This Week In Movie Posters: Tom Hanks And Marky Mark Are Saving The Day

This Week in Posters begins with The Whole Truth, which in Spanish is apparently called The Lawyer Of Evil, or Evil Lawyer. Spanish titles seem really on the nose, no?

Anyway, this poster is like 90% face, which is a really high face-to-total-poster-space ratio, in my mathematical opinion. Possibly too high? It suggests that this movie’s draw is curiosity over how Keanu Reeves is going to play this lawyer thing. I’m imagining Point Break‘s “I! Am! An FBI! Agent!” scene, as transposed to lawyering. Perhaps with a paunchy Keanu panting at the camera, holding a sheaf of arcane contracts in one hand and a half-eaten Clif bar in the other. (He was too busy billing hours to take a lunch break.) El Abogado Con Demasiado Trabajo, they could call it.

Hmm, I get the sense that this is supposed to be a sexual euphemism. Can anyone figure it out? I think it has something to do with the “wiener” being smooshed between “buns” that are also the breasts and the mouth. It’s right on the tip of my tongue. Anyone?

I feel like Swallows and Amazons is skipping the part where they give us a hint what this is about, and going straight to magical realism. This poster, in the absence of context, just looks like it’s supposed to be about statuesque women sailing off to conquer foreign lands (would watch, incidentally) but they cast poorly. Or maybe that’s actually a full-size frigate? All I’m saying is that when I hear a movie that’s about Amazons, I want the ladies to look big. Is that so much to ask? (*sigh*)

Oh look, they made a poster about your mom.

This is a nice poster for Sully. The big question is how there are going to be other parts to this story than this one image. The trailer seems to suggest that it’s going to be set in some alternate universe where Sully wasn’t a hero from the second he landed. It’ll be interesting to see how that works out, getting people to believe a narrative different from the one they actually lived through. Especially with ol’ One Take Eastwood directing.

I have no idea what this movie is about (is it even a movie? the posters looks like it could be a one-act play), but I’m getting the sense that it’s the kind of arthouse-type picture where critical buzz is everything. So making the poster 80% pull quotes makes a lot of sense (and in Futura no less, the official font of arthouse films!). Also, not only did they match the names and the faces, they even organized the critical praise next to the corresponding actor. Very orderly. This pleases me.

UN JUEGO SIN REGLAS! (A Game Without Rules, aka Nerve). I never noticed how similar Dave Franco and Emma Roberts’ bone structures are before. This is some strong evidence for the all-white-people-look-alike theory.

This poster is for Marauders, though PRADATOR II seems like a much better title. I don’t know what’s funnier, the The Town-inspired super scary bad guy masks, or Adrien Grenier’s “I am an FBI agent!” pose. I like to imagine Adrien Grenier on the shooting range the first day, weakly dropping his gun on his toe after the first shot, at which point the instructor notices he’s wearing flip flops.

So I get that Alicia Vikander and Michael F. Assbender are going to be having sex in this, but how does Rachel Weisz fit in? I guess that’s the cliffhanger, huh? And what a cliffhanger it is! There’s no curiosity gap like a me-wondering-how-Rachel-Weisz-is-going-to-get-involved-in-a-Vikander/Fassbender-sex-scene curiosity gap. Speaking of which, they could just call this movie “Alicia Vikander And Michael Fassbender Are Going To F*ck.”

Here’s a tip for aspiring poster designers out there: if you’re considering using 10 tiny unlabeled headshots of actors we probably wouldn’t recognize anyway at the top of your poster… uh… don’t?

I think one of them might be Horatio Sanz.

I like this poster. The fact that I don’t entirely know what I’m looking at makes me keep going back to it.

This looks like Antonio Banderas playing Tom Hanks in Angels and Demons playing Nic Cage in National Treasure. FYI, Altamira is a cave in Spain with paintings from the Paleolithic era. Maybe it has a treasure map hidden in it? Spanish treasure.

This woman looks so bored of her sex demon.

That is one hell of an intriguing image. Though maybe “Roman Polanski” has too much baggage to put “echoes of Roman Polanski” at the very top of your poster? Just a thought. I mean, you probably knew I was going to comment on that part of the poster specifically before you even read this, didn’t you. Like I said, baggage.

I like the idea that the fires of the Deepwater Horizon sent a plume of Mark Wahlberg-shaped smoke into the air like a bat signal in Gotham. As if every time a calamity happens, the universe summons Mark Wahlberg to fix it. The wind in the trees whispering “If he’d a been awn that plane on 9/11, it nevah woulda happened.”

There’s a lot going on in this Brother Nature poster. First, there’s the fact that the only two cast members named but not shown also happen to be the non-white ones. Then there’s the utter randomness of the eyelines. But of all the strange things about this poster, the strangest is that this is supposed to be Bill Pullman:

No way that’s Bill Pullman! You must be pullman my leg.

Is “odd perspective in a movie that looks like Taken” the most specific poster trope? Has to be, right?

Oh well, at least it’s better than whatever this is:

That might be the worst poster ever designed. Anyway, “a father makes his own justice” is a pretty badass tagline. And actually, I’ve seen Blood Father, and it’s much better than Taken. Seriously.

This would be a beautiful poster even without the taglines, though the gross-out promises add a whole other layer of meaning. The visual, the title, the taglines — they all contribute. It looks like an artsy depiction of a grown woman passing through a birth canal. …And I like that. I’m sorry the best poster went last.

Vince Mancini is a writer, comedian, and podcaster. A graduate of Columbia’s non-fiction MFA program, his work has appeared
on FilmDrunk, the UPROXX network, the Portland Mercury, the East Bay Express, and all over his mom’s refrigerator. Fan FilmDrunk on Facebook, find the latest movie reviews here.

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