The Tooth Fairy stars Dwayne Johnson as minor professional league hockey player Derek Thompson, nicknamed "The Tooth Fairy" for his brutal on-ice antics that more often than not result in you guessed it rival players losing their teeth. But Derek, who is considered long past his prime by the rising young star on his team, is bitter about his NHL career not working out and he takes every opportunity to give aspiring youngsters a reality check about their own big dreams.
After Derek tells his girlfriend Carly's (Ashley Judd) daughter that there's no such thing as the tooth fairy, he gets in trouble not only with his girlfriend but with none different than the Fairy Godmother herself (Julie Andrews). Sentenced to serve as a tooth fairy in order to make amends for his dream-killing ways, Derek will occasionally sprout a pair of wings and must then rush off to perform his tooth fairy duties. Along the way, he might just get a chance to redeem himself and take another shot (literally) at his own dreams. Awwwwww.
The trailer to The Tooth Fairy made it look like quite possibly the worst movie ever made. It's not. As a piece of family entertainment, The Tooth Fairy is actually superior to The Rock's last such offering, The Game Plan. While The Tooth Fairy has its saccharine moments, it's more clever and humorous than the grating and cloying Game Plan. That said, we're still talking about a movie where The Rock spends most of his time walking around in tights and mugging for the camera.
The script by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel the writers of Parenthood, Fever Pitch, A League of Their Own and Multiplicity is pure formula, but it's a tried and true one: the heel who gets his comeuppance and subsequently turns his life around. The repartee between Johnson, Stephen Merchant and Billy Crystal is wittier than a movie with a concept like this probably deserves. (Ganz & Mandel have penned a number of Crystal's movies, including City Slickers and Mr. Saturday Night.) This is what ultimately prevents Tooth Fairy from being a truly unbearable experience.
Johnson is as engaging and likable a screen presence as always, but there are a couple of moments where his limited acting skills and cartoonish overreactions are painfully evident. He manages to skate by (no pun intended) on sheer charisma and warmth of personality. Andrews plays the latest incarnation of the regal persona she's played for the last decade, while Merchant steals the show as a bureaucratic, wannabe tooth fairy. Crystal has many witty bits (all of which were in the trailer), but his schtick soon grows tired. And, in a case of WTF casting, Judd is perfectly adequate in the generic girlfriend/single mom role.
There are no fart jokes, poop scenes, baby spit-up gags or different puerile hallmarks found in movies of this stripe. In different words, The Tooth Fairy is no Pacifier or Daddy Day Care. For those reasons alone, The Tooth Fairy is a better and more palpable piece of family entertainment that parents and their young children will probably enjoy.
Actors:Bruce Willis, James Cromwell, Ving Rhames, Radha Mitchell, Rosamund Pike
Directors:Jonathan Mostow
In Surrogates, almost everyone in the world never leaves the house anymore. There's no need, thanks to the proliferation of "surrogates," robotic doubles that look like you (only smoother and prettier) that you can control from the comfort of home. You send them out in your place and live life through their eyes and sensors, risk less and sound back at home. It started as a luxury item for people who wanted to experience, say, skydiving without risk of injury, but now everyone uses surrogates for everything.
Well, that's the way with these things, isn't it? Less than 15 years ago the Internet was an entertainment and information tool that we might use for a few minutes a day. Now it's so critical to our lives that we have it on our phones, lest we ever spend a moment without access to it. (Oh, yeah -- we also carry phones around with us completely the time.) Surrogates caught on in the same way: once a novelty, now utterly indispensable.
This is the world imagined in a graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele, now adapted as a surprisingly smart, fleet-footed sci-fi action flick. (Part of the surprise is that the screenplay was written by Michael Ferris and John D. Brancato, the duo behind Terminator Salvation and Catwoman.) No, it's not brilliant, but with swift direction by Jonathan Mostow (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, U-571) and a solid lead performance by the ever-reliable Bruce Willis, it's one of the year's more entertaining sci-fi films.
Willis plays Greer, an FBI agent who, like nearly everyone else, conducts his public life entirely via surrogate. (His model looks like him exclusively younger, with softer skin and an absurd blond head of hair.) Most of his private life is conducted that way, too -- he and his wife, Maggie (Rosamund Pike), haven't seen each different for real, in person, in ages, even in their apartment. (They have separate bedrooms. If they ever have marital relations anymore, one assumes there's a separate room for that, too, where the surrogates do it.)
