The Adventures Of Chris Fable [2010]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

I need you to look at the poster for this movie to understand why it was our choice for the night. That is a set up for a "Harry Potter" rip off based on the font or at minimum some for of "Lord of the Rings" influenced fantasy. We were wrong. Right in the beginning, with so much shaky cam we all felt like we needed some dramamine, it said that the plot was based off of John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," which is a Christian allegory Everyman adventure from 1687. The basis lends itself pretty well to a dystopian story, which appears to be the setting, but overall it wasn't quite weird enough to be really worth the time.

Chris (changed from Christian) wanders into a church one day and meets Evangeline, a woman who introduces him to the concept of books and later teaches him how to read. There is one book in particular that is specal (guess which one). Evangeline finds out that Chris is estranged from his fisherman father and encourages him to leave the City of Destruction where they live to go to the Celestial City. Along the way he loses a friend named Duck to a swampy bog with a monster in it, meets up with a girl named Faith and later saves a girl named Hope, learns the art of the blade from a cowboy named Grant, fights off bugs that rival the "Birdemic" birds in quality, and hangs out in Satan's (Luc's) pleasure house before realizing it's all an illusion and fighting off his mech with his slingshot a la David and Goliath. In the end he gets pulled out of the water by a fishing net so we assume he achieved his goal of finding his father, but it's not really clear. The dad narrative was pretty superfluous. Why doesn't he just want to get to the Celestial City because the world is crap? They should have spent a bit more time fleshing out their universe instead of wandering around a national park.

Either way, it's not exciting enough to be an adventure, not bad enough to be especially funny, and only a mediocre adaption of the source material anyway. Allegory unclear: Luc's fun house seems fun. What is truth anyway?

Spoon Rating: 3