Word: alvin
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...rest of the universe, the James Cameron extravaganza again emerged dominant. At the North American box office, according to early studio estimates, the picture earned $48.5 million, or more than the combined take of the next three movies: the Victorian action-adventure Sherlock Holmes, the singing-rodents comedy Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel and the vampire drama Daybreakers, the weekend's one new release to crack the top four. (See Top 5 Underrated Sci-Fi Movie Masterpieces...
Explain to me, then, why Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel earned more than $75 million in its first five days of release. Was the boffo gross due to brand recognition after the 2007 movie about Simon, Theodore and Alvin was a hit? But that's no guarantor of success; the Stuart Little, Scooby-Doo and Garfield sequels all tanked. Were parents seeking a celluloid babysitter over the Christmas holiday? They could have taken the cherubs to The Princess and the Frog or Disney's A Christmas Carol, worthy efforts that, together, took in only about a fifth...
Send in the teen clichés. Alvin (voiced by Justin Long) joins the football team and wins a game; Simon (Matthew Gray Gubler) gets a toilet swirlie from the jock bullies; Theodore (Jesse McCartney), fretting that his brother act is close to breakup, runs away from home and gets menaced by an eagle at the zoo. There's also a musical-talent sing-off that pits the little guys against a female trio of chipmunks, the Chipettes, laboring under the management of evil Ian Hawke (David Cross), the villain from the first movie...
...musical numbers, especially those performed by the Chipettes, have a generic verve; that's the best that can be said about the movie's CGI animation. (As in G-Force, the animated rodents interact with the live-action humans.) But when it talks, or tries to develop a situation, Alvin 2 relies on shtick that sinks below even the dismal standards of high school comedies and buddy farces. Pain is the key here: the movie has more gags that involve hitting, hurting and humiliating than you'll find in an entire Super Bowl's worth of commercials...
Squeakquel seems not to have been written so much as manufactured from an unwarranted pride in the first Alvin and desperation about what to do next. (If the director played by Daniel Day-Lewis in Nine had seen this movie, his sudden awareness of what the competition was producing would have instantly unblocked his creative sinuses.) The picture's single triumph, true to the mercantile nature of the enterprise, is thunderously obvious product placement. During one of their many demolition scenes, the Chipmunks perform the Kinks' "You Really Got Me" while opening a bag of Utz Cheese Balls. The whole...