It's Lady and the Tramp reset and retrofitted into the vast wilderness of Canada. It's Romeo and Juliet with wolves instead of warring Italian families. It's The Odd Couple with carnivores instead of angst ridden New Yorkers, and it's every other lame excuse for CGI -- Space Chimps, Fly Me to the Moon, Astro Boy -- that's come out in the last few years. Not even the spit shine stunt patina of 3D can save this exceedingly average family film. Not even the attempted role reversal makes us care for these lovelorn and homesick critters.
Kate (voiced by Hayden Panettiere) is the "alpha" of the title, a type A-personality vulpine who is destined to be the leader of her pack. Humphrey (Justin Long), on the other hand, is a genial goofball who wants to lounge around doing nothing all day. Though he has a crush on the beige babe, he has no chance. As an "omega", he's destined to be a loser, playing second fiddle to fitter members of the species like Kate's arranged intended, Garth (Chris Carmack). One day, fate steps in and separates the two from the rest of their clan. They are shipped off to Utah in an attempt to "repopulate" the area. Wanting to get back to their respective broods, they band together with a dopey duck (Eric Price), a goofy goose (Larry Miller), and their own growing infatuation to travel the many miles toward a potential wildlife reunion. Of course, their path is fraught with formulaic dangers.
Hurling things at the camera with reckless disregard for the audience's attention span and purposefully overstuffing its many meandering scenes with as much nonsense as possible, Alpha and Omega argues for an entire subpar second tier of cinematic computer animation. Unlike Disney and its perfectionist partners at Pixar, this is hurried hackwork at its brain-dulling worst. （英文影评）While no one expects a Wall-E each time out, would it hurt the off-brand entrepreneurs responsible to offer up some small semblance of entertainment or imagination? The opening paragraph only covers half of the referential rip-offs present. We get smatterings of The Incredible Journey, aspects of The Lion King, and more atonal howling than at a Lady Gaga concert (because, you see, off-key baying is how wolves say "I Love You", or something like that).
Like an insane cur endlessly chasing its own tail, Alpha and Omega spins inward until it finally implodes. We know that, somehow, our furry leads will end up together and the various supporting players are nothing more than idiotic icing on a spun-for-small-fries commercial cake. But unlike the work of Fox and/or Dreamworks, there's no joke-a-minute mindset. We get scant soon-to-be-dated pop culture riffs, the rest of the so-called laughs being derived from wit that hasn't worked since vaudeville.
But the biggest problem facing Alpha and Omega is how rudimentary it is. This is a movie that doesn't take risks, that relies solely on the need for PG-rated fare for the smaller members of the nuclear family. The filmmakers know there is a demand for this kind of muck, whether or not it has any inherent originality or amusement value. As a result, we get some fun cameos (the late, great Dennis Hopper as the requisite four-egged heavy) and nothing else. While it's hard to imagine what changes could spruce up this dreary experience, the truth is that as long as audiences show up, underwhelming experiences like Alpha and Omega will be the norm. The technology has clearly caught up with the marketplace. The talent has not.
