Race to Witch Mountain (2009)

  This will most likely be the last Christy pick for a while.  I'm woefully far behind on her selections and with this last semester and the Oscars, I just don't have time to get to them.  Don't worry, I'm sure they'll be back this summer, after I graduate.  Until then, just enjoy this post from her August pick.

Jack Bruno (Dwayne Johnson) is a cab driver in Las Vegas.  He used to be a wheelman for some bad people who are still after him.  After one such encounter, Jack hits the streets to start his day, then realizes he has two kids in the back seat.  Sara (AnnaSophia Robb) seems nice but has this annoying habit of calling him by his full name.  Seth (Alexander Ludwig) is a little more reserved.  Jack is not in the mood to deal with two runaways, especially after the kids offer him a large wad of cash to take them to an abandoned shack in the desert.  He follows them inside, only to discover that things are much weirder than he expected.  The children are aliens being chased by an unstoppable killing machine from their planet and by a shadowy group of government agents led by a sociopath named Burke (Ciaran Hinds) from ours.  Jack is in way over his head and reaches out to a chance meeting with a fare from earlier in the day, Dr. Alex Friedman (Carla Gugino), an astrophysicist speaking at the UFO convention.

This is supposed to be a remake/reboot/reimagining of Escape to Witch Mountain, one of my favorite non-animated Disney movies as a kid.  Comparisons were unavoidable but I tried to not let my existing nostalgia get in the way of watching this movie.  So I'm going to tell you my thoughts about it as its own entity, then go in to the side-by-side.

This is much more of a straightforward action film than I was expecting.  The star is definitely Dwayne Johnson and he handles it with the same kind of easy self-assurance as all of his other roles.  That has the potential to be quite boring, depending on how many movies of his you've seen and how often.  Fortunately, I tend to space out my Rock exposure so it was within acceptable tolerances.  There is no real room for backstory or character development.  The obligatory romance is shoehorned in but not overdone simply because every move is in service of propelling the plot forward at breakneck speed.

Okay, here's the comparison.  The whole point of Escape to Witch Mountain was the mystery about the kids, who were named Tony and Tia.  Race to Witch Mountain just flat out tells you from the opening menu that they are aliens.  Sara has the same kind of powers as Tia (telepathy/telekineses) only cranked up to 11.  Tony struggled with his but Seth is obviously superpowered.  There was also no concept of a Terminator-type super soldier sent by their own alien government to kill them.  Obviously, the biggest difference is having Dwayne Johnson instead of Eddie Albert.  He's clearly trying to go for the "crochety old man saddled unwillingly with two weird kids that he slowly comes to care for" type, but he seems much more like a hired bodyguard than a bystander chosen by chance.  Also, the pacing doesn't really allow for Johnson's character, much less the audience, to get invested in these two kids like Escape to Witch Mountain does.  Part of that is because Race to Witch Mountain swaps the villain from a creepy millionaire posing as the kids' uncle to a shadowy government agent who wants to dissect them for science.  I agree in the reasoning.  The creepy millionaire bit seems bizarre and totally dated whereas the idea that there are portions of the government whose job it is to cover up alien incursions like this are accepted as within the realm of fictional plausibility.  But it forces the film into such an accelerated pace that nothing feels like it has consequences.

Final judgment:  these are two totally separate films.  I think it's possible to like one or the other, or both, or neither, equally and without reservation.  One is a mid-70s Disney adventure film about an old man and two precocious orphans and the other is a late-00s Disney action film about The Rock as a Las Vegas cab driver helping two extraterrestrials get home.