What classics did you see last week ? (9Feb - 15 Feb 2020)
Feb 17, 2020 10:05:15 GMT
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Post by cschultz2 on Feb 17, 2020 10:05:15 GMT
“Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)” Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, 109 Minutes, Rated R, Released February 07, 2020:
“Birds of Prey,” the new DC Comics-based action adventure from Warner Bros. Pictures, highlights the continuing adventures of Harley Quinn, the heroine of the surprise hit 2016 picture “Suicide Squad.” Now a hard-drinking, pole dancing, hearty-partying roller derby queen, Harley’s broken up with her unfaithful boyfriend, Batman’s traditional arch-enemy The Joker...but still finds herself perpetually at odds and on the run from the forces of law and order.
“Birds of Prey”--the full, official title of the picture is the unwieldy “Bird of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn”--features a shallow, freewheeling plot tied to the recovery of a missing diamond, which has been embedded with the account numbers of the bank accounts containing the enormous fortune of the late Bertinelli crime family. The diamond’s been unwittingly stolen by a young pickpocket named Cassandra Cain...who swallowed it.
With its flashy graphics, impressive stunt work, and dubious morality (“I have all my best ideas drunk,” says Harley Quinn at one point), “Birds of Prey” is lighter in spirit than “Suicide Squad,” but otherwise pretty much cut from the same cloth. Sort of a stylishly grungy, ultra-violent 2020 update of the old “Batman” television series from the 1960s, minus Batman, “Birds of Prey” is a bubble gum picture filled with soda pop fizz and candy coloring disguised as grown-up entertainment. Your enjoyment of the picture is directly proportional to your tolerance for loud, brash, neon-lit noise--for some it’ll be noxious, and for others it’s nirvana. And if you’re looking for a message or a moral, you’d best look elsewhere.
“Birds of Prey” isn’t exactly a vanity project for Margot Robbie, although the actress was intimately--some say persistently--involved with the development of the picture, and retains an onscreen credit as its producer. But it’s plainly Robbie’s show all the way, and the actress is allowed by screenwriter Christina Hudson to develop her character and display some extra depth as Harley Quinn. With a movie of her own, the character is permitted to occasionally display hurt, loyalty, dreams, ambitions, and even demonstrate her singing and dancing chops in a stylized musical sequence built around the ode to avarice, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
Still, Robbie as Harley Quinn does play well with the other characters, and as directed by Cathy Yan, the film is a surprisingly entertaining introduction to the all-female Birds of Prey superhero team of crimefighters, inadvertently recruited by the hapless Harley throughout the picture’s narrative in her quest to recover the coveted Bertinelli diamond. And as a team effort, actress and producer Robbie shares ample screen time with Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, and Rosie Perez as the newly-minted Birds of Prey, 13-year-old Ella Jay Basco as the young street criminal Cassandra Cain, and Ewan McGregor as an especially brutal and duplicitous crime lord with Joker-like qualities.
Despite some glowing reviews, “Birds of Prey” is repeating the disappointing financial results of other DC Comics-based pictures. Originally projected to earn up to $55 million in ticket sales over its opening weekend, the picture earned only $33.2 million during the period, representing the lowest opening weekend for a DC title since 2010’s relatively obscure “Jonah Hex.” In an effort to boost the picture's ailing box office fortunes and emphasize its name recognition, Warner Bros Pictures as of February 10 has taken the almost unprecedented step of changing the movie's name onscreen and in media advertising from the cumbersome "Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn" to the more succinct "Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey."
Actor Jared Leto was rumored to reprise his “Suicide Squad” characterization as The Joker in “Birds of Prey,” but does not participate in the picture--the actor is said to be keenly disappointed by his exclusion from Todd Phillips’ acclaimed stand-alone “Joker” feature, particularly since its notable financial and critical success, which includes an Academy Award for actor Joaquin Phoenix in the Joker role (Phoenix is the second actor to have earned an Academy Award for the role, after the late Heath Ledger for 2008’s “The Dark Knight.” The Joker character does appear in “Birds of Prey” during the picture’s opening sequence...courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures’ peerless animation department.
An early incarnation of “Birds of Prey” contained the character of Barbara Gordon, aka Batgirl, and was to have been played by actress Kristen Stewart, but was excluded from the script during revisions. A sequel to 2016’s “Suicide Squad” is scheduled to be produced for release in August, 2021, with the departing Will Smith being replaced with a different character played by actor Idris Elba. The ending of “Birds of Prey” teases next year’s “The Batman,” Matt Reeves’ highly anticipated reboot of the series, with “Twilight” heartthrob Robert Pattinson inheriting the role as the Caped Crusader.
