Quite why anyone goes to the cinema is beyond us. It’s a stupid place to go to. They play rubbish music in the foyer and they always smell like a mixture of detergent and ageing offal rotating in hotdogs that have developed a thin film of grease and bluebottle droppings.
Yet still, people the world over appear in their droves to cackle about the imagined ‘cinema experience.’
And this weekend, royally kicking the arse of everything else was a computer game played out on the silver screen as Resident Evil: Afterlife showed the makers of the terrible Street Fighter movie how it really should be done.
1. The top of the pile, and by some distance, is Resident Evil: Afterlife. It’s all in 3D and features stuff getting beaten up and lots of dramatic panting. It’s all ludicrous action packed capery, which of course, is perfect for the cinema because the sheer volume of the film itself can cover up the noise of teenagers slobbering over each other in the back row and the fat would-be movie critic gorging on handfuls of cheese covered crisps. $27,700,000
2. The film Takers once had the slightly interesting title of Bone Deep, but alas, the makers wanted to have something even more vague. This crime caper features an ensemble cast that includes more wooden acting than a Punch & Judy convention. We have Matt Dillon, Chris Brown, T.I., Hayden Christensen and a bunch of other people who have CVs that say “GOOD AT LOOKING MOODILY INTO CAMERA’ on them, with the exception of Chris Brown who has “LOL” in comic sans printed out 40 times. Here is a number. $6,100,000
3. George Clooney takes his well designed head into a film called The American. He even plays someone with a really American sounding name – Jack. Here, he raises one eyebrow and falls for a girl in an Italian village and hopes that no-one notices that really, all Clooney is, is an American version of Roger Moore. Directed by Anton Corbijn and shit. $5,896,000
4. Machete looks like a really silly b-movie and is an expansion of the fake trailer that was released together with Rodriguez’ and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse. Danny Trejo gets his first lead role, supported by Cheech Marin, Jeff Fahey, Michelle Rodriguez, Steven Seagal, Lindsay Lohan, Don Johnson, Jessica Alba, and Robert De Niro. Silly, silly, silly. Silly, for the record, isn’t always a bad thing. $4,200,000
5. Here, we find Drew Barrymore once more trying to revive the romantic comedy in Going the Distance. Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, but boy and girl have stupid jobs that spoil everything. Barrymore plays a writer that doesn’t spend all day picking food from her rolls of fat, sobbing uncontrollably on the sofa living on a diet of cereal, straight from the box. $3,835,000