'I Am Number Four' just a 'Twilight' photocopied turd

People who complain about cheap knockoffs and imitators have obviously never worn a Superman cape to work.

You give that a try, you will be the office hero. You will have your inbox emptied before you sit down. Customers will wave to you from the street. You'll end the day shaving your boss' head, hauling him up to the roof, and battling him until he confesses his evil conspiracy to make employees bring their own coffee. The reason people copy cool things is self-evident: because they're cool.

-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.

Life gets less awesome when people start copying stuff that was never that great to begin with. I can't speak for the books, but the Twilight movies are not good. Now we get to enjoy a decade of attempts to replicate their success, starting with the photocopied turd that is I Am Number Four.

When brutal space aliens destroyed their race, a handful of other aliens escaped to Earth, where they pose as everyday teens. But the bad guys have tracked then down one by one--and Alex Pettyfer is next on the list.

His guardian, warrior Timothy Olyphant, wants to move and hide. But Pettyfer's fallen for classmate Dianna Agron. He doesn't want to leave it all behind again. He wants to fight.

Two parts Twilight, three parts hacky crap that makes little sense, I Am Number Four has no idea what it's doing. The most illustrative point here is Olyphant's character. As the warrior sworn to protect Pettyfer, what does he do? Scrub the Internet of Pettyfer's picture and, in one instance, beat him up. That's right. He doesn't train him. He doesn't go ambush the Mogadorian bad guys. Instead, he chokes Pettyfer out. As the man assigned to protect one of the last survivors of their people, Olyphant spends his days surfing Facebook and calling Pettyfer every hour of the day. He's almost as possessive and needy as a sparkly vampire.

This is only the most obvious example. Everyone's status and motivations are equally muddled. As an alien graced with superpowers, Pettyfer has apparently never tested a single one of his abilities. Are they all developing just now? Well maybe. But as far as we know, the notion of giving his powers a whirl just hasn't occurred to him, as his brain is the size of a peanut M&M that doesn't have the peanut in it.

Written by three people who've done a lot of TV work, the script is in love with introducing recurring elements and steadfastly refusing to explain their importance. As Pettyfer relocates from Florida, an ambitious lizard stows away in his stuff. We see the lizard hop out at their new town in Ohio. We see the lizard turn into a dog and trick its way into his home. We then see the dog again and again and again with no development of what it's up to until the climactic battle, at which point my level of caring could be described as "dead, buried in a shallow grave, and marked with a tombstone that got my name wrong."

The cast ain't too bad, though, so I Am Number Four has that much going for it. But a good cast in the middle of a confusing, mixed-up, illogical story with a mythology as weak as water and twice as colorless (sound impossible? Do the math for yourself)--this isn't going to save it. This is like dropping a strawberry in a bowl of chunky milk.

From a distance, I Am Number Four looks like a real movie -- Pettyfer is thrown into trouble, he develops his powers, it concludes with a laser-heavy climax. But every scene along the way is thin, half-baked, purpose- and momentum-free.

Grade: D+

This story was originally published February 21, 2011 at 6:34 AM with the headline "'I Am Number Four' just a 'Twilight' photocopied turd."