By Debbie Schlussel

The relative best movie this weekend is aimed at teens and kids.  The rest are skipworthy for various reasons.

*  “Unknown”:  Read my review column.  Liam Neeson plays a man whose identity has been stolen from him and who is targeted by a hit squad after waking up from a coma.  What could have been a great Hitchcock-esque conspiracy thriller collapses under the weight of ideological baloney promoting the “virtues” of Muslim illegal aliens and attacking agri-business.  Again, read my complete review.

TWO MARXES PLUS A BIN LADEN

*  “I Am Number Four“:  This Disney movie is great for teens and kids and is devoid of any sex or other objectionable stuff usually contained in teen movies.  And the first half or so of it was pretty good.  Only in the last third did the movie become a little too messy.

John (Alex Pettyfer),  looks like an all-American high-school-aged teen boy.  But he’s not what he seems.  In fact, he’s an alien–not an illegal one, but an extra-terrestrial one.   His father (Timothy Olyphant) isn’t his father either.  He’s a soldier from the same planet, looking out for John and protecting him from the alien killers who’ve killed most of John’s planet and have arrived here, trying to kill the few survivors, all of them kids, who’ve escaped to Earth.

As the alien assassins come closer to finding John, he and his faux-father escape to a small Ohio town, where John befriends a cute fellow high school student interested in photography, who has a blog with photos.  Olyphant’s job, in the age of the internet, is to zap all photos and videos of John posted online, lest the alien assassin team find him that way.  John also befriends an ostracized student whose father was obsessed with aliens and UFOs and mysteriously disappeared years ago.  And then there are the jealous, competitive jocks.

Telling you more would give away the movie, but it wasn’t bad.  And the scary looking aliens aren’t just scary, in a few scenes, they are funny.  Not a great movie, but if you’re a teen, it’s good enough.

ONE REAGAN

Watch the trailer . . .

* “Cedar Rapids“: This was one of the crappy movies Michigan residents paid for with the generous Michigan Film Tax Credit. I hated it. It’s nothing more than a dumb, long, slow boring attack on small town life, small town values, conservatives’ social and family values, and chock full of dumb and sick jokes.

Ed Helms, John C. Reilly, and Anne Heche (who looks better in red hair, her color in this movie) play Midwestern insurance agents at a convention. The naive, unworldly (is there any other way Hollywood sees middle America?) Helms is sent there from his small town, after the top agent in his office is found dead from asphyxiation during a perverted sex act. Helms, himself, is sleeping with his former school teacher, Susan “Sigourney” Weaver. When Helms gets to the convention, his assignment is to win his insurance agency the top rating it wins each year.

But, instead, Helms ends up sleeping with the married Heche, getting drunk, and skinny-dipping in the hotel pool. This displeases the religious conservative head of the insurance convention and the body that gives out the multi-star ratings. But, no worries, because Helms learns that this man allegedly has gay sex or some other such impropriety and can be blackmailed and bribed into giving Helms’ insurance agency the highest rating.

And Michigan taxpayers spent their money on this because . . .? I’m not sure. Skip this.

FOUR MARXES
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Watch the trailer . . .