Journey 2: The Mysterious Island has a solid helping of thrilling elements. For yours truly, seeing a cameo by Branscombe Richmond (Bobby Sixkiller from Renegade TV series) was probably the most thrilling. Man, I miss that show.

Moving along, the 94 minute 3D adventure is a dazzling epic blend of Goonies meets Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. The fam-friendly flick commits to what it is and just flows effortlessly for the most part. Kudos goes to the cast (Dwayne Johnson, Josh Hutcherson, Luis Guzman, Vanessa Hudgens, and Michael Caine) who take endless mediocre dialogue, and through their talents alone, maximize it throughout the story.

Fortunately, the world created by filmmakers is a pleasure to explore. And in a rare occasion, the 3D is actually worthwhile. While it may not be Avatar good, it’s pretty damn close. The landscapes created on the island features ancient cities, a perilous underwater escape, and an emotionally engaging action sequence in the air; all of which can be described as having smooth CGI work. Everything is visually stimulating and easily has the ability to overshadow the under-developed comedic lines.

Yeah, the audible aspects can’t quite keep up with what one’s eyes are being treated to (though Dwayne Johnson’s song lyrics were fairly creative). And the pacing seems to jerk around a few corners and forces in the clichéd moments everyone can see and hear coming a mile away. What gets one through these is, again, the cast. The five main players all want to be here. Granted, the script lets them down but they are pressing on and will entertain the audience no matter what crappy lines they’re given.

Despite its generic nature – outside of the special-effects of course – this film rests its laurels on the escapism factor that is immediately present after the rushed opening. It’s very similar to an amusement park ride; expensive thrills that may have the ability to have your heart skip a beat here-n-there. But just don’t expect an Epcot-type ride (educational and/or substantial).

That’s pretty much all there is to this, kids. It’s a film that creates a charismatic world to explore and has a game cast who finds the right pitch in their performances. And if you can swing it, shell out the extra bones for the 3D gimmick.

Overall, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island is decorated extremely well and has some exceptionally talented hosts (cast members) to guide one through a typical grand-scale fam-friendly adventure.

RATING: 4 out of 5

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Journey 2: The Mysterious Island starring Josh Hutcherson, Dwayne Johnson, Michael Caine, and Vanessa Hudgens won’t be released until February 10, 2012, but according to The Wrap audiences responded positively to test screenings over the weekend, so plans are in motion for a third film.

The site says director Brad Peyton, writers Brian Gunn, Mark Gunn and Richard Outten and the producers are attached to the third outing, and while none of the cast are confirmed, New Line are said to want everyone back.

One could call these plans very premature as Journey 2: The Mysterious Island has yet to prove itself at the box office, but the first film starring Brendan Fraser made $242 million worldwide on a $60 million budget, so the sequel could have similar success.

Below is the first trailer for Journey 2, which follows Johnson, Hutcherson and co. as they set out to find a mysterious island, rescue Michael Caine, and escape before seismic shockwaves force the island under the sea and bury its treasures forever.

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New Line has released the first trailer for Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, sequel to 2008′s Journey to the Center of the Earth, and it’s quite entertaining (if you ignore the bad CGI). We are introduced to mini-elephants, giant bees, lizards, exploding volcanoes, and Michael Caine.

Watch out for Dwayne Johnson’s'pec pop of love’ towards the end.

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island begins when young adventurer Sean (Josh Hutcherson) receives a coded distress signal from a mysterious island where no island should exist–a place of strange life forms, mountains of gold, deadly volcanoes, and more than one astonishing secret. Unable to stop him from going, Sean’s new stepfather (Dwayne Johnson) joins the quest. Together with a helicopter pilot (Luis Guzman) and his beautiful, strong-willed daughter (Vanessa Hudgens), they set out to find the island, rescue its lone inhabitant and escape before seismic shockwaves force the island under the sea and bury its treasures forever.

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island hits February 10, 2012 and is directed by Brad Peyton (Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore).

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After spending his career creating film adaptations of other people’s content, Zack Snyder (along with co-writer Steve Shibuya) delves into writing for the first time with Sucker Punch. Snyder’s trademark visuals are on full display, but anyone expecting this movie to be anything more than visual gratification will surely be disappointed. This movie is like a Cadbury cream egg that’s been pricked with a needle and slowly drained of the nougat inside: we’re upset all the substance is gone, but at least the chocolate shell is still tasty. On the most basic level, the film succeeds at being an entertaining piece of pop art that has some of the most ridiculous visuals ever committed to celluloid. What other movie has fire-breathing dragons, zeppelins, giant samurai with Gatling guns, robots, and machine gun-toting reanimated zombie Nazis?

