Category 6: Days of Destruction (2004)

With the advances in computer software that allow even the cheapest effects houses to churn out scenes of incredible, if not totaling convincing, mass destruction the boom in made for TV disaster movies has really escalated over the years. Category 6: Day of Destruction is prime example of one of these and it tosses the viewers a roster of B list actors and has been veterans into pretty much paint-by-number scripts in cacophony of CGI destruction, but the thing is if it is viewed in the right light and with proper expectations these films can still be a lot of fun.
This film starts off with a God giving sin city the finger as Las Vegas is torn apart by tornadoes that completely caught the people at the Severe Weather Center off guard. Running the show at the SWS is Andy Goodman (Brian Dennehy) a weather man who praises his guts and instinct over doppler radar, and is legendary in the field (I had no weathermen had heroes). Upon seeing the way the weather is going lately he isn’t all that upset that he’s being put out to pasture. He is of course being replaced by a smarmy jerk who doesn’t think instinct and hunches have any place in weather forecasting. Meanwhile Mitch Benson (Dharma and Greg's Thomas Gibson) is trying to keep the lights on in Chicago at Greater Midwest Electric during a record breaking heat wave, but is a bit distracted as he is having an affair with Rebecca Kerns (Chandra West) a public relations head working for the evil energy company Lexer Corp (I’m assuming the name of the company is suppose to make us think of Smallville's Lex Corp) whose practices of cutting corners makes them especially vulnerable to hackers. Reporter Amy Harkin (Nancy McKeon Fact's of Life) tired of puff pieces her boss keeps sticking her with finds a whistleblower, but is it too late? Secretary of Energy Shirley Abbott (Dianne Wiest) declares that America is a first world super power with a third world energy network and if things aren’t upgraded soon it could lead to…wait for it…DISASTER! Rounding off the cast of characters is Amy’s brother who flies for the U.S. Air Force Weather Hunters and his pregnant wife, but the gem in this ensemble is Tornado Tommy (Randy Quaid) who is a storm chaser par excel lance, and who will get you closer to a twister than you’d really rather be.

A massive hurricane rips through the Gulf of Mexico destroying everything in its path which of course enrages Goodman because none of his people saw it coming...again, “And now people are dead! From now on if a dog farts in Duluth I want somebody in this office to know about it.” Then a huge lightning storm destroys the generators that keep Chicago lit so Lexer Corp steps in to save the day, but pushes their plants beyond safety regulations and ends up polluting the waters, but of course they claim it was an accident (psst It’s cause they’re evil).

Goodman and his cute young intern discuss concerns that the arctic front pushing down towards them fueled by the polar jet stream is going to collide with the storm coming up from the Gulf being fueled by the tropical jet stream, and guess where they are going to meet? Yep, down town Chicago. Amy’s whistleblower gives her the scoop on the vulnerability of the Lexer Corp power system but her boss won’t run the story because he’s afraid of fighting such a big company (he must later get a job at Fox News). So the whistleblower decides the best way to show people how easily the system can be wrecked is to hack into it himself and shut down the power to the city. Of course he does this just as the two major storms are about to converge on the city and with no television or phone systems operating the people can’t be warned. Needless to say things go from bad to worse. Mitch Benson’s wife and rebellious daughter (are there any other kind in these films?) are trapped in the bank with the daughter’s gun wielding boyfriend, Amy’s pregnant sister-in-law gets stuck in, you guessed it that hoary old chest rears it’s ugly head, an elevator. To paraphrase Elmer Fudd, “North winds blow, south wind blow. Typhoons, Hurricanes… Earthquakes! CLICHÉS!!!”
A band of tornadoes (F-6 in scale) race up Tornado Alley taking out St. Louis and its landmark arch heading to join up with the category 6 hurricane coming down from the north and when they meet it will be as Goodman states, “Nagasaki and Hiroshima times fifty.” Our band of characters have a lot to contend with as the whistleblower futilely attempts to undue the damage he caused, while Mitch and Amy team-up to rescue his wife and daughter and the trapped sister-in-law.
The storm roars over the city as triple twisters take Tommy Tornado up into their loving embrace (he goes laughing so we don't feel bad), the evil head of Lexer is taken out by his exploding escape helicopter, and the Air Force Storm Hunters form a daring plan to fly into the eye of the storm to rescue their loved ones.

