Open Season (2006) September 15, 2008
Posted by gproject in : Recently Viewed , trackbackDirected by: Roger Allers & Jill Culton
Open Season falls into the unidentifiable glut of CG animation films that seem to pop in and out of our multiplexes whenever a school holiday rears its head. Notably, it is the kid-friendly animal adventure category, from which this movie also derives, that makes up a vast percentage of the market. Not to be outdone, Sony Pictures Animation pitch in with their effort, and along with its buddies Madagascar, The Wild and Barnyard, these anthropomorphic Stepford Wives gain another shallow member.
This time it’s the pairing of bear and deer that sets the hijinks in motion. Boog the bear (Martin Lawrence), the domesticated pet of a park ranger, meets Elliot the deer (Ashton Kutcher), a happy-go-lucky wild animal, when he saves Elliot from the hood of a hunter’s truck. Unfortunately, circumstances find Elliot and Boog trapped out in the woods alone, right at the start of hunting season. As Boog tries to make his way home again, he quickly realises that being a garage-living bear has left him unprepared to deal with the harshness of the great outdoors. Instead, he has to trust Elliot, his hapless companion, to help him.
The imdb.com trivia page for this movie whimsically remarks “Ashton Kutcher and Martin Lawrence never met during the making of the film”. And you know what? It really feels like it, too. Although this is quite a standard practice in the animation world, there are times when the voices gel and times when they don’t. This, for all its consistent efforts to make you think otherwise, is one of the latter. Maybe if Kutcher and Lawrence had actually been in the room together, one of them might have toned down their over exaggerated vocals, although I can’t credit all fault to the actors.
It certainly feels a little like the voices were chosen based on the ‘names’ rather than their appropriateness for the role. Debra Messing takes a slightly annoying part as the caring but misguided park ranger, yet it is Gary Sinise, playing the dastardly hunter Shaw, who really has to pantomime his act up. The moustache-twirling lunacy of the role makes for a villain who is about as threatening as the sock puppet theatre from which he is plucked. This on its own would be enough to sink the film, but Open Season plays it safe and ensures disappointment by ruining a few other key elements too.
Most notably, a story that starts out as brisk and energetic, but very quickly turns to rushed and then to “wait, what?” before the 86 minutes are up. It doesn’t really know if it’s coming or going as the creators struggle to squeeze in all the generic plot components that are essential to a buddy movie like this. You can’t go wrong with the standard ‘they hate each other, they like each other, they fall out, they make up’ structure, but the film never spends enough time making us care, while the final rallying stand against the oppressors (hunters, in this particular tale), is just an excuse to get everyone back together for a bit of good-humoured violence. Even the overarching story of Boog getting home is stretched by his obvious but unjustified choice during the conclusion.
I can’t really blame anyone for wanting to have a stab at this market, but after three and a half years in the making it’s just a shame to end up watching another weak contribution. Most of that time is set aside for the animation process of course, and in this movie the standard is pretty good – especially on the character models which fall somewhere between The Wild’s humanised reality and Madagascar’s wacky, angular caricatures. The script might give the kids some laughs but it offers very little to those outside of its demographic, and while the gags aren’t sparse by any means, the mismatched and sometimes overacted line readings don’t help get the best out of them.
At the point where the line-up of celebrity names became the only defining factor in telling these movies apart, we should have started exploring new directions. Some have tried [review] and even succeeded [review] in pushing the boundaries, so if we’re going to call open season on any strand of animation, let’s have it be this one - their unstoppable propagation is ruining the ecosystem.
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