Vengeance in the Form of Brazen Stupidity

Movie Title: Furry Vengeance (2010)
Spoilers: one partial spoiler in the third to last paragraph

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Brendan Fraser plays Dan Sanders, a career-minded building contractor who moves his family to Rocky Springs, a wilderness community, for the purpose of tearing down the forests to build a community and shopping center. His boss, Neil Lyman, is played by Ken Jeong (“King Argotron” from Role Models, 2008, and the unexpectedly funny “Therapist #2” from Couples Retreat, 2009). Lyman is the deep-pocketed, wayward businessman and the driving force behind the effort.

When Dan begins to build, he finds the animals are out to get him. These animals are amazingly smart, smarter than the business execs that take their throwing cigars out the window and hatred of the environment way too seriously (they actually announce their anti-green-ism followed by cackling laughter).

No one should be surprised to see Brendan Fraser in this audience-torturing failure. Fraser is to cheesy comedy as New York is to rude people. Dan's wife, Tammy Sanders, is played by Brooke Shields, and she is the closest thing to a non-cringeworthy presence in this film with its less than a handful of decent slapstick moments.

This terrible insult to all audience members - young and old - is loud, obnoxious, and stupidly predictable on a level that is, quite honestly, hard for intelligent people to fathom. The vengeful, growling raccoons, the badgers and grizzlies with sixth senses is surpassed in stomach-turning imbecility by a senile science teacher and an instructor who speaks turkey. Dan's nerdically greedy Japanese boss manages to be stupid and an insult to Asians at one and the same time.

Don't bother to ask where the animals get perfectly rounded stones and boulders to use for their Goonie-ish traps, or since when do humans argue with raccoons on a stretch of highway in the mountains. The humor is supposed to be in how Dan keeps getting beaten up and sabotaged by these furry little animals over and over again while nobody believes him until the last few minutes of the film.

It's 55 minutes in before you learn that the animals are out, not merely to get even for wrongs against the environment, but for revenge. So the whole thing is not so much about “going green” as it is about animal payback from beasts who never kill, but only make human builders miserable in the wackiest of ways.

A part of me wants to believe that the writers had to know how bad this was and the pain it would inflict on viewing audiences, but I know better. Some will really like this, though that is hard to believe when thought about.

Here is one of the most pathetic attempts at promoting the environmentalist agenda yet, but it's not a total waste of tape. It may be beneath the acumen of most five-year-olds, but at least the mentally deficient get to see close-ups of cute animals. That’s one use. And for those in power, this is a potential tool to be used to extract information from detainees at GITMO. I say, go for it!

(JH)

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Grade: F (0 Stars)
Rated: PG (for smoking and some crude humor)
Director: Roger Kumble
Summary: In the Oregon wilderness, a real estate developer's new housing subdivision faces a unique group of protesters, local woodland creatures who don't want their home destroyed.
Starring: Brendan Fraser "Dan Sanders," Ricky Garcia "Frank," Ken Jeong "Neal Lyman," Eugene Cordero "Cheese," Patrice O'Neal "Gus," Jim Norton "Hank," Brooke Shields "Tammy Sanders," Matt Prokop "Tyler Sanders"
Genre: Comedy / Family
Trailer

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