Journey 2: The Mysterious Island

Okay, you can laugh at me now, but I went to see this movie last week with my brother and his son. I even chose it (it is kid-safe).

Why would I pick it, you may reasonably ask?

1. The Rock (Dwayne Johnson, now that he's appearing in movies that the WWE doesn't own) demonstrating "the pec pop of love" while playing the concerned stepfather

2. Michael Caine, who's looking squirrelier and squirrelier with every passing year, as the eccentric (you think?) grandfather

3. A plot based on an entirely improbable mash-up of Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jonathan Swift is just too much to pass up

Plus, any movie that promises to show me another take on Nemo's submarine is always going to interest me. I'm a sucker for anything related to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

I'd love to be able to tell you that Journey 2 is a great family film, but I can't. It is a very uneven family film that I enjoyed at times and that at other times left me grimacing at its cliches.

All the right character ingredients are present: the dad who makes a plausible but reluctant adventurer, the plucky lead teenage boy with a wild imagination and a gift for science, his hot but wholesome love interest, the wacky granddad who motivates it all, and so on. The settings, which manage to throw Atlantis and all sorts of wild creatures into a single island, also provide the requisite exotic points of interest.

Unfortunately, the mixture never fully gels, so you spend parts of it captivated and other parts groaning.

On balance, I enjoyed the movie well enough and don't regret seeing it, but I suggest waiting for DVD or at least catching a matinee.