« Goal! The Dream Begins | Main | The Omen »
May 19, 2006
Over the Hedge
(out of four)
The foragers — a raccoon, a turtle, a skunk, a squirrel, two possums and a family of porcupines, for those keeping score at home — eat to live. When they're not hibernating, these critters spend the rest of the year gathering bark and berries to hold them over the next winter.
As for the humans just over the hedge, "These guys live to eat," explains RJ (Bruce Willis, more Death Becomes Her than Die Hard). "For humans, enough is never enough. And what do they do with the stuff they don't eat? They put it in gleaming silver cans just for us." Leave it to a raccoon to condense the lessons of Fast Food Nation into a monologue worth the price of admission.
That same raccoon is resourceful enough to know that an innocuous offering of nacho chips is all the convincing this naive bunch of mismatched mammals, with token turtle (Garry Shandling), needs to recognize the cornucopia that awaits in their neighbors' upturned trash cans.
It ain't Shakespeare, but junk food like this can certainly hold its own against Dan Brown. Over the Hedge spends none of the time that Michael Fry and T. Lewis' daily comic strip does staring at the stars or asking questions of the Tree That Knows Stuff, but the movie does offer an amusing animals'-eye-view on the absurdity of suburbia. And it accomplishes that with a visual beauty second only to Pixar.
This is no bargain-basement CG feature, infinitely richer in its appearance than Hoodwinked or The Wild. Over the Hedge hails from Shrek's neck of the woods, with environments that seem to erupt with life and characters whose subtle body language conveys nuances many flesh-and-blood stars can't even achieve. The humans still look stiff and ungainly, but then, so do the humans in the comic strip itself.
The animals' sass and smart-alecky dispositions come right out of the strip, but there's a dramatic difference in tone. The comic is all about relaxing in the face of humans' rat-race lives (with laziness being RJ's most celebrated virtue). These guys are manic, mile-a-minute Ritalin cases, and the movie does its best to keep up.
Steve Carell's squirrel, in particular, embodies an almost radioactive state of agitation, until the show-stopping moment Hammy downs a caffeinated energy drink, triggering a slow-motion scene that makes The Matrix's "bullet time" look NASCAR-fast. At a brisk 84 minutes, Over the Hedge feels like a sugar rush.
The movie opens with a clever silent routine (RJ trying to outwit a stubborn vending machine). But the instant these animals start chattering, they keep at it till the credits roll, slowing down only once, long enough for the obligatory Ben Folds song. Kids will eat it up, while solid voice work from William Shatner and Wanda Sykes should keep this borderline-feral toon from pushing adults over the edge.
[as featured in The Miami Herald]
Posted by Peter Debruge on