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Yahoo!It’s actually shocking that Hoyt Yeatman, the director of G-Force, was not forced to screen Ratatouille before he finished this unspectacular 3-D adventure film, told from a rodent’s point of view. If he had been thus educated, he might have learned what cinematic potentials creep along sideboards, behind sofas, and from the tops of dressers. In other words, this film might have been goofy, suspenseful, and beautiful—it actually has a decent plot twist—instead of lamely derivative and predictable.
The story concerns a gaggle of guinea pigs working as spies for a nerdy maverick branch of the FBI, fitted out with linguistic devices and taught to do extra-legal surveillances; a Bush-era wet dream. When the agency discovers the rodents in their midst, it shuts down the experiment, just as a global domination plot begins right where the wee pets were snooping. But besides a few long computer-tracking shots and one adventurous camera angle from the fly, G-Force is only nominally three-dimensional, and, when you add in all the fart jokes and divide by the racial clichés—the sultry Latina, the sassy black woman, and a sex-obsessed jivey hamster—it seems more like stereotypes than stereo-vision. (I even felt sorry for the dorky FBI agent.)
Disney earned parents’ approval by aiming high, but this is where families get abandoned. This is the first live-action kids’ movie produced by Mr. Blockbuster, Jerry Bruckheimer for Disney, and it contains all the class that implies. Here, the House of Mouse hands him the kids as cinematic guinea pigs.
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For showtimes, check the Independent's movie listings, here.
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