Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
3/12/11
Being a genre-loving geek
at heart, I've enjoyed more than my share of two disreputable things:
blockbuster action movies and cheesy sci-fi TV shows. I Am Number
Four arrives at the crest of a tidal wave of hype from its studio Dreamworks
trumpeting its positioning as a "sci-fi Twilight" and the presence
of producer Michael Bay and Disturbia / Eagle
Eye director D.J. Caruso, all elements suggesting this is a big-budget
tentpole wisely choosing a President's Day release because of its lack
of starpower. Alas, what you actually get is a lot more like the
pilot episode for one of those cheesy TV shows I mentioned. Limited
in scale and far more interested in stocking the goods than delivering
them, Number Four packs a whole lot of idiocy into its 100-minute
running time. But it also keeps stubbornly springing to life in the
oddest places, and knows how to run the genre playbook just effectively
enough to keep the attention of people predisposed to enjoy this kind of
crap. Like, you know, me.
Number Four (Alex Pettyfer)
is a refugee from a fallen alien civilization, forever on the run with
his faithful protector Henri (Timothy Olyphant), who refuses to allow him
to build lasting bonds with the people he meets before having to once again
hit the road with the vicious Mogadorians in pursuit. Having destroyed
Four's world and determined to take ours next, the Mogs set their sights
on the nine teens with dormant superpowers and numerical names, making
the peculiar and indefensible decision to kill them in order. And
as our tale begins, Number Three (Greg Townley) has just tasted their cold
steel. So Henri takes his charge to Paradise, OH, where he's got
a secret mission to perform. Meanwhile, Number Four takes the name
John Smith and registers at the local high school, where he meets sweet
photographer Sarah (Dianna Aragon) and her ex, demented jock Mark (Jake
Abel, coming off like a Winklevoss twin in the grip of roid rage).
He also befriends outsider Sam (Callan McAuliffe), whose father vanished
while searching for signs of alien life. As “John”'s powers begin
to manifest, the Mogs close in on Paradise. But there's backup on
the way, in the person of Number Six (Teresa Palmer).
I Am Number Four's
“bad aliens invade a small town where good alien romances a local girl”
plotline has certainly been done before on more than one occassion with
both better and worse results. The Mogs aren't the most inspired
alien menaces, although I did like how they haul a giant monster around
in an eighteen-wheeler for those occasions when they need it to eat someone.
The actors are mostly steady, and a few are better than that. Olyphant
steals pretty much all his scenes in the “mentor who shouldn't start reading
any long books” role and Kevin Durand is quite good as the only Mog with
a personality. Palmer's real Australian accent helps her to make
quite an impression when she kicks down the movie's doors and demands to
be let inside, even if Number Six's prominent role in the third act pretty
much comes out of nowhere.
But what will decide whether
you find Number Four enjoyable or insufferable will depend upon
what parts of its wildly schizophrenic screenplay most capture your attention.
On the one hand, the details of its sci-fi story are almost unbearably
dumb. Try to wrap your brain around this: nine good aliens
named after numbers are hidden from evil aliens around the world, and they
are hunting them down and killing them... In. Numerical. Order.
Seriously. Should a stray bullet take out Number Six during the climax,
I guess it would be back to Mogadoria with the lot of them because their
OCDed-up plan would lie in ashes. And while I found the romance between
“John” and Sarah to be unusually sweet for this sort of movie (more on
that later), the teen romance novel notion that the people of his wisely-unnamed
world can only fall in love once is really unacceptable to anyone who's
not clutching a picture of Justin Bieber to their chest while watching
the film (kuddos to Olyphant for almost selling us that he believes this
crap while explaining it to his ward). An extended sequence at Paradise's
“Spring Scare” a Halloween event complete with Haunted Hayride held around
Easter for no conceivable reason sees Mark engaging in such third-rate
teen villainy even the young James Spader would have called him out for
being so over-the-top. And the way the movie ends is unforgivably
low-rent, apparently having no sense at all of the difference between the
kind of dangling plot threads that set up a movie sequel and a weekly TV
series (note to movie: there have been 12,000 shows where people
traveled the back roads in search of a missing person or persons and exactly
no movie franchises where they did so. So endeth the lesson).
But just when you think Number
Four is going to totally jump the tracks and have you dreaming up drinking
games, it keeps finding little moments that sing (being a huge fan of her
work on TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I'm gonna go ahead and credit
Marti Noxon, who gets the final writer's credit that generally suggests
a thorough polish). As much as his Alien Destiny stuff is boilerplate,
“John”'s dinner with Sarah's family feels both real and spontaneous, her
photographs the work of someone with a genuine artist's eye and their relationship
a real, breathing thing that this 1/9th of Superman could really use to
teach him about the positive parts of the human experience. Pettyfer
and Aragon have potent chemistry, and when the script gives them room to
feel like a real couple, they do. Durand's nameless heavy has an
understandable contempt for humanity's abundance of leisure time, and his
dressing-down of a couple of comic book geeks who promise to betray their
fellow humans in exchange for a seat at the Mog table is inspired.
And the little dog who latches onto Number Four and follows him everywhere
he goes is another nice touch.
I Am Number Four is
one of those Genre Fan Specials that won't interest anyone who hasn't seen
a hundred other movies like it, but is good enough to get the job done
for those fans who like seeing little changes worked on a formula they
enjoy. It lacks the polish and momentum Caruso brought to his two
prior directorial outings (where's Shia LaBeouf when you need him?) and
almost certainly won't spawn the franchise it covets, leaving future generations
to scratch their heads about why the CW never picked up this pilot.
I know I'd have kept watching... for a couple weeks at least. But
then I also watched every episode of Earth 2. Caveat Emptor. |
