Film: Rise of the Guardians

Guardians appears to be The Avengers for folklore characters; featuring Santa (Alec Baldwin), Jack Frost (Chris Pine), the Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman), the Tooth Fairy (Isla Fisher) and the Sandman (who is mute) teaming up to fight evil. Unfortunately it lacks the spark that made Avengers such a smash hit, featuring the occasional good moment but mostly just sizzling out.

Pitch Black (Jude Law), the boogeyman, has had enough of being ignored by children and decides to sabotage the Guardian’s various holidays and activities so they will no longer be believed in; which causes them to lose their powers and eventually stop existing. The good guys must team up and stop Pitch before his evil plan can go in to effect, replacing children’s hope with fear.  Essentially this leads to a lot of fairly repetitive fight scenes and scenes of Pitch looking menacing up until the sappy conclusion. There is also a subplot about Jack Frost trying to recover the memories from his real life; that is rather pointless in the long run.

The CGI animation can be quite impressive at times; the snow scenes in particular really help to get you in the Christmas spirit. The Sandman’s dream magic and Frost’s ice powers also look amazing; glitzing up the action scenes. The character designs are distinctive and stick close to folk lore; except for the Easter Bunny whose design is just plain random. As Easter is a bit of a dull holiday they had to create a lot of things to make it more exciting, a lot of which don’t really work. The stone-egg things for instance are just downright bizarre.

The villain isn’t as terrifying as he could be; all his fear powers just seem to be centered around black horses for some reason. In the end he’s just a bit too emo for his own good. Jude Law does his best Loki impression and ends up pretty flat. Chris Pine brings some fun to his role as Jack Frost. The rest of the voice cast doesn’t do much to stand out. Alec Baldwin at least is able to pull off a semi-realistic Russian accent for North. My favourite character was actually the mute Sandman; who's incredibly adorable and also a little bit awesome.

There is a fairly massive plot hole, which is rather integral to the story and honestly the film kind of falls apart around it. If the fairytale characters stop existing when no children believe in them; then why do Pitch and Jack Frost still exist when its established right at the start that no one believes in either of them?

The film’s comedy mostly falls a bit flat, although a few children in the cinema did seem to find it hilarious. The ending is far too predictable; most people will probably guess how it ends incredibly early on. The cute and Christmassy moments just about keep it sweet enough to entertain young children. Essentially it’s just not a very adult friendly film.