Flushed Away

By: Drop The Dude an email

Director: David Bowers, Sam Fell
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Ian McKellan, Jean Reno, Bill Nighy
Rating: 2 out of 5
 
Next time you down a particularly spicy curry and spend the next 48 hours damaging the Dalton, spare a thought for the folk who live in the sewers. No, I’m not talking about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I’m talking about the rats and the frogs.

No, I’m not considering joining the RSPC-flaming-A. It’s just that according to this here Flushed Down the Toilet movie, there’s a community of rodents and aforementioned amphibians under the streets of London (which could be from where they recruited a hefty portion of the English cricket team).

Anyways, these animals are down there living the crap out of life on our crap, and they’re chucking parties and watching soccer (supporting their locals if you catch me drift), and generally living it up.

It’s kinda Wallace and Gromit meets TMNT meets The Little Rascals meets some other movie set in a sewer with little animated frogs and rats.

There’s the usual sight and verbal gags, along with the now obligatory reference to pop culture that these animated flicks have turned into their bread and butter. The only problem is that as an adult sitting in a room full o’ kids when I saw this – there were too many fart, poo and wee jokes that went over the heads of the miniature audience.

It don’t have the visual bang for your DVD buck that say, Cars has, and it also does not have the razor sharp lines of Shrek – or Evil Woman - is what The Dude is gettin' at.

The good folk who crafted this flick have stuffed it to the eyeballs with toilet gags, and while there are a few nuggets in there – pun intended thank you very much –  they are few and far between.

What happens is that there’s this well to do snobby type o’ rat named Hugh Jackman who falls in love with Kate Winslet after he gets flushed further down the loo than an Asian nerd at a frat house booze up. Racist!

He then has to go and save the little village below what is under attack by some maniacal frog with a bad case of revenge over some childhood trauma I wasn’t much paying attention to.

The Dude has to scratch his head and wonder if kids these days are even interested in watchin’ these sort of movies. What with the internet making it so easy for them to watch all the things their parents so no to on YouTube – like the top 10 moments from The Family Guy.
 
Verbatim:
Roddy: “Roddy St James saves the day!”

In a word: Amusing