ALL SAINTS - NO NEW TREATS AT HALLOWEEN BOX OFFICE

NO NEW TREATS AT HALLOWEEN BOX OFFICE

Halloween weekend usually marks a bleak time at the box office, and, except for Michael Jackson's This Is It! concert documentary, which actually debuted on Wednesday (or, in many markets on Tuesday night), no new film is opening wide this weekend. The closest thing to a wide opening is Troy Duffy's Boondock Saints II All Saints Day, which is being let loose in fewer than 70 theaters -- a film in the Quentin Tarantino mold of cartoonish violence. Kyle Smith in the New York Post says that the movie can not be regarded as "a taut thriller. More like a fleshy, messy, jangled frenzy of shootouts and much discussion about the mechanics of romantic entanglements that bloom between prison inmates." Robert Abele in the Los Angeles Times observes that the ten years since the original Boondock Saints haven't made Duffy, a former bartender, "a better Tarantino knockoff." But Ty Burr in the Boston Globe disagrees, saying that at least Duffy has learned "how to structure a scene for baseline coherence. The result isn't art, but it is an improvement." Compared with the original, Burr says, the new movie "doesn't make you want to claw your eyes out. How's that for praise?"

30/10/2009