Escape From Planet Earth

 

The new animated comedy, Escape From Planet Earth, is gentle, goofy, and should be great fun for kids up to a certain age.  I'd say about 8 or 9.  Anyone in the double digits, and you might be pushing it.  The movie is brightly colored, well animated, and features a strong voice cast, but none of these features are really being put to their best use here.  It's mediocre at best, and forgettable at worst.

The plot starts out on the distant alien planet of Baab, home to creatures who kind of look like Smurfs if they were taller, and had been hitting the gym.  We're introduced to two brothers, who naturally, are as different as can be.  One is Scorch Supernova (voiced by Brendan Fraser), the planet's resident superhero who goes on a lot of exciting adventures, and saves other worlds in peril.  The other brother is Gary (Rob Corddry), who is a family man, and is not very fond of adventures, preferring to help his brother out from the safety of mission control.  The action kicks in when Scorch is forced to answer a distress call on the "dark planet".  It is called this, because no alien who has ever visited the planet has ever returned.  This planet is better known as Earth.  Scorch heads for our world, only to discover that the distress call was actually a trick engineered by the evil human, General Shanker (William Shatner), who is kidnapping aliens and sending them to Area 51 to fulfill his own purposes.

When Gary learns of his brother's capture, he has to go against his own nature, and fly off to Earth in order to rescue him.  It does not take long for Gary to get captured by Shanker also, where he finds out that the villain has been kidnapping aliens for decades in order to steal their advanced technology, and then selling it to Earth corporations.  According to this movie, things like smartphones, mp3 players, and even computer animated movies are all alien technologies that have been stolen over the years.  It's a clever little bit of satire, and it's a shame that the movie doesn't follow further with this idea after it introduces it.  It's eventually revealed that Shanker has even more diabolical plans in store, as he is forcing the aliens in captivity to create a massive super weapon that can destroy entire worlds.

Escape from Planet Earth is strictly for kids, except for a handful of clever moments that seem to have been tossed in there to keep accompanying adults from getting too bored.  These include a short 1950s-style film that Shanker shows to recently captured aliens to introduce them to Earthlings, and a different short film that Gary watches at one point which chronicles the history of intelligent life on Earth.  Very young kids under 10 will get the most out of this.  It's energetic, and the jokes aimed at them fly pretty fast.  And while it isn't the best looking animated feature out there, it does have a very nice and colorful look to it.  There's simply nothing all that special about it.  Despite the efforts of the large and spirited voice cast (which also includes the likes of Ricky Gervais, Jessica Alba and Jane Lynch), the movie delivers very few dialogue-driven laughs.  But don't worry.  There's enough toilet and fart humor to keeps the kids rolling in their seats.

 

Since the movie is being released in the middle of winter, and it's the only family-friendly option out there right now, I'm sure it will carve out a small niche in the box office before going to DVD where it belongs.  Beyond that, there's very little to say about it.  It's kind of uninspired and not that memorable, but it will entertain the kids for about 90 minutes.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!    

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