Realing Reaching....

Rating: 3/10 (18 July 2010)

Ratatouille is a film starring a inexperienced cook and a rat who knows how to cook.
The problem with the film is that it is TOO far fetched. We are introduced early on to Remy (the rat) and learn that he has a far stronger sense of smell than other rats, so much that he can smell rat poison and save his Dad. Effective rat poison is odorless, so this is sort of a plothole but whatever. Remy and the nest get washed away into Paris and the main story begins.
Most of the movie is centered around a restaurant, where a young inexperienced chef gets a job. He screws up a sauce somehow, and Remy saves the day by adding a bunch of ingredients. Here's a major problem I have... how did the rat just... LEARN to cook a complicated soup? I mean, he can smell ingredients, but where does he learn to cook them and what flavors work well together? The next part is where the film just launched a rocket filled with believability right off the planet. Since the rat can't work in a kitchen (obvious reasons) he sits on top of the chefs head and pulls hair to command him like a puppet because of some involuntary reflex. Are you serious? Just.... no.... Since the rat can understand English (huh? - would like to know how he developed it), why didn't they just rig some microphone thing so the rat could just sit on top of his head and talk to him? Frankly it would've been a more believable and interesting movie if they had gone into the background of how the rat learned to talk English (using subtitles and squeaks for the rest of the rats), and developed a tool to be able to speak to the human, and developed the relationship in that direction.
Regardless, eventually the human comes clean, the rat essentially works as a head chef in the new restaurant they open. Queue a little love fling with another chef and some drama with a couple competing chefs and that's the film.
I can only suspend my belief for so long before even my imagination is like, "Whoa.... hold on guys."