Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (2012): D+

There's plenty of offense to go around in Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, and if you're someone who's ever found meaning in Green Day's album American Idiot, you'll know it within the opening minutes of this gimmicky, soulless widget. The works of Jules Verne serve as the jumping off point to this 3D in-name-only sequel to 2008's Journey to the Center of the Earth, but my sense is that anyone capable of appreciating said science fiction literature is going to be as bored to tears as I was watching berries bounce off of Dwayne Johnson's chest in what might be a new low for the surcharge-friendly format, so perhaps the best that can be hoped for is that some small children will seek out those novels after ingesting this Hollywood trifle. Common sense - nay, anything like human behavior, or competent screenwriting, or a properly conceived (or even half-baked) joke - is an extinct species here, and even the second-act introduction of Michael Caine only temporarily relieves the proceedings of their life support status. Without the over-explanatory dialogue and insincere adages, this wouldn't even qualify as feature-length; the rest is noisy, banal spectacle that only occasionally taps into the awe of the natural world at the heart of Verne's texts. It's family entertainment reinvented as a numbing mental assault, and while kids might like it just fine, feeding this to a young mind should count as a chargable offense.