“Birds of Prey” is rated R for strong violence and language concerns throughout and some drug and sexual content.
“Gretel & Hansel” Distributed by Orion Pictures and United Artists Releasing, 87 Minutes, Rated PG-13, Released January 13, 2020:
The original story is so familiar that it’s practically programmed into our collective DNA.
Hansel and Gretel are the children of a poor family suffering through hard times. When a famine spreads over the land, the children’s wicked stepmother takes them into the woods, and deserts them there. Left to fend for themselves, the children discover in the forest a cottage constructed of gingerbread, candy, and other treats, and inhabited by a lonely old woman...who eventually reveals herself to be a witch and imprisons them with nefarious intentions. But by using their wits to outsmart their wicked captor, Hansel and Gretel manage to escape with their lives and make their way back home.
Possibly the most notable part of “Gretel & Hansel,” the new movie from Orion Pictures that reimagines the familiar children’s tale, is not what it is, but rather what it is not. Never facetious, campy, or tongue-in-cheek, screenwriter Rob Hayes recreates “Gretel & Hansel” as a genuinely compelling little morality fable. There are no knowing winks or smirks in the picture, and the cast of seasoned troupers avoids reading double meanings into their lines as a means of providing sly clues to what might or might not occur later. It’s to the credit of the filmmakers that nearly everything that occurs in the picture is a surprise to the viewer.
In the new reading of the source material, instead of becoming a fractured fairy tale or a repeating of the well-remembered bedtime story from a more adult perspective, screenwriter Hayes frames the fable with a template of dark fantasy and gothic horror. And in doing to, the writer manages to shed two centuries of retellings, additions, updatings, and gradual revisions, in the process bringing the story closer to the intention of the original authors--a cautionary tale carefully crafted to scare the bejesus out of its audience.
Directed by Osgood Perkins, the filmmaker behind the acclaimed 2015 psychological horror picture “The Blackcoat’s Daughter” and the atmospheric 2016 supernatural thriller “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House,” “Gretel & Hansel” employs austere, tableaux-like staging reminiscent of early portrait photography and the dreamlike deep-focus cinematography of Galo Olivares, and gives us an idea of what might’ve happened if Ingmar Bergman had worked for Hollywood’s Blumhouse Productions.
Starring as a maturing adolescent Gretel, seventeen-year-old Sophia Lillis graduates from her appearances in 2017’s “It” and its 2019 sequel (as well as the misguided 2019 updating of “Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase”) and portray the storybook heroine as a repressed modern heroine, the unwavering protector of her eight-year-old brother Hansel. With an unsmiling demeanor and a pixie haircut that causes her to resemble a rural eighteenth century incarnation of medieval martyr Joan of Arc, after being banished with Hansel to the wilderness by their mother with the parting words “Get busy digging your own graves,” Gretel gradually finds within herself the skills to survive...even if the skills are from unexpected sources.
Royal Shakespeare Company-trained thespian Alice Krige in turn interprets the Witch as a supernatural force banished to the shadows of the dark forest wilderness after revealing terrifyingly evil impulses during a previous generation. With a parched, sun-dried pallor and lilting Scotch-Irish brogue, Krige is a witch that’s simultaneously restrained and commanding. At first seeming sympathetic to the children’s tale of despair, the Witch is soon more jailer than benefactor, and a formidable opponent to the increasing independence of the maturing Gretel. At one point after a disagreement the Witch cautions the young girl, “Say that again and I’ll turn your tongue into a flower.” And you get the feeling she means it.
A clever blending of the Brothers Grimm with “The Blair Witch Project,” and seeming like an epic even with a compact running time of 87 minutes, “Gretel & Hansel” is a storybook containing pentagrams and symbols of foreboding and hallucinogenic mushrooms. This is a bedtime story where rain sometimes falls from a clear sky and a tiny rustic cabin in the forest contains a cavernous dining hall and a morgue in the basement, all combined to reinforce the lessons we were taught as children: If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. And beware of strangers bearing gifts...especially if the stranger wears a pointy hat and rides a broomstick.
