Noah Wyle is charming as Flynn, a professional student turned reluctant hero when he finds himself named The Librarian, and is charged with guarding a number of priceless artifacts he previously thought were only the stuff of myth. Flynn's race to recover the stolen section of the Spear of Destiny and prevent the Brotherhood of the Serpent from finding the remaining sections is Indiana-Jones-esque action and adventure at its light-hearted best.Jane Curtin and Bob Newhart display their usual dry wit, with Newhart's scene with the bad guys near the end of the movie alone worth watching the movie for. Olympia Dukakis plays Flynn's mother, who wishes her boy would just find a good woman and settle down.
This is entertaining fare, a nice mix of action, adventure, brain teases and yes, a bit of romance. It isn't a big-budget Raiders of the Lost Ark production, but for a made-for-TV movie it does a fine job, and holds up on repeat viewing.
The movie itself is just a lot of fun! It follows the adventures of a "professional college student" who finally gets turned loose by the school and has to find a job. He finds a position that requires his unique mix of talents (or did the position find him?) and finds himself in a series of dangerous situations, deadly threats, and close calls. The movie is, above all, fun.
I watched it with my teen-aged daughter and we both had a blast!
I also bought the second and third movies in the series. I think it's a shame that the powers-that-be make it so difficult to get a movie of this quality and appeal. There's no real reason this title couldn't be available in American packaging and at a price that's more consistent with the other two movies in the series.So, this movie wasn't Indiana Jones. So what? What is? They did they best they could with a limited budget. So it had factual errors? So did Indiana Jones, so did the Mummy, so did National Treasure and Sahara. Does that make them less enjoyable movies? Not to me. So, give this movie a chance before you bash it.
This movie was superbly cast, given the TV movie budget. Noah Wylie was the geeky and goofy, but kinda cute, intellectual Flynn Carson, who finds himself in his thirties, living with his mother, while having amassed 22 degrees (is that even possible?) and is no longer welcome in school. He's told to get a job (and a life) and is thrust into the real world. His well-meaning mother (Olympia Dukakis) is constantly trying to fix him up, in the mean time. So, here is Flynn, a genius with 22 degrees, and he doesn't have employers beating down his door with jobs? I took a star off for that being really inplausible.
Flynn finds an invitation to interview with the Metropolitan Libary. After waiting a whole day in line, he goes into an interview with cranky Jane Curtain, humorless director of library, although she was actually pretty funny. In a funny sequence, he deducts, with Sherlock Holmes logic, that she's recently divorced and had three different cats. Surprise, he meets a Judson, the senior librarian (Bob Newhart). They take him on a magical tour of the portion of the library that few people know about; it's stocked with antiquities that the rest of the world doesn't (or shouldn't) know about: the REAL Mona Lisa, the Holy Grail, unicorns, the golden goose, the arc of the covenant, pandora's box, among other things. The Librarians are keepers of these great treasures. And it's the Librarian's job to keep them secret from the public.
On Flynn's first official day, they discover that the library was broken into and a band of theives took only one thing: one-third of the Spear of Destiny, the spear that lanced Christ's side. To wield it gives the user great power. Hitler had a third. Napoleon had a third. So basically, humanity is SOL if the evil Serpend Brotherhood gets all three pieces. The only clues as to where the other three pieces are in in the Language of the Birds, which no living human being can translate(of which, our hero does so in less than 6 hours). Thus, Flynn's on the job training begins.
Flynn finds himself on a flight to the Amazon while he steadily attempts to translate the language of the birds. Judson manages to come on Flynn's personal TV in coach, telling Flynn, "Trust No One." Unbeknownst to Flynn, the Serpent Brotherhood is on the plane, too! The horrors! A beautiful, but arrogant, Amazonian woman sits beside him, and eventually saves his hide (in a fantastic, yet unbelievable sort of way). When they escape to the jungle, she introduces herself as Nicole Noone (here's No One, get it!? Nyuck, Nyuck) and she has no interest in anything but keeping the Librarian alive. Thus, the adventure begins.
There was one romance scene, but really, most of it was just implied, not shown, so this movie is safe for the kiddies over the age of 8. There was great romantic tension between Flynn and Nicole. Wylie really flexed his comic muscle in this film (I never knew he had one). The best part, in my opinion, was when Bob Newhart got into a Ninja fight (you heard right!) with the Serpent Brotherhood (anybody else want a piece of me!?!). I laughedSemper Fi! Overall this is a good movie if you need something funny and cute with good chemistry in it.I though that, this movie had the best action scenes with just enough quirky humor in it to keep you laughing. The movie was well done and does have a original ideas to it but throw in some of the old movies with that and it came out great. There are great one-liners in the movie that keep you remembering it time after time.
I would suggest that you get this movie you wont be disappointed if you are looking for a good laugh!Even though this DVD was made for the Korean market it works just fine on a US DVD player and is in English.
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