Director M. Night Shyamalan has a habit of kicking away the acting crutches of Hollywood's A-list stars, but it is our loss when he takes aim at Will Smith in After Earth.
Bruce Willis was forbidden by Shyamalan to fall back on his usual smirk to powerful effect in The Sixth Sense, the mystery thriller the film-maker is still trying to top 14 years later.
Smith is an action man who can elevate even the most mediocre of scripts, but After Earth distils those qualities so much he never cracks a smile and is laid up with a broken leg, speaking robotic lines, for most of this attempt at a new science-fiction franchise.
Jaden Smith co-stars with the old man for the second time after The Pursuit of Happyness.
A thousand years in the future, Smith jun is the estranged son of his granite-featured father, a fearless general, who returns home to his family on Nova Prime.
An asteroid shipwrecks father and son on this island earth, a wild and savage place where every creature has evolved to kill humans.
It is humourless and contrived. Someone should strip Shyamalan of his directorial cliches of portentous silences, lugubrious camera moves and shock cuts and get Smith senior back, somehow, on his earlier abandoned earth for I Am Legend 2.
After Earth (M)
Starring: Will Smith (Men in Black 3), Jaden Smith (The Karate Kid).
Director: M. Night Shyamalan (The Last Airbender).
Screening: Reading Cinemas Queenstown.
