Star Trek Into Darkness

A depressingly inferior sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness follows the Enterprise crew as they’re forced to battle a rogue Starfleet officer (Benedict Cumberbatch’s John Harrison) bent on mass destruction. It’s clear virtually from the get-go that filmmaker J.J. Abrams, working from Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof’s screenplay, has little or no interest in developing these iconic characters further, as the movie is instead, for the most part, devoted to larger-than-life action set pieces that progress from impressive to exhausting faster than one would like. The charm and novelty of 2009’s Star Trek is largely absent here, and, as indicated by the title, Abrams seems to be going out of his way to put an almost incongruously gritty spin on the franchise. The director’s inability to wholeheartedly do so boils down primarily to Cumberbatch’s ineffectiveness as the film’s villain, with the actor delivering a one-note performance that isn’t, by and large, able to generate the type of fear or menace that Abrams is clearly striving for. (And given his character’s origins in the original series, Cumberbatch’s far-from-flamboyant turn is at best curious and at worst wrongheaded and distracting.) And although many of the film’s action-oriented moments are rendered flat by an overuse of computer-generated effects, Star Trek Into Darkness admittedly does possess a handful of striking moments that just barely push the film into passable territory – with, for example, a third-act foot chase between Harrison and Zachary Quinto’s Spock ranking high on the movie’s list of genuinely enthralling sequences. The end result is a terminally perfunctory followup that just barely gets the job done, which is certainly the last thing one would’ve expected given the effectiveness of the original film.

**1/2 out of ****