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Monday, March 23, 2009
Can ‘Duplicity’ really be THAT bad?
Reading EW’s box-office wrap-up for this week, there was one stat that absolutely, totally floored me.
No, it wasn’t the fact that Knowing won the weekend with $24 million. I thought the film was borderline painful, but hey, the trailer sucked me in, so I knew other people would fall for it too. I expect it to drop off faster than Nicolas Cage’s script judgment, once word of mouth gets out.
But no, the passage that stunned me was this: “And with a woeful CinemaScore grade of C from a “one quadrant” crowd mostly comprised of older women, Duplicity doesn’t appear to be the comeback hit many hoped it would be.”
Um … wow. A C? Really??
A little background here - CinemaScore is a firm that polls audiences that attend the opening nights of movies and asks them to assign a letter grade. Usually, audiences that attend opening night are there by choice and so they tend to be generous. Therefore, a C grade does not bode well at all for Duplicity.
I’m very surprised for two reasons. First off, the reviews by and large have been quite kind. Second of all, I find it very hard to believe that Julia Roberts, Clive Owen and writer-director Tony Gilroy, who made one of my favorite films of 2007, Michael Clayton, could misfire that badly. The trailer looked delicious.
Looking through the reviews, I see a common thread popping up, in that maybe the movie was flying over people’s heads. Todd McCarthy of Variety, who quite liked the film, wrote: “The twisty, time jumping narrative forces viewers to keep on their toes, and it could well be that Duplicity is too smart for its own good as far as the popcorn masses are concerned.”
Similarly, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone was mixed-positive, saying: “Given the assault of devilishly clever plot twists that buzz-bomb your brain like a two-hour binge of quad-shot lattes, Duplicity goes down as too smart for its own good.” And perhaps Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal, who was mezzo-mezzo, cuts to the heart of the matter for many people when he writes: “Its ironic complexities tease the brain without pleasing the heart.”
Mind you, none of this will deter me from seeing Duplicity one bit. I’m still very much looking forward to catching the movie this week, and I’ve disagreed with CinemaScore before. As I recall, some audiences gave Vanilla Sky an F, and I still think that film is underrated.
But if you have seen Duplicity tell me: Is the low grade warranted? Is the film indeed “too smart?” Even if you haven’t seen the film, what do you make of all this? Is it really so bad for a film to be “too smart” when so many movies these days are too dumb?
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