PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 9/30/04)


If Finding Nemo proved the impossible by getting human audiences to care about the plight of a few measly fish, DreamWorks' Shark Tale manages to achieve the opposite. Here's a movie about a vegetarian shark (Jack Black) that should have you and the kids eating fish again in no time.

Welcome to the world of Oscar the "Shark Slayer" (Will Smith), whose turf inexplicably looks like an Atlantean version of Times Square, complete with blinking neon billboards for stores like "Gup" and "Old Wavy." If you're more amused than alarmed by the infiltration of deep-sea product placement in Oscar's hood, then you should have an easier time than this critic did getting past the many paradoxes of Shark Tale's meticulously detailed yet frustratingly impossible backdrop.

Why, for instance, do fish need apartments with elevators and stairs? And who or what exactly rides inside those checkered yellow taxi fish? Or, to quote Oscar after he loses 5000 clams at the seahorse races, "He tripped underwater! Who trips underwater?" I guess such questions are a sign of poor sportsmanship in the face of a high-concept comedy like this, but I can't help but wonder why tell an animated mobsters–meet–wannabe gangsta story underwater at all.

What does the aquatic setting offer animators except an anti-gravity environment and an excuse to hit us with every fish pun in the book? It's as if a team full of story editors sat around a whiteboard listing every fish gag they could think of, then mercilessly tried to cram them all into one 90-minute movie. (If fish puns are what you're after, check out Kip Addotta's classic "Wet Dream" sketch from the Dr. Demento radio show instead.)

Where Pixar gives us heart, the DreamWorks crew serves up tired pop-culture references from an unsympathetic lineup of non-characters, "fishified" celebrity voices—including Oscar winners Renée Zellweger, Angelina Jolie, and (scene-stealer) Robert De Niro, along with motormouth director Martin Scorsese—playing creepy-looking versions of themselves with fins, all in the name of a weak allegory about a macho dad learning to accept his gay son. If you were hoping to find another Nemo, you're likely to be let down by this insincere and borderline unpleasant alternative.

—Peter Debruge