Osmosis Jones

I had never heard of Osmosis Jones before, but I grew up watching the animated series based on this movie so I went into it with excitement and a nostalgic drive.

What I got was rather mixed. Let me explain.

The live-action parts pretty much sucked in my opinion. This guy named Frank (Bill Murray) is a single father taking care of his daughter and is a really unlikable father figure. How are we supposed to sympathise with a lazy and egotistical doof? I never felt sorry for him one minute. Mix that with gross-out humour which wasn't even helped the slightest by Bill Murray who is usually really funny.

Enough said about that, because the animated segments were actually pretty awesome. The world inside Frank's was impressive by how it was crafted. How it functions by having a whole community run by a mayor (William Shatner) and a police force of white blood cells and a lot of real-life city stuff showcased a lot of creative effort was put into it.

It centers on a white blood cells Osmosis Jones (Chris Rock) who is that kind of cop who does things his own way and the others at the police station do not approve of his ways, but he is later assigned to a new case with a partner to keep him on track, a cold pill named Drix (David Hyde Pierce). Sure, it follows all the buddy cop movie clichés with nothing new added, but the world they must explore and the colorful characters they meet make it entertaining albeit predictable.

Speaking of the colorful cast of characters, the most interesting and memorable of them all has to be the villian Thrax (Laurence Fishburne) who is menacing and merciless and has a deathcount very high for a PG rated movie.

Without being boring I found that Chris Rock and David Hyde Pierce seemed to do their usual schtick with Rock being hip and a loudmouth and Hyde Pierce doing his quirky and excentric british gentleman voice. But Fishburne surprised me. He could as easily just have put on his Morpheus voice, but he didn't. I'll give him more credit for that.

The live-action segments is the movie's biggest drawbacks with an unlikable main character and lowbrow humour as you would expect from the farelly brothers, and frankly (no pun intented) the animated segments aren't perfect and the transitions between the two don't always work.

But overall Osmosis I found Osmosis Jones enjoyable, but flawed. I understand why it failed in theaters, but I have seen so much worse elsewhere.

As an aesthete, this movie goes against everything I stand for, but I found it nonetheless very entertaining. It was like a peculiar yet satisfying mix between the Incredible Journey, Toy Story, and Lethal Weapon or Rush Hour (the whole loose-cannon, loner cop with a new partner bit).

I found the idea rather original: the human body is like a body of government, the cop is a white blood cell, the "president" was the cell whose will was that of the man (Bill Murray), the villain is a virus who hangs out in seedy areas of the body with shady characters, the bladder is a sort of train station/airport... clever stuff.

I did have issues with the "What a zit- I mean, what is it?" part, though: it landed on her lip! Wrong! I could have gone the rest of my life without seeing that. Molly Shannon is quite a sport. 7/10

OSMOSIS JONES / (2001) ***1/2 (out of four)

By Blake French:

Consider the Farrelly brothers. The majority of a crowd would think of adjectives like shocking and envelope pushing, to describe them, but the most shocking thing about "Osmosis Jones," is the PG rating. Originally warranted a PG-13 rating, still a surprise from filmmakers whose credits include "There's Something About Mary" and "Me, Myself, and Irene," the film finally earned the family friendly PG rating after it was subjected to a re-rating. Peter and Bobby Farrelly are known for their crude, rude, and disgusting sense of humor. Breaking free of their traditional styles, their focus is now on something a little more entertaining than gross-out humor-imagination.

Directing a wildly amusing script by Marc Hyman, the Farrelly bothers are really on to something here. This is arguably their best film to date. Only "There's Something About Mary" stands up against "Osmosis Jones," a film that jumps between live action and cartoon animation. It calculates each moment with the perfect timing. This is not a movie just for this kids, although it's perfectly appropriate for everyone in the family. This is a feast for anyone's imagination. "Osmosis Jones" creates a world we seldom see in the movies-inside the human body.

"Osmosis Jones" is not an extremely funny movie. Only a handful of plentiful laughs occurs in the film. None of the gross-out humor works; the ideas are too jumbled within other ideas to payoff. "Osmosis Jones" does play with a lot of different humor types-from a clever "Titanic" joke that practically winks at the audience, to a laugh out loud performance by SNL veteran Molly Shannon. In "Superstar" Shannon proved to be a nuisance. However, in this film she is a very welcome screen presence.

Bill Murray needs to be in more movies these days. He still has the comic connection with the audience that carried "Scrooged," his best film, to my list of all time favorites. He stars as Frank Detorri, a lazy, slothful zoo worker who would get life behind bars if hygiene was a law. His wife passed away because of a sickness that their young, but healthy and intelligent, daughter (Elena Franklin) believes evolved from poor eating habits.

Frank eats something that contains a deadly virus, and it's up to his immune system to fight back. Osmosis Jones (voiced by Chris Rock) is one of those white blood cells who serves as a cop and must capture various villainous germs and viruses inside Frank. Although not a popular individual among the world of Frank, especially with the Mayor (voiced by William Shater), who is running for re-election very soon, he does have a crush on his assistant, Leah (voiced by Brandy Norwood). After the virus, named Thrax (voiced by Laurence Fishburne), accumulates villainous help and starts on a plan to kill Frank in a record time of forty eight hours, Osmosis must work with a cold pill named Drix (voiced by David Hyde Pierce), to stop this monstrously powerful germ before it's too late for Frank and his daughter.

The movie has some very clever material-various parts of the body represent neighborhoods in the City of Frank. For instance, the stomach is the airport with frequent departures to the colon. The Mafia relaxes in a steam room located in the armpit. Lawyers hang out in a hemorrhoid. When a zit pops up, it's seemingly the party room for the entire body, complete with a dance floor and strippers. Just simple content like that makes "Osmosis Jones" worth a watch. Even adults will enjoy the live action humor, as well as the film's zest, energy, and irony.

In a time when summer movies are at an all time low, "Osmosis Jones" is here to save they day. It's one of the most clever films of the year.

Whoever made this has a big imagination about what goes on inside the human body. It's very witty and smart. The whole rookie cop cliche who messes up and is THIS close to being pulled off the force and has a hunch a teams up with an unlikely buddy and ends up being right (for example, Rush Hour) is being given a whole new twist. The Farrley Brothers have done it again- and made a solid B+ stand out comedy. B+, 8/10

How does the body work?

I've always wanted to know exactly what goes on inside my body, and I must say I had a pretty fair idea thanks to my Biology class in school.

Then I saw Osmosis Jones, which completely threw me off.

The way Frank's body works and the cause/effect situations in this movie are hilarious! Frank is seen as a huge city, such as New York or Los Angeles, and blood cells live out their daily lives. The creative abilities of the creators of this movie seems endless even though it is limited to Frank's body.

The characters are well drawn-out, and we even learn some of Jones' background (he lived in a certain area of the body and had hardly any education). Drix is a product of a cold pill and assigned to help out around the place, and we learn much about him as he explains it all to Jones.

The music in this movie isn't bad, but some of it didn't really match with the scenes. Randy Edelman is the composer, and he doesn't do a bad job. Even the rap and R&B music fit in and didn't sound too bad.

All in all, Osmosis Jones is a great movie if you like animation (especially quick-action animated fighting scenes) and imaginative adventures such as these.