Photo Credit: Sony Pictures
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You know it’s never a good sign when you’re sitting at a movie screening and every time you look up to gauge the audience reaction they’re either yawning, checking their watches, or gazing at their smartphones. Such was my experience for nearly the entire duration of the new Will Smith-M. Knight Shyamalan movie After Earth.
I’ll spare the long and odious backstory about a boy named Kitai (Jaden Smith) who years desperately to prove himself to his father Cypher (Will Smith): the story is set in the future when humanity no longer lives on planet Earth (this seems to be a recurring theme in movies lately - Wall-E much?). The ‘rangers’ that travel the universe (in search of what we never know exactly) crash land on Earth where Cypher is critically injured. Kitai finally gets his chance to show his pop that he gots the stuff of a legend. Okay then.
The movie isn’t bad per se, it’s just needlessly tedious when it should be loud and boisterous. For all his charm, there is nothing particularly complex about Will Smith and the same can be said about his son Jaden. Try as Shyamalan might to instill these two with a futuristic and neo-intellectual depth, it just doesn’t work, and it comes off as hokey rather than sincere. Imagine casting Eminem in Al Pacino’s role in The Go dfather. That basically what this experience boils down to.
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