Capture The Flag, film review: Bland family fable has a feeble storyline

(PG) Enrique Gato, 94 mins. Featuring: Dani Rovira, Michelle Jenner, Carme Calvell

‘Capture the Flag’ is a very bland 3D feature (Paramount Pictures)

This very bland Spanish-made but American-set computer-animated 3D feature is a family fable masquerading as a drama about going to the moon. A nerdy boy whose grandfather was almost part of the 1969 moon landings can't work out why the grandad gets on so badly with his father.

A ruthless billionaire tycoon called Richard Carson (with a hint of a young Donald Trump about him) is trying to hoodwink the American public into thinking the landings were a hoax so he can set up his own helium plant on the moon and become the most powerful man in the world. His cunning plan is to make a lunar voyage himself and steal the flag the American astronauts planted there.

To thwart him, the US president orders an old spaceship out of mothballs to race Carson to the lunar surface. It's a feeble storyline and the film is only partially lifted by some lively action sequences and one or two Gravity-like scenes of the astronauts drifting in space.