Video review: "The Space Between Us"

Part science fiction, part road movie, a whole lot angst-y teenage romance, “The Space Between Us” shows the limits of what you can do with a good cast of actors.

Asa Butterfield is a talented young thespian (“Hugo,” “Ender’s Game”), Britt Robertson has stood out in some not-so-great flicks (“The Longest Yard”), and Gary Oldman is, of course, Gary Frickin’ Oldman. Toss in Carla Gugino as a supporting figure, and that’s more talent than most movies can muster.

Alas, the story (screenplay by Allan Loeb) is a mish-mash of random themes and plot threads that don’t weave themselves together in any sort of coherent way. It ends up feeling like a combination of the old David-Bowie-as-space-alien movie, “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” and “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” with a human boy standing in for the cute outworlder being chased by a small army of scientists and law enforcement.

The set-up is that Gardner Elliott (Butterfield) is the first human born on Mars – an accident, as his mother and the leader of the astronaut expedition got herself pregnant shortly before takeoff. Now 16, he’s a super-smart kid with obvious impulse issues and a clinging longing for a chance to walk on Earth -- preferably in the company of a cute teen girl.

Tulsa (Robertson) is the gal in question. They’ve been communicating via video chat and messages for a while. She’s a tough outcast sort, so they share a sense of loneliness.

Through a lot of high-tech hi jinks, Gardner manages to get himself to Earth and, eventually, hook up with Tulsa. Unfortunately, after growing up in a low-gravity atmosphere, his body isn’t very suited to Earth’s weight. Ignoring the advice from the NASA eggheads, he and Tulsa run off together for an adventure.

After landing the girl, tops on his list is finding out who is father is. All Gardner has to go by is a photo he found in his mother’s stuff. (She died, of course, because otherwise we wouldn’t have a movie.)

Leading the chase for them is Nathaniel Shepherd (Oldman), a super-rich entrepreneur who dreamt up the Mars colony years ago, but has become something of a recluse ever since. He’s very fidgety and prone to neurotic outbursts, and seems able to command government troops and resources with a phone call, for some reason.

Director Peter Chelsom (“Hannah Montana: The Movie”) can’t manage to sustain a consistent tone to the movie or a steady emotional keel from his actors, so it’s not surprising that they seem to go off in different directions from each other. For Butterfield, that means coming across rather flat, while Oldman is a whirligig of haphazard behavior. Robertson tries to break out of the teen romcom prison bars the movie puts her behind.

“The Space Between Us” is a stellar idea for a film that never achieves liftoff.

Bonus features include five deleted scenes and an alternate ending. There is also a feature-length commentary by Chelsome and a 4-minute featurette, “Love.”

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Review: "The Space Between Us"

“The Space Between Us” is a cosmically flawed science fiction love story filled with talented actors striving mightily against bad material.

Some of the scenarios and dialogue ring so false, even the talents of Gary Oldman can’t save him from seeming preposterous at times. Asa Butterfield, who anchors the movie as the first human born on Mars who years to travel to Earth, has been terrific in fare like “Hugo” and the underrated “Ender’s Game.” Here he's a bit stiff and remote.

And Britt Robertson has often been the best thing about some not very good movies like “Tomorrowland” and “The Longest Ride.” She tries hardest of all, attempting to craft a character out of meet-cute tropes and puppy-love-on-the-run contretemps.

(Though somebody needs to tell her people that her days of passing as a teen are behind.)

I didn’t buy this movie for a minute. I didn’t swallow the premise, I didn’t believe in the characters, I wasn’t engaged in the plot the film puts them through. The whole affair is just tiresome and often ridiculous.

It plays like a combination of “The Man Who Fell to Earth” and any one of a dozen teenybopper romances.

Butterfield plays Gardner Elliot. In a long, tedious and largely unnecessary exposition, we learn about how his mother (Janet Montgomery) was the lead astronaut on the mission in 2018 to permanently colonize the red planet. Except she made a little mistake and got pregnant right before the launch. (Apparently none of the 8,500 physical tests they put astronauts through detected this.)

The heads of NASA and the Genesis company that conceived the Mars mission decide to cover up the baby's existence as a potential PR disaster, especially after Gardner's mom dies during child birth. Oldman plays Nathaniel Shepherd, the Steve Jobs-like head honcho who's always flinging his hands in the air and shouting in an exasperated manner.

