#67: The Croods (2013)

My name is Ed and when I have finished watching every film Nicolas Cage has ever been in, I will finally know happiness. If for no other reason than because I will have definitely managed to win the UK National Lottery using numbers picked from one of those films. As the famous saying goes: money can absolutely buy you happiness. Or a swimming pool, which is much the same thing.

I don’t know that anyone’s ever really queried the origin of the techno-stone age society we are presented with in enduringly popular cigarette advert The Flintstones, but for whatever reason a few years ago Dreamworks decided to answer that unasked question and make The Croods.

The Croods start their film as a simple hunter-gathering lot; Cage plays the father, Grug, dedicated to keeping his family safely inside their cave as much possible away from anything new or dangerous. In particular, various prehistoric beasts that are all luridly-coloured wacky ‘mash-ups’ of modern day animals: elephants the size of mice, turtles with wings, and so on. Must have taken literally an afternoon to think of.

Teenage daughter Eep is bored of this, wanting a bit more adventure in her life. Her wish is granted when a) a teenage boy turns up and b) the Croods’ cave is destroyed in an earthquake, literally hurling them into an exciting new world where they’re forced to start thinking. They’re not quite a modern stone-age family by the end of the film, but they’ve started domesticating animals and have invented manned flight by glueing loads of birds to a gigantic animal’s rib cage: can foot-powered motor vehicles be far off?

Like the last cartoon Cage movie, Astro Boy, the best animation in Croods is the ‘2D’ exposition sequence that starts the movie: self-imposed limitation resulting in something more interesting than the infinite possibility of the competently realised, but rarely surprising, three-dimensional world most of the film’s set in. Worse still, it teeters on the edge of the uncanny valley — while the characters are stylised, some of the detail is realistic enough that the whole thing becomes occasionally unsettling. It’s a bit like those weird live action Asterix movies where the comic book violence becomes slightly horrifying once you see it being done to real actors.

The script is pretty thin stuff — the story amounts to ‘let’s go over here, for some reason’, the moral: ‘ideas are good’. Raise one eyebrow for the story credit given to John Cleese, who worked on the original version when it was going to be an Aardman claymation job before eventually sitting in production hell for 10 years. Co-director/writer Chris Sanders gives Cleese some slightly back-handed credit for Grug’s hatred of anything new, which he says reflects Cleese’s own attitudes. Someone mean could point out that it’s also reflected by the film’s total lack of originality: hey and indeed, oooooo.

But despite it’s flaws The Croods does just about get away with it. Grug probably represents Cage’s best voice work: not a patch on his best live action performances, nothing to trouble the sleep of a proper voice actor, but a properly realised character. All the acting and animation does no more or less than what’s required, treading a careful line between simplistic and irritating. It’s even got Ryan Reynolds in it, who has spent his entire career somehow being quite likeable despite having almost never been in anything any good at all.

The highs and lows of attempting to watch all the Nicolas Cage films are such that sometimes ‘a basically amiable film for children’ is exactly what you need, i.e. it was not very good, but at least it was not a thriller so crap that it made me physically angry. Half a limply-raised thumbs up.

THE NUMBERS

2 — The Croods use a two knuckle warning, i.e. the Sun is two knuckles from the horizon when you hold your hand-up, to indicate that it is time to go hide in their cave. Bear with me on this one it’s a film about cavemen so there’s not even any number plates in it.

4 — At the start of the film Eep lists off four other cave people families and various untimely deaths. The sequel (currently in production) better feature some less dead people, because one quite small family plus a Ryan Reynolds indicates sad times in The Croods’ genetic future.

5 — The Croods is apparently set in a fictitious era of the Pliocene called the Croodaceous (lo, it is a pun) period. The Pliocene started around 5.333 million years ago, it says on Wikipedia.

6 — At the start of the film, there are 6 Croods. Grug counts them at various points, always hoping that his mother-in-law will have died. My mother-in-law, my mother-in-law, I wish she was literally dead LOL!

12 — Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture is played during a sequence where some giant corn goes on fire and turns out to be a sort of naturally growing firework. I do not think this film has much educational value, to be honest.

58 — The Croods grossed $587.2 million worldwide, making it by some distance the best performing film Cage has made this century, possibly ever depending on how you calculate your inflation adjustments. He is reportedly returning for the sequel.

THE RESULT

Well, The Croods has not saved me from collapse in the same way that it apparently saved Dreamworks Animation after they’d pissed away all their money on a catastrophically shit film about the tooth fairy having a fight with the easter bunny (or something).

But 2 numbers, so a free Lucky Dip next time!

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

The Frozen Ground