Race to Witch Mountain Review
I’m all for The Rock continuing to have a career. In every movie I’ve seen him in he’s acquited himself as well as you could hope for, and he does that again in Race to Witch Mountain.
But here, as well as you could hope for means The Rock is mildly amusing at best.
Personally I enjoyed his action films, particularly The Rundown and Walking Tall, but the theatergoing public didn’t turn out enough, so The Rock had to take drastic measures (The Gameplan) to save his career.
He’s paired (playing their in-over-his-head cab driver) with a couple of kids playing aliens who’ve crashed on Earth looking for some precious MacGuffin (they’re both above) to largely not-funny effect.
One of the kids, AnnaSophia Robb, kind of looks a little like an alien already, so fair casting there.
But she and her co-star/co-alien Alexander Ludwig are saddled with annoyingly over-verbose lines, like:
“The vehicles behind us are indicating a pattern of pursuit!”
And see the look Ludwig is making in the picture above?
He makes that face for almost the entire movie.
Carla Gugino is in this too, as is Ciaran Hinds, but they’re both playing dull, generic roles (a discredited scholar and a humorless government official) and the performances match the characters.
Bottom line watch this and watch say, any movie Pixar has made in the last few years, and you will realize it’s bargain-brand material.
Also the FX are pretty rough
I’m talking TV movie-level rough.
And the bad guy looks like a Power Ranger
Not an exaggeration, seriously, it’s a little hilarious.
Jack Bruno
For some reason Robb says the full name, “Jack Bruno”, everytime she addresses The Rock in this movie. It’s extremely annoying and not funny at all.
-Dan Benamor