Theatrical Reviews: Home

I, for the most part, have a soft spot for animated films.  The process alone is mind blowing, as is the care that is put into most films of the genre.  Add to that a quick pace and colorful visuals, and you’ll be hard pressed to find an animated film that I don’t at least find divertingly entertaining.

Home, I’m afraid, is one of those rare un-entertaining animated films.  It isn’t awful, but it doesn’t really have enough going for it to carry its audience through its nearly 2-hour run time.  The basic conceit, characters and sense of humor are all passable for the first fifteen minutes or so, but when stretched to feature-length the film becomes tiresome, and even sort of obnoxious.

Is the movie funny?  A little bit.  Is the movie heart warming?  Sort of.  The tiny little good things that are scattered through-out the movie cannot withstand the childish-stupidity of the rest of the film.  It doesn’t help things along that the score is mostly-made up of half-baked Rihanna songs and that Jim Parson’s alien character brings to the table a Jar-Jar-Binks level of annoying.

Home is a movie that is relatively easy to sit through, but it isn’t the kind of movie that you want to sit through.  I imagine your kids might enjoy the lame humor and lame characters, but why should you have to suffer for their gain?  Especially when you can probably buy much-better alien movies for families at Wal-Mart for $5.  Why would you want to watch Home when you could be re-watching Lilo and Stitch or E.T. The Extraterrestrial?

I seriously feel like the filmmakers were on auto-pilot during the production of Home.  Was there any thought put into the jokes?  Not much.  Was there much thought put into casting?  Nope; I’m pretty sure the casting was actually done by the marketing department, because the woman who recently released the single “Bitch Better Have My Money,” was cast as the innocent little girl.

The movie isn’t really as awful as I’m making it out to be, but it’s also probably not worth paying the money to watch.  Will it be a solid way to get your kids to be quiet for two-hours on a Friday night?  I guess; but it accomplishes this at the expense of your own adult movie-going experience.  If you want to go see a movie with your kids, Spongebob is still in theaters.  If your kids want to watch this movie specifically for some un-godly reason, then wait for it to come out on DVD and save yourself the boredom.