Dying children and their devoted parents sound like a pre-existing condition for a medical weepie. Titrate with an antisocial Nebraska scientist, Chicago venture capitalists and a Seattle pharma-corporation, and the prognosis is teary. Director Tom Vaughan (“Starter For 10″) upsets those expectations. “We absolutely had to avoid a sort of tugging-at-your-heartstrings tearjerker,” Vaughan told Film Journal International. Robert Nelson Jacobs’ screenplay is based on Geeta Anand’s 2006 book “The Cure: How a Father Raised $100 Million and Bucked the Medical Establishment in a Quest to Save his Children,” based on her two earlier articles for the Wall Street Journal. John Crowley (Brendan Fraser) finds a researcher and the funds to sustain, not cure his little Megan (Meredith Droeger) and Patrick (Diego Velazquez). They both face death by age 9 from Pompe disease. This chronic genetic degenerative neuromuscular condition costs the family $40,000 per month for nurses and medical bills, yet Crowley quits his job and sacrifices his health insurance to back ornery Dr. Robert Stonehill (Harrison Ford), whose lab blasts the Grateful Dead, The Band, The James Gang and Deep Purple. None of the characters are especially well-drawn, but they do articulate textbook issues of theory, money and humanity. Read the rest of this entry »

A director of British TV since 1972, Roger Tucker makes his feature debut with a cliché-packed script by Chuck Conaway that’s a chore to endure. In “Waiting for Dublin,” Andrew Keegan, acting like a stand-in for Brendan Fraser, plays Mike. Drunk in Chicago on New Year’s Eve, this rookie flyboy welcomes 1945 with a $10,000 bet he will shoot down five Axis aircraft. We skip over his first four German hits and see him crash land on the Irish coast. Cue a village of colorful Irish caricatures. Mike tries to bed the local lass Maggie (Jade Yourell) and tries to get German defector Otto (Jenne Decleir) to let him shoot down his Messerschmidt so he can tally a fifth hit and win the bet with the Chicago bookie, who is a nephew of Al Capone. Meanwhile, a Gestapo hit man (Guido De Craene) makes his way to the village to kill Otto. This lackluster comedy only surprises with its consistent unoriginality. It is only notable for noisy sound design that overuses off-camera songbirds, sea gulls, roosters, dogs and cows to lend rural color to the aural mis-en-scene. With Hugh O’Conor, Frank Kelley and David Wilmot. 83m. (Bill Stamets)

Booklovers of all sorts ought to like this fantasy based on—what else?—a 2004 book by Cornelia Funke. Nine years ago, Mortimer (Brendan Fraser, whose “Journey to the Center of the Earth” was triggered by a novel and a notebook) was reading aloud to his 3-year-old daughter. Turns out Mo, as everyone calls him, is a Silvertongue. That means when he reads a book, speaking the words can bring characters—as well as a dog named Toto and a Kansas cyclone if the book in hand is “The Wizard of Oz”—from the plot into reality. Metaphysical accounting dictates a balanced exchange: real people exit the real world and end up in the book when book people leave their world for ours. It’s like finding yourself in a film, reality TV show or a psychotic fugue. (“How did I get here?” as David Byrne and Truman Burbank inquired on other occasions.) Mo unknowingly exiled his wife Resa (Sienna Guillory) into the imaginary land invented in “Inkheart” by its author (Jim Broadbent). Bad guys from that book, led by Capricorn (Andy Serkis), now live in rural Italy in an old castle. 12-year-old Meggie (Eliza Hope Bennett) inherited her dad’s gift or curse. Her quick-witted first draft of a rewrite will save the day. Director Iain Softley (“Hackers,” “The Wings of the Dove”) and screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire translate this grand adventure of bibliophilia and bibliophobia. Book-haters disheartened by the end credits naming nineteen translators of the original “Inkheart” can take heart that books likely burned in the book-burning scene, since no there’s no disclaimer that no actual books were harmed in the making of this motion picture. With Paul Bettany, Helen Mirren, Andy Serkis, Rafi Gavron and Jennifer Connelly. 106m. Widescreen. (Bill Stamets)

For the third time Brendan Fraser plays Rick O’Connell, an Indiana Jones knock-off with a knack for mummy mayhem. O’Connell’s wife Evelyn (Maria Bello) owes her publisher a third adventure novel to follow “The Mummy” and “The Mummy Returns,” the same titles of the 1999 and 2001 films in the film series. Adventure beckons and she escapes writer’s block on her Oxfordshire estate. The English government asks the couple to repatriate The Eye of Shanghai, a legendary gem, to China. That’s where their grown son (Luke Ford) is excavating the tomb of a Han emperor (Jet Li) cursed by a Sanskrit-chanting sorceress (Michelle Yeoh) in 50 B.C. Ten thousand terra-cotta encased warriors await resurrection. “I will crush any idea of freedom,” thunders their evil leader, as they battle revived corpses of slave laborers buried under the Great Wall. Rob Cohen (“The Fast and the Furious,” “xXx”) imports a spirited brainless aura to the action-friendly screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar, who earlier co-wrote 153 episodes of “Smallville.” Messages are irrelevant in this lark set in 1946 with no Mao in play. However, the automated crossbows installed in ancient crypts are historically accurate, more or less. Cohen, a Harvard anthro major, told the Archaeological Institute of America’s magazine that he’s practiced Buddhism for two decades. Yet, he preaches to his Mummy Blog Family: “the lesson I want you to master: the world is dense, competitive and usually aligned against you. SO WHAT?!!! You go out there and rip your goals out of its throat.” With John Hannah, Russell Wong, Liam Cunningham and Isabella Leong. 112m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Bill Stamets)

This ADD adventure for boys sports 13-year-old Sean (Josh Hutcherson), his geologist uncle Trevor (Brendan Fraser) and their hot Icelandic guide Hannah (Anita Briem) on an action ride. It’s an overnight roundtrip to and from the underworld where Trevor’s brother disappeared ten years ago. Visual effects supervisor Eric Brevig (“Men in Black” and “Pearl Harbor”) makes his feature debut with kid-friendly digital 3-D effects: a yo-yo, a tape measure, spit and dino-drool are among the images that leap out of the screen. The depth-free screenplay by Michael Weiss and Jennifer Flackett & Mark Levin adapts Jules Verne’s 1864 fantasy about a two-month trek by a German geologist, his nephew and their Icelandic guide Hans. Verne dropped the names of scientific worthies of his era, such as Blumenbach, Cuvier and Davy. Likewise, “At the Earth’s Core”—Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1914 tale about a ten-year adventure in a land where a reptilian master race used a “sixth-sense fourth-dimensional language”—lists such beasts as labyrinthodon, plesiosaur and ramphorhynchus. But this film’s dumbed-down notion of scientific literacy is one mention of Scientific American magazine. If you’re counting qualified firsts, this is billed as “the first live-action, narrative motion picture to be shot in digital 3D.” (Bill Stamets)