#56: G-Force (2009)

My name is Ed and I live in a formless void surrounded by Nicolas Cage films and lottery tickets. One day I will pick 6 numbers from a Nicolas Cage film use them to buy a winning lottery ticket, and then a word will be spoken.

I don’t have a child, otherwise, I’d make it watch Nicolas Cage films with and report back its hilarious comments such as “Daddy, why did the man make Top Gun but shit?”, “Daddy, I am 8 and even I find Con Air to be unpleasant juvenile nonsense”, and “Daddy, what is a snuff film?” I expect some people think it’s bad to make your child watch age inappropriate movies, but it’s okay if they’re only notional.

One of the bad things about having a non-notional child must be their reputedly low threshold for quality: while there are of course many good children’s films, there is also the unfortunate tendency to go down the “What unexpected thing can we make talk for 90 minutes?” route. Once you’ve decided which animated things will talk, cast some Hollywood stars as the voices, make no effort whatsoever to make it entertaining, and reward yourself with a big cocaine sandwich.

This is basically what I was steeling myself for as I hit play on G-Force, the tale of some computer-animated guinea pigs who have been trained to be spies by Zach Galifianakis for some reason. And possibly my incredibly low expectations are why I was so pleasantly surprised: G-Force is not completely uncharming and I was more than happy to watch it with my notional child, except for when he kept making us pause it so he could tell me that I was the “best dad ever” and “definitely not a failure who stinks like gin”.

You can never entirely know where to assign credit for these things, but I have a strong suspicion that the writers should get a lot: because the husband and wife team that brought us the National Treasure movies are back! All praise The Wibberleys (no, seriously, that’s what they’re called) for continuing to purvey completely acceptably entertaining scripts.

The voice work is also not bad — it is still lamentable that they shove in movie stars rather than the usually much better professional voice actors, but everyone (Sam Rockwell, Tracy Morgan and Penélope Cruz star) makes at worst a decent fist of it. Will Arnett turns up playing his (in fairness, amusing) character. And although this is not saying very much, this is by some distance Cage’s best voice work to this point — here he is Speckles, the computer-animated mole who runs the technical side of the spy/guinea pig operation, and sensibly plays it to his cartoonish strengths.

Call me churlish for having a go at the plot of a film about computer-animated guinea pigs if you like, but it does go off the rails a bit at the end with a last act twist in which it’s revealed that the real villain is Speckles the mole. Who then proceeds to turn every electrical appliance in the world into a killing machine in revenge for every mole ever exterminated by humans. It feels a bit too much like some producer just really wanted to make a film about murderous lamps and that got turned down so they insisted on putting them in this one? Anyway, they talk down Speckles and forgive him even after it all got a bit too real so that’s nice.

The only other major criticism I’ve got of G-Force is Bill Nighy’s truly appalling, and apparently unnecessary Australian accent. He’s on of the live action characters, the boss of the firm that makes the murderous electrical appliances; we’re initially supposed to think he’s the villain. Why’s he doing an Australian accent? Is it someone’s incredibly lame dig at Murdoch? Nighy himself protesting the use of British accents to indicate villainy? If you know Bill Nighy, why not ask him incessantly about this until he asks you to go away?

Anyway, I asked my notional kid what their favourite bit was and he said it was when the guinea pig went on the DDR machine. And then vanished back into the fog of imagination when I accidentally knocked over the bottle and became extremely angry.

THE NUMBERS

3 — Speckles claims that if you Google the word “mole” (Is this the first time Cage has said the word Google in a film? I don’t know why I’m asking like anyone other than me is going to find out.), there are 3 million entries, and they’re all about extermination. This isn’t true — there are about 89 million entries, and loads of them are about skin cancer, you vain mole twat.

5 — The bloke who works in the pet shop the guinea pigs find themselves temporarily imprisoned in has a number 5 tattooed on his hand. Presumably, this is a real tattoo belonging to the 27-year-old actor Justin Mentell, who sadly died in a car accident 6 months after the release of this, his final movie. Christ.

9 — Guinea pigs are 9 inches tall, according to one of the guinea pigs. I don’t think this is true, I think guinea pigs are 9 inches long — these guinea pigs just stand on their hind legs a lot because they have been anthropomorphised for the purposes of this fictional film. You can’t train guinea pigs to be spies. It’s a lie.

16 — Zach Galifianakis’s secret guinea pig training base has the number 516 written on the door.

29 — After escaping the base guinea pigs need to reunite with Zach Galifianakis before Clusterstorm (the thing which turns out to be the food mixers coming alive and so on) launches in 29 hours.

33 — The aforementioned pet shop has the zip code 90033. It also a Twitter account, either created by a confused marketing executive or a really dedicated G-Force fan (there has to be at least one by the laws of the internet), but sadly doesn’t appear to have ever tweeted anything. Lazy.

THE RESULT

That’s a solid no, then.

I expect I’ll win on the last one, that would be nicely narratively convenient.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Yet another animated ‘classic’ that I’ve never heard of: Astro Boy. What are Astro Boys, and are they better than guinea pigs?