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Walden Media sure does like to crank out mediocre fantasy flicks.
Maybe you can place the blame on Peter Jackson. Since his dazzling version of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy won 17 Oscars and hauled in a box office of nearly $3 billion worldwide, studio executives have scoured the landscape of fantasy literature in search of the next big franchise.
Walden Media is leading the way in that regard, and whether it be Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Water Horse or Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, the company continues to produce forgettable efforts in what is now an increasingly tired genre. Even Walden's headliner series, The Chronicles of Narnia, seems underwhelming when considering the renowned quality of C.S. Lewis' source material.
So when the company tabbed Gil Kenan, whose only directorial credit is the 2006 animated feature Monster House, to helm City of Ember, there was no reason to think this latest children's adventure story would be any different. And Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) or Alfonso Cuarón (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), Kenan is certainly not - he lacks the flare and imagination of Hollywood's most creative minds, and City of Ember suffers for it.
An adaptation of Jeanne DuPrau's 2003 novel, City of Ember bluntly opens "on the day the world ended." In a prologue seemingly ripped straight from The Fellowship of the Ring, we learn mankind built Ember as an underground, essentially a communist civilization with the means to isolate itself from the sorrows of the outside world - but only for 200 years.
The secret to escaping Ember lays within a special metal box each mayor passes on to his successor. Along the way, though, "fate ran another course," and the box is forgotten. (Yes, it is this vague.)
When those two centuries expire, the city's power generator starts to fail and the food supply dwindles. With the city crumbling around them, the vital box secretly falls into the unlikely hands of Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan, Atonement) and Doon Harrow (Harry Treadaway, The Disappeared), an ambitious pair of children fresh out of school.
What follows is a haphazard mess of predictable twists, flat dialogue and lackluster special effects. Familiar faces Bill Murray (The Lost City), Tim Robbins (The Lucky Ones), Martin Landau (Entourage), Mackenzie Crook (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End) and Toby Jones (soon appearing as Karl Rove in W.) all pop up along the way, but scribe Caroline Thompson (Corpse Bride) doesn't give them a whole lot to work with.
In fact, among the four Oscar honorees in the cast, the 14-year-old nominee Ronan is the only one who really holds her own. Winners Robbins and Landau seem fairly uninterested with their parts, while former nominee Murray - who hasn't starred in a decent movie since The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou - painfully sleepwalks through his scenes.
The 24-year-old Treadaway, meanwhile, is fine enough in his leading role alongside Ronan. That is, if you can ignore him being nearly a decade older than his co-star, who is supposed to be the same age (in the book, they are both 12).
City of Ember turns out to be a fantastical story with no charm and no heart. Some veiled jabs at modern political tendencies (the mayor resolves the chaos by simply forming a "task force to investigate the blackouts") provide a few amusing quips, but it's still a startlingly unoriginal attempt. One would think the young director (age: 31) with the chance to stylize a fictional world would have fashioned something a bit more bold and distinctive.
The narrative itself carries the substance and thrill of those movies they show with amusement park rides. You know, the ones with a hasty, bare-bones plot before it gets to the action scenes where your seat starts rumbling around. Although it may be a fun ride for the kids, it's just a stiff, unremarkable diversion for everyone else.
Like fantasy adaptations Eragon and The Golden Compass before it, City of Ember came packaged with an option for its sequel (The People of Sparks). Those films bombed critically, however, practically dooming the possibility of those series continuing. And from the look of it, don't expect City of Ember to be breaking that trend, either.
tfloyd1@umd.edu
Rating: 2 stars out of 5
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