Epic review

Directed by Chris Wedge ("Robots") on a budget of $93 million with distribution from 20th Century Fox; "Epic" is the animated adventure story about a teenage girl who discovers a hidden world of tiny super-humans who battle ugly creatures who want nothing but to destroy the forest. What's that you say? That's the plot for "Ferngully: The Last Rainforest?" Well DUUHHHHHHHHH!!!!! Jesus H. Christ, what the hell did I do to deserve such tripe?! I could have seen Star Trek again and instead, I had to watch this load of sh-

The plot follows Mm-Kay (Amanda Seyfried) as she is forced to live with her eccentric dad (Jason Sudeikis) who believes there is a race of tiny people living in the woods. Naturally Mm-Kay doesn't believe him until she witnesses the death of the Queen Tara (Beyonce Knowles), the protector of the forest from the hands of the evil Mandrake (Christoph Waltz), leader of the Electric Boggans. Because she just happened to be around, Mm-Kay is shrunk down to the size of the Leaf-People. Being led by the leader, Ronin (Colin Farrell), she teams up with obvious love interest whom they will fall in love even though they practically know nothing about each other Nod (Josh Hutcherson), a leaf-man wannabe snail Grub (Chris O'Dowd) and a really unfunny slug hitting on Mm-Kay named Mud (Aziz Ansari). There's also a glowworm named Nim Galuu (Steven Tyler) and a gambling frog who's only in the movie for two scenes and he's voiced pointlessly by Pitbull. Noticing something here?

Word of the wise to future screenwriters: if your movie takes more than three people to write a screenplay, it's clearly going to suck. This movie graces us with five, one of which includes children author William Joyce, who not only wrote the original book this movie was based on, but also co-wrote a movie I enjoyed last year, "Rise of the Guardians."

So what the f*ck happened here?

This story is so predictable, you might as well bring a checklist of every screenwriting cliche and mark it off. The characters are boring, the voice acting sounds phoned-in so most of the time, you thought the voice-acting for "Battle for Terra" was bad? The voice-acting here sounds uninvolved and distant. Even the two characters who are meant to be our comic relief, they had me rolling my eyes and running my fingers through my hair in annoyance.

So now you would think the only saving grace of this movie would have been the visuals, but let me tell you, even they managed to fail here. The locations and the characters resemble Barbie dolls more than actual breathing human beings. Remember how wooden-looking the characters looked in that "Star Wars The Clone Wars" TV show? Yeah, they look horrible here. Even the colorful backgrounds resemble plastic trees you put in your house to hide the fact you can't grow for sh*t. The music in forgettable, which is saying something considering Danny Elfman has his name in the credits and I didn't even make that connection, not because it was so good that I hadn't noticed, but that it sounded so generic that I couldn't even tell the difference.

This is a bad movie, this is a movie that lowers itself to making sugar-high 6 year-olds laugh through dumb jokes, unfunny visual gags and an overdone story that can go and join the ranks of "Avatar," a movie that aims to look good but lacks originality. There was potential early on, mind you, Mm-Kay comes to her dad's house they reveal through dialogue that her mom has died and she is hoping her dad could give up on his quest so they could be a normal-functioning family. This one moment was the only piece of sincerity I felt from the characters throughout his whole movie and the opening battle where Nod flees a group of Boggans is intense as it portrays a sense of dread for falling at tall heights, but that all goes down the toilet the minute Beyonce appears on screen, then the movie goes down-hill from here.

This is not just a pretentious movie, it's a lazy one that doesn't put enough heart or originality to make a seasoned ciniphile give a fuck. "Rise of the Guardians" had a been-there done-that story, but it managed to keep my interest with fascinating characters. This movie is just for the little, little kids and nothing more. Parents, just take your kids to see "Star Trek Into Darkness" again, or better yet, just watch "Rise of the Guardians" at home, both are far more enjoyable to watch and feature interesting characters with believable effects.

Final Rating: 0/5 "Epic" is an Epic Failure.

If you can't wow me with your visual effects, give me an engaging story. If you can't give me an engaging story, distract me with pretty visuals. This movie failed in both categories.

Mark my words, unless I can find one even worse, this will be my Worst Movie of 2013. I'm dead serious.