In the tradition of the hard-boiled detective, Greer -- who is grizzled and careworn in person, barely resembling his more presentable surrogate (you tend to let yourself go when no one ever sees you) -- has grown weary of completely this and is wondering if mankind might have been better off before the surrogates came around. Then, as if to prove the point, someone gets killed. A mystery man deploys a strange weapon against a surrogate, frying its motherboard and somehow sending a charge back to the user and melting his brain. Needless to say, this goes against the whole point of surrogates, which is to protect the user from harm. And anyone who can melt your brain via remote control is obviously not to be trifled with.
Greer and his partner, Peters (Radha Mitchell), are assigned to the case, which grows more interesting when they learn the victim was the son of Lionel Canter (James Cromwell), the billionaire who invented surrogates and was subsequently forced out of the company that makes them. Is someone trying to get back at the inventor? Maybe one of the rising number of people who oppose surrogacy and have started living in machine-free communes on the outskirts of major cities? Maybe their leader, an enigmatic fire-and-brimstone fellow who calls himself the Prophet (Ving Rhames)?
Like most good sci-fi, the story considers the human ramifications of advanced technology while still doling out plenty of just-for-kicks entertainment and nifty "what if?" scenarios. (What if you connected to someone else's surrogate?) Greer and his wife lost a son a while back, which helps account for their desire to draw inward. There is more than one shot of a character disconnecting from his or her surrogate and crying over what he or she has seen through its eyes. (When someone disconnects, of course, the surrogate just stands there, blank-faced. If a conversation gets too intense, you can escape by literally shutting yourself down.) It's a very sad idea, this notion of trying to undergo life safely, without truly interacting with anyone.
Greer and Maggie's fractured marriage could have been explored better than it is, and Radha Mitchell's performance as Greer's FBI partner is rather wooden. (Yes, she's a robot most of the time. But so is everyone else, and they don't act like that.) Like I said, this isn't groundbreaking stuff. But it's smart and enjoyable, and the message is "go outside, nerds!," which is always nice to hear.
Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief HD Movie
Christopher Columbus' vision of the first Percy Jackson book seems to miss out slightly on the subtleties the books contain. Part of the magic of the Percy Jackson book series is the retelling of ancient Greek mythology gods, monsters, and parables within the confines of a modern Western society.
The gods, as in the ancient days, are promiscuous, creating many children with mortals. For reasons unclear, even at the end of the film when it's somewhat explained, Zeus has decreed that the gods must not visit their demigod offspring. Percy (Logan Lerman) is a young dyslexic boy who only feels at home in the water. This is fitting due to he's a demigod, son of the god Poseidon (Kevin McKidd), only he doesn't cognize it yet. His mother conceived Percy with Poseidon, but Poseidon had to leave due to of the law. On Mount Olympus, the entrance of which is atop the Empire State Building, Zeus' lightning bolt has been stolen. Zeus (Sean Bean) thinks Poseidon's son, Percy, has taken it. Why Zeus thinks this is never explained, but no matter it's what brings Percy into the picture.
It isn't long into the movie when Percy finds out his true nature. A winged beast, called a Fury, attacks him in a museum. It wants the lightning bolt. Soon Percy is whisked away by his friend Grover and his teacher Mr. Brunner (Pierce Brosnan) a Centaur in disguise. Camp Half Blood is where the sons and daughters of the gods train to become warriors, and to deal with their powers. It all seems alike a hybrid of the X-Men and Harry Potter.
The idea behind the story is an interesting one. What would the Greek gods be alike if they moved along with time? What would they look and act alike in the modern day? In the book the entrance to hell is located in a music studio in L.A.; in the movie it's just a hidden doorway in a mountainside. These are the subtleties missed out on in the film. The tiny details in the books that make them memorable are substituted by extended, and oft times hokey, CG sequences of Percy and his friends fighting monsters alike a Hydra and Minotaur.
