G-Force

G-Force are a highly trained group of special agent guinea pigs, voiced by Sam Rockwell, Jon Favreau, Tracy Morgan and Pen?©lope Cruz, who must prove themselves on a key mission if they want to earn their badges
Animation has come a long way since critic Kenneth Tynan justly bemoaned the genre's "accidental domination" by Walt Disney's "clothed, speaking animals and birds going through motions designed to entertain the nursery." G-Force, a mixture of live action and state of the art 3D CGI produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, is less a film than it is a multi-platform marketing event. Where it differs from the multi-platform marketing events of yesteryear such as Godzilla is that it is actually fairly entertaining, and not just during the big action set-pieces. This guinea pig movie is a perfect engine, an entertainment machine. All this machine does is entertain children, distract their parents and make the kids want to buy little guinea pig toys. It is calculated to appeal to kids from around three to 13, but with plenty of material in there to keep the parents from nodding off. Indeed, the plot is more sophisticated than many a movie aimed at older moviegoers. This is not to say it boasts an overly complex, involving narrative - the twist is guessable, motives straightforward - but it's an exponentially different beast to an old school children's fairytale. In G-Force, the villain is not a wicked witch or mean talking tiger. G-Force's apparent villain is a Richard Branson-esque entrepreneur played by a dapper live-action Bill Nighy, whose global home appliance empire turns out to have sinister uses. It's a plot that takes in microchips, consumer paranoia, the FBI, bureaucratic obstacles, a satellite network, computer viruses and a shady international crime conglomerate, all lovingly rendered in distractingly gorgeous 3D CGI (it's no surprise that director Hoyt Yeatman's CV reveals a background replete with FX experience). G-Force is Mission: Impossible's little sister. It's not all 007Junior: The Rodent Years. The spy flick tropes sit alongside more traditional Mouse House concerns: there's Dumbo's lesson that you're special because of who you are and not your totemic gadgets, there's The Jungle Book's teaching that everybody needs a family of their own, The Lion King's theme of rightful leaders triumphantly returning from exile, and the near universal stronger-as-a-team motif. G-Force is a soup of all things found (doubtless via extensive market research) to appeal to today's child. Everything that G-Force's creators have identified as key to a successful modern children's film is here. The soundtrack is relentlessly hip, with an end of credits dance-off sequence that might feel familiar to viewers of Madagascar. This music is intended as shorthand for cool to its intended audience, with tracks from the likes of Flo Rida and Nelly Furtado. It screams mainstream tween zeitgeist. The film is also supposed to appeal to older audiences, with a fine vocal cast featuring Nicolas Cage, Steve Buscemi and Jon Favreau, and gags including a great movie-referencing one-liner when lead pig Darwin successfully takes down a Terminator-style cappuccino machine gone beserk, quipping "Yippee-ki-yay, coffee-maker". We can only assume this isn't aimed at the film's primary audience - if you're currently 11-years old, Die Hard came out 10 years before you were born. G-Force wasn't just designed to have cross-generational appeal: it's aimed at a cross-cultural audience too. Cool, collected Darwin, voiced by Sam Rockwell, is your standard middle class hero - Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. But there's plenty here for the "minorities" too, and it's noticeable that although the tech is up-to-the-minute, this is not a film trying to be especially modern in its values. Disney's Holy Grail is wide appeal, not progressive attitudes - otherwise we probably wouldn't find big black gung-ho guinea pig Blaster, voiced by Tracy Morgan, embodying pretty much every cozy black stereotype from amiable street slang ("Holla!") to way-cool breakdancing. They do, however, stop short of suggesting he's packing in the pants department. And, as so frequently in kiddie ensemble films, there's just the one girl in the team, Juarez, voiced seductively by Pen?©lope Cruz. Her character, while no early-Disney shrinking violet, revolves almost exclusively around who out of the rest of the team she might like to become her boyfriend. Like all females, she plays mind games a-plenty to keep them guessing; she's even shown updating her Facebook to mildly manipulative effect. Women, eh? Despite the feeling that you're being bludgeoned into liking something so manifestly created with a franchise in mind, G-Force is at times genuinely entertaining. What it is missing is the elusive C-Force: charm. Where Pixar's roll-call of smash hits have plenty of similarities in the global appeal stakes, to date they share a charisma it's very difficult to whip up via extensive focus grouping. The 3D look of G-Force is a gadget-strewn delight, but preceded as it was by a trailer for the newly minted Disney-Pixar's Up, it leaves you wanting to see what this technology will look like on something with a little more heart and soul.
Verdict: Technically accomplished holiday fun to while away a wet afternoon with the sprogs, G-Force is exciting while it lasts, but about as memorable as the bucket of over-priced popcorn that's such a perfect accompaniment to something this loud, silly and ultimately weightless.