‘Free Birds’ Should Have Stayed Cooped Up

Reggie (Owen Wilson) is Different (TM) from all the other turkeys on his farm. He alone realizes that all the free food is just to fatten them up for consumption by humans. As a result, he is an Outsider (TM). But this pays off when it ends up making him the turkey pardoned by the President on Thanksgiving. For a while, Reggie lives a comfortable life at Camp David, scarfing down pizza and watching telenovelas all day long. But then he’s abducted by Jake (Woody Harrelson), another turkey who believes that he needs Reggie’s help to find the time machine secretly hidden beneath Camp David. Jake wants to use this machine to go back to the Plymouth Settlement of 1621, crash the first Thanksgiving, and make sure that turkey-eating never becomes a tradition.

The duo, despite copious amounts of Bickering (TM) do indeed find the machine (voiced by George Takei) and travel back in time. Once in 1621, they hook up with a flock of turkeys who are also Native Americans, although Reggie’s Love Interest (TM) has the distinctively white name of Jenny. (Also, she’s voiced by Amy Poehler. And she has breasts, despite being a turkey, making her the latest example of a very strange animation trend.) The turkey tribe are under constant threat from the pilgrims of Plymouth, led by the cartoonishly evil, hunt-happy Miles Standish (who looked like this historically, but is now swarthy, reed-thin, and has a Snidely Whiplash mustache and a dastardly Cockney accent, courtesy of Colm Meany). Reggie, Jake, and the Indian-turkeys get up to various shenanigans, during which they learn important lessons about Friendship (TM), Courage (TM), and Belief (TM), until finally one of them realizes that the pilgrims are armed with muskets while they have a damn time machine, and use that to very easily resolve the situation.

I watched this.

I thought that no movie this year could possibly top Turbo for sheer lazy, no-fucks-given story ideas, but Free Birds proved me utterly wrong. And yet the badness does not end with the premise. Of course a movie whose very core is so tremendously dumb would be just as boneheaded in its execution of that premise. Said idiotic execution begins with a President presented as a Clinton caricature for some reason, continues with one of the 1621 turkeys being a unibrowed Hispanic stereotype, and ends with a new version of the first Thanksgiving in which pilgrims and turkeys dine on baldly product-placed pizzas. Along the way comes sub-Family Guy humor (of both the pop culture reference and jokes-going-on-for-too-long variety) that draws no laughs and  attempts at pathos that provoke quite a few.

Any given scene from Free Birds seems more like a YouTube parody of stupid children’s films than a piece of something that real human beings put together with honest artistic intent. It tries to ape Pixar’s buddy-comedy-with-life-lessons formula, but a formula only works if you follow its rules. This film grafts cliches onto a formless plot that does not progress so much as it spills from one scene to the next. It’s so embarrassingly bad it didn’t even manage to please my screening audience full of children. And what’s an animated film without that? A sad, sad specimen.

Grade: D