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| Adventures Of Rocky And Bullwinkle, The |
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  (4/10)
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Runtime: 88 m |
| Public Rating: 7.25 (8 votes) |
Director: Des McAnuff |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Comedy/Family |
Year: 2000 |
| Writer(s): Kenneth Lonergan |
| Distributor: 1 |
| Reviewed by: Vadim Rizov |
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Based on the classic Jay Ward TV series, The Adventures Of Rocky And Bullwinkle features none of the cheerful lack of plotting or lack of moralizing that another Jay Ward movie, George Of The Jungle, featured. Instead, a terrific first half-hour is followed by another hour of moralizing about the inner child, little humor and increasingly tiresome special effects. For TV fans, the movie will be disappointing for those reasons. For fans of other live-action cartoons such as Space Jam and, of course, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the movie will be disappointing because it doesn't particularly feel like the actors are talking to the cartoons.
This time around, R&B must battle evil Pottsylvanian spies Boris (Jason Alexander) and Natasha (Rene Russo), who are under the control of Fearless Leader (Robert De Niro). For the first half hour, the jokes are fast and furious: there's a Nixon joke, an Easy Rider joke, a 2001 joke, and lots of other pop culture references. Things take a turn for the worse, however, whenever live-action actors become involved, as in the normally terrific Janeane Garofolo cracking lame jokes as a studio worker, Rene Russo's lame take on Natasha, or Piper Perabo as FBI agent Karen Sympathy. Admittedly, Perabo has the toughest job in the whole movie: constantly interacting with R&B. As an actress, Perabo doesn't have the skills yet to interact with thin air, and seems to have been cast more for her (babe-like) looks than for any acting skills (this suspicion is confirmed by her being cast in Coyote Ugly, the Jerry Bruckheimer movie about how wearing tight shirts and pants can help women dominate men sexually and feel empowerment). Her overacting doesn't help much. Bored viewers may want to watch carefully while seeing how obviously she's responding to off-camera directions (e.g., "Look left! Now run!"). De Niro is amusingly hammy, Alexander is near perfect, and Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell are right on in their cameo as college students.
However, so much talent (I haven't yet mentioned that the writer, Ken Lonergan, also wrote You Can Count On Me and Analyze This) for such a mediocre movie is really a shame. The end product of the movie is a blatant "inner child" message featuring a whole song devoted to the subject and - just in case viewers don't get it - a visible child in Perabo's eye. Good stuff for little kids, I guess, but they'll be bored by it as well, and the message will be lost on them. Mark Mothersbaugh's sprightly score helps matters a little bit. The F/X (the 3-d Rocky and Bullwinkle) are excellent, even if the actors aren't up to interacting with them realistically.
The Adventures of Rocky And Bullwinkle is not a god-awful wreck of a film, but it is pretty boring after the first half-hour. Since the movie is aimed at kids, and all the best jokes are aimed at adults, the movie will please no one except the very easily amused
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