The Croods
(2013)
DreamWorks’
increasingly wonky animations, in terms of both quality and box office, are
getting so that even Jeffrey Katzenberg has to admit they’re a bit shonky. Still,
he’s able to put on a brace face as the studio looks likely to get a major shot
in the arm with the release of How to
Train Your Dragon 2 (we’re talking Despicable
Me 2 and Shrek 2 gains on a first
outing here). But how long they can sustain themselves with a reliance on
sequels for coffers nourishment is debatable. If Turbo screwed the pooch then The
Croods did surprisingly decent business, making the most of an uncrowded
March 2013 release date. Its success does rather make the case of undiscerning
adults eager to take their kids to see something, anything, just to keep them
quiet for 90 minutes, since the movie is a desperately middling affair; something
of an Ice Age clone (a trek to safety
as the environment changes) but with humans (well, Homo Neanderthalensis and a
Cro-Magnon). And replete with every join-the-dots element the frankly lazy
studio can muster. And a really
crappy title. If the titular family had been farting, belching and making vile
gestures throughout the movie, there might have been a decent pun in there.
The “Never not be afraid” starting point
isn’t an okayish one; a family holed up in their cave save for occasional
excursions to get hold of a bite to eat. It would have been a whole lot better
if it had developed an even slightly subversive theme, though. Emma Stone as
the chunky but not especially beetle-browed Eep is your standard issue
rebellious teenager, and Nicolas Cage is the typically over-protective but
well-meaning dad (in this case not so bright either). Both make an impression,
performance-wise, but Catherine Keener as wife Ugga barely gets a look in.
There’s a Les Dawson-esque running gag involving Grug’s wish for his
mother-in-law to expire (Cloris Leachman as Gran) that kind of works because
it’s so retro (definitely one for the parents; grandparents, even). When Guy
arrives, Ryan Reynolds voicing a noticeably smarter semi-alpha male (albeit afraid
of the dark), Eep is smitten and Grug threatened. So you can see the trajectory
from there; Grug’s emotional journey etc. towards acceptance and proving his
patriarchal beneficence.
Of the two
directors, the influence of Space Chimps’
(doh!) Kirk De Micco is felt more strongly than How to Train Your Dragon’s Chris Sanders. The picture has a varied
history, starting out with an attempt by DeMicco and John Cleese (there’s nothing discernably Cleesey here, in
his first movie writing credit since Fierce
Creatures; those post-divorce bills must still be biting hard) to adapt The Twits which then segued into a
caveman story Sanders picked up. Then
DeMicco joined again as co-director. All of which is more interesting than the
movie itself. Lacking a sufficiently interesting cast of characters, and with bland
design work (airbrushed ape men is about the size of it; too audience-friendly
to go the full ugly, the family ends up with sporting the alarming combination
of thickset and large-eyed features), it’s left to the whacked out incidental
pleasures to sporadically raise a smile.
If nothing
else, DreamWorks can be relied on to provide, amongst the carefully rehashed
plot beats, some genuinely mirthful detours. If Guy’s pet sloth Belt is your over-familiar
kooky weirdo animal sidekick, the scene in which the Croods first encounter fire
(“Try hiding from it in the tall grass”)
is satisfyingly undiluted (one have expected a careful instruction that the
little ones not play with the stuff). The Stone Age-modern inventions are too
sub-Flintstones clever-cute, in that
“everything’s one long sugar rush pop video action montage” way these
animations have a habit of becoming, but there’s some inspired lunacy involving
puppet birds and (later) a puppet sabre tooth tiger that wouldn’t look so out
of place in a Looney Tunes.
Those
moments of inventiveness are a reminder of the better moments in the Madagascar trilogy, which at least had
memorably distinctive lead characters when all fell down in the plot
department. The Croods has no such
luck, yet the picture has clearly made enough to have a sequel scheduled. One
can expect second tier business along the lines of Fox’s Rio, as this is far behind the quality of How to Train Your Dragon, or even the “it says it right there in
the title” Kung Fu Panda (how they
can get a third of those made, when the second was virtually indistinguishable
from the first, is beyond me). It’s a shame the studio’s ideas have become so
tepid, and each underperformer makes them even less adventurous (Mr. Peabody & Sherman had an
arresting idea and origins, but fed through the studio blender comes out
looking much the same as anything else; Rise
of the Guardians looked good as a premise but suffered from utterly banal
plotting). Alternating (semi-) original fare with sequels is probably a
(relatively) wise financial move – even Pixar has lost it’s creative backbone,
so one can hardly have a go at their always less artistic rival – but it’s four
years since DreamWorks last made a great movie. And, apart from a sequel to
that movie, they don’t look like they’re going to buck their self-imposed trend
any time soon.
**1/2
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