Movie Review: Furry Vengeance (2010)

The premise behind 2010’s Furry Vengeance — a live-action cartoon featuring woodland mammals — is tolerable. However, the film is rendered insufferable due to its soulless, mean-spirited, moronic script, the repetitive, obnoxiously unfunny slapstick comedy, and the ill-conceived attempts to inject this cinematic stool sample with an environmental message. It is a film with no redeeming qualities at all — it’s the opposite of art, the opposite of entertainment, and the opposite of funny. It’s not so bad it’s good, but so bad that it’ll make you lament how far Hollywood — and mankind in general — has fallen. If you reach the end of Furry Vengeance without being reduced to a depressed soul who has lost the will to live, it’s impossible for you to be a sentient being.

Dan Sanders (Fraser) is a dithering land developer who has moved to the middle of nowhere with his science teacher wife (Shields) and Jonas Brother clone son (Prokop). Trying to suck up to his boss Neal Lyman (Jeong), Dan reluctantly accepts the job of assuming control of a massive community expansion project which necessitates the removal of all trees and wildlife from the area. Due to the demands of the plot, the animals become clued into Dan’s plans. Determined to thwart his efforts, the animals declare war on Dan; tormenting and attacking him in secret, leaving his colleagues and family to assume he has lost his mind. Predictably, Dan has an epiphany towards the end of the film, as he realizes that there’s something wrong with demolishing a wildlife preserve and executing a bunch of animals. And the catalyst for Dan’s epiphany is the sight of his raccoon nemesis with its family. Who knew raccoons were so monogamous and loving? This leads to a heartfelt apology to his family, an admonition of his boss, and a contrived career change.

Without an ounce of hyperbole, it can be stated that Furry Vengeance is the most loathsome and moronic family film to hit cinemas in years. For goodness sake, the film consciously supports and encourages terrorism! It’s apparently acceptable for the animals to murder if it means saving their habitat. In the film’s opening moments, a land developer is sent careening off a cliff by the animals. Minutes later, a viewer gets treated to a disturbing photograph of a human corpse who has been bitten by a poisonous snake. Are you having a good time yet?! The animals are never cute or cuddly in this fucking awful movie, but instead outright monsters that are just as bad, if not worse, as the humans. Speaking of the humans, Dan is an absolute stiff and his wife is unsupportive and sassy. Dan’s son, meanwhile, is an effeminate bitch of the highest order — he alters his perceptions to appease a girl he likes, and he complains like a 17-year-old slut unable to find her hair extensions. And Neal Lyman is a super-villain who flies around in a corporate jet with nothing but bad intentions. Everyone in this film is insufferable.

Beyond the fact that Furry Vengeance is populated with unredeemable bastards, the film fails as a comedy as well. In order to generate “comedy”, Dan is repeatedly bashed in the nutsack, and a raccoon takes a piss on his face. At one stage, a flock of birds machine-gun the forest demolishing antagonists with runny, white globs of poo. This is all joyless, humorless slapstick, and every gag is repeated a couple of times just in case you missed it the first time around. This type of material constitutes a solid 80 minutes of the 90-minute runtime — the remaining 10 minutes or so are dedicated to arguments between Dan and his family, a soulless romance between Dan’s son and a classmate, and an end credits montage wherein the cast frolics and sings along to a cover version of Cypress Hill’s pop anthem Insane in the Brain. Meanwhile, the blend of CGI and live-action is appalling. At times the digital manipulation is decent, but this all breaks down during the scenes where there are a lot of animals — hardly anything looks real at all. One must feel sorry for Brendan Fraser, too, who is awkward and hopelessly out of shape with a pot belly. The only thing which can be said in the film’s favor is that the director at least tried to make this bullshit palatable.

One supposes that the intended moral of this empty, miserable, heartless cinematic abortion is the importance of forest and wildlife conservation. This notion is overshadowed, however, by the wrong-headed message that physical force and life-threatening violence is the answer for getting what you want. Furry Vengeance is also nothing more than another in the long line of family films which mistake stupidity for storytelling and noise for excitement. Children deserve far better than this dreadful movie, and they’re far too smart for it. Furry Vengeance is an insult to anyone with a functioning brain. About midway through the movie, Dan’s wife remarks “I just don’t think this can get any worse.” She was wrong.