Someone REALLY wanted to make “Heroes: The Movie”. I went into the theater expecting that from the trailers in the first place. It’s a world where people with powers don’t wear capes or costumes and have ambiguous nicknames like “movers” (telekinetics), “watchers” (can see the future), “pushers” (can implant thoughts in your mind), and “sniffers” (can track someone by touching or smelling an object the person has touched). It’s a very gritty world with a secret government agency attempting to turn these people into war weapons. In other words, not much surprise in the way of the plot or the characters, from Chris Evans’s reluctant hero to Dakota Fanning’s smart-alec kid with mission for reluctant hero to Djimon Hounsou’s evil agent who must foil plans of smart-alec kid and reluctant hero.

OK, so most stories have to have some familiar elements to get the audience in on the ride, and there was an interesting story element about how to get the jump on a watcher, but it felt like there were some decisions made about the movie in post-production, most notably a few obvious voice dubs that wrapped the story up instead of extending it to a possible sequel which was more likely the original intention. This tended to water down the movie’s impact as a whole. Nothing in the movie was really bad, but nothing was really good either. There was no ‘push’ to it.

Having said that, I wasn’t bored watching the movie, but I would wait for a rental or buy when you can see this at home with friends. It’s defenitely better than the movies SciFi Channel airs. This is something you can watch when they re-run “Dungeons and Dragons 2″ and pretend they got a hold of a decent movie, for once.