witless fun

Rating: 4/10 (27 May 2000)

My boy, who's 11, loved it. It does truly well with all kind of
pyrotechnics and flips, but there's a reason that fireworks
shows don't last over two hours. It gets boring. The plot had
no coherence, no attempt to make sense of the dilemmas
that needed solving, so there was no tension in learning if
they could be or how they would be solved. It came out flat
and humorless. And as often happens when folks take themselves deeply seriously, the dialog has all been heard
many times before, and wasn't particularly good the first
half dozen times. I did perk up to realize the girl lead's
character was named Nordoff Hall, like the authors of the
Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy. I have no idea why they did that,
but it was fun to see. Probably they were loads of little
Easter eggs like that scattered through the story, but it was
so doggone soporific my attention wandered. I just couldn't
take another loooooooooong extennnnnnnnnnded romaaaaaaaannntic shot substituting intense gaze for human life.But the people were better looking than most
soap opera folks, the cars were fast, the flames were billowing, so really, it wasn't toooooooooooooooooo bad.