Furry Vengeance is not a terrible movie because we’ve all seen it before. It’s not terrible because its two leads are indifferent and well past their primes. Hell, it’s not even terrible because it’s god-awful. Furry Vengeance is terrible because every single person involved, from initial conception to final execution, flat-out failed at the task they were assigned. Absolute debacles on this scale cannot possibly be attributed to one person. Sure, Brendan Fraser is terrible but so is the script, so is the CGI, so is every last unchecked detail. Furry Vengeance is so singularly awful that its awfulness isn‘t even a matter of debate. Everyone, from the director’s mom to mentally-handicapped children, will uniformly agree this movie sucks. It’s less a matter of opinion, more a matter of objective common sense. It’s not as if the producers made grape Kool-Aid when most people would have preferred cherry; it’s as if they swapped out the sugar for baking powder and salt. Furry Vengeance is terrible, so terrible, in fact, that I’m left to wonder if there was one single entity in this entire film which could have been executed more poorly, hastily and ignorantly.
Brendan Fraser is awkward, lazy and out of shape so he’s made to do physical comedy. Dr. Ken and Angela Kinsey have no chemistry so they’re asked to do all of their scenes together. Jim Norton and Patrice O’Neal, two of the ten greatest stand-up comedians working today, are constantly in the background of shots so they’re given less than five combined lines throughout the entire film. The raccoon is easily the most despised, piece-of-shit, scavenger knock-over-your-trash asshole in the entire animal kingdom so attempts are naturally made to turn him into the most sympathetic character in the movie. Brooke Shields is most fondly remembered as a blonde so she’s given gothic witch hair to ward off any memory of her former hotness. The pacing slogs and scenes frequently end a few dry beats too late so misplaced indie rock music is used to accentuate the choppiness. Rest assured, if John Wayne would have found his way into this movie, he would have ended up in black face doing a dance number opposite a Dyson vacuum.
Dan Sanders (Brendan Fraser) is a middle-management schmuck employed by Neal Lyman (Ken Jeong) to build a residential community in the middle of the Oregon forest. He’s one of the good guys, working for a green company, but that all changes when he decides to blow up a beaver damn and a ragtag lot of skunks, bears and vermin band together like the 1986 Celtics, communicating through a bizarre series of thought bubbles to wage war on Dan Sanders. He’s got a wife and kid (Brooke Shields and Matt Prokop). They’re pissed about communing with nature, even more pissed about the lack of readily-available Starbucks’, and in no way pissed about their father blowing up a beaver damn. Of course, that all changes when they’re given their own side plots (a job teaching science, a girl) which make them re-evaluate their patriarch’s tree hugless choices.
Now, normally, films like Furry Vengeance have clear-cut heroes and villains, but as I may have mentioned before, Furry Vengeance is terrible, thus is riddles its film with all villains. Dan Sanders is an absolute stiff. Wishy-washy and forgettable, he sometimes destroys beaver damns, sometimes acts self-righteous when Mr. Lyman talks about making money at Pandora’s peril. His wife is neither supportive nor sassy. She mostly blends into the background, occasionally popping up to make holier-than-thou faces at an old woman who certainly has dementia. Their son is an effeminate bitch of the highest order. He alters his perspective to please a girl, he complains like a seventeen year old slut who can’t find her hair extensions, and worse, he waits for said girl to ask him to kiss her. Neal Lyman is obviously a super villain. He flies around in a corporate jet and openly discusses manipulating the public. That damn raccoon devises Mousetrap-like pulley systems to literally knock SUVs off the road. Everyone in this entire film is insufferable, which would I guess be tolerable if they were at least consistently insufferable. They’re not.
As you may have guessed, the Sanders clan eventually decides maybe raping the forest isn’t the best idea. But rather than discover this organically, it takes a drowning attempt from that damn raccoon to get Dan on board. It takes a blandly-attractive marathon enthusiast to make his son give a shit about the Earth. It takes his wife losing control over a festival she’s bizarrely put in charge of to convince her animals shouldn’t be locked in cages. And it's not until that goddamn fucking raccoon benefits from grandiose displays of kindness that he briefly stops acting like a card-carrying sociopath Terrible.
I cannot muster one positive thing to say about Furry Vengeance. It is garbage belched from the shithole of better, third-rate putrescence like Air Bud: Golden Receiver. It is neither funny nor entertaining. It’s not worth the time of children, nor is it worth the time of film reviewers. I gave G-Force one star. In retrospect, it looks like Jurassic Park. Saying I hate this film is, frankly, offensive to all the things I hate. The Detroit Red Wings, women who pretend to be idiots, Game Show Network re-runs of Card Sharks, mayonnaise, Chelsea Handler, guys who take advantage of drunk chicks, ribbon dancing, Comcast’s DVR service, assembling furniture, all of these truly horrible things now seem flaccid and tolerable in comparison.
Last week, Cinema Blend’s own Josh Tyler called The Back-Up Plan “one of the worst movies ever created.” Your move, J-Lo.
