The Non-Oscar Contenders

Amidst all the heavy-duty worthy awards contenders sometimes you find yourself needing some pure popcorn entertainment. Three of them from this weekend:

National Treasure: Book of Secrets
Lets not kid ourselves, National Treasure wasn't a great movie, but what it was was fun and entertaining. In fact, it ended up being a darned sight more entertaining than the similarly themed Da Vinci Code released the same year. It is somewhat bizarre therefore, that for the sequel they seemed to have decided to have emulated The Da Vinci Code. And that's not a good thing.

So gone is any sense of a coherent plot or character motivation. The plot speeds across the globe from set-piece to set-piece, leaving more holes than in a swiss cheese and most importantly having no sense of fun. Character motivations are too obscure to interest and there are hideously glaring lines of dialogue where you can't help thinking that the scriptwriters suddenly realised that talking about native american treasure they'd better stick in something to say that murdering them all was actually wrong.

Whatever chemistry Nicolas Cage and Diane Kruger had from the first film has completely disappeared (the characters have, of course, split up since movie 1 in Hollywood cliche no. 25). Even Justin Bartha's sidekick Riley seems to have had his sense of humour surgically removed. Ed Harris does his usual snarly villain (see A History of Violence) but a last act redemption is a step too far for even this nonsense.

Its therefore left for the older generation - Jon Voight and Helen Mirren - to try an inject something watchable and in their few moments together they almost succeed, but you can't help the feeling that both are thinking they deserve better material.

Overall - 1.5/5 A definite step in the wrong direction since the first film. Save your money and wait for Indy IV instead.


Jumper

Director Doug Liman has a decent pedigree - The Bourne Identity, Mr and Mrs Smith, Go - which makes his involvement in this piece of sci-fi popcorn all the more surprising. And it is, probably by quite a long way, his weakest film to date. After all any movie with Hayden Christensen in the lead is likely to be struggling. To be fair to Christensen he has doubled his usual emotional range from scowling to include scowling in a slightly different manner.

Christensen plays David, a young man who discovers he has the ability to "jump" (teleport himself to anywhere else on the planet he already knows. Being an upright, moral sort of a fellow he uses this ability to rob banks until Samuel L Jackson turns up, one of a number of people called "paladins" whose mission is to kill all jumpers using rather questionable methods including getting at David through his childhood sweetheart Millie (Bridge to Terabithia's AnnaSophia Robb in early years, later Rachel Bilson). Then you throw into the mix possibly slightly deranged jumper Jamie Bell and thats about it.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind it ain't, but actually if you can suspend your disbelief for a while, its rather fun. Christensen is at least bearable, but Bell is on good form and Jackson is basically being Jackson. The special effects are passable and some of the switches are quite neat. There's the odd moment where the jumps happen too quickly to really follow, but on the whole the action is skillfully handled (as you'd expect from Liman).

Overall - 3/5 Great cinema it ain't, but for an evening's undemanding entertainment there's far worse around.

At least the globetrotting in Jumper looks real, which is more than you can say for

The Bucket List

A movie whose leads apparently travel all around the world without ever convincing you that they've left a cosy studio in California. The story such as it is follows Carter and Edward, two men from very different walks of life, who meet in hospital whilst dying of cancer and then team up to do all the things they want to do before dying. Of course, they have that particular movie kind of terminal cancer which is agony in hospital but then allows them to skydive, drive racing cars and visit the himilayas before passing away peacefully. Along the way there's rather predictabke things about being reconciled to estranged family members and so on.

The film marks a new low for director Rob Reiner, who seems like he will never recover from his post 80s (when he gave us the delights of Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally) slump. In fact, but for two things this would be unbearable, irredeemable sentimental tosh - those two things being Messers Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. Nicholson does his growly Jack Nicholson thing with his usual aplomb, whilst I doubt there is anybody working today who can make such twee sentimentality sound as credible and watchable as Freeman. Oh, and Sean Hayes does a decent job as Nicholson's put upon assistant.

Overall - 2/5 Only the presence of two of the most watchable of Holloywood greats makes this bearable.