Osmosis Jones

The Farrelly brothers are dipping into the animation pool. It's colorful and primitive animation. It's pretty good, but that's not really the problem. Surprisingly the problem is Bill Murray and live action stuff.

Frank Detomello is a slob. He eats a hard boiled egg covered with a deadly germ. And we travel inside Frank to see white blood cell policeman Osmosis Jones (Chris Rock) battle evil virus Thrax (Laurence Fishburne) with the help of Drix (David Hyde Pierce).

Bill Murray looks awful as he gets sicker and sicker. I have to ask if we're supposed to laugh at Bill? It's just gross. Not the gross out humor that the Farrellys are known for. It isn't funny at all.

The animated sections are much better. In fact I prefer they cut out the live action stuff. Chris Rock does a good voice. He has good chemistry with David Hyde Pierce's Drix. They need a few more jokes, but I like the City of Frank.

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.

I thought this movie was very good. The people leaving bad reviews are being too critical. This movie was meant to be fun. The way the inside of the body is a city, the white blood cells are the police, fireman, etc., the lymph nodes were the police stations, veins were highways, the stomach was a bus station/airport type place, and the germs and bacteria were, of course, the criminals, and so on. This movie gives a very imaginative way the body works to fight infection, as if the body was a city of people just like in the real world. You may need to have some sort of knowledge about the body to get some of the puns and jokes, maybe not very young kids will get it, but they will like the animation...this movie is even good for adults. I give the movie 8/10...I thought it was a very entertaining movie!!!!!

Okay, I think I've found the Sadly Underrated Movie of the Year.

I think that, between this and "the Iron Giant", Warner Brothers Animation has GOT to spring for a better promotion department. Really, all they'd have to say is something like: "We just let the creators of 'Something About Mary' and 'Dumb and Dumber' make their own cartoon. Brace yourselves."

All complaints aside, and none of them are really the movie's fault, this is one of the most inventive animated films I've seen in a very long time. The characters and backgrounds are allowed to look and move in ways that are downright refreshingly bizarre. The visuals are very imaginative. The humor, while funny, is still very much what you'd expect from a Farelly Brothers movie that takes place inside a very sick man, so I wouldn't recommend it to little kids or the weak of stomach. If you have a little future A+P major, however, this is going to blow their mind. Give it a look!

Osmosis Jones is a comedy of human proportions, I guess. It works enough and when it works well it's a good movie. Although when you think about it the plot-line inside Frank's body (frank is played by Bill Murray with no shame in great form) is rather routine and for me was the only thing keeping this from being really good.

Still, it might be a worthwhile movie, more for kids than adults, but it it watchable for all. Various voices include Chris Rock, Brandy Norwood, Laurence Fishburne, David Hyde Pierce and William Shatner. Pleasant most of the way and sometimes cool. B