Silly G-Force One for the Kiddies
When nefarious billionaire Saber (Bill Nighy) attempts to take over the world using hugely powerful microchips secretly installed in his company’s electronics products, it’s up to three highly trained government agents, Darwin (Sam Rockwell), Blaster (Tracy Morgan) and Juarez (Penélope Cruz), along with underground tech support genius Speckles (Nicolas Cage), to save the day. One problem, they’re all rodents (three guinea pigs and a mole) and the FBI doesn’t think they’re up to the task. But they’ll show them, and with the clock ticking towards doomsday there’s no problem too big or mammal too dangerous to keep this stalwart team from shutting Saber down.
The rodents are running the operation in Walt Disney Pictures' G-Force
You want to know what the new Disney 3-D adventure G-Force is? It’s Transformers for preemies. Loud, obnoxious, filled with poop jokes and obsessed with its leading lady’s curves, the film is a crassly opportunistic play to cash in on a popular idea only with the added caché of including talking animals á la Alvin and the Chipmunks. It is childish and inane valuing style over anything slightly substantive, playing to such a lowest common denominator it almost can’t help but become a box office smash.
Granted, that description alone already makes it twenty times better than Revenge of the Fallen, and seeing how first-time director Hoyt Yeatman obviously knows just how insanely silly all this is to say the movie has its tongue firmly planted in cheek is a major understatement. No one involved takes it close seriously, and I guess if your brain could be set a good ten notches below neutral a person might even admit to somewhat enjoying themselves when exiting the theater.
I should also add that those kids it is aimed directly at seemed to eat it all up with glee. They laughed and cheered, and if it weren’t for the fact we were all wearing those annoying 3-D glasses I’d even go so far to say their eyes were popping right out of their collective sockets. This thing knows its audience and it unapologetically panders to them, and if the sight of an overweight guinea pig passing gas in order to make a fireball tickles your funny bone then welcome to the movie manufactured 100-percent for you.
For the rest of us, I can’t really say it is as painful as it could have been. There are one or two relatively decent action set pieces, and the vocal work, especially by an unrecognizable Cage, is uniformly solid. But I can’t say this is a movie I’d ever want to see again, not even on a dare. While the kid in me is sort of disappointed by that fact the truth of the matter is that G-Force just wasn’t for me, and as dangerous missions go I’m just happy I made it out of the screening without a headache.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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