I Am Number Four engages you from its very first frame. It plops you down in the middle of the jungle. The camera lingers over the nooks and crannies of an impossibly remote jungle shack. Two men sleep in beds covered in mosquito nets. A noise is heard outside, they jump into action, and before you even know what you’re watching somebody has met their grizzly end. Not only does this sequence get your blood pumping from the sudden violence, but also it instantly introduces a ton of intrigue. Who are these men? What are those things that came to them in the night? What am I in for with this movie? And then you get a jump from a nocturnal ambush in the bush, to a scene of a group of impossibly attractive American teenagers tooling around on jet skis. Water splashes, they flash their gleaming smiles, some sort of generic rock music plays over the soundtrack. It feels like the movie you were watching got interrupted by a soda commercial. But the soda commercial doesn’t end; and then you start to realize that you paid to watch the soda commercial.
Once the Raiders-esque opening vignette in the jungle is over, and then the Baywatch-esque character introduction on the beach is over, we get a whole lot of wordy, voice over narration telling us the backstory of the film. The main character is a teenage alien. His caretaker is an alien warrior. There are bad aliens trying to kill them that they are always running from. The real narration is much longer and more filled with pseudo-scientific sounding, world building jargon; but that is the main idea. The kid will come to be known as John (Alex Pettyfer), the caretaker as Henri (Timothy Olyphant), and as we meet them they are forced to flee from an idyllic beach town setting and head to the boring small town of Paradise, Ohio. All the way back at the beginning, when we were lost out there in the jungle, this seemed like a film that was going to allow it’s mysteries to unfold over time. It would engage by forcing you to pay attention and ponder what it was, exactly, that was happening. But what you’re really watching is a movie that tells you its whole story in a couple minutes of expository narration. And then all of the information you’re given is thrown aside for quite a while so that you can watch a cookie cutter, new kid comes to school, teen movie plot. We watch John discover a new love. He meets his goofy new best friend. He runs afoul of the school jocks. It’s all very pedestrian and well worn, and it only gets broken up every once in a while to show us images of the bad guy aliens on their way to town or a couple scenes of X-Men inspired, dealing with newfound super powers stuff. Don’t forget, this is a superhero alien action movie. So instead of a school dance climax, you’re going to get a special FX action climax.
Alex Pettyfer comes off as a bit of a clown. He’s statuesque enough to be the next big thing when it comes to teen film stardom, but he doesn’t quite have that emoting thing down yet. Every time the script calls for John to feel an emotion you get to look on uncomfortably as Pettyfer contorts his face trying to make sure he gets it across. He’s playing to the back of the theater with his expressions. Somebody should have tapped him on the shoulder and let him know that this isn’t a stage thing; it’s a film. He’s never exactly terrible, but he comes off as kind of lame during the heavy lifting scenes. Timothy Olyphant is solid in the little he gets to do as Henri. If you know the actor you can picture his standard performance. His character doesn’t amount to much as far as the film goes, but Olyphant manages to make him likable. Dianna Agron plays the love interest Sarah. Her character isn’t written as anything more than an impossible dream girl, but Agron does fine with the role, as she’s naturally a dream girl already. Callan McAuliffe plays the dweeby sidekick best friend character. He isn’t really around enough to get a handle on if he’s any good or not. And perhaps you can see a pattern forming here. Nobody got much to do. That’s because, despite it’s feature length runtime, I Am Number Four somehow only manages to accomplish as much as most films do in their first act. And by the time you start getting close to the climax of this film, you begin to realize that you aren’t going to get much closure on what you’ve watched at all. I Am Number Four isn’t even really a complete film; it’s mostly just a setup for a potential I Am Number Five. Oh brother.
I’ve called the teen drama portion of the film pedestrian, but it’s never really incompetent. You’ve seen this story a thousand times before, and you’ve seen it done better, sure. But it’s paint by numbers, so it’s kind of hard to mess up. The real problems start to show up when they have to shoehorn the alien warrior movie from the first few minutes back into the extended episode of Dawson’s Creek that the rest of the film becomes. Logic problems crop up right and left as the script tries to shuffle around all of the players and get them where they need to be so there can be a big fight. Sarah has John meet her at a crowded house party when his face has been all over the news as a wanted felon. Cars are being blown up and people are very publically being tossed around with super powers once the alien attackers show up, and Sarah and John take a break to go develop pictures in a dark room. None of the actions the characters take in the final third of the film make sense under scrutiny. You just have to sit back, turn your brain off, and hope that once things start blowing up it’ll be entertaining enough.
Due to the goofy, non-threatening nature of the bad guys, having the fight scene climax turn into something worthwhile seemed unlikely. The evil aliens are bald, leathered, pointy toothed, and gill nosed. They should be menacing enough, but they are played with such hammy, scenery chewing zeal that they come off less as badasses and more as something out of an avant-garde stage show. They wanted to be the bald guys from Dark City, but they were closer to being side characters from Little Monsters. Fortunately, the big fight at the end is choreographed and presented well enough to be a pretty fun sequence anyway. Teresa Palmer shows up as Number Six and wows with some pretty slick moves. She pulls off the chick martial artist thing better than maybe anybody else I’ve seen in an American film, and in just a couple minutes on screen. Like John, she has super powers, and when they start working together the alien smack down gets pretty large in scope and impressive to take in, mostly due to the very strong effects work. I can’t imagine that this movie had too much money to do big special effects, but they make their money count by saving it all up for one big blowup, and they smartly set the thing to go down at night so the shadows can make sure we don’t get too hung up on the particulars. For a few minutes at least, you get just as satisfying a super powered throw down as we’ve seen in any big budget summer tent pole.
