Journey 2: The Mysterious Island wants to be a family adventure movie. It mostly settles for a loud, dimwitted disaster comedy dressed in dinosaur skins. The film follows Sean Anderson, played by Josh Hutcherson, who joins his uncle, played by Dwayne Johnson, on a mission to rescue Sean’s father from a mysterious island. What follows is a succession of set pieces that care more about spectacle than story.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
The Setup
The premise is simple enough. Sean’s father goes missing while searching for a lost city. His uncle, a survivalist, believes the island holds the key. The two men, joined by a young girl named Karina, played by Vanessa Hudgens, and her uncle, played by Michael Caine, set out across a stormy ocean to find him. That setup should carry weight. It doesn’t.
Lost City vs. Real Story
The film spends its runtime chasing set pieces instead of character. A volcanic eruption, a giant squid attack, and a final showdown with a massive creature all arrive faster than the film can explain why they matter. The island itself, meant to hold secrets and wonder, feels less like a destination and more like a warehouse of effects.
- The volcano erupts without warning.
- The squid appears from nowhere.
- The final beast arrives with no build-up.
Each set piece is bigger than the last, and each leaves the audience no closer to caring about the characters involved.
Comedy That Misses Its Mark
Dwayne Johnson plays the uncle as a gruff, ex-military type who tells jokes at the worst possible moments. The film leans on his physical comedy heavily, with Johnson repeatedly getting hit by debris and falling into water. It works once. By the third act, it’s a rhythm the film cannot sustain.
Josh Hutcherson plays Sean as a nervous teenager who watches everything happen to him. His reactions are meant to ground the chaos, but the script rarely gives him anything to react to. The result is a lead who spends most of the film running and hiding while the adults solve problems he shouldn’t have to.
Vanessa Hudgens and Michael Caine get smaller roles. Their scenes exist to provide exposition and comic relief, and neither rises above the material around them.
Where It Falls Short
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island fails at the most basic level of filmmaking: it forgets why we care about the people inside it. The volcano, the squid, and the final beast are impressive individually. Together, they add up to a film that cannot remember its own point.
The film’s biggest mistake is its pace. Set pieces arrive back to back, with no room for breath between them. The audience gets no time to sit with a loss or a discovery before the next explosion hits. The film runs at a constant clip, and that clip is fast enough to keep the audience alert but not engaged.
A Familiar Pattern
This is a pattern familiar to viewers of this franchise. Big budget, small heart, bigger explosions. The film borrows the name of a classic novel and then discards everything that made that novel worth reading. What remains is a machine built to move from one disaster to the next, with the human story left to catch up.
The film ends without resolving much of anything. The father is rescued, the island is left behind, and the group returns home. There is no sense of closure, only a shrug.
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island is a film that knows how to blow things up and doesn’t know when to stop. It is loud, occasionally funny, and almost never smart. It earns a score of 4.1 out of 10.
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