It’s easy to forget that tabloid favorites Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez have day jobs that include things other than being hounded by the paparazzi and accidentally creating a bountiful menagerie of memes, but the coincidence of the high-profile married couple having blockbuster movies releasing on the same day hasn’t gone to plan after both Hypnotic and The Mother took a pounding.
Robert Rodriguez’s sci-fi action thriller had been a passion project of the filmmaker’s for the better part of two decades, only for the end result to find itself coming under fire for being little more than a Christopher Nolan clone, except on a vastly inferior scale. At the time of writing, Affleck’s latest foray into genre territory holds a Rotten Tomatoes score of 39 percent.
Meanwhile, Lopez did some running and gunning of her own over on Netflix in The Mother, which premiered on the streaming service today. Needless to say, it hasn’t avoided the platform’s regular trap of putting big names in banal shoot ’em ups, with the film’s approval rating on the aggregation site sitting at a lowly 38 percent.
On the plus side, at least they won’t be able to argue over who’s got the better end of the deal, although The Mother being a Netflix original does at least mean it doesn’t have to worry about those pesky box office dollars, which may yet prove to be in short supply for Hypnotic. Affleck does have The Flash to come, though, so a silver lining is that he’ll appear in at least one big screen effort this summer that people are more than likely going to enjoy en masse.
