At the very least, it’s worth a rental and a watch with your kids on a Friday night. I mean heck, it will probably be forgotten completely by the end of the year. Let me emphasize one thing: this is a funny and entertaining movie for both kids and adults, but it is not groundbreaking, it’s not going to win any awards. Any longer and it would have really hurt the movie. That’s just over an hour! It packs in action, humor and lots of colorful characters to keep the kids interested. One of the biggest selling points for me? The run time. Again, this is pretty much a waste of the talent, but it’s fun to hear her anyway. Jane Lynch ( The 40 Year Old Virgin, Role Models) shows up as one of the scientists as well. The story back on Earth with the NASA scientists is not nearly as interesting as what’s going on in space. Poole, one of the scientists, but his role was pretty much a throwaway role. Jeff Daniels played the big bad guy Zartog, and you can tell he had a really good time doing this movie. Kristin Chenoweth has a fun, small role as a quirky little alien named Kilowatt. Andy Samberg and Cheryl Hines were perfect for these roles. This is one of those cases where it seems like they didn’t just cast these roles because of the big names, but because they really fit with the characters. The voice cast also really helps the movie out. This movie had me and my six year old daughter laughing throughout. They’re just silly little plays on words, but I’d rather hear that than Shrek sequel style humor. I love all the goofy “chimp” jokes he tells. Titan, for example, is almost painfully optimistic throughout the whole movie, but what makes him more bearable is his humor. I’m a sucker for cheesy, old-fashioned humor and this one is full of it. The biggest relief for me was that this wasn’t one of those Dreamworks-style animated films overloaded with pop culture references and adult humor. Yes the plot is ridiculous, yes the animation isn’t all that great but the movie still works. They now have to save the planet and manage to get back home to their own. The chimps pass through the wormhole unscathed, but find themselves on a planet full of colorful creatures who are in danger of being turned to statues by an evil lord named Zartog (Jeff Daniels). He is sent up with two NASA trained chimps Luna (Cheryl Hines) and Titan (Patrick Warburton). Instead of sending humans and possibly obliterating them, they decide to send the chimps and Ham III is recruited unwillingly. When a space probe is lost through a wormhole, NASA wants to send a space ship through it to see if it could become passable by humans. He’s naturally rebellious and thinks he’s a screw up compared to the successes in his family. Ham III (voiced by Andy Samberg) is a circus monkey whose grandfather was one of the first chimps in space back in the ’50s. But honestly, and stay with me now, it’s not such a bad movie. But after WALL*E and all of its glory, kids didn’t get another mind-blowing blockbuster. It gave kids plenty of time to see the movie, buy the toys, get the Happy Meals at McDonald’s and then get bored with it. For example, it was good timing for Kung Fu Panda to be released prior to WALL*E being released this summer. Too often a movie is released with bad timing.
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