Coming up this weekend ...

Will Max Payne finally beat down the Chihuahua?

Opening today:

• It's never a good sign when a movie like Max Payne gets only 17% from Rotten Tomatoes. And then there's this love note from the Los Angeles Times:

  It's understandable that teenagers want to wolf down this stuff, but one has to wonder about the full-grown men who commit large chunks of their lives to turning out power fantasies for 13-year-olds. There's a case that still needs solving.

  But it nevertheless seems to be most prognosticators' pick for #1 this weekend.
• The big surprise in the reviews of Oliver Stone's W. is that it turns out to be a "surprisingly sympathetic" portrayal of 43. The question is whether movie audiences (as opposed to those of us who average an hour a day on the political blogs) are burned out on the subject at the moment.
• A (female) friend who caught a preview of The Secret Life Of Bees dismissed it as "the latest movie in which Dakota Fanning doesn't wash her hair". A exec at Fox, which is releasing both Bees and Max Payne, tried to convince Nikki Finke that the two movies will make "a nice dovetail", whatever that means.
• And Sex Drive gets 43% on the Tomatometer -- more than twice as much as Max Payne.

The numbers will speak -- and we will report them on Sunday.