My mini-review of Jimmy Haywards Free Birds Free Birds has a very clever premise about a pair of turkeys time-travelling to stop themselves from being the main Thanksgiving course. The beginning of the film definitely shows the comedic potential, as Jimmy Hayward and Scott Mosiers screenplay manages to be frequently funny and sharp. It does a great job of establishing Reggie as smarter than the average turkey and has a lot of fun with pairing him up against less intelligent birds. The comedy is also quite subtle and smart, especially the scenes inside Camp David and the secret military base our title characters break into. Reggie is a likeable character and Owen Wilson does very well in voicing him. However, once the plot truly starts and they time travel back to 1621, the laughs are more sporadic and the plot takes a surprisingly generic and predictable turn. A couple of jokes here and there manage to work, but there are long passages where little in the way of humour occurs. Were eventually saddled with a cliched, one-dimensional villain and the films unearned attempt at being dramatic and sad. Free Birds does manage to pick itself up again in the ending, but as a whole, the screenplay is disappointedly on the uneven side. If Hayward and Mosier had kept the comedic momentum of the first act, this would have definitely been a contender of one of the funniest films of the year. As it stands, its merely mildly amusing.
Posted on: Fri, 01 Nov 2013 20:11:03 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015