John Carter: Thud and blunder

John Carter (2012) • View trailer
Two stars. Rating: PG-13, for relentless fantasy violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.9.12


What a slab of meat.

A clumsy, disorganized and bone-stupid script is the biggest problem afflicting John Carter, but Taylor Kitsch’s stiff and wooden starring performance also leaves much to be desired.

After capturing John Carter (Taylor Kitsch, right), the Thark chieftan Tars Tarkas
(center) argues the displaced Earthman's fate with a rival warrior, Tal Hajus, while
the entire tribe waits to see what will happen next.

The young actor, who made such a strong impression as a troubled high school football player on TV’s Friday Night Lights, has made a laughably poor transition to big-screen leading man. Given his much stronger work on the tube, blame must be assigned director Andrew Stanton: an accusation given greater weight by the similarly dismal acting delivered by Kitsch’s co-stars.

When even seasoned professionals such as Ciarán Hinds and Mark Strong look silly, the guy in charge clearly is at fault.

Stanton (Finding Nemo, Wall-E) is the second Pixar filmmaker to make the ambitious leap from pixels to flesh-and-blood performers, but he hasn’t done nearly as well as colleague Brad Bird, who recently brought such stylish snap to Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Based on this evidence, Stanton can’t direct live actors, period.

But — as mentioned above — that isn’t this film’s worst sin. The haphazard script scarcely makes sense from one action sequence to the next; it feels as if scenes are being fabricated on the fly. Stanton and co-scripters Mark Andrews and Michael Chabon have made an absolute mess of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ characters, not to mention the novel (1912’s A Princess of Mars, first in what became an 11-book series) on which this misfire is based.

Chabon’s participation should raise some eyebrows. You’d certainly think that the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who brought us The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay would better understand how to deliver a pulpish sci-fi adventure, but the evidence here suggests otherwise.

Most cruelly, Stanton & Co. have maligned the character of Carter much the way vintage Hollywood films bungled the big-screen adaptation of Burroughs’ other, more famous creation. Tarzan — born John Clayton, later Viscount Greystoke — was a perceptive, noble and impressively intelligent man who rejected the “hypocrisy of civilization” in order to lead a purer life in the African jungle with his wife, Jane.

Needless to say, the archetypical film image of Tarzan — forever cemented by Johnny Weissmuller’s disheveled, monosyllabic jungle warrior — made a mockery of such lofty origins.

The same is true of this film’s concept of John Carter. Granted, the 19th century Southern cordiality is present, as are Carter’s virtuous instincts; he also has been granted a tragic back-story. And, to their credit, Stanton and his fellow scripters retain the clever mystery revolving around Carter’s Earthly “death” in 1881, which triggers a summons to his nephew, Edgar “Ned” Burroughs (Daryl Sabara).

But once Carter gets zapped to Mars by a mysterious amulet, he turns into little more than a Martian version of Conan the Barbarian. Scratch that: Next to Carter, Conan could have been a Rhodes scholar. What follows is pulp-style twaddle at its worst ... and even that might have been all right, if Stanton had acknowledged and embraced such a campy atmosphere.

But no: All this nonsense is intended to be taken seriously, which turns the film into the worst sort of big-screen comic book.