Even when making a movie for kids, filmmakers know that they will inevitably be accompanied by an adult, and so accordingly aim to please them too. Pixar draws on universal themes that leave audiences of every age sobbing with heartache and joy over the characters’ tribulations and triumphs. Dreamworks shove pop-culture meta-jokes into the scripts of all-star voice casts. And Jim Henson just includes innumerable close-ups of David Bowie’s bulging crotch to cause insecurity among men, arousal among women and a sudden need for Freudian-influenced therapy for the now not-so-innocent children.
Zookeeper has no idea how to relate to children, parents, or indeed any being with basic cerebral function. In this horribly shot, unfunny, product-placement-laden, simultaneously immature and completely inappropriate for children insult to film, Kevin Smith plays an insipid, personality-less zookeeper who attracts both Rosario Dawson and Leslie Bibb because Hollywood is made up of wishful-thinking misogynists. As ever, one is an evil gold-digger who wants him to stifle his true self while the other is an innocent, undemanding dream girl patiently waiting in a glass coffin of low self-esteem and desire to settle for an undeserving man to quippily seduce her into a you’ll-do-ever-after. But because they’re both pretty, he can’t decide, and so enlists the help of his unappealing and racially caricatured talking zoo animals to help him.
Merely recalling the movie enough to type that summary has left me cold, bitter, angry and afraid I’ll never laugh again. To see how I was immediately after watching Zookeeper, you’ll have to tune into the upcoming episode of Law And Order SVU based on my experience, where a young woman (I’m hoping for Emma Stone) is found rocking in the foetal position on the floor of a cinema, gathered into the strong arms of Christopher Meloni, given a doll and asked to show him where the bad film touched her. Get your TiVo ready.