14 DAY TRIAL // Going to show that what movie critics say is not always what the audiences want to hear, or see in a film for that matter, Beyonce’s critically panned “Obsession” swept all competition at the US box-office over the weekend. Grossing $28 million, the thriller starring the singer has proved to have a very strong opening, leaving all other films to have opened on Friday in the dust, Yahoo! News says.
After the initial showings, “Obsessed” started to get mostly bad press – reviewers were not allowed to view it before the release, presumably because the movie studio had anticipated this kind of reaction. With all this, the film showed that, at times like these, some thriller action was all the audiences needed, helping make “Obsessed” the last successful opening before the summer blockbuster season officially kicks off this Friday with “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.”
Ironically enough, “The Soloist,” starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr., despite being hailed as a possible strong contender for the upcoming Oscars, managed to gross only $9.7 million, opening at number four, behind Channing Tatums’s “Fighting.” By comparison, “Obsessed” is a movie that got close to nothing in terms of media as it was shooting and, afterwards, while it was being promoted.
Over the weekend, though, the first reviews started to come in and, as noted above, they were none too kind on the film. Everything, from the acting to the cast and the story itself, was harshly criticized, the most solid argument working against the flick being that “Fatal Attraction” and “Basic Instinct” had already done all that was to be done in the genre, which made “Obsession” just a poor copy of much greater films.
“It’s doubtful that ‘Obsessed’ will stick in the popular imagination for more than two weeks, because the movie is borderline ludicrous, and it jams its characters into rigid slots.” top critic Owen Gleiberman was saying for EW over the weekend. “‘Obsessed’ has little plausibility, but at moments it’s an entertaining bad movie, and the performers are vivid.” Gleiberman conceded, but still holding strong that the movie would perhaps slip down and out of the box-office chart in a fortnight.