Midnight Special
Director: Jeff Nichols
Year Released: 2016
Rating: 1.0
Eight-year-old Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), who has mystical powers (his eyes glow! he can destroy a house!), is kidnapped by his biological father (Michael Shannon) and a rogue police officer (Joel Edgerton) from a cult in Texas in order to take the boy to a particular location based on the kid's 'secret knowledge' ... there to follow is every federal officer in the Southern United States as well as understanding NSA agent Paul Sevier (Adam Driver). What should be quick-and-light B-movie fun is slowed down to a crawl by Nichols, who has (misguided) artistic aspirations for fundamentally corny fare: it's E.T. crossed with Tomorrowland, except Alton is too alien to be empathetic and its script is too drawn out to be invigorating. A few select scenes of the lad shooting beams of light out of his eyes or generating large domes of energy don't exactly quicken the pulse; Shannon, regularly the Freak du Jour, is unfortunately restrained.
