The titular Alex Rider (Pettyfer) is an English teenager who lives with his uncle Ian (MacGregor) and his housekeeper and friend, Jack (Silverstone). Ian is in exactly one scene, where he does a whole explodey James-Bond-esque escape from some Evil Bad Guys, but then gets shot in the face by the most Irish-looking Russian ever (Lewis). At his funeral, Alex learns that he was a spy and has the "aw my uncle was lying to me" pout, but then gets recruited by Mr. Blunt (Nighy), doing his best to convince us he just ate so many lemons, and Mrs. Jones (Okonedo), who I would say is wasted in this role but that's true of the whole cast.
Turns out that Ian had been secretly training Alex to be a spy all his life, by teaching him...um, multiple languages and advanced martial arts (side note: the litany of shit Mr. Blunt gives him that's supposed to be relevant is hilarious. "You've been SCUBA diving, parasailing..."). Alex gets sent in spy on Darius Sayle (Rourke), a tech bro who couldn't be more obviously evil if he was literally eating a kitten in front of you and whose guyliner gets more intense every scene. His evil plan is to give away millions of VR headsets to British schoolchildren, but the headsets are infected with a virus!
No, not a computer virus (Alex makes that mistake, too). A literal virus that will kill them. Because Sayle was bullied as a child by the guy who is now Prime Minister (Robbie Coltrane).
Anyway, a lot of stupid action scenes ensue, including fight scenes that I thought would be good because Donnie Yen helped choreographed them, but they're all quick cuts and chopped to shit, and Red-Haired-Russian dude (the character's name is Gregorovich) drops in and blows Sayle away. There's very much "next time" moment between him and Alex, and he zooms away in a helicopter.
So, as is often the case with movies Toasty gives me, we need to discuss why exactly this movie is bad. (I've been noodling it.) There's the obvious stuff - weak script, lousy dialog, and that god-awful fight choreography - but what I think is most egregious is how hard this movie wants to be Harry Potter. That happened a lot in the early 2010s, but here in the mid-aughts, the YA franchise to beat was Harry Potter, so "established genre plus kid from normal life" was very much the vibe.
It seems like what we're going for here is taking a Roger Moore-era James Bond vibe and trying to apply it to a modern British YA sensibility, but there's a couple of things wrong with that. For one thing, Bond murders a shit-ton of people and fucks a shit-tone more. The movies are never rated R, but the content is there, meaning that Alex can't be that kind of spy and you can't even imply that he is. Also, Bond movies at least had some relationship with the tradecraft part of being a spy, but this is basically a superhero movie more than anything else.
But the tone, my god. Our opening scene has Alex' voice-over talking about how absent and kind of milquetoast his uncle is, as we're watching his uncle blow dudes up with missiles and then get shot in the face. The villain's plan isn't about world domination or fiscal control or repopulating the world like Bond's villains of the era, it's about literally murdering a generation of children because he was bullied. Our villain henchman include Mr. Grin (Serkis), a former circus performer and knife-thrower with a Joker-esque scar who just grunts and hisses, and Missi Pyle as Nadia Vole, a Russian (?) operative who reminds me a lot of Mila Jovovich's character in Zoolander.
This was supposed to be the kickoff of a franchise, and you can practically hear the producers (and the screenwriter, who was also the one who wrote the novels this is based on) yelling "SEE, KIDS?! JUST LIKE HARRY POTTER, RIGHT? BUY ALL THE MERCH!" And like, the dude must have done something right, because there are a zillion novels and comics and there's another go at putting it on screen with a series that ran three seasons and was positively reviewed. So maybe there's something in the source material worth looking at, but lordy, you wouldn't know it by this.
My Grade: D
Rewatch Value: Low
Rewatch Value: Low
Next up: CHiPS
No comments:
Post a Comment