The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle
Fractured Fairy Tale
There are any number of cameos in the new Rocky and Bullwinkle movie, all but the ones that I really wanted to see. Despite the very welcome presence of David Alan Grier, Jonathan Winters, Janene Garofolo, and a couple of others that I won’t mention lest I spoil the surprise, there is no reference whatsoever to Mr. Peabody and his boy, Sherman, time travelers extraordinaire. (For that matter, there isn’t any reference to any of the other characters in the Jay Ward canon, and Bullwinkle doesn’t even try to pull a rabbit out of his hat.)
Mr. Peabody and Sherman would really have fit in to the spirit of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, whose main characters are all refugees from the Way-Back Machine. The start of the movie has some of the best gags, detailing the lives of Rocket J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle Moose in Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, since the 1964 cancellation of the old Rocky and Bullwinkle show. It’s a bit reminiscent of a classic Saturday Night Live routine with Ed Asner going in to save Mary Tyler Moore from a life of reruns (”I like my life in reruns, Mr. Grant!”), but things are grim in Frostbite Falls as the residual checks get smaller and the forest is cut down. Bullwinkle is reduced to gags that weren’t funny in the Sixties (or the Seventies, or the Eighties) and Rocky is so dispirited he can’t even fly.
Fortunately for our heroes, kind fate intervenes (it does a lot of that) and Boris Badenoff and Natasha Fatale and Fearless Leader exit post-Soviet Pottsylvania to take on a new plan to conquer the world. They’re brought forth from the cartoon world into the world of today by Janene Garofalo, who confirms the worst fears of would-be screenwriters as a drone whose responsibility is to feed screenplays into the shredder. (”Too intelligent,” she remarks, as she feeds yet another labor of love into the industrial-strength maw of the machine.) Boris, Natasha and Fearless Leader emerge from the television as Jason Alexander, Rene Russo, and Robert DeNiro, and immediately start to hatch their plan. They start “RBTV”, Really Bad TV, which is designed to mesmerize the viewing public into a state of complete catatonia. (Predictably, this starts a rash of jokes at TV’s expense, but not so many as you might think.)
At this point, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle takes its greatest risk, and it pays off dramatically well. From almost out of nowhere, the movie taps the heretofore unknown Piper Perabo to play FBI agent Karen Sympathy (say it out loud), who’s responsible for luring Rocky and Bullwinkle out of rerun hell and marshalling them against the forces of evil and rottenness. Perabo makes a huge, tremendous splash in her first starring role, rivaling Matthew McConaughey in A Time To Kill, almost. She’s a sweet-faced cutie, a young Meg Ryan, almost, and she’s going to be turning heads and breaking hearts for the rest of the decade, you just watch. Here, she’s got to maintain a tough-guy FBI agent persona and check the wild excesses of Rocky and Bullwinkle (who constantly chide her for telling fibs and stealing cars).
It helps that Perabo is so lively and sparkly and.. er… well… animated, enough so that she can hold her own on the same screen with the Moose and the Squirrel. (Note: Telling the ticket person at the movies that you want “One for Moose and Squirrel” will not get you a laugh, although it seems like it would.) She has the same thankless task that Bob Hoskins had in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and she pulls it off with more dash. Unfortunately, she falls victim to a transparent Boris and Natasha plot early on, and the minute she’s removed from the proceedings is the minute that the movie goes completely off the rails. (Somehow, it manages to involve both Norman Lloyd from St. Elsewhere with Keenan and Kel from Nickelodeon in the same scene, presumably in the name of cultural and intergenerational diversity.)
However, the proceedings are buoyed considerably by the trademark postmodern sensibility that made the original Rocky & Bullwinkle show so fabulous in the first place. (The Simpsons, among others, owes a huge debt to Rocky & Bullwinkle, enough so that Homer J. Simpson was named after Jay Ward, and Simpsons fans should be first in line here.) Kenneth Lonergan (who penned the witty Analyze This screenplay) does things the way that Jay Ward would have wanted, with heaps and heaps of good-natured social satire (it’s a treat, for once, to hear a cell phone go off in a movie for once and have it belong to a character and not an audience member) combined with slapstick and goofy, groan-inducing puns.
The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle is like a hammock; comfortable, just right for summer, but it sags badly in the middle. Fortunately, the laughs pick up towards the end - helped by the funniest product placement scene since Jackie Chan spilled all those Pepsi cans in Mr. Nice Guy — as the movie comes to its zany conclusion. It should keep the little ones happy while providing a cool and refreshing jolt of grown-up humor for the adults in the audience. It’s not quite a comic masterpiece, but I don’t expect to see a better, sharper comedy this summer.
However, there are two major disappointments in the movie, and I’m dealing with them last. As I said, this is a movie where cameos predominate. It works out that the two potentially juiciest roles in the movie — Alexander’s and Russo’s — are little more than extended cameos themselves. There just isn’t enough for Natasha and Boris to do in this movie, which is just too bad. Russo is more fabulous as Natasha than you possibly might have thought. (As it turns out, Natasha wants nothing more than to be a Stay-At-Home Mom, which tells you something you might not want to know.) Alexander looks the part of Boris, but he seems like he’s got a bad cold or something, and just doesn’t have the edge you need to be truly rotten. In contrast, DeNiro’s part works best as an extended cameo, and he looks like he’s having a lot of fun if nothing else.
The second disappointment is the one that no one can do anything about. Jay Ward is gone, so is the voice of Bullwinkle, Bill Scott, and the Narrator, William Cannon. (June Foray is still around, thank goodness, and voices Rocket J. Squirrel, with Keith Scott taking over as Bullwinkle and the Narrator.) Really, all that The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle had to do is remind us of the greatness of the Jay Ward legend to be a worthwhile effort. It does that, and more besides. (Would it have been so hard, though, to give a little love to Sherman and Peabody? )