Director Stephen Sommers subscribes to the notion that Hollywood entertainment consists of hammering the senses until the viewer has lost any semblance of intelligent thought, and until recently, he’s made a solid career out of this practice, financially anyway. After years of family adventure stories (including live-action Disney adaptations of The Adventures of Huck Finn and The Jungle Book), Sommers began making B-movies rooted in overkill and hokey visual FX with Deep Rising (1998), an entertaining lark. He continued in full monster-movie-adventure mode with his financial breakthroughs The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001) for Universal Studios, and then followed them with the overloaded Van Helsing (2004). In 2009, Sommers continued his reign of over-the-top heroes fighting cartoonish baddies with G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. His movies have made hundreds of millions worldwide, despite the content being prime direct-to-video quality. With his latest, an adaptation of the Dean Koontz book Odd Thomas, the release finally seems more aligned with the material. Odd Thomas is a low-budget production for Sommers, made for a mere $27 million or about one-fourth the budget he’s accustomed to. And yet, given its SyFy Channel quality and air of derivative cheapness, this minor price […]
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