Yesterday we saw what Adrien Brody was doing 10 years ago (he was playing the villain in DRAGON BLADE). Now let’s jump back another decade-plus and check on his future director Brady Corbet (core-bay). In 2004, a long before Brody was felled by the Silk Road Protection Squad, his THE BRUTALIST director was rolling with a more high tech protection squad called International Rescue.

That’s right, before he was a director Corbet was an actor, and his third movie (after the edgy indies THIRTEEN by Catherine Hardwicke and MYSTERIOUS SKIN by Gregg Araki) was the Hollywood non-puppet remake of the ‘60s British “Supermarionation” TV show Thunderbirds. He’s not top-billed, but he’s the lead, playing 14-year-old Alan Tracy, son of Thunderbirds founder and leader Jeff Tracy (Bill Paxton, THE DARK BACKWARD). His thing is he goes to a boarding school and dreams/whines about wanting to grow up and join the team with his dad and his three older brothers.

(I wonder if they ever considered a non-puppet version of The Muppet Show?)

This is a prequel, set in the futuristic year of 2010, while the show started in 2065, when Alan will be almost 70? I’m not sure about the timeline. If you haven’t seen the show, or only remember that they are funny puppets, the premise is that they live on a cool private island in the South Pacific and each pilot advanced flying machines called Thunderbirds to rescue people from disasters. In this movie that makes them so famous that when they’re in Russia fighting an oil rig fire Alan’s entire school runs into a room to watch it live on TV and cheer. (It’s unclear if everything we’re seeing is somehow on the news or not. If so, amazing camera crew they got there.)

Immediately after Alan sees his entire family almost die horribly on live television (but luckily surviving as Forest Taft style firefighting heroes), a bully kid says with withering sarcasm, “Ooh, I wish I could be a Thunderbird one day.” And then the coup de grace:

He calls him “Thunder-turd.” Cold-blooded.

Just like his dad in that Russian fireball, Alan should have been burned alive by such a deadly blast. Luckily he has two devastating comebacks:

1) calling that kid “diaper boy”

and

2) like one second later his hot blond adult undercover agent friend Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward (Sophia Myles, UNDERWORLD, ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL) comes to pick him up for Spring Break and acts all flirtatious with the whole school so they almost die of boners.

Alan’s best friend is Fermat Hackenbacker (Soren Fulton, 1 episode of Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue), son of Thunderbirds engineer Brains (Anthony Edwards, MIRACLE MILE). Both are cartoonish nerds/engineering geniuses who wear big glasses and stutter. There’s also a girl on the island, Tin-Tin Belagant (Vanessa Hudgens, also in THIRTEEN, later in SPRING BREAKERS), who’s the daughter of Jeff’s, um, manservant Kyrano (Bhasker Patel, “Temple Guard,” INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM).

Meanwhile there’s an openly sinister bad guy with mind powers called The Hood (Ben Kingsley, SECURITY). Oh shit, yeah, I recognize him from the puppet. He discovers the location of Tracy Island, invades their house/fortress, and reveals he’s the brother of Kyrano, previously believed dead, now alive with a grudge against Jeff for rescuing Kyrano from an earthquake but not him. He has some henchmen, but who cares, I only remember his henchwoman Transom (Rose Keegan, FIRST KNIGHT), who seduces Brain by being a sexy nerd (hot redhead but with big teeth). Also he traps the adults in their Thunderbirds, but the kids hide so they can figure out how to rescue them. In my opinion the kids should call themselves The Underbirds and then once they’ve proven themselves they ceremonially remove the ‘e’ and squeeze the other letters together.

