Whether you found the final decisions of the Academy at the Oscars to be just, unjust or just out-right boring and predictable one thing is for certain – the award season is well and truly over. Now let’s get back to some big, loud and mind-numbingly stupid action/romance pictures in preparation for summer! Kicking off the season of stupidity comes enthusiastic new-comer I Am Number Four, which tells the story of the titular Number Four – one of nine infant aliens saved from his massacred planet, before its complete destruction, now living on earth. At first it’s easy to see why Number Four bears the quality mark of a Steven Spielberg producing credit; stories of lost aliens and coming of age schmaltz are no stranger to Spielberg. However the story takes on some pretty morbid overtones thanks largely to the evil intergalactic nemeses of our fair hero, pointy-teethed space Vikings who come in search of worlds to plunder and decimate. Normally the concept of “young alien boy must come of age and defend earth from seemingly motiveless and nasty looking space demons” would conjure images of Disney and Saturday-morning-kids-show levels of seriousness. In steps our saviour, Mr Caruso.
Caruso has made a name for himself by doing something rather interesting that, thankfully, Hollywood seems to be appreciating – making teen movies, with gore. The young director topped the box-office in the US a while back with his Hitchcock inspired sleeper hit “Disturbia” which saw another disgruntled teen, played by the much more watchable Shia LaBeouf, spying on a neighbour who looks suspiciously like a serial killer. So Caruso’s name alone brings a lot of darkness with it. His vision of the evil antagonists “the Mogadorians” (or “Mogs” for short) sees them doing some pretty nasty shit; when people die in Harry Potter they get shot with a flash of green light, when people die in this story they’re usually getting stabbed to death by big arse knives. Expect some, almost surreal, weirdness from the stories ghoulishly OTT villains. Having already killed the first three of the chosen survivors of planet “Lorien”, they begin their relentless hunt of our beleaguered hero. This brings us nicely to our actors, aforementioned Number Four is played by home-grown talent/pretty-face Alex Pettyfer who some may (unfortunately) remember as the young Alex Rider in the misguided movie adaptation of Anthony Horowitz’s teen-super-spy novels. Pettyfer isn’t bad, nor is he exactly anything to write home about; the role realistically doesn’t ask him to do anything other than to stand there and look kinda moody and pretty. But there are a lot of moments where you feel Pettyfer could have injected a lot more humour into the film, he just didn’t, instead spending all his time being all Edward Cullen moody and mysterious. This is the beginning of some Twilight-inspired problems that I’ll come back to later. The all-important love interest of the piece comes courtesy of Glee’s Dianna Agron. Again, Agron functions comfortably meeting any expectations but brings a nice bit of super-cute eye candy for the male audience who get may be getting tired of looking at Pettyfer being tall, dark and mysterious. The always terrific-no-matter-what-he’s-in Timothy Olyphant lights up the first hour or so of the film as Number Four’s body-guard while Number Four himself gets to grips with alien-hormones in the form of superpowers and his equally angsty affections for the young, free-spirited, Sarah (Agron).
The film opens nicely, if unspectacularly, with the death of Number Three and moves nicely along as we see the poor Number Four and his protector, Henri, demonstrate the lonely life of aliens on the run. However, it’s when our young hero decides “universe be damned, I want to go to High School and be a real boy” the film begins to slow into a swamp of problems. If you feel like you’ve heard the story of a ridiculously good-looking, abnormal and super-humanly gifted teenager going to High School and falling for a normal but kind of loner-ish and oddball girl before – it’s because you have. It’s called Twilight, in case you didn’t know, and its influence can’t help but rear its ugly head. What begins, and ends, as a very fun mild-sci-fi romp is bogged down by a middle section of pure Twilight “I’m only 17 but I’ll love you forever and ever” dross. The story, as a whole, takes most of its inspiration from Superman canon about the lonely destiny of an alien superhero , who is the last of his kind. But, and I say this seriously, people who fuel the Twilight-mania by fanatically watching the films for a bit of mindless fun, you should be aware of one simple fact: you’re potentially destroying cinema for the rest of us by making studios think this crap is all teenagers want to watch. Saying this, if you can survive the family-friendly mush of loving a girl because she takes pictures which automatically makes her super-deep, you shall be rewarded. The last 40 minutes of I Am Number Four explodes into something that can only be described as spectacular. Having been, finally, tracked down by the evil Mogs and their, actually pretty scary, giant-bat-things our hero’s make a very-welcomed gear change into kick-ass mode and Caruso comes well and truly into his element. The last 40 minutes of I Am Number Four contains more, and better, action than every Twilight and Harry Potter film combined. Teresa Palmer’s leather-clad super-bitch Number Six enters the fray and changes bland schmaltz into gymnastic gun and sword play with some added monster fighting as they take the film out with one hell of a bang. Your feeling goes straight from “I Am Number Bored” to “I Am actually pretty god-damned impressed”. With plotlines fully formed and questions to be answered the film leaves you genuinely wanting more, and nothing has had this much potential for greatness for quite a while.
5/10
Harry Potter on crack.
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