Mr. Popper's Penguins (2011)

Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

Absolutely brilliant

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

I just find him really irritating. He was good in the mask and truman show, but often he's just really IRRITATING. Sorry. To be honest, I think he probably knows this.

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Before I start, I'd just like to say that movies don't necessarily have to follow the source material to be good. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, The Neverending Story, Conan the Barbarian(the original movie), and most Disney animated movies are good examples of fun movies that are basically the stories in-name-only. As long as there's a good creative team behind it, a movie can be great even without following the source. ...But then, there are movies that obviously don't have anything to do with the source material, that whoever produced it just said "Ooh, this thing has a nice title to it. Turn out a script in two weeks, get some actors who will work for scale, and put as much awkward symbolism and/or gross-out humor in it as you can. People don't have enough to do on a Saturday, so they'll see it no matter how much it sucks and we'll get money off of it! Genius!" Blood & Chocolate, Inspector Gadget, and everything by Uwe Boll are all movies that have fallen prey to greedy producers, becoming horrible adaptations of terrific stories.In case you haven't guessed yet, Mr Popper's Penguins is one of them.If you've never heard of it, Mr Popper's Penguins is a 1938 children's book about a man who inherits penguins and decides to put on a show with them, traveling the vaudeville circuit and becoming household names. The writing's nothing special, but the ideas and some of the humor is really great and would have made for a fun movie. Throw Jim Carrey in the mix and you would have the ingredients for an incredible family movie! I was excited to see this... but now all it does is make me mad as hell!The movie has absolutely NOTHING to do with the book. The setting is wrong, the characters are wrong, the story is wrong, the message is wrong, everything is wrong! Like I said before, I wouldn't mind so much if they were replaced with good ideas, but they're NOT! The story in a nutshell is that Mr Popper, played by Jim Carrey, is a divorced, highly paid, white-collar worker who gets a penguin as a posthumous gift from his late father, who, as we learn from a poor opening, never spent enough time with him. By accident, he receives 5 more and he has to find a way to live with them in the middle of New York. Hijinks ensure. ...Actually, not really, because this movie is blander than Kevin Costner eating Styrofoam on wheat toast...The entire movie is a contrivance, using every single tired cliché. The dad is divorced but still has a loving family that visits him, he's almost at the top of his game but is suddenly dragged down by something close to him, he needs to learn that family comes before business, the animal sidekicks do things that are cute, funny, and impossible for normal animals to do normally, a penguin wants to fly, and so on and so forth. We've seen all these ideas in practically every family film of the last decade! We know what's going to happen, we know how it will end, and there are no surprises or clever lines throughout!How are the characters? BORING! Yes, even Jim Carrey, one of the funniest people of the big screen! Normally, he's a very flexible, very over-the-top guy who puts as much energy into his roles as he possibly can. But here, he always looks like he's restrained, like someone off-screen is constantly telling him to not steal the spotlight from the penguins. As a result, we have a very boring Carrey who seems to frown and act depressed the entire movie. Besides Carrey, we have Ophelia Lovibond, whose only role is to perform alliteration with "P" words, Clark Gregg who plays a sleazy bad guy that only gets 5 minutes of screen time, and Angela Lansbury(yes, THE Angela Lansbury) who is much too talented to be in this movie.Let's talk about the humor. The humor is about as juvenile as it can get. All jokes are aimed at kids, and the producers are praying that penguins screaming at a picture of a shark will get the kids laughing. And that's the height of the humor here. There is a lot, a LOT, of gross-out jokes in this movie. One of the penguins, named Stinky appropriately enough, constantly breaks wind throughout the movie. Oh, and there's a two-minute scene of Popper holding the penguins over a toilet and... let's just say it's time to refill your popcorn here. The humor is bottom-of-the-barrel generic kid movie stuff that will probably leave anyone over 3-years-old groaning.Well, maybe the story is good? NO! Without giving much away, the story is a contrived mess without logic or creative thought. For example, when Carrey reads that penguins like cold environments, does he buy a freezer? No, he just opens the windows, letting snow and ice flood a very expensive New York penthouse. His care of the penguins becomes more and more of an obsession throughout the movie, to the point where it actually gets scary and he neglects his family, his job, and any sense of other responsibility. The whole plot is based around the requirement that everybody be an idiot. Nobody thinks, nobody plans, they just do, creating unlikable characters and unlikable settings.Overall, this is one of the WORST MOVIES I HAVE EVER SEEN! There is no thought, no creativity, no effort, NOTHING! I am AMAZED at how lazy this movie is! It was clearly only made to make money for the studio or to provide a way for younger audiences to shut up for 95 minutes. My recommendation: Give your kids the book, give the Goodwill store the DVD, and watch one of the several dozen GOOD movies Jim Carrey has made.

I always liked the lame and gross funny stuff that Carrey started out doing, but this is getting all too sentimental... Oh, and of course he has done some wonderful drama ('Eternal Sunshine...'), but such is beside the point here.Jim Carrey has his moments and so do the penguins, but overall this is your very average family film for Christmas. I could've known, but wanted to try it anyway. As far as I could tell, there were mostly computer animated penguins, but also a few small parts with actual penguins. The (love)story is nothing new and towards the end gets out of hand in an overly sentimental way. Again - I could have known...Even as a light snack in between actual movie meals, this is hardly worth the effort. The given 'Carrey + penguins = some fun' made it just watchable. 4 out of 10.