The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)July 5th, 2000
PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com
"We Put the SIN in Cinema"
I love The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show as much as anybody else. I even named my cats Boris and Natasha. But the idea of a full-length film featuring the flying squirrel and the 400-pound Wossamotta U. graduate brought chills to my spine. Not good chills, either. See, the whole appeal of Jay Ward’s cartoon series, which ran from late 1959 through 1964, was that there was just enough Rocky and Bullwinkle to keep you interested.
The half-hour show always started with a brief clip of the duo getting in some type of cliffhanger-type trouble and ended with them foiling Boris and Natasha's dastardly plans. In between these two parts were Fractured Fairy Tales, Peabody’s Improbable History and a bunch of other solid animated entertainment. Rocky and Bullwinkle were just a small part of the show. So how could it possibly work as an hour-and-a-half film without the support of Peabody, Dudley Do-Right and Snidely Whiplash (that’s my other cat’s name)?
The answer is a short one - it doesn’t. The dry humor and silly puns get really tiring after about twenty minutes, but thankfully R&B features enough inspired casting and self-mockery to make the film somewhat less torturous than it could have been. R&B opens with an animated Rocket J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose, who have been living off of puny residual checks from the show’s reruns, which have been airing since the 1964 cancellation. It seems that in the last thirty-six years, poor Rocky has lost the ability to fly.
Flash from Frostbite Falls to Pottsylvania, the home of Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale. Through some bizarre blend of science and nonsense, the two baddies and their fearless leader (named Fearless Leader) submit a movie script to a beleaguered movie mogul (named Minnie Mogul and played by Janeane Garofalo, Mystery Men) and are somehow transformed from cartoon into reality. Jason Alexander (Seinfeld) plays Boris, Rene Russo (The Thomas Crown Affair) tackles Natasha, and Fearless actor Robert De Niro becomes Fearless Leader.
The three hatch a plan as diabolical as ever – taking over every cable television station with something called RBTV (or “Really Bad Television”). The broadcast signal of RBTV will hypnotize the entire country into voting for Mr. Leader in the upcoming Presidential election, thus ousting current Commander-in-Chief, President Signoff (James Rebhorn, Snow Falling on Cedars), from office.
Luckily, the FBI is on the case, assigning bumbling, knock-kneed Agent Karen Sympathy (newcomer Piper Perabo from the upcoming Coyote Ugly) to entice Rocky and Bullwinkle out of retirement to stop the mass-hypnotism. The squirrel and moose remain animated, despite the fact that the three bad guys are now real. Isn’t this a big plot hole? Well, yes, but the whole film doesn’t make sense. It knows it doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t care. And that’s damn admirable, especially after something like Gone in 60 Seconds, which was just as illogical but pushed itself as a serious action film.
Eighty-year-old June Foray still provides Rocky’s voice, while Aussie Keith Scott (who narrated Ward’s overrated George of the Jungle film) handles voices for both Bullwinkle and the film’s narration. There’s also a load of cameos, from Carl Reiner, Jonathan Winters and Don Novello, to Randy Quaid, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg and Good Burger’s Kel Mitchell and Kenan Thompson. John Goodman, who will play Perabo’s father in Ugly, also has a small role in the film. There isn’t a lot of acting going on here, as most of the talent spends the entire film reacting to characters that weren’t there during filming.
R&B was directed by Des McAnuff, who helmed the abysmal Cousin Bette, but also was a producer on The Iron Giant. The screenplay was written by Ken Lonergan (Analyze This) and features a dazzling score by Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh (Rugrats). Lonergan’s script is peppered with a decent amount of pop culture references (like spoofing DeNiro’s famous monologue from Taxi Driver), and several miss-‘em-if-you-blink homages to the original show (like the Wossamotta U. infirmary being called the “J” Ward).
1:25 – PG for very mild adult language
More on 'The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle'...
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
