I AM NUMBER FOUR
Directed by: D.J. Caruso
Written by:Alfred Gough, Miles Millar and Marti Noxon based on the novel by Pittacus Lore aka James Frey
Starring: Alex Pettyfer, Timothy Olyphant, Teresa Palmer, Dianna Agron, Callan McAuliffe, Kevin Durand
I AM NUMBER FOUR takes the tried and true Twilight formula of emotionally vacant boy meets equally vacant girl, only replacing sparkly vampires with hand-glowy aliens and switches the perspective from the lady’s to the dude, which doesn’t necessarily improve things.
John (Alex Pettyfer, a welfare recpient’s Ryan Phillipe without any of the charisma) is the fourth of a group of nine aliens who are being hunted, in sequence, by a set of gilled bad guys with trenchcoats and head tattoos. Why the bad guys have to hunt these aliens in sequence is never explained (I’m guessing there is an intergalactic OCD equivalent out there), nor the reason why they have to be hunted in the first place, but DJ Caruso and the writers of the film don’t expect that you have the mental capacity to ask those kind of questions.
So John and his dad Henri (Timothy Olyphant, who is far better than this material) move to Ohio and try to stay in hiding, but John can’t help falling for indie “I take photos with a film camera and have knitted hats” girl Sarah (Glee’s Dianna Agron) and beating up the local jocks with his glowy hands, and Twilight flips and runs through the forest, and lots and lots of brooding.
If you’re thinking that I AM NUMBER FOUR is a kick-ass sci-fi blockbuster by the look of the TV ads, let me just tell you that this is not entire film, but at best it’s the last twenty minutes of the film, which has some of the best and worst parts of it.
On the good side of things is the sole reason that I AM NUMBER FOUR is not an utter crapfest: Teresa Palmer, who plays one of the other aliens, Number Six. When the film is moving along at a sluggish pace, Number Six rolls up in a red Ducati and blows up a house while some Adele plays in the background, because that’s how she rolls.
Teresa Palmer owns this role and is so bad ass, and far more committed to the role, which involves flipping around knifing bad guys and generally being awesome, that it makes you wish that someone had made I AM NUMBER SIX, because it would have been a far better movie than I AM NUMBER FOUR since Palmer is having fun where Pettyfer and Agron, who on top of being kind of dull, have zero chemistry with each other.
On the bad side of things is that during this sequence, the direction of the film borders on the near unwatchable, as we sit through a series of fights, which all take place in the dark and are shot so messily that you can’t really tell what’s going on, especially the unnecessarily emotionally cloying CGI fight between a dog chimera and an alien bat of some kind – please don’t ask me to even try and explain that.
If nothing else, I hope that I AM NUMBER FOUR spawns a solid action career for Palmer, because if she plays her cards right she can definitely get into an action movie career akin to someone like Angelina Jolie. As it stands, I AM NUMBER FOUR is largely boring and derivative of other recent teen fare (TWILIGHT, PERCY JACKSON, ETC) but not as interesting as any of those other movies, but is worth catching the last twenty minutes of for a pretty solid action sequence.
2.5 out of 5
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