Jim Carrey is a haunted man and if you’re not careful Mr Popper’s Penguins will follow you to your grave. You think I’m joking? You think this is going to be one of those smart-alec reviews delivered with a knowing wink because it’s just a silly kids movie? Go find a cinema showing this, sit down in front of the screen and spend the next 85 minutes staring into Jim Carrey’s eyes and try to come out of the cinema with a reason to live. Good luck.
Carrey hasn’t been making many films lately – the recently released I Love You Phillip Morris was sitting on a shelf since 2009 and the one before that was the all-CGI Christmas Carol, making his last mainstream comedy 2008’s Yes Man – but whatever it is he had that made him a star, he’s still got it. Mr Popper’s Penguins doesn’t want him using all that much of it because it’s a kids’ movie about adorable CGI penguins, not a rubber-faced loon who gives off a palpable sense of menace. But it’s still there. Only now it’s brought the Devil along for the ride.
The story begins with Popper growing up listening to his explorer dad on ham radio as he tours the world giving his son the gift of emotional distance. It’s a gift that comes in handy 30 years later when he lurches on screen with a divorced wife and two kids who supposedly like him but don’t want to spend any actual time alone with him. Suits him fine, he’s busy being the sleaziest real estate developer ever. This is meant to be a kids’ movie, right?
As a real estate developer Carrey does that charming but creepy but compelling bit that he’s been doing at least as far back as Liar Liar, and it almost makes up for rubbish “jokes” like him sniffing a contract and saying “I love the smell of toner in the morning”. Kids, you remember Apocalypse Now, right? Oh, hang on, this is one of those “kids movies” that spends most of its time trying to persuade grown-ups not to run screaming from the cinema by casting actual funny people like Jeffery Tambor and Phillip Baker Hall in roles that could have been played by hamsters. They’re supposed to distract you from the fact you’re watching a movie for kids that starts off with ten minutes about broken families and real estate deals. Not even hamsters could pull that one off.
Into this perfect storm of Hurt Locker references for the grown-ups and soccer balls to the groin for the kids comes penguin number one, aka The Captain. Five more soon follow via a wacky phone mix-up, but not before The Captain manages to take a dump on Carrey’s head, thus providing the perfect metaphor for how this film treats the audience.
The wild swings between farting penguins and jokes about the drug references in The Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds continue - if this film was a person you wouldn’t so much put them on meds for their mood swings as cast them in a direct-to-video movie about Batman villain Two-Face - as Popper juggles trying to convince the owner (Angela Lansbury) of New York’s Tavern on the Green restaurant to sell with the increasing demands the penguins place on his time and hang on if they’re so annoying why doesn’t he just get rid of them?
Enter Nat Jones (Clark Gregg). He works for the New York Zoo and wants to put the penguins in a controlled environment where they can be looked after properly. So, of course, he’s the villain of the film. Meanwhile, our hero wants to keep them in his apartment so his kids will love him again and yes, that’s why he keeps them – because when they’re not around his kids actually do stop loving him. Good luck ever sleeping again after you’ve digested that insight into humanity’s essential hollowness.
It’s not like Mr Popper seems able to cope with it. While the film itself is content to stagger around like a drunken high school student looking for a place to throw up – on the up side, this does include a revival of the classic bit where a wealthy dowager actually says “This is the premiere social event of the season, everything must be perfect” seconds before people in tuxes start going arse-over-head – Carrey himself is a different kettle of dolphin-friendly penguin snack entirely. In scene after scene he’s required to look exasperated at what the penguins are up to. The result is a little like squashing a blood pudding by dropping a medium sized aircraft carrier on it.
For the last decade Carrey has kept his wild flailing for his light comedies and his serious emoting for his arthouse films, but here he just doesn’t care anymore about keeping the two separate. Seeing a man at the bottom of the blackest pit of utter despair simply because a penguin dry humped his leg isn’t just off-putting; it’s a portal to an emotional Hell that even the grimmest Russian novel doesn’t want to hint at.
For those paying attention, Carrey is simply too good an actor in these scenes. This is a lightweight, incoherent comedy based largely on “ooh, aren’t penguins cute”, and yet every time he wryly shakes his head at their latest wacky mix-up we get a glimpse at a man on the brink of some personal abyss, idly dangling one foot over the edge, wishing gravity was just that little bit stronger.
If this was just your typically inappropriate, movie-destroying performance, no-one would care. But Carrey’s uncanny (in the disturbing sense of the word) portrayal of a soulless monster is utterly spot-on. Behind the farting penguins and environmentally dubious in-house winter wonderland Popper creates for the birds, this is a bleak, barren story about an emotionally distant father who crippled his son’s feelings so badly that the son was never able to figure out how to love anyone else. The penguins are fantasy, barely more convincing than the CGI used for their more extreme stunts; Carrey makes the emptiness and despair at the core of his character uncomfortably real.
If this sounds like exaggeration, just look at his eyes. His body is still one of the most ridiculously expressive things seen on-screen, and while he’s aging a bit – he’s nearly 50 – he’s hardly falling apart. But time and again his eyes are just dead. Dead, empty pits that go somewhere you do not want to follow. What’s he doing here? What’s he doing anywhere kids can see him? Why didn’t someone throw a bag over his head? Why didn’t anyone involved in this emotional horrorshow realise that no matter how many cute penguins and adorable kids and wacky scenes you pack into a film, when your lead has the eyes of a man staring straight into the void you might as well spend 85 minutes filming nothing but a sky-high mound of human skulls?
Source: The Vine
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