"Fat Ablertbr>DVD Review
by Kevin Carr
| MOVIE: *1/2 (out of 5 stars)
DVD EXPERIENCE: **1/2 (out of 5 stars) STARRING Kenan Thompson as FAT ALBERT Kyla Pratt as DORIS Dania Ramirez as LAURI Shedrck Anderson III as RUDY Aaron A. Frazier as OLD WEIRD HAROLD Mques B. Houston as DUMB DONALD Alphonso McAuley as BUCKY Keith D. Robinson as BILL Jermaine Williams as MUSHMOUTH Bill Cosby as HIMSELF Rated PG Studio: 20th Century Fox Directed by: Joel Zwick Back to DVD Review Home |
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I may not have grown up on the streets. Oh sure, my lily white suburb where I spent my formative days had its streets, but they weren’t really all that tough. But even though I was from the ‘burbs, I still watched the shows on television that were set in the city - shows like “Sesame Street” and “Fat Albert.” So, in a way, you can say that I, too, grew up with the Cosby Kids.
For years, Hollywood has been making live-action films based on kids cartoons and old television shows. Sometimes you have clever ones - like the first “Scooby Doo” movie - and sometimes you have awful ones - like the second “Scooby Doo” movie.
In “Fat Albert,” Bill Cosby and company decided not to just tell another version of the hit cartoon show. Instead, they brought Fat Albert and the gang into the real world. It felt like they were trying to recapture the magic of “The Brady Bunch Movie” by juxtaposing the Fat Albert kids against the modern teenage life. But unlike “The Brady Bunch Movie,” this film didn’t even have a decent excuse.
It seems that the “Fat Albert” show is alive and well on TV Land, and one day a young girl named Doris (Kyla Pratt) in North Philadelphia starts crying while watching the show. Her teardrop lands on her remote, which suddenly opens a portal to the cartoon world and allows Fat Albert and his friends to cross over. Fat Albert claims he’s there to solve problems because that’s what he does, so he takes on his personal mission to find some friends for Doris.
Okay, stop. You probably think I’m making this up. Well, I’m not. It’s the shakiest plotline I’ve seen since some old “Richie Rich” cartoons I caught on Boomerang with my three-year-old son. At first, I was tempted to say that the story didn’t make sense, but it does. It just is silly.
Forget the plot holes. Forget the fact that no one else (except a little kid at a street fair) seems to notice that these guys are the Fat Albert gang - even when Fat Albert yells, “Hey, hey, hey! It’s Faaaaat Albert.” Forget the fact that the premise of the show was NEVER that Fat Albert is a guy who solves problems. I can’t even get past the stepping-out-of-the-TV idea. It worked in “The Ring.” Not so much here.
The cast is only so-so, and they are at the whim of the script and the director. Some of the Cosby Kids are pretty well done, like Bucky, Rudy and Old Weird Harold. But Bill stands out too much, Dumb Donald’s hat looks like an old dishrag and Mushmouth is can’t speak like Mushmouth and wears clothes tighter than Eric Estrada’s on “CHiPs.”
While I could stomach the movie, I had a terrible time choking down the commentary track with producer John Davis and director Joel Zwick. It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t talk down to their audience like we were still in diapers. To make matters worse, Zwick actually brags about how important it is to have a solid story with strong characters. I don’t disagree with this philosophy, but these things are completely absent in “Fat Albert.”
The DVD is salvaged by an assortment of extended scenes and a few behind-the-scenes featurettes, although these really don’t make a whole lot of sense. It did, however look like they had fun making the movie. But as Steven Soderberg once said, if that was the measure of a movie’s worth, then “Cannonball Run” would be the greatest film of all time.
Specifications: Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound. Fullscreen (1.33:1) and widescreen (2.35:1) presentations. French and Spanish language tracks. Spanish subtitles. English subtitles for the hearing impaired.
