'City of Ember' review

Bill Murray (Credit: Fox Walden)

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In the futuristic but strangely antiquated City of Ember, citizens live underground, are forbidden to go outside city limits and receive all power from a central generator and food from storage overseen by the Mayor (Bill Murray). When the generator goes down, two plucky kids (Saoirse Ronan, Harry Treadaway) try to find a way out of the city and into the natural light. Tim Robbins and Martin Landau also star.

The buzz: With a title no more enthralling than "Body of Lies," "City of Ember" doesn't look like much, despite the presence of Murray and the young, Oscar-nominated Ronan ("Atonement"). The film's based on Jeanne Duprau's book and directed by Gil Kenan, who helmed the immensely overrated "Monster House." Whoopee.

The verdict: "City of Ember" gets some good goofiness from Murray—the only actor here having any fun--and some OK visuals that guarantee this won't disintegrate your brain the way family-friendly fare like "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" does. But the vaguely drawn, bone-dry story will almost certainly bore both you and the child/kid brother/nephew/court-appointed protégé you brought along--unless they truly love learning about pipes and power sources. The movie's kinda like a youth-oriented puree of "Dark City," "Children of Men" and "The Truman Show," generating little magic when all it does is spark your memory of other movies. This may not be a huge issue for the under-9 crowd, but I'd still prefer a kids' movie that fails daringly over one that hovers so placidly around the middle.

Did you know? In Ember, everyone's job is determined by randomly picking a piece of paper out of a bag, with roles ranging from pipeworker to messenger to potato peeler. We see absolutely no reason why this approach wouldn't work in real life, do you?

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