With a lavish Kremlin premiere and a big budget production, Burnt by the Sun 2 should have been the cinematic event of the year. But its first weekend was a flop, recouping just $3.7 million of its $55 million budget.

The film, which continues the story of the original Burnt by the Sun, an Oscar winner in 1995, is billed as "A great film about a great war". But even tapping into the patriotic feeling surrounding the upcoming Victory Day celebrations hasn't had cinemagoers flocking to the silver screen, judging by figures released by filmz.ru. There have been numerous reports of the film going in empty theatres. In Novgorod, for example, only 38 people visited the film's premiere in the 500-seat theatre, report Novgorodskie vedomosti.

For many the problem seems to be the plot – at the end of the first film all the major characters are killed, only to be inexplicably resurrected for part two. In a cop-out reminiscent of the infamous Dallas dream sequence, where the cliff-hanging murder of popular character Bobby turned out to be entirely in the imagination of one of the characters, Nikita Mikhalkov fails to provide adequate reasons for the sudden change.

And if viewers find it hard to sympathize with the newly-resurrected characters, reviewers have been savage, saying it lacks a plot and is just a mixture of episodes with detailed description of blood and torn limbs. Kommersant's film critic wrote that the film is a "jargon mixture of newspaper cliché, comics, trash, cheap popular print, superstition, passed for faith and infantile or army humour."

Despite these problems, distributors are pinning their hopes on a revival at the start of next month, when Russia enjoys two holiday weekends.