Note: This is the first in an ongoing series of family-fare movie reviews written for parents. Reviews will appear here on the Huffington Post and on Screendad.com.
Oh dad, poor dad. And mom, don't forget her, even if Dreamwork's new caveman flick, The Croods, does. Slope-headed dad Grug (Nicholas Cage) and mom Ugga (Catherine Keener) represent an endangered species -- not because they are the last of the cavemen, but by being parents in a family film.
Writers of kids' movies like nothing better than a dead parent: often, one or both are dead before the film starts; or one will die early in the plot, leaving the other to parent badly. Even when both parents survive, the climax of the film frequently hinges on one or both facing death so their children can suffer enough emotionally before the happy ending.
Writer-directors Chris Sanders and Kirk DiMicco don't entirely depart from this playbook, but instead ramp up its strengths and flaws. On the one hand, they focus on an intact family, with parents who not only live all the way through the opening credits, but remain at the core of the story until its multiple peril-of-death endings. This might be more refreshing if not for the fact that dad's most discussed feature is his rank stupidity; the film's central premise is that disobedient eldest daughter Eep (Emma Stone) leads them all to ignore him so that his ignorance doesn't get them killed. (Comparatively, mom gets off easy, but only because she barely has anything to do in the film, except eventually change her hairstyle.) Lame as the parents are, the script does keep the Croods emotionally connected to each other, so that their unity in the face of troubled times becomes one of the film's core values, a way of saying, "Family is family, even when they're stupid."
The film's primary message -- which gets spelled out bluntly and often -- is that fear of change is bad; success means seeking new ways of thinking (or thinking for the first time, as only one character in the film ever actually has called on his brain before). You can read this several ways, one of which is as an inspiration for kids to try new things, be open to change and to be bold in the face of scary situations. Yet because this message is posited by contrasting the endlessly mocked Grug with boy-band-pretty Guy (Ryan Reynolds), you might also read it as "parents don't know anything, so go ahead and do what your friends tell you."
You'll do better with this film if you don't think about it as offering meaningful messages at all. As entertainment, the film is a rip-snorting barn-burner. Inventive minds were clearly at work coming up with ways to turn a prehistoric world into a playground or amusement park for adrenaline junkies, with sequences that blend kinetic action with slapstick humor. The film doesn't slow down much for character and emotion, as it leads the family through dinosaur egg-stealing, landslide-fleeing, jungle-navigating and the like. There is a period just under ten minutes long at the heart of the film (back-to-back sequences involving campfire tales followed by Grug's attempts to prove he has ideas) in which The Croods takes its first real breath; on either side of that, there is a chase or peril scene literally every three or four minutes for the entire hour and a half.
The creativity in these action sequences is matched by the visual beauty of the world. Perhaps taking their cues from Chinese scientists who have posited that dinosaurs may have been brightly colored, the world of The Croods involves vivid candy hues, with creatures you've never seen (like a pastel-colored sabertooth kitten or miniature polka-dot elephants), and fantastical flora given equally cool treatment (including carnivorous flowers the size of a high-rises -- venus skytraps, if you will). The wit of the film is visual, not verbal, including a Paleolithic version of Polaroid photos (which, let's just say, are a headache). Smartly disregarding the most familiar dinosaur models in favor of whole-cloth creations, the film frees itself up for imaginative bits like flying piranha birds that are at once both cheerfully pink and truly deadly.
Death, of course, is a recurring theme, since Guy is (somewhat inexplicably) sure the world is about to end, and the Croods are the last of their kind because all their neighbors have been previously eaten or squashed. [STOP READING PARAGRAPH HERE TO AVOID SPOILERS:] Like so many of its predecessors, The Croods feels a need to string viewers along through a fake-out death sequence -- two, actually, with dad sacrificing himself for the family before heading into his cave to die, and then escaping from that, only to seemingly fall to his death anyway. My 7-year-old kept whispering, "He's going to live through it because they always do," a self-soothing mantra while she leaned against me, nervous, hoping he was right.
To its makers' credit, there is something powerful about the way in which The Croods handles its clichéd climax: we get a portrait of a father doing everything he can for his children, the protectiveness for which he was once mocked now displayed as a fierce love of the kind that so many parents will recognize. Then, when he thinks he has lost them for good, there is a lovely cave sequence in which we see what he makes of his memories. It's in that moment that Grug and the film alike both come closest to something like true humanity.
Review at a Glance:
Good for: Kids who like and are comfortable with action, fantasy violence, peril sequences, broad humor.
Risky for: Very sensitive kids, kids who have lost a parent or are fearful of losing a parent, kids upset by conflict or peril (of which there is a lot).
See it for: Visually appealing, fast-paced entertainment, rife with mixed messages.
Talk about: What do you do when the grown-ups seem to make bad choices? How do you feel when you face something brand new?