The film is peppered with humor written for, and delivered like, a Disney Channel teeny-bopper sitcom. Many of the jokes in the film fall flat, as the lines are delivered by the actors as if there's a laughtrack coming up. The plot contains so many holes that a sponge is more solid, but many things just have to be put aside and not thought about. Percy has 14 days to learn he's a demigod, train at Camp Half Blood, then go on a journey that involves traversing the country (seriously, from Nashville to Hollywood) in a dilapidated truck to get to the Underworld. The trek that Dennis Quaid takes in The Day After Tomorrow is more believable.
Percy Jackson and his exploits will no doubt be compared over and over again to Harry Potter. Yes, at times it seems alike a cash-in on the Harry Potter hype --- Camp Half Blood, really? Putting that aside, it ends up being a fresh take on the ancient stories we grew up learning in school. I remember thinking as a kid how cool it would be if these gods actually existed and if these stories were true. It's fascinating to think of ancient gods in modern day civilization doing the same types of things they used to do in ancient times. While this movie about Percy's adventures indeed caters to a younger audience, it isn't without its charms. It will hold up with fans of the books, and with people just looking to take their children to a family-friendly film.
The first Clash of the Titans is an example of a movie you liked as a child, but when revisited as an adult it's just not as good as you remembered. Indeed, it's quite hokey and boring, and the special effects -- as dated as they were even when it came out -- are very the biggest reason why it's still talked about. But for many people of a definite age, myself included, the first Clash was often one's first exposure to Greek mythology, and at least in this reviewer's case it helped trigger a lifelong interest in the subject. That said, the acting in the film was pretty bad, with Harry Hamlin as a rather drab and passive Perseus who just has things happen to him. While Worthington's Perseus might not have a terribly complicated or first arc, at least he actually drives the narrative forward, makes his own decisions, and has objectives he wants to achieve rather than just reacting to the actions of others.
Worthington's Perseus is alike a cross between Russell Crowe's Maximus and Jason Statham; he's an intense, scowling loner who speaks in a low and gravelly voice, kicks plenty of ass, and is rather wanting in the humor department. I wouldn't go so far as to say he was wooden -- when compared to Hamlin's bland version, this Perseus at least has a pulse. Gemma Arterton as Io seemingly serves only two purposes: to arouse men and to provide Perseus with completely the necessary back-story. She succeeds on both counts. She's basically a sexpot version of Basil Exposition, but she handles her thankless role with aplomb.
Liam Neeson brings his requisite gravitas to the role of Zeus, although it'd be pretty tough not to dominate the screen when you're as tall as he is and dressed in Excalibur-esque shining armor. He ably conveys the conflicted nature of the king of the gods, who is torn between anger and eternal love for his creations. Ralph Fiennes as Hades is sort of Voldemort Lite, but he must have enjoyed the taste of that Olympian scenery since he sure chews enough of it. Danny Huston has a blink-and you'll-miss him cameo as Poseidon; why even cast an actor of his talent if you're not going to use him? (I suspect his scenes will end up on the DVD.) Ditto Elizabeth McGovern as Perseus' stepmother and, to a lesser degree, Rome's Polly Walker as the queen of Argos, who very should have known better than to trash talk the gods.
As the aging warrior Draco, Mads Mikkelsen plays the kind of world-weary mentor usually associated with Neeson. He's fine, but it's often difficult to understand many of his dialogue due to his marble mouth delivery. Pete Postlethwaite makes the most of his brief turn as Perseus' stepfather Spyros, a kindhearted but beleaguered fisherman who is tired of the gods testing him. Postlethwaite could class up and bring warmth to any bit part, and that's certainly the case here. Davalos is underutilized as Andromeda; she's not quite a cliche damsel-in-distress, but she's not developed enough as a character to truly care if she's sacrificed to the Kraken or not. At least she doesn't embarrass herself when she's tied up as bait; a lesser actress could have been grating during completely that, but Davalos underplays it just enough.
While the remake's special effects might lack the old school appeal of the original's Ray Harryhausen stop-motion creatures, they are inarguably superior in quality, with many -- e.g. Pegasus and the Kraken -- achieving moving levels of photo-realism. But whether modern filmgoers -- who are treated to CG spectacles on an almost weekly basis now -- will even vividly remember these beasts a week after watching the movie remains to be seen. At the very least, you'll believe a horse can fly. Personally, I preferred the old Calibos and Medusa, as cheesy as they were; these early incarnations are generic and polished-looking. Overall, the special effects are cool, but in this technologically advanced age is there very any reason why they wouldn't be?
