Of all the questions running through my head while watching a computer animated gerbil action/adventure produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, the one that kept creeping into my foreground was an unexpected one: Why pay brand-name movie stars to do voice-overs any ways? Even from a business perspective, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense once you look a little closely. Sure it seems great to have an ‘A-list’er on the marquee but has any child begged their parents to take them to see a movie because William H. Macy to the voice over of the robot? Is the studio really trying to court the die-hard Billy Mace fans to see a cartoon ?
Some smarter studios are realizing the diminishing returns of this practice. From Toy Story to Toy Story 3: Resurrection, Pixar had stopped even mentioning their two leading stars, Tom Hanks and Tim Taylor. But this still remains the status quo; get the most famous person you can and shove a mic in their face for a cartoon. Using A-list actors in CGI movies is a waste of money and talent.
…Which brings us to Nicolas Cage in G-Force. A stunning waste of talent, time and money, Cage fits right in. This dude was in Leaving Las Vegas, Adaptation and Wild at Heart, for Christ’s sake! Even his critically bad movies tend to digress into vehicles for his absurd pantomimes. He provides a sort of catharsis, like how one becomes silly and goofy when one is tremendously bored. It’s as if he’s saying, “Yeah, I know this movie sucks so I’ll let my crazy out for five minutes. Enjoy.” But in this ‘film’ he is a broken stallion. This is a caged bird who does not sing.
How buried is he? It took me half the movie and an IMDB.com search to figure out which character he was voicing. His is the first name in the credits so I spent the beginning of the film asking myself why Cage sounds a lot like Sam Rockwell. I ask again: What is the point of having A-listers voicing Gerbils?
Anyways, Sam Rockwell plays Darwin, the leader of an elite quasi-legal team of guinea pigs in what amounts to a standard ‘fish-out-of-water’ adventure. On the cusp of foiling a major evil “world domination” plot, the team’s funding gets pulled and they escape before they are caught by the FBI (led by a tired Will Arnett). Only problem is that they escaped to a – wait for it – pet store! Will the new homes be able to handle the sass of Penelope Cruz and the hood slang jive of Morgan Freeman Tracey Morgan? Hell no! These rodents are all that and a bag of Gerbil mix (that goes out to you, Gene Shalit)!
To add to the cool-factor of the guinea pigs, they do stuff with the Black Eye Peas blasting in the soundtrack. They run away from and towards various things, they dance, and they sneak into and out of places. I watched CGI gerbils running in a tire past live-action dogs to “Tonight’s Gonna be a Good Night”. I needed the mental fortitude of Hal Jordan not to kill myself.
The one bright spot is the unbelievably straight role of Splinter to these gerbils’ ninja turtles, played by Zach Galifinakis. Zach Gilly is the star of this movie and plays it like a drama major trying way too hard in a Sesame Street sketch.
Nick Cage is Speckles, the mole technician that turns out to be the bad guy or as Tracey Morgan quips, “who thought the mole would turn out to really be the mole?” Not I, Tracey Morgan. Not I. Cage is so under utilized that it is often hard to remember he’s even in the movie. He basically vanishes for the middle third of the movie only to come back with a giant robot made of house-hold appliances. I will not elaborate. There is only one good scene from him. In a flashback we see his dad and him (Cage with a deeper voice) just before the exterminators close in on them in a field. Speckles’ Dad’s last words are as follows: “Son, if you ever get out of here … and you have the chance … I want you … to bring humanity to its knees!” As bad as this movie is, I would buy the DVD if it had an hour-long extra of Cage recording his lines.
There may be worse Cage movies but this must stand alone as being the most pointless. No child worth raising will like this movie. And no parent is going because two academy award winners are voicing hamsters. Every one of these super star actor voices could have been replaced by interns and one would still have a steaming pile of computer generated shit but with about $70 million less on the tab. No Nicolas Cage movie has so perfectly matched the wasteful habits of their headliner. I hope there never will be either.
