ZOOKEEPER (D: Frank Coraci, 104 min). Opens Friday (July 8). See listing Rating: N
The half-baked premise at the heart of Zookeeper – in which the animals of a Boston zoo rally to give their favourite human a second chance with the woman who dumped him five years earlier – feels like something Adam Sandler might have scribbled down in his dream journal late one night, only to realize in the light of day that this was an idea that simply couldn’t support a feature film. So he let his buddy Kevin James have it instead.
And in all fairness, I’d rather watch James run around screaming like a girl and bumping into things than Sandler. He’s a much more charismatic performer, and once again I’m impressed by his incongruous physical grace. But he keeps wasting his star quality in terrible films. Sure, Paul Blart, Mall Cop was a left-field crowd pleaser, but did anyone really like Grown Ups and The Dilemma?
Small children will enjoy this film, in which James’s humble zookeeper Griffin discovers not only that his animals can talk, but that they’re keeping an eye on his love life. And when the shallow, manipulative ex (Leslie Bibb) for whom he inexplicably still carries a torch re-enters his life, the animals decide the best thing to do is to help him win her over by unleashing his inner alpha male.
Thus, we get about half an hour of James learning to puff himself up (like a king of the jungle!), swing his sack around (like a mighty grizzly!) and pee on things (like, um, a really big dog that’s supposed to be a timber wolf) under the instruction of various digitally enhanced mammals, including lions (voiced by Sylvester Stallone and Cher), a chatty monkey (Sandler) and a neurotic elephant (Judd Apatow). And then there’s another 45 minutes or so where he tries to put those skills into play against a dickish rival (Joe Rogan, and what the hell has he done to his face?).
The scenes with the talking animals, who live in an obviously artificial zoo set that’s roughly the size of a dog park – seriously, it looks like a child designed it – are so weirdly unreal that I started wondering if James and his four co-writers had cooked up some sort of kiddie Fight Club homage, and we’d find out that the conversations were all in his character’s head. That would have been kind of awesome, but no such luck it’s just director Frank Coraci deciding that continuity is for saps.
Who needs continuity when you can have a depressed gorilla with the voice of Nick Nolte, whom Griffin takes to a TGI Friday’s in what may be the strangest scene in any film you see this year. I can’t really explain it, except to say that everyone involved clearly thought it was hysterical to watch James do iced tea shooters and play foosball with a guy in an animatronic gorilla suit. Maybe you had to be there.
Oh, also Rosario Dawson is in there, as a comely veterinarian who becomes part of Griffin’s plan to win back his ex. She’s swell, in an effortless sort of way that nicely matches James’s easy appeal, and they have one lovely scene together at a wedding reception – far away from any animals, digital or otherwise – that made me wish I was watching them in a proper movie, instead of one where Sandler voices a monkey with a Yiddish accent.
