BEFORE: I was going to space things out a bit more, not watch another movie until Friday, but then I realized I'm working tomorrow starting at 5 am, a 12-hour shift, so I think I'm going to be very exhausted on Thursday night, too tired to watch a movie. So, let me get it out of the way now, then I can watch another movie Friday night, which will count for Saturday. I'm still on track, I've got extra days to spare right now, so no worries, we'll be on Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas movies soon enough. Just have to kill a little time here and there until then - but also, I should take the time to enjoy fall when it gets here, there's no need to rush things. I'll be busy with working staff meetings and student orientation sessions, plus an art sale, plus New York Comic-Con, so, really, my life's about to get very crazy and I should try to enjoy the down-time when I do get it.
Toby Jones carries over from "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain".
THE PLOT: Young Tom Hall and his misfit friends fight to save Buster the baby elephant during the German air raid bombings of Northern Ireland in 1941.
AFTER: Well, I thought I was done with movies about World War II, but it turns out they're not done with me. I burned this to a DVD with "The Zookeeper's Wife", another World War II film set at a zoo, but they are VERY different movies. One's a complex drama about the German occupation and hiding Jewish people in a Polish zoo, and this one's more of a tween comedy about saving an elephant. To each his own, I guess. But is there a market for two "World War Zoo" films? Maybe not, because this 2017 film barely charted at the box office, grossing only $231,000 worldwide. Did people not want to see a feel-good comedy about the bombing of Belfast?
Oh, geez, I guess it's kind of animal appreciation week around here, if you count the robot cat from "Lightyear", then Louis Wain's cats yesterday. I've got another World War II film set to close out the week, but I'm not sure there are any animals in it, so trend over, that was quick. This is supposedly a true story about the fact that the Belfast Zoo reacted to the Nazi bombings of their city by killing all the dangerous animals. The theory was that if the zoo should get bombed, any break in the walls or fences would release dangerous animals on to the streets of Belfast, and then they've got another problem, with lions or wolves roaming the city. Yeah, but did they have to KILL them? The animals did nothing wrong, they just want to live their lives and eat their food and it wasn't even their war, it was ours, so it was a really shitty thing to do. Find another solution, same goes for that walrus they killed up in Norway just because it was sitting on people's boats and sinking them. Drug it, move it, release it into the wild, just try to be more humane instead of just being human. Damn the governments who look for the quickest, easiest solution, which is not always the best one.
In this story, the teen son of a zookeeper (who was sent off to fight in the war) takes it upon himself to steal the elephant from the zoo, once he realizes that the soldiers are killing the most dangerous animals - you know, to protect them from the bombing. There you go, kill them so they don't get hurt, that makes sense. To do this, he and his very mopey non-girlfriend need to recruit one of their school's bullies over to their side, because they need a strong kid who can open a back gate. That bully turns out to not be such a bad kid, he's got a younger brother with a genetic condition, who for some reason needs to tag along on every zoo-related mission, how very PC. And the zoo employee who works the main gate turns out to not be such a bad guy, he even helps the kids when he realizes they're trying to save the elephant's life.
The problem then becomes not how do you steal an elephant, but where can you HIDE an elephant? The trio of teens befriends an older woman with a menagerie of her own - rabbits, hedgehogs and a bunch of birds - because who's going to notice one more creature in her house, if nobody ever visits her? If you want to hide a book, find a library, I always say. Of course, this whole mission is just really a distraction so that young Tom doesn't have to deal with his father being away at war, or thinking that he may not return, or that they'll all be killed by German bombs one of these nights. Umm, yeah we may lose a character in this film, but I guess that's why they didn't give that character much of a personality, so we won't mourn as much.
Other than that, this feels a bit like it could have been a Disney movie - or would that have made it even cornier and hokier? Maybe it's for the best that this wasn't made by Disney, it's still got that indie sort of feel to it - but it also feels like it WANTS to be a Disney movie. Whether that's good or bad, I suppose that depends on how you feel about Disney movies.
Also starring Art Parkinson (last seen in "San Andreas"), Penelope Wilton (last seen in "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society"), Ian O'Reilly, Ian McElhinney (last seen in "City of Ember"), Amy Huberman, Damian O'Hare (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides"), Stephen Hagan (last seen in "Risen"), James Stockdale, Emily Flain, Geraldine McAlinden, Frank Cannon, Shane McCaffrey, Pauline Hutton, Donncha Crowley (last seen in "Angela's Ashes"), Glen Nee, Cecilia Ward, Gary Huston.
RATING: 6 out of 10 hungry penguins
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