Review by Sam Price
Stars Tom Cavanagh, Anna Faris, TJ Miller, Nathan Corddry, Andrew Daly, David Stott and the voices of Dan Aykroyd,
Justin Timberlake & Josh Robert Thompson
Written by Jeffrey Ventimilia & Joshua Sternin
Certification UK U | US PG
Runtime 80 minutes
Directed by Eric Brevig
Lambasting a cinematic adaptation of Yogi Bear isn’t hard. Much has been made of the inopportune poster/tagline combination for the film: emblazoned with the words “Great Things Come in Bears”, Yogi looms large over a grinning Boo-Boo with their lower halves out of shot. Its subject matter, too, lends itself to a cavalcade of eye-rolling puns (Bear with me, grin and bear it, etc) and its most notable catchphrase – “smarter than your average bear” – is tailor-made for glib critical skewering (I had “dumber” and “lobotomy patient” picked out as substitutions prior to seeing the film).
So it’s little surprise that a guest on the comedy podcast Doug Loves Movies memorably described Yogi Bear as “worse than a billion 9/11s”. This is without mentioning bears’ predilection for defecating in the forest, previous and egregious bear-heavy precedents (Razzie favourite The Country Bears), and the titular character’s standing as a poor man’s Top Cat. But one of the main surprises of Yogi Bear is that it’s not an affront at all. It’s just a deathly boring childrens’ film which, in a post-Wall•E world, seems increasingly lazy and an outmoded irrelevance.
Professional voice actors are shunned in favour of can’t-get-arrested-now Aykroyd as Yogi, who seems to be under the impression that lowering his pitch and bellowing in a staccato tone passes for an adequate vocal performance. Meanwhile, much of the goodwill that was thrown Timerblake’s way in the wake of The Social Network is likely to evaporate, given his galling performance as Boo Boo is the film’s most annoying attribute. And a wasted Farris hops around looking like she’s recovering from a bout of aggressive dental surgery between literally having Spam forced down her gullet by Ranger Jim (Cavanagh, giving the most nondescript performance in a nondescript picture) and being forced to sit through one of the film’s myriad ritual abuses of Sir Mix-A-Lots’s Baby Got Back, which is invariably accompanied by Yogi waggling his posterior in a variety of contexts. Elsewhere, Eastbound and Down’s Andy Daly crops up as a Machiavellian mayor with an unhealthy interest in privatising Yogi’s stomping ground, Jellystone Park, and hapless buffoon Ranger Jones is played by TJ Miller in one of the film’s few bright spots.
In the grand scheme of Hanna Barbera cartoon adaptations, it mercifully falls higher up the list than one should reasonably expect, though given the existence of The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas that may not seem like much of a feat. That said, it nixes the farting idiocy of the Scooby Doo films, and for the most part eschews winking references directed at the adult audience. Given that the target audience for this film, though, is children who have yet to reach their 10th birthday, crafting a film around a character whose in-built cultural cache has long since faded seems a bizarre decision, given that little is done to define his character outside of “he likes food”. Indeed, Yogi’s travails prove not enough to hang a 90-minute narrative on, and the shunted-on third-act histrionics involving a rare species of turtle fail to excite. Let this be a lesson: a portly kleptomaniac forest-dweller with a penchant for pilfering picnic baskets does not a feature film make.
At best, Yogi Bear is an affable kids’ film. At worst, it promises to do for logging rights what the Star Wars prequels did for taxation on trade routes: prove irrevocably that it’s impossible to make an intriguing film about them. And while its heavy-handed messages of environmentalism and conservation are laudable in and of themselves, it’s not enough to make you wish Faris wouldn’t just grab a shotgun, blow both the bears away, and end this godforsaken affair in 30 seconds flat.