November 28, 2006: Movie Review--Happy Feet
Happy Feet should be a fun, funny, family film--but it's not. Sure, the CGI penguins are very cute and fluffy, but even a pack (gaggle? herd?) of cute penguins can't save this movie.
It starts out as a retread of every ugly duckling movie ever made. Poor Mumble has no heartsong. The other penguin kids make fun of him. His Dad tries to hide the fact that Mumble tap dances instead of sings. If you slapped a red nose on Mumble, he'd be Rudolph!
Then, like Rudolph, Mumble heads off on his own in exile. Poor, poor Mumble. Along the way, he meets up with some other misfit toys--er, penguins. They meet up with a Cornealius-type and come across a Bumble or two (in this case penguin eating seals and killer whales). The twist is that instead of Mumble being asked to guide Santa's sleigh, he is captured by humans, put in the zoo, and has to tap dance his way to freedom. Oh, and a long the way, he convinces the humans to stop overfishing in the penguin waters.
If you just read that last sentence and thought, "What the heck?", you see the problem with the movie. It's a hodgepodge with a tacked on moral. A moral without a practical solution--given that I know no tap-dancing penguins available to make humans more careful with their garbage and fishing rights.
Kids will see right through the ploy and be bored by this mixed up mess of a movie. There are a few cute moments, but nothing to save it from itself. Even Robin Williams (voicing two characters) is oddly subdued.
I went with an eight year old, two eleven year olds, and a fourteen year old (and two other adults). The three younger kids hated it. The best the rest of us could muster was it was "okay". Honestly, we'd have had more fun staying home and watching Rudolph.
138 minutes; rated PG; now playing; recommended for: no one in the theater. Penguin fans may enjoy it later on DVD.