Now the visuals this movie provides for these storms consist of three elements; stock footage, CGI effects, and scenes from The Big One: The Great Los Angeles Earthquake and in some cases they are very effective but in others they come off really, really cheesy. We certainly didn’t get anything like the cover art implies of an F-10 tornado ripping through the heart of Chicago while a massive storm surge sweeps across the city, in fact the mentioned storm surge is never shown.

I can only recommend this film to die hard disaster buffs, and tell everyone else to just move along as their really isn’t anything to see here that hasn’t been done better elsewhere, but still there is worse...Category 7: The End of the World leaps to mind.

Poseidon (2006) - Review

When it comes to remakes the danger of incurring the wrath of fans of the original is ever-present and in the case of Irwin Allen's The Poseidon Adventure, a beloved classic of the disaster genre, the danger was even greater, so director Wolfgang Petersen took the basic premise of "A ship hit by a rogue wave, is flipped over, and a group of survivors must climb their way up to freedom" and then populated it with his own characters to fill in the story's prerequisite group of survivors, but did these changes Petersen made still result in a good film?

It’s New Year's Eve and the immense luxury liner Poseidon cuts its way majestically through the waves. On board is Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas) a professional gambler, Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell) ex-mayor of New York City, as well as a former firefighter, his daughter Jennifer (Emmy Rossum), her boyfriend Christian (Mike Vogel), Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss) whose boyfriend recently dumped him and is suicidally depressed, there is cute stowaway Elena Gonzalez (Mía Maestro), single mom Maggie James (Jacinda Barrett) and her son Conor (Jimmy Bennett). After our introductions to these characters, and a fairly painless “meet cute” moment between the gambler and the single mom, we find ourselves in the grand ballroom as the New Year is rung in…and then disaster strikes!

 

Mother Nature has such great dramatic timing.

And face it folks this is the moment that gets you in theatre, a big rousing spectacle, and like Irwin Allen before him Petersen doesn’t waste time getting to the good stuff, in fact, we only have to wait 17 minutes before the carnage ensues. And we do get a lot of carnage and the production pulls out all the stops as we get some pretty spectacular stuff here, particularly in the area of stuntwork, sadly, while practical effects abound much of the effects used to depict the ship being hit by the rogue wave were liberally enhanced by CGI, which sometimes the effects look great while other times not so much and leaned a little towards the cheesy side.  All quibbling aside watching the Poseidon getting hit by the rogue wave, and all its occupants being tossed higgledy-piggledy, is damn impressive and once the ship settles upside down in the water we get the classic situation of the survivors taking stock of what happened and it's here where our movie gets underway...or underwater.

 

"I escaped from New York, I can escape from this."

Captain Bradford (Andre Braugher) wants everyone to stay where they are and wait for rescue, on the other hand, Ramsey wants to find his daughter who is one deck below (now above) at the disco, nor does Dylan have any intention of waiting around for rescue.  Upon hearing his plan the mom, her kid, the heartbroken Nelson, along with Ramsey decide to make their way up to the bottom of the ship. Surprisingly, there is no scene where Ramsey implores that the rest of the people join them on their trek through the bowels of the ship, the small group just decides to up and leave, and aside from a brief argument with the captain, they leave rather quietly. What follows is a torturous journey through deck after deck of death and destruction.

 

"Sorry, the kitchen is closed."

Dead bodies are constantly floating by to remind the viewer of how precarious the situation is, and while not too grisly it may not be appropriate for the kiddies. The only scene in the movie that I didn’t like was when Elena the stowaway goes into hysterics when told she must crawl through a small air duct, sure claustrophobia is a crippling affliction, but in disaster films, I’m sick of the screaming hysterical woman stereotype. Slap her, and if that doesn’t work leave her behind. Well, I won’t get into any more detail as to what happens to our intrepid cast of survivors, just to say that each hurdle they must pass will keep you on the edge of your seat.

