Fade in: night.
A dog food dish lying on a cement patio. From out of the
darkness a bandit comes bounding. That's no dog. This interloper
looks cute, but really wants only one thing: to steal that
food. And maybe knock over a trash can or five.
Anyone living
in suburbia has had that occasional battle with a raccoon
or maybe found a tortoise making his way across the lawn.
That alone gives both the comic strip and the movie Over
the Hedge a clever rationale for its characters.
With today's
crossover marketing, it also makes sense that the roguish
raccoon R. J. (Bruce Willis) hawks cell phones and snacks
to his audience. What's perhaps surprising about the shallow
R.J. is that he stars in a movie that has actual heart.
A prequel to
the popular strip by Michael Fry and T. Lewis, Dreamworks'
Over the Hedge is the family film that they thought
they were delivering with the Shrek franchise. Though
the characters give in to consumerism, they never lose their
sincerity and warmth.
Nor, thankfully,
do they stop being funny. Directors Tim Johnson and Karey
Kirkpatrick keep the film from ever becoming cloying. They
do use one visual gag a few too many times, but then turn
it around into a masterful payoff with Hammy the Squirrel
(Steve Carell).
It
would be easy to just praise the perfect voice casting in
this film. Carell, for instance, takes his hyper squirrel
to levels that even his weatherman in Anchorman
could not have dreamed. But it's also obvious that the filmmakers
have carefully thought out the physicality to seamlessly
blend with voice into an hilarious character.
In a nutshell
(sorry, Hammy), Willis' R.J. gets a little too greedy and
tries to steal snacks from the hibernating bear Vincent
(Nick Nolte). Accidentally destroying all of it, R.J. has
one week to replace it all or face Vincent's wrath.
Meanwhile, during
other animals' hibernations, tract housing has edged out
even more of the forest. When turtle Verne (Garry Shandling)
awakens with his adopted and motley family, their foraging
abilities are sharply curtailed. Unless they give in, of
course, to the siren call of pre-packaged junk food.
The film mixes
lessons about friendship and family with quick jabs at human
lifestyles. None of it gets too heavy-handed, or heavy-pawed
as its clear that the bear will never learn. For some, this
might be a weakness. No jokes are too "sophisticated," nor
do they ever stoop very low. The closest the film comes
to toilet humor, really, lies in the skunk femme fatale
played by Wanda Sykes, and even those jokes flow naturally
from the situation …and her tail.
As is only appropriate,
the humans appear as grotesque, in particular the exterminator
played by Thomas Haden Church. Having his voice come out
of a character so unlike him is jarring, which is kind of
odd considering that Shandling and Willis aren't animals.
But they play
animals so well. Even William Shatner seems born to play
an opossum with delusions of Shakespearean grandeur. Everybody
voices their characters so earnestly that it feels refreshing.
Over the Hedge doesn't have a hint of archness to
it.
As a result,
it's a warm and fuzzy comedy, what a true family film should
be.