Released January 31 to some 3007 theaters across the United States and Canada, “Gretel & Hansel” earned only a little over $6 million in ticket sales during a slow box office weekend. By Sunday, the picture had landed in the fourth-place spot in the Box Office Mojo Top Ten, behind the returning “Bad Boys for Life” in first place with $17.65 in additional earnings in its third week of release, the acclaimed World War I drama “1917” in second place with $9.6 million, and the family adventure “Dolittle” in third with $7.7 million.
A former actor, occasional screenwriter, and maturing filmmaker, director Oz Perkins (billed as “Osgood” in the picture’s closing credits) is the grandchild of esteemed stage actor Osgood Perkins and oldest son of actor Anthony Perkins, the performer best known for playing the iconic role of the troubled Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film “Psycho.” As a child the younger Perkins played Norman as a child in flashback sequences for the 1983 sequel “Psycho II.”
“Gretel & Hansel” is rated PG-13 for disturbing images, thematic content, and brief drug-related material (magic mushrooms).
“The Rhythm Section” Distributed by Paramount Pictures, 109 Minutes, Rated R, Released January 31, 2020:
In “The Rhythm Section,” a young British woman is emotionally devastated when her parents and younger brother are killed in a Pan Am Flight 103-like airline disaster, and spirals into a malaise of despair and substance abuse. But when the distraught woman learns that the plane crash was actually the result of a bomb planted on the airliner, she emerges from her melancholy and begins to train herself as an assassin, with the single-minded intention of avenging herself on the international terrorists responsible for killing her beloved family.
Adapted by Mark Burnell from his 1999 novel of the same name and directed by former cinematographer Reed Morano, “The Rhythm Section” makes the fatal mistake of presuming the viewer is already familiar with the original novel, and is therefore able to grasp the movie’s intricacies without further explanation. Jetting from locations from London to Madrid to Tangier to New York to Marseilles, the picture resembles a collection of the author’s favorite parts from his novel, stitched together with the briefest transitions or reasons possible. The result often leaves the viewer on the outside, looking in.
“The Rhythm Section” is further complicated by Marano’s often photographing the narrative in a jittery and pasty manner reminiscent of news footage from the front lines of a war zone. The chainsaw editing a visual palette might enhance the picture’s sense of realism and immediacy, but simultaneously interrupts the viewer’s illusion and makes the story that much more difficult to follow. The picture spends so much time trying to be stylish, arty, and cutting edge that it forgets to be comprehensible. And the filmmakers never even bother to explain the movie’s intriguing title.
Still, “The Rhythm Section” is almost redeemed by a terrific performance by actress Blake Lively as Stephanie Patrick, the central character of Burnell’s series of novels. Wounded, dewy-eyed, drug-addicted, haunted by gauzy memories of happier times and appearing in a succession of wigs and disguises, Lively portrays Burnell’s heroine in flesh-and-blood terms which often elude the film incarnations of Steig Larsson’s similar Lisbeth Salander character. A genuinely talented and surprisingly eclectic actor who’s often the best part of flawed pictures, Lively with her vivid performance provides whatever interest “The Rhythm Section” generates.
Produced on a budget of $50 million by the people behind the megabucks James Bond motion picture franchise, “The Rhythm Section” often seems to be a form of James Bond Lite, a new character for the new millennium, a new age heroine who leaves behind the Bond series’ fabled sexism and implied misogyny for the period of enlightenment and the era of #MeToo. And that’s fine--with three more titles in Burnell’s series of Stephanie Patrick novels, there’s plenty of room for the character’s development and growth. Just find a new director and screenwriter for future installments...but hang onto Blake Lively.
Playing in 3049 theaters in the United States and Canada, “The Rhythm Section” was expected by distributor Paramount Pictures to generate up $12 million in ticket sales during its opening weekend but is proving to be a major financial disappointment. With box office receipts of only $2.8 million, the picture has set a record of sorts: It’s the worst opening, ever, for a motion picture playing in wide release on more than 3000 screens, displacing the previous champion, a 2006 family comedy entitled “Hoot.”
It gets worse. After the picture's dismal financial showing during its premiere week, "The Rhythm Section" by its third week at the box office managed to attract only a truly humiliating $25,602 in total ticket sales across the entirety of North America, marking the steepest decline in box office business since the dystopian science fiction thriller "The Darkest Minds" in 2018. "The Rhythm Section" was at that point withdrawn by distributor Paramount Pictures from public release. Future plans for the film remain uncertain.
