Cloudy with a Chance of Cliché!

Rating: 2/10 (29 April 2014)

I grew up reading the simple picture book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. It simply about a grandpa telling the kids a bedtime story about a town whose weather always consists of meals. For example, if it was windy hamburgers would blow in, it would snow ice cream, rain hot dogs or orange juice, and so on! However it eventually grew dangerous for the town to stay in, so everyone had to evacuate the town. I would read this book while eating alone, and the story never got old!
When I saw the trailer for the upcoming movie I was very excited! I was aware that it would be about the town itself and an inventor and I thought, "What could go wrong?" After seeing it, I began to want a refund near the beginning of the third act.
What should I start with about what's wrong? Let's start with everything I found painfully predictable: 1) Dead mother 2) Grieving father who's not thrilled with his nerdy kid. 3) The reporter is a nerd too. Oh it's a match made in Heaven! 4) All nerds get tossed aside, even on news cameras. 5) Invention goes wrong. 6) Added villains (or at least one I want to use as a punchbag) 7) Nerdy inventor saves the town. 8) Father's heartfelt speech at the end of the movie about how proud mother would be if she could see this. 9) Throughout the entire movie, the inventor must prove himself worthy to his father.
I don't have much a problem with the last cliché, but the story must be clever; which this flick wasn't! I also mind that the story was made into an "America is Fat" message. Please don't tell me that after seeing this movie you couldn't see that message written in bold capital words with examples like the extremely creepy mayor, especially with his theme, "the bigger the better." That wasn't the theme of the book! The weather always existed, there was no machine to make it happen or enlarge the food sizes, nor was there an overeating mayor, and worst of all the food wasn't alive at the end! Oh I could barf at that! It's at the scene when the inventor and his girlfriend go to shut down the machine, but as they get closer, the food fights back! I'm not kidding. As soon as I saw that I said to myself, "Okay, game over! I hate this movie!"
I often think that Hollywood has a tendency to take simple beloved children's books and turn them into forced morals, which I hate! Some adaptations of children's books are okay, but when they're done in a way to shove in morals we've heard so much then enough's enough! I don't mind the idea of the weather being created through a machine (though I still wonder what would happen if it really rained) but this film just spat in the book's face, and it becomes even more painfully obvious in the sequel!