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Not terrible, but too bogged down in exposition and clumsy storytelling to be enough fun
Fanboys may love to blame the marketing or the title change or even an elaborate conspiracy by Disney to sabotage their own massively expensive film for John Carter - formerly John Carter of Mars - becoming the biggest money loser of all time, but Andrew Stanton's very loose reworking of Edgar Rice Boroughs' books has plenty of more fundamental problems that turned a potential franchise into a $200m loss on its theatrical run. The twin perils of poor casting and lumpy storytelling for a start. Stanton never made much secret of the fact he didn't think Burroughs' influential pulp novels were that good and made huge changes not just to the plot, not least introducing a radically reworked version of the villains from the second novel into the film, but also to the central character, turning him from a heroic adventurer to a bad tempered, moping gold-hungry prospector so he can have more of an emotional journey before becoming the saviour of Barsoom, as the locals call Mars. The kind of thing that Harrison Ford could have done in his sleep back in the 80s before he settled into his grumpy old man routine, it could have worked with a genuinely charismatic lead, but Tyler Kitsch ain't it, sulking and growling his way though the first half of the film as the script requires without ever making you give a damn about him.
Not that he's the only one who feels wrong - the actor playing Burroughs in one of the film's multiple framing scenes and the cavalry officer who tries to press Carter into service against the Apaches in what feels like the third opening of the picture grate more than somewhat, and you suspect that they're not getting much help from behind the camera. Stanton's direction doesn't help keep things moving either. It's not always that his ideas are all bad, more that some of them just don't work, partially because of the constant stop/start rhythm of the film, partially because the character doesn't win you over and you tend to notice the joins more because of it. Even when the film finally does promise to burst into action, it's either uninspiringly handled or, in the case of the Tharks' attack on the city that oh so very briefly promises to turn into Lawrence of Arabia with aliens, over in a few shots because a minute of thousands of CGi creatures is much more expensive to shoot even on a $250m budget than several minutes of thousands of real Arabs on real camels.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that in the hundred years since the books were published, they've been strip-mined by everyone from George Lucas and Frank Herbert to James Cameron, so that there's so little that's new to moviegoers here that it needs to be told with real panache and enthusiasm. Unfortunately what we get is an overfamiliar tale clumsily told, despite the large amount of money spent telling it. It's not a disaster of Dune-like proportions, though it does share David Lynch's film's habit of spending so much time stopping the film to explain the plot that the story never really gets a chance to get going: it's the kind of film where Mark Strong's shape-shifting villain will capture the hero only to take him for a long walk in front of expensive CGi backgrounds so he can explain the plot at great length for several minutes. What makes it worse is that his character is actually from the second novel in the series and remains an unresolved behind-the-scenes manipulator obviously being set up for a sequel that will never happen. Not that this is good enough for that to be a cause of much regret.
There is enough that is good to make it worth a look, albeit more as a rental than a purchase: the Tharks are well realised and parts of the film do work and momentarily create a very 1960s fantasy film sense of wonder before the film almost completely loses its way in a rather messily staged final battle and a twist-in-the-tale epilogue that needs far too much setting up at the beginning of the picture. It's certainly not as bad as its huge losses would imply, but it's just too mediocre to really stand out in an increasingly crowded field.
Typically for a flop, the extras package seems a lot less extravagant than it was presumably originally intended to be (the French 3-disc 3D release also includes two extended scenes and an additional featurette). There's a lengthy selection of deleted scenes that wouldn't have improved the picture - one even includes the Princess of Mars telling the assembled statesmen of her kingdom all about their planet at great length as if they needed to be told where they were - a decent look at a day in the making of the film, audio commentary by Stanton and his producers, self-congratulatory featurette about the origins of the film that includes a glimpse of the test footage Bob Clampett shot for his proposed 1930s animated version as well as an interview with Jon Favreau, who spent years developing a much less expensive version of the film that was abandoned due to budget concerns, and a blooper reel.
