The Librarian

Last night, I and a couple of local friends settled in with cheesy-popcorn, potato chips, and other assorted snacks to watch The Librarian : Quest for the Spear, a 2-hour made-for-TV movie that appears to be intended as the pilot for a projected series. I had, I confess, some hopes that it would be an ironic-but-intriguing boost to the rather pathetic public image of the profession.

Sadly, none of the snacks could compete with the cheesiness and flakiness of what was presented on the screen. I'm not a big fan of taking one's frustrations out on television screens -- unlike Edward Abbey, I've never taken a gun and blasted a hole in the silly thing -- but on this occasion, the screen did get pelted with popcorn on a number of occasions.

The plot of the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the show can be summarized more or less as follows:

Our Hero, an uber-nerdish perpetual live-at-home grad student with 22 degrees (and counting), gets thrown out of university for being too good of a student. This guy's so pathetic outside the classroom that the blind dates his mother sets up for him last about thirty seconds before the woman goes sailing out the door, advising him to get a job. His own mother, in between bludgeoning him with thunderously trite advice about head and heart, feels compelled to advise him not to listen to the books if they "tell him to do bad things".

Fortunately for our socially-inept hero, a magically-engraved invitation to apply for a "prestigious position at the Metropolitan Public Library" inexplicably falls from the sky into his hands.

While interviewing for said position in an improbably opulent public library building, he suddenly starts pulling Sherlock Holmesian stunts like telling the interviewer all the embarrasing details of her personal life based on his hyperacute observation and excruciating knowledge of trivia. This, apparently, is enough to get him the job as "The Librarian", since the interviewer is so wowed by his perception that she has mononucleosis that she immediately cancels all the other interviews and Bob Newhart magically materializes in a shimmer of sparkly stuff to guide him into a deep dark secret vault underneath the library where, it turns out, all the greatest magical treasures of myth are conveniently stored in one place. Our Hero is informed that he's really, really special because there's only one Librarian (with a capital L) and they choose The Librarian very carefully. In response, he promptly tries to open Pandora's box and nearly gets decapitated by Excalibur.

Believe it or not, the plot gets less plausible from there. Mayan temples in the Amazon rain forest, filled with impossibly complicated booby-traps lifted straight from the Indiana Jones films. People blithely tromping through the peaks of the Himalayas with jackets unbuttoned. People jumping out of airplanes and surviving because someone else jumps out of the same airplane with a parachute and chases them down and catches them before they hit the ground. Butch-and-Sundance-style paired jumps into impossibly shallow water, and a subsequent swim down the river in which an important book, while carried in a visibly soggy backpack, somehow conveniently fails to get wet. Ridiculous purported mental feats like instantly learning a dead language with only one surviving manuscript and nothing to compare it to. Ridiculous physical feats of the kind made possible only by CGI and the total denial of reality. A couple of sultry female kickboxers who, after the requisite tough-girl posturing, inexplicably-but-predictably come to lust for the nerdish hero. (I will grant, however, that their inevitable one-on-one faceoff yields one of the few really funny one-liners in the movie.) Plot holes you could drive the Polar Express through, including the totally unexplained disappearance and reappearance of a major character.

It's as if the producers deliberately looked for every silly action-movie cliche they could find, and then asked themselves: yes, but how can we make it WORSE?

I could go on, but why bother? If you must watch it, watch it for unintentional laughs. Or for the novelty of seeing Bob Newhart try to portray a martial artist. He really does try, but even staged choreography and professional editing just aren't up to the task of making the avuncular Bob Newhart appear to move quickly.

Best and most unintentionally unironic line: "The fate of the world rests in my hands? That's sad."