FURRY VENGEANCE

As stinky as its oft-replayed skunk joke, Furry Vengeance takes an admirable environmental message and makes it into a dreadfully dumb family film.

If there were ever a target audience for a film like Furry Vengeance, where gentle woodland creatures get their revenge on evil developers who are threatening to destroy their forest, why, of course it would be me. I not only tolerate, but admittedly enjoy films about talking puppies that speak in hip-hop accents and guinea pigs that double as secret agents (so sue me). But I'm also the first to admit that films like this can go very very wrong. Case in point: Furry Vengeance.

The story starts out promising with a funny scene of a squirrelly critter narrowly NOT getting flattened by a car driven by one of these developers. In fact, this scene by itself would make a great viral clip, like that one of the Dramatic Chipmunk (which is actually a prairie dog... duh!). The kids laughed, the adults laughed. OK, it was funny.

But once the "plot" gets rolling, you quickly realize that the film should have just ended at about the five-minute mark. Brendan Fraser playing Dan Sanders, a developer who has hauled his family (Brooke Shields, Matt Prokop) to live in the first house in a new community being built in the middle of the Colorado woods. They are all bitter, because of course the forest sucks and Chicago rocks. But Dan is intent on pleasing his greedy boss (played by Ken Jeong, who proves that a cheesy kung-fu accent can be funny one movie—The Hangover—and completely unfunny in another—Furry Vengeance).

But the land is cursed! WHAT?! No, I'm sorry for giving away apparently one of the few plot points, but humans have tried to take over this forest in the past, only to be beaten down by the forces of nature, i.e. raccoons that can sock you in the jaw. Many hijinks are to be had as nature's beasts revolt against Dan. For instance, Dan ends up in a Porta-Potty that has been tossed up into the trees by a bear. And in the process, Dan got his pants inexplicably ripped off his body (and no, he wasn't using the toilet), so that when he is finally freed, he can run screaming across the lawn in his soiled underwear. Heee-larious.

All of this is intended to teach a muddy message of environmentalism to kids I suppose.

But the film is a mess. Sometimes the critters looks like real animals, but with, say, a slight furrowed brow. But then other times, crappy CGI takes over and the critters becomes terrible anthropomorphized animated beasts. The film is just basically the same scene over and over, with different animals humiliating Fraser in a comedy style that is so broad that it ends up not being funny at all. And I hate to say this, but Fraser himself could use a bit of CGI alteration himself, as he is suddenly alarmingly doughy with a huge gut, and seems to be morphing into Kevin James. Fraser may have been studly George of the Jungle at one time, but he has lost his edge in more ways than one if he continues making turkeys like this flick.