Set in Southern California, a father moves his young family to the countryside to renovate and re-open a struggling zoo.
Crowe’s sincerity as a filmmaker is both his greatest strength and weakness, and it’s the weaknesses that make the biggest impact in this dishearteningly average movie.
It’s slight, sure, and there’s a better, less-glossy film buried in the material, but warm performances redeem Crowe’s agreeable return.
Zoo is the antithesis of edgy, an overlong, all encompassing experience that despite Crowe’s integrity and lightness of touch doesn’t deliver the emotional experience of, say, Jerry Maguire or Almost Famous. Still, it is good to have the righteous dude back.
Instead of [director Crowe's] genial emotional truth-telling, we have trite implausibility; it’s a movie caged by its own lack of complexity and ambition.
The picture may be too wholesome and twee for fans’ of the director’s edgier work like Almost Famous but it deserves to be a big hit with families.
What emerges is a picture that makes for pleasant enough viewing, even if it is more of a walk in the municipal park than a safari park.
A warm, Sunday-afternoon-in-the-park type of movie, if that’s your thing.
Amid the mush, coercively overscored by Jónsi from the Icelandic band Sigur Rós, there’s good support from Thomas Haden Church and Elle Fanning, but the main thing keeping this grounded is Damon’s performance, which is square, shaded and honest enough to make Crowe’s featherbrained film touching in spite of itself.
The film lost me at “hallo”.
Even the predictable feelgood ending in which crowds are lining up for the big reopening feels like a hopeful plea for the audiences that didn’t show up to Crowe’s previous three flops.
It's an easy-going, likable film.
It's the kind of movie where the bereaved hero will say of his lost wife, "she loved red tights and blueberry pop tarts". Pass that mop and bucket.
With an overblown score, endless cut-aways of cute animals and plenty of talk about life being an adventure, no opportunity to tug at our heartstrings is missed.
Shameless.
There is no harm in it and not a single surprise.
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General release. Check local listings for show times.
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