While there are many, many terrible animated films in Hollywood’s history, none of them quite measure up to the utter atrocity that is 2013’s “Foodfight!”
While this Charlie Sheen-led film is horrible, the story behind it is an even greater travesty. Judging by the cast, it’s pretty obvious this movie was supposed to come out in 2002. Castmembers Wayne Brady, Chris Kattan, Eva Longoria, Hilary Duff and the aforementioned tiger-blood-drinker, all lost a fair amount of their star power by the time this movie was finally released in 2013.
The lack of quality on screen defies belief. This movie was released around the same time as “Frozen” and “The Wind Rises,” and it is astounding how far short this monstrosity lags behind in animation capability. Broadly, the plot of this film follows Dex Dogtective’s (Sheen) quest to rescue his abducted girlfriend, Sunshine Goodness.
The names of the characters are icons of certain grocery brands. They all exist within a grocery store, hilariously and nonsensically coming to life from their motionless product.
Beyond the plot’s lack of sense, the animation is awful. In an age where animation consistently pushes the limits of reality, the wooden motion-capture style is disheartening to say the least. The characters all have a bad habit of moving nothing but their mouths, and frequently engage in a trope of bad animation — forearm acting.
Forearm acting happens when character animators have no idea what they’re doing, and can’t animate facial muscles moving in a realistic way. So characters emote by waving their arms around, squirming in a way that makes the audience wonder if the filmmakers used spastic orangutans as motion-capture actors.
But the crowning jewel in this massive pile of steaming horse manure is the writing. With this plot and characters with the names mentioned above, you could safely assume that “Foodfight!” is meant for children. But oh, is that a terrible assumption to make. The amount of terrible double entendres and innuendos in this movie defies comprehension. Some of the greatest hits include, “are those melons real?” and a squirrel played by Brady saying, “she’s got a real taste for chocolate!”
A reasonable mind would find something like this offensive, and indeed, many have. There’s a reason this film is so reviled among Internet reviewers — the “so bad it’s good” moniker ceases to be applicable when there are so many sex puns.
Finally, this travesty of modern cinema makes several nudge-wink references to the classic film“Casablanca,” but honestly, not even mentioning one of the greatest films ever made can offset this disaster of a movie.
