Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
8/17/08
“Kidnapped Jabba
the Hutt's son has been.”
-Yoda, Star Wars:
The Clone Wars
Star
Wars is a different animal than other sci-fi/fantasy franchises:
while they may not have all been great, every movie ever released under
that brand name has been an uber-blockbuster, made on a gigantic scale
at the cutting edge of Hollywood knowhow. Creator George Lucas has
built his franchise into a commercial empire unlike any other, but there's
never been a Star Wars movie that wasn't trying to be something
really special. Until now. For reasons that elude me, a 98-minute
pilot for an upcoming Cartoon Network animated series has been released
theatrically as Star Wars: The Clone Wars. I'll be skipping
the series (as I probably would have anyway, not being all that interested
in the further adventures of barely adequate Jedi hero Anakin Skywalker)
in no small part because Clone Wars is unspeakably awful, an amateurish
animated travesty of the Prequel universe not unlike those old 80's Saturday
morning shows that sent Laverne and Shirley into the Army with a talking
pig for a Drill Sergeant and the Happy Days gang (with Fonz's dog
Mr. Cool) traveling through time. We're not talking dry, stately
Phantom Menace awful here: with its' utterly painful sense
of humor, bizarre extended Hutt family and multiple characters who'd seem
more at home in South Park than The Old Republic, The Clone Wars
is Star Wars Holiday Special awful. And it doesn't even have
Bea Arthur.
Between
the events of Episodes II and III, the Republic and its' clones are at
war with Separatists led by Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) and his army
of Battle Droids. Obi-Wan Kenobi (James Arnold Taylor) and Anakin
Skywalker (Matt Lanter) are joined in battle by Anakin's new Padawan learner,
Ahsoka Tano (Askley Eckstein) and then receive a new mission. It
seems that the son of crime lord Jabba the Hutt (Kevin Michael Richardson)
has been kidnapped and the Jedi and Separatists both promise to retrieve
him from the other in exchange for safe passage through the parts of space
controlled by Jabba's forces. While Obi-Wan lags behind, Anakin and
Ahsoka battle Dooku's henchwoman Asaij Ventress (Nika Futterman) for possession
of the sick Huttlett they dub Stinky (David Acord). Can Senator Amidala
(Catherine Taber) uncover the conspirators behind the kidnapping before
it's too late?
Where
to begin? The Clone Wars essentially deposits the Boy Who
Would Be Vader and his new Padawan sidekick into a road show version of
The Thin Man Meets Stinky The Hutt. Oh, there's tons of Star
Warsy action, with armies of clones and droids shooting at each other while
ships fly around and jedi absently flick their lightsabers around to deflect
two or three of millions of laser shots headed in their direction.
But none of it means a thing because none of the characters ever feel,
seem or seem to feel the least bit imperiled. The movie's heart lies
in bonding Anakin with Ahsoka while a bemused Obi-Wan looks on and Stinky
hams it up for the kiddies. The biggest obstacle to building Clone
Wars around its' characters (beyond the fact that they weren't all
that interesting when played by real actors) is the animation style chosen
for the new animated series. It's clunky, awkward and inexpressive,
turning the jedi into crosses between Gerry Anderson's old supermarionation
puppets and the Spitting Image caricatures from 80's British TV.
Director Dave Filoni refuses to acknowledge this fact and keeps cutting
to lingering looks at faces incapable of having an expression. The
vocal performances of Lanter and Eckstein, while nothing to write home
about, are fine, but Taylor is so, so delightfully wrong as Obi-Wan, working
so hard to put “fun” into his every utterance that he ends up making them
all sound like double entendres only he understands. The Jedi Master
as smarmy perv is probably Clone Wars' most entertaining attribute,
but that's certainly not its' intent.
It's
beyond astonishing that anyone would build a Star Wars adventure
around the abduction of Jabba the Hutt's son (what's next? A buddy
comedy in which Obi-Wan and Bib Fortuna search for the Lost Treasure of
Jango Fett?), but the concept does not prepare you for the belching gurgling
lump that is Stinky. The tiny little guy gets hauled around in a
Republic Baby Carrier absolutely refusing to puke on anybody like I so
desperately wanted him to while characters who don't call him Stinky refer
to him as “Jabba's son” “Jabba the Hutt's son” or “the Huttlett” as though
they have no idea what his name is (the credits assure me it's Rotta, but
I don't believe them). It gets much, MUCH worse when Padme Amidala
shows up (it should be mentioned that Taber is the best and most natural
of the movie's vocal performers) to follow the Hutt conspiracy to Ziro
The Hutt (Corey Burton), a kind of Gangsta Rapping Truman Capote slug who
would surpass even Jar Jar Binks as the most innately insulting ethnic
caricature the franchise has produced if only I could figure out exactly
what ethnicity he's caricaturing.
A handful
of holdovers from the prequels reprise their roles (Lee as Dooku, Samuel
L. Jackson as Mace Windu, and Ian Abercrombie as Palpatine/Sidious), but
they all sound as exhausted as their unpleasant doppelgangers look.
You can't have Star Wars anything without Anthony Daniels, and he does
his C-3PO thing as well as ever, albeit to no good end. It's quite
a surprise not to hear Frank Oz's voice coming out of Yoda's mouth, but
while Tom Kane's impersonation is good enough to get by, it's one of the
movie's greatest hoots listening to the ways writers Henry Gilroy, Steven
Melching and Scott Murphy tie themselves into knots trying to conjugate
Yoda English. But there's probably nothing funnier than how unfunny
a couple of comic relief Battle Droids are (yes, I said “comic relief Battle
Droids”. If this movie had been made in the 60's, we'd pass it all
off on the drugs...). Were they not so skinny, I'd swear they're
all Eric Cartman clones in his AWESOM-O costume, holding his nose to disguise
his voice. One of them even utters the words “Do you want me to alert
Count Dooku or what?” at one point. Amazing.
To
adequately criticize the many sins of The Clone Wars, I'd have to
sit down with you and point them all out moment by moment, scene by scene,
for 98 minutes. There may well not be a single moment of legitimate
entertainment in this entire movie, but the MST3K crowd will go bananas
laughing at it. Die-hard Star Wars fanatics have grown skilled
at rationalizing low-quality drama, but even they will be hard-pressed
to make apologies for the general cheesiness of these proceedings (I especially
enjoyed how Jabba's palace has only one dancer and about three hangers-on).
I highly recommend that fans wait until the Clone Wars animated
series surfaces this fall: at least it will be free. Just like
The Star Wars Holiday Special. |
