JOHN CARTER

title: JOHN CARTER
year: 2012
cast: Taylor Kitsch, Willem Defoe
rating: **

This two hour and twenty minute film, based on the story by Edgar Rice Burroughs written in 1912, would have made a terrific Western. Starting out with our rugged hero John Carter, a rogue confederate soldier seeking a mountain of gold. He’s captured by Yankees and they can’t keep him pinned down. The boundless action is fast paced and exciting, Taylor Kitsch displaying the right amount of lean bravado and swift agile. But then something happens. Finding an emulate, Carter is transformed into a strange world that doesn’t look much different than the badlands of America: except there are green creatures bursting from eggs and giant, lanky aliens with four arms. And Carter himself has a powerful skill of leaping a hundred feet in the air. The plot's somewhat familiar: a beautiful princess is forced to marry a swarthy scoundrel in order to save her race. Declining that option, she winds up with Carter, who’s been taken in with the tall green aliens (the endearing leader voiced by Willem Defoe) and after a few cool fights, Carter and the Princess travel across the Mars terrain: each seeks a different location without realizing. Here’s where the movie hits a long, tedious wall… And by the time the action sustains you’ll feel robbed by the ponderous bouts of dialog describing the planet's history, why it’s doomed and who’s dooming it. Thus a scene where Carter battles a formidable beast in a Roman like coliseum is too little, too late. But after all’s said and done, and we return back to Earth, the final fifteen minutes provides an intriguing closure. And it's ironic that a film originally titled JOHN CARTER OF MARS would have been better off spending much less time there.