Unappetizing Meatballs a Dish Better Left Untouched
For those who love author Judi Barrett and illustrator Ron Barrett’s timeless 1978 children’s book, I would probably argue to avoid the new 3-D computer animated comedy Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. For those who are easily entertained by cartoon family fair that doesn’t tax the brainpan, well, sorry to say, but I’d quietly suggest they take a pass on this one, too.
Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader) and Sam Sparks (Anna Faris) bond over Jell-O in Sony Pictures' Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
While not entirely terrible, this new movie is by and large a humongous waste of time. Not only does the screenplay have little if anything to do with the delightful source material, the film is so haphazardly constructed it almost felt as if the monkey at the center of a lot of it put it together himself. Watching it is about as entertaining as listening to Rosanne Barr sing the National Anthem, but where that is over with rather quickly this goes on for a full 90-minutes of snore-inducing tedium.
The basic premise follows an inventor named Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader) who creates a machine that can turn water into food, hopefully saving his small island township from another sardine dinner in doing so. There’s also intrepid network weathernews intern Sam Sparks (voiced by Anna Faris), sent to the town to cover the odd meteorological events; Flint’s fishmonger father Tim (voiced by James Caan), a veteran seaman who doesn’t know how to express his love verbally; the egocentric Mayor Shelbourne (voiced by Bruce Campbell), who sees Lockwood’s invention as his own personal food-making chew toy; petulant minor town celebrity ‘Baby’ Brent (voiced by Andy Samberg), a blindly narcissistic man-child who doesn’t like playing second fiddle to a nerd; police officer Earl Devereaux (voiced by Mr. T), a didatic force for justice who is positive the inventor will louse things up; and a talking monkey named Steve (voiced by Neil Patrick Harris), a pintsized simian with a computerized voicebox who is obsessed with Gummy Bears.
My problem is that this movie is all visual site gags and one-liners with nothing interesting to connect them. Characters aren’t developed, storylines aren’t fleshed out and everything going on isn’t so much taken at face value so much as it just sits there in the hopes something intriguing might happen. It’s all energy without the enthusiasm, everyone running around crazy like they’re high on Red Bull for no other apparent reason than it is apparently funny if people run around crazy like they were high on Red Bull.
Listen, in small doses this kind of energetic free-for-all can sometimes work, just look at a random episode of “The Fairly OddParents” and tell me otherwise. But stretched out to a full hour and a half this sort of thing gets old quick, and by the time our heroes were fist-fighting roasted chickens and dodging shards of carnivorous peanut brittle I had pretty much checked out.
It’s not all bad. Both Caan and Faris make something of an impression, each doing more to make their vocal work memorable then the movie actually deserves. Campbell, as always, is good for a few laughs, while the first appearance of Mr. T’s limber police officer admittedly had me chuckling out loud. There is also a truly great set piece inside a gigantic building made of Jell-O, Flint and Sam sharing a moment within it that almost couldn’t help but make me smile.
Still, there is just no reason for this film to exist, the whole thing feeling like it came off of an assembly line and not sprung forth from someone’s fertile imagination. I sat there wondering why the filmmakers even bothered, the 3-D process poorly used and the story itself feeling like an afterthought. In short, I just didn’t like it, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs an unappetizing digital dish the chef should never have allowed to be served in the frist place.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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