Furry Vengeance (Summit Entertainment)
The Animals Outact the Humans
What is it with Brendan Fraser these days! He pops up in a kids’ movie looking like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. The movie is titled Furry Vengeance and in this film he suffers through horrendous humiliations, one right after the other. It might be worth it if it was funny but it never is. In this film the best lines belong to the animals.
Fraser plays Dan Sanders a developer who has moved his family from Chicago to a beautiful locale where there are trees and fresh air. He is there for one year to help develop some property. Soon he finds out that his boss Neal Lyman (Ken Jeong) wants to pave over the entire forest area.
When the wild life of the forest learn of this plan they go on the attack and Dan is their target. He soon learns they are after him but he cant convince his wife (Brooke Shields) and son (Matt Prokop) of the plot. They think he is having a breakdown of sorts.
The movie has an environmental friendly theme but it pretty much gets bogged down in the crazy antics that fill the screen. The ring leader of the animals is a raccoon but the skunks of the forest get a lot of screen time too with obvious results. Seeing Dan get sprayed is so funny one time that they repeat it several times.
Fraser plays Dan as an inept doofus. He appears to have no backbone or any real concern for his family. It is not an ingratiating performance and for the movie to succeed at all it needs to be. In the war between Dan and the animals, the audience is pretty much on the animals side from start to finish.
As Dans wife Tammy, Shields is a non-person. Shields has some talent as a comedienne but it is not allowed to be seen in this movie until the credits are rolling. As a matter of fact the best moments in the movie are seen as the credits are running.
The movie is rated PG for some crude humor.
Kids will probably enjoy the scenes with the animals getting the best of the humans, and they will all absorb the message that nature needs to be protected, All the bad acting and boring moments in the script will be overlooked. But for humans it is an endurance race for an hour and a half. If you take your kids stock up on popcorn and any other pleasure food you can find.
Brendan Fraser has made good movies in the past and hopefully he will make good ones in the future but this latest one is a low in his career. It makes George of the Jungle look like an Oscar winner.
I scored Furry Vengeance an animal friendly 3 out of 10.
