Review of Zookeeper (2011) by Antonio T — 27 Dec 2011

Kevin James making an ass out of himself for 100 minutes... even more so than usual. So James plays a helpless zookeeper who is infatuated with a self-absorbed materialistic woman who dumped him five years ago.

He is such a hopeless case that the animals of the zoo decide to break their code and talk to him, because the advice they have to offer can't be any worse than what he is already doing. I haven't liked Kevin James ever since he started getting exposure; the last movie I liked him in was Hitch, and it's been so long since I've seen that, I can't even make that claim with a whole lot of certainty.

He is a one-bit act, which is him being overtly unintelligent and loud, all while stumbling around clumsily like a girl in a bad romantic comedy. Makes perfect sense for him to get around to making a stupid talking animal movie, right? Well, it's about what you would expect from a stupid talking animal movie; you get a lot of animal reaction shots and a pretty flexible script, almost like they built it around the shots they happened to get that day of the animals i.

E. making an elephant with a compulsive eating habit. The script being as loose as it is makes it so that every single plot thread is utterly predictable; not that creativity was ever the main goal here, mind you, but from the first twenty minutes, you can call what's going to happen the rest of the movie scene for scene.

There reached a point at about the forty-minute mark where I sort of surrendered myself to the movie. Call it Stockholm Syndrome if you must, but I actually stopped groaning and got into the gorilla's subplot, if only because it is so surreal and bizarre to see a talking gorilla that is voiced by Nick Nolte.

That was my sole straw to clutch for this entire movie, and Kevin James is as annoying as he has ever been.