It isn’t too hard to tell when a film is built by committee; when it doesn’t so much spring from the mind of a dedicated creator, and is instead fashioned to meet the demands of the market. Free Birds is an easy example. It feels like some executive just realized one day that there weren’t many movies about Thanksgiving. And so, a group of creative people was quickly assembled to come up with something appropriate for the holiday. What they came up with walks a straight and narrow path down the most tired elements of the genre, and seems to have spent much of its production time in the punch-up room. There just isn’t a whole lot of love in this.
Reggie (Owen Wilson) is smarter than the average turkey. He is smart enough to realize that he and his brethren are just being fattened up to be eventually led to the slaughter. Luckily, he happens to become the one turkey pardoned by the president one Thanksgiving. He’s brought to Camp David, where he discovers the joys of pizza and Mexican telenovelas. And he’s content to live out the rest of his life there, but one day he runs into another Turkey, the slow but heroic Jake (Woody Harrelson). Jake forces Reggie to go on an absurd mission: to travel back in time to the first Thanksgiving and prevent turkeys from ever being put on to the menu.
The film, like so many others before it, begins by introducing us to an outsider protagonist. The voiceover narration informs us that Reggie has never really felt like he belongs. The film then contrives its way to its main plot, and then pretty much forgets about Reggie’s initial concerns. The film can’t even commit to its own pandering, and simply devolves into a bunch of messy action set pieces and silly jokes.
The film doesn’t really seem to have an original idea of its own. It simply tries to replicate the success of every other animated film. It runs through a checklist of popular elements: the mismatched buddy chemistry of Toy Story, the mismatched romance of Rio, the goofy side characters, the inevitable break to feature a set of really cute characters, and a sudden push for drama. But the film only copies the surface. It doesn’t have a heart of its own, the filmmakers clearly not committed to making any of this really work.
Whatever pleasures may be derived from this film come from the quips, many of which seem to directly make fun of the movie itself. The jokes are mostly about how stupid the characters are, and how their quest is utterly absurd. And that’s just really a sign that the movie itself doesn’t think any of this is really any good. The animation is okay for what it is, though hardly memorable. The voicework is disproportionately strong, particularly from leads Owen Wilson and Woody Harrelson. George Takei pretty much gets a lot of great lines, and his signature delivery provides a couple of solid laughs. Amy Poehler vast reserve of talent is kind of squandered in an uninteresting role, but it’s never a bad thing to have her around.
Free Birds is just kind of sad. Despite the rampant commercialism involved in all forms of filmmaking, animation has managed to become a strong medium for the delivery of specific visions. But Free Birds has none of that. It’s happy to be a completely mediocre product, delivering the sheer minimum of what these animated movies can be. As audiences, we shouldn’t have to settle for that. There are so many choices out there, and Free Birds isn’t even worth considering.
My Rating:
