The Ant Bully Review 2

Lileks didn't like it either:

The main characters. There’s Lucas the Ant Bully, who picks on ants because big kids pick on him. Through the marvel of recent advances in ant necromancy, he gets shrunk down to ant size so he can learn important life lessons, like the need to swarm over enemy colonies and sting them to death by the millions. Well, actually, no; he learned the virtues of community and sharing and helping, etc. At one point he’s on a mushroom with the wizard ant looking at the great & glorious human city in the distance. The wizard asks about human society, and he is amazed that humans don’t all work together. That is not the Ant Way, which is selfless and communal. John Galt wept. I mean, is it too much to ask that the kid at least stick up for humans? A little? Nope! We’re all selfish and individualistic, scorning the common good, which is why the distant city they’re observing is brightly lit and reaches for the heavens, and the ants are all naked drones giving in a defenseless hole, ruled by a gigantic maternal ant (Meryl Streep.)

Lucas the Reluctant Ant could have been a fine character, but as written he’s a sullen humorless self-pitying shite for half the movie, and most adults watching the film wanted to step on him.

The other main characters. Nicholas Cage as the wizard ant, for example. For half the movie I thought he was Tom Hanks. Julia Roberts plays the nice-girl ant who befriends the Ant Bully for reasons absent to the disinterested observer; boring. There’s a boastful vain stupid ant played by Bruce Campbell, but I couldn’t tell. Something is very wrong when you cannot detect the presence of Bruce Campbell. And there’s a sassy ant with attitude, too. Because you gots to have a character with Attitude.

The human character models, with the exception of the exterminator, are unattractive and off-putting. There’s a crrrrazy toothless granny who thinks aliens are coming to abduct her, a subplot that exists for no apparent reason, except to make her “colorful” and “wacky,” and provide a rationale for putting fans all over the house so the ants can have a hang-gliding expedition. (The granny believes that the aliens hate fans. Why? Because the script required it.)

The script. I swear, nearly every computer animated movie is funded by Pixar, just to remind you how good they are. Even “A Bug’s Life,” which ranks low on the general Pixar-love scale (I like it more than “Nemo,” frankly – you can’t beat that troupe of misbegotten circus insects) had an amusing script. “Ant Bully’ ladles out one thin cliché after the other; every line of dialogue is witless, strained, leaden, derivative, or annoying. It’s one of those movies where everything everyone says could be replaced with “I’m shouting out Expository Dialogue!” and every scene would have had the same impact.

The length. Any movie that seeks to immerse you in the wonderful world of insects yet makes you learn for the exterminator to show up has gone on too long. And not just because you know that’s the boss battle.