Bruce Campbell Week continues: cuz there’s never enough Bruce

Bruce Campbell is Fugax, ant
scout and manly man– er, antly ant.

How fortuitous for me that my overreaching ambition — thinking, as always, that I’m gonna get more done than I could possibly get done — which is gonna see Bruce Campbell Week stretch to Bruce Campbell Fortnight, can be totally justified by the fact that Bruce is “appearing” in The Ant Bully, which opens this Friday. Which I vaguely remember, in retrospect, hearing about a while ago but had totally forgotten when I sat down to see Bully on Sunday morning. Until that one charming-idiot ant called a lady ant “sugarlips” (or something like that), and I giggled. “That,” I told myself, “can only be the voice of Bruce Campbell.”

And indeed, it is Bruce as the voice of Fugax, a sort of supermacho, overconfident ant scout, but not a total writeoff — “I won’t forage for food,” he responds when it is suggested that he might pitch in with some of the women’s work, “I’ll scout for food!” He’s a little bit Ash, if Ash were a team player, and a little bit Autolycus, if Autolycus were less of a coward, and a little bit Jack Stiles, if Jack had a chitinous exoskeleton, and a little bit just, you know, Bruce.

The film is plenty funny, and worth seeing for lots of reason, but one of my favorite ones is how it shows off the talents of my man Bruce. The big names here — Nicolas Cage and Julia Roberts — are perfectly fine, but you won’t recognize them; their voices are undistinctive separated from their famous faces. But Bruce proves (as does Paul Giamatti as a human exterminator) that even when he’s got nothing but his voice to work with, he’s still utterly unforgettable.

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