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MEET THE ROBINSONS Select theaters across the nation (including a couple in Charlotte) are showing this latest Disney animated feature in 3-D, and I'm sorry I didn't catch the film at one of those venues -- at least it would have added an extra dimension to what is otherwise a shallow cartoon that somehow manages to be slow-moving and hyperactive at the same time. Imagine The Incredibles made by profiteers and that's pretty much Meet the Robinsons in a nutshell -- it's not surprising that, like Chicken Little (to name but one dud), this is Disney operating without the safety net of John Lasseter and his Pixar team. This obnoxious film focuses on obnoxious Lewis, an orphan whose scientific contraptions are coveted by an obnoxious villain known as the Bowler Hat Guy. In a bit of time-hopping not worthy of Back to the Future (I, II or III), a member of the obnoxious Robinson family of the future comes to help out Lewis, thereby leading to a scattershot adventure involving obnoxious singing frogs, obnoxious food fights and an only-slightly-less obnoxious dinosaur. The final 20 minutes include a pair of decent plot pirouettes, but by then, I was so bored out of my skull than even a wayward reel of Raiders of the Lost Ark somehow slipping onto the projection booth platter probably wouldn't have stirred me out of my comatose state. *1/2
NEXT One of the weakest adaptations yet of a Philip K. Dick story ("The Golden Man"), Next is most notable for how it shunts the vibrant, 46-year-old Julianne Moore off to the sides while it gives 43-year-old Nicolas Cage a noticeably younger love interest in 25-year-old Jessica Biel. (In similar fashion, the movie's poster makes it look like Biel's bodacious ta-tas are the leading characters.) Biel is basically filling the same function as she did in last year's The Illusionist, which is serving as girlfriend-pawn to a magician hoping to keep her out of harm's way. Cage's Cris Johnson actually uses his Vegas "magic man" act to cover up the fact that he can see two minutes into his own future and therefore shape his destiny to his liking. Cris considers his gift a curse, but FBI agent Callie Ferris (Moore) believes it can help her locate a Eurotrash terrorist outfit plotting to destroy Los Angeles with a nuclear bomb. Into the mix walks Liz Cooper (Biel), a teacher who's been frequently appearing in Cris' visions and who might hold the key to ... well, something; the movie never bothers to elaborate. Next quickly loses altitude once it becomes apparent that Cris' powers will conveniently come and go as needed to keep the screenplay lurching forward. Yet even this slipshod quality is tolerable until we reach the final portion of the film, a monumental copout on the level of those overused "It was all a dream" stories that our fiction writing professors would urge us not to pen back in college. One plus: It's great to see Peter Falk (now 79) as Cage's confidante, even if his screen time seemingly runs shorter than the end credits crawl. *1/2
