I Am Number Four
If you hate Twilight, teen romance, anything featuring incredibly attractive or hideously deformed aliens or positive portrayals of pretentious amateur photography, give this a miss.

Imagine you are from a faraway planet called Lorien (seriously) but have been sent to Earth as a child to escape a race of ugly enemies called Mogadorians (stay with me) and that you rock up from town to town in the USA, trying to keep a low profile but drawing attention anyway because you look like an Ambercrombie and Fitch model and John Smith is the most obvious pseudonym of all time. You are Number Four, of nine, but the bad guys are tracking you all down and the first three are goners. You have a bodyguard called Henri who is fiercely protective and won’t let you do cool things like join high school sports teams and go out on dates with arty girls who wear berets and take photographs of everything. You’ve just had to move to Paradise, Ohio, which is really ironic because it’s a bit rubbish and rains a lot.

If this is all a bit of an information overload don’t worry, the audience of I Am Number Four will be right with you. This is a lot of exposition to shove into the first ten minutes of a film, especially one that is simultaneously trying to blow your mind with swooping camera shots and copious amounts of special effects at any given point. The producers have obviously gone for the Twi-hard demographic, with a tortured male lead (Alex Pettyfer) who must constantly tear himself away from whatever attachments he manages to form in each town because he will be putting his friends/lovers/pets in danger or inevitably his leg will start glowing bright blue. That never happened to Edward Cullen but he had that sparkly-in-sunlight thing to deal with. His romantic cohort Sarah Hart (Dianna Agron) lives up to her sweet and boring name but we are supposed to find her charming and interesting. She has a load of cameras and a strange website full of pictures of her classmates – she claims no-one likes her anymore because her popular ex-boyfriend turned everyone against her, but make your own mind up.

The aforementioned Mogadorians look like extras from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and could not be more ‘evil’ if they tried, in the most unthreatening way imaginable. There’s a dog that turns into a huge alien dog, which is somehow meant to be a surprise, slightly ruined because the dog had previously been a lizard or some kind of gecko. There’s a nerdy best friend who is such a stereotype he points it out himself within ten seconds of his first appearance. Number Six (Teresa Palmer) is a tough gal who is there because they couldn’t convincingly get boring Sarah into any leather outfits, although she does get the best line of the film – “Red Bull is for pussies”.

Despite all of this, I Am Number Four is actually very watchable. Timothy Olyphant (as Henri) and Palmer both flesh out their one-dimensional characters well, and the gaudy effects work. Somehow the entire film shamelessly hangs together from the exposition heavy start to the non-ending, and manages to hold back from being ‘so bad it’s good’. It’s silly but good with it, and refrains from falling into total parody or shoving self-awareness down your throat, although suspension of disbelief is a must. But if you hate Twilight, teen romance, anything featuring incredibly attractive or hideously deformed aliens (no room for middle ground here) or positive portrayals of pretentious amateur photography, give this a miss.

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