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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 11.63%
Worth A Look: 10.47%
Average: 39.53%
Pretty Bad: 24.42%
Total Crap: 13.95%
7 reviews, 44 user ratings
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| Shark Tale |
by Erik Childress
"The ‘Joey’ Of Animated Spin-Offs"
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SCREENED AT THE 2004 TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: For years and years I’ve preached that animated films have an instinctual leg-up on all the live-action fare out there because they allow themselves the time to refine the story and pack-in the laughs. Even before Pixar reinvented the Acme wheel, it would still take years for the filmmakers to create these works and just by default could wind up improving the script or finding the right voice actors. Save for the occasional passing adventure like Road To El Dorado or Sinbad, the big seasonal event fare have ranked from very good to all-out masterpieces. October isn’t quite the holiday season nor does it qualify for summer, but that’s no excuse for Shark Tale being the underwhelming stale concoction that it is.Imagine the sharks from Finding Nemo getting their own spinoff movie and you’ve got the beginning of a pitch meeting at Dreamworks Animation, Pixar’s arch-nemesis. Someone might as well have suggested Jabberjaw get his own movie. That’s just a bad idea. But Shark Tale had a promising one whose creativity seemed to fly down a whirlpool as fast as the film changed its title.
Lenny (voiced by Jack Black) doesn’t exactly fit in amongst the top of the food chain. He doesn’t have the killer instinct to feast on the cute little crawfish or even the worms left up for bait. Now Lenny finds himself on the hook from the Family. Yes, sharks are of the Mafioso lineage and Don Lino (Robert DeNiro) doesn’t want his youngest son behaving like such a sissy. Maybe the gay culture will find a hero in Lenny's refuse-to-conform attitude.
Oscar, as voiced by Will Smith, is your average wacky inner-sea-city fish with big dreams and a lot of talk. A LOT of talk! If only he can get out of the film’s one treasured creation, the Whale Wash, the audience can stop hearing that damned “Car Wash” song for the fourth time during the movie. Being in the wrong place at the right time, Oscar inadvertently causes the death of Lenny’s brother and is heralded as a hero for the oft-terrorized shark snacks. Dubbed the Sharkslayer, Oscar takes full advantage of his fame and teams up with the presumed dead Lenny to punctuate the façade.
Quick Quiz – What’s a cooler sounding title? Shark Tale or Sharkslayer?
The brass at Dreamworks thought just the opposite when they felt Slayer would have been too scary for children and send the wrong message. They’ve also taken the focus off of the main character, Oscar, and duped audiences into believing we’re seeing a film about the sharks. Shrek was not called Donkey. Finding Nemo wasn’t Fishtank and Toy Story wasn’t The Chronicles of Buzz. And I sure as hell didn’t sign up for Shark Tale being another miscasted travesty in the Will Smith canon.
Remember who Will Smith played in the 19th century Wild Wild West? That’s right, Will Smith. How about in the futuristic I, Robot? Right again. Animators love to take the persona of their celebrity voices and have fun with the makeup of their characters. On display you’ll see DeNiro’s mole, Martin Scorsese’s eyebrows and Angelina Jolie’s lips. It doesn’t stop there with Smith though as his entire backdrop, soundtrack and aged humor surrounds Oscar and everything he does. (M.C. Hammer jokes, are you SERIOUS?) When he finally gets down to infecting Scorsese’s mafia hanger-on with the fizzle-shizzle mannerisms, it’s a low point for Marty that has to rival his pained look at the 2002 Gangs of No Oscars or absorbing his loss to Kevin Costner in 1990.Shark Tale is beautifully animated and may be enough to distract kids with the pretty colors, but adults and savvy animation fans are likely to recognize the lack of effort in the humor department. Where films like Shrek and Toy Story pack punch into their throwaway jokes by never calling attention to them, Shark Tale punctuates them as if they are the funniest things the writers have ever seen. The Shark Mafia gets all the best lines and are meticulously delivered by the likes of DeNiro, Peter Falk and Scorsese (whose early scenes aren’t nearly as embarrassing.) Renee Zellweger’s angelfish gets a nice dig to Jerry Maguire, but Black’s Lenny is awfully lifeless and Smith is as irritatingly one-note as ever. This effort barely qualifies as bait to catch the attention of its rivals, since many of them are far higher up the food chain to notice.
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=10360&reviewer=198
originally posted: 10/01/04 14:00:46
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Toronto Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Toronto Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
01-Oct-2004 (PG)
DVD: 08-Feb-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
23-Sep-2004
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