The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box

The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box

Some critics and thinkers argue that mediocrity is worse than failure, but the reason why mediocrity is so pernicious is that it’s very ordinary too difficult to get angrily stirred up about than anything truly bad. Perhaps. I’m sorry if this seems circuitous, but I want to give you a proper account of where my mind was after watching “The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box.”

This movie hints at being the first in a series and indeed, it was adapted from a popular fantasy book by G.P. Taylor called “Mariah Mundi and the Midas Box” but there’s no way Mariah Mundi looks better on a poster than “The Adventurer.”

Not that Mariah, a late teen orphan in Victorian-era England, does much adventuring. In this movie he has to hop around London looking for his brother Felix who’s been kidnapped by minions working for Otto Luger (Sam Neill) because Felix possesses half of an amulet that leads to the realm containing the titular changing stuff to gold device of great power, which as you might guess if you can’t imagine anything directed by Jonathan Newman spells out during some opening narration: “He who owns the box can own the world.”

Along his path Mariah befriends an impish fellow named Charity (Michael Sheen), hangs out in unusual hotel presided over by vampy Lena Headey and populated with underground-clinching miners and eccentric magicians and waifish teen maids from bad homes.

Helping Luger with his quest are grinchiest henchmen Grimm and Grendel. It’s that kind of fantasy realm; little-lite steam punk, watered down Indiana Jones stuff; not quite Pottery material. Of course derivative/obvious elements like these are major components of what makes any movie let alone one so clearly poor mediocre. But here’s the thing: As I was being proverbially bludgeoned by mediocrity, I couldn’t get mad at “The Adventurer.”

Well, except maybe when dialogue includes lines like “He drinks away the pain of my mother’s death.” At other times, and perhaps this was just a dull unjudgmental feeling on my part, I thought “this isn’t really engaging me but then again it’s not for me, and it seems harmless.”

I mean January is normally such a month of cinematic dogs, and when critically lauded pictures from the holiday season such as American Hustle or Inside Llewyn Davis or good lord The Wolf of Wall Street aren’t exactly ideal YA fare there are worse things. Then again it could be that teens and YAs are way more ruthless in their judgment than I am and that the sheer rootlessness of “The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box” pushes all their wrong buttons. Couldn’t tell you. Meh times two on this movie.

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