Uhura (Zoe Saldana) helps Spock (Zachary Quinto) suit up in a scene from ‘Star Trek: Into Darkness.’ (AP)
‘Why would a Starfleet admiral ask a 300-year-old frozen man for help?’’ asks Captain Kirk in his latest adventure — and, after sitting through two-plus hours of the mind-numbing “Star Trek Into Darkness,’’ damned if I could tell you why.
Or explain exactly why that defrosted villain levels San Francisco in what almost amounts to an afterthought.
The only darkness here — besides the dingy-looking images dimmed by 3-D glasses — is the murky plot, which is as silly as it is arbitrary.
A more accurate title for J. J. Abrams’ followup to his vastly more satisfying 2009 reboot would be: If you really wanted to leave out the colon, “Star Trek This Time It’s Personal.’’
After temporarily being demoted for disobeying directives for the 2,947th time, Kirk (Chris Pine) is made captain again. All he has to do is promise the aforementioned Starfleet admiral (Peter Weller) to take out the defrosted intergalactic villain (Benedict Cumberbatch) for killing Kirk’s mentor (Bruce Greenwood) and, oh yeah, destroying a good portion of 23rd-century London in a terrorist attack.
This takes Kirk and company to a Klingon stronghold, where the good captain is persuaded by Spock (Zachary Quinto) to give the bad guy, who goes by the name John Harrison, a chance to surrender.
Bad move. Harrison — whose actual identity will easily be guessed by Trekkers (no one else will really care) — is a super being, impervious to harm, who knows everything except how to deliver a decent quip. In short, he’s lethally boring.
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“Harrison” gets plenty of help in stunning audiences into submission from Abrams. The director and his writers serve up reams of leaden dialogue (“Cut the 23rd wire down’’) and utterly generic action sequences.
Abrams shoots something like 90 percent of the film in closeups. After watching this in IMAX, I felt like I knew every pore on Pine’s face personally, as well as every square inch of the Enterprise.
The special effects are surprisingly cheesy for a big-budget event movie, and the post-converted 3-D is nothing to write home about. You’ll find more impressive 3-D space footage in the trailer for “Gravity’’ than in all of this movie, which plods along from climax to climax without actually building any momentum.
This would be more tolerable if any of the regulars had anything more than one-dimensional characters to play, or were permitted to relax their strained impressions of actors from a 50-year-old TV series. The budding romance between Spock and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) is a nonstarter, and the admiral’s dishy daughter (Alice Eve) doesn’t seem interested in Kirk even if she does at one point appear briefly in a bikini.
The Kirk-Spock bromance is better fleshed out, but in clumsy fashion as each is required to save the other’s life.
“Star Trek Into Darkness’’ doesn’t end so much as pause at the end.
Abrams will next direct a “Star Wars’’ reboot. Fine. Just keep him away from the sequel.
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