Flash forward 16 years, and Gardner is now a hyper-smart, mischievous kid who longs to go back to Earth -- in no small part because he's got a gal pal with whom he exchanges text and video messages. (Despite taking nearly a year to travel between the planets, apparently by 2034 data can ping back and forth without even any buffering.)

Tulsa (Robertson) is a typical tough, alienated girl struggling through high school. She takes her nickname from her hometown, because here she has absolutely no friends. There's this weird scene where she wanders into the band room and starts noodling on an electric piano, and some boys peer over the edge of the window outside to laugh at her. Then they literally chase her out of the school as she tears off angrily on her motorcycle.

Haven't these boys ever seen someone playing a piano before. (Especially in the band room.) Or don't they just have better things to do? It plays out like a fourth-grader's conception of what high school must be like.

Let's skip ahead. Gardner manages to get himself to Earth, but his body isn't suited for the heavier gravity. He skips out from the NASA facility to hunt down Tulsa, and pretty soon they're on the lam while the science guys and lawmen are on their tail. Tagging along with the chasers is Carla Gugino as Kendra, a scientist who acted as Gardner's surrogate mom while they were on Mars.

The second half of the movie is one big chase, interrupted by smooches and the sort of deep, abiding love that normally forms over the course of two days. Gardner and Tulsas commit an astonishing number of crimes along the way, including stealing innumerable cars.

This is low-budget science fiction, so the world of 2034 looks astonishing similar to the one we have right now. The cars, the clothes, the smartphones and tablets -- they didn't even dress it up a little bit. Heck, the astronauts even ride in rockets that wouldn't look out of place in "Apollo 13." The one concession is laptops with clear cases, which are kinda cool.

After hooking up with Tulsa, Gardner's big quest is to find his father. The only evidence he has is a photo of his mom with him at a beach house. I won't say more, other than if you haven't figured out the ending by the midway point, you need some lessons on Screenwriting 101. (Allan Loeb gets the blame... er, the credit, for the script.)

"The Space Between Us" contains a few nice moments, mostly intimate little cues where Butterfield and Robertson are allowed to behave like real people rather than characters in a movie. Most of the rest is otherworldly bad.

Review: "San Andreas"

"San Andreas" is like a lot of second-tier summer action movies: it's not very original, it's not very smart, it contains several gag-inducing unintentional laugh moments -- yet it'd be unfair to say that it's not breezily entertaining.

It's essentially a remake of "2012" from a few years back, with a natural disaster laying waste to large stretches of populated lands as various groups of people struggle to escape the unfolding mayhem, with ashen-faced scientists popping in occasionally to explain what's going on and warn that the worst is yet to come. It even recycles that movie's story of a divorced couple rekindling their love amidst the chaos.

Hey, I'm sure the millions of dead don't mind their fate if one family is brought back together!!

I admit I've kind of soured on Dwayne Rock's stardom. He showed some sneaky acting chops and deft comedic timing in a few offbeat roles, many of them supporting, but at some point he and his handlers decided he needs to be Schwarzenegger II. It's all popping muscles and post-smash quips these days.

(Though few in Hollywood seem to notice that he's better at invigorating existing film franchises as a sideshow player than his own star vehicles.)

"San Andreas" rehabilitated him a little bit in my estimation. He uses his big soulful eyes more than his swollen body. He plays a dad who's wounded and vulnerable, and just wants to protect his family. It makes him a lot more sympathetic as a character.

He plays Chief Pilot Ray Gaines of the L.A. Fire Department, and as we establish in an opening canyon rescue sequence, he is the best there is at flying choppers and saving lives.

But then a curious thing happens: a rolling wave of dire earthquakes start shaking California to bits, and Ray's first instinct is... to abandon his duties and go rescue his ex-wife and teen daughter instead!

That's right, he flies off in an expensive rescue helicopter that could be saving a bunch of people's lives, and instead rescues his ex-sweetie (Carla Gugino) off the top of a collapsing skyscraper. All the other people in that building trying to survive? Screw them!

Then they fly the chopper for hours north to San Francisco to rescue their daughter. It sputters out, so along the way they also have to steal a truck, a plane and a boat to continue their journey. At no point do they take the initiative to stop and save anyone else. They fly over an inferno of fires, looting and human degradation and Ray looks down and says, "That's Bakersfield," as if that explains everything.

