Dwayne Johnson plays a stepfather who does paperwork and punches nothing. Michael Caine plays a grandfather who has been marooned for years and seems mildly annoyed about it. Between them sits Josh Hutcherson, back as Sean Anderson, the only actor to return from 2008’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. Kristin Davis replaced Jane Wheeler as Sean’s mother, Liz — the only other character carried over.
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island came out on February 10, 2012, from Warner Bros. Pictures. Brad Peyton directed. Brian and Mark Gunn wrote the script, with Richard Outten also credited. It runs 94 minutes and it made $335 million worldwide, more than the first film. That number is the most interesting thing about it.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
Sean Anderson and the Dirt Bike
The film opens four years after the trip to the center of the Earth. Sean is 17 now. He gets caught by police after a high-speed dirt bike chase that ends in a neighbor’s swimming pool. A cop named Jim, played by Stephen Caudill, tells Hank Parsons about the break-in. Hank is Sean’s stepfather, a former Navy officer, and he steps in to keep the kid out of juvenile detention.
Sean had broken into a satellite facility to boost a coded signal. He thinks it came from his grandfather, Alexander, who has been missing for years. Hank helps him decode it. The message points to three novels — Treasure Island, Gulliver’s Travels, and The Mysterious Island — and a set of coordinates in the South Pacific.
So the movie has a premise. A boy who lost one father figure goes looking for the one he still has. That is a real emotional engine, and the film spends about ten minutes on it before the helicopter shows up.
Palau, Gabato, and the Cyclone
In Palau they hire Gabato Laguatan, a helicopter tour operator of low quality, and his daughter Kailani. Luis Guzmán plays Gabato. Vanessa Hudgens plays Kailani, and the film casts her as Sean’s love interest, which it does by having her sit near him.
A cyclone crashes the helicopter onto the island. The island has miniature elephants and giant butterflies. Alexander finds them. Michael Caine has been living there for years and reveals this is the legendary Mysterious Island, which rises and sinks every 70 years. He thinks they have time. Hank finds signs it will sink in days.
That is the plot’s one good idea: the old man’s clock is wrong and the younger man’s clock is right. Caine and Johnson could do something with that. They do not. Caine delivers his lines like a man reading a menu in a language he does not speak. Johnson smiles.
The Nautilus and the Giant Bees
To escape, the group needs the submarine Nautilus, hidden in an underwater cave at Poseidon’s Cliffs. Kailani finds Captain Nemo’s journal and they identify the sub’s location. They travel on giant bees and get attacked by bee-eating birds. Sean is injured saving Kailani.
Gabato goes missing, drawn by the island’s gold. Alexander and Kailani pull him out of an erupting volcano while Sean and Hank dive to the cave, dodge a giant electric eel, and restart the Nautilus using the eel’s bioelectric charge. Gabato pilots the submarine out as the island sinks.
Every one of those beats is a set piece. None of them lands. The bees are weightless. The eel is a dark shape in dark water. The volcano is orange. Peyton shoots all of it flat and bright, like a nature documentary that has given up.
| Order | Beat |
|---|---|
| 1 | Dirt bike chase ends in a swimming pool |
| 2 | Hank decodes the signal; three novels named |
| 3 | Palau; Gabato and Kailani hired |
| 4 | Cyclone; crash landing |
| 5 | Alexander found; the 70-year cycle explained |
| 6 | Nemo’s journal; Nautilus located |
| 7 | Giant bees; bird attack; Sean injured |
| 8 | Gabato lost in the volcano |
| 9 | Eel, cave, Nautilus restarted |
| 10 | Island sinks; escape |
What the Cast Is Asked to Do
The film’s biggest problem is that it has Dwayne Johnson and gives him nothing physical to do. He is a former Navy officer. He decodes a message and he dives. That is the whole job. A man built like a door is used as a lockpick.
Michael Caine has the opposite problem. He is given the wild-eyed explorer part and plays it as though he wandered in from a different, better movie. When he says the island is real, you believe him. When the script asks him to be wrong about the sinking, you stop believing the script.
Hutcherson is fine. He was fine in the first film. He is 17 here and the movie keeps forgetting it, handing him a romance with Hudgens that consists of proximity and a shared near-death experience. Guzmán is the only person on screen having fun, and the film punishes him for it by dropping him into a volcano.
The 70-Year Clock and the 94-Minute Problem
Here is the thing the film never solves. The island sinks every 70 years. That is a long time. That means Alexander, if he arrived even a decade ago, should have known the timeline. The movie needs him to be wrong so Hank can be right, so it just makes him wrong. That is not a story, it is a scheduling conflict.
The 2008 film had a gimmick: going down. Journey 2 goes sideways, to an island, and loses the claustrophobia that made the first one work at all. What is left is a series of rooms — jungle, cave, volcano, submarine — connected by nothing but running.
The film is based on Jules Verne’s 1875 novel The Mysterious Island, and like its predecessor it puts Verne’s book inside its own universe. That is a cute idea. It is also the only idea the movie has about adaptation, and it uses it in one scene.
The Numbers
- Release date: February 10, 2012
- Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
- Director: Brad Peyton
- Writers: Brian Gunn, Mark Gunn, Richard Outten
- Runtime: 94 minutes
- Worldwide gross: $335 million
- Metacritic: 41/100
- Clay Tribune score: 4.1/10
Giant Bees and a Signed Contract
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island is a sequel that learned the wrong lesson from its predecessor. The first film was a B-movie with a strong hook. This one is a B-movie with a budget and no hook at all, coasting on the idea that a giant bee and a giant eel and a giant volcano add up to a movie. They do not. They add up to a trailer.
The $335 million gross is the real story here, and it is not a happy one. It says audiences will pay for a familiar title, two movie stars, and 94 minutes of forward motion, and that they will not ask for much else. Journey 2 is what that bargain looks like when it is signed. It is not a disaster. It is worse — it is a product, assembled correctly, with nothing inside.
Caine and Johnson share maybe four real scenes. In each one, you can see the movie they could have made: an old man who refuses to be rescued and a younger one who refuses to leave. That film is not this one. This one has giant bees.
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