Review: "If I Stay"

The harsh truth is that kid stars, even fantastically talented ones like Dakota Fanning, Abigail Breslin or Haley Joel Osment, basically get one shot to transition from child roles to adult ones. A few make it, but most don't.

Part of it is looks. (Again, this is tough love time.) The physical features that make for an irresistibly cute kid -- huge liquid eyes, cherubic cheeks, Popeye chin -- don't look so good on an adult face. Part of it is a talent that fails to evolve from simplistic portrayals of a child's emotions to the more nuanced, hidden expressions of grown-ups.

Chloë Grace Moretz would seem to have a leg up, since even as a kid she's usually played characters who seemed much older than their years. I first remember her from "(500) Days of Summer," playing Joseph Gordon-Levitt's younger but world-weary sister. Of course, most people know her as the pint-sized, homicidal Hit Girl from "Kick-Ass."

If "If I Stay," based on the book by Gayle Forman, is to be her jump into more adult roles, then it's a stumble. It's not that she's bad in it -- if anything, she's the best thing in the wobbly romantic supernatural drama.

The problem is the movie around her is not equal to her abilities. It's another one of these stories about people severed from their mortal existence, who must watch on from a ghostly perspective as life turns on without them. Here, as the title implies, her character is trying to decide if she should hang onto a life that she has come to see as meaningless, or return to chase a love that seems lost.

This film contained absolutely no surprises for me. I knew everything that was going to happen before it did, from the very moment Mia Hall (Moretz) first stumbles upon teen heartthrob Adam (Jamie Blackley) to the last glimpse we see of them.

I don't need a movie to constantly throw twists and surprises at me, or labor to keep the audience on edge. But when we know exactly where it's going and are just waiting around for the story to arrive, we feel like the film is just going through the motions.

The set up is that Mia and Adam are musicians from opposite worlds: he's a confident rocker, she's a wallflower cellist. Their initial courtship is almost painful to watch, as if the cocky guitarist feels like he's doing the unpopular girl a favor by wooing her.

The romance gets a little better, but not much. His band starts making a name for itself and doing tours all over the Pacific Northwest, while she's still got another year of high school to finish and an application to Julliard to fret about. The separation strains their relationship, and they're officially quits when Mia's family is involved in a terrible car accident.

I'm not giving anything away by stating that most of her family members are severely injured or killed. Mia herself wakes up next to her body, a wraith who follows herself to the hospital to witness her surgery and subsequent coma. She must decide whether to fight on or (literally) walk into the light.

This is one of those movies where people with life-threatening injuries are depicted with just a hairline cut or two on their face, their hair artfully arranged on a pillow. There's little sense of true peril.

Directed by R.J. Cutler from a script by Shauna Cross, "If I Stay" is tired and uninspired filmmaking. The romance, told entirely through flashbacks, is an uneven jumble of contradictory emotions and motivations. At one point Adam says, "I'm not going to be that a-hole who keeps you from going to Julliard." Then, two scenes later, he is the jerk who doesn't want her to go to Julliard.

I hope that the rule doesn't hold true for Chloë Grace Moretz, and that she gets another shot at a grown-up gig. Some kids deserve mulligans.

Review: "Kick-Ass 2"

"This isn't a comic book! If you die, there is no do-over! There are no sequels!"
--Dave Lizewski, aka Kick-Ass

I lost track of how many times the characters in "Kick-Ass 2" reminded me that what I was watching was real, not just pretend -- as if to give weight to the proceedings that did not otherwise exist. The joke, of course, is this is very much a comic book movie, super-heroes get do-overs all the flipping time, and it's a sequel that is trying so hard to convince us that sequels and reboots are soulless affairs with little point for existing.

I'm not sorry they made a sequel to "Kick-Ass," or that I watched it. But it feels like the original's vital juices all got sucked out of it.

The 2010 film, directed and co-written by Matthew Vaughn based on the comic books by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., was shocking, hard-edged, hyper-violent and whip-smart. The sequel is jokey, surprisingly soft around the edges, sorta-violent and not half as clever as it thinks it is.

Writer/director Jeff Wadlow takes over the reins, and to his credit the characters haven't just been frozen in time since last we saw them. Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the rail-thin high school dweeb who first started the masked vigilante craze, is now a burned-out senior who looks like he's been living at the gym. Seeing so many would-be superheroes copycatting his style finally convinces him to get back in the game.

More problematic is Hit-Girl, the pint-sized terror who spewed vile curses while literally chopping up bad guys with her arsenal of blades and guns. Now she's a trembly 15-year-old freshman, uncertain of her place in the world and feeling ostracized by the mean girls at school.

Chloë Grace Moretz is one of the brightest lights of her generation, but her character's back-and-forth dithering gets really old, really fast. We know she's eventually going to put the purple wig back on again, so everything until then feels like marking time.

There's a long sequence where Hit-Girl gets sucked into the bitchy schemes of the ruling clique, led by Brooke, deliciously played by Claudia Lee. It's like the movie goes all "Heathers" for a time, and while it's engaging enough in its right, this section belongs in another movie.

Rejected by Hit-Girl in his quest for a partner, Kick-Ass hooks up with a bunch of other supers, who dub themselves Justice 4 Ever. These include Battle Guy (revealed to be Dave's oldest friend), Dr. Gravity, Night Bitch and Insect Man. For wannabes, they sure come up with lackluster names for themselves.

They're led by Colonel Stars and Stripes, a deranged fascist played by Jim Carrey, nearly unrecognizable under a mountain of prosthetics. The Colonel teaches his disciples not to use foul language, but sees nothing wrong with siccing his attack dog (also masked) on the nether regions of his foes.

