Two Cent Review: "John Carter"

I tried, folks.  I gave it more than the old college try.  But after about thirty minutes or so, I had to turn off "John Carter".  It was just too much.

Looking like a bizarre mixture of "Cowboys and Aliens" (perhaps a fitting analogy seeing this was on Jon Favreau's slot before doing "Iron Man" and the previous aforementioned movie), "Star Wars", and Sam Raimi's first "Spider-Man", "John Carter" is (or at least as much as I could glean from the plot) about Captain John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) who gets mysteriously whisked away to Mars (or as they call it, Barsoom), where he is caught between a war between Jeddak ("king") Tars Tarkas (voiced by Willem Dafoe) and Jeddak Sab Than (Dominic West).  Sab Than proposes a cease fire and end of the war by marrying the Princess of Helium Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins), daughter of Jeddak Tardos Mors (Ciaran Hinds).  When Dejah meets Carter, she believes him to be a savior, and, of course, everyone wants to kill him after that.

Director Andrew Stanton ("Wall-E", "Finding Nemo"), who co-wrote the script with Mark Andrews ("Brave") and Michael Chambon ("Spider-Man 2"), has honestly done the the film justice...and by that, I mean make a movie so bad the book "John Carter From Mars" has to be better by default.  The action is forced, the dialogue contrived, and the special effects were impressive about a decade ago.

Perhaps there was a reason the film got buried into the dregs of box office scraps and bombed as bad as it did.  The sad thing is that, in a year that showed wonderful human-vs-alien battles in "The Avengers" and "Men In Black 3", "John Carter" falls incredibly short in comparison.

The biggest tragedy is Taylor Kitsch's movie career.  First this movie drops a bomb, then "Battleship" almost makes the box office charts look like Hiroshima in comparison.  Both featuring the "True Blood" star.  I would say there could be hope for him yet, but he just passed on a key part in "The Hunger Games" sequel "Catching Fire".  Oops.

MY TWO CENTS:  I know I didn't watch the whole thing, but, in the end "John Carter" wasn't worth finishing.  Perhaps if you're curious to see how this movie ends, do yourself a favor and pick up the book.  Sure, finding time to read the book will be taxing, but getting your time back from watching the movie will be fruitless.