A half-baked story, a fully-baked storyteller, and Old James (no wait, he wasn’t there, I don’t even know nobody named Old James) lend the film a certain smoggy air of awkward, stilted, fairy tale-like charm (Mary [Jane] Poppins-esque green-screen flying and all) but the good bits (e.g. guy on the couch, “janitor” and “scientist”) are outnumbered by the bad ones: namely, a gross jail caricature (rape, always hilarious), eye-rolling scantily-clad henchwomen, and a romance that’s hard to root for.
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joel watches movies 