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Directors Chris Renaud and Pierre Coffin, and writers Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio animate a fun PG-rated story with enough clever details to keep adults awake. There’s more than tossed-off signage for Bank of Evil (formerly Lehman Brothers). At the same time, in different places, kids can feel let in on ways grown-ups really see little ones when off-duty from good parenting. Calling bedtime storybooks unbelievably bad literature is the endearing meanie, the character cited in the self-aggrandizing title of “Despicable Me.” The villain Gru (Steve Carell, voicing his “Middle European” accent) conspires to acquire a gizmo belonging to a younger villain named Vector (Jason Segel). Pleasing his soul-stomping mom (Julie Andrews) keeps Gru going. This people-hating overcompensator thinks that kidnapping a miniaturized moon will impress the known world. He adopts a trio of orphaned sisters once he sees these plucky cookie pushers can furnish a tactical cover for penetrating Vector’s lair and grabbing his miniaturizer. But the crusty Gru falls for the tykes and an unlikely family takes form. The largely gratuitous 3-D CGI is an opportunity for a gag at the end wherein Gru’s impish, chirping minions compete at constructing bridges further and further towards the audience. WIth the voices of Russell Brand, Will Arnett, Kristen Wiig, Danny McBride, Miranda Cosgrove, Jack McBrayer, Mindy Kaling. 95m. (Bill Stamets)

Three seasons of Nickelodeon’s “Avatar: The Last Airbender” spawned three video games, and now M. Night Shyamalan (“The Happening,” “The Sixth Sense”) produces, writes and directs a 3-D live-action fantasy film based on the animated  series. Kids resist a genocidal, religion-intolerant tyrant to renew global harmony through spiritual healing, with an assist from a princess committing suicide. Adapting his three daughters’ favorite TV show, Shyamalan abandons his signature metaphysical terrors for pre-adolescent adventures. On a polytheistic monolingual planet, there are four nations named after four elements. Exceptional individuals in each nation can bend their respective element using telekinetic chi. These benders display little artistry bending air, water, fire and earth, primarily for military purposes. One bender is more exceptional than all others since he can bend all four elements. And he is the only intermediary with the gods. All tribes bow to this exalted one known as Avatar, reincarnated now as Aang (Noah Ringer), the last in a nearly exterminated line of Airbenders. But there’s injustice and imbalance due to evil designs of the Fire Nation. These mean imperialists dress in black and command soot-belching metal warships. Will that bald boy with a glowing downward-pointing arrow on his forehead emerge from a century-old iceberg and lead a popular front of the faithful to achieve a Grand Unified Theory of the four elements for geopolitical Gaia? Spoiler alert: yes. Even though “The Last Airbender” was partly shot in Greenland, the dim smear of CGI disguises any trace of that landscape. The 3-D is mostly used to float place names such as “Northern Earth Kingdom” and “Southern Water Tribe” somewhere over the heads of audience members ten rows in front of you. Character-bending and mind-bending are not happening anywhere. With Dev Patel, Jackson Rathbone, Nicola Peltz, Cliff Curtis, Shaun Toub, Aasif Mandvi. 103m. (Bill Stamets)

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An exponential increase in peril faces a community of toys who talk and walk when  people aren’t around. In 1995, the American boy Andy who owned the toys was only moving to a new house. In 1999, when Andy went off to summer camp, a collectibles dealer preyed upon toys destined for a Tokyo museum. Lee Unkrich directs the third Disney/Pixar G-rated animated adventure, and ratchets up the stakes for toy solidarity and survival. Read the rest of this entry »

Jackie Chan delivers the most impressive performance of his mid-career, far better than his embarrassing paycheck for “The Spy Next Door.” In “The Karate Kid” he’s a maintenance man at a Beijing apartment building who mourns the wife and son he lost in a car accident—a character rather like the Japanese-American maintenance man at a Reseda, California apartment building who lost his wife and daughter in childbirth in “The Karate Kid” released in 1984. In both movies, this character is a father figure to a fatherless American kid who moves into his building and knows a little karate; the Italian-American high school senior learns more karate in the original film, and the African-American 12-year-old learns kung-fu in the 2010 remake. Unbelievably, Chan thinks the two movies are “totally different,” as he told WGN-TV entertainment reporter Dean Richards. Maybe Chan is thinking of the differences between the number of bullies accosting the kid (five versus six) or the number of minutes the referee allots the injured kid before forfeiting the big tournament (fifteen versus two). Director Harald Zwart (“The Pink Panther 2,” “Agent Cody Banks”) and writer Christopher Murphey surpass the 1984 film and its 1994 remake titled “The Next Karate Kid” that starred Hilary Swank as the kid, a fatherless and motherless Boston teen who moves to neither California nor China. Read the rest of this entry »

