Free Birds

2013 has not exactly been a banner year for animated films.  Sure, we've had a couple of good ones, like Despicable Me 2, Monsters University and Epic.  Still, none of those could certainly be called classics.  Most of the other entries in the animated family genre this year could be labeled as average, derivative, or worse.  Those very same labels could be applied to Free Birds.

Remember Chicken Run, the clever and witty animated film from 2000 about the chickens trying to escape from the farmer before they became the main course for his supper?  Well, consider Free Birds an uninspired take on the same idea, only with turkeys as the stars.  To differentiate the film, director Jimmy Hayward (who did the much better Horton Hears a Who a couple years ago) and co-writer Scott Mosier (best known for his work on Kevin Smith films) throw in elements of time travel, a top secret U.S. government project, a fight for survival, and even former President Bill Clinton (I kid you not).  The end result is an overly stuffed animated movie that tries to tackle too much, while not really succeeding at any one element.  The movie's not as sharp or as funny as it needs to be to work, the puns and wordplay between the talking turkeys is lame, and the animation, while colorful, is not lively enough to hold our attention. 

And yet, things in the film start out cute and promising as we're introduced to our main character, Reggie (voice by Owen Wilson), a rare survivalist turkey who has figured out why the farmer is fattening them all up with corn, and what he plans to do with them.  He tries to warn his bird brothers, but he quickly comes to the conclusion that "turkeys are dumb" when they won't listen to him, and go on believing that the farmer is their best friend.  With Thanksgiving quickly approaching, Reggie thinks he's done for when he is plucked out of the crowd by human hands.  Turns out those human hands belong to the President (voiced by director Hayward, doing a Clinton impersonation), who has chosen Reggie to be this year's "pardoned turkey".  Reggie is whisked off to Camp David, where he becomes the playmate of the President's hyper-active young daughter (who is also apparently a narcoleptic, given how she falls asleep at a drop of a hat), and begins living the good life as he discovers the joys of delivery pizza, Mexican soap operas on TV, and fuzzy slippers.

This introduction gives us some hope that Free Birds might work, but then things start to fall apart when we're introduced to our other main turkey character.  That would be Jake (Woody Harrelson), a large and possibly insane bird who believes that he is on a mission from "the Great Turkey" (a spiritual bird who he claims appeared before him and spoke to him) to go back in time and stop turkeys from becoming the main course at the first Thanksgiving.  Supposedly, the Great Turkey also told Jake that he needs to take Reggie along with him on his mission, so he abducts Reggie from Camp David, and leads him to a secret underground bunker where the President and the military is supposedly holding a top secret time traveling device.  Why does the President happen to have a time machine, and what does he plan to do with it?  The movie oddly never explains, so I guess we're just supposed to go with it.  Oh, and the time machine is also named S.T.E.V.E., and it has the voice of George Takei.  Just go with that, too.

So, Reggie and Jake travel back in time to a few days before the first Thanksgiving, where they find that the colonists are starving, and the gun-crazy Myles Standish (Colm Meaney) is on a personal mission to hunt down as many turkeys as possible for the feast they plan to hold.  Our heroes learn that the turkeys in this time period are already beginning to stage a rebellion against the hungry humans.  The turkey resistance is led by the noble Chief Broadbeak (Keith David), and his strong-willed daughter Jenny (Amy Poehler), who becomes a love interest for Reggie.  The time-traveling duo join up with the resistance, where they concoct a plan to destroy all of the humans' weapons and traps, so that they can't hunt turkeys anymore, as well as rescue all of their brothers who have already been captured.  It's about this point that the movie's plot becomes a bit too overstuffed and convoluted for its own good.  It's also the point where Free Birds loses any charm it may have had in its opening moments, and becomes an unfunny, loud, and tedious adventure story about survival.

Everything about this movie feels stagnant and underwritten.  The time travel element is confusing instead of being fun, the romance that blossoms between Reggie and Jenny is not very interesting, and the whole thing about the turkeys fighting for survival turns out to be a sloppy metaphor for the treatment the Native Americans got from the new settlers.  Worst of all, the script's just not that funny.  It tries to throw in a few jokes that will fly over the heads of the kids in the audience (including a brief, unneeded reference to the fact that the President may be having an affair), but most of them fall flat.  I doubt kids will even find much to get excited about here, other than the bright and colorful animation.  I hope I'm wrong.  I want kids to have a good time when they go to movies like this.  But I also think they deserve better than what they're given here.

With Free Birds, there's just one question you have to ask - Just because the movie is about turkeys, why does the movie itself have to be a turkey, also?

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

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