This long, boring winter continues. Not only has the weather been horrendous out here, but it isn’t like we can even escape to the theaters for any great entertainment. It’s been a remarkably bad run of movies of late. Nothing changes too much this week.
Just remember, I'm not reviewing these movies, but rather predicting where they'll end up on the Tomatometer. Let's take a look at what This Rotten Week has to offer.
Rotten Watch Prediction
I’ve sat on enough planes with enough pain in the ass people next to me that I would have welcomed some kind of hidden threat intent on picking off passengers until his/her demands were met. In fact, if I knew it was going down like that on the flight I recently took with the guy who kept farting, I would have buddied up with the hijacker and made a few suggestions about who to ice next. Then it would have been two seats to myself. Luxury! Unless of course a dude like Liam Neeson was around trying to put the kibash on much-improved air travel.
Liam Neeson has now been officially typecast. The only character he now plays in a leading role, and this is written firmly into all of his instructions to his agent, is the guy who is put into some kind of short-term life and death scenario in which he must use his "skills" to overcome a very odd problem he is uniquely prepared to handle. Of course, there’s Taken and Taken 2 (alternate title: Yup, They Got Taken Again), The Unknown, and The Grey. And now including Non-Stop, in each of these movies Neeson is just going about his business and then circumstances arise that necessitate him kicking ass, looking a bit confused and ultimately taking care of business. It’s perfect for him.
Here's the trailer for Liam's new movie Non-Stop, in case you haven't seen it yet...
This movie should appear very stupid, a plane is hijacked in an overly elaborate scenario in which the ends surely do not justify the means, but for some reason I have a feeling it’ll be an entertaining watch. Neeson is just your standard US Air Marshall, originally born in Ireland (go with it), who finds himself racing against the clock to stop a terrorist who’s framing him as the actual plane hijacker. Follow? No? Who cares it looks fun.
Directed by Jaume Collett-Serra (Unknown-56%, Orphan-55%), this flick looks like it’ll fall right in line with the rest of his resume. Fine enough, not overwhelmingly well-reviewed, but far from a basement dweller. I think it ends up rating high in the simple entertaining field, not promising to offer much else but visceral thrills like fighting and plane swan dives. In fact, I don’t even care who the threat is. I just want to watch Neeson use his "skills" to do whatever is necessary to stop the threat. Unless the threat is taking our annoying passengers. Then let them have at it.
Rotten Watch Prediction
This movie is made for a very specific person. That person has about 2.3 billion other friends throughout the world. And while I’m sure the movie studio would love for every Christian to head out to the theaters and see Son of God, they’d probably settle for, like, half of that. Either way it’d be a nice payday.
Here's the official trailer for Son of God in case you haven't seen it yet...
Son of God is actually just a condensed version of the History Channel’s ten part miniseries "The Bible". They cut it down to a couple of hours and threw it up on the big screen. One thing Christians (and really all organized religions) are good at is getting that money, son. If you already have the footage you need, get people who could have watched it for "free" to pony up the bucks to watch a shorter version of it the theater. Amazing really. Interestingly enough, this is pretty much also the business plan for much of religion in general. So, nice work.
In making our prediction for the film's potential reviews, we already have a bit of a road map. The Metacritic score for the miniseries was about 44%. Can we expect the film to be much better? It’s doubtful, though even if you feel like the editors only included the very best parts, how much better in critics eyes can we realistically expect this to be? I’d contend not too much. But a hit at the box office? I bet it makes a bunch of money. Jesus going to make it rain at that box office.
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Finally, a quality week. Finally. I’ve been running super cold in the prediction department so it was nice to get two wins. First off, thank god Pompeii (Predicted: 22% Actual: 29%) stunk. Kristy Puchko crushed it in her review calling the script "laughably bad" and just generally taking a massive dump on everything from the acting, to the writing to the effects. She gutted it. It’s an entertaining read. Not all critics were as ice cold but it still fell in the bottom third of the Tomatometer and that made it a win for the Rotten Watch.
Meanwhile, 3 Days to Kill (Predicted: 37% Actual: 27% ) just sneaks into the prediction win column. Worse than I expected over the aggregate, though CB’s Gabe Toro did me no favors in his review calling the movie "surprisingly pleasant." Come on Gabe, next time look at the prediction and review accordingly. Thankfully, other reviewers didn’t see things quite the same way and I was able to sneak in a win. Next time around an empire rises and Mr. Peabody goes time traveling. It’s going to be a Rotten Week!
