Imagine Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” as a children’s comedy, and you have a rough idea of the excruciatingly unfunny “Furry Vengeance,” which keeps slamming the audience over the head with a single joke.
That’s birds and animals — an army led by a beaver (who communicates in thought balloons) and includes crows, squirrels and turkeys — attacking a developer who plans to raze their nature preserve and turn it into a gated community.
I won’t deny some children may enjoy the sight of the developer (Brendan Fraser) being repeatedly doused in the critters’ bodily fluids and receiving blows to the crotch.
But any adult unlikely enough to stick around for this will also be treated to the sight of the pudgy actor running around in a way-too-small pair of pink sweat pants before he is sent to a psychiatrist (Wallace Shawn).
Those pants belong to Fraser’s unhappy wife — a rare big-screen outing for Brooke Shields, who gets less screen time than Fraser’s SUV. The vehicle oddly gets the most product placement (including an invasion by a squad of skunks) in this allegedly eco-friendly production.
Although the ubiquitous Ken Jeong turns up in a vaguely racist role as Fraser’s “comically” accented boss, Angela Kinsey (“The Office”) plays Jeong’s assistant, and Matt Prokop (“High School Musical 3”) is cast as Fraser’s son, Fraser appears with just the animals in most of the movie.
Sort of. They were, in most cases, photographed separately with computer-assisted expressions — with CGI taking overly entirely (and unconvincingly) in the spectacularly witless climax.
Fraser, who has star-red in two part-animated films in the past, is up for any sort of slapstick humiliation here, but defeated by a script by the writers of “Mr. Woodcock” that almost managed to make me nostalgic for “Over the Hedge” and “Dr. Doolittle.”
Incoherently directed by Roger Kumble (“College Road Trip”), “Furry Vengeance” is co-sponsored by Participant Media, which would be well advised to stick to socially conscious documentaries like the Oscar-winning “The Cove.”