Talk about fantasies of your far-out childhood adventures, this flick could well trump it all. To begin with, it has all the major elements of some of your well-loved childhood book plots namely of Jules Verne’s “20, 000 Leagues Under the Sea”, Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels”, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island”.
Now if that isn’t enough to pique your interest, I’m not quite sure what will.
Anyway, the movie opens with the police in hot pursuit of Sean Anderson (Josh Hutcherson) on high-speed motorcycle, that is, after getting caught red-handed accessing a high security computer system. As the police finally catch up with him, we learn that Sean has a new family after the first film, “Journey To The Center of the Earth”.
(FAST FACT: Brendan Fraser (as Trevor Anderson) plays his biological uncle in the first while his dad, Max Anderson (deceased in the first film) is the catalyst for the discovery of the ‘center of the earth’… thus the title.)
Sean’s mom Elizabeth (Kristin Davis) was also introduced as a cast in ‘Journey To The Center of the Earth’ but was played by a different actress in the person of Jane Wheeler. Furthermore, it was Elizabeth’s sister who took Sean to Trevor (Fraser) along with a box containing clues to Max’s whereabouts.
Presenting… “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island“.
Dwayne Johnson plays Hank, Sean’s stepfather, and a high-ranking officer in the police department. Naturally, Sean gets away with his caper with no complications whatsoever.
As the movie unfolds, it turns out that Hank is an-all around good guy and a very capable and supportive ‘new’ dad. Now, Sean’s caper is revealed as one having to do with a cryptic message that he has to decode from a close blood relative from his dad’s side. Difficult? Not quite…
Hank’s experience in the force made it all quite easy. The message was easily decoded with the help of the three books mentioned earlier to recreate a layered map composite of the ‘mysterious island’.
And as seen in the trailer, the duo by twist of fate, enlist the service of of Gabato (Luis Guzman) tagging along his daughter Kailani (Vanessa Hudgens) to the perilous search of the legendary island on an old, decrepit helicopter.
The journey now begins…
What transpired after was an adventure worth every kid’s while… an escapade that involves creatures ‘big and small’, ‘treasures’, ‘a lost city’, and a legend believed to be non-existent but is proven real in the mysterious island.
The panoramic view of the legendary site and its ‘inhabitants’ are breathtakingly real. CGI effects do figure in quite impressively in the movie lending credence to the island’s spectacular wonders. Words are just too limited to describe the experience.
The adventure and the movie’s action sequences are a different matter altogether. But in all due fairness, it fuses quite well with the underlying plot. Believe it or not, Dwayne gets to feature his vocal chops in this movie as well to provide the needed ‘relief’ to the building tension.
And yeah, we get to see a different Vanessa Hudgens in this movie. She’s enticingly voluptuous…
For all it’s worth, you momentarily enjoyed the trailer to Journey 2: The Mysterious Island… now we dare you to fully appreciate the whole caboodle of it all… in 3D!
Now showing in theaters, “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island” is a New Line Cinema presentation, distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.