Stormbreaker

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Based on the young adult book of the same name by Anthony Horowitz, Stormbreaker is a children’s action film centering on fourteen-year-old British schoolboy Alex Rider (Alex Pettyfer.) When his uncle, Ian Rider (Ewan McGregor,) dies under mysterious circumstances, Alex is recruited by MI6, his uncle’s secret employer. He is tasked with finishing his uncle’s last mission: Investigating the Stormbreaker line of computers, which seem too good to be true, as they are about to be distributed to schools across the country. They are the pet project of eccentric businessman Sayle (Mickey Rourke,) who holds a grudge against his old schoolmate, the prime minister (Robbie Coltrane.) Also known as Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker.

Whew. Got all that?

I will say I liked the movie better than the book. The movie was supposed to kick off a franchise the way the book did, but it was a certified flop and the film series was promptly cancelled. The book series is still going strong, there’s what I understand to be a fairly successful recent TV series, and they’re apparently still quite popular with preteen boys to this day.

I am not a preteen boy, so neither the book nor the movie held much appeal for me. I’m just not the target audience.

The book, while short, felt really lifeless and flat. It just felt like ticking off checkmarks. Alex goes to this location, accomplishes this task, moves on to the next location. It was boring. Wish fulfillment aspect aside, I really struggled to find what preteen boys would even find appealing about it. Surely there are other, better spy boy books out there?

The movie, on the other hand, was more fun mainly because of the cast. Aside from Alex Pettyfer. Remember when they were trying to make him a thing? I don’t want to be too harsh because he was a child here. But he’s far and away the weakest cast member, which is unfortunate, considering he’s playing the main character. He’s a charisma vacuum as always. Also, seeing a fourteen-year-old child repeatedly beat the asses of half a dozen grown men is way more unintentionally funny than reading the same thing in a book.

But the adult members of the cast really woke me back up whenever they were onscreen. We’ve got Andy Serkis playing a mute, disfigured former circus performer henchman. We’ve got Bill Nighy playing a higher-up at MI6 like an absolute lunatic. We’ve got Stephen Fry as a toy salesman/gadget dispenser. We’ve got the late, great Robbie Coltrane as the school bully prime minister. We’ve got Missi Pyle as a henchwoman doing a comedy German accent. We’ve got Damien Lewis doing a comedy Russian accent and murdering people while dangling upside-down from helicopters.

The specific highlights for me included Stephen Fry in his one scene giving Alex his gadgets; as well as the scene that was not in the book which had Missi Pyle’s character stealing Alex’s cellphone, getting his personal information from the SIM card, showing up at his house, confronting his housekeeper/cook/nanny Alicia Silverstone, and the absolutely goofy brawl between them that ensues.

Overall, I feel like there were some improvements that the movie made on the book. As I said, the above scene wasn’t in the book at all. Alex blows his own cover immediately. MI6 arranges to get him inside the Stormbreaker factory by passing him off as a different boy his age who won a contest to test out the computer. When Sayle introduces himself and says to Alex, “You must be [NAME OF KID WHO WON THE CONTEST WHICH IS NOT REMOTELY SIMILAR TO ‘ALEX’],” Alex instantly responds with, “Call me Alex.” Oh my god. I get he’s a fourteen-year-old kid, but he’s also supposed to be a spy prodigy. That’s the kind of rookie mistake that gets you a well-deserved faceful of bullets. What a dumbfuck. He blows his own cover slightly less egregiously in the movie by openly talking about his freshly dead uncle these people just killed, but at least he doesn’t immediately blurt out his real name.

I also appreciated that the film bothered to bring back the characters it introduced, unlike the book. I understand that the book was very short and the first in a series that I will not continue to read. Maybe some of them show up again later. But Alicia Silverstone’s character, Jack the housekeeper, who Alex had to save from deportation by reluctantly agreeing to work for MI6? Introduced in the first chapter and is never seen or heard from again. The guys Alex ends up earning the respect of during a rocky basic training? Never seen or heard from again. It’s not like a lot would have changed if those characters had been dropped, but it was nice they came back in the movie. It made it feel more like a complete story, rather than a series of unrelated vignettes. I can’t believe I’m actually giving points for Anthony understanding how basic planting and payoff works on his second draft.

Jack, especially, being more present was very appreciated. It would have been way too hard to believe if she was just gone and was apparently completely unconcerned that the child left in her care simply vanished for several days in a row.

On the other hand, the addition of a love interest for Alex was clearly an unnecessary studio mandate. Again, cool the film remembers she exists and brings her back at the end and is the only classmate who knows Alex’s secret. That would have been fun for a sequel. But as it is, I would have liked it more without the love interest character.

