BEFORE: This will finish off the Dwayne Johnson chain, as he carries over from "Doom" - a very respectable showing with 8 films, and I didn't even get to many of his films. Still avoiding the "Fast & Furious" franchise. He's been trending on Twitter this week, but apparently I had nothing to do with that, he's going to appear on the new WWE Smackdown show on Fox tomorrow. What great timing!
THE PLOT: A Las Vegas cabbie enlists the help of a UFO expert to protect two siblings with paranormal powers from the clutches of a government organization that wants to use the kids for their plans.
AFTER: First off, there are no witches in this film, it turns out. Witch Mountain is a fictional place where there's a government facility, much like Area 51 (which we're told doesn't really exist, but come on...). But that suggests we're talking about aliens here, two people who look like normal teens but have some extraordinary powers. There were two films back in the 1970's that this is roughly based on, "Escape to Witch Mountain" and "Return from Witch Mountain", and I do sort of remember them, but only vaguely. They had a lot of campy 1970's stars like Eddie Albert, Bette Davis and Denver Pyle in them, but still, that makes this some kind of sequel or reboot, rather than a direct remake.
Like "Doom" and "The Rundown", this one was made when The Rock was famous, but not quite a superstar yet. He plays a Vegas cab driver here, and like his character in "The Rundown", he owes some big important (but probably criminal) person a lot of money, and he's in the midst of working off that debt. The last thing he really needs is a couple of alien kids hiring him to drive out to the middle of nowhere, but of course that's what ends up happening. Confusion follows when he assumes that the shadowy government people chasing the kids are instead shadowy mobsters chasing him.
Then there's also a mysterious (robot?) killer who keeps turning up also. Really, that's just an excuse to have a character that The Rock can use his wrestling moves on. In case you didn't notice, in many of his films, Johnson comes pretty close to giving bad guys something like the Rock Bottom or the People's Elbow. It's almost like directors kept asking him to do the stuff he's good at, the stuff that made him famous in the first place. The rest of the film, apart from the fight scenes, is pretty blah though. I wish they'd made more out of treating the aliens like "illegal aliens", that's a great metaphor - but then, this was released back in 2009, before our government started its wave after wave of anti-immigrant hysteria.
Throughout the film, there's (quite coincidentally and conveniently) some sort of UFO convention going on at one of the Vegas casinos. But we also regularly see people dressed up in sci-fi costumes, most notably a pair of guys dressed as stormtroopers from "Star Wars", but also there are people dressed like characters from "Tron" (hey, all Disney films or future Disney films, another coincidence...). Now, it would be theoretically possible for the same casino/hotel to be hosting a UFO convention and a comic-con (where people would dress up like Star Wars characters) at the same time. But isn't it WAY more likely that some screenwriter just didn't know the difference, and thought mistakenly that for some reason, it would be appropriate to cosplay at a UFO convention?
But it's extremely appropriate that there are costumed sci-fi characters seen attending a convention, because the New York Comic-Con starts today - so I'll be working there the next two days, and I'll be back here with another film on Sunday. This was always planned as a possible spot for a break, but I had no way of knowing there would be a Comic-Con (or sci-fi con) seen in this film! Also, I didn't know this was set in and around Las Vegas, and I'll be going there myself in just over two weeks! But first I have to survive the NY Comic-Con, which isn't easy for me - in fact, it gets a little harder for me each time I work at a convention. That's why I'm only going there two days and not the full four days, I'm counting on my co-workers to cover the first and last days, and handle the load-out afterwards, which is one of the toughest parts for me. Sometimes I'm the ONLY one who works the load-out, last time I had to convince my brother-in-law to help me, and buy him dinner after. This time I'm trying to take it a little easier, and if my boss has to do the load-out, maybe he'll realize how hard I've been working at it these last few years. Probably not.
Also starring Carla Gugino (last seen in "San Andreas"), AnnaSophia Robb (last seen in "The Way Way Back"), Alexander Ludwig (last seen in "The Hunger Games"), Ciaran Hinds (last seen in "First Man"), Tom Everett Scott (last seen in "One True Thing"), Tom Woodruff Jr. (last seen in "Sorry to Bother You"), Garry Marshall (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), Cheech Marin (last heard in "Cars 3"), Chris Marquette (last seen in "Alpha Dog"), Billy Brown (last seen in Cloverfield"), Eva Huang, Kim Richards (last seen in Black Snake Moan"), Ike Eisenmann, Bob Clendenin (last seen in "Wish I Was Here"), Kevin Christy, Sam Wolfson, Bryan Fogel (last seen in "Icarus"), with cameos from Whitley Streiber, William J. Birnes, Meredith Salenger (last heard in Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens) and archive footage of Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Billionaire Boys Club"), Bill Clinton (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle").
RATING: 5 out of 10 conspiracy theorists
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