Movie Box Review

Let's put off talking about ZOOKEEPER--it's terrible, for those with no time to spare--by mentioning the trailer for Adam Sandler's upcoming Jack & Jill that's attached to it (both movies are produced by Sandler's production company Happy Madison and released by Sony).  While it's naturally unfair to judge a picture that won't be opening until November based on 2 minutes of footage, the trailer was created for the express purpose of generating audience enthusiasm, so it's not completely out of place to say that Jack & Jill, in which Sandler plays twins--one of them female--and thus shares the screen with himself in drag, looks like one of the worst movies ever made.  Actually, it's more specific than that:  Jack & Jill resembles nothing so much as one of the "Sandler" parodies that dotted Judd Apatow's Funny People; it even has in-joke celebrity cameos by Katie Holmes and Al Pacino.  Watching that trailer is the Razzie equivalent of seeing the previews for a movie like The King's Speech:  even as it's playing, you think How is this movie not winning awards?

But I digress.   And I'll continue to do so by noting the marketing campaign for Zookeeper, which has itself been very curious.  The movie is basically A Night At the Museum meets Hitch:  the titular zoo employee (Kevin James) discovers that when no one is looking, the animals in his care become an all-star cast of celebrity voices, and they band together to help improve his inept dating life.  You'd expect a picture like this to be sold to kids and their mothers, but as anyone who watches sports on TV (or goes to websites like espn.com) knows, Sony has been massively selling it to guys, with ads blanketing the NBA playoffs and other broadcasts.  Was James' Paul Blart a magnet for male audiences?  Is it the Sandler connection?  No one will question the strategy if the movie does a big number this weekend (Mitch Metcalf's prediction is $24M), but it's an interesting approach.

OK, fine:  time to talk about the movie.  Zookeeper is directed by Frank Coraci, one of Happy Madison's 2 house directors (Dennis Dugan, who handled Jack & Jill, is the other).  His pictures for the label include The Wedding Singer, The Waterboy and Click, all of them hits (Wedding Singer was even pretty good) but none exactly a showcase for the Auteur Theory.  It's written by a conglomerate of screenwriters:  James, Nick Bakay, Rock Reuben, Jay Scherick and David Ronn, who between them couldn't come up with better than a collection of witless animal gags and cliched rom-com storylines (James is pathetically in love with WASPy Leslie Bibb and doesn't even notice the adorable Rosario Dawson, as a zoo vet, under his nose).

Coraci doesn't seem capable of composing an interesting shot, but he also doesn't seem to care.  He's there to make sure the CG and animatronic animals work, which they mostly do, and to let James milk his lovable schlemiel persona.  Most of the animals (Cher, Jon Favreau, Maya Rudolph, Jim Breuer, Don Rickles and Judd Apatow himself) are there for quips only, the exceptions being Sylvester Stallone, wry as the local lion; Sandler, who contributes his high-pitched Old Jewish Man voice as a monkey; and especially Nick Nolte, as a gorilla who becomes James' sidekick and has a storyline that comes to include one of the most blatant product placements in film history and unfortunately also some jarring physical mistreatment of the animals (parents, take note).

There's little charm and less laughter in all this.  James showed real skill in Hitch and a fumbling Everyman quality in Paul Blart, but Happy Madison isn't a place for moderation, so his character quickly becomes strained and overly silly here (when he takes Dawson to his brother's wedding to make Bibb jealous, it's not long before he's splitting his pants, knocking over an ice sculpture and doing a gorilla imitation).  Dawson and Bibb have different extremes of thankless roles, although there's the occasional moment between James and Dawson that suggests they could have had romantic chemistry in a movie with a half-decent script.  The other humans are barely present, and the plotting is awful and twelfth-hand:  yes, James has to chase down the love of his life on her way to the airport.

Parents who are tempted to bring their kids to Zookeeper should also be aware that there are long stretches when those cute talking animals are off screen, and the movie is a relatively straight (and not very good) romantic comedy.  Sports fans:  you're on your own, but ESPN Classic must be airing some 10-year old college football bowl game that'd be more fun to watch.  Say this for Zookeeper, though--it's not Jack & Jill.

(ZOOKEEPER - Sony/MGM - PG - 103 minutes - Director:  Frank Coraci - Script:  Nick Bakay, Kevin James, Rock Reuben, Jay Scherick, David Ronn - Cast:  Kevin James, Rosario Dawson, Leslie Bibb, Donnie Wahlberg, Nick Nolte, Sylvester Stallone, Adam Sandler, Cher, Jon Favreau, Judd Apatow - Wide Release)

Remember the Sideways universe in the last season of Lost?  (I feel your pain; bear with me.)  In particular, remember the storyline where Sawyer and Miles were tough LA detectives, living out their version of a 1970s cop show?  Well, for Battlestar Galactica fans, there was almost a network TV series this year where Lee Adama and Gaius Baltar would have been partnered as homicide cops--and not only that, Six was another detective in the precinct, and Joseph Adama from Caprica was on the force too. 

It wasn't to be, because the pilot for 17TH PRECINCT, produced by Sony Television--and not coincidentally written by Ron Moore, the auteur behind BSG--probably didn't come close to getting onto NBC's schedule.  But there they all were:  Jamie Bamber, James Callis, Tricia Helfer and Esai Morales, together again.  And in case there was any doubt this was an A-list pilot, they were joined by Stockard Channing and Eamonn Walker (from Oz). 

17th Precinct must have looked great on paper, provided by Moore with one of his dense mythologies.  Set in Excelsior, California (a slightly twisted version of San Francisco), it posits a world where magic is everyday, and science doesn't exist.  There are still cars, lights, and other mechanized objects, but they're powered by plants; the equivalent to the internet is the "stream," a band of light that, when touched, supplies information and even prints out documents.  The police are sorcerers, able to manipulate blood spatter to reconstruct a crime, and bring victims briefly back from the dead to get an account of the crime; they shoot spells instead of weapons.  Prophecies affect the stock market, and judges can sentence criminals to instant aging or dislocated bones.  In the closing minutes of the pilot, we learn that the villains of the series would have been the "Stoics," who believe in science and have invented guns.  (Had the show developed, this might have been similar to the philosophical underpinnings of the human vs. Cylon conflict in BSG.)

The idea must have been to create a Harry Potter-like universe without Muggles, one that resembles our own but where magic is taken for granted and technology is mysterious and frightening, all in the context of a procedural cop show.  Unfortunately, the pilot just doesn't work:  the expository dialogue is clumsy and the banter between the characters is worse.  Even though the cast is obviously very fine, none of them have much to play (Morales' cop seems to have switched genders, for unspecified reasons), and some of them, like Channing, seem downright uncomfortable with the mix of cop and fantasy jargon; watching Bamber and Callis, you'd never imagine these two actors had spent years playing intense, multifaceted scenes opposite one another.  The explanation of the pilot's crime is overcomplicated and unconvincing.   There's one sequence that offers a hint of what might have been:  a creepy action sequence set in a house that's been cast with a spell of absolute silence.  But the rest just fails.