'Code 8' - Movie Rewiew

The movie outlines a world that looks exactly like ours, but "Lincoln City" where the movie is set (which looks suspiciously like some of Toronto's seedier areas) was populated by people with Powers. Now the people with Powers are hated and feared by most of the population, and the police department has built drones and robots to fight those with Powers who can't make a living because they're so marginalized.

Our protagonist is Connor Reed (Robbie Amell), who works under the table in construction as he's a powerful "Electric." His mother Mary (Kari Matchett) is dying of a brain tumour that they can't afford to treat, and in the process starting to lose control of her ability to freeze things. Connor starts taking criminal jobs to try to pay for her treatment, working with Garrett (Stephen Amell).

By this point (perhaps 20 minutes in?) they had multiple marks against them. Robbie Amell is a crap actor. Most of the "Powers" are shown to be very useful, and I really wasn't sold on the idea that they would be uniformly hated - but that's the only view the movie was willing to pitch. The writing lives down to Amell's acting: it was staggeringly pedestrian with wooden dialogue and no humour. And then they tossed in the other Amell cousin, whose only distinction is he's been acting badly for longer than Robbie.

There are crimes, there's a double cross, there's a crisis of conscience, the only difference from your average badly written heist movie being that this involved super powers. And it was set in Toronto - at least I got to enjoy trying to identify neighbourhoods, particularly the incredibly seedy Hotel Waverly which they apparently borrowed right before it was torn down. And at the end, the movie closes out on a relatively minor character who got a good outcome from this mess. What? That just felt weird. I'm not even sure where our main character went.

This bears a noticeable resemblance to both "Project Power" and "How I Became a Superhero" - either of which is more worth your time (although it's interesting to note that those other movies came after this one, and may have stolen its ideas).

Poorly thought out on almost every level, this should only be seen by hardcore fans of the Amells. It's their show, and not worth watching for anyone else.