Alpha and Omega (review)

Hoorah for Humphrey the wolf! He’s madly in love with future pack leader Kate, even though he is but a low-ranking cur: call him the pack clown. And she’s getting ready to be married off to another alpha, which she has agreed to for the good of the pack, because, you know, animals who mate for life could totally be fobbed off into arranged marriages by their politicking parents. But now Humphrey (the voice of Justin Long: Going the Distance) and Kate (the voice of Hayden Panettiere: I Love You, Beth Cooper) have been kidnapped by humans and dumped into a strange park far from home. Surely this just the opportunity Humphrey has been waiting for to subvert biolgical reality and make Kate fall in love with him. If only Alpha and Omega were merely this woefully misbegotten. But no: the CGI animation -- pointlessly rendered in 3D -- is plastic and cheap. The bizarre non sequiturs that pass for jokes -- such as the golf-playing goose who really, really hates cupcakes -- make the poop jokes sound like wit. Perhaps worst of all, the lupine howling at the moon has been transformed into something that sounds like overproduced pop muzak. When it’s not deeply unfunny, it’s deeply creepy. It should have gone straight to DVD, where it could have been easily ignored. Better still, it should have been left on the bottom of that shoe and never scraped off in the first place.