Just Your Typical Action Flick With Extra 3-D Gimmicks

Rating: 2/10 (12 May 2015)

This film was shown as a pre-screening at The Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia on 5/11/15. I was working front-of-house for this event, which was well-promoted and highly anticipated. A virtual sell-out (roughly 400 in the house), but 1/3 of the tickets were Film Society waivers, Press passes and promotional giveaways.
I saw only perhaps 20 minutes of this, and, it was what I expected, a noisy, frenetic, cartoonish exercise in special effects, gratuitous violence and shock value. Ridiculous, lightweight premise and totally unbelievable characters. Visually compelling, but, that was about it...
In this, the flick will make some good coin, because such is what puts meat in the seats these days. Novelty, explosions and comic book narrative are what appeals at present in our low-brow, mainstream popular culture.
We had several walk-outs in the first half hour of the film. I asked these patrons what they didn't like about the film, and, the general response was a "waste of production money and talent." All right, this isn't everyone's cup of tea, but most of these folks were Film Society people, and, as a rule, they have higher standards and more informed taste than your average moviegoer.
At the end of the show, some departing patrons were enthusiastic about the film, but, most who I spoke to indicated that they felt it was merely a somewhat better-than-average actioner, nothing more.
Caveat emptor. When I finished my shift, I felt I was leaving a WWF event rather than an effort at meaningful filmmaking.
As a post-script on August 8, 2015: I predicted this would be a box office flop, and, I was on target.
Through today, this piece of junk has done $368 million in business worldwide. Sounds great, doesn't it? However, the studio gets 2/3 of the total drop, which means the return was around $240 million.
The total cost of the film production, advertising/promotion and distribution was roughly $250 million.
This latest installment in a worn-out franchise didn't even make back its investment during initial release.
Of course, it appealed to its low rent devotees, but, turned out, financially speaking, as "Dead Max."