From the Vaults: Blogorium Review - Igor

The cruelest thing you can say about a movie is that it's inconsequential. There are a lot of ways to damn a film with faint praise, but the harshest one I can think of is to say that all of the effort behind the camera amounts to something that's neither really good or really bad: instead, it's of no consequence.

It takes a degree of passion to love or to hate a movie. Even to like or dislike something means the film had some impact on you. You remembered it enough to give it a pass or warn others to steer clear. I have a handful of those coming along later this week, but there are movies that just have no impact on you at all. The instantly forgettable films that litter the closet of your mind, gathering dust in the corner.

Sadly, Igor is such a film. That bums me out to say it because clearly the makers of the film had their heart in the right place. Igor is trying to be to classic horror stories what Kung Fu Panda is to chop sockey films: a gateway for kids. But where Panda succeeds, Igor merely lumbers along, faintly entertaining until it ends.

Part of the problem is that you can tell a story about Kung Fu and still be "kid friendly" while appealing to adults. Igor is trying to strike the balance between scaring children (something they love, by the way) and still playing it safe enough so that parents won't turn the movie off. And it plays it a little too safe. The fights in Kung Fu Panda have consequences for the characters. Igor may be the tamest movie to feature a suicidal rabbit and a brain in a jar, and that does it no favors in the long run.

On paper, the story sounds pretty good: in the country of Malaria, Mad Scientists spend all year working on evil creations and then show them off in front of the world as ransom ("Pay us or we'll unleash them on you"). You're either born a peasant, a scientist, or an Igor. Since Igors are the lowest class, they only exist to help the mad scientists and to be recycled into spare parts. One Igor (John Cusack) has dreams of his own, and when Dr. Glickenstein, his scientist, is accidentally killed, he gets the chance to make his own "evil" creation.

Since his earlier, secret, experiments, Scamper, an immortal rabbit with a death wish and Brian/Brain, a brain in a jar with a robot arm, don't need to hide anymore, they help. Of course, since Igor isn't all evil, his ability to create life from death backfires, and Eva is born. She's sweet, and that just won't do. In the background, the evil Dr. Schaudenfreude (Eddie Izzard) is looking to take over Malaria and wants to steal Eva to do it.

It's not hard to guess how this all plays out, along with some other background details about how Malaria came to be the home of Mad Scientists or what Eva's story arc will look like. The predicability isn't the problem though. Most kids movies aren't hard to work out, and Igor throws in some nice touches about the day to day workings of Malaria, like a brain washing facility. It's just that the movie only really does enough to skate by and nothing more.

Nobody in the cast is doing anything wrong either: John Cusack gives the title character that "everyman" he brings to all of his roles, and Steve Buscemi is fine as Scamper, the aforementioned bunny who can't die because he's immortal. The rest of the cast does so well that I honestly didn't recognize the voices of Sean Hayes, John Cleese, Jennifer Coolidge, Christian Slater, Arsenio Hall, Jay Leno, or Molly Shannon. In fact, I had no idea Molly Shannon was playing Eva until the credits rolled.

Have you noticed how much of this is just recap? I can't honestly thing of things that sway me one way or the other about Igor. The budget was clearly pretty low, since there are times where Dr. Schaudenfreude's face doesn't move at all, other than his mouth. I liked the tiny references to movies like Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, and The Fly, but ultimately Igor is just inconsequential. I can't imagine ever wanting or needing to see it again and a mere 24 hours later I'm already forgetting the movie.

It's damning, but true: some movies amount to nothing. There's nothing particularly wrong with Igor, nor is there anything particularly right. Their hearts were in the right place, but the movie doesn't work. It's just "meh", and that bums me out. I could've done something more productive with my time, even if it was a movie I hated. Such a shame...


Thoughts from 2010: Another way to look at Igor is to compare it directly with Monsters vs. Aliens, which is the Science Fiction equivalent of the film. Both are relatively entertaining while you're watching them, but utterly forgettable hours later. It's not that they're doing anything wildly wrong, it's merely that the end result is so formulaic that they fail to be the genre deconstructions they set out to be.