Director Brings In The Noise But Just Gives More Funk In "9"

9
Rated PG-13 for violence and scary images.
79 minutes
Focus Features
*** out of 5

When it comes to computer-animated feature films, there are some who get it and some who do not. There also happen to be some who are stuck in the middle and have great ideas, compelling visuals but still manage to skimp on the story in favor of getting to the next action sequence. The same tends to go along with the big dumb action movies of summer. When your new computer-animated feature film feels the need to be one of those movies it deserves to be released in the dump days of September. Marketing executives also must have thought they’d struck the ultimate goldmine when a film is called “9” as they have the even more ultimate release date of 9/9/09. However, it’s a good thing the movie is as loud and obnoxious as it is to keep you awake when the screening you attend also happens to be at 9:09 p.m.

Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov have never made the most emotionally fulfilling films. But they each have produced enough crowd pleasers filled with enough story to make up for their lack of emotion or true character. With the likes of “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” “Beatlejuice,” 1989’s “Batman,” “Edward Scissorhands,” “Ed Wood,” “Big Fish,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” and “Corpse Bride,” along with “Night Watch,” “Day Watch” and “Wanted” you would think that even if the story was slim, as producers they would be able to help first time feature director Shane Acker come up with something more arresting than what they’ve given us with Acker’s own freshman effort “9.”

Based on Acker’s own Oscar nominated short film and padded out for an additional 68 minutes, “9” begins in a post-apocalyptic world where the only “living” things are robotic dolls created by The Scientist (voiced by Alan Oppenheimer). The Scientist has also created a machine that holds “The Brain” which was meant as a way for creating peace only to be stolen by Dictator (Tom Kane) and it winds up being the end of civilization instead. A group of these rag-tag dolls led by #1 (voiced by Christopher Plummer) are amassing to save each other as there appears to be no more humans which just makes the audience wonder why you’re supposed to care about their little mission to begin with. Along with #9 (voiced by Frodo himself, Elijah Wood) and the take-charge #7 (voiced by Jennifer Connelly) they fight off giant robot cat-beasts and flying sentinels right out of “The Matrix” but just when things get all “Lord of the Rings” and the characters start getting all cute and cuddly together you realize that the movie isn’t over and there’s still more pots to bang for the sound designers and more explosions to render for the computer animators.

*On a side note one character looks exactly like a do-over of Oogie Boogie from “The Nightmare Before Christmas” which just seems like a cheap way for Tim Burton fans to remember that they’re watching a movie he’s producing plus there’s also a weird throwback to the “Ghostbusters” ghost trap which again just makes the audience wish they were watching one of those other movies instead.

“9” falls far more into Burton’s category of films that consists of “Batman Returns,” “Mars Attacks,” “Sleepy Hollow” and “Planet of the Apes.” Sure they had pretty visuals, interesting effects work and brilliant moments of absurdly inspired silliness but they were big and noisy and far from par of the rest of his filmography. I remember just back in 2004 when the naysayers piped up upon the release of Pixar’s “The Incredibles” claiming that Pixar had joined the rest of the summer movies and that it was mere noise and explosions completely missing what that brilliant work really was, a complex dissection of comic book movies, superheroes and dysfunctional family relations. When it comes to “9” naysayers beware ‘cause you ain’t heard nothin’ yet. Here is a movie that is so bereft of complex ideas that it feels the need to crank the volume to 11 but the action sequences end just as fast they start. Before you can think “ooh” or “ahh” it’s all over and you have no idea what really just happened or how it fits into the grand scheme of things. This is a very episodic and random film. At one point #1 tells #9, “Your path takes us to catastrophe,” and Shane Acker should have heeded his own advice.