Ewan McGregor plays Alex’s uncle, Ian. He’s dead by the six-minute mark. I felt this way with the book, but somehow even more with the movie, even though his death is way less ambiguous in the movie: I kept expecting a reveal that Ian wasn’t really dead, that he’d been captured or had gone into hiding, and this mission or a subsequent mission would result in Alex rescuing him. Even the trailer thinks that’s what happens; possibly because Ewan McGregor was too bankable a name to admit to killing off before the opening title in the trailer, or because parents would have thought it was too dark. Either way, uh, no. Even in the books, apparently he’s dead dead. I’m honestly not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, I can respect that death is permanent in this children’s series and that they stick to this ice-cold opening. On the other hand, I feel like this abrupt inciting incident had a lot of emotional potential that goes completely unused.

Ian Rider never even appears in the book. The book opens with the police showing up at the house to inform Alex of his uncle’s death. So I liked that we get to see him even briefly in the film. It does kind of immediately ruin the whole “Surprise, your uncle was a spy” reveal, but it also shows a glimpse into Alex and Ian’s relationship. Alex is the last person Ian speaks to before he dies. As he’s driving back home, he calls Alex to let him know he’s on the way. He apologizes for being away so much. He hangs up and thinks he’s in the clear before Damien Lewis appears upside-down from the sky outside his car window and shoots him.

The lack of fallout from this was easily the weakest part of both the book and the movie for me. I know it’s made clear that Ian was away on missions all the time, and when he was there he was keeping secrets and was emotionally distant, so he and Alex weren’t really close. But still, Alex never particularly seems to care that his last surviving biological relative who’s taken care of him since he was a toddler is dead. It makes Alex seem like kind of a psychopath. This is not helped by Alex being casually racist and ableist in the book. He’s only casually ableist in the movie. It’s okay, because he’s being bigoted to the bad guys.

There is, at least, a moment towards the end of the book, where Alex is retracing Ian’s footsteps to a specific location, and he gets emotional. He realizes that his uncle came this far all alone, and that he never would have made it if he hadn’t had his uncle’s work up to this point showing him the way. For the first time in his life, he actually feels a connection to his uncle, and he wishes he’d gotten a chance to know him better.

That scene nor anything like it is in the movie, and I think the movie suffers because of it. Everyone is like, “Of course, you want to get revenge on the people who killed your uncle,” and aside from one and a half scenes, Alex is like, “Eh, not really.” I believe him, this is not a priority for him! He does not have to be this cold, Anthony, you wrote him this way!

Damien Lewis’s character, Gregorovich, is basically unchanged from the book, and he was one of my favorite parts of both mediums. He’s the assassin who killed Ian, but he doesn’t work for Sayle. He’s a contractor. He works for another shadowy organization who loaned him out to Sayle. When Sayle’s plan fails, Gregorovich is ordered to kill him to avoid embarrassing his employers. He ends up being the one to rescue Alex from Sayle. When Alex asks why, Gregorovich says, “I had no orders concerning you.” Nothing personal, just business, you know. But then…

Every other adult has been, bafflingly, treating this child like an equal. They’re all either blackmailing him, bullying him, endangering him, or attempting to murder him in the most unhinged ways possible. This is why I find Gregorovich’s treatment of Alex so refreshing. He reacts to all this like a facsimile of a real person.

Alex does the whole, “You saved me today, but we’re not even. You killed my uncle, so one day when I’m big enough and strong enough, I’m going to kill you,” thing. And Gregorovich basically stops short of condescendingly patting him on the head. He advises Alex to get out of the spy game while he’s ahead and tells him not to let the government manipulate him into doing their dirty work anymore. He’s like, “You’re a child. Go back to school.” They part ways with a grudging respect for each other and the knowledge that they’ll meet again some day, but it’s still abundantly clear that after everything, Gregorovich is the only adult who truly understands or cares that Alex is a child who doesn’t belong here. Even Alex’s uncle didn’t seem to fully comprehend that, with the implication that he’s been surreptitiously training Alex to one day take his place. That loose thread on Alex and Gregorovich’s relationship in the future was compelling enough to have me briefly considering checking out another book in the series. But that compulsion didn’t last long.

This movie feels less dated than the book–where Alex is given a Game Boy Color that can send faxes–but is still incredibly dated. Even with some fun performances, it’s utterly forgettable among the other spy children movies of the mid-2000s.

COMING UP NEXT: SCENES OF A SEXUAL NATURE