I can’t remember ever seeing such a spectacular implosion of a squad of all-stars as “Rise of the Guardians.” Well, not since Yankee Stadium in October.
This 3-D cartoon manages to be frantic and bizarre, yet boring. Based on William Joyce’s “Guardians of Childhood” series of books and directed by a first-timer named Peter Ramsey, it throws together Santa, the Easter Bunny, Jack Frost, the Sandman, the Tooth Fairy and the Bogeyman and sets them to racing around trying to convince us they belong in the same movie. They don’t.
The Bogeyman (Jude Law), angry because the kids don’t believe in him, is jealous of the other characters, so he tries to disrupt children’s dreams, steal the teeth under their pillows and make off with all the Easter eggs so youngsters won’t believe in any of his rivals. So the Guardians convene at Santa’s place at the North Pole for an emergency meeting.
I grew up on Sid and Marty Krofft (“H.R. Pufnstuf”), so I thought I knew weird, but nothing about the psychedelic ’70s in children’s entertainment prepared me for this. I spent all of “Rise of the Guardians” thinking: Why? Why is Santa (Alec Baldwin) Russian, and why does he look like a bouncer? He’s got “naughty” and “nice” tats on his forearms, he carries gladiator swords in both hands, he’s shaped like a refrigerator with feet, he’s got an army of on-call yetis who paint toys for him. Yetis? How’d the elf union let them take their jobs?
Now, the Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman): He’s a 6-foot Australian who carries a boomerang, just as you’ve always pictured him. The Tooth Fairy (Isla Fisher) is a creepy green pixie attended by hummingbird minions who fly around picking up kids’ teeth, which are said to be important because they contain children’s “memories.” No, they’re important because they’re exchangeable for cash. Memories hang out in minds, remember?
Jack Frost (Chris Pine) is a vinyl-faced 300-year-old teenager with a mysterious back story that the film keeps us waiting for, not that it changes anything. As for the Sandman, well, that legendary figure of fancy who has captured so many imaginations for depositing crust in eyes needed the most work. So what did they come up with? He’s a golden garden gnome who doesn’t speak (instead he has emoticons float up over his head) and brandishes whips made of sand. Of course.
On this team of rivals there is mild joshing. A typically awful line is Jack Frost on the Easter Bunny: “He’s real, all right. Real grumpy, real annoying and real full of himself!”
The movie dives right into establishing how boring these characters are. Jack, for instance, can’t do much except fly and spread the cold in winter. An early scene shows him helping some kids in a snowball fight: “Who needs ammo?!” he exclaims, casting his staff to make snow — when the ground’s already covered with the white stuff.
The Tooth Fairy’s gig is equally dull: Pitch Black (the Bogeyman’s formal name) steals the kids’ teeth, but are today’s tots really going to get too worked up if they don’t get a quarter under their pillow? If you really want to terrify them you’d have to come up with a villain who limits their iPhone data plan.
As for Pitch, he spends a lot of time being sinister and threatening, but it’s not clear that he has the power to do much of anything except give kids nightmares. Mostly he just throws sparkly black sand. At one point he breaks Jack Frost’s crook, rendering him powerless, but then Jack just pieces it back together and it’s fine. So what was the point? Also Pitch can apparently be made to go away with a mere punch in the nose.
“Rise of the Guardians” is so odd, it’s like biting into what looks like chocolate ice cream and discovering it’s peach. No, stranger than that: liver.