After Earth

Arriving on the heels of the nigh disastrous The Last Airbender, After Earth can’t help but come off as a step in the right direction for beleaguered filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan – as the movie, though saddled with an astonishingly inept lead performance from Jaden Smith, boasts more than enough positive attributes to warrant a relatively enthusiastic recommendation. The spare storyline follows a futuristic father (Will Smith’s Cypher) and son (Jaden Smith’s Kitai) as their spacecraft crash lands on an Earth that’s been long-since abandoned by humanity, with the movie, for the most part, detailing Kitai’s perilous efforts at recovering a beacon that will summon help for both himself and his injured pop. It’s an engaging, low-key premise that stands in sharp contrast to the over-the-top fare that generally dominates multiplexes during the summertime months, as Shyamalan, working from a script cowritten with Gary Whitta, offers up an engrossing father/son tale that’s enhanced by the inclusion of intriguing sci-fi elements. There’s little doubt such attributes, coupled with Will Smith’s typically engrossing work, goes a long way towards compensating for the ineffectiveness of the younger Smith’s performance, as the fledgling actor’s less-than-competent turn ensures that Kitai simply never becomes the dynamic, charismatic lead character that one might’ve expected (and hoped for). It’s subsequently not surprising to note that After Earth hits a palpable after the protagonists find themselves unable to communicate, with the pronounced emphasis on Kitai’s solo exploits ensuring that the movie’s second half simply doesn’t fare as well as the first. (And it doesn’t help, either, that the film is topped off with a fairly generic battle between Kitai and a laughably unconvincing CGI monster.) Still, After Earth is, for much of its refreshingly brief running time, a better-than-average big-budget blockbuster that marks Shyamalan’s most entertaining effort since 2006’s Lady in the Water.

*** out of ****

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