Tuesday 9 March 2010

Movie 68: The Librarian: Return To King Solomon’s Mines

This is a sequel and a TV movie so I’ll recap the premise a bit too.

Flynn Carsen is a bookish young man, a professional student, with 22 degrees. He gets a job for the Metropolitan Public Library and its not all it seems. The Librarian doesn’t just stack books, he’s tasked with finding and protecting ancient powerful artefacts. So it’s like Indiana Jones meets Warehouse 13.

In the first instalment it’s the Spear of Destiny. In the second film it’s a hunt for King Solomon’s Mines to protect its secrets and find the book of Solomon. In an added twist Flynn already has a connection to the secret via his father. He’s aided by Emily Davenport, played by Fiona from Burn Notice.

The series is cheesy as hell, but I find them quite entertaining. This is a bit of a step down from the first one but still relatively decent. Your looking at mainly actors who are on hiatus from TV shows or are regular guest stars all over the place, cheap and cheerful CGI and thrown together fight scenes

Nothing remarkable then. In fact it does sort of come across as a fan film to Indy. The start of the movie finds Flynn on another mission and it’s to find the Crystal Skull. These 10 minutes are actually possibly a little better than the 4th Jones movie. Their treatment of the skull mythology is anyway, at least it’s a bloody HUMAN skull this time.

I’m pretty sure TNT made these as family adventures too, and this is enough to keep the kids entertained on a public holiday for a couple of hours. Flynn, a bit like Macgyver, uses his book learning to help himself out of some tricky spots but not quite as much as I would have liked. The script didn’t seem to be as smart as it wanted to be and they might have gone for too big a story.

And Jonathan Frakes shoots it’s adequately, he’s a good TV director.

If you see the first one The Librarian: The Quest For The Spear on the telly then give it a look. If you like it, you’ll probably like this. And I’ll be rounding out the so far trilogy tomorrow as

Next up: The Librarian: The Curse Of The Judas Chalice

They seem to come along every 2 years so maybe there’ll be another one before 10 is done. However, wikipedia indicates that it was headed for theatres last year but there’s nothing since and I can’t remember hearing anything about that. As you can see they stick to the biblical themes, just like the Indy series. Hopefully they’ll keep that up if they do make another one as we saw what happened when they made a change there

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