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movie: Race to Witch Mountain
Sep. 4th, 2009 01:19 pmI've got two things to review or at least comment about.
I watched Race to Witch Mountain. It was lousy. And worse, it was lousy in the way that says, "We're going to ruin a really great idea."
I am, to almost anyone's surprise, a fan of Dwayne Johnson. I like the movies he's in and I think he does a decent job of choosing roles that play to the skills he has and the focus he wants his career to have. This wasn't one of those movies. I'm sure it looked like it in the script because it calls for action scenes and emotional scenes that would showcase his tough-guy- exterior- hides- human- side. But the way it was edited together it looked more like someone with multiple personality disorder and a big dose of crazy.
I liked the kids in this. Their roles were relatively minor and seemed to mostly involve being eerie and wooden. I'm sure that's work, but it's not really high caliber acting-acting. Hard to tell whether the parts were reduced because the children were unable to do more successfully or if the parts the children had just sucked as originally written.
However, the story was completely fucked up. They tried to play up the confusion about who was on what side and ended up making it look like the director couldn't find his own ass without it being a flagged location on his GPS. There wasn't enough time devoted to the children being good or being children or having any sort of context whatsoever. The villains in this were completely cardboard cutouts and the backstory was only sketched in after-the-fact. It'd be like watching say, Cinderella, and having ET drop in for tea with zero explanation until the end of the movie during the credits where Spielberg got a phone call from Disney.
What's worse is that there were enough big names involved in this and the plotting was fairly decent, this could have been a really nice movie. This was an easy tucked-roll dive from the 10m board and what we got was "squid falling off dock".
Next review, Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (the book, not the movie.)
I watched Race to Witch Mountain. It was lousy. And worse, it was lousy in the way that says, "We're going to ruin a really great idea."
I am, to almost anyone's surprise, a fan of Dwayne Johnson. I like the movies he's in and I think he does a decent job of choosing roles that play to the skills he has and the focus he wants his career to have. This wasn't one of those movies. I'm sure it looked like it in the script because it calls for action scenes and emotional scenes that would showcase his tough-guy- exterior- hides- human- side. But the way it was edited together it looked more like someone with multiple personality disorder and a big dose of crazy.
I liked the kids in this. Their roles were relatively minor and seemed to mostly involve being eerie and wooden. I'm sure that's work, but it's not really high caliber acting-acting. Hard to tell whether the parts were reduced because the children were unable to do more successfully or if the parts the children had just sucked as originally written.
However, the story was completely fucked up. They tried to play up the confusion about who was on what side and ended up making it look like the director couldn't find his own ass without it being a flagged location on his GPS. There wasn't enough time devoted to the children being good or being children or having any sort of context whatsoever. The villains in this were completely cardboard cutouts and the backstory was only sketched in after-the-fact. It'd be like watching say, Cinderella, and having ET drop in for tea with zero explanation until the end of the movie during the credits where Spielberg got a phone call from Disney.
What's worse is that there were enough big names involved in this and the plotting was fairly decent, this could have been a really nice movie. This was an easy tucked-roll dive from the 10m board and what we got was "squid falling off dock".
Next review, Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (the book, not the movie.)
