Flushed Away

Review by Jason Gaston

While it may not have the heart or charm of Ardman's Chicken Run or Wallace and Grommit, the fast-paced rapid fire jokes and sheer oddity of the story and setting makes Flushed Away a winner for both the booger-eaters and the bill payers.

It goes like this, Hugh Jackman voices Roddy, a pet rat living the high life in London who, thanks to a little bad luck and bad manners, suddenly finds himself flushed down the potty and in the sewer city below the streets. There, he gets mixed up with a Toad (Ian McKellan) with ambitions of world... uh... I mean, sewer domination and a beautiful (for a rat) female voiced by Kate Winslet.

This isn't a perfect movie... as I said, it lacks any real heart and only a minimal amount of charm... but for pure concentrated loneness and quirkiness, few films will come close to it.

I mean, where else will you see Ian McKellan of all people hamming it up as an evil toad? I'll say this much for him, if there was an Oscar given out to voice actors, McKellan would have it down packed. He was outstandingly funny!

I've got to give it up to the whole cast. I remember watching Open Season a couple of months back and noted how "big" stars just seemed to phone in their performances for a paycheck. Personally, as someone who lived for well over ten years as a vocal actor, I can tell you the job is not that difficult and to sound as though your phoning in voice work shows dazzling laziness and a lack of any real talent. But these guys in Flushed Away? Forget about that! They're wonderful! Every single damned one of them!

As for the pacing of the film, any movie that can throw so much craziness at you in a ninety minute time span deserves much respect. I mean, singing slugs? Parodies? Blatant movie references? Dry British humor? This movie could have been about next to nothing for all I knew and I would have still loved sitting through it.

Flushed Away thankfully steers clear of a lot of scatological humor and easy jokes, focusing more on satire and parody of anything from James Bond to Superman. There's a lot of inventiveness in this movie as everyday objects are turned into new things in the sewer for the rats to play with and, of course, I would be remiss not mentioning the excellent action scenes that happen throughout the course of the movie.

A perfect film? Not quite... while it does steer clear of many easy jokes, it still makes a few such as frog characters being French and surrendering easily. Still, I ain't gonna knock it. This isn't the best animated movie I've seen all year, but it's up around the top.