Thursday 17 November 2011

Today's Review: Zookeeper






This doesn't even happen in the movie! Why is it on the poster? Oh, sorry, I've launched into criticising the movie before I've even introduced it. Zookeeper is a retarded movie in which Kevin James takes dating advice from talking zoo animals.

We open with Kevin James' bumbling character Griffin proposing on the beach to his girlfriend, Stephanie (Leslie Bibb). However, she rejects him because he's a zookeeper, with a tone that basically likens his profession to working in McDonald's. Screw that guy, he's just a zookeeper at a popular zoo, it's not like he needed qualifications or anything. Slacker. Anyway, five years later, Griffin still isn't over Stephanie, and it only gets worse when she starts visiting the zoo every day for some reason. Convinced that the only way to win the girl back is to get a job at his brother's car dealership, for some reason, Griffin plans on leaving the zoo. But the animals don't like that idea, because they like Griffin. Also they can talk, and decide to break their golden silence to talk to Griffin and tell him how to win the girl back in a different way.

Griffin appears to like that idea, as he very quickly gets over the shock of talking animals and starts taking their advice to heart, such as taking lessons on marking territory from a wolf and then pissing in a goddamn restaurant. Also a love rival turns up who's just a complete dick, so Griffin decides the best way to win her over is to be an even bigger dick, and by God it works.

Oh, sorry, I forgot to say spoiler alert, but that's okay, because you don't want to watch this movie. The situations are ridiculous. The guy smuggles a gorilla out of the zoo and takes him to T.G.I. Fridays. Then later on he does it again, damaging several things around the city and probably scaring the crap out of people, and there are apparently no repercussions at all for his job.

The animals are not so much given voices that reflect their personalities, but the ones most likely to make you lose faith in the entire family movie industry. The giraffe sounds like a person genetically bred in a lab to have the most annoying, grating voice ever witnessed. I know your voice isn't usually that bad, Maya Rudolph, what happened? Did Adam Sandler punch you in the throat until you agreed to do another of his shitty movies?

I would say the actors are terrible, but that implies that they could actually do anything good with what they're given. It's just an awful movie that makes no real sense. The talking animals are clearly there to inspire children, but at the same time it's about how much a guy is willing to change himself to do a hot chick. Also there are random eighties songs thrown into the mix to apparently make adults interested, which you always know is a sign of a good movie. I had the option of watching the Blu-Ray with MovieIQ, a service that looks up actors and songs while you watch the movie, but I gave it a miss, seeing as the only questions I was likely to ask were "Can you provide me with the addresses of the filmmakers, and also instructions for making a mail bomb?" and "When will this dark patch on my soul go away?"

I didn't like Zookeeper. You won't either.

My rating: 0/5

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