G-Force

This children's film about an elite squad of guinea pigs cobbles together action movie clichés to pointless effect, says our reviewer. Your kids may disagree.

Agent Juarez (Penelope Cruz) and Agent Darwin (Sam Rockwell) are members of the elite guinea pig squad the G-Force, who are racing to prevent a billionaire from implementing an evil plan for world domShow more

Most family comedies fall into one of two categories. There are those, such as the Shrek series, that rely on celebrity voice-overs, pop-culture references and huge action sequences to get the job done. Then there are films like Pixar's latest blockbuster, Up, which look to vintage Disney pictures or Spielberg classics such as ET for inspiration, and where storytelling is king. Perhaps unsurprisingly, G-Force, a live-action/animated film about a crack team of guinea pigs who fight international crime, falls into the first group.

The Jerry Bruckheimer-produced movie begins with a Mission Impossible-style raid, orchestrated by the pint-sized super-agents at the home of the billionaire tycoon Leonard Saber (Bill Nighy). We are introduced to the furry heroes one by one during the intelligence-gathering operation: there's the brave and likeable team leader Darwin (Sam Rockwell), the seductive female agent Juarez (Penélope Cruz), the wisecracking homeboy Blaster (Tracy Morgan) and the tech-savvy mole Speckles (Nicolas Cage). During the sequence, the team learns that Saber is planning to secretly link all of the world's technology into one mainframe, under his command.

But despite the somewhat successful operation, government operatives close down the G-Force programme after it puts two years worth of work by regular agents in jeopardy. The elite rodents quickly find themselves on sale in a local pet shop, alongside a group of mentally inferior specimens. But after breaking out of the shop with the enthusiastic but clumsy wannabe agent Hurley (Jon Favreau) in tow, the group race to stop Saber from implementing his diabolical plan. There are plenty of obstacles in their path, however. Not only are the government agents responsible for closing down G-Force still hunting them, but Saber's household appliances are turning into vicious attack drones with their sights fixed firmly on the elite guinea pigs. As if that weren't enough, the teammates are also forced to confront an uncomfortable truth about their origins.

G-Force is essentially a pastiche of some of the action genre's biggest clichés, played out by cutesy anthropomorphised animals. While there's nothing wrong with genre-tribute movies or talking animals, this film just feels cynical and opportunistic in its cack-handed combination of the two Hollywood formulas. In a year when the aforementioned masterpiece Up and the strangely brilliant Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs were released, G-Force barely deserves a mention.

The film's relentless roster of celebrity voice-overs is frustrating, not just because it is unnecessary, but because the actors in question have lent their voices to a set of painfully wooden characters. Even worse, every member of the G-Force slavishly conforms to his or her racial and gender stereotypes and the result is embarrassing and uncomfortable. The female agent Juarez seems to exist for little reason other than as an object of her teammates' desires. The guinea pig that is voiced by an African-American actor speaks in nothing but ghetto slang, and the white American male actor's character is, somewhat unsurprisingly, the team's leader.

The film deserves some praise for the look of its computer-animated characters, which (unlike Alvin and the Chipmunks) actually resemble the animals they're supposed to be based on. In fact, the film's design is generally imaginative and fun to look at. However, its few funny moments come not from the animated characters but the live-action performances by Zach Galifianakis (as G-Force's geeky human trainer) and Will Arnett (as an arrogant and self-serving federal agent).

Despite these few positives, the film does little more than piece together existing action movie sequences and disguise its laziness as irony and homage. It contributes nothing to either the action genre or family comedy. While it is easy to argue that very few children's films challenge their audience or their medium, few are as dumb as G-Force. [e-mail]