Phased & Confused
Lame ‘Star Trek Beyond’ should be banished to the final frontier
star trek beyond Beam me off, Scotty. Running time: 122 minutes. Rated PG-13 (sci-fi action violence). Now playing. fIFTY years on, the “Star Trek” franchise is still fresh: It keeps coming up with new ways to suck. From the corny sermonizing and furniture-quality acting of the original TV series to the senseless ker-blammo of 2013’s “Star Trek Into Darkness,” we now coast on the fumes of lackluster comedy that power “Star Trek Beyond.”
They should have called it “Star Trek Into Drowsiness.”
A menopausal James T. Kirk (Chris Pine), having lost his groove after being attacked by poodle-sized gremlins, is in a reflective phase: “It can be a challenge to feel grounded when even gravity is artificial,” he says. Deep, bro. Meanwhile, Spock (Zachary Quinto), and the franchise itself, are in mourning for Spock Prime (Leonard Nimoy). Spock’s relationship with Uhura (Zoe Saldana) is on hold: “If an Earth girl says ‘It’s me, not you,’ it’s definitely you,” Bones (Karl Urban) tells him. Hey kids, it’s “Seinfeld” in space: a blockbuster about nothing.
Kirk, on the equivalent of an intergalactic mission to save a cat stuck in a tree, gets tricked into crashing the Enterprise into the clutches of Krall (Idris Elba), who is one space sprocket away from building an ulti- mate weapon that never becomes more interesting than a hubcap.
Scotty (Simon Pegg), Bones, Uhura and Chekov (Anton Yelchin, who died in a freak accident in June) spend half the movie goofing off while Krall, instead of killing them all quickly, threatens to bore them to death with platitudes. The requisite sexy kickboxing girl alien (Sofia Boutella) helps the Enterprisers regain the upper hand with an electro-camouflage trick that’s as inane as James Bond’s invisible car in “Die Another Day” and leads to 50 Kirks bedazzling Krall with their macho motorcycle riding. That scene shortly gets topped in ridiculousness by the moment when everyone simultaneously figures out you can make aliens explode by cranking up the Beastie Boys.
Co-written by Pegg, whose interests run to fond sendups like “Hot Fuzz,” and directed by Justin Lin, who prefers to have metal things crash into other metal things (he directed 15 or 16 of those “Fast and Furious” movies), “Beyond” is tepid when it’s trying to be emotional, moronic when it’s trying to be thrilling, and unfunny when it’s trying to be non-unfunny. It lacks a storytelling module: Things just click into place when needed, as when Kirk commands Scotty to rev up a busted old spaceship, Scott says it’s impossible, and 14 seconds later everything is ready to rip.
Why is this so hard? Every episode of the 2004-2009 TV series “Battlestar Galactica” was better than this movie, on a small fraction of the budget. “Beyond” gives us 43 more examples of Kirk being inappropriately impetuous and Spock being inappropriately deadpan and expects us to laugh each time. The farther into the universe it ventures, the more it feels like it’s stuck in its own driveway.