Also featuring performances by Jude Law and Sterling K. Brown and filmed in Ireland and Spain, “The Rhythm Section” is rated R for violence and language throughout, and some drug use.
“Birds of Prey,” the new DC Comics-based action adventure from Warner Bros. Pictures, highlights the continuing adventures of Harley Quinn, the heroine of the surprise hit 2016 picture “Suicide Squad.” Now a hard-drinking, pole dancing, hearty-partying roller derby queen, Harley’s broken up with her unfaithful boyfriend, Batman’s traditional arch-enemy The Joker...but still finds herself perpetually at odds and on the run from the forces of law and order.
“Birds of Prey”--the full, official title of the picture is the unwieldy “Bird of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn”--features a shallow, freewheeling plot tied to the recovery of a missing diamond, which has been embedded with the account numbers of the bank accounts containing the enormous fortune of the late Bertinelli crime family. The diamond’s been unwittingly stolen by a young pickpocket named Cassandra Cain...who swallowed it.
With its flashy graphics, impressive stunt work, and dubious morality (“I have all my best ideas drunk,” says Harley Quinn at one point), “Birds of Prey” is lighter in spirit than “Suicide Squad,” but otherwise pretty much cut from the same cloth. Sort of a stylishly grungy, ultra-violent 2020 update of the old “Batman” television series from the 1960s, minus Batman, “Birds of Prey” is a bubble gum picture filled with soda pop fizz and candy coloring disguised as grown-up entertainment. Your enjoyment of the picture is directly proportional to your tolerance for loud, brash, neon-lit noise--for some it’ll be noxious, and for others it’s nirvana. And if you’re looking for a message or a moral, you’d best look elsewhere.
“Birds of Prey” isn’t exactly a vanity project for Margot Robbie, although the actress was intimately--some say persistently--involved with the development of the picture, and retains an onscreen credit as its producer. But it’s plainly Robbie’s show all the way, and the actress is allowed by screenwriter Christina Hudson to develop her character and display some extra depth as Harley Quinn. With a movie of her own, the character is permitted to occasionally display hurt, loyalty, dreams, ambitions, and even demonstrate her singing and dancing chops in a stylized musical sequence built around the ode to avarice, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
Still, Robbie as Harley Quinn does play well with the other characters, and as directed by Cathy Yan, the film is a surprisingly entertaining introduction to the all-female Birds of Prey superhero team of crimefighters, inadvertently recruited by the hapless Harley throughout the picture’s narrative in her quest to recover the coveted Bertinelli diamond. And as a team effort, actress and producer Robbie shares ample screen time with Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, and Rosie Perez as the newly-minted Birds of Prey, 13-year-old Ella Jay Basco as the young street criminal Cassandra Cain, and Ewan McGregor as an especially brutal and duplicitous crime lord with Joker-like qualities.
Despite some glowing reviews, “Birds of Prey” is repeating the disappointing financial results of other DC Comics-based pictures. Originally projected to earn up to $55 million in ticket sales over its opening weekend, the picture earned only $33.2 million during the period, representing the lowest opening weekend for a DC title since 2010’s relatively obscure “Jonah Hex.” In an effort to boost the picture's ailing box office fortunes and emphasize its name recognition, Warner Bros Pictures as of February 10 has taken the almost unprecedented step of changing the movie's name onscreen and in media advertising from the cumbersome "Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn" to the more succinct "Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey."
Actor Jared Leto was rumored to reprise his “Suicide Squad” characterization as The Joker in “Birds of Prey,” but does not participate in the picture--the actor is said to be keenly disappointed by his exclusion from Todd Phillips’ acclaimed stand-alone “Joker” feature, particularly since its notable financial and critical success, which includes an Academy Award for actor Joaquin Phoenix in the Joker role (Phoenix is the second actor to have earned an Academy Award for the role, after the late Heath Ledger for 2008’s “The Dark Knight.” The Joker character does appear in “Birds of Prey” during the picture’s opening sequence...courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures’ peerless animation department.
An early incarnation of “Birds of Prey” contained the character of Barbara Gordon, aka Batgirl, and was to have been played by actress Kristen Stewart, but was excluded from the script during revisions. A sequel to 2016’s “Suicide Squad” is scheduled to be produced for release in August, 2021, with the departing Will Smith being replaced with a different character played by actor Idris Elba. The ending of “Birds of Prey” teases next year’s “The Batman,” Matt Reeves’ highly anticipated reboot of the series, with “Twilight” heartthrob Robert Pattinson inheriting the role as the Caped Crusader.
