Not too shabby

Rating: 8/10 (15 June 2011)

I've given this an 8/10, mainly because I'm easy on the ratings. I saw some trailers of the movie and I thought to myself, it doesn't look too bad. Whilst with a friend, she suggested that we watch it, as there was nothing else to watch at the time. Personally, I find this movie to be a sign of the times, the body of the movie is actually pretty decent, but the start and end are sort of iffy. It takes too long to get to the real nitty gritty part. Yes, the kids are funny, the way the bag and diss each other is cool, and a not too bad depiction of what kids were like before Facebook (ie. they actually talked to each other, rather than facebook messaging the person THEY ARE SITTING NEXT TO), yes I hate those people too, but let's return to the topic at hand. The movie does take a little too long to build the storyline. I think there is too much calling for movies to be character driven in the modern era. I say no! If you want characters you can relate to THAT'S WHAT A TV SHOW IS FOR. A movie is meant to last 90-150 minutes, give or take. The characters support the plot. The ending sort of came out of nowhere. I thought that the movie was just about to take it up a notch and then it finished abruptly. Is is weird that movies are now very much "oh, so I'm going to push this button, and that will make everything else that you've seen in the past 90 minutes or so basically null and void".
Now that I've gotten the negatives out of the way, lets move onto the positives. As you can probably conclude, the part of the movie I liked was the main storyline aspect of the film. The kids are decent actors. Joel Courtney, the lead plays the role of the child superhero well, Kyle Chandler brought a little of the Eric Taylor to the film, further supporting that he probably is the best "average dad" actor out there right now. The visual effects were great without being overdone like Transformers. But I like specificity, so I'll keep it at that.
Overall, I give it an 8 for a general movie, but for a movie with the backing of Abrams and Spielberg, the guys behind ET and Lost, I give it a 7. Take of that what you will, but I reckon for others, it's a 7 and a 5.5 respectively.