Is Sucker Punch a good movie? Absolutely not. The script is riddled with as many cliches as there are spent bullet casings, with laughably bad dialogue and stilted performances throughout. Snyder reaches for epic ideas of survival and sacrifice, but because the film is so outrageous, it’s hard to take him seriously; it’s tough transitioning from a 10 minute slow motion action sequence to pretending to care about the death of a character in whom we’ve never truly been invested.

But was Snyder trying to make a “good movie” in the widely accepted sense of the phrase? I’m not sure, but I’m leaning towards “no” on that one, too. Sucker Punch is one of the best examples of a film playing to its demographic that I can think of; the intended audience – teenage guys – will go nuts for this thing. Come for the guns and dragons, stay for the over-sexualized fetishization of its female actors.

More on that later. First, let’s go over the plot. This should take about forty seconds, considering there really isn’t much of one. Baby Doll is institutionalized in the first five minutes of the film for an accidental crime, and in order to cope with her upcoming lobotomy (organized by her skeezy step-father and set to be performed by Jon Hamm, who is hideously underused in about three total minutes of screen time), she creates an alternate reality. The first layer replaces the asylum with an old-timey theater, in which the inmate girls are no longer prisoners to be gawked and violated by corrupt guards and cooks, but now dancers and prostitutes for high rollers and greasy politicians. When it’s Baby Doll’s turn to dance, she goes into a trance and imagines herself in another layer altogether: different each time, but with her and her fellow inmates as warriors battling robot ninjas and the like. Her mission: gain the items necessary for escape.

The entire movie uses its barely-there story as a stepping stone to jump from one action scene to the next, feeling more like an annoying interruption to a two-hour music video than a vital part of the film. Sucker Punch is half music video, half video game, complete with levels, items, and team search-and-destroy missions. But where Scott Pilgrim vs. The World used a bright color palette and the retro games of our childhoods to create a loving homage to video game culture, this movie is influenced more by the gritty dirt-stained look of more modern games like Call of Duty. Snyder eschews the typical three act structure for a level-based narrative, in which each action sequence (five in total) provides the distraction necessary for the girls to acquire a specific item in the theater layer of reality.

If you’re like me, all this talk of layers and levels may remind of you of Chris Nolan’s Inception. Warner Bros. has two of the biggest filmmakers on the planet in Snyder and Nolan, and though their styles are completely different, they’re currently working together to bring Superman back to the big screen (Snyder’s directing, Nolan’s producing). Sucker Punch is kind of like Snyder’s Inception, an original idea developed by the filmmaker after making serious bank for the studio working from other people’s concepts. And though this movie is nowhere near as effective as Nolan’s, I respect Snyder for stepping out from the shadow of other properties and trying to make it on his own. I also don’t want to imply that even the levels of reality in Sucker Punch are as well executed as Inception; instead, I bring this up to say that I had such low expectations for Sucker Punch I was pleasantly surprised when they put a bit of thought into the film’s structure instead of simply bookending it with the asylum sequences and calling it a day.

One of the biggest problems I had with the film comes in its depiction of its female characters. Listen, I love hot women as much as the next guy, but when infantilizing and fetishizing these girls reaches the point where they’re one curl away from Natalie Portman during that scene in V For Vendetta, you should probably take a step back and think about what you’re doing as a filmmaker. That’s especially true if the themes of your movie are supposed to be about empowerment. If most of this movie takes place in Baby Doll’s head, why are the characters dressed this way? To quote Morpheus, is that her “mental projection of her digital self”? (I guess technically it’s not a “digital” self here, but you get the idea.) Snyder’s trying to tell me that Baby Doll sees herself in a slutty schoolgirl outfit in her own mind’s eye, complete with charms attached to the end of her handgun? I find it a little hard to believe that she sees herself in an outfit crafted primarily to please men*, but even if Snyder thinks that’s a justifiable character decision, the message is still jumbled because on a purely visual level it enforces the very thing the film criticizes.

This is a Zack Snyder movie, after all, so let’s talk about some of the positives. Objectifying or not, the costume designs were a highlight. Jena Malone’s hair is the best direct translation of anything anime into live action I’ve ever seen. The overall production design was great, too, whether it be depicting the dingy atmosphere of the asylum or a spired castle with orcs from Lord of the Rings crawling all over it. By the time we see a giant Saturn-esque planet in the background of one of Baby Doll’s imagined worlds, you’re either along for the ride or you’re not – fortunately for me, Sucker Punch hooked me early in this regard so I could enjoy these aspects instead of resent them like many of my colleagues did.

