Directed by:
Geoffrey Sax
Starring:
Alex Pettyfer……….Alex Rider
Mickey Rourke……….Darrius Sayle
Bill Nighy……….Alan Blunt
Alicia Silverstone……….Jack Starbright
Sophie Okonedo……….Mrs. Jones
Missi Pyle……….Nadia Vole
Andy Serkis……….Mr. Grin
Ewan McGregor……….Ian Rider
The Weinstein Company and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer present Stormbreaker. Based on the Alex Rider novel by the same name. Runtime: 93 minutes. Rated: PG
Stormbreaker is one of the countless films based on teen literature that studios are trying to turn in to film franchises, hoping to strike gold on at least one of the attempts. This film is one of the misses, a big one. The story is boring, characters paper thin, and the patience one would need to sit through it without checking their watch every ten minutes is immeasurable. One hopes that studios will soon stop picking up whatever properties they can get their hands on and instead try to do some research on what they’re making. So they don’t have to cause me this much pain any more.
The movie is about a fourteen year old school boy by the name of Alex Rider, who’s lived with his uncle ever since his parents were killed in a car accident. His uncle took him on all types of adventures as a kid, spelunking, white water rafting and all different types of other adventurous activities. Also teaching him many forms of self defense and detective like skills. While Alex saw all of these gestures as his uncle simply trying to be a good mentor, what he was really doing was training Alex to one day work in the same field as him, undercover espionage. One day after school while getting dinner ready, he’s told that his uncle, much like his parents, had been killed in a tragic car accident.
Alex has a hard time accepting the fact that his uncle is gone, and after doing a little spy work of his own he discovers the truth about his uncle and his actual line of work. Young Alex gets caught snooping around, and baring the completely improbability of someone barely in their teens working for the nations top government agency, his uncles former employers at MI6 offer him a position to work for them. And the first mission they had in mind was for him to take over the case that his uncle died trying to solve. How generous of them. They send him off to a fast-tracked boot camp to help hone his skills so that he can help them take down Darrius Sayle, whom they believe is up to something with his latest invention Stormbreaker, which he plans to put in every school. When Alex discovers Darrius’ evil plan, it’s up to him to save millions of children across Great Britain.
While it tries very heard to be the one film in the teen spy genre to break out of mediocrity, there are just too many things keeping it from that very possible goal (it’s not like there’s any tough competition to begin with). There are several things in the script that make it no better than similar films of its nature. For starters, it seems like actors were given different scripts, because while several read the lines dead seriously, making the films plot seem more interesting than it has any right to be, there are several who are approaching Bruce Willis in Hudson Hawk levels of pure cheese. Both that and the combination of the writer throwing every spy/action movie cliche in to the story make it tough to watch the movie with the straight face it seems the writer and director intended us to watch it with.
