The Fine Print In Life

Brilliant Review by Paul Verhoeven on "I am Number Four":

Feb 19 2011, 06:00AM More like I AM NUMBER TWO.

There. All the cards are now on the table. You could bail from this review now, safe in the knowledge that you know just how deeply infected said film is with the blight of cinematic shittitude. You would, however, be depriving yourself of a risk-free exanguination of I Am Number Four. You’d be missing out on a blow-by-blow breakdown of what went wrong. And you don’t want to do that.

So where to start? Well, I Am Number Four is an adaptation of a book published about six months ago. Right away that ought to set off alarm bells; it sort of gives you the same nauseous bloated tang in your belly you’d get if a friend told you he’d planned who his unborn daughter was going to marry just as she was emerging from his wife’s reluctantly pliant cave of mystery. As it turns out, though, the book isn’t a trainwreck. It tells a tale of a handful of gifted survivors from an alien apocalypse at the hands of a genocidal race called the Mogadorians.

The survivors are called Loriens, and the children who have been sent to earth are each accompanied by a warrior babysitter, who (in theory) is there to mentor them, and make sure they all grow up to realise their powers. The plan is that they then join together, head back to their homeworld, and wipe out the occupation with maximum explosions. MAXIMUM. EXPLOSIONS. The main character of the film, Number Four (for most of the film he’s called John Smith, a pseudonym given for his personal safety) is played by Alexander Pettyfer, some handsome guy. He and his minder, Henri (Timothy Olyphant), are on the run, and decide to bunk down in Paradise, Ohio. Then the explosions begin.

So how could sixty million dollars worth of production ruin such a clear cut premise? Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a labyrinthine network of brittle, intricate plot threads. Nor is it the kind of subject matter that typically attracts Mensa luminaries (though, to be fair, Geena Davis is a member, and she was in Stuart Little 2). But it has all the trappings of a high(ish) octane coming of age tale; it has broad, endearingly clumsy metaphors for stepping bleary eyed across the threshold of puberty into the vista of adulthood (like I said, clumsy), it has the potential for awesome training montages, it has hidden identities, car chases, superpowers, romance... it’s practically designed to ruthlessly nail the teenage market. It appeals to jocks because, well, almost everyone in it is a jock. It appeals to nerds, because there are aliens and there’s a hot bookish girl, and there’s even a nerd in the movie who acts like your typical nerd. It even appeals to girls, because it vaguely critiques the plight of girls and their insecurities. You see? It should be like shooting fish in some manner of barrel used for retaining fish.

Let’s start with the good things in I Am Number Four. There are literally only two good things about this film: Timothy Olyphant and one line uttered by Sam, the nerd character. As mentioned previously, each superpowered child is protected by a warrior, and John Smith has Henri, played by Timothy Olyphant. And in case you’ve not been subjected to the pure molten wonderment that is Timothy Olyphant, he’s got genuine talent, and whenever he appears on screen, even to deliver the kind of dialogue he’s saddled with here, you listen. You also get a little bit turned on, which is weird in and of itself. And he really manages to imbue Henri, this two dimensional archetypal excuse for a father figure, with heart and authority. The second good thing in I Am Number Four is a line said by Sam, the nerd, after he shoots an alien in the chest. He turns to the sassy blonde next to him, and says offhandedly “I play a lot of X-Box”. Those are literally the only two struts in the ship of this film that aren’t buckling under the cargo. Let’s inspect said cargo, shall we? Because this ship is about to sink, and you really don’t want to be pinned to the ocean floor under six thousand kilos of ostrich shit.

Firstly, each child has a pendant, which looks like something their cool surfer dad got them; it has the swirly, quasi-spacey aesthetic Hollywood execs attribute to sci-fi, in the same way they attribute macing a homeless man directly in the eyeballs with Hugo Boss charitable. This wouldn’t be a problem, though, if the pendants in the film were in any way faithful to the book. To be fair, you can overlook things when you translate from book to film and, if you’re a good screenwriter, you sort of have to know what to keep and what to ditch. The film pretty much begins with one of the kids and his bodyguard being ruthlessly slaughtered. The head Madagorian, before eviscerating the child, takes his crappy little pendant and hangs it with several others. Around this time, John Smith explains that every time one of the others die, they all feel it, and get a scar indicating this on their leg. All good so far. He also explains that it has taken, collectively, about thirteen years for the children to get found, and every few years, he’d be wracked with pain. All good. What the film neglects to mention, however, is why it took the Magadorians so incredibly long to track each child down. One glance at the book, however, indicates that the pendants are a safety measure, made to buy each kid time; you see, to kill the children, you have to kill them in the right sequence, as dictated by the pendants. THAT’S WHY THE KIDS ARE NUMBERED. This isn’t explained in the film, however; you just get the sense that the pendants are trophies, and that the aliens are jackholes who takes a really, really long time to get shit done.

