Z/Web

I heard horrible things about this animated movie when it came out and stayed away. It seemed too predictable: a picked-on wimp takes out his vengeance on an ant colony (the bullied becomes bully) and the ant colony retaliates by shrinking him to their size and forcing him to live like they do, whereby he learns life-changing lessons. While the film takes too many shortcuts for cheap humor (like butt jokes) and the story is lightweight, there’s enough interesting characters (I loved the glow worm and beetle) and unusual things going on and the heart of the story actually is pretty good, and in the end, I decided I liked the film. Not bad.

While the idea of turning Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” into a modern story about a girl soccer player who pretends to be a boy to get on the boy’s soccer team isn’t terrible, this dreadfully unfunny and cheesily over-acted dreck just makes a mockery out of everything: love and relationships, soccer, life, reality. It has some neat ideas and a decent cast (though the lead can’t even kick a soccer ball convincingly) but everything is so ham-handled the result would bore 9-year-olds.