Country: USA / United Arab Emirates
Genre: Comedy / Family
Direction: Roger Kumble
Cast: Brendan Fraser, Brooke Shields, Ken Jeong, and fake looking animals
When ambitious real estate developer Dan Sanders (Brendan Fraser) relocates his family to rural Oregon to supervise the construction of a massive new subdivision, one resourceful raccoon rallies his woodland friends to fight back and shut down the project. As the battle between man and beast heats up, the hapless real estate developer realizes there are some natural environments that are better left untouched.
Download Furry Vengeance (2010)
Movie Review:
A group of sneaky capitalists, using the false pretence of helping the world, invade a primitive wilderness, only to find themselves locked in an unwinnable guerrilla war with the indigenous population.
It’s an old story that the family film Furry Vengeance wraps in the green jacket of eco-friendliness: The bad guys are developers building a subdivision in the forest and the heroes are the woodland creatures who fight them with the weapons at hand, i.e., skunk smell, bird poop, and the ingenious abilities of the insurgent leader, a raccoon who knows how to hot-wire a car.
The bottom line — to make a long story endless — is that Brendan Fraser gets hit in the crotch a lot and says things like, “Check out Mr. Peepee Pants,” after the raccoon conspires to spray him right in the no-no zone with a garden hose.
Fraser plays Dan, who has moved with his wife (Brooke Shields) and teenage son (Matt Prokop) from Chicago to Oregon to be in charge of the new Rocky Springs housing development. However, it’s being built at the expense of the foxes, squirrels, groundhogs, wild turkey, and bear that live there already. They’re angry, and they’ve got state-of-the-art special effects and the cudgel of liberal Hollywood outrage on their side. (Liberal Hollywood outrage is a unique mixture: Furry Vengeance was co-produced by Participant Entertainment, the social activist company behind such films as Food Inc., and Imagenation Abu Dhabi, a company based in the richest city in the world.)
But Furry Vengeance is mostly about the slapstick fun of watching the animals unplug Dan’s treadmill, say, or steal his clothes, sending him into a genial war with nature. Fraser, who’s growing an impressive pot belly, is a naturally likable actor, and Dan is portrayed as a friendly enough sort who doesn’t really want to destroy natural habitats — the company plans to replace the forest with a shopping mall that has a forest theme — but is capable of doing so as a last resort. He is us, allowing for a wild animal or two attached by its teeth to his crotch.
These misadventures, created by both live-action and computer-generated beasts, are meant to appeal to small filmgoers who will find it amusing when, say, a crow pecks on the window so loudly that Dan wakes up and eventually falls off the roof. It’s an exceptionally irritating plot development, especially when everyone thinks he’s crazy for ranting about how the raccoon is the brains of the operation that’s out to get him. This is a throwback kind of comedy — the 1930s and ’40s were filled with films about people who witnessed miraculous sights or had talking mules that no one else could see — that hasn’t aged well.
The movie’s political subplot has Dan’s employer, the putatively eco-friendly builder, showing its true colours (not green but, as his boss puts it, shades of grey). The boss, Mr. Lyman, is portrayed by Asian-American actor Ken Jeong; his co-conspirator, the money behind the subdivision, is a man from India. These are the only non-white faces in Furry Vengeance, not counting a comic Mexican foreman and the bear, and while this could be read as a refreshing break from politically correct casting, it still seems a bit odd.
Director Roger Kumble (Cruel Intentions, Just Friends) tries to keep the comedy bubbling by adding animal mayhem, but that just makes Furry Vengeance even more childish than it needs to be. Its message about letting the animals in peace would be easier to take if they weren’t such a pain in the butt.
Nevertheless, if you are dragged to it by some misguided young squirrel-lover, you should stay for the final credits, a musical number that provides more loose-limbed, silly fun than the picture that preceded it. Music really is the universal language, even to a talking raccoon.
Original article
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