|
Mr. Popper's Penguins
| Released |
5 August 2011 |
| Director |
Mark Waters |
Starring
|
Jim Carrey, Carla Gugino, Angela Lansbury, Ophelia Lovibond, Madeline Carroll, Maxwell Perry Cotton, Clark Gregg, Jeffrey Tambor |
Writer(s)
|
Sean Anders, John Morris, Jared Stern |
| Producer(s) |
John Davis |
| Origin |
United States |
| Running Time |
94 minutes |
| Genre |
Comedy, family |
| Rating |
G |
|
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Properly Painful Pap!
Alas, poor old Jim Carrey. Though he first hit big with Ace Ventura, he quickly showed he could hold his own in better material like The Truman Show and Man on the Moon. However, fifteen years later he’s still making more crap than ever. For every Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, he seems to have to make several visits to the garbage dump with films like Fun with Dick and Jane, Yes Man and Bruce Almighty. It’s a Faustian pact with the studios that he seems to be stuck in.
Last year, his excellent performance as a gay escape artist in I Love You Philip Morris went largely unseen as the studios in America buried it. They presumably weren’t comfortable with such a mainstream star playing a homosexual so graphically. There have been no such distribution problems for this new film, a nice and safe “family comedy”.
It’s very loosely based on the 1938 classic children’s book by Richard and Florence Atwater. The screenwriters have adapted it in a brazenly lazy way though by simply tacking on the plot from Liar Liar, another of Carrey’s family comedies. So Carrey plays Tom Popper, a manipulative lawyer, who’s divorced from his ex-wife (Carla Gugino) and has a troubled relationship with his two children (Madeline Carroll and Maxwell Perry Cotton). Everyone calls him Popper, even his children, which must be a touch confusing since they must surely have the same last name.
Things change when his late father sends him a penguin as a dying gift. Popper initially tries to get rid of it but inadvertently orders five more and soon he’s got six penguins running around his fancy, high-rise apartment. This provides ample opportunity for Carrey’s trademark physical comedy. His two children love the penguins and though he initially tries to get rid of them, Popper then finds himself in a battle with a local zoo to keep them.
This is a lacklustre effort on just about every level. Everyone involved, the cast, writers and director seemed to have made peace with the fact that they’re in a piece of crap and invest the minimum amount of effort involved. Carrey tries to work up some laughs but there’s no hiding the look of sadness and sheer boredom in his eyes. The attempts at humour revolve around the CGI penguins, which are supposedly cute but it’s hard to warm to them when they’re so obviously fake.
Even the children in the supporting cast fail to muster any enthusiasm for the their roles, going through the motions as the cute moppet and moody teenager respectively. At least Ophelia Lovibond, as Popper’s secretary, Pippi, puts some effort in with her tongue-twisting lines dominated with words that begin with the letter P. And it’s nice to see the redoubtable Angela Lansbury is still going strong. However their efforts are far too little to save this turkey.
This film has been described as a “crowd pleaser” but it’s hard to imagine a crowd so docile and pliant that they could be pleased by this lazy, bland, achingly inoffensive effort. Sadly for Carrey, he seems to have more garbage like this in front of him.
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Jim O’Connor |
