BEFORE: This will wrap up Mad Science week - I cleared the horror category last October, so this one's a straggler that will find a home here. The voice of John Cusack carries over from "Hot Tub Time Machine".
THE PLOT: Animated fable about a cliché hunchbacked evil scientist's assistant who aspires to become a scientist himself.
AFTER: OK, I guess another company had the rights to "Frankenstein", because that name never appears in this film. Instead we get mad scientists with names like Glickenstein, because that's sort of totally different.
The film is set in a fictitious Eastern European country, Malaria (because I guess another company has the rights to the name "Romania"), where the entire economy is based on mad scientists and their evil inventions (what, they never heard of sardines?). The country turns a profit by blackmailing other countries, getting paid to not release their experiments on the world. And Igor is not a person, it's sort of an occupation, with an entire class of hunchbacked people apprenticing themselves to mad scientists who are apparently unwilling or unable to pull the switches in their own laboratories.
But this one particular Igor, we'll call him "Igor", aspires to be a scientist himself - because we all know that personal assistants are the real brains behind any successful person, right? He seizes an opportunity to run his own experiment, and creates a woman from component parts. But nothing too gory, like using dead bodies, because this is a kids film. The resulting character is supposed to be Igor's monster-piece, but something goes wrong at the brainwashing stage, and she gets it in her brain that she's an actress instead.
Here's where the movie starts to fall short, in its depiction of good vs. evil. Since it's hard to create characters that are both evil and sympathetic ("Despicable Me" walked a VERY fine line...) they don't show too many evil acts in this film, except for people stealing evil ideas from other people. As a result it's hard to demonstrate these concepts, except for falling back on characters who SAY "I am evil" or "I want to be good." That's lazy storytelling.
So you've got characters who want to win the science fair, to literally do well by being evil, which becomes something of a contradiction. But then if they fail at that, which are they? I guess stealing constitutes evil, so if you steal an evil idea and use it to do well, that's still evil. (Now my head hurts.)
There is one character who may be genuinely evil, and that's the King, whose design looks almost exactly like the mayor of Halloween Town from "The Nightmare Before Christmas" (What was that about stealing other people's ideas?) In fact there's a lot here that seems culled from the Tim Burton / Henry Selick genre, but they just can't match the tone of those films.
Other than a couple turn-arounds, the film just sort of treads water for 90 minutes until the credits roll. The sidekick characters are not particularly well thought-out - there's a brain in a jar/Tom Servo-like character, and a suicidal bunny who's also unfortunately immortal somehow. Turns out there's no easy way out of this movie for him either.
Also starring the voices of Steve Buscemi (last seen in "Youth in Revolt"), Sean Hayes (last heard in "Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore"), Eddie Izzard (last heard in "Cars 2"), John Cleese (last heard in "Shrek Forever After"), Jennifer Coolidge (last seen in "Down to Earth"), Molly Shannon (last seen in "Shallow Hal"), Jay Leno, Christian Slater, with cameos from Arsenio Hall, James Lipton.
RATING: 4 out of 10 pickles
I was a big John Cusack fan in the 80's but as time has gone on, I've caught fewer and fewer of his films (and of movies in general).
ReplyDeleteThe combination of my love of animation and John Cusack made me really want to like this film, but it just was stuck between creepy and boring. I thought the design of the characters, specially Igor's monster, was off turning as well as the suicidal bunny being fairly inappropriate for children, and not to my liking either.