Adam Markovitz

The movie doesn’t grab you emotionally, but director Atom Egoyan (Exotica) teases apart the case’s details with grim fascination.

There's an elemental appeal to watching these animals hunt and play in the Alaskan wildnerness, and the Disneynature team has mastered the art of capturing it.

Colin Firth smolders as the PTSD-riddled veteran (played in flashbacks by War Horse‘s Jeremy Irvine), and Nicole Kidman cries dutifully as his wife — but they’re both derailed by the movie’s tidy emotional resolutions.

It would make for a pretty ghastly pageant if not for smart, understated turns by Watson and Geoffrey Rush as the charmingly Teutonic couple who rescue both Liesel and a stranded Jew (Ben Schnezter) — not to mention the movie itself — with honorable matter-of-factness.

Doesn't just wink at De Niro's history, it leans on it, hard.

Sarcastic quips and cynical attitudes abound, maybe as a way for the movie's makers to telegraph that they know this is all just so much kid stuff. But if the characters can't muster genuine awe for their adventure, it's a tall order to ask us to do it for them.

You can almost smell the brine in the boat helmed by Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant) on his quest to win Pirate of the Year.

Why are they fighting again? Never you mind. Just sit tight till the next action sequence (it won't be long), and get ready to laugh - with equal parts scorn and fanboy joy - as Beckinsale strikes another Rodinesque pose under a slo-mo shower of inhuman innards.

What saves Immortals as a moviegoing experience is the exuberant, kid-in-a-candy-store virtuosity of its director, former music-video wunderkind Tarsem Singh (The Cell).

They're all fascinating 
 subjects - or would be if Jig didn't dance around their personal stories in favor of overheated waiting-for-the-scores suspense.

As we go deeper into the cave, walls squeezing, water rising, the movie has a narrative pull as sure as gravity.

There's nothing particularly inventive in the plot or grade-school humor, but the movie skates by on the timeless, undemanding charm of watching a tie-wearing bear try to steal people's lunches.