So just so we're all clear, this is a movie about a heroic, superhuman fire/rescue guy who, when the shit really hits the fan, can be totally depended upon to GO AWOL AND OBSTINATELY REFUSE TO DO HIS JOB.

At one point Ray and his wife are cruising through the flooded streets of San Francisco on a boat -- what's an earthquake without a tsunami? -- when they pass by some random guy who also has a boat and is out finding trapped people to rescue. I kept wanting someone to turn to him and say, "Ray, isn't that what YOU'RE supposed to be doing???"

What's really ironic is that the heavy is a super-rich guy (Ioan Gruffudd) who is Ray's ex-wife's new boyfriend, who keeps abandoning people to save his own skin. But if you think about it, that's exactly what Ray does: look after his own personal self-interests rather than working for the greater good. Dang those nefarious 1-percenters.

Alexandra Daddario, with her big blue eyes, copious thigh gap and jiggling assets, plays Blake, who in some geneticist's dream factory is the daughter of Johnson and Gugino. Also tagging along are Hugo Johnstone-Burt and Art Parkinson as a pair of adorable British brothers here to provide classy accents and derring-do. Paul Giamatti plays the scientist, who finds out how to predict earthquakes using "magnetic pole rates," but alas too late to warn anyone.

There are some perilous sequences here and there, often involving people trying to dodge out of the way as buildings collapse around them. The CGI is a bit cut-rate, but gets the job done.

As cinematic fare, "San Andreas" has the same nutritional profile as the stuff out at the concession stand: tasty, empty calories.

Review: "Faster"

There's actually a lot of things to like about "Faster," but the final mixture of dissimilar elements leaves us with a strange creature whose head doesn't quite know what its tail is doing.

This new revenge drama at the very least brings Dwayne Johnson out of his self-imposed exile in kiddie flicks ("Tooth Fairy," "The Game Plan") and back into rougher fare. Let's face it, when one resembles the former pro wrestling star dubbed The Rock, he just naturally fits better in vengeful badass mode.

At first, we think director George Tillman Jr. is going for a parody, so over-the-top is the opening sequence.

Johnson plays a prison inmate who's just been sprung after 10 years hard time. After enduring a sanctimonious speech from the warden (Tom Berenger, in a throwaway cameo) he marches impatiently out of the prison gate into the desert sun. No one is there to greet him, so he literally runs to town. Waiting for him there is a souped-up Chevrolet Chevelle SS, with a gun under the seat and a list of names and addresses of people he is supposed to kill.

But screenwriting brothers Tony and Joe Gayton are actually going for something a little more sophisticated here -- a morality tale about vengeance and forgiveness, and a future enslaved to the past. Maybe that's why the principal characters are never given names, just titles. Johnson's is "Driver," since he was the wheel man on a bank robbery that went bad, leaving his brother dead and his mind fixated on slaughtering those who did it.

(The film's title is a little unclear. There are two nifty chase sequences, but I would hardly call this a car picture. And, if anything, the pace of the killings slows down the longer the movie goes on.)

Driver marches into a local telemarketing office, and without a word blows away the guy who played the bad kid in "Children of the Corn." Personally, I'm in favor of wiping out everybody that had anything to do with that movie.

Billy Bob Thornton plays Cop, a high-strung detective who's something of a laughingstock in the department. The hotshot in the squad (Carla Gugino) isn't too happy about being partnered up with a loser, who's even got the proverbial two weeks until retirement to boot.

Then there's Killer (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a British assassin with some personal issues. Rather than being a cold executioner, he's an angsty Gen Y kid who pops prescription meds and talks to his therapist over the phone while he's on the job -- in this case, taking out Driver.

Killer also has a beautiful girlfriend (Maggie Grace) who wants him to give up the assassination game -- though, for a while we think she might have a hand in it too: After a quickie wedding, they decamp to a barren patch for couples' target shooting.

All these loopy pieces spin around each other -- Driver's methodical killings, Killer's neurotic self-absorption, Cop's mumbling and dithering -- before intersecting in the finale, in ways the audience long ago guessed at.

Johnson's the steadying influence, with a face full of scars and haunted eyes, and we want the movie to be about him and his obsession with slaying those who done him wrong -- even when one or two of them express genuine remorse. But "Faster" keeps wandering off.

Thornton's Cop is such a drag, and the whole strange package of an assassin who kills out of a need for validation feels like it was plucked from another movie and sewed onto this one, Frankenstein-style.

2 stars out of four