Review of Furry Vengeance (2010) by Stuart F — 06 Dec 2010

No. I draw the line at this. Nuh-uh.

Furry Vengeance opens with a car driven by an obnoxious man. It speeds along a forest road and threatens to hit a squirrel. The squirrel is going about its business, sitting in the road, just being a squirrel. The car zooms past, and the squirrel gasps with shock. It gasps! Its eyes bulge. It makes an audible, distinctly non-animal "Gasp!" noise.

Just there, you get a glimpse of the way Furry Vengeance goes about extracting laughs. Will voice-actors lend their talents to all the forest animals, and create dialogue that the human characters just can't hear? No. Nor will the animals simply go about their business, leaving us to interpret what they're thinking. That's too much like work. Instead, a compromise is reached: the animals squeak in very unconvincing parodies of words. What's the point in that? Then we see thought bubbles appear next to them, containing whatever it is they're squeaking about. It's a lazy, random mixture. Movies have been telling stories with animals for decades. There are easier ways.

As for the cartoony ballooning of animal eyeballs, or the clumsy CG manipulation of their cheeks, eyebrows and what have you, it doesn't work. Not even a little. Why did they even bother filming real animals, if they were just going to put them through a Terrible Animation Filter? And why does it look this terrible? It's 2010. Shouldn't the standard of animation be constantly improving?

Oh, enough. I made it through 20 minutes before throwing in the towel. I'm sure the animals successfully beat up Brendan Fraser - who is looking alarmingly porky nowadays, as in I thought it was a fat-suit - and a great deal of assorted critter poop was involved. Ha ha. For what it is, such a movie could have worked, in a zero-expectations slapstick kind of way. But the way those animals get manipulated - as if they're dead, and the animators are doing their best to CGI the corpses - just made my skin crawl. Yuck. Cheque, please.

(I doubt any of this bothered Brooke Shields, who is infamously pro-fur, and therefore evil. Her decision to star in a movie about wronged animals could be seen as a desperate PR move to get her away from what is, when you think about it, basically cartoon villainy. But judging from the 20 minutes I spent writhing in agony, she's got a funny way of apologising.).