Z/Web

Director: Luc Besson

This is a movie of two parts: it’s both live action and computer animated. A young boy becomes animated as he gets shrunk to smaller than an ant and helps rescue the Minimoys, tiny elf-like creatures that live in the gardens in his backyard. Unfortunately, just like the film is two halves, I have mixed feelings about the movie. While I love French director Besson’s movies, this one is confusingly contradictory. One the one hand, it’s deep with incredible artwork. On the other, the story is surprisingly childish, with almost melodrama live action acting and dialogue. The pace is so quick and non-stop it’s difficult to keep up; it’s as though it’s targeted at kids with Attention Deficit Disorder. There are moments when the movie pauses as though for drama and you expect something profound, but it’s just a miscue — in seconds the movie’s shooting off in some other direction, and that moment is lost. The story’s too light and flimsy, the pace too thrilling, the characters too sketchy for this to be anything but a kid’s movie, yet the obvious hard work and amazing artwork is obviously designed to appeal to adults. The result is that adults will be not too impressed, while children will probably adore this. Unfortunately, since adults are the ones who pay for the ticket, this film is not going to see the success of Pixar’s animated masterpieces which deftly attract all ages. Still, this isn’t a bad movie. It just doesn’t meet adult expectations. Also, the concept, while nicely done, feels too familiar — haven’t we all seen minature worlds often enough?

This was surprisingly good for a sequel. Unfortunately it has to live up to the salacious reputation of the original, which hurts it, since it’s really more about psychology. Sharon Stone plays her same character, and once again we aren’t sure if she’s really a murderer or incredibly unlucky, as people tend to die around her. Instead of a cop, her male counterpart this time is a court-assigned psychiatrist, whom she flirts and toys with, manipulating him in devilishly clever ways. It’s quite well done overall, and the London setting adds an interesting foreign element, but the film’s heavy burden of delivering a sexual promise weighs throughout and undermines what would have been an excellent film on it’s own. The producers even acknowledge this on the DVD extras, pointing out that the film could have been released under another name, and not as a sequel, which would have helped eliminate that burder, but of course they’d potentially lose some sales with that approach. At least as a sequel it’s guaranteed a larger opening. I don’t think the film was that successful at the box office, however, so that gamble didn’t pay off. This would have been much better with a different, less sequel-ish title, like Baser Instincts or Primary Instincts. It’s actually a good film and doesn’t deserve the unfair expectations sequelitis puts on it.