“Birds of Prey” is rated R for strong violence and language concerns throughout and some drug and sexual content.
“Gretel & Hansel” Distributed by Orion Pictures and United Artists Releasing, 87 Minutes, Rated PG-13, Released January 13, 2020:
The original story is so familiar that it’s practically programmed into our collective DNA.
Hansel and Gretel are the children of a poor family suffering through hard times. When a famine spreads over the land, the children’s wicked stepmother takes them into the woods, and deserts them there. Left to fend for themselves, the children discover in the forest a cottage constructed of gingerbread, candy, and other treats, and inhabited by a lonely old woman...who eventually reveals herself to be a witch and imprisons them with nefarious intentions. But by using their wits to outsmart their wicked captor, Hansel and Gretel manage to escape with their lives and make their way back home.
Possibly the most notable part of “Gretel & Hansel,” the new movie from Orion Pictures that reimagines the familiar children’s tale, is not what it is, but rather what it is not. Never facetious, campy, or tongue-in-cheek, screenwriter Rob Hayes recreates “Gretel & Hansel” as a genuinely compelling little morality fable. There are no knowing winks or smirks in the picture, and the cast of seasoned troupers avoids reading double meanings into their lines as a means of providing sly clues to what might or might not occur later. It’s to the credit of the filmmakers that nearly everything that occurs in the picture is a surprise to the viewer.
In the new reading of the source material, instead of becoming a fractured fairy tale or a repeating of the well-remembered bedtime story from a more adult perspective, screenwriter Hayes frames the fable with a template of dark fantasy and gothic horror. And in doing to, the writer manages to shed two centuries of retellings, additions, updatings, and gradual revisions, in the process bringing the story closer to the intention of the original authors--a cautionary tale carefully crafted to scare the bejesus out of its audience.
Directed by Osgood Perkins, the filmmaker behind the acclaimed 2015 psychological horror picture “The Blackcoat’s Daughter” and the atmospheric 2016 supernatural thriller “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House,” “Gretel & Hansel” employs austere, tableaux-like staging reminiscent of early portrait photography and the dreamlike deep-focus cinematography of Galo Olivares, and gives us an idea of what might’ve happened if Ingmar Bergman had worked for Hollywood’s Blumhouse Productions.
Starring as a maturing adolescent Gretel, seventeen-year-old Sophia Lillis graduates from her appearances in 2017’s “It” and its 2019 sequel (as well as the misguided 2019 updating of “Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase”) and portray the storybook heroine as a repressed modern heroine, the unwavering protector of her eight-year-old brother Hansel. With an unsmiling demeanor and a pixie haircut that causes her to resemble a rural eighteenth century incarnation of medieval martyr Joan of Arc, after being banished with Hansel to the wilderness by their mother with the parting words “Get busy digging your own graves,” Gretel gradually finds within herself the skills to survive...even if the skills are from unexpected sources.
Royal Shakespeare Company-trained thespian Alice Krige in turn interprets the Witch as a supernatural force banished to the shadows of the dark forest wilderness after revealing terrifyingly evil impulses during a previous generation. With a parched, sun-dried pallor and lilting Scotch-Irish brogue, Krige is a witch that’s simultaneously restrained and commanding. At first seeming sympathetic to the children’s tale of despair, the Witch is soon more jailer than benefactor, and a formidable opponent to the increasing independence of the maturing Gretel. At one point after a disagreement the Witch cautions the young girl, “Say that again and I’ll turn your tongue into a flower.” And you get the feeling she means it.
A clever blending of the Brothers Grimm with “The Blair Witch Project,” and seeming like an epic even with a compact running time of 87 minutes, “Gretel & Hansel” is a storybook containing pentagrams and symbols of foreboding and hallucinogenic mushrooms. This is a bedtime story where rain sometimes falls from a clear sky and a tiny rustic cabin in the forest contains a cavernous dining hall and a morgue in the basement, all combined to reinforce the lessons we were taught as children: If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. And beware of strangers bearing gifts...especially if the stranger wears a pointy hat and rides a broomstick.
Released January 31 to some 3007 theaters across the United States and Canada, “Gretel & Hansel” earned only a little over $6 million in ticket sales during a slow box office weekend. By Sunday, the picture had landed in the fourth-place spot in the Box Office Mojo Top Ten, behind the returning “Bad Boys for Life” in first place with $17.65 in additional earnings in its third week of release, the acclaimed World War I drama “1917” in second place with $9.6 million, and the family adventure “Dolittle” in third with $7.7 million.
