Cannes 2011: THE PRODIGIES Review

An enormous wasted opportunity. That is the best way to sum up Antoine Charreyron's The Prodigies, an animated feature with an intriguing premise but a horrible, horrible script that doesn't know what sort of movies it wants to be for what sort of audience and collapses entirely under a ridiculously over complicated plot and complete lack of character development.

No. I did not like this movie. At all.

The story goes like this. We begin with Jimbo as a young teen. He's an obviously intelligent young man but stuck in an abusive home and it takes just moments before his father is throwing his mother down the stairs and laying the belt on to Jimbo - an act of violence that flashes to white and somehow ends with Jimbo's parents dead and Jimbo locked away in an asylum claiming that he killed them both despite obvious signs of it being a murder suicide. It would be a long life in confinement for Jimbo if not for the arrival of Mr Killian - a wealthy philanthropist who claims to share Jimbo's gift and who whisks the boy out of hospital care to raise him as his own son.

Jump forward a decade or so. Jimbo is now a young man, lecturing at Killian's university and overseeing a secret program to search for more youngsters with the same gifts carried by himself and Killian. And after years of nothing he succeeds - turning up five teens simultaneously around the nation. And so off he heads to round them up. And then things get just plain silly.

Kids come back to New York, Killian dies, funding slashed. Faced with sending the kids back to their own lousy homes Jimbo instead suggests funding the program with a reality TV show. About smart kids. Which works but also leads to the kids being assaulted in Central Park and one of them raped into a coma. The TV network hushes the whole affair up and, after discovering a videotape of Jimbo in the asylum talking about wanting to take revenge on the world, the four conscious kids decide to do just that, with things escalating to the point that they eventually take control of the US President and launch a nuclear attack on New York City.

Problems? Pick one. Logic problems, plot holes and enormous leaps to ridiculous conclusions abound. The film is far too violent to play for children and far too clumsy to play for anyone with any sort of critical faculties. The very elements do not mesh together at all and, critically, there is zero attempt whatsoever to establish the individual characters of any of the titular five prodigies at all. Zero. At its most basic level this boils down to a story about angry teens trying to blow up twenty million people because they're mad at a small handful with no attempt ever made to justify that radical escalation and with none of them ever questioning even remotely if all of this killing might be a bad idea. These aren't fleshed out characters. They're not even caricatures. They're just pixels being shoved around to hit a sequence of badly thought out and poorly connected plot points.

That The Prodigies will receive a large scale release in France is inevitable. The companies involved are too big and the investment too large for it to be otherwise. But I will be shocked beyond words if it receives even a marginal release in most other territories because it is simply not a good movie and its inclusion here says that the Cannes organizers clearly do not think very highly of the teen audience it was targeted to.