Say what you will about the man, but Snyder can direct the hell out of an action sequence. I’ve said this before, but he knows what looks cool and uses slow motion as his tool to bring his vision to life and accent little moments to drive his point home. Same can be said here: the fight scenes have the feel of a guru behind the camera (though they all seem a bit too similar to each other for my tastes). There’s an extended sequence near the end when the girls fight robots on a train near the end which reminded me of River Tam’s epic takedown of the Reavers in Serenity (sorry Zack – Joss did it better).

You’ve probably noticed I’ve gone this far without mentioning the acting. That’s on purpose – Emily Browning seems to be a mute for half of the film, letting her sword and 9mm do most of the talking. (Her role was originally given to Amanda Seyfried, who had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts with her TV show “Big Love.”) Jena Malone and Abbie Cornish are occasionally called upon to actually emote, but  it’s really tough to care when the film itself doesn’t seem to put any importance into what anyone is saying. Hudgens and Chung are essentially worthless, filling out the posse and that’s about it. Like this movie, they all look fantastic, but there’s nothing really going on beneath the surface.

If you love seeing people fall from the sky and land with their fist in the ground, only to slowly and dramatically raise their heads with intense looks on their faces, you should love this movie: it happens more times here than in any one piece of media I can remember. Sucker Punch is fine entertainment for the pre-summer season, but I hope I’m not expecting too much when I hope for those tentpoles to be a bit smarter than this film: a shiny package, but nothing’s inside. Until next time…

*It has just come to my attention that sexy schoolgirl outfits actually have the potential to provide women with confidence instead of just objectifying them. “Sex is power,” someone once told me, and having that power over men in that way seems to be at least partially what Snyder was going for here.

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When you’re going to attempt injecting a modern spin on an overly-told classic tale, you better go for it all the way. This is one of those cases where the people behind the 91 minute Beastly had a thought – albeit a borrowed thought – but could not cultivate it to anything special. Or even fresh for that matter.

Knowing that, everyone who does venture into the theaters to gaze upon this slacking effort; should laud the powers that be who lured Neil Patrick Harris into this Beauty and the Beast meets Hunchback of Notre Dame, with a flavoring of A Christmas Carol, set in modern day high school elitism.

Kyle (Alex Pettyfer) is your typical television network high school stud, complete with a rich-n-famous daddy (Peter Krause) and attractive looks; which has an entire private school in NYC worshiping his every arrogant move. Think of the shrewd adult-like kids from Gossip Girl (and don’t feel bad if you never seen that show, it’s a good thing). Kyle is so over-the-top rude and full of himself, that a vengeful gothic student in Kendra (Mary-Kate Olsen) is out to get him. As in, put a curse on him that will have Kyle’s arresting good lucks vanish for one year. And it works.

The once Adonis-like Kyle transforms into a gruesome, skin-headed version of Edward Scissorhands. He looks as if he is dressed for Halloween and/or is attending a Marilyn Manson concert. Scars are streaked across his face and he has these strange tattoos all over his body, which make Mike Tyson’s look normal. In order to break the curse, Kyle must find someone to tell him that they love him or else he will remain in this hideous shell.

Since his father can’t bare to have a gross looking son, he sends Kyle out to an apartment just outside the city. He hires Zola (Lisa Gay Hamilton) to attend to his needs, and also invests in a personal tutor in the blind Will (Neil Patrick Harris saving the day and keeping us awake). As Kyle tells his keepers – who live with him – what the deal is, he sets his sights on the only girl in school that never seemed to judge him even at this most obnoxious. Lindy (Vanessa Hudgens).

In acting, one must sell the audience on what is happening. The director is ultimately responsible for placing the characters in proper situations and then relies on the editing and pacing of the story to bring it all together. Therefore, the audience will become vested as things unfold. Unfortunately, the magic is never realized here. First 20 minutes might be the worst set-up and/or opening yours truly has seen in a while. Besides having a struggling chopped up screenplay, the audience will also struggle to give a crap about any of the characters. The only one they will latch onto, is the borderline cameo of Neil Patrick Harris. Simply because his delivery, along with how his character indirectly mocks the story being told, is comical.

If it wasn’t for Harris and the few symbolic scenes that had a sliver of heart in the third act, this review would have been uglier than Pettyfer’s death-metal make-up job. But even I will show mercy on this worthless adaptation.