 

“Come out to the coast. We'll get together. Have a few laughs."

Stray Observations:

• Wolfgang Petersen’s remake has a taught running time of 98 minutes, as opposed to the original’s 117 minutes, and I give Petersen credit for not bloating the length of the film beyond the needs of the story he was trying to tell.
• This could be considered part of a water trilogy for director Wolfgang Petersen sitting nicely alongside Das Boot and The Perfect Storm as good examples of why not to go to sea.
• The ship is crossing the North Atlantic, travelling from London to New York on New Year's Eve, but this means the water would be extremely cold and hypothermia should have killed off our cast of characters long before the end credits rolled.
• It’s never explained how the ship has working electricity after being capsized, the generators wouldn't have been able to maintain a fuel supply, not to mention generators were falling and the fuel was burning up and exploding.

 

“We will laugh when you unironically die.”

One of the strongest aspects of the film is its special effects, the scenes of the ship being overturned and flooded are visually stunning, and the level of detail in the destruction and chaos is impressive, and as mentioned, the use of practical effects and miniatures created a sense of realism that is rarely seen in disaster films. However, the film suffers from a lack of tension and suspense as we pretty much know who is going to live and who is going to die, with maybe one death being a little surprising, but when our band of survivors do make it to freedom I find it was well worth the trip as we do get a satisfying conclusion, which cannot be said of all disaster movies. That said, the film's biggest problem is its lack of character development as the ensemble cast, including Josh Lucas, Kurt Russell, and Richard Dreyfuss, is made up of one-dimensional characters who are difficult to care about. The script doesn't give the actors much to work with, and as a result, their performances feel flat and uninspired, making this a bit of a waste of a great talent pool.

 

"I was in Jaws, for crying out loud."

Overall, Poseidon is a visually impressive film with solid performances and while it fails to live up to the suspense and tension of the original film I'd say fans of the disaster genre will still find this one more than entertaining, and despite its flaws, the film does have some redeeming qualities. The action sequences are well-choreographed, and the film's pacing is brisk, keeping the audience engaged throughout. However, these strengths are not enough to make up for the film's overall shortcomings. While it has some entertaining moments, it lacks the emotional depth and character development necessary to make it a truly compelling film.

Next (2007)

Nicolas Cage’s latest film is Next and is about a Vegas magician who actually has supernatural abilities. Cage plays Chris Johnson, or Cadillac Frank as he goes by on stage, and he has the power to see the next two minutes of his personal future and thus he can change the outcome of certain specific events. He uses this ability for his magic act and to quietly rip-off casinos. Two events then pop up to interrupt this idyllic life; the first is a forewarning of Liz (Jessica Biel) who he sees in a premonition well beyond his standard two minutes, and the second is the FBI’s sudden interest in him helping them stop a nuclear detonation somewhere in California. Now one of these elements could lead to possible sex with Jessica Biel so it’s not hard to believe that Cage would blow off the whole saving millions of lives thing. In all fairness the movie tries to make his choice seem less assholish by telling us he and his abilities were treated very poorly when he was a child, and that he believes his two minute window into the future couldn’t possibly help national security (later we get a scene where the FBI straps him to a chair ala Clockwork Orange to help our sympathy along), but I for one don’t buy it. I’d like to think that if I were told that there was even the slightest chance I could save millions of lives that I’d feel obligated to at least try.

Now the movie has some great elements, primarily having to do with the use of his ability; seeing him looking into multiple futures to foil pursuers, win a fight, or to find the best pick-up line that could lead to sleeping with Jessica Biel. These moments are a lot of fun but the films use of the terrorist bomb threat badly offsets the story. The nuke itself is just a silly Maguffin as we are never told who the terrorists are or what their agenda is. The bad guy team is composed of French, German, and Asian members while the apparent architect of the attack is just a person on the phone that we neither see nor even hear. Were the makers of this film to afraid to pick a villain?

In the acting category Julianne Moore is that stand out victim here as she is asked to bark out some of the worst dialogue ever written as the head of the FBI team that is trying to track down Cage. It’s as if the makers of this film saw her performance in Hannibal and then asked her if she could crank up the suck a few notches. Cage himself is good and engaging, giving us the quirky performance we have all come to know and love, as for Miss Biel…well she gives it her best shot on making us believe she could fall in love with a guy she just met, and who is old enough to be her father.

