The Animal
(PG-13)
If you scroll through the list of reviews on this site,
you’ll see I’ve been to lots of movies. Many have been dumb or gross or just
instantly forgettable. But very few manage to be as unfunny and uninteresting
as The Animal.
Granted, I’m not a huge fan of gross-out comedies. I’m sure a few people will come home from this movie all sticky from rolling in the movie-theater aisles because they really like to laugh at gross stuff. But I don’t think even those people will like this movie as much as anything starring Adam Sandler or Jim Carey or Ben Stiller.
I could tell that the people in my screening wanted to laugh. They tried to laugh. But they never got much beyond a chuckle or two.
If you haven’t seen the preview, The Animal stars Rob Schneider (who I sometimes like) as a loser who gets picked on by everyone and just can’t pass the physical test to move up from file clerk to a real police officer. Then he gets in a terrible crash and gets put back together by an eccentric doctor using unspecified “animal parts.”
Of course, Schneider’s character is like a new man and can do amazing things like smelling drugs in a guy’s rear end and swimming like a dolphin and impressing the girl he likes (played by Colleen from Survivor I). Unfortunately, he can’t completely control his “animal urges.” So we get shots of Schneider peeing on things to mark his territory, eating raw meat, and attempting to have sex with a goat. (Does that make anyone else nauseated?)
Part of the reason the movie doesn’t work is because it
never even tries to get you to care about the characters. Unless it’s just a
collection of sketches or a spoof, even an over-the-top comedy has to give you
some reason to want the lead characters to succeed. It has to give you just enough
things that make sense to make the crazy stuff really funny. In The Animal, nothing ever makes sense and
you never care about anyone. You just keep waiting for a reason to laugh out
loud.
Yes, there are a few glimmers of funny that poke through. One is Schneider’s black friend who’s mad that everyone treats him so nice because he’s black. And there is a little surprise or two at the end. But with the bad language and lots of really crude sexual humor, there’s just no reason to spend an hour and 23 minutes (or six bucks) on this film.
Let us know what you thought of this review!