Doesn't live up to its potential.

Rating: 6/10 (7 December 2013)

Ender's Game is the very definition of middling. Countlessly flip-flopping from fantastic to awful within the blink of an eye, it's an extremely hard motion picture to get a handle on, enjoyment wise. The concept of teenagers leading our world's unified military - adapted from Orson Scott Card's best-selling novel - is intriguing and writer-director Gavin Hood (X-Men Origins: Wolverine) mines it for surprisingly bleak moments of social commentary, especially in the potent final 20 minutes. For a flick that has been marketed as an adolescent-friendly sci-fi romp, it's assuredly dark and thankfully doesn't pander to the lowest common denominator, but, along with some good quality CGI spectacle, this is where the film's strengths largely stop. At the other end of the scale, the acting is woefully subpar. Ranging from lazy and one-note (Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley) to uncomfortable (Asa Butterfield and Hailee Steinfeld) to downright absurd (Moises Arias as the prickly Bonzo), there's little to praise in the work of the cast. Mind you, it doesn't help that there's a lot of truly horrendous dialogue that would make even Meryl Streep and Daniel Day-Lewis look silly. With the unexpectedly sombre narrative and a gripping finale this should've been brilliant, as is it's a passable futuristic voyage that, frustratingly, doesn't live up to its potential.