday's Super Bowl commercial will show off the scale of this Andrew Stanton epic, so here's hoping that the film actually looks like it cost $300 million.

Scott Mendelson