When part of your job is to review DVD's, you often get sent titles you never really asked for and will probably never write about, and which invariably end up on top of a huge pile of other DVD's that may or may never be watched. Yesterday evening was one of those evenings when I felt like attacking that pile of unfulfilled promise (well, you have to give it a name that makes it seem better than it really is), and happened upon Stormbreaker. This movie was supposed to be the big Young James Bond blockbuster last summer, but somehow this never happened. I became curious, checked the internet and found out that Stormbreaker underperformed spectacularly. While it didn't do too well in it's home country England, it did downright horribly in the rest of the world. If you have a movie with a budget of $ 40 million, and it only makes about $ 600.000 in the US, for instance, you know you didn't do too well marketing it. But is the movie really as bad as the worldwide gross ($ 22 million) tells us? Or is this a case of a movie that didn't quite get the love it deserved? Naturally, I became very intrigued, but soon found out that the pre-movie excitement wasn't justified.
While Stormbreaker isn't a spectacular failure, it's also not good enough for me to question the tastes of the movie going public. One word sums it up very well: Enjoyable. And another word to add to that would be: Mess. Yes, Stormbreaker is an enjoyable mess, with reputable actors overacting to their hearts desire (and Mickey Rourke actuallty underacting, if such a thing exists, not hamming it up as spectacularly as he could have in the role of lead baddie), a story that is like a Greatest Hits Collection of bits from other movies in the genre, and heaps of potential just not done anything with. Because you can see that the filmmakers had a big bag of money to do their thing with, and the movie is actually based on a very successful series of books (of which the writer wrote the screenplay of this adaptation as well), but you never get the feeling that you are watching something that could really rival the Bond-movies, or for that matter, even something like the first Spy Kids movie.
The main actor does a good job as a young hero brought into the MI6 after his super spy uncle is killed, not knowing his uncle was a spy to begin with. And it's fun to see Alicia Silverstone back in a big role as the housekeeper to said uncle, even though her role is nothing more than screenfiller (and to add some bagage to the credits list). And yeah, there are some good action set pieces, with an interesting twist at the end of the movie, involving Mickey Rourke and a Russian hitman. But when it comes down to it, Stormbreaker just isn't spectacular enough for a movie of this type, not sharp enough, not witty enough, and not, well, super spyish enough. It's passable entertainment for a lazy Sunday evening, but I'm sure that the pile is full of movies just like that. Exactly the reason why those movies are on the pile in the first place.
**½**
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