Stormbreaker (DVD)

Stormbreaker is the 2006 film from director Geoffrey Sax based on the book by Anthony Horowitz. The Plot Alex Rider is a normal schoolboy living with his banker uncle. This is until he finds that his uncle has died in mysterious circumstances, murdered by international assassin Vassen Gregorovich. Alex finds himself recruited by MI6's agent Mr Blunt, and, equipped with the necessary skills due to his uncle's involvement in his extracurricular activities (languages, martial experts, shooting, mountaineering, scuba diving, etc), Alex is sent by the government to investigate the mysterious Darius Sayle in Cornwall. The Cast and ...  Read the complete review

~~Introduction~~ Having read the Alex Rider books, I was interested to see what the film would be like. My conclusion is that it just shouldn't have been made. Anthony Horowitz gets away with some completely unbelievable events in his novels because they are novels. When they happen on the big screen you start to see just how unrealistic the whole thing is. ~~Plot~~ 14 year old Alex Rider is living a normal life when his uncle dies suddenly. However, Alex finds that his uncle didn't die from a car accident, as he was told. All of a sudden, Alex is approached by MI6, and is asked to help them with the assignment that his uncle was killed ...  Read the complete review

Alex Rider thinks he is just an ordinary schoolboy living with his uncle and a housekeeper after his parents' death. Then his uncle is killed, and Alex quickly finds out that his uncle's job wasn't as boring as he thought - he worked for MI6. His bosses, Mr Blunt and Mrs Jones, decide that Alex would be the ideal candidate for a spy, and, after a training course with the SAS, send him off on his first mission. This is to infiltrate the world of Darrius Sayle, the creator of a new computer network, who wants to install one of his computers, known as Stormbreakers, into every school in the country. But is Sayle's plan as philanthropic as it seems? And will Alex be able to ...  Read the complete review

Stormbreaker is the first in what is a probably planned series of films based around the smash hit teen novels of Anthony Horowitz (creator of the much maligned BBC Saturday night series Crime Traveller amongst others). The books are the spy genres equivalent of the Harry Potter books with a young Alex Rider finding out that all his life he was being trained to become a spy by his uncle. Alex Rider is a James Bond junior so to speak. Stormbreaker has a first paragraph style start, or to put it in film terms a James Bond pre credit sequence start, it is clever enough to grab you and inform you at the same time. We are introduced to you Alex Rider (Alex ...  Read the complete review

If there's one thing you can bank on during a British summer, it's torrential rain. At least, that's how I felt on a particularly rainy day when on holiday in Great Yarmouth earlier this year. At least it was an excuse to slope off and watch a movie and with "Stormbreaker" getting good reviews, off we toddled to sit in comfort as the rain poured down outside. Teen spy movies have been in fashion in recent years with "Malcolm in the Middle" star, Frankie Muniz satiating an army of pre-pubescent James Bond fans' appetites with gadget packed shenanigans as "Agent Cody Banks" to compliment the "Spy Kid" franchise so successfully driven ...  Read the complete review