Movie Reviews

Holy crap! I remember a time when you knew that a Will Smith movie was going to be entertaining. Indepence Day, Bad Boys, Enemy Of The State, I Am Legend? I mean, those were decent movies! But ever since he started cramming his son down our throats in a sad attempt to launch his career, it all went downhill. He probably met director M. Night Shyamalan at a workshop for people whose Hollywood career is on a downward trajectory. Let’s face it… The Happening and The Lady In The Water were terrible and I have yet to encounter the first person who has actually seen The Last Airbender.

After Earth tells the story of Kitai Raige (Jaden Smith with all the charisma of a hard boiled egg) and his father Cypher (Will Smith) who crash their ship on the planet Earth 1000 years after cataclysmic event made the planet uninhabitable for humans. Cypher is critically injured during the crash and has to guide his son through the hostile environment so he can shoot some kind of rescue beacon into space before a creepy alien creature that is one the loose, kills them.

We get to see a whole lot of bad acting by Jaden who doesn’t do a whole lot except for looking scared and running through a forest and succeeding in making even that look sucky. Meanwhile, Will Smith is stuck in their crashed ship, mumbling a bunch of one-liners with the same pained expression on his face throughout the entire movie. Probably thinking of how this wasn’t the best choice for his own career. You could’ve basically replaced him by a hand puppet and nobody would’ve seen the difference. Of course the whole point is to show that father and son grow closer together but at the end of the movie, it still looks as if they can barely stand each other.

Produced by Will Smith and his wife and starring Will Smith and his son and partially written by Will Smith, this is one home movie you wish never leaked.