The Librarian: Return to King Solomon’s Mines
If you’re ten years old, and it’s the 1980s, The Librarian: Return to King Solomon’s Mines is an awesome movie. If its 2007, it might be awesome if you’re a bushman or a pygmy and have never seen a television before.
Noah Wyle plays Flynn Carsen, an employee at library that seeks out and protects the greatest treasures in history; stuff like Excalibur and the Shroud of Turin. With a title like Return to King Solomon’s Mines, it’s pretty obvious what he’s going to be looking for in this movie.
What I like about Wyle’s character is that he’s not the swashbuckling type you’d expect to see in this kind of movie. He’s nothing like Indiana Jones or Rick O’Connell from The Mummy. He’s a bookworm and a brain and a nerd. Although a cute nerd. Noah Wyle is almost forty, and still looks like a young lad of twenty five. How does he do that? He obviously suffers from Dick Clark syndrome.
Gabrielle Anwar plays an archaeologist who inexplicably teams up with Carsen when he reaches Africa. She does an OK job, but I was completely distracted by her shoulder blades, which looked they were about slice through her skin. She looked like she needed to eat a cookie.
The Librarian is derivative. It takes elements from a number of other things, and puts them in one movie. It’s a Frankenstein of a movie. It’s Filmenstein. It’s Frankenfilm. It’s nominated for a Saturn Award for best TV Presentation, with Noah Wyle and Gabrielle Anwar nominated for best actor and best supporting actress. Were TV movies really that bad in 2006 that Frankenfilmstein got nominated for something?
There are several scenes that look pulled almost shot for shot from the Indiana Jones series and The Mummy series. A mysterious package arrives from Egypt and the hero’s apartment is ransacked. There’s a secret brotherhood sworn to protect something holy. There’s a skinny stone bridge over a chasm, which we’ve seen in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. But, this chasm isn’t bottomless, it’s just really really really deep and has lava at the bottom. The climactic scene with circling ghosts is straight out of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
So, when the dopey spoof of Casablanca showed up toward the end, complete with the airplane and Wyle doing his best Bogey, it wasn’t clever. It was more of the same.
But, it’s campy and has some funny moments, mostly delivered by Jane Curtin and Bob Newhart. Curtin plays the library manager. Newhart plays the same character he’s been playing since the sixties: a mild mannered, deadpan guy surrounded by impossibilities. Just take Dick Loudon from Newhart and put him in the role of an archaeological Q.
Unfortunately, I have a couple more problems.
Janathan Frakes should only direct Star Trek related projects; that’s what he’s best at. He directed Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Insurrection, and some of my favorite TNG episodes. By the time he started directing within Trek, the world had been established, the actors knew the characters inside and out. There’s little room for mistake there.
The last thing Frakes directed before The Librarian was the live action adaptation of Thunderbirds, which had the same kind of heavy handed non-subtlety. Please go back to Trek, Mr. Frakes. Somewhere, there’s an Enterprise that needs you.
The music was annoying. It was also derivative and sounded like some guy in his basement used GarageBand to stitch together pieces from the Raiders of the Lost Ark soundtrack with Ladysmith Black Mombasa and the “Beef: It’s What’s For Dinner” commercial (which is “Hoe Down” from “Rodeo” written by Aaron Copland, if you were wondering).
The production value was pretty poor, particularly the CGI effects, which were plentiful. I get that it’s a TNT production and aired only on cable, but come on, Ted Turner. Spend some money for decent opening credits. Stock footage of the American west with Power Point style, plain white Papyrus font credits is one of the cheapest things I’ve ever seen. This is TNT, the cable network that brought us The Mists of Avalon mini series, which was actually pretty good. TNT is capable of more than what they did with The Librarian.
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