*Spoilerish* I don’t think this is much of a spoiler but more of a warning. The movie never bothers to explain why Cage’s character’s two minute future seeing ability was expanded into the days when dealing with Biel’s. Is it destiny as the film kind of hints at or is it simply lazy writing? You be the judge. The ending itself left the audience in a stunned silence, and not a happy silence either more of a “What the hell?” kind of silence.
*End Spoiler*

When I exited the theater I had the distinct impression that I’d just watched a ninety minute television pilot that somehow got a theatrical release. The hero of Next could certainly make an interesting protagonist who week to week is seen solving crimes while fleeing the evil FBI agents that want to turn him into a guinea pig, but as a movie we are left with to many unanswered questions for it to work. I have not read the Philip K. Dick short story the film is based on, I can only assume he took what is a very intriguing premise and did something intelligent with it, unlike what the people responsible for this movie turned out.

So consider this review your own two minute forewarning and give this film a miss.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007)

For those of you who are fans of the Fantastic Four comic books you can begin your hate mail campaign to Tim Story now (well that is if you hadn’t already started after the first movie), and pray to what ever deity you believe in that he never gets another shot at a comic book movie. Now in all fairness it isn’t as bad as some other Marvel movie attempts, but if the best thing you can say about your film is that it is better than Elektra you are in deep trouble. At eighty-nine minutes the film is padded with sitcom moments and a returning villain that has no place in a story about the coming of bloody Galactus!

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer starts out with us seeing a planet being eaten by a large cloud (upon seeing The Transformers Movie this weekend I now know were Tim Story got this visual), but soon we are back on Earth where the arrival of the Silver Surfer is causing strange environmental anomalies. Reed would love to investigate them but he has promised Sue that he would keep his great intellect focused entirely on their upcoming nuptials. The military gets pissy, Doctor Doom shows up to “help” and Johnny is altered by the Surfer so that he can transfer powers with a simple touch. Wackiness ensues.

Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans once again get the best lines as Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm, and even Ioan Gruffudd was more Reed like this time around, but Jessica Alba was still as much an emotionless void in this outing as she was in the first film. Julian McMahon (who I'm told is a good actor) is so horribly, horribly miscast as Doctor Doom that every moment he is on screen it hurts my feelings. I really wish they had given Doug Jones the job voicing the Silver Surfer as well as the body work because I found Laurence Fishburne's very identifiable voice distracting at times. Andre Braugher, who I think is a damn fine actor, was given some of the worst lines as the nasty General Hager, and I doubt that any actor could have pulled off.

I'm sorry but if your Fantastic Four movies concludes with our heroes sitting on the sidelines while the Silver Surfer saves the day you need to go back to the drawing board and rethink your strategy. The Surfer's noble sacrifice (which you find out isn't even a sacrifice if you wait five minutes) seems so out of left field because I can't buy his reasoning, which is basically that Jessica Alba has shown him the true meaning of Christmas.

My biggest gripe about Tim Story’s version of the Fantastic Four is of course Doctor Doom, who is thee quintessential Marvel villain, and yet in two films he comes across as nothing more than a two-bit Snidely Whiplash clone. And as I mentioned the character of Doom is certainly not needed in story about the coming of The Devourer of Worlds! And I’m sorry but if Galactus doesn’t say, “I HUNGER” than it simply isn’t Galactus, and the fact he has no lines at all (being just a nebulous cloud with the personality of a weather front) is just plain criminal and another waste of a classic character.

Shame on you Mister Story.

Evan Almighty (2007

Can a $200 million dollar comedy hope to recoup its cost? My guess is that if it involves director Tom Shadyac the chances have moved from slim to none. Having watched Bruce Almighty for the first time just prior to seeing this “sequel” I had even less hopes of being entertained, and thus I went into the theatre with expectations so lowered you’d need a unobtaniumed drilling machine to find them. So I was pleasantly surprised to find myself not hating every moment of this film (note there are still plenty of moments to hate), but that is as positive of a note I can give a film that runs out just one too many clichés and tropes for it's own good. Steve Carell is the only reason to even think of sitting through this film as he is very likable (unlike Jim Carrey in the first film), and somehow maintains his dignity throughout this enterprise.

