he Thunderbirds are an international rescue squad who circle the globe in search of disasters, natural or otherwise, that threaten the lives of Earth's varied populations.
Led by Jeff Tracy (Paxton), the group survives on the former astronaut's billions, and initiates into its ranks one Tracy son after another to help save the world, except, of course, for Alan (Corbet), the youngest—and seemingly least responsible—of the Tracy boys, who seems to find trouble more easily than fix it.
When the remaining Thunderbirds are called into action to recover one of their ranks from a space station/global monitoring system, the mission proves to be a front for the mischievous plans of villain The Hood (Kingsley), and all are trapped in the disintegrating facility and doomed to die.
Only Alan, aided by his two best pals, Fermat (Fulton) and Tin-Tin (Hudgens), can rescue them.
Thunderbirds, please go
For the many viewers who prior to seeing this film were unfamiliar with its source material, Thunderbirds was a kids' TV show created by "supermarionation" inventor Gerry Anderson that followed a crew of puppets around the globe as they dispatched archvillains and natural disasters in equal measure.
While director Jonathan Frakes' live-action version replaces dolls with flesh-and-blood actors, he might have brought the Thunderbirds' universe to life better if he'd given thought to elevating the performances above the initial level of wooden puppetry; lessons are learned with such gleeful abandon (and plodding regularity) that one can't help but wonder if the kids' reactions aren't being engineered by a couple of stagehands pulling strings off camera to draw out dimpled-cheek grins. Even Ben Kingsley seems stranded by his one-note villain, whose telepathic abilities seem to preclude the good judgment to award himself a slightly less incriminating moniker.
Frakes direction follows the predictable path of his previous cinematic efforts, which bathe the actors and sets in light and aim for a sort of dizzyingly bright day-glo atmosphere that bypasses any kind of visual (or, God forbid, emotional) complexity; while this approach can almost be excused in the case of such an unabashedly kid-friendly project as this, Frakes' visual continuity between projects suggests more about his limited breadth of talent than aptitude for nailing the mise en scene of each project.
The action is dull and uninspired, and in the film's worst choice, the Thunderbirds themselves are limited only to opening- and closing-scene day-saving activities; Corbet's Alan and his two formulaic pals (the geek and the girl) save the day, leaving the remainder of the cast stranded without a purpose, and provide a tenuous link between Thunderbirds' weakly crafted story and the special-effects extravaganza that ensues in its place.