A former actor, occasional screenwriter, and maturing filmmaker, director Oz Perkins (billed as “Osgood” in the picture’s closing credits) is the grandchild of esteemed stage actor Osgood Perkins and oldest son of actor Anthony Perkins, the performer best known for playing the iconic role of the troubled Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film “Psycho.” As a child the younger Perkins played Norman as a child in flashback sequences for the 1983 sequel “Psycho II.”
“Gretel & Hansel” is rated PG-13 for disturbing images, thematic content, and brief drug-related material (magic mushrooms).
“The Rhythm Section” Distributed by Paramount Pictures, 109 Minutes, Rated R, Released January 31, 2020:
In “The Rhythm Section,” a young British woman is emotionally devastated when her parents and younger brother are killed in a Pan Am Flight 103-like airline disaster, and spirals into a malaise of despair and substance abuse. But when the distraught woman learns that the plane crash was actually the result of a bomb planted on the airliner, she emerges from her melancholy and begins to train herself as an assassin, with the single-minded intention of avenging herself on the international terrorists responsible for killing her beloved family.
Adapted by Mark Burnell from his 1999 novel of the same name and directed by former cinematographer Reed Morano, “The Rhythm Section” makes the fatal mistake of presuming the viewer is already familiar with the original novel, and is therefore able to grasp the movie’s intricacies without further explanation. Jetting from locations from London to Madrid to Tangier to New York to Marseilles, the picture resembles a collection of the author’s favorite parts from his novel, stitched together with the briefest transitions or reasons possible. The result often leaves the viewer on the outside, looking in.
“The Rhythm Section” is further complicated by Marano’s often photographing the narrative in a jittery and pasty manner reminiscent of news footage from the front lines of a war zone. The chainsaw editing a visual palette might enhance the picture’s sense of realism and immediacy, but simultaneously interrupts the viewer’s illusion and makes the story that much more difficult to follow. The picture spends so much time trying to be stylish, arty, and cutting edge that it forgets to be comprehensible. And the filmmakers never even bother to explain the movie’s intriguing title.
Still, “The Rhythm Section” is almost redeemed by a terrific performance by actress Blake Lively as Stephanie Patrick, the central character of Burnell’s series of novels. Wounded, dewy-eyed, drug-addicted, haunted by gauzy memories of happier times and appearing in a succession of wigs and disguises, Lively portrays Burnell’s heroine in flesh-and-blood terms which often elude the film incarnations of Steig Larsson’s similar Lisbeth Salander character. A genuinely talented and surprisingly eclectic actor who’s often the best part of flawed pictures, Lively with her vivid performance provides whatever interest “The Rhythm Section” generates.
Produced on a budget of $50 million by the people behind the megabucks James Bond motion picture franchise, “The Rhythm Section” often seems to be a form of James Bond Lite, a new character for the new millennium, a new age heroine who leaves behind the Bond series’ fabled sexism and implied misogyny for the period of enlightenment and the era of #MeToo. And that’s fine--with three more titles in Burnell’s series of Stephanie Patrick novels, there’s plenty of room for the character’s development and growth. Just find a new director and screenwriter for future installments...but hang onto Blake Lively.
Playing in 3049 theaters in the United States and Canada, “The Rhythm Section” was expected by distributor Paramount Pictures to generate up $12 million in ticket sales during its opening weekend but is proving to be a major financial disappointment. With box office receipts of only $2.8 million, the picture has set a record of sorts: It’s the worst opening, ever, for a motion picture playing in wide release on more than 3000 screens, displacing the previous champion, a 2006 family comedy entitled “Hoot.”
It gets worse. After the picture's dismal financial showing during its premiere week, "The Rhythm Section" by its third week at the box office managed to attract only a truly humiliating $25,602 in total ticket sales across the entirety of North America, marking the steepest decline in box office business since the dystopian science fiction thriller "The Darkest Minds" in 2018. "The Rhythm Section" was at that point withdrawn by distributor Paramount Pictures from public release. Future plans for the film remain uncertain.
Also featuring performances by Jude Law and Sterling K. Brown and filmed in Ireland and Spain, “The Rhythm Section” is rated R for violence and language throughout, and some drug use.