I Am Number Four
Director: DJ Caruso
Starring: Alex Pettyfer, Callan McAuliffe, Timothy Olyphant
Runtime: 114 Minutes
Rating: **
This film is showing in York at Reel Cinema. Click here for more information.
Look, I’m sorry, but this has to stop. It’s just not allowed. You can’t have a sexy trio of Hollywood actors claim to be aliens from another planet without explaining why they look like a sexy trio of Hollywood actors. I mean, you shouldn’t be doing it even if you can explain it, but somewhere along the line our total lack of mental ambition meant that filmmakers can just take people’s ignorance for granted.
Of course, outside the whole humans-as-aliens thing, the movies have never been particularly ambitious when it comes to aliens as characters. Star Trek has forever made it permissible for the bad guys to be humans wearing mean-looking prosthetics, and it’s worth noting that even E.T. one of the weirdest creatures to ever terrify the living daylights out of children everywhere, was humanoid in stature.
I mention all of this because it is I Am Number Four’s chief failing – not this gaping plot hole specifically, but just laziness in general. There are so many loose plot threads lying around that it’s a wonder the screenwriters – each one of whom has worked on one of Smallville, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and, uh, Hannah Montana: The Movie – didn’t accidentally garrotte themselves.
It’s a fairly gratuitous and often-uninteresting formula: sexy alien John Smith (Alex Pettyfer) is the latest target of a bunch of murderous Vulcan-like creatures called the Mogadorians who try to track him down and kill him and his mentor/guardian, Henri (played brilliantly in the film’s only saving grace by Timothy Olyphant). Meanwhile, “John” struggles with a blossoming romance with that girl from Glee and begins a cautious friendship with that guy who’s never been in anything anyone cares about. That’s about it. Oh, and there’s also the “Number Six” to John’s “Number Four” (they have numbers) – another sexy alien played by Teresa Palmer, who’s usually good but terrible in this.
This is all bulked out by extensive and disastrous action sequences that can’t help but remind you of Transformers for their horrible style (it’s a Michael Bay Production – no more needs to be said), and it’s telling that none of the principal characters manage to engage any emotion whatsoever. Instead, it’s those that hover around the periphery that do the best job: Olyphant is brilliant, as is Jake Abel as the school bully and Kevin Durand as the lead Mogadorian. They don’t exactly save the film, but they make it a bit more bearable.
Overall, a bad film not entertaining enough to watch and just switch off: it’s too annoying. Don’t watch it, unless you like teenage blockbuster films with no real point to them. And presumably, some of you do – this film’s raked in nearly $60 million already.
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