Gen 13

With a little polishing, this could have been a really good film.

At first glance, Gen 13 seems to have all the right ingredients: Quality voice talent from Alicia Witt (Twin Peaks), John de Lancie (Q from "Star Trek: Next Generation"), Mark Hamill (duh!) and even Cloris Leachman. It also has a good plot, taken almost verbatim from the pages of Jim Lee and J. Scott Campbell's "Gen 13" comic book mini-series.

Kevin Altieri's past experience with the "Batman" animated series is obvious, mostly keeping the story moving at a good clip.

But this movie views as though the money behind it suddenly lost interest during the final stages. Although there are several good lines, "We're like... the 'Justice League,' man", the voices are not well mixed and, at times, need additional coaching. Background noises mix in and out at random. The "Grunge" character is poorly scripted as the well-meaning dope and Flea fails to give him any personality.

The music weighs everything down. It sounds more like the soundtrack for a Saturday morning cartoon than an 82-minute feature film.

Despite all that, the visuals are really pretty good. Fairchild is still the busty titan and Freefall the good-hearted bad girl. And they are still fun to look at.

Like I said, it seems unfinished.

Ok, they did stick pretty close to the comic, but why never release it? The animation was close to Batman/Superman WB, which I really like. But to not include 2 other members is a shame. Mark Hamil was at points too close to laughing like the Joker, but I love his voice in the WB cartoons, it is perfect, but for this it is not how I heard Threshold in my head, but still pretty good.

A DC superhero animated movie - made by Disney! Gen¹³ was a comic created by Jim Lee and Brandon Choi in the early 1990s through their WildStorm company - at that time part of Image Comics. Disney expressed interest in developing a Gen¹³ film; however, whilst the film was in production, Lee began talks to sell WildStorm to DC Comics, a Time Warner company. By the time the film was finished, Lee's sale of WildStorm to DC had been completed, meaning that Disney now had a movie based on a property indirectly owned by another studio. As a result Disney shelved it, and it was never released in the US. It was however released on video in Europe and Australia.

It's basically an X-Men kinda tale, with a group of teens who each possess a gene giving potential for superhuman abilities, being guided by an older mentor, to help secure the future of mankind. But (of course) there are those who want to control the youngsters for their own selfish reasons. Voice talent includes Alicia Witt, John de Lancie, Elizabeth Daily, Mark Hamill, Cloris Leachman, and Flea (yes, he of the Red Hot Chili Peppers!), all of whom do a nice job. Animation has a nostalgic 'Saturday morning TV' feel (incidentally, the logo at the beginning of the film is a green-tinted version of the old DC 'Bullet' - nice to see it again). This easily had potential for at least one sequel, although for obvious reasons it never happened. 7.5/10.

Gen 13 is not a perfect movie, it feels a lot more like setup for a television series than a movie, but with that said there is enough here to justify a viewing,including some terrific animation directed by Batman: TAS and Mask of the Phantasm director Kevin Altieri. Unfortunately the movie was never officially released in the U.S. due to Jim Lee selling his Wildstorm imprint to Time Warner's DC while the movie was in production. Once Disney found out about the sale the film was shelved out of a desire not to promote a film with commercial ties to a competing company and has only popped up on a handful of PAL releases and broadcasts on foreign television. Even if this movie isn't perfect, it still deserves to be available and hopefully one day one of independent distributors like Shout! or Kino will be able to give this film the home media release it deserves.

On the downside, the animation was uninspired by the standards of other projects associated with Kevin Altieri (ie. Batman:TAS). I also found the lack of Burnout and Rainmaker (aside from two good cameos), though it wouldn't matter to anyone unfamiliar with the Gen13 comic, mattered a great deal to me even though I don't consider myself a huge Gen13 fan -- thus, I'm sure, this also had to have an impact on to anyone else watching this, seeing as the initial audience HAD to be fans.

Of the voice cast, only E.G. Daily seemed to really hit her stride as Roxy (you could hear the Buttercup 'tude shining through!), although Alicia Witt's Fairchild was endearing in her plain candor and Cloris Leachman's Helga was terribly amusing. However, I also feel that, no offense to Flea, but I never imagined Grunge sounding quite THAT dumb.

On the upside, it was highly amusing to watch the movie earn its "not-for-children" boundaries with the occasional cussword and plenty of cheesecake. ;) More seriously, the climactic sequence was worth the wait. We finally got to see Grunge kick some ass -- as always, the character is best when he stops being a doofus and actually uses his head (and powers) to help out his friends. Roxy's power manifestation was downright gorgeous -- and impressive. And Fairchild...well, she was about as spot-on as any appearance in the comics. Go, girl!

I wouldn't give this movie a high rating, but I wouldn't trash it either. It was...well, fun. Whereas I can see and understand why it didn't get a series, I do wonder if/how they would have brought in their other two teammates -- and if the cartoon would have had enough balls to maturely tackle a certain canon controversy surrounding Rainmaker after a season or two. I would have tuned in for that. ;)