Furry Vengeance

Screenwriter turned director Roger Kumble has brought out a few films now; possibly the most notable pair being Cruel Intentions and College Road Trip. This time round he has been entrusted with $35 million and a respectable comedy cast in order to make a laugh-out-loud funny comedy. Furry Vengeance is a film where animals (aka furries – not the internet sex perverts) take their revenge (aka vengeance) out upon a group of real estate developers masquerading as environmentally conscious businessmen – or more specifically just Brendan Fraser.

The story is based upon Dan Sanders (Brendan Fraser), an essentially nice guy who is attempting to balance his conscience, his family’s well-being, and the demands of his hard-hearted boss Neal Lyman (Ken Jeong). Unfortunately the demanding boss is winning the battle and Dan is tasked with destroying a large section of forest and replacing it with housing. When a racoon, some skunks and a whole ark full of other animals discover these evil plans they use all their animal powers to take Dan down. Wife Tammy Sanders (Brooke Shields) and son Tyler Sanders (Matt Prokop) are already begrudgingly adjusting to their new surroundings, so when Dan comes back with stories of super-intelligent forest creatures they are in no mood to listen!

This film bombed at the box office and was panned by critics. But speaking as someone who has recently recovered from illness after a war against a local ant colony (a little blowback from my own biological weaponry), someone who actually took a short break from writing this review in order to lay down enough poison to paralyze an averaged-sized rhinoceros; yet also speaking as an animal lover, perhaps I will take a different view of the film. To be frank the film sucks. Almost everything outside of the trailer is bad, which is a shame because it is a darn good trailer.

If you don’t find the idea of Brendan Fraser being tormented by little, furry creatures hilarious, then there is something wrong with you. The Fraser related humour is what works best here, but between every set-up gag of Fraser being humiliated – which in themselves are hit and miss – there are weak jokes with no real purpose. One character calls Brooke Shields “Amazon woman” which is funny because I never really noticed that she looks like a classic Amazon woman cross between hotness and strength. I feel like I want to describe the funny moments to you so that you don’t have to bother paying your money to see the film, but I will stop.

There isn’t much to say about pure comedies, either they work or they don’t. This doesn’t work. Can it be excused as a kid’s film? Well no because the film fails to hold the attention of anybody, let alone the average kid for whom a boring hour seems to last a lifetime. The overall effort just seems lazy; though what is most worrying is the end credits tribute to ‘Insane in the Membrane’. A dumb and pointless throw-away gag, yet it clearly had been planned and continued over a series of weeks as the actors sing along to the song between shots for the rest of the film. It is hard to describe here, but if you do see you may agree with me that it hints at the fact that the film was created or directed by someone with a weak sense of humour. There are numerous amusing sequences but overall it is a lazy effort.