Shark Tale
Directors: Vicky Jensen, Bibo Bergeron, Rob Letterman
Writers: Rob Letterman, Michael J. Wilson
Producers: Bill Damaschke, Janet Healy, Allison Lyon Segan
Featuring the voices of: Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Renee Zellweger, Jack Black, Angelina Jolie, Martin Scorsese

So it’s an odd quibble to make in an animated kids’ movie that there is no good reason a fish should need an elevator to get to a top floor apartment. He couldn’t swim up? But I am just picky enough to think that the reason we watch movies set in another world is to bathe our imaginations in the unfamiliar, or something which is familiar but skewed in a unique way.

In Shark Tale, a harmless, diverting, but ultimately less than memorable animated comedy, fish, sharks and other creatures of the deep wear sunglasses, listen to walkmen, make their own TV shows, and dream of owning surround sound systems. Another odd quibble would be how a surround sound system works underwater, but I’m starting to come off as too much the grump.

Maybe what I am asking is, why is this story set underwater at all? Its trappings are the trappings of the human world – the sharks sit in booths at a restaurant and eat off of plates, fish use cell phones to communicate. Most of the characters spend their time upright rather than horizontally. Why did they have to be fish?

I think the answer is that if they weren’t some kind of cute animal, you would never bring kids to this movie – after all, what 6-year-old can relate to a story about mobsters and gambling? Sure, it has bright colors, fart jokes, and the voice of Will Smith at its jiggiest. But can a kid find any way to emotionally plug into his quest to live in a penthouse and have a hot girlfriend? Will they comprehend what it means that he is in debt to a loan shark (technically a loan puffer fish, named Sykes and voiced by Martin Scorsese)?

I cannot really speak for the children, who will find something to enjoy in this all as I did. But my guess is that it doesn’t nestle itself into some special place in their memory, where they store things that swept them away and made them feel something more than just a momentary laugh.

Oscar (Smith) works a menial job as a mouth scrubber at a “whale wash”. He sees himself as destined for bigger things and as such is a sucker for get-rich-quick schemes. Surviving one long enough to whip up another takes up much of his attention, so of course he is blind to the unrequited longings of his loyal friend Angie (Renee Zellweger).

But then a bad bet at the sea horse racing track has him getting worked over by some of Sykes’ jellyfish goons (Ziggy Marley, Doug E. Doug). To make matters worse, a couple of sharks, the sons of the reef’s capo Don Lino (Robert DeNiro), show up. Good son Frankie (Michael Imperioli) is fed up with the eccentricities of his little brother Lenny (Jack Black), who is trying to be a vegetarian, and wants to set him right by enjoying a little fish stalking. And Oscar is the only fish around.

All does not go according to plan, and an accident leaves Frankie dead and the reef thinking that Oscar bested him. Long in fear of the sharks, the fish denizens dub Oscar “The Sharkslayer” and suddenly he’s got everything he ever wanted – fame, money, a hot girlfriend (the ever-changeable Lola, voiced by Angelina Jolie) and the aforementioned rooftop condo. But he’s also got a deadly enemy in the form of Don Lino.

Oscar and Lenny become friends out of mutual self-interest, and of course Angie tags along to provide some voice of conscience as Oscar’s lies form ever higher and more teetering piles beneath him. The story unfolds as you might rather expect, with sitcom-like farcical situations in the climax and sitcom-like “we learned a valuable lesson today” emotional resolution for the characters. There’s nothing particularly broken in the mechanics of the story, but that’s a long way from saying there’s anything inspired to it.

While the other offerings from Dreamworks/PDI – the Shrek movies and Antz – have offered a high level of wit and expression, this is a far more modest effort. The characters just don’t pop to life like we’ve come to expect. There is a growing trend to people animated movies with the voices of big stars; frankly I can’t imagine a six-year-old caring. The no-name David P. Smith scores more laughs than any of them as a scuttling non-sequiter named Crazy Joe.

No six-year-old is going to understand why a mobster character voiced by Robert De Niro is meant to be funny in and of itself. Live action acting and voice-over acting are two distinct arts, and I have yet to be convinced that the average movie star adds anything to an animated film. For vocally gifted performers like Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers I of course make glad exceptions. But Shark Tale is overloaded with “names”, so much so that it seems to be relying on our affection for these stars to provide the razzle-dazzle the animation and story isn’t.

But we’re not looking at the stars. We’re looking at fish. They are who we’re supposed to be relating to and embracing. And at any age, not focusing on that is a let-down.

