I watched this on New Year's, and so it stands as the first film I saw in the new decade ("two-thousand-ten", thank you very much), which must mean something. Or whatever.
To be frank, I wasn't expecting much from this movie. In fact, the first minute or two made me expect even less from it. When the kid at school made fun of the protagonist (whose name I can't remember---Lockwood, I believe) by saying "Ha! He's smart, and smart people are lame" (or something to that effect), I thought "crap, this is going to be like Bee Movie, isn't it?" (Don't get me wrong, Bee Movie holds a dear place in my heart... especially the evil corporate beekeeper that goes "they make the honey, WE make the money!", which is undoubtedly one of the greatest lines in the history of cinema.)
So perhaps the lowered expectations allowed me to actually enjoy it quite a bit when it turned out that the movie didn't actually totally suck.
Sure, it's the average computer animated non-Pixar movie you'd expect, but somehow it manages to be not-irritating. Let's examine the reasons why:
-Well, it's certainly colorful, and sometimes reminiscent of the 80s, strangely.
-The obligatory romance is still kind of boring and contrived, but at least wrapped around the whole "be your inner nerd" thing the movie has going for it, which is neat, I suppose.
-The obligatory "ADHD sidekick" is occupied by a monkey that doesn't actually do much other than say a word or two.
-It spoofs disaster movies actually really effectively--it's just about as realistic as most of them, and probably only a little bit sillier in its usage of spaghetti tornadoes (and things of that ilk).
-The father/son relationship is actually surprisingly honest and touching. I would have expected that it'd be something like "cranky dad is upset son doesn't want to follow in his footsteps, gets jealous at son's success, then inexplicably accepts son as is during key plot point", but it's actually more complex than that.
-Pop culture references--surprisingly low.
Also, there are a lot of bad puns in this movie. A lot of lame lines. But at some point, I didn't really find myself caring about it. I think it's because at some point, after realizing some of the above praises, I thought the writers seemed much more competent, making all the bad and corny lines seem intentional. It's as if they realized that they'd be essentially seen as just another non-Pixar computer animated movie, so they took some of the more cliched elements of recent computer animated fare and just ran with it.
I guess there's some sort of allegory about the dangers of over-consumption, which isn't really pulled off all that amazingly well. But it's a kid movie, so whatever.
RATING:
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