REVIEW: Shorts (2009)
Shorts
Rated: PG
Runtime: 89 minutes
Starring: Jimmy Bennett, Jolie Vanier
My rating: 2 stars
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On paper, you’d think Shorts — where kids discover the adventures of the outdoors, away from technology, and adults discover what it’s like to actually talk to each other instead of sending text messages or e-mail — would be a good movie.
But Shorts is far from a good movie. In fact, it’s horrible.
Well, “horrible,” might be too strong a word. Wretched, perhaps? Eh, that sounds worse. I’ll put it this way: If you take your child to see Shorts, neither of you will laugh or feel any differently toward the world. You may even want to Tweet your friends about how boring and ridiculous Shorts turned out to be.
That’s kind of what I’m doing, I suppose, pounding away on my keyboard, watching a blinking cursor slide across a computer screen. Ah, technology.
Without that technology, however, Shorts could not have been made. You see, there are computer-animated crocodiles, snakes, a robot-like thing, a Pterodactyl and even a giant booger. All the “adventure” in this film is created by computers, yet its message is “technology runs our lives.” It’s kind of a mixed bag, don’t you think?
I also find it highly amusing that writer-director Robert Ridriguez made Spy Kids, a film all about technological gadgets, only a few years ago. Apparently he’s changed his tune.
But I digress.
I was getting a little carried away as it was. I suppose what you all really want to know is why there is such craziness like the crocs walking on two legs, et cetera.
Well it all started when this rainbow-colored rock fell from the sky. Three brothers happened upon it while taking a break from video games to enjoy the outdoors. One brother casually wished he knew what the rock was, and so the rock whispered in his ear that it was, in fact, a wishing rock. So they all wished for ridiculous things until they decided it’s a dangerous rock and catapult it into oblivion.
And that’s where our hero, Toe (Jimmy Bennet) finds it. Toe is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Thompson (Jon Cryer and Leslie Mann). They work for the Black Box company, which bears an odd resemblance to the Apple company and it’s iPhone product. Everyone has this Black Box, which can do almost anything you want from toast bread to call your mom. The company wants Mr. and Mrs. Thompson to work against each other to develop a better product. The winner gets to be partner and the loser loses their job.
Back to Toe. He finds the rock and sort of understands its powers, so he tries to keep it out of bad people’s hands. Of course, this wouldn’t be an adventure movie if the wishing rock didn’t always fall into the wrong hands.
Things get just plain silly, to the point I started just shaking my head. One person is turned into a hot dog. Really? A hot dog.
Consider this: The adult cast includes, besides Mann and Cryer, Kat Dennings, William H. Macy and James Spader. One would not be entirely out of line thinking that this group couldn’t all possibly be in a horrible movie.
There’s that word again – horrible. I guess that really is the best way to describe Shorts. It’s horrible from the first wish down to the conclusion. The CGI was horrible, the special effects were horrible, the writing was horrible and most of the acting from the young kids was horrible.
I’m still uneasy with that darn word horrible, though, because I really like the idea of the film. I like the message a lot. I think it’s important, but the execution was just so poor that I felt myself spending more time focusing on the film’s flaw than its successes. Two stars.
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