We bought… a lemon
Heybought a zoo and we’re meant to buy Matt Damon as a get-downand-dirty journalist. No bueno.
He wears the Bourne attitude he’ll always be associated like his favourite suit as he unconvincingly covers stories. Adrenalin junkie is a more apt description of what director Cameron Crowe allows Damon to convey.
As journalist Benjamin Mee, Damon is forced to alter his lifestyle to be a present father in the lives of his two children after his wife dies.
His teenage son, Dylan (Ford), is going through a rebellious phase which consists of creating dark art and having screaming matches with his father.
Rosie (Jones) Benjamin’s daughter, is a pre-teen with the most disarming smile on celluloid this year. She’s meant to play a precocious child who is wise beyond her years and, as Benjamin would have everyone believe, the reason the family leave their big city life and buy a house on a zoo that is due to be shut down if no one agrees to manage it.
Quite possibly the best thing
Tabout this film (which is based on a true story), Jones is, in a word, cute. But some of her actions and the lines she delivers aren’t plausible. For instance, we’re meant to believe that this kid who has also recently lost her mother suddenly decides to take the evening to make peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches for her school lunch while giving her father a pep-talk about getting back into the swing of things.
When we met the Mee family, Benjamin’s kitchen needs an extreme home makeover and the father handles all the, er, culinary chores. Having not even owned a dog, Rosie is also suddenly an expert on animals and a witness to the birth of geese. Er, okay.
And now for the elephant in the room: Scarlett Johansson as the head zookeeper. I should’ve counted how many times the entire cast referred to the blonde’s good looks as a hindrance to whether she could do the job. Everyone is in love with her – except Benjamin. So the unexplored love storyline ends with Kelly falling for Benjamin, the only man who didn’t make a pass at her. This storyline shouldn’t have even been touched.
The lion and tigers are scenestealers in parts, but the popcorn would be a better reason to go to the cinema than to see this film.