Stormbreaker

Stormbreaker (2006)
Directed by: Geoffrey Sax
Starring: Alex Pettyfer, Alicia Silverstone, Bill Nighy, Sophie Okonedo

Wow, Alex Pettyfer is hot. He really is. He used to go to my friend's school as well - there's my (albeit weak) link to him!

Anyway, the movie. I hadn't read any of the books, by the way, so I didn't know the story. It had gotten pretty good reviews though.

Stormbreaker is about a 14-year-old boy called Alex Rider who lives with his uncle (played by Ewan MacGregor) who is a away a lot, and their housekeeper Jack (Alicia Silverstone, who should really be getting more parts as she is a very good actress). His uncle, Ian, gets killed while away on a trip and Alex discovers that he was a secret agent. He now has to take over his uncle's role and try to stop a baddie from unleashing a virus on the schoolchildren of Britain through a revolutionary new computer called Stormbreaker. Cue lots of gadgets, action and famous British actors.

Alex Pettyfer is very well cast as Alex Rider (and hey, they have the same first name!) and is very nice to look at, as mentioned previously. Bill Nighy is hilarious as the boss of MI6, although I'm not sure the character was actually meant to be like that. I don't know, I'd have to read the books. Sophie Okonedo (now what else has she done? Hmm.) is nice and serious as Mrs Jones. Alicia Silverstone (I love her name!) is very good as I said before, and Mickey Rourke is nice and gruff and evil as the villain, Darrius Sayle. The love interest, Sabina Pleasure (what kind of a name is that? Is she meant to be a younger Pussy Galore or something?) is played by Sarah Bolger, who was very good in In America a few years ago but here seems to be trying to hide her Irish accent and sounds really weird. So I didn't like her much, although her role is not very big and she didn't actually have many lines.

The story was typical James-Bond-for-kiddies fare, with some cool action sequences and gadgets along the way. I loved how their version of 'Q', played by Stephen Fry, worked in Hamley's toy shop and that's where you get the gadgets from. Overall, the story was nothing special, but enjoyable. The production design and photography were very good - it was set in a very modern, kind of stylised Britain with nice shots of London and Cornwall and stuff.

It was very short for a movie of this kind - only 93 minutes. Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and Superman Returns were about 150 minutes, for crying out loud. That was it's problem - it needed more flesh. It was a bit flat. I don't know if they cut lots out of the book or whatever, but it just wasn't strong enough. The climax wasn't really a climax - it kind of seemed like what he'd been doing the whole time. And when it ended, it was kind of like 'Oh. Is that the end? Hm.' There just needed to be more there. Maybe I just wasn't in the right mood.

So basically, the performances and the filming were all very good, but the script and the story were too flat. Surprising, seeing how the screenplay was written by the books' author, Anthony Horowitz. I'd recommend seeing it, and I'll probably see it again when it's out on DVD because it's quite a cool movie, plus Alex Pettyfer is hot, but it didn't really do anything for me. You know how soem films just linger in your mind for hours (or days) after you see it and some don't? Well, this one didn't. Nothing against the movie, it just didn't.

B+

Talliestar

(IMDb, which usually never fails me, has a measly selection of memorable quotes from Stormbreaker. And I can't remember any myself, so I'll have to go with a sub-par one, which I don't really like to do, but whatever.)

Alex: What is this place? Hogwarts?