Here in the United States, we’ve cautiously re-accepted Shia LaBeouf into our good graces thanks to his self-aware attempts to get his life back on track, his excellent performance in Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, and his naïvely optimistic anti-Trump art projects, but things are a bit different in the United Kingdom. Over there, they apparently still think of him as the drunken rabble-rouser from the Transformers movies or—even worse—the guy who ruined the Indiana Jones series, because his film Man Down premiered in the U.K. over the weekend and literally nobody went to see it.
Well, not literally. According to Variety, the movie did manage to gross £7, which is about the price of a single movie ticket. In Man Down’s defense, it did only open in a single theater, and that one guy who bought a ticket might’ve smelled really bad or something, so it’s not like this was a wide release that utterly flopped. It’s also already available on British on-demand services, so it’s possible that some people simply stayed in their flats and watched the movie on their telly instead of taking the lift down to their lorry and driving to the cinemar with their mates.
Or maybe everyone in the U.K. read The A.V. Club’s own Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s review, in which he said Man Down is “too misbegotten to be rescued by Shia LaBeouf’s Method lead performance.” Or maybe they read a synopsis of its ridiculous plot, which would’ve revealed that it takes place across three timelines, with one about Shia LaBeouf training to become a Marine, one about LaBeouf meeting with a military therapist, and one with LaBeouf and Jai Courtney navigating a post-apocalyptic future where America is overrun with Islamist militants. Or maybe everyone was simply too busy figuring out how they’re going to get screwed by Brexit.