Godfather Movie Review: 'Yogi Bear'

In the interest of consistency, I'm going to post this one.  I noted in my previous review that I don't see a lot of movies at the theater and, of the ones I do see, I'm not impressed with many.  But I saw this one, so here we go.

I actually went to the show last week to see Yogi Bear, but I've been relatively busy and haven't devoted a whole lot of attention to this internet business, so I'm just now getting around to catching up on things.  I spent Christmas Eve at my parents' house.  Dinner with the family, gifts for my sister's kids, etc.  Somewhere along the way I was chatting with my little niece.  Since I had Mondays off at the time and she was out of school for the following week, we decided that we would go on a movie date.  When I asked her what movie she wanted to see, she said, "Jack Black."  She was referring, it turns out, to Gulliver's Travels.  The previews looked prettty dumb to me but she's seven years old, so what are you gonna do?

Then I got a call on Sunday as I was heading back to Livonia to drop off my trailer full of empty milk crates.  "Hi Uncle Joe.  My mom told me which movies are playing and I want to see Yogi Bear."  Okay then, Yogi it is.  I picked up my niece on Monday afternoon and we headed to Southgate to check out the flick.  Notwithstanding that there's some sort of pricing scam whenever these 3D movies are involved ($9 for me and $8.50 for her at 2:15pm), I was keeping an open mind.  We got our glasses, grabbed some popcorn, and found our seats.

My review is as follows - dumb.  Quite frankly, I'm not even sure that this movie would be worthwhile for a seven year old.  The 3D aspect was worth no more than a few sight gags.  Nothing in particular comes to mind but you know what I mean.  A character spits out some water and it comes flying at you or whatever.  In general, the movie should have been produced only in 2D.

The story line was a predictable adaptation of basically every movie in the last twenty years.  Some sort of people want to screw the little guy/the environment/minorities/the innocent/etc. and our benevolent heroes are determined to thwart the greedy bastards.  In the case of this movie, the forest is the intended victim.  (I don't think this should serve as any kind of spoiler, given that you already know it's a movie about a bear.)  The hero stumbles several times, as the template would require.  Things look bleak for a moment or two and then the hero recovers to save the day.  I know that it's only supposed to be a kids' movie, but it's paint-by-numbers storytelling at its worst.

Those of us who recall our childhood days will get a laugh or two from the pickanic-basket-thieving hijinks of Yogi and Boo-Boo.  This isn't an essential theme to the plot but it's what Yogi does, after all.  One 'smarter than the average bear' idea ends up helping to defeat the bad guys, as you may have guessed.

The human actors were not stars, which comes as no surprise.  They were not undiscovered gems either which, in hindsight, also comes as no surprise.  This movie wasn't made for the discerning audience.  It was a cash grab designed to get people like me to buy tickets for people like my niece.  I contributed my $17.50 to the cause.

The computer animated characters interacted with the real people fairly well for the most part, although some egregious offenses to my sensibility did occur. In particular, I'm thinking of a sequence where the humans were high-fiving the bears (Yogi and Boo-Boo). It was embarrassingly fake, beyond any sequence that you would have seen in Who Framed Roger Rabbit or Mary Poppins.  In the year 2010 I expected better.

If I had bumped my head or something and decided to see this movie by myself, then no level of verbal disappointment expressed here could have been adequate.  I didn't decide to see it by myself though.  On the way out of the theater, my niece seemed to have had a decent time.  I didn't get the impression that she really liked the movie but she also didn't seem terribly disappointed.  She got a kick out of some of the gags and she hasn't been conditioned, as I have, with abject cynicism toward the lazy and generic good/evil story template.  For this reason alone, we'll give this movie one and a half out of five strings.