Over the past two years Brendan Fraser has starred in five family films, some clearly better than others. This one, sadly, may be the worst.
In “Furry Vengeance” Fraser plays Dan, a husband and father who works for what’s supposed to be an eco-friendly land development company. Dan moves his family to a small town in the wilderness so he can be in charge of a construction project. However, he soon finds out that the project is bigger than he thought and that the entire forest will be destroyed to make room for hundreds of homes and a shopping mall.
When the animals that live in the forest find out what’s happen they begin to attack Dan in many different ways, many of them involving his groin. Dan’s wife (who’s played by Brooke Shields) and his son think he’s going crazy, because, for some reason, no one else can see the animal attacks.
But Dan realizes that the animals are simply trying to protect their own families and so when he learns that his company is going to kill all the animals, he has to try to save them.
The plot of “Furry Vengeance” is very simply and we’ve seen it before. This is sort of a live-action version of 2006’s “Over The Hedge”, except that movie was funny.
There’s way too much slapstick, most of it involving scenes with animals pooping or peeing on the Fraser character, or Fraser dealing with human poop and pee when he gets attacked by a bear inside a Port-A-Potty. And, as I mentioned before, he gets hit in his private parts a lot, too. And sprayed in the face by skunks, over and over. I’m getting pretty tired of movies that think this stuff is funny.
Many of the scenes in “Furry Vengeance” are uncomfortable to watch, including seeing Fraser in a pink sweat suit with his gut hanging out.
This may be a good time to explain why I love my job, but sometimes don’t like my job: I don’t like my job when I have to sit through terrible movies like this one. I love my job because I get to tell people to save their hard-earned money and don’t bother buy this movie on DVD or PPV.
The performances in “Furry Vengeance” are terrible, I think I laughed twice the entire movie and the special effects involving the animals are very poorly done.
One of the only things I liked was seeing Wallace Shawn, who plays a therapist. If I ever needed a therapist it would be cool to have one who does the voice of “Rex” in the “Toy Story” movies.
“Furry Vengeance” is rated PG for mild language, a brief smoking scene and the comedy violence. It’s appropriate for kids 7 and up, but that doesn’t mean they, or anyone else, should watch it.
On The Official Kid Critic Report Card, “Furry Vengeance” gets a D.
I read on-line a while back that Dick Van Dyke was originally going to be in this film. Thank goodness for his sake, and for his fans, that he isn’t.