The critters are anti-settler in this awful family comedy. A guerilla-style squirrel leads the insurrection against the bogus “green” development called Rocky Springs. For his first act of resistance, he triggers a woodsy IED that knocks a developer in his SUV off the road and over a cliff. Set in Oregon and shot in Massachusetts, “Furry Vengeance” comes with a potentially cute premise. Cuddly monkeywrenchers vocalize their communiques. Instead of subtitles to translate these chirps and yelps, thought-balloons with film clips inside visualize the messages for us. Excerpts from “Braveheart” will signal the climactic defense of homeland by the indigenous hawk, fox, bear, otters, skunks, turkeys and poop-bombing birds. Usually at the receiving end of the environmental pushback is Dan (a flabby Brendan Fraser). He’s the on-site construction supervisor who brought his wife (Brooke Shields) and 15-year-old son (Matt Prokop) from Chicago. Roger Kumble (“Cruel Intentions,” “Just Friends”) directs a screenplay by Michael Carnes and Josh Gilbert that shows none of the bite of that duo’s nasty “Mr. Woodcock.” Dan’s license plate reads “DIE 9317,” he exclaims “Miley Cyrus!” as a curse, and his lying boss is named “Neal Lyman.” The interspecies slapstick is painfully unfunny, including Dan’s three hits to the groin. This slipshod U.S.–United Arab Emirates coproduction employs the cinematographer from “Alvin and The Chipmunks” and editor of “Are We There Yet?” During the end credits, the cast spoofs music videos. The stretch for laughs continues after the film’s copyright notice with some free-floating cartoony voices. With Ricky Garcia, Eugene Cordero, Patrice O’Neal, Jim Norton, Skyler Samuels, Wallace Shawn. 92m. (Bill Stamets)

The Irish will always be with us, if you go by the clutch of  small Celtic tales on release this month in Chicago. Aidan Quinn plays a self-absorbed writer in the ghost story “The Eclipse,” which opened last week, and now in the period melodrama “A Shine of Rainbows,” he’s the reluctant, chilly stepfather of a stammering orphan. In a decade long before Ireland emerged into the modern world, on remote, picturesque Corrie Island Marie O’Donnell (Connie Nielsen) brings home little Tomás (John Bell), who’s captivated by this new world, even as the older Alec finds it hard to warm to the boy. The sights are savory, even as Bell fails to capture the necessary boyishness (and performance skills) to truly win you over. Alec’s reluctance to embrace the child seems a levelheaded reaction. Most notably, there are some worthy observations about the condition of shyness in the characters’ behavior. There are distant echoes of John Sayles’ “The Secret of Roan Inish,” especially in the invocation of local lore with seals and their secrets. Director-co-writer Vic Sarin is shameless, but in a well-intentioned way, if you like a little Celtic sentimentality. The rainbow motif? Let’s keep it to ourselves. Best wept over a jar of whiskey. With Jack Gleeson, Karl O’Neill, Niamh Shaw, John Bell, Fionn O’Shea, Joy McBrinn, Kieran Lagan. 101m. (Ray Pride)

No, this PG-rated fantasy adventure is not about a high-school kid fronting a band of misfits for the variety show where he wins a music college scholarship. Someone stole Zeus’s lightning bolt, a less impressive old-school light saber, and Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman) is wrongly fingered. Percy has no idea he’s a demigod, born of mortal Sally Jackson (Catherine Keener) and the full-blooded god Poseidon (Kevin McKidd). “I guess we all got daddy issues,” observes another kid with divinity in his genealogy. Soon our hero is secreted to Camp Half Blood where he meets Athena’s daughter Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario). For extra credit: what kind of kids are born of two demigods? Quarter deities? On what chromosome is the god gene? Percy learns his dyslexia is due to his “hardwired” literacy in Greek. That’s what made English on the chalkboard unreadable: “it’s Greek to him.” His attention disorder is really warrior-grade, battle-ready alertness. Chris Columbus (two “Harry Potter”s and two “Home Alone”s) directs a screenplay that Craig Titley adapted from Rick Riordan’s 2005 book, the first in a series of five by the middle-school teacher. The plot is a cross-country quest by Percy, Annabeth and a sidekick satyr Grover (Brandon T. Jackson) to find three green pearls that serve as “Get-Out-of-Hades” hall passes, so they can rescue Percy’s mom from Hades. Because saving your mom is always more important than averting a multi-god smackdown with the collateral damage of “the end of life as we know it.” To orient viewers who didn’t do their mythology homework, the screen teens cite “High School Musical” and “Extreme Makeover,” and use an iPod in a way Apple never anticipated. This places us life as we know it. Slightly inventive are updates for the Land of the Lotus-eaters and the “H” sign pointing to hell. Best line: “Hi, mom.” With Pierce Brosnan, Rosario Dawson, Steve Coogan, Joe Pantoliano, Uma Thurman, Joe Pantoliano. 119m. (Bill Stamets)

