Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip opens with the Chipmunks throwing a party that gets put of control in the new house in which they and Dave (Jason Lee) reside. This is not particularly important to the overall plot, but it is there to establish yet again that Alvin and his brothers are pretty terrible. Dave ends up mentioning that the Chipmunks should be punished, but he still takes them out to mini golf under the shaky justification that he wants to spend as much time with them as possible before having to go on a weekend trip to Miami.
And it is at mini golf that the Chipmunks meet Dave’s new girlfriend Samantha and her son Miles (Kimberly Williams-Paisely and Josh Green). The Chipmunks and Miles do not get along, so when they find out that Dave may be planning to propose to Samantha, the kids all decide to team to go to Miami to prevent him from doing so. Along the way, they gain the enmity of Air Marshall Suggs (Toby Hale), and end up being chased all across the American South as they try to find a way to get to Miami.
So to recap: the protagonists of this movie are trying to prevent their father from marrying a woman that he really likes. On their way to Miami, they end up breaking the law and are then rightfully pursued for their criminal activities. And yet, we are supposed to root for the success of their furry little troublemakers. And then, at the very end, the film presents itself as a heartwarming story about family. This, like the behavior of the main characters for majority of the movie, is completely unreasonable. This film is toxic, and no number of scenes where these ostensibly adorable animals cover some top 40 hit is going to fix that.
None of the Alvin and the Chipmunks movies have really been any good, but they’ve always felt somewhat harmless. This film, on the other hand, starts with an Idiot Plot that has the characters taking an insane course of action for what is essentially a non-issue. It then has them clearly in the wrong in an issue with law-enforcement, but it still presents them as heroes. There is no law that a children’s movie should present good values, but it feels like a step too far for a movie to present outright criminality as a trifle of a thing that offers no real consequences.
In every other aspect, the movie is basically the same as the other three movies. It’s mostly made up of lazily staged scenes, alternating between juvenile humor and musical performances. Despite the frantic tone, the film is actually pretty static, an apparent consequence of having to interact with animated elements. The performances from the human cast are pretty uninspiring as a whole. Jason Lee looks half asleep in his scenes. Toby Hale is pretty much the only person in this cast really giving it all he’s got, but this mainly means being put through a series of lazy humiliations.
Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip seems to have been put together by people who just don’t care anymore. They couldn’t even come up with a half decent pretense to send these Chipmunks on a road trip across America, which is really the only thing the film seems to have set out to do. In getting to that simple logline, the script makes spiteful criminals out of its protagonists. If there are lessons to be learned through this journey, they are pretty much lost in the haze of lazy writing.
My Rating:
