Gil Kenan's Monster House was a pleasantly surprising shout-out to the kind of kids’ adventure movies they don't make that often any more. The film was clearly the product of a man raised on movies like The Goonies, Explorers, and Monster Squad. Kenan's highly anticipated follow-up, City of Ember, also reminds me of some '80s movies, but this time it's Hudson Hawk and Howard the Duck. City of Ember is a design nightmare, a movie that should transport the audience to another world but instead feels unfinished and blatantly manipulative. If the Jesus lion from The Chronicles of Narnia made you raise an eyebrow and wonder if you had wandered into church instead of the multiplex, avoid City of Ember at all costs. Even ignoring my low tolerance for obvious biblical allegories, City of Ember simply doesn't work as entertainment, ending up a cluttered mess and another example for writers to use when they pull the "Sophomore Slump" feature out for publication again.

The latest attempt at siphoning even a little bit of the audience that made J.K. Rowling a billionaire and caused a generation to name their cat Hermione, City of Ember opens with the end of the world. Apparently, instead of stopping mankind's demise, the planet's most amazing scientists and architects built an underground city called "City of Ember." The idea is that the sorrow over the end of society would too much to bear for the current generation, so mankind will live like mole men for two centuries, lessening the pain and decreasing the melanoma. A box with instructions on what to do when the opposite-doomsday clock hits zero in 200 years is supposed to be passed down from Mayor to Mayor, but it gets buried and lost before the big day. As the city crumbles into corruption, chaos, and darkness, two youngsters stumble onto the secret to finding the way out. The tragically named Doon Barlow (Harry Treadaway) inherits the drive to escape from his former inventor of a father (Tim Robbins) while Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan) happens to be the ancestor of the Mayor who last held the instructions on how to leave the city behind. Instructions in the form of words written centuries ago by elders who reportedly had a plan for their ancestors about how to survive the end times, escape the darkness brought on partially by the corruption of mankind, and move on to a higher plain - I know faith-based fantasy is one of the biggest trends in fiction and cinema but this one is just too on-the-nose for me.

Maybe the biblical allegory wouldn't have annoyed me as much if City of Ember had delivered on the magical world its concept promises. Quite simply, the design in City of Ember is horrendous. Doon, Lina, and the rest of the gang run around a city that looks more like a discarded Universal Studios ride than a fully-realized world. It must have been a tough thing to conceptualize - an underground city in its last days - but there's a creative spark to these kind of films that City of Ember is missing. Ronan shows signs that she will develop into an interesting actress and make a solid heroine someday, but her character, like everyone else in Ember, feels like a plot device and nothing more. I realize that characters in kids movies are often just ways to drive the complex plots forward, but with nothing relatable or interesting to grab onto, City of Ember doesn't even deliver the action that kids are going to need to stop from getting bored. There's literally not a single action set piece worth remembering and the one real chase sequence involves a horribly designed mole that looks like a cast-off from C.H.U.D. Hey, it's another '80s movie. For his junior effort, Kenan really does need to leave his childhood behind.

Rating: ONE BONE

Reviewed by Brian Tallerico (MovieRetriever.com Film Critic)

Release Date: October 10th, 2008

Rating: PG

Starring: Harry Treadaway, Saoirse Ronan, Tim Robbins, Bill Murray, Toby Jones, and Mary Kay Place

Director: Gil Kenan

Writer: Caroline Thompson