Spoofed Spartans Edge Out Stallone's Big, Blood-Drenched Comeback
As you try to wash off the last of the oil you liberally applied to your torso for your unselfconsciously shirtless Rambo outing, have a look at the weekend's box office numbers:
1. Meet The Spartans - $18.725 million
2. Rambo - $18.150 million
America, it seems, has let Sylvester Stallone down. He gives and he gives, even a good twenty years past his cinematic prime, by offering up an exhausting 236 kills in a taut, blink-and-you-missed-the-slaughter- of-half-the-Burmese-army 93 minutes and still he's subjected to the indignity of finishing behind a third-rate spoof flick.
Still, Rambo performed well enough that executive producer Harvey Weinstein is already making noise about adding another chapter to the franchise, perhaps one in which the monosyllabic, mom-jeans-wearing killing machine plies his brutal trade back in the States, tripling his staggering Myanmar body count in an utterly punishing 68 minutes in an attempt to reclaim his rightful place atop the domestic box office.
3. 27 Dresses - $13.6 million
Meanwhile, in screenings of Rambo all over the country, guys found themselves powerless to stop the dates they'd cajoled into an evening of watching their favorite semi-retired vigilante blow holes the size of cannon balls into the midsections of his swarming, rape-crazed enemies from storming out of the theater, then seeking out the warm, comforting embrace of Katherine Heigl for a second time.
4. Cloverfield - $12.7 million
With a 68% drop-off from its January-record-shattering· opening weekend, we're forced to conclude that widespread reports about Cloverfield Barf Syndrome kept the weak of stomach far from the film and its vertigo-inducing camerawork.
5. Untraceable- $11.2 million
We realize that torture porn is a dying genre, but perhaps the Untraceable's debut performance would've been stronger if the studio had more fully embraced its sensational, gruesome-murder-by-online-video premise by titling it SnuffTube.