Journey 2: The Mysterious Island – review

4 February 2012 4:05 PM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

This new Jules Verne adventure yarn is a sequel to the ingenuous but surprisingly popular 3D version of Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth. The morose Josh Hutcherson, the only survivor from the earlier film, receives a coded message from his long-lost grandfather, the intrepid explorer Alexander (Michael Caine). He bonds with his new stepfather (Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock) when they discover it directs them to maps in Verne's Mysterious Island, Stevenson's Treasure Island and Swift's Gulliver's Travels. These reveal that granddad is stranded on a Pacific island with an active volcano, prehistoric beasts, the ruins of the lost Atlantis, and Verne's submarine Nautilus hidden in a cave. That's about as smart and as literate as the film gets. Otherwise it resembles King Kong written by Enid Blyton for undemanding children, though Blyton would have disapproved of the philistine way Johnson tears the maps out of his stepson's books. »

- Philip French

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