? An aging superhero (Tim Allen) is forced out of retirement to train a quartet child recruits for a secret project. Chevy Chase, the Tim Allen of the 1980s, plays a bumbling scientist, Rip Torn is the primary villain, and Courteney Cox is Allen’s hero-worshiping supervisor.
+ Kate Mara, playing
the older female superhero, shows some promise. There are very occasional
laughs.
- A primary goal for
superhero movies must be to provide the superheroes with creative opportunities
to use their powers. Here, for example, the character called Houdini, who can
make himself invisible, uses his power to escape the training complex. No doubt
this is because the training regiment is amazingly stupid. A comparison with
the rather similar Sky High is all too unflattering. Zoom even
reprises the scene in that movie where various potential superheroes audition
their special abilities. Even ignoring the lack of originality, and even
ignoring that auditions shouldn’t be necessary since the candidates number
fewer than a dozen and were all presumably recruited by the government, this
part isn’t nearly as much fun as it should be. The rejects have powers such as
excessive mucus, which is funnier on paper than in the movie. And I couldn’t
help but notice that all the non-white kids end up getting the “rejected”
stamp. As for the performances by Allen and Cox, ham and cheese is the best
metaphor. It’s probably not Cox’s fault,
as her character is the very stereotype of a nerdy, clumsy, glasses-wearing
scientist until one day, she take them off and…voilà.
= *3/4 Faster than a
speeding bullet will this head toward the discount bin at the local video
store. Even for kids, there are better options.
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