He Was a Teenage Spy, Surrounded by Treacherous Adults

NY Times ^ | July 18, 2006 | SARAH LYALL

[fgoodwin]

LONDON, July 17 — The problem with most movie action heroes, said Alex Pettyfer, who plays a teenage secret agent in the forthcoming film “Stormbreaker,” is that they are way too old.

“He said, like, ‘Imagine your dad on an ironing board, snowboarding down a mountain with a bunch of guys chasing him,’ ” Mr. Pettyfer, 16, said recently, recounting a preproduction conversation with the screenwriter of “Stormbreaker,” Anthony Horowitz. The full horror of the image is meant to speak for itself: Mr. Pettyfer’s father is “like 47, 48.”

To open in Britain on Friday and in the United States in the early fall, “Stormbreaker,” based on Mr. Horowitz’s phenomenally popular book of the same title, tells the story of Alex Rider, a 14-year-old orphan drawn against his will into the grown-up world of espionage, massive explosions and dangling from skyscrapers by one arm. Most of the adults are dishonest, incompetent or psychopathic.

Instead of a boring businessman, Alex’s murdered uncle (Ewan McGregor) turns out to have been an operative for MI6, the British secret intelligence service, cynically grooming his nephew for a career in spying. (That explains all those lessons in martial arts, rock climbing, white-water rafting, German, French and Japanese, Alex realizes.)

The MI6 officials who manipulate Alex into working for them are emotionally constipated weirdos led by Bill Nighy, camping it up with prosthetic balding and the look of a man who goes home to his coffin every night. The villains are a catalog of grotesques, particularly Mickey Rourke as a flamboyant billionaire who, because of his unpleasant experiences in boarding school, cooks up a scheme to gas British schoolchildren via computer.

[Yo-Yo]

To open in Britain ... tells the story of Alex Rider, a 14-year-old orphan ... Most of the adults are dishonest, incompetent or psychopathic.

The view of any adult as seen by a 14 year old.

[martin_fierro]

Based on the title, I was almost positive this was gonna be a sympathetic "Jihad Johnny Lindh" story.