I wonder what animals might find to say about Zookeeper if, like their captive peers in that movie, they could actually voice their own opinions. Unhappily for titular lead Kevin James and his fellow cast members, I suspect the highest and lowest beasts on the food chain would review the very hindquarters off it, in a wild and vengeful feeding frenzy, fiercely brandishing every last claw, tusk, talon and tooth.
Even as the happy and highly evolved possessor of functional opposable thumbs, I tend to see their point. Zookeeper is one of those kids' movies – sorry, family movies – where the wrong part of the family is being served, and ill-served at that.
It's been a decade or so since Hollywood learned that you should throw in a little PG-juice on kiddie-flavoured product as relief for all the adults forced to chaperone their kids to movies they'd never otherwise submit to. This reached an unintended-consequences kind of culmination with all the knowing pop-culture references and spoofs of Shrek 3, which likely bemused plenty of six-year-olds who were just in it for more Donkey action. It's happened again with Zookeeper, though, which has a lock on jokes about wolf piss and monkeys flinging shit. Said monkey, naturally, is voiced by co-producer Adam Sandler.
And right there is the weird part. This movie comes from the Sandler-Apatow comedy axis, with voice work and cameos from many in their orbit, including, inter alia, Ken Jeong, (Knocked Up), Maya Rudolph (Bridesmaids), Jon Favreau (I Love You, Man) and even Apatow himself voicing an excitable elephant – alongside real animals like Sly Stallone (lion), Nick Nolte (gorilla) and Cher (lioness). Brightening up as I saw the cast and gradually figured out the voice artists, I was swiftly disappointed at hearing so few echoes of Apatow's other work, and far too many shrill reminders of Sandler's. And could someone please write the underexploited Kevin James a decent script, because he had to co-write this one himself.
"Oh, give it a break," you say, "it's not aimed at you!" Really? It certainly seems to be, judging by the casting. Yet it failed to hit the spot, any spot. The poop flew right over my shoulder. And the only children to leave happy were the ones who piped up their low opinions of the movie to their relieved parents five minutes in and were led back out into the foyer. Often have I cursed my professional obligation to endure some barking, baying, vomit-eating dog of a movie until the credits roll; seldom have I so envied a six-year-old.
So much for the family movie. The lesson of Rex Harrison's calamitous 1967 musical Doctor Dolittle is lost on modern audiences, thanks mainly to Eddie Murphy's calamitous 1998 Doctor Dolittle, the clear ancestor of Zookeeper. It needs to be relearned: animals should be smelt and not heard.
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