Well. It happened: they actually made a sequel to last year's cringe-worthy "Atlas Shrugged Part I," which was savaged by critics (amazing Roger Ebert quote: "the most anticlimactic non-event since Geraldo Rivera broke into Al Capone's vault"), and even in its limited theatrical run not much of a hit (making less than $5 million against its $20 million production budget). Next month, Rocky Mountain Pictures, the studio behind such surefire classics as "Billy: The Early Years of Billy Graham," anti-evolution movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," and current wing-nut hit "2016: Obama's America," will release "Atlas Shrugged Part II," which has a vague air of "not classy enough to run on SyFy Channel, despite similar-quality visual effects" next month. Here is a trailer (via Film Stage) to prove it's not some terrible nightmare you had after ingesting too many Doritos-shell tacos.
Loosely following Ayn Rand's influential objectivist novel, the cinematic take on "Atlas Shrugged" apparently involves some kind of futuristic train and a sinister-looking Ray Wise. Just last night "American Psycho" was on cable and we were wondering what happened to Samantha Mathis (she is so funny in that scene where Christian Bale takes her to dinner), well, apparently she's stuck doing bullshit like this. The budget seems to have been upped a little bit, but we were too stuck on lines like "We can all agree capitalism doesn't work," which seem primed to elicit an election year response.
Jason Beghe, Esai Morales (!), Patrick Fabian, and Kim Rhodes also star in this nonsense (it's notable that few of the cast members from the first film are returning), which also has a new poster that looks like the first lesson in a "How Not To Use Photoshop" class.
"Atlas Shrugged Part II" opens on October 12th, when it will become Paul Ryan's favorite movie of the year. Hopefully you'll have something better to do.
