Which Mountain?

Race To Witch Mountain is the greatest movie ever. I'm assuming that everyone reading this is 12 or under. If you are not, you may disagree with that first statement.

From an adult perspective, I can say it's a cute little movie that was sort of entertaining, mildly interesting and several other descriptive phrases that all contain words like "almost" and "not quite". The plot is kind of like Day The Earth Stood Still except this isn't so fucking solemn. (Oops, sorry about the language, 12 year olds. Hopefully you have responsible parents who made sure to activate controls and language filters. If you don't then fuck it, cause you've seen way worse than this.)

The movie opens as the government tracks a spaceship about to crash land on Earth. Mind you, this isn't the actual government that can't find Osama bin Laden or thinks to include limits to executive pay when shoveling huge sums of money to failing financial institutions. No, this is the all powerful and supremely competent government that exists in movies and television that easily covers up any and all existence of extraterrestrials. In this case, the government is represented by Henry Burke (Ciaran Hinds, one of my favorite character actors) who heads up a top secret facility in the Nevada desert called Witch Mountain. Since a movie made mainly for kids needs a simplistic villain and tracking down aliens who've crashed on Earth is actually a perfectly reasonable thing for the government to do, they had to make Henry Burke a total dick by making his personal philosophy toward aliens something along the lines of, "Dissect First, Ask Questions Later."

We don't want them to be dissected when we see that the aliens are a couple of cute blond kids with the exotic alien names of Seth and Sara (Alexander Ludwig and Annasophia Robb). Even though they possess superpowers and advanced technological rescources, they can't get by without the help of some apathetic loser tough guy who can single handedly take on not only the entire U.S. government but a heavily armed and shielded alien bounty hunter. Enter Jack Bruno (Dwayne "The Rock? No, you must be thinking of someone else" Johnson). Jack is a cab driver who used to be a wheel man for gangsters. This gives the movie an excuse to toss in several highly dangerous car chases. The kids just sort of appear in his cab and tell him to head off into the desert where they are confronted by Burke and his crew. His offensive driving skills combined with Sara's telekinesis and Seth's ability to manipulate density make it possible for them to trash Burke's vehicles and, even though Burke found them easily the first time, he is unable to find them again even though he knew where they were going.

It turns out the kids were trying to find some sort of data collection station hidden inside these balls of alien goo that would give them information on how to save their dying planet and blah blah blah it's not really important what it is. All that matters is that the kids have it and both the government and a powerful alien bounty hunter try to take it from them before they can get back to their spaceship which has been moved to Witch Mountain. Luckily, all they need to get in (in addition to Jack Bruno and his complete personality change) is a sexy NASA scientist played by Carla Gugino and a crazy alien hunter played by Garry Marhsall who can't really be called crazy anymore once he gets to be on a first name basis with actual aliens.

Yeah, it's a dumb plot but I can hold it to lower standards than I would for something like Day The Earth Stood Still because, unlike DTESS, it's not designed to depress the crap out of you. Even though both movies have similar themes and environmental messages, this is an escapist fantasy for kids. It has just enough jokes, action and special effects to keep you entertained and not even be bothered by the fact that a heavily fortified, top secret government facility would probably have figured that they shouldn't make their exhaust pipes big enough for people to climb around in and, if they do, shouldn't leave them unguarded.