Race to Witch Mountain
As a general rule of thumb, it’s unwise to remake a classic film. However, remaking a film that clearly had room for improvement can sometimes work. Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Oceans 11 was vastly superior to the original, the third version of The Bounty is my preferred version, and many critics who blast remakes overlook the fact that several films they refer to as classics – The Big Sleep for instance – are remakes. I am by no means justifying the many excruciatingly bad remakes that clog up multiplexes on an increasingly regular basis, but they can sometimes turn out to be a good idea.
In the case of Race to Witch Mountain, a loose remake of Disney’s 1975 Escape to Witch Mountain, both films are much of a muchness. It’s a not exactly brilliant remake of a not exactly brilliant original. That said I have fond childhood memories of the original even if the special effects do not hold up these days. Perhaps that was the reason Disney decided to give the movie a fresh lick of paint.
The plot concerns two alien children with strange powers, Sara (AnnaSophia Robb) and Seth (Alexander Ludwig), who get into the taxi of cynical Vegas cab driver Jack Bruno (Dwayne Johnson). In order to save our world, they need to get back to their crashed alien spacecraft which is hidden deep inside Witch Mountain, a top secret government facility run by men in black types led by Henry Burke (Ciaran Hinds). Along the way they are helped by astrophysicist Dr Alex Friedman (Carla Gugino), whose presentation of a genuine alien crash landing is amusingly met with scepticism at a UFO nerd’s convention. They are also hindered by the mob, Burke’s agents and a Terminator type alien bounty hunter that looks like the Anubis alien super soldiers from Stargate.
Director Andy Fickman keeps things ticking at a nice pace, and there are some genuine thrills, spills and spectacular special effects in the many chase scenes. The family friendly screenplay ensures things are exciting and dangerous but not too violent or scary, despite several opportunities for Dwayne Johnson to get into punch-ups, and the afore-mentioned alien bounty hunter sequences. The performances are all decent, and the kids aren’t annoying, despite the unwelcome inclusion of the inevitable canine helper.
As a trade-off with the original film, the visual effects and general pace in the remake are undeniably superior. However, the children also know they are aliens immediately in the new version, whereas part of the fun of the original was the mystery as to who these children really were. They had amnesia and couldn’t remember where they really came from, only that they had to get to witch mountain. What is also irritating about the new film are the constant visual references to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (witch mountain resembles the Devil’s Tower, there’s the obligatory, “it’s-a-UFO! Oh-no-its-really-a-lorry!” shot, and so on). They are annoying because they kept reminding me how staggeringly spectacular that film is in the cinema, and made me wish I was watching that instead.
That said, for family entertainment, one can do far worse. Like the original, it’s a decent, but not brilliant film.
Simon Dillon, April 2009.
