The Expendables vs. Eat Pray Love

Stallone decks Roberts at the box office: Greased biceps win over archedeyebrows

Sylvester Stallone was king of the box office this weekend.
Julia Roberts' "Eat Pray Love" was No. 2.
"The Expendables"
"Eat Pray Love"

This weekend, I did my ovarian duty and went to see Eat Pray Love with a group of female friends. I’ve never read Elizabeth Gilbert’s book and while I like Julia Roberts, it really wasn’t this summer's must-see movie for me. In fact, there were only two reasons I went.

One, my best friend in the group recently moved out to Sugar Land, and though I disapprove of this lifestyle choice, I’m trying to support her by trudging out to suburbia to see a movie with her occasionally.

And two, Sylvester Stallone. I read Saturday morning that The Expendables, and its cast of aging to has-been action stars had bested Eat Pray Love in box office receipts the night before and my uterus felt this was wrong.

Back in July an Expendables fan video surfaced on YouTube titled “The Expendables Call To Arms.” Along with many shots of the stars of the movie looking manly while shooting and blowing things up, the trailer spread the dire warning that if Julia’s movie makes more money than Sly’s, women would suddenly rule Hollywood and the future will hold only sparkly vampires and romantic comedies.

This idea is, of course, absurd, evidenced by movie screens littered by the many superhero, action hero, and pudgy/geeky loser-heroes who win the heart of the blond babe with zero percent body fat. And some of these movies I do enjoy. Two X chromosomes do not prevent me from getting a thrill watching shit get blown up as much as the next guy, but occasionally we have to vote with our pocketbooks for explosion-less movies.

The problem is that I didn’t find Eat Pray Love particularly good, but neither did I find it all that bad. Yes, it’s long and overly self-obsessed — one critic dubbed it "Sit Watch Snooze" — but like Sex and the City 2 before it, this is not the crime against humanity the critics make it out to be.

Do chick flicks not have a right to be as annoyingly self-indulgent as the male buddy movie or bromance? The main difference is this summer, the female heroes decide to go to exotic locations to find themselves, instead of putting on a superhero mask or greasing up their biceps like their male counterparts. Should I resent real Liz or fictional Carrie for traveling the globe in an attempt to solve their existential dilemmas? I will, when men start resenting Tony Stark for flying the globe in a shiny red and gold suit to work through his mortality issues.

O.K, I might resent Robert’s Liz a little, but only for her too many flashbacks of her hot, but really whiny exes and her flawlessly arched eyebrows. How does one find time for proper eyebrow maintenance during months of scrubbing floors and meditating at an Indian ashram?

Unfortunately, for this contest of the sexes, the Stafford theater was only about half full of mostly women. While leaving, I didn’t hear my fellow movie goers raving about Eat Pray Love, though in the restroom I did overhear two older women discussing Gilbert’s appearance on Oprah and what a good episode that had been.

The women I was with enjoyed it, but chatting in the lobby we mostly discussed our own lives, not the filmed version of Gilbert’s. But then, taking a lesson from the film, a few of us went for ice cream afterwards without guilt.

The final tally gave the weekend to Stallone with a $35,030,000 gross to Roberts’ $23,700,000. So XY wins this round, but watch out guys. Those Twilight tweens and teens are growing up fast.

I do have to agree with “Expendables Call to Arms” about one thing. Eat Pray Love really does need some commas in that title. Punctuation knows no gender.

See the "Expendables Call to Arms" trailer that said manhood would be threatened if Eat Pray Love triumphed:

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Movie Review

Glen Powell stumbles in remake of sci-fi classic The Running Man

Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Glen Powell in The Running Man.

For all its cheesy ‘80s greatness, the original version of The Running Man starring Arnold Schwarzenegger was a very loose adaptation of the novel by Stephen King. For the new remake, writer/director Edgar Wright has tried to hue much closer to the story laid out in the book, a decision that has both its positive and negative aspects.

Glen Powell takes over for Schwarzenegger as Ben Richards, a family man/hothead who can’t seem to hold a job in the dystopian America in which he lives. Desperate to take care of his family, he applies to be on one of the many game shows fed to the masses that promise riches in exchange for humiliation or worse. Thanks to his temper, Ben is chosen for the most popular one of all, The Running Man, in which contestants must survive 30 days while hunters, as well as the general population, track them down.

Given a 12-hour head start, Ben earns money for every day he survives, as well as every hunter he eliminates. Since he only has a relatively small amount of money to use as he pleases, Ben must rely on friendly citizens who are willing to put their own lives on the line to help him. That’s a task made even more difficult as the gamemakers, led by Dan Killian (Josh Brolin), use advanced AI to manipulate footage of Ben to make him seem like a guy for which no one should root.

Co-written by Michael Bacall, the film is shockingly uninteresting, working neither as an exciting action film, a fun quippy comedy, or social commentary. The biggest problem is that Wright seems to have no interest in developing any of his characters, starting with Ben. Our introduction to the protagonist is him trying to get his job back, a situation for which there is little context even after we’re beaten over the head with exposition.

The situation in which Ben finds himself should be easy to make sympathetic, but Wright and Bacall speed through scenes that might have emphasized that aspect in favor of ones that make the story less personal. The filmmakers really want to showcase the supposed antagonistic relationship between Ben and Dan (and the system which Dan represents), but all that effort results in little drama.

Ben has a number of close calls, and while those scenes are full of action and violence, almost every one of them feels emotionally inert, as if there was nothing at stake. It doesn’t help that Wright doesn’t set the scene well, making it unclear how far Ben has traveled or who/what he’s up against. There are times when Ben feels surrounded and others when he can walk freely, weird for a society that’s supposed to be under almost complete surveillance.

Powell has been touted as a movie star in the making for several years following his turn in Top Gun: Maverick, but he does little here to make that label stick. With no consistent co-star thanks to the structure of the story, he’s required to carry the film, and he just doesn’t have the juice that a true movie star is supposed to have. Nobody else is served well by the scattershot film, including normally reliable people like Brolin, Colman Domingo, Michael Cera, and Lee Pace.

The Running Man is a big misfire by Wright and a blow to Powell’s star power. On the surface, it has all the hallmarks of an action thriller with a side of social commentary, but nothing it does or says lands in any meaningful way. Schwarzenegger’s one-liners in the original film may have been goofy and over-the-top, but at least they made the movie memorable, which is way more than can be said of the remake.

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The Running Man opens in theaters on November 14.

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