According to the press kit , producer Andrew Gunn found such happiness in his successful 2003 remake of Freaky Friday that when his production company landed at the Disney lot he actively pursued the opportunity to remake Escape to Witch Mountain, another Disney live-action classic. On the one hand, becoming known as the guy who remakes 1970s Disney movies doesn’t seems like an odd career choice. On the other hand, though, Freaky Friday was way better than it had any right to be so it raises hopes for a modern take on Witch Mountain.
So, what is apparently required for a modern take? First of all, get rid of all that pesky backstory stuff. Since nobody in the movie knew each other before the movie begins (other than the siblings from another planet) there is no need to slow things down with backstory deep enough that it can’t be handled with a couple expository setences. Dwayne (forever to be stuck with “The Rock”) Johnson is Jack Bruno, a Las Vegas cab driver trying to go straight after a life of petty crime. Dr. Alex Friedman (Carla Gugina in her second movie in so many weeks, though this one is much more kid-friendly than last week’s Watchmen) was fired from her university for believing in aliens. Ciarán Hinds is Henry Burke, a relentless “man in black” working for a government agency tasked with tracking down and capturing aliens. Those are the planets in orbit.
What, or rather who, they’re orbiting are the alien brother and sister team of Sara (AnnaSophia Robb) and Seth (Alexander Ludwig). The action starts when they crash their spaceship outside of Las Vegas. Burke, and his mysterious agency, needs to capture them for vivisection, and he chases them into Jack Bruno’s cab. Eventually Dr. Friedman gets pulled in to help them recover their ship so they can go home and prevent really bad things from happening on Earth.
So, all the characters are stripped down to bare frames. What’s next in the modernization? Why violence, of course. As mentioned, Bruno is trying to go straight but some local hood is trying to pull him back in. That provides a couple generic thugs for The Rock to beat up on. Also, Sara and Seth are being pursued by a hyper-competent (except at shooting things it is aiming at) assassin. The assassin likes to hit people. In partnership with the fighting is plenty of of mechanical violence: Cars bumping each other and flying through the air; a massive train derailment; the Millennium Falcon escaping the Death Star after blowing up the core. No wait…that last one was a different movie, but oh so similar.
If you’re a parent, don’t worry about the violence, though. It is a well-known fact that violence is OK so long as nobody actually dies—and the movie goes to The A-Team lengths to make it known that everybody is safe if banged up. No car crashes without a shot of the groggy—but still alive—driver in the aftermath. In a movie full of fighting, gunfire, and explosions, there is only one certain death.
In short, it is a shallow movie, it is nothing more than a PG-rated chase caper and doesn’t really strive for anything more significant. Fortunately, sometimes that is than enough. For all of its blandness, Race to Witch Mountain is not boring, and Dwayne Johnson’s charm isn’t firing on all cylinders but is still present. The story doesn’t really make any sense in that the path Sara and Seth takes is awfully convoluted considering the special powers that they have, but then if movies required people to do the logical thing most of them would be eight minutes long.
Unlike Freaky Friday, Race to Witch Mountain does not make a compelling case for doing remakes, but if you have pre-teens and want some action fun that doesn’t revel in the gore and brutality, then it is a nice option. Or maybe you just want to see what the original Sara and Seth look like all grown up.