Evan Baxter (Steve Carell) has moved on from his career as Buffalo news anchor to the exciting world of politics as a freshman congressman. His wife (Lauren Graham) is supportive but his three kids are angered about moving to Washington and losing all their friends. Yes, five minutes into the film and cliché number one rears its ugly head, and is further piled on with the tired old trope of the dad who puts work before his family. If only someone would answer their prayers and make this family a close knit picture of Norman Rockwell proportions. Enter God (Morgan Freeman) who tells Evan that a flood is coming and that he must build an ark. At first Evan is skeptical but after God harasses him into submission (I must have missed that part in the original Noah story) he agrees to build the ark. This of course doesn’t sit well with the wife or his co-workers. We also have the shady congressman played by John Goodman who wants Evan to sign a bill that would allow development of park land, and he is even more displeased when Evan starts dressing like a hermit and leading animals around two by two.
This leads to one of the biggest leaps of faith the movie expects you to make as more and more animals arrive to help build the ark or just hang around making Evan’s life more complicated. If one can buy that God is “magically” making lions, tigers, and bears show up in a fashionable suburb outside of Washington they may find it harder to swallow the lack of repercussions. One newsman (played by old Daily Show friend Ed Helms) makes mention that with all these species what is being done about the feces? More to the point what are all these creatures eating? That is assuming God is doing his usual number and preventing them from eating each other. But the big problem I had was the complete lackadaisical reaction the world had to all these animals showing up at Evan’s home in the first place. Come on people! How can any character doubt that Evan is talking to God when he has elephants and giraffes showing up to follow him around? (Not to mention all the animal rights groups and agencies that would be all over him for having such a collection of dangerous and endangered species in his backyard) Add in the fact that he has a magically re-growing beard, and he shouldn’t have any difficulties proving Devine intervention.
One particular idiotic moment in the movie is when he first comes down to breakfast with his new miracle grow beard and his wife asks him, “When did you start growing a beard?” WTF??? She has to be one of the most clued out wives in the history of the world if she hadn’t noticed that the night before her husband was beardless and now somehow has one. That the whole “magic beard” bit is lifted right out of the Tim Allen’s The Santa Clause just makes it that much sadder.
Now I won’t get into the flood, as that leads to major spoiler issues, but if one remembers that God promised Noah he would never flood the world again you may have an inkling as to where the filmmakers are going with this, and plus it would be hard pressed for anybody to make a comedy that ended with the death of billions.

So that does sound like a movie most people should avoid like the plague, but I must admit I smiled and chuckled from time to time (when not being hit over the head with the film’s message) so I can’t condemn the movie completely. At a cost of $4.20 Steve Carell made it worth checking out for me (experiences may vary wildly), and it was leaps and bounds more enjoyable than Bruce Almighty. So if you are bored and want a harmless and silly film to take the kids to you could do worse than Evan Almighty.

Transformers (2007)

I’ve not seen a single episode of the Transformers cartoon, and having only just recently seen the animated Transformers: The Movie so my review of this incarnation will be quite free of comparisons. How Michael Bay has created a bastardized version of a generation’s childhood will be up to another reviewer. What I will say is that we do get another big, loud and fairly unintelligent film that one has come to expect from Michael Bay. That said I’ll have to admit that it does have it’s entertaining moments, and if your desire is to simply see giant robots kicking the crap out of each other in an urban setting you won’t be disappointed (though the shaky-cam frenetic photography does take some of the joy out of a couple of the action sequences).

