Have any of you seen I Am Number Four? In a brain dead mood -- it's summer, it happens -- it was watched right here. At first I thought I might write up a whole review. Its jumbled five or six films in one chaos might be worth savaging as it continually reveals itself as a member of the "we're making this shit up as we go along!" school of storytelling. Pettyfer is number four of a race of escapee aliens who are being hunted on Earth by their old nemesis and they're being killed in numerical order. I'll give you one guess as to how many of them are already dead.
Number three is dead.
Good guess!
I knew nothing about I Am Number Four's origins but immediately assumed it was based on a comic or graphic novel due to its continual expository mythology. All this for one stand alone feature? It must have fuller origins elsewhere.
But in the end the movie is too disposable and harmless to be mean to. So let's just focus on the troublesome pet peeve: Alex Pettyfer's Magic Hands.
Pettyfer knows he's an alien and he knows he's number four but he doesn't actually understand his own powers yet and strange things keep happening to his body, like pulsing blue light from his hands. Pettyfer is a bit too, um, well-developed for I Am Number Four to double property as a puberty metaphor but it seems to be trying anyway. Once he starts using those hands his powers seem limitless. His hands are always ready with some solution: lock-picking, energy blasts, heat generation, super strength, you name it. At one point when he just decides to use them as flashlights in a dark room where key exposition secrets are hidden we had to add our own dialogue from the couch: "I've got an app for that, too!"
There's just nothing those mitts can't do.
Note to all filmmakers of this and Green Lantern and anyone taking on any future heroes with undefined powers: it doesn't work. If your hero's gifts are never defined there are no stakes. You can't push them to their limits for a dramatic climax if you've never given any indication that they have any. Think it over.