Thunderbirds |
  • UK / France / USA • 2004 • 95m •    • Directed by: Jonathan Frakes. • Starring: Brady Corbet, Debora Weston, Soren Fulton, Lou Hirsch, Alex Barringer, Demetri Goritsas, Genie Francis, Philip Winchester, Deobia Oparei, Bill Paxton, Kyle Herbert, Dominic Colenso, Ben Torgersen. • Music by: Ramin Djawadi, Hans Zimmer.      Having narrowly averted a major disaster on an oil rig, the Thunderbirds have just returned home to their secret base when TB5, their space based station, is critically damaged in a suspected meteor strike. Unbeknown to them, the attack on TB5 is a deliberate ploy by international master criminal Aristotle Spode to get them off the island. He takes over the island and forces Brains into submission, using the power of his mind. But Spode has overlooked one key factor: Alan, Fermat and Tin Tin are still on the island.
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Review:
Thunderbirds manages to cock up everything it attempts. The list goes on and on but there are other more subtle, humiliating things that are painfully obvious when you think about it. From the off, Thunderbirds is wrong, wrong, wrong. The whole moral message and 'goal' is set up in an excruciating way: Jeff Tracy (A new low for Bill Paxton) tells his youngest son Alan he's not yet proved himself to be a Thunderbird after Alan randomly and stupidly decided to go down into Tracy Island's bowels to fire up Thunderbird One. The whole film is then a series of events and miss-fires consisting of Alan trying to prove himself whilst his father and other brothers are trapped in space aboard Thunderbird five.
The film relies on kid actors to carry the film: A 16 year old Alan Tracy (Corbet), a 16 year old Tin Tin (Hudgens) and a 14 year old Fermat (Fulton) who is Brains' son. To say that watching the 'adventures' they get up to is painful is an understatement. Frequently trying to act and utilise the script whilst combating the evil 'Hood' (Kingsley) in ridiculously unfunny and hammy ways acts as the entertainment for the duration of the film; it only differs when everyone's in a different location. Also, the whole 'mind control' thing was very tiresome and basically dragged the film down as it was overused and offered a way for our heroes to see a weakness in The Hood – forced and incidental.
I know that most 'film's for kids' these days try to integrate some sort of material for adults but in Thunderbirds it's done in a way that fetishises Lady Penelope. Sophia Myles plays Penelope and I think it's no coincidence she's a little older than the rest of the kids – at 24 years old, it's almost too good to be true. Her scenes are often highly charged and carry an erotic push. We see her in the bath, bubbles up to her neck watching TV; in comes her butler and sneaks a peek as she seductively changes channels with her wet, bare and bubble covered foot. Frequent shots of her massive, bright pink high heeled shoes filling the screen during various scenes: This first happens when she is actually tied up with the second happening during a fist fight with another woman! Twinned with this, her bright pink costumes that reveal just enough yet cover just enough are particularly outstanding as is the way she moves and talks with that posh, dominant, English accent; sounding like a commanding mistress (Well, she is LADY Penelope after all – and you'd better make sure call her that) The whole thing is laughable but the editing is so quick that the kids won't notice but it sure as hell is there.
The actual plot of The Hood doing all that he does just to rob a few banks is very bizarre, the characters that are his bodyguards: a geeky looking woman and hard bodied black man who gets agitated a lot. Are we supposed to be laughing at this? What about the fight scenes? Poorly choreographed stunts and what the hell was with the silly noises? It's utterly, utterly laughable.
The list goes on. The way Bill Paxton plays it all so seriously, like he was told they were doing it one way but it was made another, the way Ford motor company have their logo slapped all over the place. News bulletin: sponsored by Ford, the camera even moves to endorse Ford several times when cars are in shot, the way the CGI looks like something out of a computer game video clip – it's infuriating. The fact we are told to believe that a 16 year old girl can swim in the freezing Thames, against the current, rescue a downed monorail (monorail over the Thames!?), get back to the hatch and thus; save the day all the time holding her breath. It is absolute bull and the makers know it – I don't even know if a 10 year old would swallow it.
In short: avoid, avoid, avoid. Thunderbirds is infuriating, unfunny, poorly scripted and even the Rolls Royce was taken out and replaced by a flying car – everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.
Review by johnnyboyz from the Internet Movie Database.
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