The first forty minutes of the film, before the Autobots make them self known, I found myself really digging the story. We get a little opening narration from Optimus Prime (voiced by the original actor Peter Cullen) informing us how there was a war on their home world of Cybertron between the Autobots and the evil Decepticons over a powerful cosmic cube called the Allspark (a device that apparently can turn any machine into a Transformer). Their planet is destroyed and the Allspark ends up on good ole planet Earth where it lies dormant. Megatron, leader of the Decepticons, followed it to earth but ended up frozen in ice for his troubles. In 1850 his ice-covered body is found by Captain Archibald Witwicky, and it’s this Artic explorer who provides the films primary maguffin.
The films human hero, well one of them as this films got plenty, is Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBoef) who is the great grandson of the Captain Archibald Witwicky, and when he puts his great grandfather’s glasses on EBay things starting getting strange for our poor hapless teen-ager. The used car he buys turns out to be a robot, a cop car that chases after him turns out to be a robot, and the hottie he has a crush on turns out to be a robot…no just kidding, but that would have been more believable. It seems both the Autobots and the Decepticons want those glasses as they have the location of the Allspark imbedded in them. That’s all of the plot I’ll get into (actually that’s really all the plot Michael Bay gets into), but just know that wackiness does ensue. And that is when the film started to lose me.


What will determine your level of enjoyment will depend heavily on how you can handle Bay’s attempts at humor. From Bernie Mac as a slick used car salesman to an Autobot taking “a leak” on John Turturro we get plenty of scenes that are played strictly for laughs, and most definitely aimed at the younger audience members. Having not seen the cartoon series I can’t say how accurate the movie depicts their original characters, but what I came to conclude is that Michael Bay saw Small Soldiers and liked the goofy dynamic used in that film and so what we get are a lot of one-liners and slap-stick humor from these giant robots. This caused me to roll my eyes more than a few times, but I guess I’m not really the target audience here.
The other problem with this film is the lack of focus. It really should have been about Sam Witwicky and the Autobots, but we get a really useless side story about a computer language expert (Rachel Taylor) and her hacker friend (Anthony Andersen) who aside from a few expository lines of dialogue add nothing to the story. We also have a group of soldiers, who survived an early attack by the Decepticons, lead by standard hero sergeant (Josh Duhamel), and who are not even as fleshed out as your average G.I Joe characters. Also added to the pot (simmer until flavorless) is the Secretary of Defense (Jon Voight) giving a performance so wooden they most likely had to spray the set for termites, and a looney toon Sector Seven Agent (John Turturro) whose seemingly sole job is to be goofy and be piddled on by a robot.

What is truly sad is the amount of lifted material to be found in the 144 minute running time; aside from the aforementioned Small Soldiers Michael Bay has ripped off elements from Independence Day, Jurassic Park: Lost World, Men in Black and the Mighty Joe Young remake. And I’m sure there are others. That Steven Spielberg was one of the early names attached to this project is a bit distressing, and when he hired Michael Bay I thought maybe he’d slipped a gear or two, but the result is a true hybrid as you have your typical boy and his dog elements found in many Speilberg films, and they are tossed into the hyper-kinetic mixing bowl of Michael “King of the two second edit” Bay.

Like Live Free or Die Hard I can’t give the film a harsh thumbs down because I did have a lot of fun. The robot action was well handled and as expected the effects were amazing, and the early scenes with Shia LaBoef, his girlfriend, and his family were really quite good. I only wish they had toned down the jokes and tried to make a good ole fashioned sci-fi adventure film instead of an overblown “Family Film” because there really good have been a good movie here.

Underdog (2007)

Right off the top the movie makes a huge mistake by starting with clips from the original cartoon. Some one should have told the filmmakers that it’s not too good an idea to remind the few fans of the show that might be in the audience of what they’re not going to be seeing over the course of the next 84 minutes. Now from seeing the trailers I knew I was in for, but as Underdog was one of my childhood favorites I had too see just how bad they were going to muck it up. With director Fredrick Du Chau (Racing Stripes and Quest for Camelot) and the writer Adam Rifkin (Zoom) I certainly wasn’t expecting Batman Begins or even Ghost Rider, but even with lowered expectations this film still managed to surprise me on its level of lameness.

