Shattered, which is apparently also running around with the goofy, but slightly improved title, of Butterfly on a Wheel, is a strange pic. Technically, this isn’t a big-budget flop, that is if you believe the stated budget numbers for the film, which are suspiciously low at somewhere around $18- $20 million.Don’t get me wrong, one could make 20-40 films of Shattered quality for that mount of money, but knowing how Hollywood craps money away almost as quickly as Washington, well you get the point. Regardless, the box-office on this film is hard to pin down, but its probably around $2-3 million, so that is a minor league flop even using the suspicious $20 million numbers.So what is this masterpiece about you ask? Why not after all, it’s a movie review and not a bitch fest. Unfortunately, we’ve all seen the basics of this script before, in that it’s a “what would you do to save your precious little kidnapped child.”
Man, am I sick of those movies, I mean it’s a cliché at this point no matter what sort of McG-ing it goes through. "McG-ing." A term I have coined to describe the increasingly common process of taking a crappy product and injecting it into a slightly differently shaped mold and then placing it in a corporate wrapper. It should be noted that McGenius was not involved in Shattered/Butterfly on a Wheel; he was giving his McG goodness to some other deserving script. Mercifully, I guess.There are other clichés as well. Having the villain, perplexingly played by Pierce Bronson (who apparently is running out of cash), have a British (or Irish or whatever) accent is another cliché we could all do without. The whole not so subtle reminder from Hollywood that the British are in charge and better than us, well, man that is getting old too. Anyway, folks I digress, here’s the deal: a-hole kidnaps this vacuous rich Yuppie couple’s kid, we, the beaten and bruised audience don’t need to see this yet again. You don’t care about these characters, what you learn about them along the way actually makes you care about them even less and you wonder how the hell such a script finds its way into production. Even, if the bad guy has an English accent and there is a “twist” ending, the fact remains; we just don’t need this “film”.
The real mystery behind this film isn’t that it was made, as Hollywood loves crap like this. I believe there are car chases as well. No, the mystery here is why did Bronson and Maria Bello and Gerard Butler take their respective parts? This script wasn’t solid enough to attach these stars, period. Truth be told, I strongly suspect that this movie IS quite the studio flop as I don’t buy the budget, not with the stars attached as I can’t imagine they would have taken this script for anything other than salary or the threat of violence. Avoid this flick and pray that you are not trapped in an airplane seat with some screaming kids and nothing else to watch, or you too will be…shattered.Download Shattered full movie here.
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