On Feb. 6, director Alex Zamm released the “Woody Woodpecker” movie straight to DVD which is probably his worst work to date. This movie was all kinds of failure from blasting music from 17 years ago, a sadly-terrible script, and hard to believe characters to an overall awful direction.
Lance Walters (Tim Omundson) is a lawyer who decides that his next big thing is to build an investment home in the middle of a forest. To an uninteresting turn of events, Woody (Eric Bauza), an animated bird lives in the tree that’s to be cut down by Lance’s contractor to make space for their future building plans. Woody’s character is supposed to be a cartoon targeting an audience of young kids. It comes as no surprise that the director failed horribly at creating a lovable character for children and instead created a lonely scary bird that starts fires, poops in people’s hair, chews on wood, and creepily undresses kids by chewing off their clothes. His famous giggly laughter was only successful in imitating that of a triumphant serial killer.
Woody is an animated character in the form of a pileated woodpecker whose other members of the species are extinct. One would think the fact that his kind has been extinct for almost 100 years in the movie and his character was created in the early 1900s would have made him extinct from Hollywood by now as well. Woody has been a failed character for almost 100 years, but he was not the reason this movie failed. The main cause of this film’s inevitable collapse was a collective action by the entire cast. All of the characters lacked chemistry, and it was more like watching an Ad about how bad direction looks. At the beginning of the movie, it is hard to decipher whether the other characters can hear Woody, the talking bird, or not. While interacting with Woody, the character’s faces seemed as though they were looking far into the distance, unaware of his presence.
Some of the scenes seemed as though the director did not even bother to make them believable. There’s a scene where Woody is forcefully locked in a cage so big he could have slid out of it effortlessly. At some point, Woody even stretches his whole body except his leg, out of the cage to threaten his abductors. Watching this scene was very frustrating, but then again Woody is just a fictional, animated talking bird.
The main cast is pretty much the whole cast apart from a few characters here and there who are used more like props than actual people with thoughts and opinions. Tommy’s two friends are only seen on screen when the script says it is time to show off Woody’s musical talents, and so a band is formed.
It is hard to choose the worst thing about this movie, but it hits its lowest when it assassinates the reputation of the one recognizable character in this film. It is hard to believe that Tommy (Graham Verchere) is the same kid who delivered a killer performance on “The Good Doctor.” In “Woody Woodpecker,” he speaks as though someone is showing him the script for the first time and one can almost sense mockery in his laughter when he laughs at the highly
unsuccessful jokes. No expert critics even bothered to comment anything about this movie. 0 out of 5 paws
