Movie Review:

Shark Tale

   Dreamworks' animation department is not likely ever to catch up to Pixar.  There is their insistence on prioritizing star power over actual voice acting talent, there is their often ugly animation, and there is, above all, their inexcusable decision to make as important as the plot pop culture references that will be dated in two years.

   Shark Tale is not as bad as it looked - it's much, much worse.  The animation is exactly as bad as it looked, except now we have to endure the ugliness for 90 minutes instead of 90 seconds.  I don't know who decided Oscar the fish should look like a grotesque caricature of Will Smith, but they need to be fired.  The great white sharks are equally hideous.

    Then there's Smith's incessant mugging.  Doesn't he get enough of that when he's actually onscreen?  An even bigger problem than his inane posturing and assortment of quotes from better movies (he at one point yells "Are you not entertained," "You can't handle the truth," and "You had me at hello" in succession) is the animation job - no one seems to have much cared how well his lips match what he's saying.  This is a problem for several other characters as well.

    It doesn't help that until late in the movie, only Jack Black displays any significant voice acting talent.  It's not that you have to change your voice, which Black does, to be a good voice actor, but it rarely feels like the other actors aren't just playing themselves.  Smith and Robert DeNiro pull it together at the end, just in time for Martin Scorsese to humiliate himself by talking "street" and the rest of the cast to have a dance number.  Hey, it worked for Shrek!

    The basic idea behind Shark Tale is that the sharks are the mafia and all the other fish are scared of them.  Meanwhile, Oscar (Smith) works at the Whale Wash and dreams of being rich and famous - of course, such dreams only help make him more of a loser.  Oscar becomes a hero when he takes credit for the death of Frankie (Michael Imperioli), brother of the timid Lenny (Black) and son of Don Lino (DeNiro), but naturally this leads to more trouble than it's worth.

    I hold no particular love for the mafia, so you'd think this sort of parody might appeal to me, but its visual mimicry of other movies and general operation is, magically, even more annoying than the American fetishization of the mob.  Most of the movie is pretty annoying just in its sheer blandness - Renée Zellweger's character might as well exist as stock footage, so cliché is her character arc as Oscar's long-suffering best friend.  This might be the film's biggest mistake, since Zellweger does a pretty good job making her character sympathetic despite the lack of depth, and her character design is by far the best-looking.

    With such an annoying, unlikable, and downright unattractive protagonist, Shark Tale has a lot of ground to make up right off the bat, and it doesn't try very hard.  The various pop culture jokes are at best groaners (Katie Couric has a cameo as a fish reporter named "Katie Current"), and the film either makes little other attempt to appeal to adults or fails miserably at doing so.  This makes the film all too similar to 2002's Dana Carvey disaster The Master of Disguise - while too manically idiotic for all but the most easily distracted children, there are too many jokes that the kids either won't get (such as the shark plot borrowing quotes, shots, and even entire characters from The Godfather, a movie released more than 20 years before the film's target audience was born) or shouldn't get (well, there's The Godfather, an R-rated film, but there's also stuff like the "Baby Got Back" reference).

    It's never good to have your film fall between audiences, although most kids probably won't notice the difference.  Whether a parent would want their kids watching this kind of braindead reference-fest is another question.  Personally, I'd steer the kids toward Finding Nemo, which is significantly more family-friendly, as well as being smarter and better made. Shark Tale at least throws in a couple of messages, although if your kids need to learn "don't lie" and "it's okay to be yourself" from ugly, talking fish, you should probably be trying a little harder.

   Shark Tale's last third isn't too bad, particularly considering what has preceded it, but it's hardly worth sitting through a miserable first hour to get to an above-average ending.  A failure from just about every conceivable angle, Shark Tale's only remaining hope is that it fades into obscurity before its references have time to go stale.  D

Shark Tale is a Dreamworks release.  Rated for some mild language and crude humor.