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Thunderbirds
Story: A live action version of Tracy Island, with parmesan! Running Time: 95 minutes. Certificate PG
THREE!!! Cutesy colourful imagery! TWO!!! All the vehicles from the popular TV series! ONE!!! Entertaining special effects instead of wobbly stringy puppet things! THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO! I'm sorry readers, I know that was possibly the cheesiest possible way to start off this review, but I wanted to give you a feel of what we're looking at here. It's a camembert-fest, an edammery of stiltonian proportions, an emmenthalian attempt to milk every udder pint out of the Gene Rodden-brie franchise. I'm so glad I got that out of my system. Having come out of Thunderbirds I feel like a human fondue and needed a little exhaust, thanks for bearing with me. Wensleydale.
Learn from my mistake, readers. Send the kids to Thunderbirds and stay at home. Use the time to write a web site. It's surprisingly fulfilling - otherwise how else would you be able to tell the world that you'd wasted yet another two hours of your life? I enjoyed this film: I think the average moviegoer will enjoy it: (kids), (adults) Testosterone Satisfaction Rating: Some nice sequences of the Thunderbirds themselves. To enjoy this film you should be: Under 12.
To order Thunderbirds, use this link: Thunderbirds [2004] [DVD] To order the ORIGINAL Thunderbirds, every episode in a 9-disc set, use this link: Thunderbirds Complete Series Digistack--9-Disc Box Set [DVD]. |
Cast: Ben Kingsley, Bill Paxton, Sophia Myles, Ron Cook.
OK, so I've largely given the game away, but here's what Thunderbirds is about. We're all familiar
with the TV show - the Tracy family run International Rescue with their personal fleet of 5 vehicles
(imagine such a decadence), they foil plots by international terrorists by using guile and cunning and
blowing stuff up. You know, you'd think they could have left that well alone and just added a bit of
tongue-in-cheek humour, wouldn't you? But no, for some presumably holiday-friendly reason, the Tracy
family now has kids, the kids now take centre stage and proceed to rescue the adults. Fine if you're ten,
not so good if you stand any chance of actually remembering the old show. There's very little here to
entertain the adults - Lady Penelope and Parker have some jolly old japes that raise a smashing titter
rather than a guffaw (sorry, slipped into Lady P there for a moment) but the rest is a yawnfest as big
as Cheddar Gorge and twice as cheesy. Somehow they managed to buy Ben Kingsley as The Hood (bad man),
and he is easily the most watchable character in the whole charade, but even he looks like he's practising
his next "proper" role in his head while The Hood is doing his own thing. Bill Paxton could have been
Bill Beaumont for all the acting skill his zero-dimensional role required and Anthony Edwards (Brains) ... well.
I'm particularly sensitive to screen representations of stuttering as I happen to suffer from that
particular affliction myself, but OH MY GOD. You were good in Top Gun, you were good in ER, but please
Mr Edwards, rent A Fish Called Wanda - that's how you act a stammer. If silent pubescent kids
with intense eyes start coming up to you and kneeing you in the bollocks, you've only got yourself to blame.
As usual of late, having seen a lot of films recently that could have been so much better, I'm being
unduly negative. The effects were good and the first 20 scene-setting minutes of the film were thoroughly
entertaining, but then the kids took over and it all went horribly wrong. Everyone's likening this to
Spy Kids and it's inevitable that they would, it must have been deliberate. Why did they choose to
aim the Thunderbirds film at an age group who couldn't know the original show? Surely if they'd used the same
franchise and called it Thunderkids, it would have conveyed more accurately the content. But then I probably
wouldn't have gone to see it ... yes, I see. Suckered again.
