Watched this with Fusho, Isis (8) and J (10) last weekend in Shrewsbury.
Judged within it’s own terms – lowish budget movies about kids with superhero powers – this film is way better than the really dire Sky High. However, I may well be in the minority with my mild appraisal of this one. Judging from the extreme emotion on display over at the IMDB comment boards (including “recycled, regurgitated crap from uninspired filmmakers”, “WHY DOES PETER HEWITT GET WORK, why??” “I took an 11 year old to see this movie, and he was actually sore at me”), many internet commentators have far higher expectations of Peter Hewitt than I do. All I ask is that there are no more tiny people freaking me out.
The kids that I watched this with loved it. They were jumping up and down in their seats with excitement (and no, we don’t lock them in the cellar and just let them out to watch movies). Why would any sane adult watch with them?
1. You can play spot the movie references. Much of the script is cobbled together from scraps of other scripts found by the writer in a dumpster. However, you need to have watched a ton of similar movies to get the references – the writers went for very literal parallels, for example Courtney Cox’s brainy but accident prone scientist has been snaffled wholesale from Dr Allison Reed, Julianne Moore’s brainy but accident prone scientist in Evolution
2. You can see whether there are 3 or 5 occasions when the boom mike is visible. Seriously! At a period in history that the cinema going public are gorged on CGI by control freak directors like they were digital pate producing geese, this movie is almost avent guard in its disregard for continuity.
3. You remember what Paul Verhoeven did with Starship Troopers? A parody of Fascist Imperialism that sinisterly morphed in to a full blown Neo-Con celebration of the exact same thing by the closing scenes? This film treads the same bitter path, albeit in a default kind of way, because the lazy ass script writers wouldn’t manage to sustain a critique of the wholesale slaughter of people with the letter C in their name for more than half a minute. Potentially containing some kind of message about how no good will come of a military willing to expose kids to enormous doses of radiation to exploit their superpowers, it’s reassuringly all ok by the end of the movie.
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