Alvin and the Chipmunks (2007)
Directed by Tim Hill
A struggling songwriter named Dave Seville finds success when he comes across a trio of singing chipmunks: mischievous leader Alvin, brainy Simon, and chubby, impressionable Theodore.
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What critics compared Alvin and the Chipmunks to
Well, that’s not entirely true: the film’s third act introduces an aberrant, psychosexual element that is frankly misjudged, trying to riff on “Killer Joe” with a turkey baster but never reaching those operatic heights.
Because while Sonic the Hedgehog is cut from the same bland mold as Garfield (2004), Alvin and the Chipmunks (2007), and The Smurfs (2011), the one thing besides the little blue fur ball that feels most like a relic of the Clinton years is Jim Carrey.
Scriptwriters Patrick Casey and Josh Miller breezily steer Sonic down well-mapped odd-couple and chase-movie highways, with Alvin and the Chipmunks and Easter comedy Hop (also starring Marsden) as signposts.
Live-action comedies which rely overtly on pint-sized CGI mascots don’t exactly have a great standing among audiences or critics – just look at Alvin and the Chipmunks or The Smurfs – but Sonic the Hedgehog is aided enormously by the charmingly daft personality of Sonic himself.
And although the final product was essentially just a riff on the live-action Alvin and the Chipmunks , it appealed enough to audiences (or, more likely, children in the audience) that it made more than $300m (£228m) at the global box office.
These high jinks more closely resemble Michael Bay’s Transformers, the live-action Alvin and the Chipmunks, or live-action Scooby-Doo films.
Rather than conjuring up memories of Alvin and the Chipmunks or 2011’s The Smurfs, it instead harkens back to witty, wordplay-driven British comedies of yore.
While some viewers had probably been expecting non-Muppet Segel to hog the spotlight, like other children-show-turned-modern-movies (such as Neil Patrick Harris in The Smurfs or Jason Lee in Alvin and the Chipmunks), the “humans” are all portrayed with campy tongue-in-cheek fun that serves to let the Muppets shine.
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The movie features self-consciously cute protagonists who already have a presence on toy shelves (just like the Smurfs), trying to escape an ogre-like presence who wants to eat them (also the Smurfs), while trying to help a seemingly hopeless humanoid figure show her true greatness (“Ratatouille,” “Shrek,” “Alvin and the Chipmunks” etc).
Screenwriters Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger may have been writing for the kiddie circuit a little too long with multiple Kung Fu Pandas and Alvin and the Chipmunks movies under their belt, because this one feels a little too stale and formulaic.
And not helping is the movie being written by Jon Vitti, who penned two of the Alvin and the Chipmunks movies.
They simply keep eating and dancing and engaging in scenes that allow the film’s screenwriter—Jon Vitti, who is best known for his work on The Simpsons but is also responsible for Alvin and the Chipmunks —to make many, many pig-and-bird puns.
If you like puns, the script by Jon Vitti (Alvin and the Chipmunks) has a million groaners.
At a bare minimum, you’d expect the script to try to differentiate between healthy and unhealthy anger, but screenwriter Jon Vitti (who also wrote the first two Alvin and the Chipmunks movies) doesn’t see the need to bother.
Jon Vitti, who has written for The Simpsons (good) and Alvin and the Chipmunks (bad), The Angry Birds Movie takes a lot of familiar genre elements (outsider/loner forced to come good), and does very little that’s new with them.
It’s a pet farce so flat it makes you long for the Lubitsch touch of the “Alvin and the Chipmunks” comedies.