Children deserve quality entertainment as much as anyone else. Pixar, for example, has consistently taken concepts that seemed strictly low-grade kiddie fare (talking toys! talking mice! talking cars!) and elevated them into high-caliber works of art. With Race to Witch Mountain – let’s just say the bar is not set as high.
Two of the leads in Mountain are aliens (crash landed on Earth to find some all-important piece of alien technology), which for any writer worth his or her word processor should mean an explosion of creativity. There are no imaginative boundaries for alien characters, and anything is fair game, so long as it stays within the commercial friendly PG rating. Therefore, it’s very frustrating that screenwriters Mark Bomback (Live Free or Die Hard) and Matt Lopez (Bedtime Stories) have either neglected to improve the characters from their adaptation of Alexander Key’s novel or independently concocted the most unimaginative aliens possible.
Humanoid extraterrestrials Sara (AnnaSophia Robb, Jumper) and Seth (Alexander Ludwig, The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising) speak in the most clichéd way possible for aliens: over-intellectually (“The vehicles behind us are indicating a pattern of pursuit,” Sara says at one point). It doesn’t really help matters that Robb and especially Ludwig emphatically spit out these awkwardly over-worded lines, making them even more aurally dissonant.
They also engage in tired fish-out-of-water misunderstandings, such as asking their cab driver Jack Bruno (Dwayne Johnson, Get Smart) if a huge wad of cash will be “sufficient” to pay for cab fare. Viewers could be forgiven for flashing back to Ben Stiller’s Simple Jack character from Tropic Thunder saying, “You make my eyes rain.”
Taking their cab fare is an ex-getaway driver turned cabbie in Bruno, played by a gently comic Johnson. As he typically does, Johnson displays the affable charm that could have once made him an immensely charismatic action star. But after watching the box office draw of his butt-kicking films dwindle domestically from 2002 to 2005 (when Doom turned in a paltry $28 million), Johnson reinvented himself as a family-friendly lead.
Indeed, the similarly family-friendly The Game Plan no doubt resurrected Johnson as a leading man, giving him his best domestic gross in a starring role since 2002. But it’s tough to escape the feeling of a promising career pacified watching “The Rock” gamely goofing around with teens in this toothless affair. The man whose catchphrase was “Can you smell what The Rock is cooking?” has been reduced to a harmless Happy Meal.
Johnson’s opponents certainly have softened up, as well. In Mountain, he faces off against an alien assassin called Siphon (Tom Woodruff Jr., AVPR: Aliens vs. Predator – Requiem), who appears to have wandered off a Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers set. For anyone even remotely familiar with the Power Rangers series, this renders the villain immediately laughable rather than menacing.
Siphon’s less-than-impressive appearance isn’t relegated to costuming; the special effects work in Mountain is noticeably low-grade, too. Given the typically high level of special effects audiences are accustomed to seeing in major feature films, Mountain comes off as TV movie-esque in its blurry CGI and plastic-looking alien orbs. Also, the spaceship of Seth and Sara is blocky and garish – even 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still had a sleeker and more visually striking ship design.
Of particular note given the release date is the recurrence of Carla Gugino, currently giving a fine performance in the challenging role as an aging superhero in Watchmen. Here Gugino is pigeonholed into exactly the same part she played in Night at the Museum, with the changes practically a game of mad libs: In Museum/Mountain, Gugino plays an enthusiastic scholar of history/astronomy who gets the chance to meet her historical/extraterrestrial idols. Both performances are as routine and dull as the characters Gugino is stuck playing.
Also completely wasted are Ciarán Hinds (The Tale of Desperaux) as a humorless government official, as well as Tom Everett Scott (Because I Said So) and Chris Marquette (Fanboys) as his conflicted and goofy aides, respectively. All these characters are thin to the point of transparency, and the actors, for the most part, are given generic dialogue.
Also weak is the logic behind many of the action scenes, given the alien powers of Sara and Seth. At one point, Sara blows out the engines of government officials’ parked cars to prevent them from chasing her. This, of course, raises the question of why she chose not to perform the same action during the prolonged chase scene earlier in the film.
All told, Mountain might mildly amuse less discerning audiences and could possibly pass the time for some kids, but that’s no excuse. The argument that it’s just a kids movie is an insult to both kids and movies.
They both deserve better than this.
dan.benamor@gmail.com
1.5 out of 5 stars