According to the credits the screenplay is by William Osborne (GHOST IN THE MACHINE, THE SCORPION KING) and Michael McCullers (AUSTIN POWERS 2 and 3, UNDERCOVER BROTHER), story by Peter Hewitt (director of BILL & TED’S BOGUS JOURNEY) and Osborne. The director is Jonathan Frakes in his fourth theatrical feature, second non-Star Trek (after CLOCKSTOPPERS). They all seem to have recognized that by 21st century standards a family that has flying ships that just put out fires and stuff is not a very exciting idea for a movie. So instead they focus on… well, children who only dream of some day being able to do that thing that we just agreed was not enough to justify a movie. If I may skip ahead, THUNDERBIRDS was considered a big bomb and got poor reviews, and I doubt it was only because it came out against SPIDER-MAN 2. Did they really think there was someone who would know what Thunderbirds was and be excited for a non-puppet version? If that guy really was out there he must’ve been bummed when he found out it wasn’t even that.

By the way, here is an ordinary light-up wall display that the family has in their house, being that they are an ordinary family and not a weird one.

It seems like it’s trying to be kind of a kiddy event movie. It was released in July and has a big score by Hans Zimmer a couple movies before he reinvented what that means with BATMAN BEGINS. There’s an “additional music” credit for Ramin Djawadi (BLADE: TRINITY, DRACULA UNTOLD) and I can only assume Hans made him do the techno dance music type action parts whenever they want to simulate what it might sound like if something exciting happened. The kids do get to ride bulldozer things in one part, they’re pretty excited about that. One of them has a water cannon. I guess to be fair they’re also trying to do some adventure movie stuff: there’s a CG scorpion, a CG bee swarm, some underwater feats, a hover-sled chase through the jungle that is very, very, not as good as the RETURN OF THE JEDI speeder bike chase or the later chase in INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL, no matter how bad your attitude is about that one. There’s also a giant drill thing.

They escape onto a neighboring island and try to hack into a satellite feed or whatever and regain control of the Thunderbirds. Fermat stole “the guidance processor” to stop the bad guys from launching, so he solders it to an antenna tower. There’s a weird joke where he’s wondering where he can get metal to solder with and it cuts to him pulling Alan’s braces out with pliers, seemingly non-consensually.

Alan kinda deserves it, though. It’s fairly standard for the main kid in a family movie to be a whiny brat who says something mean to his friend, but usually they repent and learn a lesson. This guy has a scene where he mocks Fermat’s stutter, and it stops everybody cold, it’s so harsh.Tin-Tin looks at him like what the FUCK dude, this is rated-PG, I wish we were in THIRTEEN again so I could tell you how out of line you are.

But he doesn’t apologize! The moment just passes. It’s weird.

Occasionally the movie cuts to the much more delightful Lady Penelope, who takes bubble baths, always wears pink, rides in a flying car, and in one scene busts out a bunch of high kicks and flips (stunt double: Nikki Berwick, also doubled Sonya Blade in MORTAL KOMBAT: ANNIHILATION).

She beats up all the henchpeople, but The Hood telekinetically blocks her kicks and her butler Aloysius Parker (Ron Cook, HOT FUZZ)’s punches and kind of does a SCANNERS on them until Alan gives up the processor thing and then they’re all locked in a freezer. The end. We wish.

I don’t find this a very entertaining or well made movie, but I want to say something nice. Some of the sets and vehicles, inspired by the original show, have kind of a nice retro look to them. (Production designer: John Beared, THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, HACKERS.) I like that while flying a Thunderbird Lady Penelope has a pink headset. I guess I sort of respect the weirdness of including one shot where Fermat has a marionette hand. Obviously it’s an homage to the show, but there’s no other context to it and I think it’s cg?

By the way, at the end of the movie Dad answers a call from “Madam President.” As a country we’re failing to live up to a not very good movie from over 20 years ago. Jesus. Anyway, it was the aughts, so the end credits have a pop punk “Thunderbirds Are Go” song by the British band Busted, fresh off their 2003 wins for Favourite Newcomer at the National Music Awards and Best Band at the Disney Channel Kids’ Awards.

Much like the architect László Tóth before him, Jeff Tracy is a man who followed his dream, found a way to construct his vision at a massive scale, and fought to do it his way. Also he’s the father of a whiner who is a very bad friend but does later learn to fly a plane type vehicle.