Big Thumbs Down

Rating: Null/10 (13 October 2004)

When I watched the trailers of this movie, I sensed that this movie would not turn out to be a winner. Against all my judgment, I went to watch this movie (partly because of my 4-year old girl who is in love with ocean creatures), hoping that I was wrong. Sadly, I was proved right. This movie was a disaster -- I've never been more bored in watching a computer-animated film. This movie has a number of problems including:
(1) The story/plot (if there was any) was incredibly shallow and flat. It was the old, million-times-tried-and-failed story of "realizing true love is most precious thing." I am not saying this is a bad theme. That is a very important piece of philosophy that any human being should live by. But the story presented by this movie was so stereo-typed and monotonous that it was almost insulting. Anyone with an average movie-intelligence will figure out how the story will unfold within 3 minutes of the movie.
(2) The character development was very poor. Sure, Dreamworks managed to cast all star voices, but we know that it is usually a source of problem. Good acting is not to be yourself in the movie, but to create a credible character. All the characters in the movie are the actors themselves. This movie quickly degrades itself into a big excuse of showing off multiple stars. I like most of the stars in this movie. An amazing thing is that this movie managed to bring out the worst of those stars. For example, DeNiro acted (or sounded) exactly like the character in "Analyze this." I am sure most of you will agree that it was not the best of DeNiro. Will Smith was incredibly annoying, and portrayed a very stereotyped character. He was ten times more annoying than the donkey in Shrek -- you know it is not an easy task to achieve. Jack Black, a very good actor, was wasted as well. What a shame.
(3) The animation was good although you should not expect any Pixar quality here. It won't bother you. However, the character designs were far worse than what you saw in Nemo -- in fact, I feel almost unfair to compare this movie to Nemo because they are in a totally different league especially as the character design goes. The fish characters looked ridiculous (sharks were better) and even scary. They looked like goldfish that is genetically enhanced with human genes (fish with human face, that is), and were ugly say the least. My daughter slept with Nemo for months after she watched it, but I do not think she will ask me to buy her the Will Smith fish.
(4) I liked Shrek for the smart jokes although Shrek 2 overdid it a little bit. Jokes should exist in a movie to make the story better. But this film exists to make jokes. Uninteresting and uninspired jokes at that too. I laughed about twice (one being the mole on DeNiro shark and the other I don't remember, maybe I laughed only once).
All in all, the highest rating I can give this movie is 4/10. Skip this movie unless your child is bugging you to death. If you can persuade them, please do so. The chances are your child may not like it either.