Race to Witch Mountain

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

Race to Witch Mountain is a perfectly agreeable, totally non-threatening sci-fi adventure movie. That might come as a relief to those parents who didn't check the rating before they unwittingly took their seven-year-old children to Watchmen last weekend.

It stars the effortlessly appealing Dwayne Johnson (no longer The Rock) as a Vegas cab driver named Jack straight out of the Hollywood playbook of cab drivers -- that is to say, a really nice English-speaking guy who's great in a car chase and likes to make lots of sarcastic comments.

A UFO convention is in town, which is also out of the Hollywood playbook of UFO conventions: everyone there is a super-whiny pocket-protector geek who claims they've been abducted. But never mind: the story kicks off when two kids (AnnaSophia Robb and Alexander Ludwig) get in Jack's cab, and he quickly discovers that they're real aliens -- trying to get back to Witch Mountain, where an evil government agent (Ciaran Hinds) has quarantined their spaceship.

This is all a very loose adaptation of the 1975 movie Escape to Witch Mountain, which is to say it steals the basic idea in order to have brand name recognition, which will help at the box office. Here, the kids' alien backstory is actually fleshed out a little better, although it does follow the current annoying trend of giving all sci-fi films environmentally-friendly messages (see also: The Day the Earth Stood Still, Wall-E).

Complicating the plot is a lovely UFO scientist (Carla Gugino) who ends up helping Jack and the kids out, and an evil terminator-style robot who's also landed on Earth intent on killing the kids. (Actually, it might be an alien. I thought it was a robot, but then its mask gets ripped off -- one of the cooler scenes, actually.) Though its goal is to thwart the kid, all it really ends up doing is creating a complication for the evil government types. Not very smart.

There's also an altogether pointless subplot about a crime boss who's trying to force Jack to come back to work with him that goes absolutely nowhere. Nowhere. It's really hard to figure out why it exists. And the alien kids have learned English almost immediately, which suggests that they're pretty smart, but they apparently forgot to go over the lesson on contractions. You'll hear what I mean.

I'm kind of beating a dead horse with all this cynicism, though. Of course it's a remake of an older movie; of course it's entirely conventional; of course it's the most non-threatening sci-fi movie I've ever seen -- it's a big Disney spectacle. And does it work on those terms? Yeah, it does. Kids who've grown tired of going to computer-animated animal movie after computer-animated animal movie will get a big kick out of it.

But for the rest of us? The best I can say ...