I’d like to take back all those times I said Nicolas Cage was one of the most annoying actors on film. It turns out he’s equally terrible when he’s only on the soundtrack.
And yet Cage is the least of the problems with “The Croods,” an animated comedy about cavemen whose writers took things a little too literally when they were told to write Cro-Magnon humor.
Daddy caveman Grug (voiced by Cage) spends a lot of time getting hit by lightning, crushed by boulders and screamed at by his mother-in-law (Cloris Leachman). When his daughter Eep (Emma Stone, who must have one of the least interesting voices in Hollywood) meets a cute guy named, er, Guy (Ryan Reynolds), Grug keeps him stuffed in a hollow log.
Daddy is what you might call a cultural conservative: He teaches the frustrated Eep and his wife (Catherine Keener) and son (Clark Duke) to fear everything, mainly because every other family has been killed by wild animals, war and disease. Failing to appreciate that Dad’s caution is the only reason she’s still alive, Eep finds Daddy lame in the tradition of every daughter since the dawn of man. The film’s message is that you have to get out there and try bold new things, which is a strange point to make when you’re rehashing “The Flintstones” and “Ice Age.”
As in “Ice Age,” there’s a big opening set piece involving a madcap chase for an object (in this case an egg) much like Scrat’s elusive acorn. And as in “Ice Age,” the cast spends a lot of time wandering the landscape in search of something funny.
Grug loses the family cave in a rock slide and suggests everyone head out for a randomly chosen destination because “It just feels right.” I’m not sure which screenwriters’ manual writer-directors Chris Sanders and Kirk De Micco were working with, but the ones I’ve glanced at generally agree that characters should be working toward an important goal, not trudging along for no particular reason. Unless we’re talking screenwriting à la Jean-Luc Godard.
Various dangerous or odd critters (such as a skunk-odile) come and go, peril is survived in ways that are silly without being funny and there’s lots of bickering and scream takes. Most of the dialogue doesn’t even get close to being funny; it just fills in the spaces between the pratfalls.
Every so often, someone attempts an actual one-liner, but these invariably sound like they come from writers who prepared for the movie by having actual boulders dropped on their heads. Grug, for instance, says to Guy, “OK, ‘Smart Guy,’ now what?” And Granny recalls of an earlier romance, “He was a hunter, I was a gatherer. It was quite a scandal!”
Gran lets slip that she’d drop dead of a heart attack if Grug ever came up with a new idea, so he spends a few minutes doing wacky and unpredictable things like putting a wig on his head: “I call it a rug, rhymes with Grug,” he says. And I call this movie crustier than a Paleolithic fossil.