Brendan Fraser has uprooted wife Brooke Shields and their teenage son to some unspecified rural area, where he's overseeing the construction of a McMansion community in a formerly pristine natural area. This angers the local wildlife, headed by a cackling raccoon, who set off to humiliate, injure, and presumably kill Fraser and other human interlopers.
Now, I'm all for the stupidly funny. I wasn't expecting Oscar material and certainly didn't expect it from this. But even on its own low terms, this movie just fails to be funny, and in my eyes, there's little worse than a bad comedy. Bad efforts at other genres can be great for laughs, but when comedies fail to elicit laughs, they're just painful and dull.
Fraser's goofy amiability has levitated other films before, but this time he's just not up to it. There's too much bottom-of-the-barrel slapstick, an overpopulation of stupid characters, and predictable family drama. Also, frequently weirdly inconsistent. At one point Fraser is flung into a bee's nest and is covered with stings, but the next morning he's shown without a scratch or swelling on him. Early on, another character suffers an animal-induced auto accident that's rather appalling since it would be clearly fatal and later we're told the character "disappeared." There quite a bit of wet-crotch and groin-injury humor; I remember a time when that was considered too risqué for children, and now is standard for kid flicks. At any rate, they're cheap laughs.
Fraser looks bad; he's gained weight and looks pudgy and uncomfortable. Brooke Shields can be a great comic actress but spends most of the time playing the straight man, so her talents are underused. She also doesn't look her best, either. They're basically playing second fiddle to the cutesy animals, which range from real animals to poorly-done CGI stand-ins. Also has nocturnal animals, like owls and raccoons, running around in the day, and daytime animals, like crows, active at night. Not to mention seagulls suddenly showing up in a clearly inland and mountainous locale. At one point the flick attempts to set up some sort of mystical/magical reasoning for the intelligent animals (who not only understand human speech, but seem every bit as aware of human pop culture as the humans are), but then it's quickly dropped and forgotten.
I saw this at a preview screening; there were a number of families there and I could tell the very young found it funny, but older kids and adults were clearly not amused and unimpressed. I guess they wanted a sort of live-action cartoon here, but amidst all the mayhem they forgot to make it truly funny...and contrasting it to a halfway realistic family drama doesn't help. You're better off staying at home with some classic Warner Brothers cartoons. FURRY VENGEANCE is to be avoided at all costs, one of the worst things I've seen in a long time.
Now, I'm all for the stupidly funny. I wasn't expecting Oscar material and certainly didn't expect it from this. But even on its own low terms, this movie just fails to be funny, and in my eyes, there's little worse than a bad comedy. Bad efforts at other genres can be great for laughs, but when comedies fail to elicit laughs, they're just painful and dull.
Fraser's goofy amiability has levitated other films before, but this time he's just not up to it. There's too much bottom-of-the-barrel slapstick, an overpopulation of stupid characters, and predictable family drama. Also, frequently weirdly inconsistent. At one point Fraser is flung into a bee's nest and is covered with stings, but the next morning he's shown without a scratch or swelling on him. Early on, another character suffers an animal-induced auto accident that's rather appalling since it would be clearly fatal and later we're told the character "disappeared." There quite a bit of wet-crotch and groin-injury humor; I remember a time when that was considered too risqué for children, and now is standard for kid flicks. At any rate, they're cheap laughs.
Fraser looks bad; he's gained weight and looks pudgy and uncomfortable. Brooke Shields can be a great comic actress but spends most of the time playing the straight man, so her talents are underused. She also doesn't look her best, either. They're basically playing second fiddle to the cutesy animals, which range from real animals to poorly-done CGI stand-ins. Also has nocturnal animals, like owls and raccoons, running around in the day, and daytime animals, like crows, active at night. Not to mention seagulls suddenly showing up in a clearly inland and mountainous locale. At one point the flick attempts to set up some sort of mystical/magical reasoning for the intelligent animals (who not only understand human speech, but seem every bit as aware of human pop culture as the humans are), but then it's quickly dropped and forgotten.
I saw this at a preview screening; there were a number of families there and I could tell the very young found it funny, but older kids and adults were clearly not amused and unimpressed. I guess they wanted a sort of live-action cartoon here, but amidst all the mayhem they forgot to make it truly funny...and contrasting it to a halfway realistic family drama doesn't help. You're better off staying at home with some classic Warner Brothers cartoons. FURRY VENGEANCE is to be avoided at all costs, one of the worst things I've seen in a long time.