Furry Vengeance (2010)
Crimes:
- Using cheap-looking special effects to animate an army of animals, all out to make life hell for real-estate developer Brendan Fraser and thus prevent his bosses from destroying their forest
- Filling 90 minutes with more animal-on-human slapstick violence than a year’s worth of Woody Woodpecker cartoons
- Making sure audiences know that Fraser’s family enjoys their Wii, MacBook, Kindle, and iPhone
- Wasting a supporting cast filled with the likes of Wallace Shawn, Rob Riggle, Angela Kinsey, and Toby Huss
- Offering a shallow vision of environmentalism that amounts to “Animals are like angry little people, so don’t fuck with them”
Defender: Director Roger Kumble and stars Brendan Fraser and Brooke Shields
Tone of commentary: Goofy, bordering on juvenile. Within the first five minutes, Shields spies a chipmunk nibbling a nut and says, “There’s Roger. Always eating. Always at the craft-service table,” while Fraser warns that he might be unusually quiet during the commentary because “I’m captivated by shiny, bright things.” For his part, Kumble alternates between tongue-in-cheek comments like “People say I direct broad. I don’t get it,” and self-deprecating comments like “This is where the studio stopped watching dailies.” Particularly fascinating, though, is the “I’m dumber” / “No I’m dumber” game Kumble and Fraser play throughout, as when Kumble says, “I read a dummy’s guide to directing, and they talked about foreshadowing,” while Fraser says, “Foreshadowing? I thought it was just introducing a doofus.” At least the Kumble/Fraser dynamic offers more than Fraser/Shields, who mainly repeat what each other say, like so:
Fraser: There was a sports beverage in that mug.
Shields: Sports beverage.
Fraser: A highly caffeinated sports beverage.