This review by Teri from Front Room Cinema.
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island – follow up to 2008’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, both driven, plot-wise and market-wise by the fact they’re in 3-D – is a rather schleppy family movie that lacks some serious effort. Rather than focusing on the story, which is thin and mega-clunky towards the end especially, the filmmakers have spearheaded its faddy selling point thus it feels more like a breathless, brief and ultimately shallow ride at Disneyland than a satisfying and engaging film. Maybe I should have expected less, given its premise and the fact that it is indeed a sequel to another disappointing kids movie, but with Michael Caine, an oddly charming Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and future Hunger Games star Josh Hutcherson in its cast, I was actually braced to have more than just a fleeting, tepidly-good time.
Sean (Sean Hutcherson) is a bit older, certainly less wise, and has discovered, after decoding a message transmitted over ham radio, that his grandfather (Michael Caine) is living on an uncharted island – claiming to be the island featured in Verne’s Mysterious Island, Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels – somewhere in the Pacific. In an effort to connect with Sean, Hank (Dwayne Johnson), his alarmingly misguided, pointy-nippled stepdad agrees to the trip, where they meet tour guides Gabato (Luis Guzman) and Kailani (Vanessa Hudgens) who take them there on their tour-copter. What bothered me about this was the unbelievable blind optimism of the unknown. Call me unadventurous, but I sure as hell wouldn’t jump onto a rusty old helicopter with a couple of strangers to see if the island does or does not exist, whether my grandad (who apparently is rather neglectful anyway) was there or not.
I grew up with Robin Williams’ family-goes-on-an-unexpected-adventure film Jumanji (1995), and found myself constantly comparing Journey 2; where Jumanji has an air of real peril, nothing feels truly threatening in the world Sean and his cohorts have landed, where everything that is big in our world is small, and everything we know as small is big. So sharks are the size of goldfish, and lizard eggs look like giant rocks filled with Nickelodeon gunge (less Funhouse, more Cronenberg next time, please!). As I said earlier in this review, the plot is driven mainly by how many 3-D effects the makers have managed to squeeze into an hour and a half, leaving the drama and characterization on the wayside. As soon as they crashed onto the beach, I was kind of hoping for a Lord of the Flies type of situation, where someone would be nominated as Piggy and eventually ostracized before meeting a bloody end. No such luck. Instead I got The Rock playing the ukulele and singing at me until I wanted to melt into my seat and cease to exist.
Like the rusty, pastel-painted tour helicopter that is shattered in the wind after two minutes, Journey 2 is a charmless let-down and, for lack of a better word, it was pretty naff. One thing I do have to give the film credit for though – which bumps this review up to two stars instead of one – was that the screening was full of children, none of which said a single word during the entire film. It caught their attention, but I just wish the moguls at Hollywood would put more effort into capturing their imagination.
