Sky Captain and the punch-lines of yesterday

Battle ships. Planes shaped like decapitated birds. Obnoxious music jolting obviously painted clouds and cows just plopping out of the sky. All around, fifty-foot-tall robots are breaking things left and right like elephants in a chem lab. Amidst all the clamor and chaos, there is only one thing you can count on: Paramount Pictures' Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow surely won't save viewers from 107 excruciating minutes of bad special effects, atrocious acting and even worse scripting.

The movie starts in a sci-fi version of 1930s New York City, where our heroine, a Lois Lane-esque Chronicle reporter named Polly Perkin (Gwyneth Paltrow), receives a clue to the serial killing of scientists around the world. Apparently, seven mad WWI scientists are being hunted down by a madder eighth scientist, an evil egghead named Dr. Totenkopf (Sir Laurence Olivier), whose goal is to create the "world of tomorrow" by erasing today's Earth. Along with aviator Joe "Sky Captain" Sullivan (Jude Law), Polly sets out to get the story on Totenkopf, and of course, to save the world. The story follows the daring duo as they span the world in a series of mutilated rip-offs of Batman, The Matrix, and The Wizard of Oz.

Sky Captain didn't spare Jurassic Park, The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars from its rip-off list either. Someone probably picked the troll-like creatures and dinosaurs out of some digital recycle bin from Jurassic Park or LotR special effects studios. The planes, pods, rockets and robots in Sky Captain looked more childish than the machines in the first Star Wars movie, which is pathetic since George Lucas made that movie some 30 years ago.

Though the special effects looked hilariously fake, the gray-overtones and blurred edges of the shots made the cinematic presentation of the film quite easy on the eyes. The color quality of the film is reminiscent of old black-and-white films and sleuth movies in the golden era of the motion pictures.

The other pleasant thing in the movie is Captain Franky Cook (Angelina Jolie). As a commander in the British Royal Air Force, Franky saves Joe in his moment of need. She can navigate, she can shoot, and she can obliterate man-killing machines as easily as one might swat a fly. She is the real "Macho-Man", and she makes pretty-boy Joe seem as tame as a dolly. Okay, her eye patch looks pretty dumb, but she is one chick who will rock this world.

Jolie is in the film for all of, oh, five minutes. That's too bad, because Paltrow and Law really needed help. Paltrow's Polly is an idiot-savant who can read German but cannot manage to run in a straight line. While Law's Sky Captain tries to save the world with stiff lines like "I'm on my way" and "Follow the stars," Polly is busy saving her camera and her six-inch heels. But hey, her hair is shiny at all times (huh, wonder what shampoo she uses), and heck, she can enunciate her lines like no other.

Hollywood has drilled moviegoers to endure dull language time after time with film after painful film. If Sky Captain was simply bland, it wouldn't be too awful. But the failed attempts at humor are really enough to make viewers want to strangle themselves. To fish out a few paltry laughs, the film's writer and director Kerry Conran resorted to using racy Tibetan jokes about nipples and to putting the unclad Polly and Joe in bed together with a burly nude man. And Conran probably thought he was terribly clever to make the interweaving joke about Polly's camera and her stinginess to use up the last two pictures left on her only roll of film. With a closing line like "Lens cap," Sky Captain's overwhelming failure to entertain is enough to inspire the audience to watch Dumb and Dumberer again and again!

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is rated PG for sequences of stylized sci-fi violence and brief mild language.