The Animal

Plot. Ah yes, the plot. Now where is it? Lemme have a look around a bit... nope, nothing here. Let's use Schneider's description, shall we? The Animal is your basic boy wants to be a cop, boy wants girl, boy is useless and can't be cop, boy has a bad accident, boy gets animal organ transplant, boy becomes supercop, boy gets girl story.

It's not really worthy of a much better description than that. Stuff like this is really just extended sketch comedy with padding.

Is it funny? Ah, a question for the ages. What's funny to you may not be funny to me. So did I laugh? Well it got some "humph"s, a couple of "ha"s and maybe two or three "Hahaha"s at the best. Sorry, I guess that means I didn't find it too funny.

But Rob Schneider tries. He really does. It's just that he's crap, really. And the film is pretty badly directed. And scripted. And acted. I'm sure Michael Caton, who plays the mad doctor, is regretting having had any part in this. His mad British accented doc just doesn't work at all, and had me wondering why the Hell they used him at all, rather than some American generic "mad type" actor. Christopher Walken would have been a hoot in this role. Sure, the rating probably would have been changed to an R, but he'd be the best thing in it by a mile. I think they used Caton because Aussie actors are cheap to hire. If our exchange rate ever manages to climb back up from 3 bananas for 1 American dollar, then I think all our actors will quickly be out of work overseas and back to guest spots on Neighbours and Celebrity Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

So there you have it. I didn't think much of it, but if there's nothing on the telly, your friends have abandoned you and your girlfriend would rather drink Drano than spend time with you, then give this a whirl.

Average film, well above average transfer. It's in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio and 16:9 enhanced for those of us lucky enough to have a whopping big new widescreen tele. While you can pick the movie apart, you couldn't do it so easily with the picture. It's another of those bloody brightly lit films where everything is a rich shade of its colour, like really green grass, beautiful blue skies and everyone has healthy glowing skin. Of course, on DVD it looks great, with a clean and detailed picture to treat your eyeballs with even the occasional dark scene revealing plenty of depth and solidness.

So far, it's an average film, with a well above average picture and now let's add well above average sonics, shall we? What can a film like this do to impress? I mean, it's just a silly comedy about a man with animal bits in him. To start, the dialogue is always clear and well defined amongst all the other sounds. Every now and then it gets the chance to have a bit of fun with the split rears, adding direction effects and the like. It's not the most aggressive soundtrack, but there's a bit happening around you, some good bass for support and not a thing worth mentioning on the down side.

Just to rub salt into the wound, they throw in a whole heap of extra features that you animals so desperately demand on all your discs. You get not one, but TWO commentaries. Frankly, I'm surprised they had enough to comment on to justify it. One is with the director, the other with Schneider and the producer. There's a feature called Badger Delivery which is like the White Rabbit feature on The Matrix. A symbol pops up onscreen with this option enabled and hitting 'enter' on your remote takes you to deleted scenes with an intro. I watched one, then couldn't have been bothered waiting for the rest to pop up. Annoyingly, you can't just access these deleted scenes on their own right from the menus. Bad dog! BAD BAD DOG!

Moving right along, there are another four deleted scenes available in the... you guessed it... 'Deleted Scenes' section. It wouldn't have made a lick of difference leaving them in the film, but I guess that would have made the film a few minutes too long for the pantwetting adolescent audience they were targetting. Learn to control your bladders, people! You'll be adults soon!

Then we have TWO "Behind the scenes..." featurettes, neither of which I found very good unfortunately, especially the 21-minute Comedy Central feature which is about 22 minutes too long. The "What's In Marvin?" feature has what appears to be another few deleted scenes, but this time accessed using an "interactive" interface. Again, it would have been easier just putting all the deleted scenes together in one spot, as this just pushed my patience for time wasting a little too far.

The trailers section has four trailers, for The Cable Guy, The Animal, Big Daddy and Meet Joe Dirt. See? That was simple. Four trailers in the one section. Not scattered all over the bloody place. Good dog!

To be fair, if this film tickled your funny bone then you'll look at this DVD and probably say "Whoah, cool!". You'll be more than a little pleased with the look and sound and the extras, while reasonably extensive, are kind of average quality. Still, the target audience seem to lap this crap up, and this DVD will help keep them off the streets chroming, I suppose.