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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

Epic

EPIC (Chris Wedge). See listing. Rating: NN


In Epic, Chris Wedge and his Blue Sky animation shop – makers of the Ice Age series and the fairly charming Rio – reimagine Ferngully and Avatar as a series of elaborate chases. The result is a wobbly eco-adventure that lacks the depth to which it aspires.

Using William Joyce’s picture book The Leaf Men And The Brave Good Bugs as a jumping-off point, Epic focuses on MK (voiced by Amanda Seyfried), a human teen magically miniaturized to help a race of tiny forest warriors save their habitat from an invasion of rot-spreading Boggans.

The one-dimensional characters are occasionally spiked to life by the voice cast: Colin Farrell and Josh Hutcherson are fine as quippy Leaf Men, Jason Sudeikis stammers endlessly as Seyfried’s wacky-scientist dad and Steven Tyler and Beyoncé turn up to be obtuse and philosophical, because what the hell.

Chris O’Dowd and Aziz Ansari put some serious English on their sidekick roles as a snail and a slug respectively, and Christoph Waltz seems to be enjoying himself as the sneering villain Mandrake. But mostly everybody just runs around shouting a lot.

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