The Most Painful Movie I've ever watched - I Am Number Four Review
This is my attempt to write more :)
So I went to a friend's house yesterday, and it was raining cats and dogs while I was there, and I told her we should watch a movie while it was raining. We ended up with I Am Number Four, because I've never watched it, and I've always liked looking at Dianna Agron's face in Glee, so I thought, why not?
Why not, indeed. It's really the most painful movie I've watched. I had a bit of a throbbing pain in my head when I started, and maybe 3/4 into the movie and it had exploded into a full-blown headache, partly due to the numerous number of times I shouted at the screen.
I've never read the book, but the plot is easy to follow. And the script is rather straight forward too. There are some plot-holes, but plot holes in action movies are always forgivable. Michael Bay is directing it, so I was expecting the movie to be in the way of the Transformer franchise; lots of action and rather okay acting and 'vases' (or, in other terms, purely for eye candy) throughout the movie. But I did not expect the leads to be so uninspiring and flat it's so painful to watch. Particularly Dianna. She just makes every scene that she has in the movie so monotonous and puzzling and she's flatter than a two-dimensional character in comic books. No really, it's that bad.
There's a scene in the movie where Daniel/John (Number Four) had been warned to stay away from her character Sarah, delivered by her jerk ex Mark (played pretty well by SPN Adam Winchester's Jake Abel). So Number Four (NF) saw her in the hallway, and she saw him, and smiled at him, but NF just turned his back to her and walked away. Instead of looking puzzled, or knowing, or something similar to that, she looked slightly put out. Even then, this description is generous. She is literally standing there like a pose for a photo shoot set in a school. And don't get me started at the way she holds the cameras. She's using those old film cameras, but yet she holds the camera gingerly like they're made of porcelain and she doesn't focus and it all looks very contrived. You know, if Dianna doesn't know how to use the film cameras, then she should bloody well familiarise herself with them prior to filming. She looks fake in that aspect, and not for a second do I believe that she knows how to use it.
And talking about cameras, one of the story acts that doesn't make sense is the one where NF goes to see her (ostensibly to say goodbye) at a party, ends up saving her and letting her drag him back to the school to develop the film that he had given her as a parting gift. WTH. You're supposed to get the stone from your buddy Sam and then get the hell out of dodge, You're not supposed to waste precious minutes developing some stupid pictures that won't even contribute to saving your own damn life. Priorities!!
The leads are lucky they have such great supporting characters. Number Six (Teresa Palmer) really steals the entire show in the whole of fifteen minutes that she's in there, and Sam (Callan McAuliffe) does the comic relief and loyal sidekick spot on. Timothy Olymphant as Henri the guardian warrior is superb. To be fair, Alex Pettyfer, who plays the lead, actually shines in some few scenes, and those scenes are when Dianna isn't in it. What do you make of that? She acts really really badly in the movie, and that's such a disappointment. I know she can act pretty moderately, as evidenced in Glee, or at least there are some emotions that she can convey without looking like she's a robot pretending to be human pretending to have emotions, so why she's not doing so in the movie I'm not sure. Hell, let me just throw in the dog that acts better than her in this movie.
In short, I did not enjoy the movie much. The scene stealers are too few to make up for the wooden acting, and the action sequences that act as bookends to the movie really do not make it all right. And Dianna Agron should not make anymore movies until she engaged an acting coach.
So I went to a friend's house yesterday, and it was raining cats and dogs while I was there, and I told her we should watch a movie while it was raining. We ended up with I Am Number Four, because I've never watched it, and I've always liked looking at Dianna Agron's face in Glee, so I thought, why not?
Why not, indeed. It's really the most painful movie I've watched. I had a bit of a throbbing pain in my head when I started, and maybe 3/4 into the movie and it had exploded into a full-blown headache, partly due to the numerous number of times I shouted at the screen.
I've never read the book, but the plot is easy to follow. And the script is rather straight forward too. There are some plot-holes, but plot holes in action movies are always forgivable. Michael Bay is directing it, so I was expecting the movie to be in the way of the Transformer franchise; lots of action and rather okay acting and 'vases' (or, in other terms, purely for eye candy) throughout the movie. But I did not expect the leads to be so uninspiring and flat it's so painful to watch. Particularly Dianna. She just makes every scene that she has in the movie so monotonous and puzzling and she's flatter than a two-dimensional character in comic books. No really, it's that bad.
There's a scene in the movie where Daniel/John (Number Four) had been warned to stay away from her character Sarah, delivered by her jerk ex Mark (played pretty well by SPN Adam Winchester's Jake Abel). So Number Four (NF) saw her in the hallway, and she saw him, and smiled at him, but NF just turned his back to her and walked away. Instead of looking puzzled, or knowing, or something similar to that, she looked slightly put out. Even then, this description is generous. She is literally standing there like a pose for a photo shoot set in a school. And don't get me started at the way she holds the cameras. She's using those old film cameras, but yet she holds the camera gingerly like they're made of porcelain and she doesn't focus and it all looks very contrived. You know, if Dianna doesn't know how to use the film cameras, then she should bloody well familiarise herself with them prior to filming. She looks fake in that aspect, and not for a second do I believe that she knows how to use it.
And talking about cameras, one of the story acts that doesn't make sense is the one where NF goes to see her (ostensibly to say goodbye) at a party, ends up saving her and letting her drag him back to the school to develop the film that he had given her as a parting gift. WTH. You're supposed to get the stone from your buddy Sam and then get the hell out of dodge, You're not supposed to waste precious minutes developing some stupid pictures that won't even contribute to saving your own damn life. Priorities!!
The leads are lucky they have such great supporting characters. Number Six (Teresa Palmer) really steals the entire show in the whole of fifteen minutes that she's in there, and Sam (Callan McAuliffe) does the comic relief and loyal sidekick spot on. Timothy Olymphant as Henri the guardian warrior is superb. To be fair, Alex Pettyfer, who plays the lead, actually shines in some few scenes, and those scenes are when Dianna isn't in it. What do you make of that? She acts really really badly in the movie, and that's such a disappointment. I know she can act pretty moderately, as evidenced in Glee, or at least there are some emotions that she can convey without looking like she's a robot pretending to be human pretending to have emotions, so why she's not doing so in the movie I'm not sure. Hell, let me just throw in the dog that acts better than her in this movie.
In short, I did not enjoy the movie much. The scene stealers are too few to make up for the wooden acting, and the action sequences that act as bookends to the movie really do not make it all right. And Dianna Agron should not make anymore movies until she engaged an acting coach.