Movie audiences apparently aren’t as tired of being Taken as all of us movie critics are. Liam Neeson’s third PG-13 patriarchal vengeance fantasy took in an estimated $40.4 million over the weekend, despite the fact that it had barely climbed out of the single digits to a 12% approval rating over at Rotten Tomatoes.
In my review of the film last week I said of the unlikely 62-year-old action star’s latest effort,
Neeson looks as tired and bored with the now formulaic avenge-and-protect plot as I was with watching it. The carnage is as predictable as it is incessant, as rote and generic as it is mind-numbing.
It’s as if the screenwriter simply copied and pasted the phrase, ‘Bryan Mills pummels and shoots bad guys’ on every other page of the script.” Reviews like that one, however, did little to blunt fans’ appetite for the Neeson’s character with “a particular set of skills.
And it looks like we can expect more of the same when his next similar film, Run All Night, lands in theaters in April. The second spot on the box office list belonged to Selma, which expanded to about 2,200 theaters over the weekend. The film about Martin Luther King Jr. that’s generated both critical acclaim and criticism for historical inaccuracies made an estimated $11.2 million. Box Office Mojo’s Ray Subers puts those numbers in historical perspective: “Compare that to Lee Daniels’ The Butler, which dealt with similar issues during a similar time period in U.S. history and earned over twice as much in its first weekend ($24.6 million). Selma instead wound up opening in line with disappointing political dramas J. Edgar ($11.2 million) and W. ($10.5 million).”
Spots three through five on the weekend tally were held by familiar films. Into the Woods snatched another $9.8 million, pushing its domestic take over the $100 million mark. Bilbo and Co. pilfered another $9.4 million for The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. (Purists may have protested director Peter Jackson’s decision to split the beloved children’s story into three parts, but with the final Hobbit film closing in on $800 million in revenue internationally, no doubt New Line Cinema and Warner Bros. love Jackson’s plan to generate almost as much “gold” as ol’ Smaug had tucked into the dark corners of Erebor.)Unbroken, meanwhile, held in there long enough to make another $8.4 million. (Like Into the Woods, Angelina Jolie’s well-received and inspirational portrait of World War II POW Louis Zamperini also crossed the $100 million threshold over the weekend.)
Next weekend sees the arrival of a cyber thriller (Blackhat), an animated bear (Paddington) and yet another crass wedding movie (The Wedding Ringer).
Final figures update: 1. Taken 3, $39.2 million; 2. Selma, $11.3 million; 3. Into the Woods, $9.6 million; 4. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, $9.4 million; 5. Unbroken, $8.2 million.
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