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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 20.22%
Worth A Look: 47.19%
Just Average: 20.22%
Pretty Crappy: 11.24%
Sucks: 1.12%
7 reviews, 47 user ratings
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| Over the Hedge |
by Jay Seaver
"Makes a nice jump from the comics page to the movie listings."
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There's something a tiny bit dishonest about advertising "Over the Hedge"as "from the producers of 'Shrek' and 'Madagascar'". PDI/DreamWorks certainly produced the film, but this thing's been a newspaper comic for years. Not that anyone reads those anymore, though.Those who still read the papers know that it follows the lives of a group of forest critters whose natural habitat was leveled to make way for a suburban housing development, leaving only a small patch free. Though Verne (a turtle with the voice of Garry Shandling) had been the group's leader in the quest to forage enough food to last them through the winter, their usual hunting grounds are gone, and a recently arrived raccoon, RJ (voice of Bruce Willis) convinces them to start nicking the humans' junk food. What he fails to mention is that as soon as the crew has found enough to fill their hollow log, he intends to hand it off to a bear (voice of Nick Nolte) to whom he owes a previous debt.
Despite a plot which basically encourages theft as long as the victims aren't your own family or friends, this is probably the most kid-centric animated feature that DreamWorks has produced in some time (the Aardman films were acquisitions). That's far from a complaint; Over the Hedge has a consistent tone that many contemporary animated films lack. There's no stopping the movie dead with a pop-culture reference or double entendre that goes straight over the primary audience's heads. The down side of not trying to serve two masters is that the grown-ups may get a little fidgety. The film's relatively gentle sense of humor is never able to really surprise the audience enough to elicit the guffaw. A fair number of chuckles, but not the nearly-incapacitating belly laugh.
DreamWorks continues its practice of star-studded voice casts. It's a very well-chosen and utilized group, for the most part. Bruce Willis gets to break out the manic, fast-talking persona that a career as an action hero and his advancing age has kept him from using much in live action lately. Shandling's wimpy voice is a good match for the character who gets steamrolled by RJ's charisma. Steve Carell is a hoot as Hammy the hyperactive squirrel, and William Shatner's tendency to oversell (and self-parody) is put to good use as a possum who's a bit too enthusiastic about playing dead. Eugene Levy and Catherine O'hara are far from prickly as the heads of a family of porcupines - "prickly" is for Wanda Sykes's skunk. There are a few who seem to be cast as names rather than great voices - Alison Janney as the animals' human nemesis, and Avril Lavinge as the Shatner character's daughter. Thomas Haden Church as the exterminator Janney's character calls made me think "man, does Patrick Warburton have a cold?"
If you didn't know that this film was based on a comic strip going in, it might be difficult to tell. The look is standard-CGI, rather than trying to mimic the style of Michael Fry's and T. Lewis's strip, as can be seen by the side-to-side comparisons during the credits. The four credited writers do a decent enough job of making Over the Hedge a movie with its own through-line as opposed to an assembly of the strip's greatest hits while still managing to keep the main characters mostly intact. The songs by Ben Folds (mostly montage music as opposed to something the characters break into) aren't bad, but aren't up to his usual standards (or even, really, the song he contributed to Hoodwinked). An evil part of me does hope that parents hear the version of "Rocking the Suburbs" played over the end credits and buy their kids the CD by that title which has somewhat different lyrics.
Directors Tim Johnson and Karey Kirkpatrick are experienced hands at animation (Johnson most notably for Antz, while Krikpatrick mainly has experience from the writers' side). They handle their job well enough, and the kids seemed to enjoy what they were seeing. They finish their business in just over an hour and a quarter (including credits that are two songs long), so there's not a lot of wasted effort. At the very least, this movie won't try the audience's patience.Which, often enough, is all parents need to ask of a movie for their kids. "Over the Hedge" is a solidly average example of that, and should prove amusing enough even to its older audiences.
link directly to this review at http://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=14328&reviewer=371
originally posted: 06/25/06 22:17:27
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2006 Tribeca Film Festival For more in the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
19-May-2006 (PG)
DVD: 17-Oct-2006
UK
30-Jun-2006
Australia
22-Jun-2006
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