An unimaginative bore

Rating: 3/10 (19 May 2005)

It is strange to see a film so lacking in imagination. Two hours and a half with, apart from some obvious and puerile slapstick, no humour or irony is a bit wearing. Yankland set in the future with some chaps with funny hats on seems a pretty feeble thing to imagine too.
All the required plot details (to fit in with the sequels already shown) are ploddingly filled in, with no flair, surprise or twists. Characters are all cardboard cut-outs with good and evil sketched out as immiscible options taken up with for arbitrary reasons just like deciding what sports team to 'support'.
The physics is mainly nonsense, with space ships making noises in space, needing wings to manoeuvre and having a slipstream so things attached to the surface can be blown off.
The irritating green toad-like creature that obviously imagines that speaking ingrammatically makes prosaic truisms appear profound is on stage far, far too long. It also exhibits peculiar traits like walking with a limp and needing a stick at times, but, at other times, leaping about like a flea.
The visual effects are at much the same level as the other films in the series - worse in places where they've tried to make large panoramic views interesting but fail giving a mushy appearance to it all. It won't give much away to say that I quite enjoyed the scene where huge ash trays were used as missiles - though it was irritating to know that the green toad wasn't going to be crushed by one.
The Babylonian imagery of the funeral was well done.
It would be much improved, and cut down to two hours, by cutting out the slushy bits and those where characters ponder frowningly for ages whilst deciding which of two straightforward options to choose - one gets the impression that the collective sum of the IQs of the characters can't be much more than 100.
What a waste of celluloid. It wasn't even truly and grimly bad like 'Troy' or 'Titanic'.
I look forward to the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy