Weekend Movies: ‘Bourne’ and ‘Catwoman’ Square Off
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Two action movies with vastly different approaches hit theaters nationwide on Friday as Matt Damon in “The Bourne Supremacy” battled Halle Berry in “Catwoman” for box office dominance.
“Bourne Supremacy,” like its 2002 predecessor, “The Bourne Identity,” relies on old Hollywood action — car chases and hand-to-hand combat — compared to the slick special effects, costumes and futuristic sets of comic-book-inspired “Catwoman.”
Audiences will get a nearly equal crack at seeing the films as Universal Pictures lined up 3,162 theaters for “Bourne” and Warner Bros. put “Catwoman” in 3,117 theaters, according to box office tracker Exhibitor Relations.
The pair face their strongest competition from last week’s No. 1 movie, science-fiction thriller “I, Robot” which took in $52 million in the United States and Canada.
The first “Bourne” proved to be a solid success for Universal and Damon. It earned more than $210 million worldwide for the studio, making the sequel — in a year when sequels have performed well in theaters — a relatively safe bet.
Moreover, the first movie earned strong reviews for Damon, who shed his good-boy image and clean-cut looks to take the role of stone-cold killer and trained assassin, Jason Bourne.
“He’s got a dark past, and people don’t look at me and necessarily think that,” Damon told reporters in a recent interview.
As audiences learned in the first “Bourne” film, the assassin Bourne suffers from amnesia and after nearly suffering the fate of his victims has escaped to never be bothered again.
LOOKING FOR REVENGE
Or so he thought. In the second movie, Bourne is living peacefully in a remote beach town in India when the film begins.
He starts to go after his former adversaries, and when he learns they are stationed in Berlin, he seeks revenge.
But as Bourne is starting to act, his memory begins to come back to him in flashes and as the movie progresses, he learns more about who he once was and what he did.
As he seeks vengeance for a murder that affected him, he also must consider his own past.
“(When) something terribly wrong happens to you, your first instinct is to go to get revenge, but … if you start to look at your own life and take responsibility for your own actions, the most important thing you do to rejoin the human race is start by atoning for the things that you’ve done,” Damon said.
Berry, too, seeks a little revenge as the comic book heroine and feline fatale in “Catwoman.”
She has proved she can kick butt with the best of the men as Jinx in the James Bond movie “Die Another Day” and Storm in the “X-Men” films, but comic book movies have been aimed primarily at young men. As a result, putting a woman behind the mask represents a sizable risk for Warner Bros.
The movie has earned generally poor reviews, with the New York Times, for one, saying Berry is “doing her utmost to persuade the Academy to take back her Oscar.”
Goldman Sachs financial analyst Anthony Noto estimated the movie’s production budget was around $100 million and in written research on Friday said that, given the competitive weekend and early, poor reviews, “‘Catwoman”‘ likely carries a negative financial implication” for Warner Bros.
In the movie, Berry is a meek graphic designer for a cosmetics company who learns that a new anti-aging product isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and she pays for that knowledge with her life.
But she is resurrected as Catwoman, with mysterious powers and sets out to settle the score with the people who thought they had killed her.
In the end, you won’t care.
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