BEFORE: I'm going to allow this one to join the others and be classified as a Father's Day film - it wasn't planned that way, but by coincidence it does seem to fit with the theme. A young man has to team up with his stepfather to find his grandfather on the Mysterious Island, so I think it fits, since step-fathers are also fathers. Grandfathers are also fathers, but hey, they have their own day, which is in September, but maybe I can accommodate them here as well.
Josh Hutcherson carries over again from "57 Seconds".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Journey to the Center of the Earth" (Movie #526)
THE PLOT: Sean Anderson partners with his mom's husband on a mission to find his grandfather, who is thought to be missing on a mythical island.
AFTER: Wow, it's been a long time since I watched the first film, 14 years I think. This sequel came out two years after that, and for some reason I just couldn't be bothered to follow up. Something popped the film back up on my radar, I guess it was running on cable again, and I thought, "Well, why not?" and a few days later I realized how important it would be to my linking -it's funny how stuff like that works out.
This film feels like it's aimed at a very specific age group, because if you're an adult you might find everything very ridiculous, but if you're too young you might not get the references to "Gulliver's Travels" and the Jules Verne novels, so maybe like 13 to 15 years old is the target demographic? Some things came straight out of the novel "The Mysterious Island", like Captain Nemo storing his Nautilus submarine at this island, the book was planned as a semi-sequel to "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", even though the movie serves as a sequel to the "Journey to the Center of the Earth" film from 2008. (In an odd coincidence, Brendan Fraser was at the theater I work in tonight, interviewing Ellen Burstyn after an anniversary screening of "Requiem for a Dream".
Look, things don't have to really make sense if the film is a lot of fun, and well, this one TRIES very hard to be a lot of fun. Sometimes it succeeds, I guess, but the 3-D effects often get in the way, Of course you can't see 3-D effects on your home TV, so now the reason for an electric eel speeding RIGHT toward the camera is gone, however the image is locked in now and can't be changed. Same goes for the underwater boulders, the torpedo fired from the submarine, and the berries bouncing off of The Rock's pecs. (I wish I were kidding about this.).
This island is also a place where big animals are small and small animals are now enormous, however this seems like a very inconsistent ecosystem. If the elephants are the size of cats and the lizards are the size of dinosaurs, how did this come about? Did evolution work differently on this island, wouldn't that have produced entirely different animals rather than ones we know which are just sized differently? Do the giant bees eat tiny elephants? And if the bees are bigger than people, how big are the birds that eat the bees? And how can they fly if they're that big? Also, NITPICK POINT, if the island sinks every 140 years, doesn't that kill off all the mammal and insect species that live there? Tiny elephants can't suddenly become aquatic for a few decades while they're waiting for the island to rise up and become dry land again, thanks to some rotating tectonic plate or whatever.
I think this was the first "jungle" movie with The Rock in it, and then later on came two "Jumanji" films, plus "Rampage" and then "Jungle Cruise", but here is where the trend started. Right?
Directed by Brad Peyton (director of "Rampage", "San Andreas")
Also starring Dwayne Johnson (last seen in "Pain & Gain"), Michael Caine (last seen in "A Shock to the System"), Luis Guzman (last seen in "Havoc" (2025)), Vanessa Hudgens (last seen in "Bad Boys: Ride or Die"), Kristin Davis (last seen in "Couples Retreat"), Anna Colwell (last seen in "Blended"), Stephen Caudill, Branscombe Richmond (last seen in "Deep Cover"), Walter Bankson (last seen in "The Conspirator")
RATING: 5 out of 10 tiny elephants
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