Furry Vengeance

Furry Vengeance is a movie geared towards a very specific audience, and that is an audience that doesn't care much for movies. They don't want thought-provoking stories and engaging characters. They want to chuckle at dimwitted characters doing foolish things while disturbingly-animated animals make creepy noises. It's Looney Tunes brought to life, but lacking all of the charm and wit of the cartoons. The movie does contain a very simple plot, but it's clearly just an excuse to deliver slapstick humor. It's a fair assumption that there was no real script, simply a small blurb that read:

"Brendan Fraiser wants to mow down the forest to develop houses. The forest animals band together and try to kill him."

That's what they're doing, right? Trying to murder him? There was an employee before Brendon Fraiser's Dan Sanders, played by intense funnyman Rob Riggle. The opening scene of the movie begins with him tearing down a forest road in his bright red sports car. With a cigar in his mouth, he screams "I do what I want!" Shortly after, a boulder let loose by the animals smashes his car off the road and he's ultimately sent off a cliff. I assume that he dies sometime later.

If a movie is going to feature cartoonish violence, it must be set in an equally cartoonish world, otherwise the violence will seem jarring and disturbing. Satirical movies like The Naked Gun series - or really anything with Leslie Nielsen - come to mind. They feature a lot of violence, but the entire experience was so disconnected from reality that you gladly accepted every punch. In Furry Vengeance, Dan Sanders will have a deep heart-to-heart conversation with his wife and son, in what is supposed to be a very sincere, touching moment, and then immediately after suffer a colossal injury at the hands of a laughing raccoon. It doesn't work.

Even if you could maneuver into the proper frame of mind to enjoy such out-of-place hostilities, it still isn't funny. Every gag in Furry Vengeance is completely uninspired, derivative of a thousand cartoons that came before it. At one point, Brendan Fraiser's character falls with his legs spread on the edge of a pointed rooftop, crushing his testicles. That pretty much sums up the humor you're going to find here. And then there's the running joke of nobody believing that the animals are out to get him. Every time he attempts to prove his claims, the animals conveniently vanish. There's a scene where the animals take over his car and wreak havoc in a parking lot. If only he'd tell the therapist to turn around and look out the window, the therapist would see the animals in action. But he can't, because as much sense as that would make, it would bring the funny subplot of him being crazy to a screeching halt.

The biggest crime the movie commits is wasting a perfectly good character in Wilson, a security agent played by Toby Huss. Wilson is overzealous in his responsibilities and can't quite pronounce his words correctly. While it isn't enough to save Furry Vengeance, it's pretty funny to hear him refer to his walkie talkie as a "werker terker," and it took me a while to realize that "burreld-sie" was bullseye.

Furry Vengeance is far, far from a burreld-sie.

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