Overall, Beastly is the worst flick of 2011 thus far in my book. It had a novel (no pun) idea but failed to capitalize on any of it. The story is rushed; character relationships are forced; and besides the addition of using social networking and literally three nice substantial lines of dialogue to progress the story emotionally, the flick lacked innovation and ended up being severely untamed. Ironically, the outside of the story – concept – was way better than what was found inside – the camera lens.

RATING: 1 out of 5

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Warner Bros. has released a second trailer for Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch which is even crazier than the first. This new trailer shows us more of the story, and a lot more of the insane sequences involving dragons, robots, huge aerial battles, and giant samurai’s.

Watch below:

Set in the 1950s, Sucker Punch follows Babydoll (Browning) who is confined to a mental institution by her stepfather, who intends to have her lobotomized in five days. While there, she imagines an alternative reality to hide her from the pain, and in that world, she begins planning her escape, needing to steal five objects to help get her out before she is deflowered by a vile man.

Sucker Punch will be released in March 2011 and stars Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens, Carla Gugino, Jena Malone, and Jamie Chung.

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With all the images and posters that have been released lately it was only a matter of time before Zack Snyder and Warner Bros. unleashed the trailer for Sucker Punch upon us. I would attempt to describe the footage but it is quite difficult, as you will find out. There’s dragons, robots, huge aerial battles, and a whole lot of other crazy stuff.

This trailer is actually a shortened version of what was shown at Comic-Con, but it is still awesome.

Set in the 1950s, Sucker Punch follows Babydoll (Browning) who is confined to a mental institution by her stepfather, who intends to have her lobotomized in five days. While there, she imagines an alternative reality to hide her from the pain, and in that world, she begins planning her escape, needing to steal five objects to help get her out before she is deflowered by a vile man.

Sucker Punch will be released in March 2011 and stars Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens, Carla Gugino, Jena Malone, and Jamie Chung.

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Following our first look at Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch girls last week Warner Bros. has released a bunch of new character banners which gives us a better look at the females involved.

The banners feature Emily Browning as Baby Doll, Abbie Cornish as Sweet Pea, Jena Malone as Rocket, Vanessa Hudgens as Blondie, Carla Gugino as Madam Gorski and Jamie Chung as Amber.

Click the images for a closer look:

Set in the 1950s, Sucker Punch follows Babydoll (Browning) who is confined to a mental institution by her stepfather, who intends to have her lobotomized in five days. While there, she imagines an alternative reality to hide her from the pain, and in that world, she begins planning her escape, needing to steal five objects to help get her out before she is deflowered by a vile man.

Warner Bros. has set a March 2011 release date, and with them starting the marketing campaign so we can expect a trailer sometime soon.

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Entertainment Weekly has been getting a lot of exclusive images recently and today they released an image from Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch which stars Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens, Carla Gugino, Jena Malone, and Jamie Chung.

Set in the 1950s, Sucker Punch follows Babydoll (Browning) who is confined to a mental institution by her stepfather, who intends to have her lobotomized in five days. While there, she imagines an alternative reality to hide her from the pain, and in that world, she begins planning her escape, needing to steal five objects to help get her out before she is deflowered by a vile man.

Warner Bros. has set a March 2011 release date, and it seems they are starting the marketing so we can expect a trailer over the upcoming months.

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With Watchmen getting closer to it’s release date, director Zack Snyder is setting up his next movie, Sucker Punch. Amanda Seyfried (Mama Mia), Vanessa Hudgens (High School Musical), Abbie Cornish (Stop-Loss), Evan Rachel Wood (The Wrestler), and Emma Stone (Superbad) are in talks to join the all-female cast.

From THR:

Set in the 1950s, “Punch” follows a girl who is confined to a mental institution by her stepfather, who intends to have her lobotomized in five days. While there, she imagines an alternative reality to hide her from the pain, and in that world, she begins planning her escape, needing to steal five objects to help get her out before she is deflowered by a vile man.

Seyfried would play Babydoll, the institutionalized girl. If deals are completed, the rest would play Seyfried’s fellow inmates who also travel into the alternate reality. Hudgens would play a character named Blondie, Cornish would play Sweet Pea, and Wood would play Rocket.

Snyder, who co-wrote the script with Steve Shibuya, has described the fantasy world as ” ‘Alice in Wonderland’ with machine guns,” blending such elements as dragons, B-52 bombers and brothels.

Sucker Punch has a release date of October 2010, however filming schedules are still being sorted out.

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