I, Robot
Director: Alex Proyas
Writers: Screen story by Jeff Vintar, screenplay by Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman, suggested by Isaac Asimov’s book
Producers: John Davis, Topher Dow, Wyck Godfrey, Laurence Mark
Stars: Will Smith, Bridget Moynahan, Alan Tudyk, James Cromwell, Bruce Greenwood

The Dr. Susan Calvin I knew never wore leather pants, or blasted away at hordes of attacking robots with a big futuristic gun, or took gratuitous showers. I never imagined her being as photogenic as Bridget Moynahan, either. But comparisons like that between this big expensive summer movie and Isaac Asimov’s I Robot, a thought-provoking compendium of short stories, are a deadly trap. Best to stay away.

What we get with this admittedly exciting, visually-rich, action-packed movie has almost nothing to do with any of the story material from that book – although a sequence in a robot maintenance facility with an unaccounted-for extra occupant is a clear nod to the story/chapter “Little Lost Robot”. What the filmmakers have done is plug a few character names, like Lanning and Robertson, and of course, Dr. Susan Calvin, into an explosion-filled scenario. But more importantly, they used the 3 Laws of Robotics, one of Asimov’s most enduring creations.

They state that a robot cannot harm (or allow to be harmed) a human being, must obey a human’s orders unless those orders conflict with the first law, and must protect its own existence providing it doesn’t conflict with the first or second law. It’s an ingeniously simple logical construct that allowed Asimov, in his words, to write robot stories that weren’t all “CLANK CLANK AARGH!” monster tales. He preferred idea-driven pieces about what would happen over the years to people in a society that had robots serving and protecting it, and the consequences of monkeying with those laws. Every writer in the genre since has owed something to him because of this.

To its credit, this movie, though it has more than a bit of the clank clank aargh, is exploring similar ideas. In order to gain access to the kind of budget dollars it takes to depict its world, it adds the action and gags that studios consider required elements. Will Smith, playing robotophobic homicide detective Del Spooner, cracks many, too many, of his trademark sassy jokes. But there’s something a little more, there – this isn’t Men in Black, we sense that he acts this way not out of joviality, but real hostility.

Spooner hates robots, suspects that their cold, logical perfection is too easily admired, and has become something of a luddite as a result – he listens to CD’s, insists on driving manually most of the time, and takes pride in his “vintage” 2004 Converse sneakers. We will learn, naturally in a tender moment, all about why he has this attitude.

He thinks this is exactly why the suicide “note” (really an interactive suicide hologram, a novel invention) of U.S. Robotics’ brilliant chief designer Dr. Lanning (James Cromwell) asked for him by name. There’s more going on than meets the eye, and Spooner’s prejudice (“I think you just don’t like their kind” opines one character) makes him capable of conceiving the inconceivable – that a robot might have committed a murder.

There’s an unusual prototype hiding in Lanning’s lab – he calls himself Sonny (Alan Tudyk, replaced by a digital “costume” a la Gollum in Lord of the Rings), claims to have dreams, seems to experience emotion, and has been outfitted with a second positronic brain which allows him to “ignore” the 3 Laws if he wants to. Sonny is full of surprises, self-aware but childishly helpless in trying to sort out his feelings, and is easily the most sympathetic character in the movie, even when you suspect he might be a killer.

Why would Lanning build such a machine? It’s a critical time for U.S. Robots, emphasizes its CEO, Lawrence Robertson (Bruce Greenwood) – they’re about to roll out the NS5, their most sophisticated robot yet, and soon millions of them will be walking dogs, emptying trash, and cooking sweet potato pie (Spooner is disgusted that his Granny turns this duty over to her mechanical man). There’s immense pressure to declare Lanning a depressed crackpot, “Sonny” an ill-conceived experiment requiring destruction, and the whole matter closed from there.

But of course, Spooner isn’t convinced. And of course, his angry supervisor (Chi McBride) dismisses his wild ravings and asks for his badge. Even the future isn’t resistant to dull screenwriting clichés – million-dollar hack Akiva Goldsman (Batman and Robin, Lost in Space) is too set in his ways for that.

Thankfully, while the plot points carrying us through the story are routine, the story itself is going somewhere pretty damned imaginative, and we’re in the hands of the great director Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City). There’s a palpable difference between directors who shoot action sequences that are only informed by other action sequences, and directors who come into each sequence with an untethered imagination, ready to make them unique and special.

Proyas is decidedly the latter – the world of the future he depicts is heavily influenced by Minority Report (and the NS5’s look like what might result if your iMac grew legs and a face and tried to kill you) – but the money sequences of the film are each top-notch in their own way. In one, Spooner ends up on the business end of a construction robot that makes us long for a live-action Transformers movie. In another, a car chase features vehicles with spherical wheels that can maneuver in astonishing ways.

By the end, when hordes of robots are massed in the streets, brawling with people, you might think – Asimov never wrote a lick of this. But when the villain of the piece emerges, explains why everything is happening, and declares, “my logic is undeniable!” Asimov, grand master of science fiction, would have recognized why that’s a very believable thing for that character to say.