By Andy Hunsaker
Fancast Movies
When you're in the midst of making a bad movie, you can always take comfort in the fact that in a few weeks it'll all be over. A month or two, tops. When you're in the midst of making a bad animated movie, it's really got to sting, because you could have two years of your life sucked away before you can move on to something that might actually be entertaining.
Not that Space Chimps was necessarily doomed from the outset. It's a great concept - apes on space missions would seem like a natural fit for a fun animated adventure (monkeys have tails, apes don't - chimps are apes, not monkeys, just so ya know). It's all in the execution.
Andy Samberg voices Ham, grandson of the actual first astronaut chimp Ham, who currently kills time being a circus daredevil. As a PR move to help bolster NASA support, he's captured and brought in to lead a new mission to recover a vanished space probe, with backup from trained space chimps Luna (Cheryl Hines) and Titan (Patrick Warburton). Ham is reluctant and smart-alecky about it, and the business-like crew resents having him on the team. Of course, when they get sucked into a wormhole and land on an alien planet run by a bully named Zartog (Jeff Daniels), wacky adventure ensues, and Luna learns to love Ham and Titan learns not to be so uptight.
Space Chimps feels very 'by the numbers,' with weirdly stiff animation and, most unforgivably, a lack of effective humor, which is what you crave in an animated film like this. It made the obligatory attempts at spanning the gamut to please kids and adults with the inclusion of David Bowie jokes and the like, but nothing really seems to stick. Ham's constant sarcasm isn't that funny, which makes him one of those people that only thinks he's funny, and they really get grating. Wanting to tell the lead character to shut up all the time doesn't bode well, especially when they need to be a legitimate love interest. Well, as legitimate a love interest as an animated chimp can be.
The only real smiles to be had here are Warburton's, because he's the voice of Joe from Family Guy and Brock Samson on The Venture Brothers and he really knows how to do this stuff. The rest is made up mostly of groaner jokes and uninvolving action with characters that aren't all that likeable. Kids may look past all that, but when Wall-E is out there as an option, it's hard to recommend something like this.
