Mr. Peabody and Sherman review

 

            Based on a series of companion shorts aired during “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show”, “Mr. Peabody and Sherman” is another sugar-high 3D animated spectacle, aimed at keeping your kids quiet, while giving you 90 uninterrupted minutes to balance your check book. Thing is, if you happen to be a in the same room while it’s on, than you might actually find yourself glancing up at the TV every now and then and slowly getting sucked into its serviceable storytelling.

         I say TV because unless your children are literally begging you to take them to see this, waiting four months is absolutely appropriate for the level of care and attention that was devoted to this production.  However, if you do end up dropping your moppets off at the movies as you enjoy a Cinnabon a few stores away, you can rest easy knowing that while this isn’t exactly an educationally focused look at history it at least has some aesthetic interest in its academic façade.

                Mr. Peabody (voiced by Ty Burrell) is a genius dog inventor with a Harvard PHD and an adopted human son named Sherman (Max Charles).  Peabody is an attentive and playful father but slightly emotionally detached, asking his son to refer to him by his full name and struggling to express simple feelings in a simple way.  When know-it-all Sherman gets into his first school fight with a girl named Penny ( voiced by Burrell’s ”Modern Family” co-star Ariel Winter) he is then threatened to be taken away from his doggy father by child protective services.  Later, during an over-prepared peacemaking dinner with the girl's family, Sherman gets the group into a boatload of trouble when he tries to prove his knowledge to Penny by taking her back in time in an orbital device called The Way-Back machine.  

                While this film jumps from one bouncy, brightly colored episode to another, we are made spectators of history, reformed as pop-culture mythology, where important figures such Marie Antoinette, King Tut, and Leonardo DaVinci become theme park plushies, only expressing broad gestures and flat parodies of their real-life cultural counterparts. Ultimately, in a “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” kind of way, this dumbing down of history is fine as long as it at least gives children an entry point into the rest of the (usually gruesome) truth.

                Surprisingly, what plays really well in this adaptation is the character stuff between Sherman and his father. The story is structured well enough that we care if they are legally separated, and the stakes we have in their emotional journey tends to activate the banality of the time-hopping set-pieces. The film boldly stands up for non-traditional modern families and when Sherman gets accused of acting like his father and is then forced to defend himself, swearing that he IS NOT a dog, we can imagine similar playground fights today, where a minority of children are forced to defend their parents when their classmates call them a different three letter word ending in G.

                Despite its clunky plotting , a muddled ending,  punny humor that almost never lands, as well as a host of silly butt jokes that undermines whatever scholarly intentions this movie proposes to illustrate, this kiddy contraption basically works. It’s unpretentious and it manages to draw you into the character’s dilemma, even if it is a restructured, hand-me-down dilemma from “Finding Nemo”.  I walked out of “Mr. Peabody and Sherman” unoffended and slightly charmed, and sometimes that’s more than we should come to expect from a mid-winter Happy-Meal like this.

Grade: C+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2014

About Time review

                Richard Curtis has the ability to spin high-concept romantic comedy conceits into something that’s casual, breezy, and most of the time funny. A large part of this comes from the fact that he has  spent much of his earlier career working on British television. Films like “Four Weddings and a Funeral”, “Notting Hill” and “Love Actually” are modest and friendly enough to keep us from faulting their middling intentions. However, what’s remarkable about these pictures is that they contain ideas that would be cringe-worthy eye-rollers had they been produced in the states. But with Curtis’ charm and whit these films manage to float by suitably as long as everything stays light and breezy. Where things fall apart for Curtis is when he feels the need to sink into dreary, melancholic waters, as is the case with his most recent fantasy rom-com “About Time”.

                Domhnall Gleeson plays Tim, a young timid Brit who rarely has the guts to make bold choices when it comes to his love life. This all changes the day his father (Bill Nighy) lets him in on an old family secret: all of the men in his bloodline are able to time travel, no machine required. Tim then decides to go back and make all the right choices he should have made the first time around, using his newly found talent to engineer a relationship with an American dream girl named Mary (Rachel McAdams). Years after, Tim realizes that this rewriting of his life has unintentionally created some dangerous and heartbreaking outcomes.

                This movie knows what it’s doing when it’s more concerned with how to use its ridiculous premise in the service making you laugh. The matter-of-fact father-son exchanges between Gleeson and Nighy are giggle-worthy, in that dry Richard Curtis-y way, and side characters like Tom Hollander as the grouchy, foul-mouthed playwright and Joshua McGuier as Tim’s nerdy co-worker often steal the scenes they are in. Likewise, McAdams and Gleeson have decent screen chemistry, and as a couple their love is easy to root for.

                What’s not as easy to swallow is when this film switches its tracks and tries to become a tear-jerker. In taking huge leaps with its characters and the time-line, the movie asks us to drift along well past the logical climax of the story, from a clipped second act into the an extended third and an unnecessary fourth act that feels like it’s making itself up as it goes. During this stretch the screenplay stacks up tragedy after tragedy, gradually dimming the bright tone previously established in the much funnier opening half.

                “About Time” managed to make me laugh and care enough about the characters to ignore the fact the plot doesn’t make any sense and that a lot of it is very stupid. In turn, it’s because of it’s pleasant stupidity that I felt somewhat betrayed by the film when it transformed from an amiable British farce, into a soppy, weepy mess, mining the Lifetime Channel’s worst kind of emotional manipulation tactics.

Grade: C-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2013