The real, non-gushing amateur reviews of “Watchmen,” from the trades are in and boy, they’re not pretty…
But why write anything really when Jeffrey Wells sets it up fucking perfectly and simply. All the credit goes to him. “Finally, a non-vested, stand-up professional critic unblinkered by geek allegiances — Variety‘s Justin Chang — has weighed in on Watchmen and more or less called it a half-and-halfer,” Wells writes.
And they’re suggesting the box-office might not be totally gonzo. “Audiences unfamiliar with Moore’s brilliantly bleak, psychologically subversive fiction may get lost amid all the sinewy exposition and multiple flashbacks. After a victorious opening weekend, the pic’s B.O. future looks promising but less certain. “
And later they add, “Yet the movie is ultimately undone by its own reverence; there’s simply no room for these characters and stories to breathe of their own accord, and even the most fastidiously replicated scenes can feel glib and truncated. As ‘Watchmen’ lurches toward its apocalyptic (and slightly altered) finale, something happens that didn’t happen in the novel: Wavering in tone between seriousness and camp, and absent the cerebral tone that gave weight to some of the book’s headier ideas, the film seems to yield to the very superhero cliches it purports to subvert.”
The Hollywood Reporter starts their review with: “Bottom Line: Ouch.”
“The real disappointment is that the film does not transport an audience to another world, as ‘300’ did. Nor does the third-rate Chandleresque narration by Rorschach help. There is something a little lackadaisical here. The set pieces are surprisingly flat and the characters have little resonance. Fight scenes don’t hold a candle to Asian action. Even the digital effects are ho-hum. The film seems to take pride in its darkness, but this is just another failed special effect. Armageddon never looked so cheesy.”
Will the geek-set care? It should still make a good $40-50 million at the opening box-office at least, right? Most geeks seems to be speculating in the $70 million range.
Just to balance things out, Watchmen currently has a high 92% rating on rottentomatoes with 11 positive reviews to 1 negative, but I don’t know how many qualify as “geeks.” Emanuel Levy (not a geek) gave it a B+ and said,
“Decidedly not for kids, Snyder’s Watchmen is the movie event of the season: Textually dense, visually rich, structurally complex, and a major contribution to neo-noir, conveying the culture of fear and paranoia like no other recent Hollywood movie.”
That number will surely drop soon, but how low? Anyone intereted in bets? I’ll say 61%.
They will most certainly drop.
03.06.09………….