Next up on this shopping list of stupidity are the characters themselves. Firstly, everyone is pretty. I’m not talking average looking, I’m talking model pretty. And they’re all jocks. And they all appear to have been dressed by The Gap, which essentially reduces the depth of the narrative to one type of teenager, with a singular, rigid taste in clothing, music and friends. This is a passing criticism, but it’s worth pointing out, because, again, it shows how cynical filmmakers like D.J.Caruso, the director of I Am Number Four, can be when it comes to depicting teenagers. Imagine a rainbow. Now imagine instead of colours, it has five different shades of tan.

Throughout the film, we catch glimpses of a sassy chick. We’re told she’s sassy with such subtle visual cues as:

- She walks away slowly from explosions.
- She rides a motorcycle! God, she’s so sassy.
- She wears a leather jacket and sunglasses. Probably so people don’t get blinded by her sass.

When she finally swoops into the story, she reveals she’s number six. Earlier, we were told that each child has several unique legacies (powers) that would become clearer as they got more powerful. Six can teleport, shoot really well, flip off things, and, apparently, protect herself and others from fire. Which was actually a power belonging to Four in the book, and in the book it was a fairly crucial plot point and something he worked really hard at, but whatever. Six also has the worst dialogue given to any character in a film since... well, Avatar. Every line she utters is just so SASSY. Not only that, but every time she’s about to talk, it’s like the camera gets a preemptive boner, and snaps in on her sassy badass face. She then delivers her line. Everything she says is like this. Each moment she opens her mouth is like that startlingly stupid quote you see around the end of a trailer for what you assume will be the shittiest, Bruckheimeriest action film you’ll never see. Then your idiot friend convinces you it’ll be ok, and somehow, that awful line gets dissolved like an Asprin amongst the rest of the movie. In I Am Number Four, each line refuses to evaporate. They just sit there at the bottom of the glass, hanging there, suspended in what appears to be urine. Go ahead, taste it. No, seriously, taste it. I’m sure it is in no way urine.

Finally, there are several things missing that actually would have made it work. Firstly, mortality. In the movie, everyone who dies turns to ash and disappears. EVERYONE. You know how in Twilight, the awful and untalented vampires shattered like glass, partly because it looks cool but mostly because Stephanie Meyer is the literally equivalent of a violent bowel infection? Well, imagine if the werewolves in Twilight shattered like glass too. You’d be confused, right? Even if you hated the film as much as you could hate it, you’d harvest every last screed of hatred just so you could hate it more, because you’re awesome and you understandably loathe inconsistency. Well, in I Am Number Four, Loriens turn to ash, which is fine. Then, when the Magadorians start to die, THEY turn to ash. Then their massive monstrous pets turn to ash. How can three totally different species all turn to ash? Isn’t that the kind of brutally retarded liberty that, if taken, could get your film reviewed by a self indulgent yet charming prick who somehow manages to write, like, six pages of pure hatred? Probably. You see in the book, that never happens; when someone dies, they just die. Oh, except for one of the main characters, who they cremate. So I guess someone does sort of turn to ash in a way. Maybe it’s a homage. I’m sure that’s it.

And finally, there’s no mentorship. In the book, Henri spends extensive periods training John Smith with his emerging powers. You know, something you might do if you’re a mentor and you have an army to defeat eventually. In the film, all the mentoring and training is replaced by John giggling and flicking his wrist, which in turn makes a street light explode. Who needs training when you have the natural intuition of a teenager who makes repeatedly stupid decisions which get a lot of people killed? Shut up, that’s who.

In closing, this film will probably do pretty well, but if it does, it’ll just prove how stupid people can be. But people defend the musical stylings of Nicki Minaj, so I guess we’re all screwed anyway.

"One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord.
Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky.
In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand.
Sometimes there were two sets of footprints,
other times there were one set of footprints.

This bothered me because I noticed
that during the low periods of my life,
when I was suffering from
anguish, sorrow or defeat,
I could see only one set of footprints.

So I said to the Lord,
“You promised me Lord,
that if I followed you,
you would walk with me always.
But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life
there have only been one set of footprints in the sand.
Why, when I needed you most, you have not been there for me?”

The Lord replied,
“The times when you have seen only one set of footprints in the sand,
is when I carried you.”

- Mary Stevenson -