Race to Witch Mountain

This Movie Made Me: Bored

Disney’s 1975 sci-fi family flick “Escape to Witch Mountain” is a classic example of the House of Mouse’s output at the time – not all that good, but enough to enchant kids long enough to make it a family mainstay. Now it gets the high-tech, big budget updo with “Race to Witch Mountain,” starring Disney’s newest family man Dwayne Johnson. But despite Johnson’s affable sense of humor, explosions galore and a pair of precocious aliens, the film is more of a walkathon than an actual race.

Jack Bruno (Johnson) is a down-on-his-luck cab driver in Las Vegas caught in the middle of a UFO convention – one that introduces him to everyone from two nerdy Storm Troopers to a va-voomy astrophysicist (Carla Gugino.) But suddenly Sara (AnnaSophia Robb) and Seth (Alexander Ludwig) appear in his cab with thousands of dollars in cash and geographic coordinates for a destination. After a high-speed chase with a couple of black vans and a terrifying encounter with fireball-spewing assassin, Jack begins to realize there’s something… otherworldly about those kids. They’re soon on a breakneck race to Witch Mountain, a top-secret military base that’s housing their spacecraft. And if they don’t beat the government and the assassin tracking them, Earth’s very survival will be at stake.

If that’s not how you remember the original, don’t worry. “Race to Witch Mountain” is one of those that purports to be a “re-imagining” instead of a remake. But this re-imagining throws out everything imaginative in favor of a standard let’s-run-away-from-the-bad-guys shtick we’ve seen a million times before. The villains are a bunch of government suits, distinguishable only as the serious guy, the smart guy, and the whiny guy. The brother-and-sister aliens still have their powers, though this time around they can do cool stuff like wreck cars and pass through solid materials.

These new super kids should have made this movie all the more exciting, right? Not really. Looks like director Andy Fickman (“The Game Plan”) had no idea how to make an action movie. The chase is pretty much relentless, but the movie is so dark, shaky, and fast that it is often incomprehensible. They were clearly trying to emulate the “Bourne” style of action; but the end product is messy, not masterful.

Johnson is a genuinely entertaining performer, and he tries his best here. The problem is that the script gives him no opportunities to showcase his macho-chicken sense of humor, or even his action prowess. It doesn’t give anyone any opportunities, really – except to run and spew sci-fi babble. The characters don’t have any motivation other than “that’s what you’re supposed to do in an action movie.” Case in point: when Jack and his alien chums are cornered in a small-town diner, the town sheriff and a friendly waitress come to their aid without hesitation. Why? Probably because they’re played by the original film’s stars, Kim Richards and Iake Eissinmann. It’s a nice throwback to the film’s roots, but you’d think they’d at least wonder why a guy and two kids are being chased by the government.

It’s not like a “Witch Mountain” remake/re-imagining/whatever was a bad idea, especially one molded around Johnson’s comedic action antics. But you can’t help but be bored when the best joke is an alien asking, “Are we there yet?” Too unexciting to be an action film, too unfunny to be a family comedy, “Race to Witch Mountain” is a perfect definition of “meh.”