December 16, 2006
flushed away
They say that Washington, D.C, is Hollywood for ugly people, but so is animation. Or it should be. Thus the employ of perfectly attractive persons — persons who trade heavily on their perfect attractiveness — as mere voices is a bit of a mystery (or at least a humiliating sidelong glance at how thoroughly we fetishize prettiness, that we'll pay for its name on a poster even if we never get to, you know, see it.)
Kate Winslet, that is to say, is — shipbound again — more convincing as an odalisque than a swashbuckling rodent. And Huge Ackman, given his talents, has no business playing a prissy cartoon rat; he misreads the lines so consistently that the movie never sets the kind of breakneck-witty tone it needs to carry us along on its sewer screwball, and as a result feels mostly static despite (or in contrast to) numerous and accelerated chase scenes.
Indeed, unlike Winslet (who's actually done just fine in a couple of different scenarios, including the deprogrammed cultist in the Campion's Holy Smoke, whose escape from a desert safe house is abetted by volumes of Dostoyevsky strapped to her bare feet), Ackman should stick to the one role he's made for: the monstrously angry manchild seething under a protective layer of sardonic flirtation, oscillating between seduction and murder. He is finally nothing more nor less than Wolverine, and he rings only small change on that performance in...
Posted by jane at December 16, 2006 08:45 AM | TrackBack