20,000 Leagues Under Credibility

When Jules Verne was in his pomp, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing and his flights of fancy were spurred on in the imagination by science making the impossible possible.  Now, computer-generated effects are our mode of transportation to a land of wonder rather than our imagination, yet the tantalising prospects of the future have been rendered ridiculous by how far science has advanced.

Journey 2 the Mysterious Island is the purported sequel to Journey to the Center [sic] of the Earth and wins cheesiest title for a follow-up.  It’s clever but at the same time it shouldn’t really work at all.  One can’t say it doesn’t prepare us for the overall tenor of the film.

Like crime in multi-storey car parks, it’s wrong on so many different levels (thanks, Tim Vine).  One could poke holes in it at every turn.  I didn’t realise how much of a movie for kids it was (despite talk of liquefaction), hoping for some action escapism with a few nods and winks.  There is a current of surreal deadpan humour breezing through the whole enterprise and Michael Caine certainly plays to the absurdity – so many pictures (which were more po-faced in their dumbness) like this have helped pay the bills down the years, he’s a natural.  Snakes on a Plane successfully adopted a similar approach.

The plot defies logic, let alone physics.  It’s as if they included giant ants to ram the point home.  Definitely, the value of this flick is doubled if seen in 3D (I saw in 2D).  And why do the Americans have more tattoos than the Polynesians with whom they consort?  Never mind.

Like Tom Cruise’s career, this needed its star to inject financial heft into it and what muscle that is.  The script moved the Rock and rolled did the cameras.  Can you hear what the Rock is saying?  Only with a chorus line of dead presidents.  What director is going to tell Duayne Johnson that the latter mucked up the keynote scene – “It’s a mysterious… island.”  Huh, why the pause?  Trying to act?  Never mind.  To be fair, Johnson hams it up well in the context of the general lunacy, ably assisted by Caine and an assortment of stars just below the A-list firmament, such as Vanessa Hudgens and Carlos Guzman.

There is an element of tartness to the proceedings, with topics of absent parents and poverty barring the way to self-betterment, combined with scenes including where a huge bird of prey gets caught in a web and an equally humungous spider moves in for the kill.  This leavens the unbelievable near misses – indeed (is this really a spoiler?), that no matter what the peril, no character will die, as each has their heart in the right place.  Even Johnson’s role as ‘Hank’ has a nice neutral profession as head of a construction firm (with unusually close links with the police of Ohio.  Is Dayton that small?  Never mind).

One can’t say that the scriptwriters were poorly read.  They merge Journey to the Mysterious Island with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Robert Louis Stephenson’s Treasure Island, not forgetting Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.  One should approach Journey 2 with tolerance, to let a spirit of ‘never mind’ permeate oneself, accepting it for what it is.  Not a slice of hokum, but something that goes beyond hokum. Two and a half out of five.