Of course, you couldn't have a super-hero story without a villain, and it's Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Chris D'Amico, former Kick-Ass friend-turned-foe after the latter killed his mob boss father.

Recognizing that his super-power is that he has gobs of money, he gives himself a new (unprintable) moniker and sets about recruiting an evil army. His own costume is salvaged from his mother's S&M outfits, which aren't improved by his wearing them.

This leads to the inevitable showdown between the two teams, which carries a certain amount of thrills -- especially Hit-Girl's faceoff with Mother Russia, a former KGB enforcer vividly portrayed by bodybuilder Olga Kurkulina.

I didn't hate "Kick-Ass 2," but I didn't particularly like it, either. The movie just sat there for me, going through the motions of the original but with the violence and swearing toned down about 40 percent. What's most clear is that very little ass is actually kicked.

Video review: "Dark Shadows"

The long, painful decline of Tim Burton from one of America's freshest filmmaking voices to hack-for-hire director has been going on for over a decade now. Other than the occasional, fleeting return to a semblance of his former form -- "Big Fish," "Corpse Bride" -- he's mostly spent his time remaking musty intellectual properties like "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "Alice in Wonderland."

Sad to say, but audiences have happily followed him down the rabbit hole of mediocrity. His recent films have made exponentially more money than his previous, more personal work.

That is, until "Dark Shadows." With this remake of the cult favorite TV show from the 1960s, audiences couldn't wrap their heads around Johnny Depp as a fish-pale vampire awoken during the 1970s and forced to co-exist with his less-than-groovy descendants (Michelle Pfeiffer and Chloë Grace Moretz among them).

Meanwhile, he must renew his battle with the witch (Eva Green) who imprisoned him long ago out of a twisted sense of love.

Gothic themes and macabre elements have always been part and parcel of the Burton package. But here it often seems like he and Depp are making a strange movie just for the sake of being strange.

The result is a curiously flat affair, not particularly scary and even less funny.

Here's hoping Burton's next movie -- yet another remake, but at least of his own short film "Frankenweenie" -- will fly higher. If not, it's time to put a stake through the heart of his career.

Video extras are a barely a step above so-so, and virtually non-existent of you don't spring for the Blu-ray edition. The DVD comes with only a single feature, a making-of featurette about the cast and their characters.

Go for the Blu-ray and you'll get eight more featurettes, focusing on such topics as the town of Collinsport, the extensive makeup process to turn the winsome Depp into a creepy bloodsucker, recapturing the fashion and music of the '70s and the film's special effects.

You also get six deleted scenes.

Movie: 2 stars out of four
Extras: 2.5 stars

Review: "Hugo"

"Hugo" is an often-delightful movie that always kept me guessing. It's got a lot of Charles Dickens mixed with a little steampunk fantasy, layered with a rich frosting of tribute to early 20th century silent filmmaking.

In a world where most movies seem to make the entirety of themselves obvious the moment they begin, it was a pleasurable experience to have a film that took its time establishing itself. There doesn't seem to be much of a coherent story for a great deal of the time, just a sprawling group of characters who don't appear to be behaving for the camera. Slowly, though, themes and urgencies coalesce.

This is perhaps the most uncharacteristic movie Martin Scorsese has made, and not just because it's a children's movie, and contains tons of CGI and was shot in 3-D, no less. For once, the 3-D is not just an add-on to pump up ticket grosses, but actually enhances the cinematic experience by adding layers and textures without spotlighting them for their own sake.

The visuals are gorgeous and lush, almost painterly in their evocation of 1930s Paris in winter. The gently twinkling lights, the crisp white snow, the people who dress up in suits and gowns for a simple trip to the train station -- it's a feast for the eyes.

No, this is a departure for Scorsese because he's not exploring his usual theme, the human savagery hidden by urban society. He has made a paean to the dreamers, magicians and tinkerers who strive to reshape their world into something beautiful. This is a story of hope and striving, not sorrow and loss.

Asa Butterfield (who starred in the criminally unappreciated "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas") plays Hugo Cabret, an orphan boy who lives inside the clocks and mechanical guts of the Paris train depot. His uncle, the timekeeper, has long ago disappeared in a drunken fling, and Hugo's clockmaker father died. So he's tragically, achingly alone.

Hugo peers through the clock faces and steam grates at the denizens of the train station, with two figures holding most of his attention. One is the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen, chewing his vowels), an unctuous man with a bad leg supported by a squeaky metal brace, whose specialty is snatching up lost children and shipping them off to the orphanage.

The other is the owner of the toy shop (Ben Kingsley), from whom Hugo has quietly been stealing parts for his own special project. Hugo and his father began repairing a strange automaton, a little metal man who sits at a writing desk. Hugo has become obsessed with getting this creation working again to see what secrets it holds.

I can't say anything more about the plot for fear of spoiling the film's charms. Suffice it to say the toymaker's goddaughter Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) will factor in heavily, plus the local flower girl (Emily Mortimer), an ancient bookshop owner (Christopher Lee), and the movies of the great silent filmmaker, Georges Méliès.

As much as I admired "Hugo," I could not give myself over entirely to it. The movie's emotional connections are tenuous -- Scorsese and screenwriter John Logan, working from Brian Selznick's book, never let things get too dark and dreary. Even the villainous station inspector, presented as a buffoon, is allowed  redemptive love interest. And the toymaker's bile over his shattered dreams washes away a little too quickly and conveniently.

I also noticed a disturbing artificiality to Moretz' performance -- little gestures and facial expressions that seemed overly theatrical and less than spontaneous. She's been terrific in everything else I've seen her in ("Let Me In," "Kick-Ass"), so I can only fault Scorsese's direction of her.

"Hugo" is gorgeous movie-making that, in end, feels mostly like an homage to itself.

3 stars out of four