Furry Vengeance

    Oh Furry Vengeance, what could I possibly say about you that most people haven't already inferred by watching the trailer? Must I be forced to simply validate what is already known about you? Of course, how harsh can I be? It's not like you were out to be an Oscar winning comedy, were you?  No, you just wanted people to laugh by humiliating a generally well liked actor via a gang of cruel forest creatures while at the same time, spreading a message everyone can agree with. "Let's save the forest or else all the little forest creatures will seek vengeance and you will know their wrath." Oooh that sounds like a B-rated horror flick. Anyway, I think I covered all of the excuses one normally hears for why a movie such as this shouldn't criticized harshly. Mostly that it wasn't trying to be great. Well, Furry Vengeance wasn't great. It wasn't good either.
    
    Brenden Fraser playes an idiot named Dan Sanders. Fraser has played a few idiots in his time and seems to have perfected the part. Dan is a housing developer assigned to develop a new neighborhood on what was very recently a nature preserve. He takes the assignment after the last guy disappeared. Read: ran away after the animals pushed his car off of a cliff with a boulder. So, Dan moves his wife, Tammy (Brooke Shields) and his teenage son, Tyler (Matt Prokop) from their home in Chicago to the Oregon wilderness. When I say Dan is an idiot, I'm not being scathing so much as factual. His family loves the city life, yet he makes all of his decisions as if he doesn't know this. He dotes on his boss played by Ken Jeong as if this man was a god. The boss says the word "green" and Dan is trying to convince his family that he is forcing them to stay in Oregon for another few years and facilitating in the destruction of the forest in order to help the environment. Dan's logic didn't work when he said it in the movie either. His family, being as they aren't idiots, know better. As do the horror flick worthy animals.

    The bulk of the film is made up of the animals finding different ways to make Dan's life miserable. It's interesting that most of the tactics require an intimate knowledge of Dan's psyche. By targeting Dan's weaknesses, they play strategic psychological warfare. They don't just push Dan off a cliff like the last guy (although, they tried). They humiliate him in front of his employees, they turn his family against him, they keep his already minimal mental stability low by not allowing him to sleep. They also communicate with each other via thought bubbles. Dan falls into every trap. They constantly out-smart him because well...he's not very smart. I mean, when a bear chases you, why would you run AWAY from the house? I have to wonder why they couldn't find a way to communicate with him that they would like him to leave. Maybe they don't negotiate with the enemy.

    Furry Vengeance is basically a live action cartoon. The kind of cartoon that doesn't know the meaning of the word subtle. Of course, subtlety isn't exactly director, Roger Kumble's thing. See: College Road Trip, Just Friends.  The guy whose car is pushed off a cliff with a boulder probably only suffers from stars circling around his head. The comedy is obviously exaggerated and physical in nature. Um...no pun intended. The "message" is presented with the same amount of nuance. Dan drives a Hybrid through the developing neighborhood. He speaks of representing a green company before telling his head of construction to make the destruction of the beaver dam with dynamite to look like an accident. No...not subtle at all...kind of like being hit in the head with a hard cover copy of An Inconvenient Truth and then seeing stars circling around your head.

    This movie was tiring to watch. It's also tiring to write about. There was just so much that went wrong. I'm not sure if we were supposed to sympathize with the animals or not. I think maybe we were, but sadism is a hard thing to sympathize with. Speaking of sympathies, I like Brenden Fraser. He's honestly funny. He's got great timing and managed to make me chuckle a few times in this movie. He can be hilarious with a good script. But Brenden Fraser has made a career of choosing more bad movies than good lately. So, I can't really sympathize with him either.