On loan to the CIA from the Chinese intelligence service, spy Bob Ho (Jackie Chan) courts suburban neighbor, abstract painter and single mom Gillian (Amber Valletta, “Gamer”) in this rote kids adventure. Brian Levant directs a formulaic screenplay by Jonathan Bernstein, James Greer and Gregory that’s a lot like the one Levant directed in “Are We There Yet?” (2005). Once again kids conspire to sabotage a prospective step-daddy. Gillian flies to Denver when her dad gets hip-replacement surgery, so Bob babysits 14-year-old Farren (Madeline Carroll, the super-competent little girl in “Swing Vote”), her younger brother Ian (Will Shadley) who’s super-impressed that Bob saw David Bowie and Iggy Pop rock Shanghai in 1985, and little Nora (Alina Foley) who chases her squealing pet pig all around the house. An evil Russian invents bacteria to eat all the oil in the world except Russia’s, so Bob and the kids get a chance to bond while aiming trick bikes into the groins of goons. George Lopez plays Bob’s boss and Billy Ray Cyrus plays his sidekick spouting inscrutable countryisms. The press kit is more entertaining than the film: “We were trying to make a 400 million dollar movie for a lot less,” says Levant, accounting for his titanic shortfall. One actor was once an Icelandic aerobics champ, and another, hailing from Oklahoma, aspired to be “a sociologist and work in the social scope” (sic) but instead “organized a charity called Supermodels Stepping Out Against Hunger.” Chan fans hoping for his usual limber martial arts humor and garbled English outtakes ought to look elsewhere. Will Shadley, Alina Foley, Magnus Scheving and Katherine Boecher. 92m. (Bill Stamets)

The high-treble irritation of “Alvin and The Chipmunks” (2007) is now doubled. The original trio of chirpy brother chipmunks hooks up with a female trio of conspecifics breaking into showbiz billed as The Chipettes. Global pop squeakers and animated critters Alvin, Simon and Theodore are on their own after two mishaps with wheelchairs put their live-action human caretakers in the hospital. Feckless slacker Toby (Zach Levi) sort of looks after the boys who enroll in high school. The message is sacrifice personal opportunity for the sake of sibling solidarity: a boy chipmunk is shamed for playing on the football team and a girl chipmunk is shamed for wanting to open solo for Brittany Spears. All six end up squeaking in sync and then sleeping in matched bunk beds. Betty Thomas (“The Brady Bunch Movie”) competently directs a contentless screenplay by Jon Vitti and Jonathan Aibel & Glenn Berger. The only reason to see this is the off chance that the frequency of the chipmunks’ chatter kills head lice in kids and liquefies hardened earwax of their grandparents. With David Cross, Jason Lee and Wendie Malick; and the voices of Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler, Jesse McCartney, Amy Poehler, Anna Faris and Christina Applegate. 91m. (Bill Stamets)

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(Mammut) Lukas Moodysson worries for the world but not the chance of his own embarrassment: while “Mammoth” is at its weakest points of inspiration only so much Babel, the Swedish writer-director does strain with intermittent success toward the lyrical. Leo (Gael García Bernal) is a childish videogame designer about to seal a deal in Asia, leaving wife Ellen (Michelle Williams) in their New York City loft (crafted and shot in Sweden rather than above Soho streets) with their 8-year-old daughter and Gloria (Marife Necesito), their Filipino nanny. Moodysson intercuts New York life with Leo’s lollygagging in Bangkok and Gloria’s small boys back home, who long for their mother. Child endangerment, prostitution and the threat of child rape ensue. Actions have consequences. Screenplays have structure. Undercooked moralism thuds. Moodysson’s concern for the life of the child shines in movies like “Show Me Love” and even the grim “Lilja 4-Ever.” His themes are more forced here, and the surroundings of the characters, the production design of the rich couple’s pampered environs versus shanty life everywhere else speak more profoundly of a world of unequal opportuity. Bourgeois, beware! Moodysson’s English-language dialogue is overwrought, but Williams, especially, inhabits it. A doctor of children oblivious to the children of the world until they bleed out in her E/R! Still, that heavy-handedness lands with a soft thump alongside her capable features. The music score draws on songs by Ladytron and an oddly placed Cat Power tune. And, in a year of chilling, apt endings, the last line of “Mammoth” is in a class of its own: it’s perfectly demonstrated that someone has learned nothing. Then Chan Marshall plays. 125m. (Ray Pride)

“Mammoth” opens Friday at Facets.