I've been trying to cover all the bases this month but there's one thing I've been woefully short on: movies with no discernible target audience. These tend to be some of my favourites, if only because they carry a particular flavour of weird that you just don't find if somebody's thought to aim a movie at a specific demographic.
Step forward, then, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, because isn't pretty much everybody going to be queueing up to see a live-action remake of a cartoon whose last episode aired in 1964? Oh. Right. Nobody. The film cost a reputed $76 million to make and currently scores 4.1 on the imdb.
Is it really as bad as all that, though?
Probably not, actually. Certainly, I enjoyed TAORAB far more than Looney Tunes: Back in Action - it wasn't half so loud or, crucially, so eager to please. Instead, it stays true to the roots of the original, which people occasionally compared to a radio serial with added animation. Keith Scott's narrator, therefore, provides a nonstop commentary on the onscreen action, constantly pointing out the inherent lunacy of a cartoon moose (voice: also Keith Scott) and flying squirrel (voiced by June Foray; 83 by the time the film was released) trying to save the world from a bunch of generically Slavic spies led by Robert de Niro's Fearless Leader.
It's all good-natured silliness, with the jokes coming as thick and fast as in an Aardman movie, if not quite as funnily. I didn't laugh much, but I certainly smiled a lot. It's smarter than the average family flick, too, and not afraid to wear its intellect on its sleeve.
The main problem, really, is that I just couldn't quite bring myself to care. The original animated series was long before my time; I remember repeats, but only vaguely, and chiefly for the appalling quality of the animation. There may be bigger fans out there - especially on the other side of the Atlantic - but that's still a fairly small market, especially given that the movie is a little too exposition-heavy to make it truly kid-friendly.
I'm not surprised that it bombed, nor am I particularly disappointed. If you ever find yourself bored enough to hunt this one down, however, you might conceivably also be bored enough to enjoy it.
No comments:
Post a Comment