The movie starts off with the Mayor giving a speech about all the unsolved crimes in Capital City and points to a massive pile of boxes containing all the case files. A little police beagle smells something and barks, this cause everyone to assume there is a bomb in the box and to go into full on panic mode as people trample over each other to escape. Of course it’s revealed that the box in question contained nothing but a piece of meat, a gift from the Pork Association. In disgrace the poor beagle, with the other police dogs laughter in his ears, leaves the force. It’s while wandering the streets in depression that he is abducted and taken to the labs of Simon Bar Sinister (Peter Dinklage) where he and his sidekick Cad (Patrick Warburton) experiment on dogs for some strange plan to create super animals to replace normal police dogs. The cute beagle of course doesn’t want to be jabbed with a genetic cocktail and while trying to escape his pursuers he gets a whole rack of genetic chemicals (apparently DNA comes in liquid form) dumped over him and thus Underdog is born.
The beagle flees the lab and shortly there after runs into Dan Unger (Jim Belushi), or more accurately Dan runs over the dog. Dan happens to work as a security guard for the company that houses Simon Bar Sinister’s lab, now he was a hero cop before taking up security but he quit that job when his wife died so that he wouldn’t end up making his kid an orphan one day. Dan thinks maybe a dog will help his son get over all that dead mother stuff and brings him home. The beagle, for some inexplicable reason, keeps licking Dan’s shoes so he is given the name Shoeshine. This is of course referring to Underdog’s alter ego Shoeshine Boy from the cartoon.
Jack (Alex Neuberger) isn’t too keen on having a dog and is more than willing to let his dad take it to the pound, but once he finds out it can talk and has superpowers things change, and later after Shoeshine saves Molly (Taylor Momsen) from muggers, Molly being a girl that Jack has the hots for, Jack decides that Shoeshine is a superhero. Now Shoeshine is still dealing with the whole inferiority complex of being an incompetent police dog and so only wants to be a normal dog, but Jack convinces him too don the costume and truly become Underdog.
Meanwhile having had their lab destroyed during the creation of Underdog Simon Bar Sinister and Cad have moved into sewers to set up shop, and to finance his further experiments Cad enlists some goons to knock over a jewelry shop. Underdog of course saves the day but Cad escapes. Now Simon Bar Sinister wants Underdog so he can use his DNA to create super dogs (once again he really doesn’t seem to have an evil plan just evil methods), and after a really lame attempt by Cad to capture Underdog they do manage to get his collar, and with the address from the collar the villains head on over and kidnap Dan. Jack and Shoeshine race to the rescue…or would if the two actually had any brains as all Jack does is provide a second hostage. Not being able to save both Jack and Dan the brave little beagle gives himself up to Simon Bar Sinister’s evil experiments (why a dog that can fly around the world in second can’t defeat a little person and his moronic sidekick as fast is never explained) Underdog’s DNA is extracted and from that the mad scientist creates two types of pills, one gives you super powers and the other makes you normal (this is another reference to the cartoons as Underdog got his powers from super vitamin pills that he kept in his ring and which gave him the power of twenty atom bombs for twenty seconds). Simon Bar Sinister forces Underdog to take one of the pills that rob him of his power and then gives three German Sheppards the power pills and along with the Cad they storm the steps of City Hall.
What nefarious demands will Simon Bar Sinister make? Will Underdog get his powers back? Can Dan retake the mantle of Hero Cop? Will Jack learn the true meaning of Christmas? And when oh when will they stop making favorite cartoons into lame-o live action movies?

There is one name I haven’t mentioned yet and that is of actor Jason Lee who provides the voice of Shoeshine/Underdog, and I’d say not having his face associated with this film was a brilliant career decision but then I’ve seen the trailer for Alvin and the Chipmunks so I know he isn’t actually interested in good career moves. Casting wise he isn’t the worst choice but he certainly isn’t the persona I think of when I think of Underdog, and really who could compete with Wally Cox who voiced the character in the original cartoon. Both Peter Dinklage and Patrick Warburton manage to put in decent performances and don’t completely embarrass themselves, but any scene involving James Belushi would be a good time for you to make that popcorn run or bathroom break.

In all fairness this film is clearly aimed at eight your olds and going by the reaction of the kid sitting three seats down from Underdog is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but if you are an adult, or even remotely a fan of the sixties cartoon, please stay away for your own good.